Her Highness, the Traitor (27 page)

I did not sleep that night after leaving John at the Tower. I stayed in my chamber, praying and weeping. When dawn came, I dried my eyes and dressed, using more care than I had as of late. Then, followed by Henry Sidney, my daughter Mary, and my ladies, I took Katheryn’s hand and walked out to the garden, where we sat watching as the sun broke over the Thames.

The church bells tolled seven, and John’s half sisters joined the vigil. Eight, and a couple of my cousins came to sit with us. Nine—the hour John was to proceed to the scaffold.

I fingered my rosary. It was a string of beads to me, nothing more, but it was a string of beads my John had held, at least. Unbidden, the Latin prayers I had said as a much-younger woman came back to me, and I began to repeat them in a whisper. Perhaps John, dying his Catholic death, was saying them, too.

The sun was high in the sky when John’s servant from the Tower arrived by skiff at Chelsea’s landing. As I went to meet him, he took off his cap and held it to his heart. “It is done, Your Grace. I am most heartily sorry.”

I realized then that the entire household had come out to the garden, the same garden where Catherine Parr and Thomas Seymour had courted and giggled in what seemed now to be a more innocent time. Everybody stood silent, their heads capless and bowed. Some were weeping. I managed to command my voice. “Please take the rest of the day to mourn my husband,” I said, blinking back tears. “He was a good and fair master.”

“Aye, he was,” my servants muttered.

Henry Sidney took Mary into his arms, while Mistress Blount offered similar comfort to Katheryn. Maudlyn Flower took my arm. “Please go in and lie down, Your Grace. I will give you something to make you sleep.”

I shook my head. “I would like to walk for a while. By myself.”

“My lady…”

“I need to be alone.”

I turned away and set off walking aimlessly down the bank of the river. Someone from my household was protectively dogging my footsteps, I soon realized, but he stayed at a respectful distance, so I did not care. Most of the time, I was crying. At last, I grew so tired I could walk no longer, so I sat on the riverbank, where I childishly hugged my knees and watched the watercraft go by.
Most
people
in
London
travel
by
water
, John’s seven-year-old voice informed me.

How cruel my father had been, to marry me to someone I would come to love so dearly.

Grief, I found, would not keep me awake. Too exhausted from my sleepless night and from weeping and walking to hold my eyes open for long, I drifted off. For a few happy hours I was transported to my childhood in Halden with John until a touch awoke me. “My lady? It’s getting ready to rain. Please let me take you home.”

I looked up to see one of my servants, leading my horse. I nodded and let him help me to my feet and into the saddle. Then, as the rain began to fall, I rode back to a home to which my John would never return.

On October 1, 1553, the crown King Edward and the Duke of Northumberland had wanted to go on my own daughter’s head was put on that of Queen Mary. With Jane in the Tower, Harry and I took no part in the coronation; doing so would have been too awkward for words. Yet a couple of weeks later, Harry was allowed to take his seat in Parliament—albeit belatedly—and I was summoned to Mary’s presence.

My cousin smiled at me and quickly ordered me to rise. “Your daughter has written us a letter,” she said, handing it to me.

I read the long letter slowly, tracing the perfectly formed letters with a finger and imagining the voice of the daughter I had not seen since July.

Although my fault be such that, but for the goodness and clemency of the queen, I can have no hope of finding pardon, nor in craving forgiveness, having given ear to those who at that time appeared, not only to myself, but also to a great part of this realm, to be wise, and now have manifested themselves the contrary…Although my fault may be great, and I confess it to be so, nevertheless I am charged and esteemed guilty more than I have deserved. For whereas I might take upon me that of which I was not worthy, yet no one can ever say either that I sought it as my own, or that I was pleased with it or ever accepted it…

As I had urged her to do when we had parted, Jane had offered a full explanation of the events that had put her on the throne, without once speaking disrespectfully of the queen’s religion. I sighed with relief as I read on, then winced when I reached these words, written perhaps at my own advice:

I know for certain that, twice during this time, poison was given to me, first in the house of the Duchess of Northumberland, and afterwards here in the Tower, as I have the best and most certain testimony, besides that since that time all my hair has fallen off.

I at last handed the letter back to Queen Mary. “I hope, Your Majesty, that this letter shows you that my daughter was innocent of any ambition to wear the crown.”

“It shows us that the plan was concocted by others, which we already knew. That your daughter was entirely unhappy about being queen is something of which we are not completely convinced.” Mary folded the letter. “And those who have seen her at the Tower report that she has an abundant head of hair.”

I blushed. “My daughter has been known to exaggerate on occasion, but I do believe, Your Majesty, she genuinely believed that malicious forces were working against her. She was greatly agitated and unsure of what was going to happen next. I myself believed in the possibility of poison at the time, as I told Your Majesty at Beaulieu.”

“And there is nothing about you or your husband in this letter! To believe your daughter, neither your husband nor you played any role in this business. Why, you yourself have admitted the contrary.” Mary stopped me before I could speak. “It is of no matter. We merely say these things to inform you that although we are inclined to mercy, given your daughter’s youth and relative blamelessness, we are not a fool.”

I hung my head. “Your Majesty, might you be willing to set my daughter free, or at least allow her to come to live with us under our supervision? I promise Your Majesty she will be a loyal subject to you if given a chance.”

“That we must wonder at, given her heretical views. It was the talk of the Tower, what she had to say of Northumberland’s conversion.”

I sighed. Though neither Harry nor I had been allowed to see Jane since her imprisonment, we did have friends who were in a position to let us know of her daily doings. Having been dining with her jailer, Master Partridge, and his friend Rowland Lea the week after Northumberland’s execution, Jane had heard with irritation that the Mass was again being heard in London. Then she had turned to the subject of Northumberland, whom she had called the most odious of all men, and had pronounced with relish, “As his life was wicked and full of dissimulation, so was his end thereafter.”

“Northumberland’s good end was the one redeeming aspect of his life,” Mary said firmly. “It has brought many Londoners back to the true faith. If your daughter believes his death was a wicked one, what hope is there for her? We do not like to refuse you, Frances, as you are our cousin, but for now, your daughter must remain where she is. We promised you her life, and we intend to keep that promise, though there are several on the council who would have her dead.”

I shuddered.

“So be content with that for now,” Mary advised. “We called you here to let you see your daughter’s letter, and we also called you here for another reason. The Duke of Suffolk is being very difficult on the matter of religion. You must know we wish to put the state of religion back to where it was at the time of our father, King Henry, and to repeal the statutes that were enacted under our misguided young brother. Your husband is opposing these measures, and quite vocally. If you have any influence over him, we wish you would use it, for he is irritating us. He should remember that he has a daughter in the Tower.”

“I will try, Your Majesty.” I hesitated. “Your Majesty, may I ask what is to become of the lord Guildford and his brothers?”

“The Duchess of Northumberland has been wearing poor Susan Clarencius to rags, asking her to intervene with us on their behalf,” said Mary. “She is a devoted mother, and we must sympathize with her, but we are not ready to decide these matters. She must be patient.” Mary smiled. “As you must be yourself.”

***

That afternoon at our house at Sheen, I caught my husband when he returned from Parliament. “Harry, I have spoken with the queen today. She is still disposed toward clemency for Jane, but she must remain in the Tower for now.”

“What, does the queen think our Jane is going to don armor and challenge her? Jane of Arc?”

“She is mainly concerned about Jane’s views on religion, and your own, as well, Harry. She says you are speaking against her in Parliament.”

Harry shrugged. “Someone has to.”

“Why does it have to be you? Harry, you could have died on the scaffold with Northumberland! Can’t you give way on this? She wishes only to turn back religion to the way it was in King Henry’s time, and she herself proclaimed that she would not compel her subjects to follow her religion.”

“For now. Do you think that’s going to continue indefinitely? This Parliament will only be the nose under the camel’s tent, I’ll wager, if she’s encouraged in her changes. And she’s already complaining that the lady Elizabeth does not have the proper motive for attending Mass. The poor lady can’t win. If she doesn’t go to the Mass, Queen Mary squawks at her, and if she does go, she gets squawked at for not being sincere in her devotion. No, my dear, I’m afraid that if we do nothing, it’s only a matter of time before the queen brings England back under Papal control.”

“But you are angering her, Harry. She told me so. You are putting our daughter at risk.”

“Our Jane wouldn’t want me to keep silent. You might say I’m doing this for her.”

I shook my head. “That may be so, but her approval shouldn’t force you into imprudence.”

“The truth is, my dear, you have no strong feelings about these things, and you can’t understand those of us who do.”

“Perhaps I can’t. But I can understand that you are alienating the queen at a time when we should be treading carefully.”

Harry snorted. “Treading carefully? If the queen goes through with the marriage to Philip of Spain, as it is rumored that she will, it will be she who has to tread carefully. Mark my words, the English people won’t stand for it.”

It is shameful to admit, but my sons’ imprisonment was probably the only thing that saved me from following John to the grave. Working to free them gave me a purpose to get out of bed in the morning. Without that cause to occupy me, I might well have just lay there each morning, listening to John’s clock tick beside me and dreaming of an impossible revenge against those who had made him their scapegoat. I might—there were days I contemplated it—have even died at my own hand. Only the knowledge that this would make my poor daughters the children of a traitor
and
of a suicide stopped me, I think.

As it was, my thoughts were loathsome, especially toward the one male Dudley who was not locked up or dead: Jerome. On the surface, I was as kind to Jerome as ever—mending his shirts, making certain he was taken for the rides he loved, letting him win large sums (in his eyes) from me in the very simple card games he could play—but each time I looked at him, with his face that would have been so much like John’s if it had had a glimmer of intelligence in it, I wondered why God had been so unfair as to take John while leaving Jerome. Useless Jerome, who had never had a woman’s love, who would never father children. Why, if the Lord had to take a Dudley brother, could he not have taken Jerome? That I hated myself for thinking such things did not prevent me at all from thinking them, especially since at least once a week, I had to retell Jerome the pretty little fiction I had invented for him about John’s death and Andrew’s and my sons’ imprisonment: John had fallen ill while traveling and had had to be buried abroad, but he had died peacefully and happily and would be waiting for us all in heaven. Andrew and the boys, as Jerome still thought of my five sons, were traveling on very important business for the queen. No, I did not know when they would be coming back: the business was that important.

Jerome would nod solemnly and return to his cards. But I had underestimated even his capacity for observation, for one day he asked, “Jane, why do you cry so much lately?”

Caught off guard, I could say only, “I miss John very much.”

Jerome looked at me reproachfully. “I miss him, too,” he said sternly. “But he is happier where he is now. You told me that yourself, so you should not cry.”

“I will remember that,” I promised. “And I will try my best not to.”

The other story I had woven for Jerome’s benefit was that I regularly went to court to visit the queen—which was half-true, at least, for on the days Mary received petitions, I went to court and stood in the most outer of the queen’s outer chambers, alongside all of the other motley supplicants begging for a crust of royal favor. The kinder of the guards, recalling that I was a duchess in name, at least, and seeing that I was no longer young, would pull me a stool, but that was the only concession I received. Each afternoon, after several hours of waiting, I would be told the same thing. “The queen is not seeing anyone else today. You must go home.”

I did not confine my begging to the queen herself, though. There were those who knew the queen who could put in a word for me at the opportune time, and I pursued them shamelessly. Poor Susan Clarencius! In those days, when no one wanted to be associated with anyone connected with John, she was the only person in the queen’s circle of women who showed me any favor, and as a result, I bombarded her with petitions—and gifts. If she used half of the sleeves I worked for her in the evenings, when I sat in my chamber at Chelsea with none but my ladies and John’s clock for company, she must have never needed another pair in her lifetime, and if there was a bad smell anywhere around her, it was certainly not my fault, for I made her sweet bags for every corner of her wardrobe. Yet as kind as Susan Clarencius was to me, even she could bring me no more satisfactory answer than: “She is inclined to show your sons and Sir Andrew mercy, but she will not make any decisions just now. You must be patient.” Then it turned to: “She is disposed to show them mercy, but this must wait until after her marriage.”

The queen’s marriage had been the leading topic in London that autumn, pushing aside even the fraught topic of religion. There had been two leading candidates, one an Englishman and one a foreigner, both of them about a decade younger than the queen: twenty-seven-year-old Edward Courtenay, now restored to his family earldom of Devon, and twenty-six-year-old Philip of Spain, the heir of the emperor Charles.

The most enthusiastic promoter of the match with Courtenay was Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, who had spent time in prison with him. Since their release upon Mary’s arrival in London, the bishop had assumed a positively paternal attitude toward the fatherless Courtenay and lost no opportunity to praise him to Mary. He had a hard task ahead of him, for Courtenay, shut up for all of his youth in the Tower, was completely without judgment. Told what to do by others for all of his formative years, he had no difficulty in following the commands of the tricksters, whores, and flatterers who collected around him once he was free and at last had money to spend. Yet he was an Englishman and a great-grandson of Edward IV, which for many was enough to make him an ideal husband for the queen. For my part, I suspected Courtenay would be a disaster for Mary: a Katherine Howard in breeches.

Philip of Spain was a different proposition. Already a widower with a young son, he had been helping to govern his father’s vast domains for several years. Simon Renard, the imperial ambassador, had been pressing him upon Mary as a husband since the very day the ambassador had arrived to Beaulieu to meet with her. By mid-November, I and the rest of the people learned what had already been known to those at court: Mary had decided to marry Philip.

My, what a furor that caused! The Londoners’ imaginations ran wild with tales of Philip emptying the treasury and sending its contents to Spain, of Mary herself being dragged screaming from Westminster and hauled (sometimes in a sack) to be imprisoned abroad as Philip put the crown on his own head, of Philip’s son by his first wife being made the Prince of Wales, of Englishmen being thrown out of their houses in the dead of the night to make way for the hordes of Spaniards who would be coming over with the king. And this was all before the details of the marriage treaty had even been negotiated.

I was one of the few people I knew who did not regard the Spanish marriage with dread. By all accounts, Mary had had no desire to marry one of her subjects, even if a mature man of the suitable rank could have been found. Philip was the son of the man to whom Mary had been betrothed as a young child and to whom she had never ceased to regard with warm feelings. A happy marriage for the queen could only bode well for my sons, for surely then she would be more kindly disposed toward me, who had been so happy in my own marriage. And if Philip could get Mary with child despite her relatively advanced age, then that augured even better for the future, for I would be able to appeal to the queen’s maternal instincts.

So I continued to haunt the court and to shower Susan Clarencius with gifts, and to pray each day that the marriage the queen desired so much would soon come about. In the meantime, on November 13, three of my sons and the lady Jane went to trial at London’s Guildhall. Jack already had a judgment of death upon him, and Robert’s trial had not yet taken place.

With Ambrose’s and Hal’s wives, I sat on a bench that gloomy November morning, waiting for the prisoners to be brought from the Tower. In addition to Jane and my sons, there would be a fifth defendant: Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He had quarreled with John over a revision to the canon law and had been but a reluctant supporter of Jane, so it was generally believed the queen was finally exacting revenge for Cranmer’s long-ago support for the marriage of King Henry to Anne Boleyn. The archbishop had not helped matters, however, by circulating a letter denunciating the Mass.

As we waited, I saw Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, making her way to our bench. Apparently the Duke of Suffolk had been unable to come, or perhaps had not trusted himself to keep his temper at his daughter’s trial. Frances had two escorts: the ubiquitous Adrian Stokes, and Jane’s former Italian tutor, Michelangelo Florio. How many good-looking men did the woman need around her? Reluctantly, I moved down to allow her and her swains to sit, and the duchess gave me a tremulous smile of acknowledgment, which I failed to return.

Never could I forgive the woman for not saying anything to Mary in favor of John, futile as I knew it would have been.

With the Duchess of Suffolk settled into place at last, it was time for the prisoners, who had been led on foot from the Tower through the streets of London, to make their entrance, preceded by a man bearing an axe. At the forefront of the dismal procession was the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed by Guildford, then by Jane and her two ladies, and then by Ambrose and Hal.

Jane, wearing a black velvet gown and a black French hood, with a black velvet prayer book hanging at her belt and yet another black book in her hands, looked more an archbishop than the archbishop himself, save for her disadvantage of gender. She nodded at Frances, who dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief Stokes passed to her while Florio heaved a Florentine sigh.

I drank in the sight of my three sons, whom I had not seen since July, although their wives had been given permission to visit them. Their imprisonment was not harsh, and they all looked well-tended, though the exercise they were allowed—walking on the Tower leads—was far less than the sort of vigorous activity to which they had been accustomed. My sons each had a taste for fine clothing, and since the days of their young manhood, they had never gone to an event together without consulting with each other about what to wear. This trial was no exception. All wore short gowns over black embroidered doublets. The three of them sought me out with their eyes as they entered the room, and smiled.

I smiled broadly in return.

Sitting in judgment of the prisoners were the Duke of Norfolk, who had sentenced John to die, and fifteen others. One by one, the accused were brought to the bar. None had lawyers to assist them; it was not the way of a treason trial.

The archbishop pleaded not guilty. Then came Guildford’s turn. “Raise your hand.”

Guildford obeyed.

“Thou, Guildford Dudley who stands there are accused of taking possession of the Tower and of proclaiming Lady Jane Grey, daughter of the Duke of Suffolk, as queen. How do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?”

My son did not hesitate. “Guilty.”

Jane was next. Accused of taking possession of the Tower and proclaiming herself queen, with the additional charge of signing writings as the queen, she asked, “My lords, if I plead guilty, may I speak afterward?”

“You may.”

“I plead guilty,” Jane said, as easily as if she appeared in court every day of her life. “Yet I would like to add that although I accepted the crown, I never sought it, and that some of those before whom I stand sought to place it on my head.”

Norfolk, who could congratulate himself on having had the foresight to be a prisoner in the Tower during the events in question, nodded curtly. “You are finished?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Stand down.”

Jane obeyed. Her reproof to the judges had been no more successful than John’s, but I could not begrudge her a speck of admiration for having made it.

Ambrose and Hal, each charged with taking the field against Queen Mary and proclaiming Jane as queen, also pleaded guilty.

Because the archbishop had pleaded not guilty, the other prisoners had to wait until his trial was finished before their sentences were pronounced. At last—Cranmer having changed his plea after the Crown presented its evidence—each of the prisoners was called to hear his or her sentence. “Guildford Dudley, as you have pleaded guilty to high treason, I hereby sentence you to death by drawing, hanging, and quartering.”

Hal’s wife, sitting next to me, clutched my hand. I fought back nausea.

“Jane Dudley, approach the bench!”

The only sound in the Guildhall was Jane’s skirts swishing against the floor. “Jane Dudley, as you have pleaded guilty to high treason, I hereby sentence you to be burned alive on Tower Hill or beheaded as the queen should please.”

Frances Grey slumped over in a faint on Adrian Stokes’s shoulder. Jane’s face had not even changed.

My two other sons were sentenced to die the same grim death as Guildford. Then the prisoners once again formed a neat line and exited the Guildhall, this time with the axe facing them as a signal to the crowd that they had been sentenced to death.

Under the devoted ministrations of Master Stokes, who had all but knocked the curious out of the way so that his lady could come to herself in peace, Frances was reviving as I began to make my way out of the Guildhall. She looked up at me as I passed. “The queen promised me she would spare my daughter. Do you think her majesty will do so now that my child and your sons are under this dreadful sentence?”

“You know her better than I do, my lady. Unlike you, I have not been allowed into her presence.”

I had struck home. Frances blushed. Then she said, “I will beg for all of their lives if I see the queen again. In the meantime, I can at least pray that she spares my daughter’s life, and your sons’, as well. Will you do the same?”

“I shall pray for all of them.” Then I added, “But it is the queen we must convince. God may be an easier matter.”