HAMPTON COURT PALACE,
SUMMER 1555
While she is enduring a tiring pregnancy in hot weather, Queen Mary finds it in her heart to forgive her difficult half sister and succumbs to the persuasion of her husband, Prince Philip, to release Elizabeth from Woodstock Palace. Our kinswoman comes to court dressed very modestly with a small hood over her ginger hair, wearing Protestant black and white, as charming and enthusiastic as any spinster aunt-to-be.
Her presence only adds another runner in the gallop to be first behind the queen when she walks anywhere. But surely, though Elizabeth may compete for precedence, she cannot truly think that she has any chance of being named as the queen’s heir? Her mere presence reminds everyone of the religious divide, for everyone knows that Elizabeth is the Protestant heir just as my sister was.
When the court moves to Oatlands, my mother goes home to Beaumanor and, without a word of warning to me or Mary, puts off black and marries her master of horse, Adrian Stokes, who has served us and cared for the horses and hounds for as long as I can remember. Mary says that our lady mother could not afford his wages and could not bear to lose his care of her horses, but I think that she is glad to be rid of the name of Grey, which is blazoned over every illegal reformist pamphlet, and famous throughout Christendom. With Adrian Stokes she can bury her treasonous name with her traitorous husband and reformist daughter, and pretend, like everyone else, that they never existed.
It’s all very well for her. She becomes Mrs. Stokes (though I know she will always demand to be called Lady Frances, and receive a deep royal bow), but I am still Lady Katherine Grey. Mary is still Lady Mary, and there is no way for us to change our names unless someone marries us too. There is no hiding that we, along with Elizabeth, Mary of Scots, and Margaret Douglas, are the last remaining Tudors, all of us with a claim to the queen’s throne, all of us hanging around court and waiting for the outcome of this speedy conception. One of us certain to inherit, unless she has healthy baby—a thing her mother did only once.
OATLANDS PALACE, SURREY,
SUMMER 1555
God knows, not I, why nothing ever goes right for us Tudors. Queen Mary does not get the son she longs for. She goes into confinement with a good belly on her and all us ladies of honor are very charming when we sit with her and sew baby clothes, and when we come out we toss our heads and say that we really cannot discuss intimate female matters with the handsome Spanish courtiers. I make much of saying that a maiden like myself (never an abandoned wife, a girl whose marriage was annulled within weeks) cannot remark on how well the queen is doing today, such things are a mystery to a virgin like me. We keep this up—it is absolutely delightful—from the seventh month to the full nine, and then (with less conviction) for the tenth. Now it appears that it really is a mystery to all of us—maids and midwives alike. We conceal our growing anxiety as best we can and we say that she has mistaken her dates, and the birth will be any day now, but even I think this is a bit far-fetched.
In this time of waiting Elizabeth is a complete lick-spigot, charming to all the ladies, thoughtful and attentive to the lords, breathlessly concerned as to the health of her beloved half sister, and seductive as an expelled nun to her sister’s own husband, Philip of Spain, who clearly sees her as the guarantor of his safety if his old wife dies in childbirth.
I ask my lady mother what is happening with the queen and why she does not labor and bear her child like a normal woman—and she snaps at me and tells me that of all the stupid girls in the world I should be the last one to ask where the heir to the throne is, since every day that there is no birth, she is the first legitimate heir and so my position gets better and better. I whisper “Elizabeth?” and my lady mother says sharply, “Declared a bastard by her own father?” and raps me on the knuckles with her riding whip. I take it I am going to get no helpful maternal advice from her, and I ask her nothing more.
Another month goes by and the queen’s belly simply goes down, as if it were nothing but pasture bloat in a greedy old sheep that broke into clover, and now we all say nothing at all as she comes out of confinement and rejoins the court as if nothing had ever happened.
It’s agony for her, of course, because she is madly in love with King Philip and he is as polite and as patient as a man can be with an older wife who imagined herself pregnant and made them both look like fools; but actually it’s very embarrassing for all of us: all the English courtiers who made so much of our queen’s fertility, all of us maids who bustled around making ourselves important. Worst of all is Elizabeth, dripping with sympathy but walking into dinner behind the queen, right on her heels, as if Philip’s attention to her proves that she is heir, and everyone quite forgets about my mother’s claims, and about me.
In these circumstances—ridiculous and unpredictable, and just typical of the stupidity of everyone—I find that I have had the misfortune to inherit my mother’s ambition. Really, I would have expected to despise it, seeing where it has got us so far. But I can’t help myself, I resent anyone suggesting that I am not the heir and I am starting to struggle in the nightly squabble for precedence.
It’s not so much that I think I should be queen—I wouldn’t want to displace Queen Mary—but I do want to be her heir. I just can’t see that anyone else is fit for the crown. I can’t be happy at the thought of Elizabeth being queen; I can’t imagine her in Jane’s place; nobody could. She’s so unworthy! In every way, from her terrible yellow hair—it’s not golden at all like mine—to her skin, as sallow as a Spaniard’s, she is unfit to be Queen of England. I would have stepped back willingly for a little prince who was the heir to Spain and to England, born in wedlock to two ruling monarchs. But I will never step back for my great-uncle’s bastard—especially as nobody knows if Elizabeth is even that. Her mother was taken in adultery with five men! Elizabeth could well be the daughter of the king’s lute player—who knows?
But during this dull time of embarrassed regret, with no Prince of Wales in the cradle and little prospect of another pregnancy, I am not the only one who is thinking of my rights. I seem to have become of great interest to two people—two men, actually. One is my former husband, Henry Lord Herbert, who always turns his head and gives me a little hidden smile when we maids walk past him. I don’t smile back exactly, I give him a look a little like Jane used to put on when she read something that she thought unlikely: a sort of skeptical raised eyebrow, a sort of looking down my nose. I think it’s rather charming, and I cuff Mary, my sister, when she remarks that I am gurning at Henry Herbert as if I wished we were still married.
I say it hardly befits her, whose head comes only to the top of my bodice, to comment on my appearance. “You’re no taller than the queen’s dwarf,” I say crushingly. “Don’t tell me that I’m gurning.”
“I am no dwarf,” she says firmly. “I was born small but royal. I am quite different from Thomasina. Everyone says so.”
I can’t challenge her petite dignity. “Oh, and who are all these people who say so?”
“I do,” she says with huge dignity. “And it is me who matters.”
She has always been quite untroubled that she is so short and not growing anymore. Jane once told her that dwarfs in some heathen country were worshipped as gods, and it filled her with pride. She thinks very highly of herself for one who stands so low. I think it very odd that I should have had one sister who despised the world of the flesh, and one too tiny to desire it, and here am I, born between the two of them, tall and pretty, the most eager girl for worldly pleasures in all of the court.
“I suppose you want to marry him again,” Mary says sagely. “I would have thought that the way they treated you would have put you off the Herberts forever.”
I tell her, not at all! Not at all! We were never married, not at all! Just as she was never betrothed either. The marriage is denied and forgotten and I have no idea why he smiles so charmingly at me. He should have kept me as his wife if he likes me so much, if he had the sense to go again
st his family’s orders and follow his heart. But he made the mistake of letting me go, and now he sees that I am a center of attention at court, I am pleased to think he regrets it.
But the other gentleman—actually nobleman—who is taking an interest in me is even more surprising: the Spanish ambassador, Count de Feria.
I’m not a fool. I don’t think that he has fallen in love with my fair prettiness, though he is kind enough to tell me that I am like a little alabaster statue, my skin so clear and my hair as fair as an angel’s. He tells me they would kneel to my beauty in Spain, that I look like a painting of an angel in stained glass, luminously beautiful. I enjoy all this, of course, but I know very well that it is not my looks—even if they are the very best at court—that interest him. Of course it is my royal kinship, my proximity to the throne. And if the Spanish ambassador takes an interest in me, does that mean the heir of Spain—the King Consort of England himself—is also taking an interest in me? Concealing his attraction to me by an empty flirtation with Elizabeth? Am I, in fact, being groomed for the throne by the papists, just as Jane was pushed there by the reformers? Do the Spanish hope that when the queen dies they can declare me as their heir, and Philip will marry me, and rule through me?
I don’t ask the Spanish ambassador this directly; I am too clever for that. Of course I understand how these games of power are to be played. And he says nothing directly, except that I am admired by King Philip, and do I have a kindness for Spain? Am I a determined reformer like my poor sister or do I incline to the true Church?
I look down modestly, and I smile at my feet and say that no one could help but admire King Philip. I say nothing in the least heretical or even argumentative, but I swear to myself that I will be no one’s puppet. Nobody will ever order me again. If anyone is thinking of pushing me onto the throne, just as they pushed my sister, they will find that I am queenly in my own right; they will find that if they put the crown on my head, I will keep it, and my head as well. No one is going to tempt me into a usurpation that cannot be maintained. Nobody is going to tempt me to insist on my inheritance. I will be a careful wise servant of my own interests. I will not risk anything for my faith. If God wants me on the throne of England, then He will have to make the effort Himself.
But I listen carefully when the Spanish ambassador goes beyond flattery to plotting. If the Spanish persuade Queen Mary to name me as heir, and then support me, I am certain to succeed.
“And, despite your sister’s faith, do you incline naturally to the old religion?” Count de Feria asks me, sweet as the marmalade that he spoons onto my plate.
I look up at him from under my eyelashes as he invites me to deny my dead sister and everything she believed in. “Of course I follow the queen’s religion,” I say easily. “I have had to learn it all from the very beginning, and learn the Latin Mass too, since I was brought up in a household filled with reformers praying in English. But I have been glad to study and learn the truth.” I hesitate. “I am no heretic.”
Of course I am not. The queen my cousin who came to the throne so kindly, assuring us all that everyone should find God in their own way, executed my sister for her faith, and now brings in the Holy Inquisition to torture everyone else and burn Jane’s fellow believers. Not me! I am not going to be imprisoned for a form of words. I am not going to be beheaded for failing to curtsey to the Host, or forgetting to dip my fingers in the stoup, or any other thing that is life and death today, but did not even exist yesterday. Now the altars are hidden behind the rood screen so the priest’s work is all a mystery. Now there are statues in every niche, and a candle before every one of them. Now there are saints’ days when nobody works, and fast days when we are supposed to eat nothing but fish. There are all sorts of practices that I have had to learn in order not to look like a reformer and the sister of a dangerous reformer martyr. I bob and genuflect and sniff the incense with the most faithful. Nobody is going to name me as a heretic because I turn my back on the hidden altar and don’t pop up or down at the right moment.
I am determined on this. I am going to do whatever anyone asks of me. I am going to win a fortune from this most devout queen, and then she is going to choose a handsome man for me to marry and have beautiful sons. Then I will be the papist heir to the throne with one of the faithful in the cradle, and I don’t doubt she will name me as the next queen. This is my destiny. I will help it on its way but I won’t take any risks. So I smile at her husband’s ambassador, who is all but asking me if I want to be queen, and I make sure that he knows that there is no one in England more suitable.
Except for Margaret Douglas, of course, who thinks it should be her, except for little Mary Queen of Scots in her palaces in France who thinks it should be her with a French army to press her claims. Except for Elizabeth, the least likely heir to her half sister, disqualified by the law, by religion, by temperament, and by birth.
Elizabeth the Unhappy comes to court and sighs in the corners as if her heart is breaking for the imprisoned clergy and the martyrs burning at Smithfield. Elizabeth dresses very plainly, the liar, as if she does not love beautiful clothes and rich jewels. She is a peacock hidden in black. Elizabeth comes to Mass and holds her hand to her side as if she is in too much pain to bow to the Host, and sometimes she manages to faint and be carried out so that the waiting crowds outside can see her dying for her reformist faith, and think the queen is cruel to her half sister. Elizabeth the minx recovers with remarkable speed and can later be seen walking in the gardens with King Philip, his eyes on her down-turned face as he leans towards her to hear what she is whispering.
I think that Elizabeth is playing a long game and planning that the queen, who is sicker and quieter every day, will die, and then King Philip will marry her and make her his wife and Queen of England in Mary’s place. As the Spanish ambassador courts me, his master the king courts Elizabeth, and I see her maidenly reserve is as sincere as mine, and we both have our eyes on the throne.
She and I meet every day in attendance on the queen—and we bow to each other with careful politeness and we kiss as cousins, and I swear we both think: why, you are further from the throne than I am! What are they promising you? And I swear we both think: and if I am ever queen, you will know it!
WHITEHALL PALACE,
LONDON, WINTER 1558
And that is why it is such a terrible shock when, with every reason to name me, with the veiled support of the Spanish, with every demonstration I could give her of my papist piety, as soon as Queen Mary’s sickness and sorrow become fatal, she names Elizabeth—Elizabeth!—names her at the last possible moment, on her deathbed, and half the country goes mad for the Protestant princess, who now rides into London and takes her throne as if she were the legitimate heir of royal blood and not a lucky bastard.
After all I have done to prove myself a good papist, Queen Mary fails me, fails her loudly proclaimed faith that so many have died for. She does not even mention the true papist and heir, her other cousin Mary Queen of Scots, who is now married to Francis of France and has the gall to proclaim herself Queen of England, as if my branch of the family were not named to come before hers. Queen Mary does not even mention Margaret Douglas though she promised to make her heir. She plays us all false and names Elizabeth. Elizabeth, her enemy!
“Why did Queen Mary not name you?” I demand of my mother, forced into honesty with her for once, driven by resentment into frankness. “Why did she not name me?”
My mother’s face is darkened with impotent fury. She will now have to serve as loving cousin and lady-in-waiting in Elizabeth’s rooms, and she does not expect a girl young enough to be her daughter, and with every reason to dislike her, to be a particularly generous mistress. My mother, who married her master of horse in order to reassure Queen Mary that she had no plans to marry a man with a claim to the throne, and no royal-blooded son on the way, now finds herself with no great name and no heir either, for Adrian Stokes is a nobody and all her babies from him have died. She made
herself unimportant to please Queen Mary, but finds that all she has done is step back for Queen Elizabeth.
“Will you put that damned rat out of here?” she shouts.
I have a new puppy, a pretty pug called Jo, who comes with me everywhere. I bend down and quietly put her out of the room. She whines and scrabbles at the door and then sits sorrowfully on the wooden floorboards outside, to wait for me.
“Queen Mary always had strong family feeling,” my mother says through her teeth. “Despite it all. She came to the throne by her father’s will and she did not think it should be overturned. He recognized Elizabeth as his child and in his will he named her to come after her sister, Queen Mary. He named my line to follow Elizabeth only if she has no heirs, and so that is what the queen willed.” She takes a breath and I can see her fighting to master her temper, a struggle so vigorous that I think she may give herself a fit. “In accordance with tradition. In accordance with King Henry’s will, God bless him.”
“But what about me?” I demand. I think I have been saying this for all my life. “What about me?”
“You have to wait,” my mother says, as if I am not eighteen and desperate to get on with my life, to eat at the feast, to dance at all the celebrations, to wear the beautiful gowns from the wardrobe, to flirt with all the reformist young men who suddenly appear at this exciting new court, which gives up Latin in a hurry, and reads the Bible in English and has to pray only twice a day.