“Now look what you’ve started!” Guildford whispers furiously to me. “You’re such a fool! I am your husband! Why wouldn’t you crown me? I am your master, you have sworn to obey me, how can I be anything less than a king when you are queen? And now look! You have upset my mother.”
“I can’t help that! I have prayed on this, Guildford. God has called me to this great place. I don’t want it, but I can see that He has called me to test my faith. But He has not called you. He did not call you. You are not the heir: I am.”
White with rage, he cannot find the words to answer me. “Disobedient wife!” he spits at me. “Unnatural! That is treason alone! Never mind the rest of it!”
“Don’t say that word!” his mother hisses at him as he turns on his heel and flings himself from the room. She gives him a furious look and rushes after him. I am left trembling with temper and distress, the open box with Anne Boleyn’s crown on the table before me and my sister, wide-eyed, staring at me.
The Marquess of Winchester, who started all this with his foolish promise of a crown for Guildford, turns to my uncle Henry FitzAlan the Earl of Arundel, and William Herbert, Katherine’s father-in-law, raising his eyebrows as if to ask how the country is to be ruled by a warring family. “I thought all this had been agreed?” he asks slyly.
“It is agreed,” Katherine’s father-in-law says swiftly. He, for one, wants no difficulties; this is his plot too. His son, at his side, nods as if he knows anything about it.
“It was not agreed by me,” I say. I suddenly feel the hand of God spread over me, I suddenly know my own mind. I am not a fool and I know the right thing to do here. I am no longer drowning in fear; I can see my way. “I will accept the crown, since it is God’s will that I should, since I can do God’s work. But there is no such destiny for Guildford. It is I who inherit the crown from King Edward, God bless him, and Guildford, my husband, takes the throne at my side.”
I sense, rather than see, that my sister Katherine has drawn a little closer, as if to say that she is here as my heir, that we are the girls of royal blood who are named to inherit. We are not fools or pawns. My husband will not be crowned king; her husband will not be crowned king.
“But he has to have a title,” Katherine’s father-in-law remarks thoughtfully. “A royal title. After all . . .”
He does not finish, but we all know that he might say—after all, the Duke of Northumberland would hardly do all this just to put Henry Grey’s daughter on the throne. Who cares for me, after all? How would my accession benefit the Dudleys? Guildford must get a title from this day’s work, at least; his family will want their fee. Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn, and the Dudleys are greedy bullocks.
“I shall make him a duke,” I offer. “That’s a royal title. He shall be Duke of Clarence.”
The last Duke of Clarence was drowned in a vat of malmsey in this very place, for his overweening ambition. I don’t care if they make the comparison.
I sleep with Katherine my sister in the royal bed, one of my ladies on a truckle bed on the floor beside us, the silky sheets warmed for me with a golden pan, the mattress stabbed in case of a hidden killer. Guildford does not come to me, and in the morning my stomach pain is worse and I wake to find that my course has come and I am bleeding.
Katherine leaps out of bed and strips back the covers. “How disgusting!” she says. “Why would you do this? Didn’t you know your course was coming?”
“No,” I say. “It doesn’t always come at the same time. How would I know it would come now?”
“You couldn’t have chosen a worse time or place.”
“I hardly chose it!” Of course, this has never happened before in the king’s rooms: there has never been a queen in these rooms, in this bed. All the queens live in the queen’s apartments. Katherine and I have to bundle the soiled sheets out to the laundry, and the groom of the linen looks disgusted. I am so terribly shamed. We have to send for clean petticoats and a bowl for me to wash, and they bring jugs of hot water and scented towels. I feel so disgraced that when I finally get to chapel, I put my face in my hands and pray to God that I bleed to death and am released from this terrible duty.
As soon as I get to the presence chamber and seat myself on the throne I receive a message from my mother-in-law. One of her ladies comes in and curtseys low—a royal curtsey—rises up, and tells me that Her Grace the Duchess of Northumberland will not be attending court this morning, and that she and her son Lord Guildford are retiring to their house at Syon.
“Because I will not make him king?” I ask bluntly.
The woman blinks at my frankness. “My lord Guildford says that it is not enough to be a duke, and if he is not a king, then, clearly, he cannot be married to the queen.”
“He is leaving me?” I ask incredulously.
She blushes at the terrible snub. She drops into a curtsey again and stays down, her eyes on the floor.
I feel again the furious determination that I now recognize is God working through me. He gives me strength. He gives me clarity. I turn to my uncle Henry FitzAlan the Earl of Arundel, standing at my side. “Please go to my lord husband and tell him that his queen commands that he stay at court,” I say through gritted teeth. “And tell Her Grace his mother that I expect her here also. Neither of them may leave without permission. They know that.”
He bows to me and leaves the room. I look around at the other lords; some of them are hiding their smiles. I know that I will be shamed by my blood leaking out and staining my gown if I don’t get away to the garderobe at once. I look at Katherine for help and she looks back at me blankly. She has no idea what to do. “I am unwell,” I say. “I am going to my privy rooms.”
They all drop to their knees and I walk past them, my ladies following. I can barely stand with the pain in my belly, and I walk with a stupid sort of sideways sidle, trying not to let the blood leak out; but I force myself to get to the royal chambers, and I don’t cry from pain and fury till the door is shut and I am alone.
I have never bled so heavily, I have never felt so sick. “I am being poisoned,” I whisper to my maid as she takes away the bloody napkins and the rust-colored water. “There is something terribly wrong.”
She looks at me, her mouth agape. She does not know what to do. Overnight she finds herself in service to the Queen of England, and now I tell her that I am being murdered. Nobody knows what to do.
THE TOWER,
LONDON, JULY 1553
It gets worse rather than better. My brother-in-law the sinfully handsome Robert Dudley has failed to arrest Princess Mary—or Lady Mary, as we now all have to call her. He is riding around Norfolk on a string of handsome horses, making sure that no one goes to help her; but he has not taken her into his keeping.
Half the lords tell me that she is certain to flee to Spain and this must be prevented at all costs for she will bring a papist army down on us, to the destruction of ourselves and the damnation of all of England. The other half say that she must be allowed to leave, so that she is exiled forever and there is no one to lead a rebellion against me. But instead of either of these, she does the one thing that is the very worst for us, the one thing that nobody predicted a woman could do: she raises her standard at her great house at Kenninghall and writes to my council and tells them that she is the true queen and that they will be pardoned for their treason if they admit her to London and the throne at once.
This is the worst thing for the righteous cause of reform. I know that God does not want her to take the throne, and that all her promises of allowing all faiths, and not forcing her heresy on the good Christians of England who have so recently seen the light, are part of the devil’s work to undo all that Kateryn Parr believed, that Edward achieved, and that I have sworn to continue. Princess Mary cannot take the country back to Rome and destroy our chance of creating a kingdom of saints. I am bound by God to oppose her, and I insist that someone muster an army and go and capture her. If she has to be imprisoned in the Tower for treason, so be it. She has had every opportunity to get a better understanding of the Word of God; she studied with Kateryn Parr just as I did, but she persisted in error. If we capture her and the council insists that she has to die for treason against the throne, against me, then so be it. I will find the courage to send her, and all heretics, to the scaffold. I will not be a weak link in the mighty army of God. I am called, I am chosen, I will suffer affliction as a good soldier of Jesus Christ, I will not be called and found wanting.