The Last Tudor by Philippa Gregory
And then I remember, with a gulp of horror like ice in my belly, that her hood is off her head already, and her head is off her body, and if I pulled her plait, then her head would swing like a ball on a rope in my hand, and I find I am screaming and I put my hands over my panting mouth until I choke down my retching sobs.
I sleep out of sheer weariness in my bed in the quiet house. My husband, Henry, does not come to lie with me. I suppose that he never will. I think he is probably forbidden even to see me. Certainly we have not been left alone together since Queen Mary returned in her triumph to London. I imagine the Herberts are desperate to get the marriage set aside, and free him from the terrible disadvantage of a wife whose sister was beheaded for treason. They will be writing out confessions and swearing that they hardly knew us Greys at all. It was such a brilliant marriage only nine months ago; then I was a catch, now I am an embarrassment. I stay in my rooms and when I go to dinner, I sit at the ladies’ table and I keep my head down and hope that no one speaks to me, for I don’t even know what my name is: am I Katherine Herbert still? Or am I Katherine Grey again? I don’t know who I am supposed to be, I don’t know what I am supposed to say. I think it safer to say nothing.
I would pray for my father but I don’t know what prayers are allowed. I know we’re not to pray in English anymore, and absolutely forbidden from doing anything that is not part of the old Mass. I understand the Latin well enough—I’m not completely ignorant—it just seems odd to me to be praying in a language that most people can’t understand. The priest turns his back on his congregation and celebrates the Mass as if it were a secret, between him and God, and this is so odd to me, who has been brought up with the communion table on the chancel steps and everyone coming up for bread and wine. The people mumble the responses, uncertain of the strange words. Nobody knows what is holy, nobody knows what is right, and nobody knows who I am—not even me.
They take my father to trial and they find him guilty again. I think that since the queen pardoned him once before, surely she is certain to repeat the pardon? Since it is the same offense? Why would she not? If treason was not too bad the first time, is it that much worse being done again? I can’t see my mother to ask her if she hopes to save her husband as she did last time, because I don’t go anywhere. I don’t leave Baynard’s Castle. I don’t know if I am allowed out. I think not.
Nobody is going to ask me if I would like to go on a visit; nobody takes me anywhere in the barge or even invites me to come out with them. Nobody ever asks me if I want to ride out. Nobody speaks to me at all but the servants. I don’t even know if the guards on the outer gate would open the great doors for me if I walked towards them. For all I know I am a prisoner in my husband’s house. For all I know I am under house arrest, facing a charge of treason myself. Nobody tells me anything.
Actually, nobody goes anywhere. Nobody goes out at all except my father-in-law, who huddles on his best jacket and hurries to court to sit in public judgment on the very many men who were his allies only weeks ago. Now they are charged with treason and hanged one after another at every crossroads in the city. Elizabeth herself, the half sister, the heir, and for all I know, the best-hidden plotter, is suspected of treason, and I can’t say I care very much if they behead her too. Since they could behead Jane, who never wanted the throne in the first place, I don’t see why they should hesitate over Elizabeth, who has always wanted it so very badly and is a very nasty girl, so vain and such a center of gossip.
I can’t even see my little sister Mary, who is with my mother in our London house, Suffolk Place. I don’t see anybody except my father-in-law and my so-called husband at dinner and at chapel, where we pray four times a day, whispering strange words over and over again in the candlelit dusk. They don’t speak to me then, but my father-in-law looks at me as if he is surprised I am still there, and he can’t quite remember why.
I give him no cause for complaint. I am as devout as if I were an enclosed nun—a very reluctant enclosed nun. It’s not my fault! I was born and bred into the reformed religion and I learned Latin for my studies, not to mutter with a priest. I know grammar, but I never learned the prayers by rote. So the psalms and the blessings are as meaningless to me as if they were in Hebrew. I keep my head down and I mutter pious-sounding noises. I bob up and down and cross myself when everyone else does. If I were not so terribly sad, I would be bored to death. When they tell me quietly, just before Matins, that my father has been beheaded with the other traitors, I feel more exhausted than unhappy, and I don’t know what prayers should be said for him. I think that since Queen Mary is on the throne, he must have gone to purgatory and we should buy Masses for his soul, but I don’t know where you would buy Masses while the abbeys are still closed, and if they would do him any good, when Jane said there was no such place as purgatory anyway.
I feel only how very, very tiring this all is, and all I really care about is when can I go out, and if I will ever be happy again. I think this must mean that I am, as Jane said, totally without the gift of the Holy Spirit, and for a moment I think I shall tell her that she is right and I am a very worldly ninny, but inexplicably sad; and then I remember that I shall never tell her anything, ever again, and I remember that is why I am sad.
Unbelievably, my mother—the most unlikely angel in the world—delivers a true miracle. She has been constantly attending court, begging the queen that we, the innocent victims of my father’s ambition, his surviving little family of three, be forgiven his treason. My lady mother pursues the queen’s goodwill as if it were a plump deer, and in the end brings it to bay and cuts its furry throat. Once Jane is gone and can no longer be the unwilling center of any rebellion, once my father is dead and buried, the queen gives us back one of our houses, Beaumanor, near Bradgate Park, and the whole beautiful park of Loughborough stocked with our game, and we are allowed to live richly once more.
“What about the bear?” I ask Mother when she tells me of this extraordinary reprieve.
“What bear?”
“The Bradgate bear. I was taming him. Will we move him to Beaumanor?”
“For God’s sake, we have been an inch from the scaffold and you are talking to me about a bear? We’ve lost him with Bradgate, and the hounds and the horses. They’ll all go to someone in the queen’s favor. My life is ruined, I am a heartbroken widow, and you talk to me about a bear?”
Jane would have stood up to her and insisted that the bear should come with us to Beaumanor. I can’t. I don’t have the words and I cannot tell her that I feel that the bear, like Mr. Nozzle, like every living thing, deserves to be seen and considered, is fit for love. I should like to tell her that I am heartbroken too; but I can’t find the words for this and she is, anyway, not interested.
“Go to the Herberts,” she snaps. “Fetch your things from them.”
BEAUMANOR, LEICESTERSHIRE,
SPRING 1554
I feel that we have got home safe, ducked our heads as the scythe passed over us. Mary and Mother and I, Mr. Nozzle and Ribbon the kitten, the horses and hounds (but not the bear) are home but not home, close to the park, near enough to see the tall chimneys of our old house, missing our old house—but at any rate alive, and living together in a state of constant mild bickering that tells us that we can speak, that we can hear, that we are safe.
And we are lucky—far luckier than the others. My father never comes home, I will never see my sister again. They bury her in pieces in the chapel, and Elizabeth our cousin enters the Tower as a prisoner suspected of treason in the rebellion led by Thomas Wyatt and my father. Only the queen can say if Elizabeth will come out or if more Tudor blood will water the green, and she is not telling. For sure, I will never go there if I can help it. Never. Never.
I am glad to be safely far from London but I wish we could have gone back to Bradgate House. I miss Jane’s room and her library of books, and Mr. Nozzle misses my bedroom and his little bed on the window seat. I miss the poor bear. It is a relief to be away from th
At least I can sit beneath the tree where Jane and I used to sit and read, and listen to the nightingale high in the branches at dusk, and my mother can gallop around and hunt as if none of this had ever happened, as if she had not lost a husband and a daughter, as if I never had an older sister.
So much for the loss “of your woeful father’s lands’—I think of Jane’s letter and think how I will tease her that we have got most of the lands back, woeful or not. I shall ask her what is worth the most now—an old book or hundreds of acres?—and then I remember, just as I remember with a jolt every day, that I can’t tell her that she was wrong, that land is bound to be worth more than an old Bible. That I will never tell her anything again.
Mary has grown hardly at all in the months that we have been in London. She is still a tiny thing, a pretty child. She has learned to stand straight, denying the little twist in her spine, so at least her shoulders are level and she walks and dances with miniature grace. I think that perhaps she has simply stopped growing from unhappiness and will never be older, just as Jane will never grow old either. It’s as if my two sisters are frozen in time, one a bride and one a child. But I don’t say anything to Mary about this, as she is only nine years old, and I don’t say anything to my mother, who has drowned the runt of every litter that her hounds have ever had.
BEAUMANOR, LEICESTERSHIRE,
SUMMER 1554
By midsummer my mother has achieved even more: she gets Mary and me appointed to court and we are all three to be the constant companions of the queen who executed my sister and my father. We go back to court as welcome cousins, and none of us, not even little Mary, betrays for a moment any doubts we might have about this. I put it out of my mind completely. If I thought about it I would go mad. My lady mother demonstrates every day her fidelity and kinship with her beloved cousin the queen, it is “my dearest cousin” all the time, to make sure that nobody ever forgets that we are related; royal but not claiming inheritance.
No one ever forgets the other cousins either: Elizabeth the bastard, now under house arrest at Woodstock; Mary Stuart, the foreigner in France, betrothed to the French dauphin; and Margaret Douglas, married to an earl and favored by the queen more highly than any of the rest of us, because of her loudly proclaimed papist faith.
It is as good as a masque to see the anxiety when we cousins prepare to process in for dinner. Elizabeth should be here, walking behind her half sister. She is the nominated heir in the will of King Henry, and Queen Mary cannot change that. She has taken advice to disinherit Elizabeth, but they told her that parliament would never stand for it. Why parliament would stand for killing Jane but not disinheriting Elizabeth only they, in their fearful conferences, can tell. But anyway, Elizabeth is still under arrest and perhaps will never come back to court again.
So the queen takes her place, alone at the head of all her ladies, a small stocky figure richly dressed, with a kind, square face crunched up with worry. And wait! Here is my mother, dripping with jewels, always in a brocade gown of green (which declares “À Tudor” to the deafest of loyalists). She is next in line for the throne after Elizabeth—and since Elizabeth is not here, she should be hard on the queen’s heels. But wait!—and nobody dares to form a procession until these first places are organized—last in, at an ungainly gallop, comes Lady Margaret Douglas, formerly known as the bastard of Margaret Queen of Scots and her bigamous husband. But only formerly known, because she is now legitimate—Queen Mary has ruled it, the Pope has ruled it. The facts do not matter; what matters is what everyone says. And if she is legitimate, and the daughter of Margaret Queen of Scots (the older sister of Henry VIII), then she goes before my mother, who is legitimate and the daughter of Mary Queen of France (the younger sister). But in his will he names our line, and so did the will of King Edward . . . so who knows who should be the next heir? Who knows who should walk on the queen’s heels? Not me, for sure. Not anyone waiting to go in to dinner.
It turns into a hushed wrestle. Lady Margaret the Legitimate pushes rudely in front of me, and I step back with false deference and assumed good manners. She is Queen Mary’s favorite, faithful to Rome, loudly faithful to her cousin now she is queen. She is a big woman with thick graying hair packed under an old-fashioned hood. She spent her life in and out of favor of the old king, in and out of the Tower, too, and she is used to elbowing for her place. Beside her, I am like an exquisite daughter, perhaps granddaughter. I am fair, I am dainty, I am thirteen years old, the true and legitimate granddaughter of the famously beautiful Tudor Queen of France. I step back with a little patient sigh, looking a hundred times more royal than she does, pushing in with a grunt.
She and my mother go elbow to elbow, almost fist to fist. It is as good as a wrestling match on the village green, every night. Queen Mary glances back and throws a smile, a word to one or to the other of them and the order is settled. We can process to dinner.
Mary, the smallest maid-in-waiting in the world, moves with me as if we were dancing partners. We look so pretty together that nobody remarks that she is tiny compared with everyone else. They laugh at her and pet her, and they tell my mother that she must feed her game and roast meats to make her grow. Nobody thinks that there might be anything wrong with her, and my mother says nothing. With her finest daughter lost to her, she’s not going to undervalue the two that she has left. I see Mary eyeing the court dwarf, Thomasina, sometimes, as a bad-tempered kitten will challenge a small cat. Thomasina, who is fully grown at less than four feet, and excessively proud, ignores Mary completely.
When I first meet the Herberts, father and son, it is as if we are strangers. My marriage is annulled as if it had never been, and neither of them says one word to me. The Earl of Pembroke bows as if he cannot quite recall me; his son Henry inclines his head with faint regret. I ignore them both.
I don’t care for them, I don’t care for anything at court. I have become a young lady of the royal house again. I am restored. I can hardly believe that I ever had a sister Jane at all, for no one ever mentions her. I had no father, I had no sister Jane. Little Mary and I are Queen Mary’s loyal maids-in-waiting, and my mother accompanies her everywhere as her favored cousin and senior lady at court. I have my own rooms in the queen’s apartments, while Mary sleeps in the maids’ rooms with the other girls. We are acknowledged as the queen’s cousins and we make new friends and companions.
I meet Janey Seymour, who is sister to Ned Seymour, the handsome boy who came to be betrothed to Jane all that long time ago. I like Janey at once. She is a clever girl, a scholar like Jane; she even writes poetry that rhymes and yet she is playful and funny. She strikes me at once as an ideal friend: she is pretty like me and learned like Jane. She hoped to be Jane’s sister-in-law, she is the only person at court who speaks of her. We have shared a loss, and now we can be friends.
The two of us agree on everything, silently disapproving when the queen accepts a proposal of marriage from a man eleven years her junior and a thousand times better-looking, the dazzlingly handsome Prince Philip of Spain, who comes to England with a court of darkly delicious friends and proceeds to make all us girls quite giddy with desire, frantic to be admired.
They are all so rich, they are unspeakably, unimaginably rich! A girl cannot be blamed for quietly learning a few words of Spanish and praying for one of the dons, almost any one of them, to notice her. Their dark capes are all embroidered with gold or silver thread—real gold, real silver. They wear ropes of gold, chains of gold at their shoulders, flung around their necks as if they were scarves. Their hats are embossed with pearls, they wear rubies as lightly as garnets, and every single one of them has an enor
The girls of Queen Mary’s rooms whisper to themselves whether they should like to marry one of the handsome hidalgos and go away to Spain forever, and I think—yes, I would. God knows I would. I wouldn’t trouble myself over heresy and righteousness; I want to dance and wear a small fortune on my fingers. I want someone to love me, I want to feel alive, I want to feel madly alive every moment of every day, since I have seen how easily and quickly a girl can die. “Learn you to die!” I have learned; and I only want to live. Janey Seymour says that my heart rushes just like hers does, that we are both girls who have to live life at a gallop. We are young and we have to have everything all at once. She says this is what it is to be young and beautiful—not like the queen, who is nearly forty and slow as a fat old mare who has been left out in the pasture for too long.
The queen marries Prince Philip of Spain at Winchester, and she makes a poor showing. She is pale with nerves, and her square little face takes on the folded scowl of her bad-tempered father when she is anxious. She stands like he did in his horrible portraits, her feet spread apart under her thick gown, pugnacious as a hen. Heavens! What a determined old lady she is! I know it’s not her fault—I am not such a fool as to think that a woman should be blamed for not being young and beautiful—though of course I prefer the young and the beautiful, being one of them myself. But at least she looks as well as she can on her wedding day, she dresses as she should, she wears a gown of gold for her wedding, her sleeves are embroidered with diamonds—and then we start the breathless wait to see if she can bear him a son.