Her Highness, the Traitor

by Susan Higginbotham

  At seven in the evening of August 3, Mary at last arrived, preceded by hundreds of men in velvet cloaks and heralded by triumphant blasts from the Tower guns that made the ground shake beneath my feet. Overnight, the workaday streets of London had blossomed with rich cloths of arras and silk, and fresh, clean gravel crunched beneath the hooves of the horses. There were stages set up for musicians to play and sing—vying to be heard over the guns. The members of every city guild appeared in their best livery, but they were nothing compared to the hundred poor children, dressed in blue and wearing red caps, who greeted the queen at Aldgate. It was nothing like the chilly reception that had greeted Jane’s progress to the Tower, and I could not help but think it was rather unkind of the Lord to keep reminding me of this.

  The traitor Arundel had so far redeemed himself that he carried the sword of state before Mary. I hoped he would fall and impale himself upon it, but he did not oblige. Riding next to Mary were the lady Elizabeth, the Duchess of Norfolk, and the Marchioness of Exeter. The lady Elizabeth had prudently said nothing in favor of either Jane or Mary until the victory had gone to Mary. I hoped she spared some thought for her old friend Robert, my imprisoned son. The Marchioness of Exeter was the mother of the long-imprisoned Edward Courtenay; if all went as predicted, her son would soon go free. The Duchess of Norfolk’s husband would also go free today, but the duchess did not wear the same look of anticipation the marchioness did: the Norfolks’ marriage had been legendary for its acrimony long before the duke entered his cell.

  As for Mary, I had seen her many times since she was a young girl; it is safe to say that I had never seen her happier. She was clad in a French gown of purple velvet, with matching sleeves, and her kirtle of purple satin was covered with goldsmith’s work and pearls. And her train! It was so long that Sir Anthony Browne, leaning over her horse, had to drape it over his shoulder. Her horse was enveloped in cloth of gold that extended all of the way to its hooves.

  But I was not here to gawk at the queen. Waiting for a break in the gunfire, I raised my hand and cheered, so hard my throat ached for two days afterward, “The Lord Jesus save Her Grace! Long live the Queen Mary!”

  Too late, I remembered Mary was badly shortsighted. She turned to Sir Anthony, who whispered a reply, and I saw Mary’s joyous face suddenly turn cold. Then she turned her head and waved at the people lining the other side of the street until she was safely past me.

  There would be no audience for me, I finally realized.

  ***

  By mid-August, the council had ordered me to vacate Durham Place. My new home, at least until someone decided I could not live there any longer, was Chelsea, where Guildford and Jane had spent part of their married life together. It was from there I traveled on August 18 to Westminster Hall, where John and Jack, along with the Marquis of Northampton, were being tried for high treason.

  “Forty-three years and a day before this, Dudley’s father perished on the scaffold,” a man behind me whispered happily. “Like father, like son, eh?”

  Having been released from the Tower, the Duke of Norfolk had been put to work immediately; he was presiding as High Steward over John’s trial. On his right sat the Lord High Treasurer, the Marquis of Winchester, who had brought the crown jewels to Jane, and the Earl of Arundel, who had sworn to spend his own blood at John’s feet. On his left were John Russell, Earl of Bedford, George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and Richard Rich, all of whom had signed King Edward’s devise for the succession.

  John, dressed in a black satin gown and preceded by a man carrying an axe, walked into the court under guard. Having touched his knee three times to the ground before arriving at his place before his judges, he stood impassively while his confession was read out, and then knelt again. Invited to speak, he asked, “I have confessed to the charges against me, and nothing I say is meant in defense of myself. I wish to understand the opinion of the court upon two points.”

  Norfolk, who had been glaring at John throughout these proceedings, grunted. “Speak.”

  “May a man doing an act by the authority of a prince’s council, and by a warrant of the great seal of England, and doing nothing without the same, be charged with treason?”

  The Duke of Norfolk said coldly, “The great seal you speak of was not the seal of the lawful queen of the realm, but the seal of a usurper. It therefore can be of no warrant to you.”

  I clenched my fists. John, I knew, had been speaking of King Edward’s great seal, placed on the devise for the succession. Norfolk had deliberately misunderstood him.

  John, however, must have expected such an answer. His voice calm, he asked, “May such persons who were equally culpable in my crimes, and by whose letters and commandments I was directed in all of my doings, be my judges, or try me as my peers?”

  Arundel had the decency to avert his eyes from John. Norfolk responded in the same voice as before, “If any are as culpable as you, it remains a fact that no attainder is of record against them. Therefore, they are able at law to pass upon any trial, and are not to be challenged except at the queen’s pleasure.”

  “Very well,” John said. “I thank the court for its opinions on these matters.”

  “As you have confessed, I now pass sentence upon you,” Norfolk said. He cleared his throat. “You are to be drawn to the place of execution, hanged, your heart and entrails cut from your body while you are still alive, and quartered.”

  I had known this sentence would be given; I also knew it would most likely be commuted to beheading. Nonetheless, it was all I could do to keep my sickness inside me.

  John asked again to speak. Given permission, he said calmly, “I beseech you, my lords, to be humble suitors to the queen’s majesty, to grant me four requests, which are these: first, that I might have the death which noblemen have had in the past, and not the other; second, that Her Majesty will be gracious to my children, who may hereafter do Her Grace good service, considering that they went by my commandment as their father, and not of their own free wills; third, that I might have appointed to me some learned man for the instruction and quieting of my conscience; and fourth, that she will send two members of the council to me, to whom I will declare such matters as shall be expedient for her and the commonwealth. And I beseech you all to pray for me.”

  Norfolk nodded curtly and asked that the next defendant, Northampton, be brought to the bar. His defense, that he could not have defied Jane’s orders without committing treason, met with a chilly response, and he was likewise condemned to die. Jack, the last of the three, simply confessed his guilt and begged that the queen pay his debts out of his confiscated property, so the innocent should not suffer from his treason. My son was sentenced to the same horrid death as his father had been.

  Norfolk, to give the customary signal that he had completed his task, reached for his white staff of office. He cracked it in two pieces, the snap of it like a human heart breaking.

  ***

  John was condemned on a Friday. A few hours after I returned home from his trial, I heard his execution was set for Monday.

  In three days, the man who had been my companion since I was three years of age would no longer walk the earth. I wanted to hang my head and weep. Instead, I said, “Have pen and paper brought to me immediately.”

  In my own uncertain hand, shaking from anxiety, I wrote to Lady Anne Paget. Lord William Paget and John had quarreled after the Duke of Somerset’s fall, and he had been one of the first to desert John after he left London, but Lord Paget had taken it upon himself to assist me in recovering some of my goods from Durham Place and Sion, and his wife and I had been friendly. She had even contacted Susan Clarencius, Mary’s most trusted lady, in hopes of getting me an audience with the queen. Lady Paget was my last chance to save John.

  Now, good madam, for the love you bear to God forget me not, and make my lady Marquis of Exeter my good lady, and rememb
er me to Mistress Clarencius to continue as she has begun doing for me. And, good madam, desire your lord as he may do in speaking for my husband’s life. In way of charity, I crave him to do it.

  Madam, I have held up my head, for all of my great heaviness of heart that all the world knows cannot be light, so that now I begin to grow weak, and also have such a rising in the night from my stomach upward that in my judgment my breath is like clean to go away, as my women well can say. They know it to be true by the pains they take with me.

  Good madam, of your goodness remember me, and so God keep your ladyship with long life with your lord and yours.

  Your ladyship’s poorest friend, Jane Northumberland as long as it please the queen.

  The tears beginning to blind me, I wrote a postscript:

  And good madam, desire my lord to be a good lord unto my poor five sons; nature cannot do otherwise but sue for them, although I do not so much care for them as for their father, who was to me and to my mind the most best gentleman that ever living woman was matched with all, as neither those about him nor about me can say the contrary and say truly. How good he was to me that our lord and the queen’s majesty show their mercy to them.

  That last sentence did not make much sense, even to me, but I had no time to make it better. I summoned a servant and watched as he sped away.

  Two days later, a response came in the person of Lord and Lady Paget themselves, standing in my chamber at Chelsea. “We are very sorry, Your Grace,” Lady Paget said quietly, touching my hand. “We have done our best. The queen is adamant. The execution will go on as planned.”

  So on Monday, August 21, all was ready on Tower Hill: the scaffold, the executioner, the sand to soak up my John’s blood, the coffin in which to lay his broken corpse, the crowd of ten thousand to cheer and gloat. I was ready, too, standing in the throng to see my husband give up his life while those who had betrayed him and his king lived on. But as I stood there, my face veiled closely, an armed man mounted the scaffold and cried, “There will be no execution today! Go back to your homes.”

  The queen has agreed to pardon John after all, I thought wildly. A surge of hope knocked me to the ground in a faint. When I came to myself, my man John Rogers was bending over me. “Is it true? John will not die today?”

  “Not today. The duke has declared his faith in the Catholic Church.”

  “Then he is saved?” I sat up slowly. Though I had followed the new religion for years, I cared not a jot for that now; if a Mass would save John, I would hear four a day. Six! We would be better Papists than the Pope himself, which given what I had heard about the present Pope wouldn’t be all that hard.

  “I can’t say, Your Grace. It may be that it is only postponed. Please don’t hope for too much.”

  “Queen Mary would surely not bring my husband into her church only to destroy him,” I said stubbornly. “If nothing else, it would be a waste.”

  ***

  In front of a crowd of clergy, royal and city officials, courtiers, and prisoners, John had renounced the Protestant faith and heard the Mass. It was an enormous triumph for the queen: her brother’s chief minister admitting King Edward had been wrong about the religion he held so dear. But John Rogers had been right to caution me. Whether John was Protestant or Catholic, it mattered not in the end, for late that afternoon, as I knelt praying that my husband might be spared, a message came from Lord Paget that John’s execution had been rescheduled for the next morning.

  I was sitting in my chamber, weeping next to the clock that had once been John’s, when Maudlyn Flower came. “Please dry your eyes, Your Grace, and hurry. The queen has allowed you and your daughters to see the duke. Her men are waiting for you.”

  ***

  As my daughters and I entered the Tower late on Monday evening, the place where my husband awaited death was bustling with life. Royal servants were scurrying about, trying to finish the day’s business before night fell. How could the world be going on so normally, when the man I loved best was to die?

  Beside me, Katheryn faltered as we came closer to the Garden Tower. “Will he be in chains? Will they have”—she swallowed—“tortured him?”

  I cursed myself for not having realized the mental torment my daughter must have been suffering all of these days; I had hardly seen the poor child, leaving her to the care of her attendant, Mistress Blount. “The queen does not do that to people, Katheryn. He will look just as he always looks, and he will be very glad to see you.”

  As soon as we entered, Katheryn ran forward and flung herself, sobbing, at John. He backed onto a window seat and took her into his lap, where she wept against his chest while Mary and I struggled to keep our composure. “Child, you must try to be brave for your mother,” John said at last, his own voice shaking. “She will need you to be so in the days to come.”

  “I hate the queen! Mama has been begging to see her—has been begging everyone to urge her to spare you. The queen will not listen. I hate her! I hope she dies!”

  “Katheryn!” Mary wrung her hands.

  “Katheryn, you must not say that.” John managed a stern look. “I have wronged her. I made a great mistake, and she is within her rights to punish me. She has been more merciful than many would have been under the circumstances. Don’t grow bitter and angry over this. It helps nothing and could only make things worse. You will promise me never to say something foolish like that again?”

  “Yes, Father,” Katheryn mumbled. “But I still don’t like her.”

  “Well, that is understandable, I suppose, under the circumstances.” He brushed my daughter’s cheek with the back of his hand and settled her more comfortably against him. “When I was younger than you are, my father was executed, too, you know. I thought I would never be happy again, but I was. I went to live with your mother, for one thing. So you see? There will be hard days for you, but they will not last forever.” He turned to Mary and with his free hand drew her closer to him. “I was angry when you ran off with young Sidney, you know.”

  “Oh, Father, I meant no disrespect.”

  “I know. And you chose well—better than I might have chosen for you. He is a good man. I am glad to know you will be in his care.” John smiled at my daughters. “I have had six sons grow to manhood, but only two daughters grow to womanhood,” he said. “That has always made the two of you doubly precious to me.”

  I walked to the other side of John’s chamber as John and the girls talked quietly. After a little while, John called the guards. “Take them to the chamber upstairs for a short while, please. I just want a few moments alone with their mother.”

  As soon as the door shut behind my daughters, John and I came into each other’s arms and remained there, the room silent except for the beating of our hearts against each other. Finally, I drew back. “Is there any chance that the queen might pardon you?”

  “You never give up, do you? No. There’s none at all. Read this. It’s a draft of a letter I wrote to both Arundel and Gardiner.”

  Honorable lord, and in this my distress my especial refuge; most woeful was the news I received this evening by Mr. Lieutenant, that I must prepare myself against tomorrow to receive my deadly stroke. Alas my good lord, is my crime so heinous as no redemption but my blood can wash away the spots thereof? An old proverb there is and that most true that a living dog is better than a dead lion. O that it would please her good grace to give me life, yea, the life of a dog, that I might live and kiss her feet, and spend both life and all I have in her honorable service, as I have the best part already under her worthy brother and her most glorious father. O that her mercy were such as she would consider how little profit my dead and dismembered body can bring her, but how great and glorious an honor it will be in all posterity when the report shall be that so gracious and mighty a queen had granted life to so miserable and penitent an object. Your honorable usage and promis
es to me since these my troubles have made me bold to challenge this kindness at your hands. Pardon me if I have done amiss therein and spare not I pray your bended knee for me in this distress, ye God of heaven it may be will requite it one day on you and yours. And if my life be lengthened by your mediation and my good Lord Chancellor’s (to whom I have also sent my blurred letters) I will vow it to be spent at your honorable feet. O my good lord remember how sweet life is, and how bitter ye contrary. Spare not your speech and pains for God I hope hath not shut out all hope of comfort from me in that gracious, princely and womanlike heart; but that as the doleful news of death hath wounded to death both my soul and body, so that comfortable news of life shall be as a new resurrection to my woeful heart. But if no remedy can be found, either by imprisonment or confiscation, banishment and the like, I can say no more but God give me patience to endure and a heart to forgive the whole world.

  Once your fellow and loving companion, but now worthy of no name but wretchedness and misery.

  JD

  John watched my face as I read, knowing what it had cost my husband to beg in that manner. “I know it doesn’t show me at my most dignified, but I didn’t want to die. I couldn’t help but make one last plea. It was hopeless, though; I received my answer a few hours ago. The queen had made up her mind, and I had no right to expect mercy. But she offered me something else.”

  “What?”

  “You. The chance to say good-bye.”

  I laid my head on his shoulder and wept as John patted my back. Then he said, “I knew on the first day I saw you that I would marry you. Someone told me that guardians often did that with their wards, marry them to their daughters. I wasn’t pleased about it at the time.”