Secrets of the Tudor Court Boxed Set (120 page)

Queen Jane studied those of us who remained, then told everyone to leave except her own woman, Mistress Tilney, and young Lady Throckmorton, a knight’s wife.

I exited the royal apartments and went in search of Will. We were to remain in the Tower for the time being. Officially, I was one of the great ladies of the household to Queen Jane.

When I found him, I recounted the scene between Queen Jane and her husband. “Her Grace may not be as easy to control as Northumberland believed,” I warned, “and yet I think she may have the makings of a strong ruler. She certainly put Lord Guildford in his place!”

The Duke of Northumberland, and Will with him, left the Tower after dinner on the thirteenth of July. Mary Tudor had eluded capture by Lord Robin Dudley and was gathering support in the countryside. Northumberland forces, six hundred strong, were mustering at the duke’s Durham House and at the royal palace of Whitehall and
would march out, passing through London, the next morning. This army included Will and three of Northumberland’s sons—Jack, Ambrose, and Robin Dudley—but Gil would remain with Queen Jane in the Tower.

A few privy councilors were also to stay behind, among them my father. We supped together with Aunt Elizabeth that evening in high spirits. We were confident that Mary would be in custody within the week and Queen Jane’s hold on the throne secure. I gave a passing thought to Elizabeth Tudor, but everyone said she had no legitimate claim to the Crown and I soon forgot about her again.

On the morning of the nineteenth, Queen Jane announced, after breaking her fast, that she intended to leave the Tower to attend a christening at the church of All Hallows Barking.

“You cannot go,” her mother said. “It is neither safe nor seemly for you to leave the Tower before your coronation.”

“I promised Master Underhill that I would stand godmother to his six-day-old son.” The queen’s lower lip crept forward in a pout.

“Send a proxy,” Jane Northumberland suggested. “That is what queens do.”

“I suppose it is.” Her Grace looked thoughtful. “Lady Throckmorton, you will go in my stead. You are to name the boy Guildford, after my husband.”

“As you wish, Your Grace,” Lady Throckmorton said. “May I ask a boon? I should like to dine at my own house afterward and retrieve one or two things I did not have time to collect before I came here.”

Queen Jane graciously granted permission.

Soon after Lady Throckmorton left the precincts, my father sent word for me to meet him in the lord lieutenant’s lodgings. I was glad of the excuse to leave the queen’s apartments. The day seemed likely to proceed exactly as those preceding it had—uneventful, even dull, with entirely too much praying for my liking. I was counting the days until Will’s return, but had no premonition that everything was not going smoothly. By now, I was certain, Mary Tudor had been captured.

“I am about to leave, Bess,” Father said. “It would be best if you came with me.”

“Leave?” I stared at him blankly.

“The other lords of the council have already fled.”

The image of rats leaving a sinking ship sprang immediately to my mind. A sick feeling crept into my belly. “But why?” I whispered.

“The tide has turned. Mary Tudor is marching toward London at the head of an army. The common people flock to her. In their understanding, she is her brother’s rightful heir. That matters more to them than their fear of a return to the Church of Rome.”

“But . . . but King Edward made his cousin Jane his legal heir. We are only carrying out the late king’s dying command.”

His pitying look told me that this signified nothing. A terrible coldness encased my limbs. The people had turned against Northumberland, and Will was with the duke’s army. He was in danger. My legs suddenly felt too weak to support my weight. I grasped Father’s arm for support.

He broke my hold with no more effort than it would have taken to dislodge a clinging toddler. “There is only one course open to us now, Bess, if we want to avoid attainder for treason. Pembroke, Clinton, and some of the others have gone to the Earl of Pembroke’s London house, Baynard’s Castle. I will join them there and together we will proclaim Mary queen. I pray to God this gesture will be enough to save me from the headsman’s ax. If you know what’s good for you, daughter, you will make haste to Winchester House, gather up those possessions most dear to you, and abandon the rest.”

“But where am I to go? And what of Will?”

“Cowling Castle should be safe. You can take refuge there with your mother.”

“What of Will?” I repeated.

Father sent a pitying look my way as he opened the door. “You can do nothing for him. He’s too entrenched as Northumberland’s second in command.”

As shaken by Father’s abrupt change of allegiance as by his news and his warning, I turned to Aunt Elizabeth after he’d gone. “I do not know what to do,” I wailed. “Will expects me to stay here with Queen Jane, but if I could find him, warn him—we might escape Queen Mary’s wrath if he joins the others at Baynard’s Castle.” What did I care who ruled England, so long as Will was safe?

“If your father is right,” Aunt Elizabeth said, “we will all suffer for our support of Queen Jane. I have no advice to give you, Bess. I am worried about my own husband’s fate.”

“How could things change so fast?”

“Bad luck.” Some of my aunt’s old bitterness, absent since her remarriage, surfaced when she added, “Did the duke think Mary Tudor would not hear rumors that the king was dying? He should have secured her person weeks ago.”

I returned to Queen Jane’s apartments in a troubled state of mind and nearly collided with Geraldine, Lady Clinton, hurrying the other way. She hesitated when she saw me.

“Is something amiss?” I kept my voice level but my heart was in my throat.

“I . . . I am unsure how to answer you.” She avoided meeting my eyes. “My husband has sent word that I am to join him immediately at Baynard’s Castle. He . . . he bade me tell no one that I am leaving.”

At this proof of what Father had already told me, I clamped down hard on my growing fear and forced myself to smile. “You must go, then, and at once.”

“Come with me, Bess.”

But I shook my head. “I cannot go yet.”

Inside the queen’s apartments, nothing seemed to have changed. But even as that thought crossed my mind, a messenger delivered a note to Queen Jane’s father, the Duke of Suffolk. A look of pure horror crossed his face before he blanked out all emotion. Quietly and without fuss, he left the room.

I told Jane Northumberland what my father had said, but I did not mention Geraldine’s defection. Her absence would be noticed soon enough.

“Nonsense, Bess,” the duchess said, and refused to discuss the matter further. She was as blind as I had been to the possibility of failure.

An hour passed before the Duke of Suffolk returned. Protocol demanded that he bow upon entering the presence of his sovereign, even if she was also his daughter. Instead, he walked straight up to her chair and spoke in a voice loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. “The Lady Mary has been proclaimed queen. Soldiers have arrived to claim the Tower in her name. I have ordered my men to lay down their arms and surrender.”

The Lady Jane Grey, queen no more, stared at her father in disbelief. Then her hands clenched into fists on the arms of her chair. Her voice was cold and brittle. “You helped persuade me to accept the crown, and now you would take it from me.”

Suffolk did not reply in words, but he took hold of the canopy of state under which his daughter sat and ripped it from its moorings. The Lady Jane fled to an inner room, her ladies and Jane Northumberland trailing after her. The Duchess of Suffolk stayed behind to question her husband in low tones, and after a moment they left together, abandoning their daughter now that she was no longer queen.

I stared at the empty chair. A moment ago, it had been a queen’s throne. Now it was just an ordinary piece of furniture again. The torn canopy lay on the floor where Suffolk had thrown it, ruined, as everything we’d hoped for had been ruined by Northumberland’s failure to capture Queen Mary.

Once Mary was officially proclaimed queen, I would no longer be at court, no longer be Marchioness of Northampton, and no longer be married to Will. For Will the future might be even more bleak. To Queen Mary, Will was a rebel. If her men captured him, she’d execute him for treason. King Edward’s will would be meaningless against the might of a victorious army. Lady Jane Grey’s right to be queen. My right to be
married to Will. Both would be overturned because the people supported the heiress they knew—a king’s daughter—over a royal cousin most of them had probably never heard of.

But I’d wager they all knew that the Duke of Northumberland had married that cousin to his own son. Their leaders, and no doubt Queen Mary herself, imagined a dastardly plot in the triple weddings of last Whitsuntide. No amount of argument was likely now to sway them from that false conclusion. Father was right. It was too late for Will to salvage anything. We had been too closely linked to Northumberland for too long.

I rested my forehead against the cool stone of a window casing. Eyes closed, I fought tears of despair. My thoughts circled round and round, going nowhere, until finally, drawing in a deep breath, I lifted my head and looked out at a view of the Thames and Southwark and my gaze fell upon my own home, Winchester House.

Suddenly I knew what I had to do. I would be no use to Will if I was trapped in the Tower. Escape was still possible.

If Will could elude capture, he would look for me at Winchester House, not here in the Tower of London. Once we were reunited, we could go into exile in France. Will had friends there, people he had met when he’d gone to the French court as an ambassador of the king.

I left the royal apartments in haste and made my way through the Tower precincts and out through the Lion Gate. No one tried to stop me. As I hurried along Thames Street on foot, I caught a glimpse of Lady Throckmorton returning from the christening she’d attended as Queen Jane’s representative. I started to call out to her, but thought better of the impulse to warn her. I could not risk drawing attention to myself. She passed into the dark maw of the fortress that was both palace and prison, never suspecting what awaited her within, and the heavy gate closed behind her with an ominous crash.

41

F
or the next week, no news reached me at Winchester House. In some ways that was worse than hearing every frightening rumor that spread through London and its suburbs.

My servants had worked themselves into a state of panic even before I returned from the Tower of London. They knew Will and I had backed the wrong side and feared being clapped into prison for treason. Many of them ran away that first night and I was afraid to send one of the few who remained to discover what was going on, lest he, or she, not return.

“Drink a little of this posset, my lady,” Birdie Crane said, holding out a steaming goblet. “It will give you strength.”

I accepted the offering and sipped. The sweet, hot liquid warmed me from within, but I was no less worried when I’d drained the cup to the dregs. I handed it back and paused to consider my waiting gentlewoman. Birdie had joined the household shortly after my sojourn with the queen dowager at Chelsea. She fulfilled her duties and stayed in the background the rest of the time, having mastered the art of remaining so very still that her presence often went unnoticed. I’d never felt
particularly close to her, but I was grateful she had elected to stay at Winchester House.

“Do you wish to return to your family?” I asked.

She had come from somewhere in Kent. I could send her back to her kinfolk. I could send all of my household away to safety. I had no illusions about what would happen once Queen Mary reached London. She would take this house, Will’s titles, and every source of income available to him. Even the manor he’d put in my name when we married would go, once the new queen’s men discovered its existence. They’d claim it for the Crown along with all the rest.

“I will stay with you as long as you need me, my lady,” Birdie said. “My parents died of the last epidemic of the sweat and I have no brothers or sisters.”

It said something about the events of the last few days that my first thought was to wonder if she’d been sent to our household as a spy. Studying her through narrowed and suspicious eyes I saw a slender woman four or five years younger than myself with blue eyes and light brown hair; a sharply defined nose; and a small, pointed chin. One eye had a slight droop at the corner and both were reddened with weeping.

“Do you cry for the marquess?” I asked.

Her laugh was bitter. “I cry for myself, and for a good gentleman who marched out with the Duke of Northumberland’s troops.”

“A lover?”

“You are surprised,” she said with a tinge of bitterness in her voice. “I know I am no beauty, nor am I an heiress, but I still can love.”

I covered her hand with mine. “I know what it is to love and be loved. I pray he will come back safe and sound.”

“What good will that do? He’ll be a prisoner.”

“Queen Mary will not punish everyone who supported the Lady Jane. She will imprison the leaders”—I had to stop and swallow hard—“and free the rest.” I hoped that would be the case, although it would do Will no good.

“That will not help me,” Birdie lamented. “My lover is married. He
will never be mine.” Fresh tears sprang into her eyes. “And if I cannot stay with you, my lady, I have nowhere else to go.”

“Dry your eyes,” I said. “I will not send you away.”

But I did send her out into the city, to try to discover the fate of Northumberland’s army. Griggs, the groom who had accompanied Will to Cowling Castle so many years before, went with her. He was an old man now, bald as an egg and his broad red beard gone gray. He’d been in service to the Parrs since Will was a boy.

While they were gone, I sent the rest of the household away. It was no good pretending we could stay at Winchester House. One of Queen Mary’s first acts would be to release Bishop Gardiner from the Tower, and he would lose no time reclaiming both his bishopric and his house in Southwark. A few of the servants, who had been with Will almost as long as Griggs, did not want to leave but I insisted. The rest made haste to escape.