The Last Tudor Read online

  To give Katherine her due, I have to admit that Ned Seymour is as charming as all the Seymours. He reminds me of his uncle Thomas, who was the kindest man I have ever known, husband to my tutor Queen Kateryn before Elizabeth destroyed their happiness. Ned is brown-haired with hazel eyes. I have never noticed before that they are kind eyes, but my sister is right, he has a pleasing warmth and a quite irresistible smile. I hope he does not have sinful thoughts behind that knowing gleam. He was brought up at court, companion to my cousin the king, so we know each other, we have ridden together and learned dancing together, and even studied together. He thinks as I do—as we all do—all the clever young people are Protestants. I would call him a friend, insofar as anyone is ever a friend in the bear pit that is a royal court. He is a great one for the reformed faith, so we share that too, and behind his lightheartedness he has a serious, thoughtful mind. My cousin King Edward is scholarly and grave like me, so we love to read together. But Ned Seymour makes us both laugh. He is never bawdy—my cousin the king will have no fools around him—but he is witty, and he has charm; he has that intense Seymour charm that makes friends wherever he goes. He is a boy that makes you smile to see him, a boy like that.

  I sit with my mother’s ladies at dinner, he sits with his father’s men. Our parents are seated at the head table on the dais above all of us, and survey the room, looking down on us. When I see the tilt of my mother’s overly proud chin, I remember that the last be first, and the first last, for many are called, but few chosen. She, in particular, I am certain can never be chosen; and when I become a duchess I will outrank her, and she will never be allowed to shout oaths at me again.

  When the tables are cleared away, the musicians play, and I am commanded to dance with my mother’s ladies and with my sister Katherine. Of course, Katherine flirts her skirt around and lifts it too high, so that she can show off her pretty shoes and her twinkling feet. She smiles all the time towards the top table where Ned is standing behind his father’s chair. I am sorry to say that once he winks at us. I think it is for the two of us, and not directed at Katherine. I am pleased that he is watching us dancing—but I think less of him that he should wink.

  Then there is general dancing and my mother orders me to partner him. Everyone remarks how well we look together even though he is a full head taller than I am. I am very small and pale; none of us Grey girls are big-boned; but I am glad to be dainty, and not a stout thing like Princess Elizabeth.

  “You dance beautifully,” Ned says to me, as we come together and wait for another couple to finish their part. “Do you know why my father and I are here?”

  The movement of the dance separates us and gives me time to think of a dignified reply.

  “No, do you?” is all I manage.

  He takes my hands as we progress down the line of other dancers. We stand and make an arch with our hands and he smiles at me as the others duck their heads and wind their way through. “They want us to marry,” he says cheerfully. “It’s agreed. We are to be husband and wife.”

  We have to stand opposite each other while another pair of dancers makes their way down the set, so he can see my response to this news from him. I feel my cheeks grow warm, and I try not to beam like an eager idiot. “It is my father who should tell me, not you,” I say stiffly.

  “Shall you be pleased when he does?”

  I look down so he can’t see what I am thinking. I don’t want my brown eyes to shine like his. “I am bound by the Word of God to obey my father,” I say.

  “Shall you be pleased to obey him and marry me?”

  “Quite.”

  My parents obviously believe that I should be the last person to be consulted, for I am not summoned to my mother’s rooms until the next day, when Edward and his father are preparing to leave and the horses are actually standing at the open front door, the scent of the English spring blowing into the house with the ecstatic singing of courting birds.

  I can hear the servants taking out the saddlebags in the hall below as I kneel to my parents, and my mother nods to the servant to shut the door.

  “You’re to marry Edward Seymour,” my mother says briskly. “Promised; but not betrothed in writing. First, we need to see if his father can get himself back on the council and work with John Dudley. Dudley is the man now. We have to see that Seymour will work with him and rise again.”

  “Unless there is any chance of the other matter . . .” my father says, looking at my mother with meaning.

  “No, he’s certain to marry a princess from abroad,” my mother says.

  I know at once that they are talking of Edward the king, who has said publicly that he will marry a foreign princess with a queenly dowry. I, myself, have never thought anything different, though some people say that I would make a wonderful queen, and I would be a light and a beacon of the new reformed religion and speed religious reform in a country that is painfully half-hearted, even now. I make sure that I keep my head bowed and I don’t say a word.

  “But they’re so suited,” my father pleads. “Both so scholarly, both so devout. And our Jane would be such a rightful heir to Kateryn Parr. We raised her for this; Queen Kateryn trained her for this.”

  I can feel my mother’s eyes scrutinizing me, but I don’t look up. “She would make the court into a convent!” she says, laughing.

  “A light in the world,” my father replies seriously.

  “I doubt it will ever happen. At any rate, Lady Jane, you can consider yourself promised in marriage to Edward Seymour until we tell you different.”

  My father puts his hand under my elbow and raises me up from my knees. “You’ll be a duchess, or something better,” he promises me. “Don’t you want to know what might be better? What about the throne of England?”

  I shake my head. “I have my eyes on a heavenly crown,” I tell him, and I ignore my mother’s vulgar snort of laughter.

  SUFFOLK PLACE, LONDON,

  SPRING 1553

  It is as well that I don’t set my heart on handsome Ned Seymour as a husband. His father’s return to power is short-lived and ends in his death. He was caught conspiring against John Dudley, and arrested, charged, and then executed for treason. The head of the family is dead, and the family ruined again. His famously proud wife, Anne Stanhope, who once had the criminal pride to push my tutor Dowager Queen Kateryn to one side so that she might go first in to dinner, is widowed and imprisoned in the Tower. Ned does not come to court at all. I was lucky to escape marriage with a young man who—however kind his eyes—is now the disgraced son of a traitor.

  It is as well that I never let my father’s ambition enter my prayers either, though I cannot help but know that all the reforming churchmen, all the Protestant believers, every living saint in England, wants me to marry the king and to lead a kingdom of pilgrims to our heavenly home. Not that my cousin King Edward says this—he insists that he will marry a royal from somewhere abroad; but clearly he cannot tolerate a papist princess. Of all the Protestant girls, I am the most suitable, devoted to the religion that he and I share, childhood friends, and the daughter of a princess of the blood.

  Significantly, my father has ordered that I be taught rhetoric—a royal skill—and I choose to study Arabic and Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek. If the call ever comes for me to take the crown, I will be ready. I lived with Queen Kateryn Parr: I know that a woman can be a scholar and a queen. Actually, I am better prepared than she was. But I will not fall into the sin of coveting the crown.

  The king’s half sisters do not follow my example in either study or religious devotion. I wish that they did. They do all they can to maintain their positions at court and their places in the eyes of the world but not in the sight of the Lord. None of the royal cousins walks in the light as I do. Princess Mary is a determined papist, and only God knows what Elizabeth believes. The other direct heir, Mary of Scotland, is a papist, being raised in sinful luxury at the court of France, and Margaret Douglas, daughter of my great-aunt Margaret who m
arried a Scotsman, tucked away in Yorkshire is said to be a papist too.

  But Princess Mary is the closest heir to the throne and we have to show her every respect, whatever we think of her religious beliefs. My own mother and John Dudley’s wife ride in Princess Mary’s train as she enters London with a great show of force, as if to remind everyone that she is the king’s heir and that they are all the best of friends.

  Alone, of our family, I refuse to wear ornate clothes and ride in Mary’s train. I will not peacock about in a richly embroidered hood. But she sends me gowns as if she hopes to buy my cousinly love, and I tell her lady-in-waiting Anne Wharton that I cannot endure to hear that a vain thing like Princess Elizabeth is praised for dressing more modestly than me. I shall wear nothing but the most sober garb. There shall be only one royal theologian in England, one heir to the reformer Queen Kateryn Parr, one maid to lead the reformed Church, and it shall be me. I won’t be seen to dress more gaily than Elizabeth, and I won’t riot along in a papist train.

  That was the end of cousinly love. I don’t believe that Princess Mary had any great affection for me anyway, since I once insulted the enormous crystal monstrance that holds the wafer for Mass on her chapel altar by asking her lady-in-waiting why she curtseyed to it. I intended to wrestle with her soul—engage her in a holy discourse where she could explain that she, as a papist, believes that the bread is the very body of Jesus Christ. Then I would have shown her that it was nothing but bread—that Jesus himself meant the disciples to understand that He was giving them bread at the Last Supper, real bread, and inviting them to pray for Him at the same time. He was not saying that it was His body. He was not speaking literally. Surely, any fool can see this?

  I thought it would be an extremely interesting discussion and one that would have led her to true understanding. But unfortunately, although I knew exactly what I intended to say, she did not reply as I expected. She did not speak at all as I thought she would, she only said that she was curtseying to Him that made us all—a completely nonsensical answer.

  “How?” I asked, a little flustered. “How can He be there that made us all, and the baker made Him?”

  It didn’t come out right at all, and God must forgive me that I did not build up to the argument, repeating my point three times, as in my rhetoric lessons. I did it much better in my bedchamber than I did in the papist chapel at Beaulieu, and this can only be because the devil protects his own, and Anne Wharton is under his hairy hoof.

  I went back to my room to do the speech again in the looking glass. I saw my pale face, my bronze hair, my little features and the tiny speckle of freckles over my nose that I fear spoils my dainty prettiness. My pale skin is like the finest porcelain except for this dusting that comes in the English summer like seeds from the willows. I was hugely convincing when I played both sides of the argument on my own: I shone like an angel when I wrestled with the soul of the imaginary Anne Wharton. But the real Anne Wharton was impossible to persuade.

  I do find people are very difficult to convert; they are so very stupid. It is hard to raise sinners to grace. I practiced a few lines to myself and I sounded as powerful as a preacher; but while I was rehearsing my argument Anne Wharton went to Princess Mary and told her what I said, and so the princess knew me as a committed enemy to her faith, which is a pity, for she was always kind and petted me before. Now she despises me for my belief, which she sees as error. My outstanding faith as error! I shall have to forgive that, too.

  I know that she will not have forgiven this, nor forgotten it, so I am not comfortable following my mother and riding in Princess Mary’s train, but at least Princess Elizabeth is in a worse position. She cannot even come to court since her disgrace over Thomas Seymour. If I were her, I would think myself in a hell of shame. Everyone knows that she was all but his lover, and after his wife’s death he admitted that he planned to marry Elizabeth and steal the crown. God save England from an intemperate woman like Elizabeth! God save England from a papist queen like Mary! God help England if Edward dies without a boy heir and the country has the choice of the papist, the flirt, the French princess, or my mother!

  Princess Mary does not stay for long. Her brother’s palace is not a happy court. My cousin King Edward has a cough that he cannot clear. I can hear it rattle when I sit beside him and read to him from Plato—a philosopher that we both love—but he gets weary quickly and has to rest. I see my father’s hidden smile as he observes that I have been reading Greek to the King of England, but everyone else is only worried that he looks so ill.

  Edward manages to attend the opening of parliament but then he takes to his bed. The councillors and the lawyers go in and out of his bedroom and the rumor is that he is planning the succession and writing his will. I find this hard to believe. He is only fifteen—we are the same age—I cannot believe that he is making a will. He is too young to prepare to die. Surely, the summer will come and he will go on progress and in the warm weather he will lose his cough and be well again? I think if he would just come to Bradgate and sit in the gardens and walk by the river and take a boat out on our wide, beautiful lakes, he would be certain to get well again. His will can be stored with all the great papers of the council and forgotten about. He will marry and have a son and all the calculations of which heir might attract whose support will be forgotten. He will marry a great princess from Europe with a mighty fortune, and I will become her friend and a great lady at court, probably a duchess. I might marry Ned Seymour despite his father’s disgrace. He might regain the title; I might still be a famously learned duchess and a light before the unworthy.

  GREENWICH PALACE,

  SPRING 1553

  The court travels to Greenwich, everyone’s favorite palace, downriver from the noise and smells of London, its golden quayside washed by the tide twice a day, shining like a heavenly shore. It would be a mirror of the kingdom of heaven, except for the almost total absence of the godly. Father and I are rowed with the king in the royal barge, but Edward lies back on the cushions, wrapped in furs as if he is shivering, and when the guns roar from the Tower and the ships at anchor fire their cannon, he flinches at the noise and turns his pale face away.

  “He will get better, won’t he?” I ask my father quietly. “He looks terribly ill; but he will get better in summer?”

  He shakes his head, his face dark. “He has made a will,” he says. I can hear the excitement tremble in his voice. “He has chosen his heir.”

  “Doesn’t the throne have to go to the eldest kin?”

  “Of course. It should be Princess Mary. But how can she be queen when she has sworn obedience to the Bishop of Rome? How can she be queen when she is certain to marry a papist foreigner and set him over us? No, the king has done the right thing; he has obeyed God’s will and excluded her from the succession—just as his father did.”

  “Can the king name his heir?” I question. “Is it even the law?”

  “If the throne is his property, then of course he can name his heir,” my father says. His voice is quiet so that the boy shivering in the furs cannot hear, but there is an edge to his tone that shows that he will not tolerate contradiction. These are arguments that are being carefully rehearsed in every corner of the court. “The crown is property: just as we all own property. A man must be free to dispose of his property, every man can choose his heir; Henry VIII chose his heirs. And—most importantly—a young man like Edward, raised in the reformed religion, with never a papist thought in his head, is not going to leave his throne to a servant of Rome. He would not tolerate it—and John Dudley will make sure that he does not.”

  “Then who?” I ask, thinking that I probably know the answer to this.

  “The king—and his advisors—would prefer the nearest in line, of the reformed religion, someone who is likely to have a son to take the throne.”

  “There has to be a Tudor boy?”

  My father nods. It is like a curse that has been laid on this family. The Tudors have to have sons to take
the throne, and they are extraordinarily hard to come by. From King Henry’s six wives he got only one son: Edward. His older sister, Margaret, had only one son, James, who had a girl: Queen Mary of Scotland, who lives in France and is betrothed to the dauphin. Margaret’s daughter was from a Scots lord and is both papist and probably illegitimate; Cousin Margaret Douglas, so her son, Henry Stuart, hardly counts. King Henry’s favorite sister, Queen Mary, was my grandmother, and the king named her line to inherit; and her daughter, my mother, is still alive. Mother has just us three girls, and surely will never have another baby. Princess Elizabeth has no betrothal planned for her—who would take a royal bastard with uncertain parentage and so little dowry? Princess Mary has been promised and denied to almost every king in Europe. Clearly, not only is there no Tudor boy among all of us, there’s no prospect of one.

  “But none of us is with child,” I say, thinking of all us royal cousins. “If they want the throne to go to a Tudor boy, there is none. None of us five heirs is even betrothed. None of us is married.”

  “And that’s why you’re going to be,” he says briskly.

  “Married?”

  “At once.”

  “I am?”

  “All of you.”

  “The Princess Mary, and Elizabeth?”

  “Not them. You and Katherine and Mary.”

  GREENWICH PALACE,

  SPRING 1553

  Katherine is no help at all in defending us against this sudden plan. My lady mother commands her to come to court on a flying visit, and Katherine is thrilled by the rooms and the servants, the foods and her gowns. She dresses Mr. Nozzle in a coat of Tudor green and buys a pure white kitten with her ribbon allowance. She calls him “Ribbon,” of course, and takes him everywhere in the pocket of her cape. Her only regret is that she has been taken away from the horses at Bradgate, and the bear. She was hoping to tame the bear with kindness so that he could be a dancing bear instead of a killing one. She is not horrified, as a virgin maid should be, at the sudden prospect of wedlock; she is completely delighted.