Her Highness, the Traitor (35 page)

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 in 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.

Frances gave birth 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.

In 1557, the surviving Dudley sons, Ambrose, Robert, and Henry, fought for King Philip at St. Quentin, where Henry was killed. Following this, the Crown reversed the attainders of Ambrose, Robert, and their sisters.

The Dudley children and the Grey children fared very differently in Elizabeth’s reign. Robert Dudley became the Earl of Leicester. His volatile but enduring relationship with the queen, which ended only with his death in 1588, has fascinated readers for centuries. Elizabeth marked the final letter he sent to her before his death as “His Last Letter” and kept it for the rest of her life. Ambrose Dudley became the Earl of Warwick. He survived his younger brother Robert, to whom he was devoted, by two years, dying in 1590. Ambrose had no children.

Mary Sidney and her sister Katherine Hastings (which I spelled “Katheryn” in my novel to distinguish her from the many other Katherines of her day) each attended Queen Elizabeth. Mary lived until 1586. Her firstborn son, Philip Sidney, gained fame as a poet and critic and as an embodiment of the chivalric ideal. His literary works are still studied today. Her daughter Mary, who eventually married Henry Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, was both a poet and a literary patron. Katherine Hastings’s long marriage to Henry Hastings, who inherited his father’s earldom, was happy but childless. As Countess of Huntingdon, Katherine took many well-born young girls into her household and prided herself on her ability to “breed and govern young gentlewomen.” Widowed in 1595, she outlived her husband by a quarter of a century and was buried in 1620 at Chelsea’s Old Church alongside her mother.

For Katherine and Mary Grey, Elizabeth’s reign was disastrous. Katherine Grey fell in love with Somerset’s son, the Earl of Hertford. Frances, approving of the match but recognizing the need to gain royal approval, drafted a letter to Elizabeth seeking permission for the couple to marry. Before she could send the letter, she died. Instead of seeking another means of gaining the queen’s approval, the couple secretly married in 1560 with the assistance of Hertford’s sister Jane. When their marriage came to light, both spouses were imprisoned in the Tower, where the pregnant Katherine gave birth to a son. Katherine spent the rest of her life in custody, first at the Tower and later in various private homes, though a sympathetic Tower guard had allowed the couple to meet, resulting in a second son. Katherine died in 1568, at about age twenty-eight. Hertford eventually was freed and was allowed custody of his two sons by Katherine. Having remarried, he died an octogenarian in 1621. Hertford and Katherine Grey were finally reunited that same year when their grandson, the new earl, moved Katherine’s body to Hertford’s tomb at Salisbury Cathedral.

In 1565, Mary Grey likewise made a secret marriage, hers to Thomas Keyes, a widower who was a sergeant porter at court. The match also resulted in the couple’s imprisonment. Although the spouses were eventually freed, they were never allowed to resume living together as a married couple. Keyes died in 1571. Mary, who had set up her own household at Aldersgate, died in 1578. She was buried at Westminster Abbey in her mother’s tomb.

Except for Mary Sidney’s letter to her mother and the letters mentioned by Katherine Hastings, all of the letters and other writings quoted in this novel are genuine, although I have modernized spelling and punctuation in some cases. Likewise, all of the execution speeches are taken from contemporary accounts, except for Guildford Dudley’s speech, the substance of which was not recorded.

My depiction of the Lord of Misrule’s antics is based upon contemporary accounts of the festivities. The December 1551 celebration featured “an infamous tabernacle, a representation of the holy sacrament in its monstrance, which [was] wetted and perfumed in most strange fashion, with great ridicule of the ecclesiastical estate.” This is as good a place as any to make clear (if anyone is in doubt) that the religious bigotry expressed by various characters echoes their own beliefs, not mine.

There is no evidence that Jane and Frances attended the trials or the executions I have depicted them as attending, but there is nothing putting them elsewhere at the time. Likewise, the execution-eve visits each woman makes to her husband are products of my imagination, but it is possible such visits were allowed. Mary’s refusal to give an audience to Jane Dudley in July 1553, and Frances’s arrival at Beaulieu at two in the morning to see Mary, are both recorded by contemporary sources.

Mary did indeed make plans to escape from England in 1550, but her confiding her intentions to Frances is purely my invention.

Jane Grey’s exact birth date is unknown, but Eric Ives convincingly places it in the spring of 1537 rather than the October date of tradition. The birthdates of the children of John and Jane Dudley are also unrecorded. An unnamed Dudley son was christened in March 1537, and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, who was Guildford’s godfather, was in England from May 1537 to September 1538; I think it possible then that Guildford was the Dudley son born in March 1537 and that Diego served as his godfather, not at his christening, but at his confirmation on a later date. With the other Dudley children, I have followed the estimates of their ages given by Simon Adams, a specialist on Robert Dudley, or, failing that, those given in the
Oxford
Dictionary
of
National
Biography
.

Anne Seymour, born in 1538, was only twelve when she married Jack Dudley. I therefore think it likely her marriage had yet to be consummated when her husband was imprisoned in 1553.

Robert Dudley’s marriage to Amy Robsart was later characterized by William Cecil as a “carnal” marriage, a love match, and that it was not a particularly illustrious match for an earl’s son is further evidence the couple married for love. That Mary Dudley’s marriage to Henry Sidney might have also been a love match is suggested by the fact that she had two wedding ceremonies: one at Esher, the other at Ely Place. It may be that the first was secret, the second public. Her marriage was certainly less distinguished than that of her younger sister, Katherine Dudley, who married the heir to an earldom.

A supposedly contemporary description of Jane Grey’s physical appearance states she was thin and very small, with reddish-brown eyes and nearly red hair. As Leanda de Lisle has observed, however, this description may have been the invention of Richard Davey, a modern biographer of Jane, so I have not relied upon it. No portrait has been definitively identified as being an authentic one of Jane, but John Stephan Edwards makes a good case for a portrait at Syon House as being a true one of Jane. I have therefore followed that portrait, which shows an auburn-haired young woman with brown eyes, in my own novel.

There is no historical evidence that Adrian Stokes suffered the loss of a fiancée. That is my invention.

A “Mistress Ellen,” who is otherwise unidentified, accompanied Jane Grey to the scaffold. As Leanda de Lisle points out, the story about her being Jane’s nurse is a modern invention, possibly inspired by Juliet’s nurse. I supplied her with the first name of “Ursula.”

Recently, several historians, including Eric Ives and Leanda de Lisle, have questioned the story that Frances married Adrian Stokes on March 9, 1554, just weeks after her daughter’s and husband’s deaths. It has been suggested the wedding actually took place in 1555 and there was confusion caused by the official practice of dating the New Year from March 25. In researching this book, however, I found in the United Kingdom’s National Archives a 1560 inquisition post mortem for Frances. To my dismay, it gave the March 9, 1554, wedding date as well as precise birth and death dates of Elizabeth Stokes, her place of birth and death, and the ages of Katherine and Mary Grey—and because it used regnal years, not calendar years, it was unlikely there was confusion over new style/old style dates. While it is possible this information is incorrect, as it sometimes is in inquisitions post mortem, it also seemed likely the dates could have come from Adrian Stokes himself, who would have known this information better than anyone else.

There is, however, evidence that contradicts the March 1554 marriage date. A land grant to Frances dated April 10, 1554, makes no mention of Stokes. As late as April 21, 1555, Frances was still thought to be free to remarry: Simon Renard, the imperial ambassador, passed along the news that the Earl of Devon had been proposed as a husband for her. As Judith Field, a commenter on my blog, pointed out, however, these discrepancies could be readily explained if Frances kept her marriage secret for a time. After wrestling with the matter, I finally chose to use the March 1554 date as the historically more likely one, along with the scenario of a secret marriage.

***

Several of the characters who have appeared in this novel have traditionally been treated harshly in historical fiction, as well as in history. The reader may wonder why I have chosen to treat them differently.

For centuries, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, was viewed as one of history’s villains, whose insatiable ambition led him to destroy the innocent Somerset and to manipulate the hapless Edward VI. In the past few decades, however, historians have taken a much more balanced view of this man. As Susan Brigden and other historians have pointed out, there is evidence that Somerset was involved in some sort of plot against Northumberland in 1551, even if its actual details were exaggerated by the government. Far from ruthlessly engineering the downfall of Somerset, Northumberland arranged for the marriage of their children and restored the duke to his position on the council, although his attempt at reconciliation failed.

It continues to be debated whether the plan to alter the succession originated with Edward VI himself or with Northumberland, but it is beyond question the young king held rigidly Protestant views and made it clear to Mary he disapproved of her Catholic practices, berating her in person on occasion. Certainly once his “devise” was revealed, Edward VI himself demanded his councilors put it into effect. Thomas Cranmer would later tell Mary it was not Northumberland, but other members of the council and Edward, who pressured him into supporting Jane as queen. He wrote that the king himself required him to sign the document supporting the king’s will. Furthermore, while the devise certainly benefited the Dudley family, it should be noted that Northumberland’s first choice of a bride for Guildford Dudley had not been Jane Grey, but Margaret Clifford, who was much further from the throne than her cousin Jane. William Cecil indicated that the idea of a match between Guildford and Jane originated with the Marchioness of Northampton.

As Edward VI sickened, rumors swirled that Northumberland, hated by many because of his role in executing the popular Somerset and because of his suppression of Kett’s rebellion, was poisoning him. (Even Frances alleged that Northumberland had poisoned her husband, and Jane claimed to have been “envenomed” in the Duchess of Northumberland’s house.) The charges against Northumberland at his trial did not include regicide, and modern historians give the rumors of poison little credence, although it may be that a wise woman was called upon when conventional physicians failed to cure the king. An associated story, which still is repeated today, even had it that the duke switched Edward VI’s body with that of a youth murdered for that purpose. This story is most improbable. The merchant John Burcher, the only contemporary source to record this particular rumor, was residing in Strasburgh at the time and did not name his informant. Edward VI was buried on August 8, long after Northumberland had been imprisoned in the Tower. Had there been doubts the body was the king’s, it would have been simple for Mary’s government to ascertain the truth.

Northumberland’s private life does not support the notion of him as a scheming, coldhearted man. Jane, his wife, loved him deeply, as her letter to Lady Paget pleading for his life, and her will, make heartbreakingly apparent. In a revealing letter, the duke, ailing and depressed, wrote, “Surely, but for a few children, which God has sent me, which also helps to pluck me on my knees, I have no great cause to desire to tarry much longer here.” He was indulgent to his son John when he ran into debt, telling him to inform him of his bills so they could be paid. Facing execution, he begged for the lives of his children, and though his motives for his last-minute conversion to Catholicism will likely never be known, it has been speculated that he did so in hopes of saving his sons from his fate.