She gives a little snort of laughter. “Hush,” she says. “If you can laugh, then you can eat. They tell me your sister is in deep grief and starving herself. That’s not the way to victory. I shall write to her and give her this advice, too. It is what my friend the queen Kateryn knew; it is what your mother knew. A wise woman lives long and hopes for change.”
GREENWICH PALACE,
AUTUMN 1567
My rooms at Greenwich are adequately furnished and the queen herself sends me some silver pots for the ale and wine, after my stepgrandmother provides William Cecil with a list of the things that we need. I don’t think she minces her words as she rails about my poverty. I don’t think she spares her assurances of our good housekeeping skills. My stepgrandmother lost all her good things in the years of exile while she traveled in Europe, one step ahead of the papist spies who would have dragged her back to England for a heresy trial. Now she is determined that neither she nor her family will suffer again. She is high in favor at Elizabeth’s court and she awaits the return of the court to Greenwich when she will argue for my freedom. She is confident that I will be released, that Ned will be allowed to go to Hanworth, that my sister Katherine and Thomas will join him and Teddy, that the family will be freed and reunited. She believes that Elizabeth’s genuine devotion to the Protestant faith will overrule Elizabeth’s perverse, persistent love for her papist cousin, her lingering family loyalty to Mary Queen of Scots, her fearful defense of the rights of queens, even for one who has done so little to deserve it.
“Be brave!” the duchess says brightly to me when she sees me wearily walking in the gardens, looking out at the river where the ships spread their sails and drop the tow ropes and look as if they are ready to fly away, free as the birds that circle their masts. “Be brave! You will go where you please next spring, I swear it. I will speak for your husband, for your sister, for your brother-in-law, and for those two innocent little boys. Your life will not end in prison, like that of your poor sister Jane. You will be freed, believe it!”
I do believe her. Her husband, Richard Bertie, bends down and kisses my hand and tells me that good times will come. Everyone suffers in this troubled world, but God rewards those who are faithful to Him. He reminds me that my stepgrandmother was summoned home when her religion became the faith of England, and overnight she was no longer a damned heretic but one of the chosen.
“Besides,” my lady grandmother tells me, “Elizabeth cannot create a force for Mary Queen of Scots. She has given the Clan Hamilton a great bribe, but they will not raise an army for Mary. She has demanded that the countries of Europe starve Scotland out. But not even the French, Mary’s former family, will support a trade blockade on Scotland. Without Spanish support, without the French, Elizabeth can do nothing for her cousin: she cannot act on her own.”
“Or at any rate she dare not,” Richard Bertie supplements quietly.
My lady grandmother laughs and slaps her husband’s hand. “It is not in the interest of England to restore the papist queen to her throne,” she says. “The queen, our queen, will never work against the interest of her Protestant country. Wherever her heart yearns to be, she always has a steady head. You can be sure of that.”
“I can be sure of William Cecil,” Richard Bertie says. “His heart doesn’t yearn for a papist in trouble.”
“And in the meantime,” I ask, “what is happening to Mary, the former Queen of Scotland?”
My stepgrandmother shrugs her shoulders as if to say “Who cares?” “She is imprisoned,” she says. “She must miss the son that she handed over; she must grieve for the babies that she lost. She must know that she has been a fool. My God, she must regret with all her soul that she married that vicious boy and then allowed his murder, and then married his killer.”
“I don’t know that there is any evidence that she murdered Lord Darnley,” I put in.
My stepgrandmother raises her eyebrows. “Then who did?” she asks. “Whoever benefited from the death of that worthless young man if not his abused wife and her lover?”
I open my mouth to argue, but I fall silent. I don’t know the truth of the matter, I don’t know what my dangerous and beautiful cousin might or might not have done. But I know that she, like Katherine and me, will hate her prison, beating against the bars like a frightened bird. I know she will be like us, determined to be free. I know that she, like us, will do anything to be free. In that is our only power. In that we are a danger to ourselves.
I think that Katherine and I have a chance. The luck that has run against us ever since Jane went upriver to Syon in the Dudley barge, and did not resist them when they crammed the crown on her little head, has turned at last. My sister is suddenly liberated by the death of her old guardian and keeper. This event comes as a surprise only to those who hoped to put my sister away and never think of her again. Poor old Wentworth was more than seventy years old: he objected to the cost of her keeping, he pleaded that he could not be expected to do it, and now he has escaped his duty into the long rest of death.
I am so accustomed to bad news that I feel only dread when I see my lady grandmother come towards me, down the raked gravel path in early September with a single sheet of paper in her hand. I fear at once that something is wrong. My first thought is of my husband, Thomas Keyes, imprisoned in the Fleet, and my second is for my sister Katherine and her little boy.
I run towards her, my little boots crunching on the stones. “My lady grandmother! Is it bad news?”
She tries to smile. “Oh, Mary! Do you read minds like a dwarf in a fair?”
“Tell me!” I say.
“My dear, sit down.”
I grow more and more frightened. We go to a little stone seat in a bower of a golden-leaved hedge. I clamber onto the seat to satisfy her, and I turn to her. “Tell me!”
She unfolds the letter. “It is your sister. It is your poor dear sister.”
It is a letter from the executor of the old man’s will, a man of no importance, caught up in great events. He writes to William Cecil to say that the widow Wentworth cannot take the charge of Katherine and her son, though she loves her as dearly as a daughter. Tentatively, Mr. Roke Green says that he has no instructions as to where Katherine should go, or what the queen wishes for her. He is too poor himself, he lives in too small a way to house such a great lady. He himself is a widower, though if he had a wife they might offer her a poor refuge. Surely, nobody could allow her to come to him without a lady of the house to attend her, and his house is small and cramped and he himself is a poor man. But still—but still—this is his third letter and no one has told him what is to be done! While Katherine’s next destination is being decided by the great men of the queen’s court, while Katherine has literally nowhere to go—shall he invite her to his own house? This is not to suggest any sympathy, any prejudice for or against her cause or her claim. But she is young and frail, beautiful and terribly thin, starving herself and in despair of ever seeing her husband and child again. She hardly gets out of her bed, she rarely stops crying. May Mr. Roke Green put a roof over her head while the queen, in her wisdom, decides what shall be done with this poor weak lady? Because she cannot stay where she is, and she will die if they continue to neglect her.
I hold the letter out to my lady stepgrandmother. “She has nowhere to go,” I say flatly.
Her face is alight. “So he says.”
“Yet you look pleased?”
“Yes, because this is our chance to free her, I think.”
I can feel my heart suddenly race. “You think they might allow it? Will you invite her here?”
She smiles at me. “Why not? As we have been warned, she has nowhere else to go.”
My lady grandmother writes to the queen, writes to William Cecil, writes to Robert Dudley. The court is at Windsor Castle. They are delaying their return to London, the weather is so fine, everyone is unwilling to come back to face the demanding question of how to support the Scots queen—a cousin! a monarch!—witho
ut opposing the Scots lords, our coreligionists. Elizabeth does not know what to do and would rather avoid the problem by staying at Windsor and flirting with Robert Dudley. My lady stepgrandmother has to write to a court that has no appetite for thorny difficulties. So she offers them a solution, a simple solution: that Katherine shall come to live with her grandmother and bring her little boy with her. Ned shall be released to his mother’s care at Hanworth. Thomas Keyes will be sent to his family in Kent. We should all be bound over to make no trouble, to send no letters, to correspond with no powers or factions; but that we should live as private citizens, and—since we have committed no crime—we should be free.
She sends the letters: to William Cecil at his beloved new home, Burghley House; to Robert Dudley, dancing attendance on Elizabeth at Windsor; and to the holidaying queen herself, and we wait, with hope, for a reply.
It comes promptly from William Cecil. The two secret lovers Dudley and Elizabeth must have decided that they will leave it to him to write to us. Their happiness, their freedom in the harvested dusty gold fields of England, shall not be troubled. The weather is fine, the hunting good, they neither of them want to deal with affairs of state. Elizabeth is celebrating that she has another year of keeping Dudley in thrall. I know Robert Dudley will speak in favor of Katherine’s release, but only when he feels that he can do it without causing trouble. He will not allow anything to disturb the queen’s happiness when she is happy with him.
William Cecil writes in his own hand that Katherine may not come to us yet. He writes “yet” and he underlines. For this season she is to be housed with a good loyal man, Sir Owen Hopton at Cockfield Hall, Suffolk.
“Good God, who is he?” my stepgrandmother demands irritably. “Where do they keep finding these hopeless nonentities?”
“At Cockfield Hall, Suffolk,” I say, reading the letter over her shoulder. “Look at this . . .”
I point to a brief sentence. Her Majesty insists that Lady Katherine and her son are kept totally isolated. Neither receiving letters, gifts, guests, visitors, or emissaries from foreign powers.
My stepgrandmother looks at me. “What do they imagine she would do?” she demands of me. “Don’t they know that she is so sad as to barely speak? That she is eating so little that she is exhausted? That she rarely gets up from her bed, that she weeps all the time?”
I gulp down my grief at the thought of my sister, alone again, and moved even farther away from me. “Did you tell them?”
“Of course I told them. And anyway, Cecil knows everything.”
“What does the queen want of us?” I demand. “Does she just want us to die in confinement and silence, in some little out-of-the-way place where no one will complain if we just die of sorrow?”
My stepgrandmother does not answer me. She looks blankly at me as if she has nothing to say. I realize that I have spoken the truth in passion, and she has no will to deny it.
The court returns to Hampton Court, but my stepgrandmother is not ordered to attend.
“I don’t want to be the cause of your disgrace with the queen,” I say to her. “I know you have to think of your own children, Peregrine and Susan; I know that you have to keep them safe. You can’t have your household being tainted with the disfavor that follows Elizabeth’s cousins.”
She tilts her head on one side and gives me her wry smile. “I have faced worse, you know,” she says. “I served the queen who taught Elizabeth all the scholarship that she now demonstrates with such pride. I served the queen who showed Elizabeth how to rule. I served the queen who wrote the prayer book and taught Elizabeth—and your sister Jane—their theology. I served her when she faced a charge of heresy and treason. I never forget Kateryn Parr, and I am not going to be afraid of Elizabeth now.”
“I’m afraid of her,” I confess, and I feel a sudden strange release from the defiance that has been a thread through the weave of my life since I was first deployed as a pawn in my family alliances, a little girl too young to give consent, given away in an alliance with Arthur Grey. “I won’t pretend to be brave. I am afraid of her. I think that she will be my undoing. I think that she already has been. I think that she wishes my death and that of Katherine, and that she always has done.”
My redoubtable stepgrandmother gives me her brightest smile. “Survive,” she reminds me. “Survive and hope for better times.”
These are not better times for those of our religion in France. The king, dominated by his family—the Guise family—persecutes those of our faith until they rise up in a holy religious uprising. Of course, England, the primary Protestant power, should send the Huguenots arms and money, should send them an army to overthrow their papist rulers. But Elizabeth, as always, can go only halfway in any duty. She knows that she should prevent the papist rulers of France from murdering and destroying her coreligionists. But the Protestants of Scotland have overthrown her cousin the Guise French queen, and she cannot tolerate that threat to royal power. She knows she should be the enemy of the Pope who—it is said—will declare her anathema: a figure to be despised, who can be legally killed. But it is a Protestant leader in Scotland, John Knox, who calls her and Mary Queen of Scots a “monstrous regiment of women” unfit to rule, and urges all right-thinking men to rise up against them. Elizabeth is so piqued by this disrespect, so muddled in her thinking, that she hates John Knox worse than the Pope, and thinks that she should stand in sisterhood with Mary Queen of Scots as a fellow queen against him.
I send a note to my sister, carried by Richard Bertie’s most faithful man, hidden in the foot of his hose. I don’t doubt by the time it gets to Katherine it is smelling ripely of his sweat. I don’t know if she will be able to reply. I don’t even know if she will live to see it. I don’t know how she is.
Dear Sister,
I pray for you, my dear Katherine, in this time of our trouble. I am living well and kindly treated by our stepgrandmother the Duchess of Suffolk at Greenwich. I live in her rooms and I am allowed to walk in the gardens and beside the river. I cannot see visitors, but I enjoy the company of Peregrine and Susan.
I write constantly both to Queen Elizabeth and to the lords of the court for our release, and for the freedom of Ned Seymour and my poor husband, Thomas Keyes. Please don’t reproach me, even in your thoughts, for marrying him. He is such a good man, Katherine, and he loves me so much. Our marriage has been a disaster for him. I would have it annulled if it would rescue him from prison. But for no other reason.
I hear that you are frail and weak. Please, please, fight for life. Eat, walk, play with your son. We have to live, Katherine. It was Jane who said “learn you to die” and that was only when she was under an inescapable sentence of death. She was wrong. We don’t have to learn to die. I want to live. I want you to live. I am going to live. I pray to God who hears all our prayers, and for whom we are more important than the little sparrows that fall, that you and I will live and be together one day. When I see the sparrows in the hedges around the water meadows below Greenwich Palace, I think of Janey’s linnets and your love of wild things and I pray that we will all be as free as the little birds one day.
I will not write—Farewell Good Sister—for I pray to see you soon and that we will both be well and happy—
M
Bertie’s man tells me he gets the letter into her bedroom in a stack of wood for the fire, but there is no way of knowing if she has read it, and there is no reply.
GREENWICH PALACE,
WINTER 1567
There is no summons to court at Westminster, not for my lady grandmother, nor for her children, nor for me, but the gossip seeps downriver from servant to servant, carried by pedlars, brought by candle sellers, and volunteered by milkmaids. Everyone in London, including us, knows that Elizabeth is preparing to marry at last, and her choice has fallen on Charles II the Archduke of Austria, son of the late Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand.
It will be a mighty alliance, joining England to the great power of Europe, the Habsburgs. I
t will make us safe from invasion from any of the continental powers, inured to the enmity of the Pope. It will mean that we are restored to our place in Christendom, no longer a heretical outsider to the faith of Europe. We can aid Mary Queen of Scots or not, as we like. Her fall or her rise will not threaten us when we have the Habsburgs as our allies.
We will achieve this at almost no price. Elizabeth would not have to change her religion, the country would not change its religion. She would not have to put him, as a husband, above her. This is not to be a king consort. He is a younger son: he knows all about coming second. Best of all, perhaps, the archduke would not change his religion, he would practice his faith in private, there would be a chapel in every royal palace and a priest would travel with him. He would hold a Mass but not force it on any other. We would show, as we should, in this country, which has been papist and Protestant and papist and Protestant, turn and turn about with one ruler after another, that we can live in harmony. That there is one God, but different ways of approaching Him. That God’s will is that we should love one another. Nowhere does Jesus say that we should persecute one another to death. No passage in the Bible required Jane’s death; no law of man nor God requires our imprisonment.
But I am not tempted by this glittering prospect for my cousin Elizabeth. If I were free, I would not waste a moment of my time on it. Elizabeth persuades her council that she intends to marry the archduke. She would never persuade me that she will ever put a man in Robert Dudley’s place; but the Privy Council are hugely relieved at this solution to the inheritance question—and then—to further divert them, she asks them for their opinion and advice.
This is mostly to satisfy those lords and commoners who demanded last year that she name a successor and insisted that it be a legitimate Protestant—my sister Katherine. Now Elizabeth, like a marketplace mountebank who charms coppers out of the pockets of the credulous, says that she has taken their advice that she must marry, that she is minded to marry a papist Habsburg, that the happy couple will (no doubt) conceive an autumn child, so she need name neither Mary Queen of Scots—trapped on her island—nor Katherine—locked up with Sir Owen. But Elizabeth can promise that she will have a baby, a beautiful son, who will be the nephew of the Holy Roman Emperor and the grandson of Henry VIII, and all the world can rejoice that love has found a way where hatred could not, to bring papistry and Protestantism into harmony once more and everyone can be happy—except, of course, Katherine and I, and Mary Queen of Scots. We will all three be left in imprisonment forever and (hopefully) forgotten.