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  For my sister

  BOOK I

  JANE

  BRADGATE HOUSE, GROBY, LEICESTERSHIRE, SPRING 1550

  I love my father because I know that he will never die. Neither will I. We are chosen by God and we walk in His ways, and we never swerve from them. We don’t have to earn our place in heaven by bribing God with acts or Masses. We don’t have to eat bread and pretend it is flesh, drink wine and call it blood. We know that is folly for the ignorant and a trap for papist fools. This knowledge is our pride and glory. We understand, as more and more do in these days: we have been saved once and for all. We have no fear, for we will never die.

  True, my father is worldly: sinfully worldly. I wish he would let me wrestle with his soul, but he laughs and says, “Go away, Jane, and write to our friends the Swiss reformers. I owe them a letter—you can write for me.”

  It is wrong of him to avoid holy discourse, but this is only the sin of inattention—I know he is heart and soul for the true religion. Also, I must remember that he is my father and I owe obedience to my father and mother—whatever my private opinion of them. God, who sees all, will be the judge of them. And God has seen my father and forgiven him already; my father is saved through faith.

  I fear my mother will not be saved from the fires of hell, and my sister Katherine, who is three years younger than me, a child of nine years old, is almost certainly going to die and never rise again. She is unbelievably silly. If I were a superstitious fool, I would really think she is possessed; she is quite beyond hope. My baby sister, Mary, was born into original sin and cannot grow out of it. She is quite tiny. She is as pretty as a little miniature version of our sister, Katherine, tiny as a doll. My lady mother would have sent her away as a baby to be raised far from us, and spare us the shame, but my father had too much compassion for his last stunted child, and so she lives with us. She is not an idiot—she does her lessons well, she is a clever little girl—but she has no sense of the grace of God; she is not one of the elect like Father and me. One like her—whose growth has been blighted by Satan—should be particularly fervent for salvation. I suppose a five-year-old is a little young to renounce the world—but I was studying Latin when I was four, and Our Lord was the same age as I am now when He went to the Temple and preached to the wise men. If you do not learn the ways of the Lord when you are in the cradle, when will you make a start?

  I have studied since I was a child. I am most probably the most learned young person in the whole country, raised in the reformed religion, the favorite of the great scholar and queen Kateryn Parr. I am probably the greatest young scholar in Europe, certainly the most educated girl. I don’t consider my cousin Princess Elizabeth a true student, for many are called but few are chosen. Poor Elizabeth shows no signs of being chosen, and her studies are very worldly. She wants to be seen as clever, she wants to please her tutors and exhibit herself. Even I have to take care that I do not fall into the sin of pride, though my mother says, rudely, that my principal care should be that I do not fall into being completely ridiculous. But when I explain to her that she is in a state of sin, she takes me by the ear and threatens to beat me. I would gladly take a beating for my faith, just as the saint Anne Askew did, but I think it more pleasing to God to apologize, curtsey, and sit down at the dinner table. Besides, there is a pie of pears with burnt cream for dinner, which is my favorite.

  It really is not easy to be a shining light in Bradgate. It is a worldly house and we are a big household. It is a great building, a brick-built house as red as Hampton Court, with a gatehouse that looms as large as that palace and set among the huge forest of Charnwood. We have every right to royal magnificence. My mother is the daughter of Princess Mary, who was Queen of France, the favorite sister of King Henry VIII, so my mother is heir to the throne of England after the late king’s children, my cousins the princesses, Mary and Elizabeth, who are heirs to their younger brother, King Edward. This makes us the most important family in England, and we never forget it. We keep a houseful of retainers, more than three hundred, to serve the five of us; we own a stable filled with beautiful horses and the parkland all around the house, and farms and villages, rivers and lakes at the very heart of England. We have our own bear for baiting, kept caged in the stables, our own bear pit, our own cock-fighting ring. Our house is one of the biggest in the Middle Lands; we have a great hall with a musicians’ gallery at one end and a royal dais at the other. The most beautiful countryside in England is ours. I have been brought up to know that all this land belongs to me, just as we belong to England.

  Of course, between my lady mother and the throne are the three royal children: Edward, the king, who is only twelve like me, and so he rules with a lord president, and then his older sisters Princess Mary and Princess Elizabeth. Sometimes people don’t count the two princesses as heirs, since they were both named bastards and denied by their own father. They would not even be included in the royal family but for the Christian kindness of my teacher Kateryn Parr, who brought them to court and had them acknowledged. Even worse, Princess Mary (God forgive her) is a declared and open papist and heretic, and though I am bound to love her as a cousin, it is a horror to me to be in her house, where she keeps the hours of the liturgy as if she is living in a convent and not in a reformed kingdom, for all England is Protestant now under King Edward.

  I don’t speak of Princess Elizabeth. I never do. I saw more than enough of her when we both lived with Queen Kateryn and her young husband, Thomas Seymour. All I will say is that Elizabeth should be ashamed of herself and she will have to answer to God for what she did. I saw it. I was there during the chasing and the tickling and the romping with her own stepmother’s husband. She led Thomas Seymour—a great man—on to imprudence and then to his death. She was guilty of lust and adultery—in her heart if not in his bed. She is as guilty of his death as if she named him as a treasonous plotter and led him to the scaffold. She willed him to think of himself as her lover and her husband, and the two of them as heirs to the throne. She may not have said so much: she did not have to say so much. I saw how she was with him and I know what she made him do.

  But—no—I do not judge. I will not judge. I never judge. That is for God. I have to retain a modest thought, an averted gaze, and compassion as from one sinner to another. And I am certain that God won’t think of her either, when she is in the fires of hell, praying too late for her unchastity, disloyalty, and ambition. God and I will pity her, and leave her to her infinite punishment.

  At any rate, since Princess Mary and Elizabeth were both declared illegitimate, and are both clearly unsuited for the throne, these half sisters to King Edward have less of a legal claim than the daughter of King Henry’s favorite sister, Queen Mary, which is to say: my mother.

  And this is the very reason, the very reason, why it is so important that she study the reformed faith and put aside brilliant adornment. She should avoid feasts and drinking, she should dance only with the most chaste ladies of her household and not ride around the country on that great horse of hers all day, hunting whatever is in season as if she were some sort of hungry beast of the field. The great woods around our house echo with her hunting horns, the meadows are flushed for game. Dogs die in the bear pit, heifers are slaughtered outside the