The Last Tudor

by Philippa Gregory

  Lucy comes to me, white-faced, and tells me that her mother, who lives outside the walls of the Tower and does my washing, has taken to her bed. She has the terrible swelling in her armpits and the buboes in her groin that indicate the plague. Lucy is shaking with fear. “She washed your linen only yesterday,” she says. “I brought it in myself. I put it on the baby.” She is trembling with distress. “God spare us, your ladyship. I would never have done it! I did not know! What if the baby takes the plague?”

  Lucy’s home is nailed up and marked with a red cross on the door. Lucy is not allowed in to see her mother; everyone is barred out. The sick woman tosses and turns on her bed, alone in her house. She will live or die in a lonely vigil; but she knows that she is most likely to die, and her daughter cannot even take her a mug of clean water. Sufferers with the plague pray for death as their fever rises and the swellings on their body make them cry with pain, but nobody can go to them.

  “I have not seen my brother,” Lucy says fretfully. “He’s in service to the Duke of Norfolk.”

  “Then perhaps he’s out of the city with the court,” I say helplessly. “Perhaps they’re safe at Windsor with the queen.”

  “Shall I take the baby’s linen off again? And wash it again?”

  My newborn child has been in linen from a plague house for half the day. “Yes, do,” I say uncertainly, “and burn herbs, Lucy, at the doorway and windows.”

  Elizabeth, the heartless queen, takes no risks with her own health, though she leaves me and my little boys in the heart of the pestilential city. She locks herself up at Windsor Castle, and no one is allowed to go from London to her court. She even has a gallows built on the edge of the town to hang anyone who dares to approach. A gate and her giant sergeant porter is not enough for Elizabeth—she has to be guarded by a hangman—but she leaves me and my babies here, in the most diseased place in England.

  The worst thing is never knowing why one person catches the illness and another is spared. In a good year a whole street can be well, and one person, perhaps in a little house in the very middle, will die. But in a bad year the whole street will go dark and only one little house, surrounded by death, will burn a candle and use whatever preventatives they can buy. As the heat of August goes on and on, it becomes clear that this is a bad year, one of the very worst. The parishes have to send out carts to fetch and bury the dead every night, and they report that perhaps as many as a thousand people are dying every week.

  Every day I am more terrified for myself and for my boys, and for Ned in the Tower. “Keep away from the boys,” I say anxiously to Mrs. Rother and to Lucy, to anyone who comes into the Tower from the diseased city. “I will care for them today. And throw away all the linen that has come from the Thames washerwomen. And clean up the room, sweep the floors and make it sweet.”

  Lucy looks at me with sulky resentment. Her grief for her mother has soured her. “Your son Thomas slept with his wet nurse,” she says. “The clout he has on was hemmed by my dead mother. If you think the plague comes from touch, the boys may have it already.”

  I give a little moan of fear. I think that if I lose either of my sons, I will die of grief. I think: this is what Elizabeth was hoping for. She has prayed that I will die, and my sons will die, and nobody will be able to fix the blame at her door. I will be like Amy Dudley, her victim whom everyone has forgotten.

  I put out a blue scarf from the window so that Ned can see that we are well, and I stand by the window till I see the answering flutter of blue on his wall. I know he will be pacing the floor in his fury, writing to all of our friends at court. A bad year for plague makes imprisonment in the Tower a death sentence. Here, in the very heart of the city, encircled by a stinking drain, every cloth that we wear and everything that we eat comes from the diseased city and is handled by half a dozen people before it gets to us.

  I write to William Cecil myself and beg him to send Ned and me and our babies out of the Tower to the country. I have never, in all my life, willingly spent the summer in London. I dare swear that neither has he. Nobody with a country house or even a little cottage stays in the city during the plague months.

  All day long I wait for an answer; but none comes. I think that Cecil must have already left the city, gone to his beautiful new house at Burghley, or perhaps he is safe in Windsor Castle with the merry court, hiding behind the guards at the entrances to the town, the gallows waiting for anyone who seeks shelter with the privileged few. How shall I survive this summer if everyone goes away and forgets about me? How happy Elizabeth would be to come back to London in the autumn and find that I am dead and buried in a plague grave, my babies’ little swaddled corpses thrown in with me.

  I don’t know whether to close the windows against the dangerous miasma that breathes off the river, or fling them open to try to keep the stuffy room cool. In the evening, when the babies are asleep, I wrap my head and shoulders in a shawl and walk in the lieutenant’s garden. The newly appointed man, Sir Richard Blount, who has replaced poor Sir Edward, watches me from his window. A guard stands at the gate. I feel terribly tired, and I wonder if it is a sign of the plague. If exhaustion and a sense of foreboding swell up before the buboes, then I may not see the dawn.

  I am about to turn and go back into the house when I hear a clanging noise. It is not the tocsin bell of alarm, it is a deeper tone with a crack in it, clattered by an irritable hand. I can hear the creak of cartwheels as the sound comes closer, as if a cart, ringing a bell as it goes, has entered the gateway and is making its way around the guardhouse and the little village of the Tower where the servants live. Again and again the bell rings and then I hear the cry that comes between each clang of the clapper.

  “Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!”

  God help us, the plague cart has come inside the Tower itself. There must be plague in the servants’ cottages, or among the grooms at the stables. I pull the shawl over my mouth and I go quickly indoors and bolt the door as if I would lock out death itself.

  I get a note from Mary, it is damp with vinegar. Someone has sprayed it with stale wine in the hope of preventing the plague clinging to the paper.

  We are at Windsor; but you are not forgotten. The lords insist that you are not kept in the Tower in a plague year. They tell Elizabeth that it is a hidden death sentence. Keep everyone at a distance and let no one touch the boys but yourself. I believe you will be freed within a few days.

  I wash the boys’ linen myself. I take Teddy out to play in the early morning: the midday sun is dangerously hot for a Tudor like him, with his fair skin and copper hair, and the evening mists carry disease. I wash our own plates, but the water comes from the well in the Tower, sometimes I can see it is cloudy with dirt, and there is nothing I can do about the dinners that come from the lieutenant’s kitchens. The baby suckles from a woman who may have tainted milk. I have no way of knowing, but I dare not starve him by sending her away now. Lucy continues to be well and I watch her for any sign of faintness or fever and discourage her from coming and going. Mrs. Rother sends a message that her sister is ill, and that she is going with her to the country. She says she is sorry to abandon me but she dare not delay. The villages outside London are closing their doors to anyone from the city, and if she does not leave now, she will have to sleep in outhouses with sick people fleeing sickness.

  I watch Ned’s window and every day there is the blue handkerchief that shows me that he is well. I give one of the guards a silver penny to tell Ned that none of us is sick, and we hope to be released. He sends me back a poem:

  My love is not blighted by plague

  Nor burnèd by the sun

  My love is constant through all days

  Until our freedom’s won.

  I sprinkle it with powder before I take it from the guard’s hand and I read it at arm’s length. The words I hold in my heart. I burn the paper.

  THE TOWER, LONDON,

  SUMMER 1563

  In the early morning, while it is still
cool, I can hear the tramp of many feet coming up the stairs to my rooms, which means a visit from Sir Richard, the new lieutenant of the Tower. I stand beside my tattered throne, Mr. Nozzle on my shoulder, Thomas in my arms, Teddy beside me, his hand in mine. Lucy stands behind me. I think we look more like a poor family of plague-struck beggars than the royal heirs of Elizabeth’s nightmares.

  The door opens and Sir Richard comes in and bows. “Forgive me,” I say, “but the guards must stay outside. I am afraid of the plague.”

  “Of course,” he says. He gestures to them and they step backwards. “I am glad to say that you need fear no more. You are to be released.”

  I am so flooded with joy that I cannot hear him. “What?”

  He nods. “Yes, my lady. You are to be released from the Tower. You can leave today. You can leave this morning.”

  “Released?”

  “Yes,” he confirms. “Thanks be to God—and to the mercy of our sovereign lady the queen.”

  “God bless her,” I whisper. “I can go when I wish?”

  “I have horses ready for you, and a wagon for your goods.”

  I gesture at the chipped table and the tattered chairs. “I have nothing worth taking. Lucy can pack our clothes in a moment.”

  He bows. “I will wait for your command,” he says. “You should go as soon as possible, before it gets too hot.”

  “And the Earl of Hertford comes with me?” I ask as he reaches the door.

  He bows again. “His lordship is released also.”

  “God be praised,” I say. “I thank the merciful God for answering my prayer.”

  We are packed and ready to travel within half an hour. I won’t allow anything to delay me. The well-worn furniture can come in the wagon behind us, along with a trunk of clothes. The linnets will come in their cage shrouded with a shawl, and Jo the pug with her heirs in a basket, a net tied on top so they are kept safe in the open wagon. Mr. Nozzle will go in his cage in the shade. I shall have Teddy before me on my saddle and the wet nurse will carry Thomas strapped before her. Lucy will ride pillion behind a guard, and if Teddy gets tired, she can take him in her arms.

  I imagine us riding into Hanworth, the cleanliness of the house, the brightness of the sunshine, the sweetness of the air, with Ned’s mother, Lady Anne, on the front steps waiting to greet her grandson, a Tudor-Seymour boy, the heir to the throne of England.

  Sir Richard is in the Tower yard with the loaded wagon and a guard. When they see me coming, they mount up and then I see my husband, Ned, coming under the arch of the stables, surrounded by his guards. He crosses the yard in four swift strides. Before anyone can stop him he takes my hands and kisses them, searching my face for my rising blush of desire, then he takes me into his arms and kisses me on the mouth. I feel a rush of love for him. I put my arms around him and press against him. Thank God we are reunited at last, and tonight we will sleep in the same bed. I could cry for relief, and thank God our worries are over.

  His face is as radiant as mine. “My love,” he says. “We are spared the plague and reunited. Thank God.”

  “We will never be parted again,” I promise him. “Swear it.”

  “Never parted again,” he promises me.

  “Now, you must see your boys before we set off.”

  Teddy remembers his father, despite these long days of separation, and jumps towards him, his arms oustretched. Ned snatches up his son, and I see how small my boy is, when he is held in his tall father’s arms, against his broad chest. Teddy puts his arm around his father’s neck and holds his face against his cheek. Thomas gives the gummy beam that he shows to everyone, and waves a sticky hand.

  “How handsome they are, how well they look! Who would have thought that we would have brought such bright blooms from this dark place?” Ned says. “Truly, it is a miracle.”

  “It is,” I say. “And now we will start our married life with two boys, two sons and heirs, in your family house. We are going to Hanworth, aren’t we?”

  “Yes. We have to thank my mother for this release. I know that she has been writing constantly to William Cecil about us. She will want us at home.”

  The lieutenant comes to my side. “My lady, we have to go now if we are to make the journey without too much fatigue for the children. It’s going to be very hot later.”

  “Of course,” I say. I take hold of Teddy’s plump little bottom, but he tightens his grip on his father and insists: “Teddy—Dada! Dada!”

  “Will Teddy ride with me?” Ned asks. “I don’t think we’ll get him off me without a crowbar.”

  “Do you want to ride with your dada, on his big horse?” I ask him.

  Teddy lifts his beaming face from his father’s neck and nods. “Teddy—Dada. Hee-up.”

  “Teddy can go before his father, and when he wants to rest he can be carried by Lucy as she rides pillion,” I suggest.

  “Your lordship’s horse has cast a shoe,” the lieutenant says to Ned. “Farrier is shoeing him now. He’ll be a few minutes more. Best to let her ladyship start her journey so she can rest as she pleases. You’ll catch her up on the road; the wagon will be so slow.”

  “Very well. Teddy can wait with me and we’ll catch you up. I’ll hold him steady,” Ned promises me. He kisses me again, over our little son’s head. I have a moment of rare joy when I embrace my husband and my elder son together, my hand on my husband’s shoulder, the other around my little boy.

  “I’ll see you on the road.” I cup my hand around my son’s cheek. “Be a good boy for your dada and keep your hat on.”

  “Yeth,” my boy says obediently, his grip tight on his father’s neck.

  “He’s choking me.” My husband smiles. “Don’t fear he’ll fall off. He’s clinging on as if he was Mr. Nozzle.”

  I kiss him again and then I climb on the mounting block and into my saddle. Everyone is mounted and waiting for me. I wave my hand to Ned and my son, and follow the guards out of the stable yard. “See you in a little while!” I call. “See you soon.”

  The horses’ hooves clatter on the cobbles of the main gate. We ride under the arch of the gateway and, as the shadow falls on me, there is a deafening roar. Beyond the gateway, the lane is lined by the guards of the Tower and the bridge over the moat is massed with the Tower servants. As I ride past, the guards present arms and salute, as if I were a queen riding out to take my throne, and I emerge into the sunshine into a blast of cheering as the servants throw their hats in the air and the women curtsey and kiss their hands to me. I am free at last; I can smell it on the breeze and in the joy of the cry of the seagulls.

  I smile and wave at the Tower servants, and then I see that beyond the bridge and the farthest gatehouse the citizens of London have somehow heard that we are free, and there are people being pushed back from the roadway by the guards, cheering, and even holding up roses for me.

  I go through them all as if I were leading a royal procession. I am still fearful of the plague so I don’t stop to take any flowers, and besides, my guards, stern-faced, push their way through the crowd that parts before them. But the fishwives and the street sellers, apprentice girls and the spinsters and brewsters, all dressed in their rough work aprons, defy the guards and throw roses and leaves down before me so my horse walks on a trail of flowers and I know that the women of London are on my side.

  We wind our way past Tower Hill and the scaffold that stands there, where my father ended his life, and I bow my head to his memory, and remember his hopeless struggle against Queen Mary. I think how glad he would be to see one daughter, at least, riding from the Tower to freedom, her baby beside her and her noble husband and heir following behind. It’s bitter for me to think of him, and the death that he brought on Jane, so I turn my head to the wet nurse as she rides pillion behind the guard with Thomas strapped against her, and I beckon her to ride beside me so that I can see my boy, and feel my hope for the future.

  That’s when I notice that we are riding north instead of west, and I say t
o the officer riding ahead of me: “This isn’t the road to Hanworth.”

  “No, my lady,” he says politely, reining his horse back. “I am so sorry. I didn’t realize you had not been told. My orders are to take you to Pirgo.”

  “To my uncle?”

  “Yes, Lady Hertford.”

  I am so pleased at this. I will be far more comfortable with my uncle in his beautiful new house than at Ned’s home at Hanworth. His mother may have written to Cecil for her son, maybe she even persuaded the queen to release us, but I have had no good wishes from her, not even after I had given her two grandsons. I would far rather that we stay with my uncle in his family home than with her, as long as he has forgiven me for the deception I had to practice on him.

  “Did he invite me?” I ask. “Did he send a message for me?”

  The young man ducks his head. “I don’t know, your ladyship. My orders were to take you all to Pirgo, and see you safely there. I know no more.”

  “And Ned knows to follow us? He thought we were going to Hanworth.”

  “He knows where you are going, my lady.”

  We ride for about two hours, through villages where the front doors are resolutely closed, past inns with bolted shutters. Nobody wants anything to do with travelers from London. Everyone on this road is fleeing from infection, and when we pass people walking, they press back against the hedge so that not even our horses brush them. They are as afraid of us as we are of them. I stare at them, trying to see if they have any signs of the plague on them, and the wet nurse gathers Thomas closer to her and pulls her shawl over his face.

  When the sun is overhead, beating down on us, it is too hot to ride on. The commander of the guard suggests that we stop and rest in the shade of thick woodland. The wet nurse takes Thomas and feeds him, and the rest of us dine on bread and cold meat and small ale. We have brought everything from the Tower kitchens; I have to pray that the food is not infected.