“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. It 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.