Her Highness, the Traitor

by Susan Higginbotham

  My green parrot, looking at me with interest as I write, I leave to the Duchess of Alba. She is a wealthy woman and will have no need for more fine gowns or beds. I have nothing else worthy of her.

  I am not quite sure it belongs here, but I beg my executors to give my thanks to those men of the privy chamber who helped my sons, and to ask that they continue to do so. God, I know, will requite them for it.

  It occurs to me that someone, after I am dead, may decide to open me up for embalming. That will not do. Although circumstances have forced me to assert myself when needed, I have not liked to be bold even before women, nor do I want any man’s hands upon me when I am dead. All I want is to be wound up in a sheet and put in a wooden coffin, then given such a funeral as my executors see fit, seeing that none of my children will inherit John’s forfeited title.

  I would rather that my debts be paid, and the poor given their due, than that any pomp be showered upon my wretched carcass, that has at times been too much in this world full of vanities, deceit, and guile. For whoever trusts to this transitory world as I did, may happen to have an overthrow as I did. Yet I am smiling as I write these words, for each one of them brings me closer to my John.

  ***

  My will is witnessed and safely in the hands of Henry Sidney, one of the executors. This feat accomplished, I am dozing when someone glides into my chamber. I open an eye. “Andrew!”

  “Yes, it is I.”

  “You are free?”

  “Yes.”

  This is indeed my brother-in-law Andrew, a man of few words. Imprisonment turns some men voluble after they are freed, but not this one. I push myself farther upright. “You have been pardoned?”

  “No. I’m still in that no-man’s-land between prison and freedom. I’m on a bond for good behavior, and I daresay I needn’t behave very badly to find myself back in the Tower.”

  “Jerome will be so glad to see you. Even with my sons back, he has still missed you. I have been afraid that he will pine away.”

  “I’ll take good care of him.”

  “I am sorry about the Clifford girl,” I say gently. Her engagement to Andrew was broken off after his arrest and trial; evidently God did not intend her as a Dudley bride. Perhaps it is just as well. She stands after the surviving Grey sisters in line for the crown.

  Andrew shrugs. “Probably she would have talked too much anyway.”

  My sons and Jerome soon follow my brother-in-law into the room. For a while, they sit around my bed, talking of a tournament Robert and Ambrose were in recently—thanks to the king, who had invited them personally to take part. Then they all drift away except for Robert. “I wanted you to know that I heard from the lady Elizabeth the other day.”

  “I thought she was still under house arrest.”

  “She is, but she has her sympathizers.”

  “Robert, you are still under attainder. Not to mention a married man.”

  “The lady Elizabeth and I are old friends, Amy knows that. And it’s not treason to send my good wishes to the queen’s sister, surely?”

  “If you put it like that, no, but do be careful.”

  “I will. I can’t help but think, though, that someday my friend Elizabeth will be queen. No, we haven’t spoken of it!” he says, forestalling my protest. “Not to each other or to anyone else. I’ll do nothing to shorten Queen Mary’s reign. But I think God means Elizabeth to rule, and years ago, she promised me that if she did, I would be one of the first she calls to her side.” He smiles at me as fatigue begins to make me sink back into my pillows. “It will be a golden age, Mother.”

  ***

  Over the next few days, letters come while I slumber. Many of them are from people who have studiously avoided contact with me since John was arrested and who deem it safe to renew our acquaintance now that I am so soon to pass out of this world. Vanity, deceit, and guile, I think to myself and order Katheryn to toss them—the letters, that is—into the fire.

  But there are other letters. My daughter Mary writes to inform me that while she was holding little Philip in the nursery and reading—it strikes me as entirely natural that my daughter should be doing these two things at once—the child grabbed the edge of her book and held it fast. He displays a most encouraging interest in the written word, Mary writes smugly.

  Another letter, however, makes Katheryn, who is reading it to me, break out crying. Good Lord, I think, has the Earl of Huntingdon chosen this time to dissolve our daughter’s marriage to his son? “Tell me what it says.”

  “It is from the Countess of Huntingdon. She writes that she is very sorry to hear of your illness, and that when you can no longer take care of me, she will welcome me to Ashby-de-la-Zouche as her very own daughter. She has set aside a pretty chamber for me there, which I may furnish just as I like. And there is a postscript by Lord Hastings, telling me he will come to take me there himself whenever I please. He calls me his very own sweetheart and his darling wife.”

  I join my daughter in her tears, thinking that sometimes, the goodness of human beings can make one weep harder than their follies.

  ***

  It is the twenty-second day of January, a miserable day outside. Even behind my bed curtains, I can hear the sleet coming down and the wind beating against my windows. Faintly, I feel sorry for anyone who is abroad on this bleak day, but I myself am quite content, for John’s clock ticks steadily and John himself is holding me tight in the bed we shared for so many years, keeping me safe from all that is without. Patience, his voice tells me. Soon.

  All it took to bring him back to me was to do this, just as Anne Boleyn taught me so long ago. Why did I not try it sooner?

  There are footsteps and a jumble of voices. “Has she been like this long?”

  “Most of the day, my lords. I don’t believe she can last for much longer.” Nurse Stacy, my laundress who also attends me in my illness, adds uncertainly, “She received the last rites, my lords, when she could still respond to them. The Catholic rites, of course.”

  Someone grumbles about this, but not too strenuously.

  “Can she hear us?”

  “You can try, my lords.”

  Someone bends over me. He is speaking too loudly, really, for my hearing is perfect, but under the circumstances, I can be forgiving. “We have received our pardons from the queen, Mother.”

  Pardons. I have done all I can do on earth for my sons; there is no need for me to linger here any longer. I start to smile, and just as my mouth crinkles upward, my John bears me away.

  48

  Frances Grey

  January 1555 to April 1555

  The Duchess of Northumberland has died,” Adrian informed me one morning in January as we sat breaking our fast in my chamber at Sheen. “A heart malady, it is thought.”

  I stared at my lap. We had not liked each other or the other’s children, but for a few short months, we had been bound together by the will of one young king, and now that Jane Dudley was gone, I felt peculiarly bereft.

  “She died in comfort. Her children were with her, all of them, and the queen pardoned the sons the day the duchess died. She did so out of compassion for their mother.”

  “We should have parted in this life as friends. After all, we each lost a husband and a child to the headsman.”

  “Will you go to the funeral?”

  “No. It might grieve her children to see me there. I will send someone from our household to pay our respects.” I sighed and pushed my untouched plate away.

  “Are you ill? This is the second day in a row that you have not eaten.”

  “No. I am not ill.” I touched my belly. “I have suspected for several weeks that I have been blessed far more than I deserve, but now I am quite certain. I am carrying our child.”

  Adrian abandoned his own breakfast and wrapped me i
n his arms. “God be thanked,” he whispered.

  ***

  There was a funeral for the Duchess of Northumberland on the first day of February, with two heralds and many mourners, but it was not what was spoken of that month. Three days after the duchess was laid in her grave at Chelsea’s church, the burnings started.

  They began with John Rogers, a canon of St. Paul’s, at Smithfield on February 4. It was a matter no one at court was supposed to speak of, but one everyone was speaking of three days later when the court gathered for a grand wedding: that of my niece Margaret Clifford to Henry Stanley, Lord Strange. People watched the jousts and the Spanish cane-play put on for the occasion, but their minds were plainly not on the grand spectacle before them.

  “His wife and eleven children were standing along the route, watching him go to the stake,” I heard Jane Seymour, the Duchess of Somerset’s daughter, whisper to my Kate.

  “He bathed his hands in the flames, as if they were cold water,” Lord Paget murmured to his companion.

  “People collected his ashes as mementoes. Just as they collected the Duke of Somerset’s blood,” Lord Hastings told one of his sisters.

  I went home to Sheen that night fancying the smell of Rogers’s burning flesh lingered in London’s air.

  Perhaps, I prayed, his death was an aberration. Instead, on February 8, the day after the wedding, Laurence Saunders, the rector of All Hallows in Coventry, was burned. He was followed the next day by Dr. Rowland Taylor, the rector of Hadleigh in Suffolk, who had supported my daughter’s accession to the throne, and by John Hooper, the Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, who had given the Duchess of Somerset spiritual comfort while she was in the Tower. It had taken the bishop, crying out for more wood because that which he was provided had failed to ignite properly, forty-five minutes to die.

  Yet even as the burnings continued, Mary sat serene and happy, her hands folded over her belly—for the queen was now expecting a child, a state of affairs many regarded as miraculous, as the queen was well in middle age. Each time I came to court before my own condition began to show itself, I saw the Mary I had always liked, the Mary who lost graciously at cards, the Mary whose women were comfortably housed and never overtasked, the Mary who visited the poor in disguise and never failed to make certain something arrived after she had left—a sum of money, a draught of medicine for an ailing child, some warm blankets. My daughter Kate, who like my Jane was strong in her likes and dislikes, never spoke of Queen Mary with anything other than warmth. How to reconcile this Mary with the one who roasted human beings to death?

  “It’s not that hard to do,” said Adrian. “The government gives them the chance to recant. I doubt that the queen gets any pleasure from these burnings.” He shook his head. “But the fact remains, she goes on with them.”

  And indeed she did. At the end of March, Robert Ferrar, the Bishop of St. David’s, was burned in Wales.

  Two bishops in two months, I thought. And God only knew when it would all end.

  ***

  In April, Kate, along with her new friend Jane Seymour, came to visit me at Sheen. “We thought we had better come while we had the chance,” Kate explained. “The queen’s going to go into confinement soon, and then we’ll be boxed up for weeks.”

  “She is doing well?”

  Kate frowned. “She’s not showing much more than she did a couple of months ago. You’re showing more than she is, in fact. I heard…”

  “Well?”

  Kate lowered her voice. “I heard one of her ladies, Mistress Strelly, asking her if she might not be with child at all. The queen was furious. She boxed Mistress Strelly’s ears. She hardly ever acts like that. But how could she be mistaken, Mother? She does have a great belly. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

  “Of a woman growing a great belly, yet not bearing a child? Yes, I have. It happened years ago to our kinsman Arthur Plantagenet’s wife.” I was silent, not wanting to think of this possibility as it concerned Queen Mary—or me, for that matter. “But this is different. The queen has had the best physicians in England examine her.”

  “True,” said Kate. She giggled. “Anyway, I have another piece of gossip, and it is about you, Mother! They say there are plans afoot to marry you to the Earl of Devon.”

  The Earl of Devon was Edward Courtenay, the foolish young man who had been released from the Tower when Mary came to the throne. Although he had revealed to the queen what he knew about the Wyatt rebellion, or at least some of what he knew, he had later been imprisoned. A week or so ago, he had been released in the hope he had learned his lesson.

  Kate continued, “Devon said he would rather leave the country than be married to a woman ten years his senior whose husband and eldest daughter had been executed as traitors.”

  I snorted. The earl appeared to have forgotten that his own father had been executed as a traitor. “And who proposed this?”

  “Some of the queen’s council, but others were against it. They said that if, God forbid, the queen should die in childbirth, along with the child, there would be a contest for the crown between the lady Elizabeth, the Countess of Lennox, the young Queen of Scots, and you. If Devon was married to you, they said, he might try to seize the crown in your name.”

  “There will be no contest for the crown on my part,” I said. “It belongs to the lady Elizabeth.”

  “It will be quite the joke when everyone finds out that you’re married already,” Kate said. During her last visit, I had told her of my marriage and of my coming child. To my relief, she had reacted with no more than an indulgent smile at the folly of her elders. She glanced at my belly. “Are you going to tell the queen about Master Stokes soon?”

  I had been stalling, half hoping that the news of our marriage, known to our small circle of close friends and relations, would reach the queen on its own. It might well have, had not the burnings and the queen’s pregnancy preoccupied the court. But the time for stalling was past. “Tomorrow,” I said. “It is time the queen knew the truth.”

  ***

  The next morning, Adrian and I went to Hampton Court. It was the last time the queen would be seen in public before she withdrew to her private apartments, accompanied only by her female attendants. Her chamber was crowded with courtiers attending to last-minute business. No matter: a large audience suited my purpose.

  Mary had a great belly, but not of a size commensurate with the May date that had been predicted for the birth. I had the sickening conviction Mistress Strelly was correct: there was no child on the way. Poor Mary, there would be sorrow ahead for her, I feared.

  Unconscious of the burst of pity I felt, Mary smilingly bade us to rise. “I believe we have seen this gentleman before. He accompanied you to Beaulieu?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty. He is Adrian Stokes, my former master of horse. He is now my husband.” I pushed back my cloak, revealing the distinct bulge under my gown. “As Your Majesty can see, we have been married some time.”

  A silence settled over the court. “You did not ask permission of us for your marriage.”

  “No, Your Majesty, I did not, but I believed it would be agreeable to you. I am asking now for your blessing upon it.”

  “You must surely know that your marriage is a matter of great concern to us, as you are so close to the throne.”

  “It is because I am so close to the throne that I married a good, honest man who will put me far away from it.” I took Adrian’s hand and placed my other hand against the child who grew within me. “I want nothing of crowns, Your Majesty. Not for me, not for those I love. They cost too much.”

  Mary placed her hand on her own belly and nodded.

  “You and your horse master have our blessing, Cousin Frances,” she said. “Go in peace.”

  And so we did.

  Author’s Note

  Frances gave birt
h to a daughter, Elizabeth Stokes, on July 16, 1555—the anniversary of Frances’s own birth. Sadly, the child died on February 7, 1556, and Frances and Adrian seem to have lost other children in infancy, as well. Frances herself died in November 1559 and was buried in St. Edmund’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey, where the fine tomb erected by Adrian in her memory can still be seen today. In her will, she made Adrian her sole executor.

  In 1572, Adrian Stokes married Anne Carew, the widow of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton. (She makes a very brief appearance in this novel as Jane’s proxy at a christening.) Adrian’s stepdaughter, Elizabeth Throckmorton, married Sir Walter Ralegh (or Raleigh). Adrian served in Parliament and on local commissions before his death in 1585. He was buried at Beaumanor.

  Two different death dates are recorded for Jane Dudley: January 15, 1555, in a postmortem inquisition, and January 22, 1555, on her memorial inscription at Chelsea’s Old Church. I chose the latter date, which allowed her to hear the news her sons had been pardoned. The January 22 date also seemed more compatible with the date of her funeral, which took place on February 1. A resilient woman, Jane Dudley would be pleased to know her tomb survived a Nazi bombardment of the church in 1941.

  Andrew Dudley died in November 1559, having spent his last years at his house in Tothill Street in Westminster. His disabled brother, Jerome, was still alive in 1556, when Andrew left him a bequest in the will he wrote that year.

  Katherine Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk, returned to England with her husband, Richard Bertie, and their two children, Susan and Peregrine, after Queen Mary’s death. She died in 1580, having remained an outspoken Protestant.

  Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset, followed the examples of the two Duchesses of Suffolk and married her husband’s steward, Francis Newdigate, late in 1558. Having outlived her second husband, she died in 1587, leaving behind masses of magnificent jewels. Her daughter Anne, Countess of Warwick, widowed when Jack Dudley died at Penshurst, remarried in 1555 and had seven children by her second husband, Sir Edward Unton. The countess suffered from bouts of mental illness in her later years.