The Last Tudor Read online

  “Yes,” I say brokenly, and we kneel together to pray the Pater Noster in English, the prayer that Jesus taught us Himself, where we all are told that God is “Our Father.” I have a Father in heaven even if I don’t have one on earth. Brother Feckenham prays in Latin, I speak the words in English. I don’t doubt that I am heard. I don’t doubt that he is heard, too.

  THE TOWER, LONDON,

  SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1554

  They charge my father and he will stand trial for his part in the plot. It was a big, treasonous conspiracy, and it might well have succeeded. They were going to put Elizabeth on the throne and marry her to Edward Courtenay, our Plantagenet cousin, one of our family and one of our faith. Elizabeth denies all knowledge of this, of course. For a girl so well educated she manages to be impressively ignorant when it suits her. But this conspiracy means that our cousin Queen Mary must regard all her kinswomen as a threat. Elizabeth, me, Katherine, even little Mary, Margaret Douglas, and Mary of Scots in France—any one of us could be named as Queen of England in preference to her. We all have an equally good claim; we are all suspect.

  I am so anguished that it is a relief when there is a tap on the door and John Feckenham comes in, his big red face creased in a tentative smile, his fair eyebrows upraised as if he is afraid that he is not welcome.

  “You can come in,” I say ungraciously. I take a breath and give my prepared speech: “Since I have been granted these days of life to talk with you, though I do so little lament my heavy case that I account it more a manifest declaration of God’s favor towards me than ever He showed me at any time before.”

  “You have prepared,” he says, recognizing at once the opening words for a debate, and he puts his books down on the table, and seats himself, as if he knows that wrestling with my soul will be hard work for a misguided heretic like him.

  THE TOWER, LONDON,

  SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1554

  My lady mother and Katherine are allowed to visit Father; and Katherine leaves our father and mother to be alone together—as they always want to be—and comes to my room.

  She does not know what to say to me, and I have nothing to say to her. We sit in awkward silence. She cries a little, stifling her sobs in the sleeve of her gown. While she is sitting so close, gazing at me with her tear-filled eyes, I cannot study, write, or pray. I cannot even hear my own thoughts. I am just gripped in a whirl of her regrets and fear and grief. It is like being churned in a butter tub; I feel myself going rancid. I don’t want to spend my last day like this. I want to write an account of John Feckenham’s discussion with me, of my triumph over his wrong thinking. I want to prepare my speech for the scaffold. I want to think; I don’t want to feel.

  We can hear the noise of the carts bringing the wood to build the scaffold and the workers shouting for their tools, and guiding the carts to the green. At every rumble of the wood being tipped on the paving stones, at every rasp of the saws and tapping of a hammer, Katherine flinches, her pretty face white as skimmed milk, her eyes the color of ink.

  “I will die for my faith,” I say to her suddenly.

  “You will die because Father joined a rebellion against the crowned queen,” she bursts out. “It wasn’t even for you!”

  “That may be what they say,” I reply steadily. “But the queen has turned her back on those who believe in the true way to God, broken her promise that people might worship according to their conscience, and is throwing the country under the command of the Bishop of Rome and the hidalgos of Spain. So she has turned against me because of my faith and that is why I shall die.”

  Katherine claps her hands over her ears. “I won’t listen to treason.”

  “You never listen to anything.”

  “Father has lost us everything,” she says. “We are all destroyed.”

  “Worldly goods,” I say. “They mean nothing to me.”

  “Bradgate! Bradgate doesn’t mean nothing to you! So why say so? Our home!”

  “You should turn your mind to Our Father’s house in heaven.”

  “Jane,” she implores me, “tell me one kind word, one sisterly word before I say good-bye!”

  “I can’t,” I say simply. “I have to keep my mind on my journey and my joyful destination.”

  “Will you see Guildford before he dies? He’s asked to see you. Your husband? Will you be together for one last time? He wants to say good-bye.”

  Impatiently, I shake my head at her morbid sentiment. “I can’t! I can’t! I will see no one but Brother Feckenham.”

  “A Benedictine monk!” she squeaks. “Why would you see him and not Guildford?”

  “Because Brother Feckenham knows I am a martyr,” I flash. “Of all of you, only he and the queen understand that I am dying for my faith. That is why I will only see him. That is why he will come with me to the scaffold.”

  “If you would just admit that this is not about your faith, this is nothing to do with your faith—it’s only about Father’s rebellion for Elizabeth—then you wouldn’t have to die at all!”

  “That is why I won’t talk with you, or Guildford,” I say in a sudden storm of unsaintly temper. “I won’t listen to anyone who wants me to see this as a muddle by a fool, which leads to the death of his daughter, a pawn. Yes! Father should have rescued me; but instead he rode out for another pawn and his failure has condemned me to death!” I am swept with rage and sorrow. I have raised my voice, I am shouting at her, panting. I feel that I have to claw myself back to peace, to calmness. This is why I cannot argue about worldly things with worldly people. This is why I cannot bear to see her, to see any of them. This is why I have to think and not feel.

  She looks at me with her mouth open and her eyes wide. “He has ruined us,” she whispers.

  “I’m not going to die thinking about that,” I hiss at her. “I am a martyr for my faith, not for a foolish accident. I will never die, and my father will never die either. We will meet in heaven.”

  I write to my father. I always knew he would never die and now I am setting off on a journey, and I don’t doubt that I will see him at journey’s end.

  The Lord comfort Your Grace . . . and though it has pleased God to take away two of your children, my husband and myself, yet think not, I most humbly beseech Your Grace, that you have lost them, but trust that we, by leaving this mortal life, have won an immortal life. And I for my part, as I have honored Your Grace in this life, will pray for you in another life.

  THE TOWER, LONDON,

  MONDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1554

  Two of my ladies, Mrs. Ellen and Elizabeth Tylney, stand with me at the window, waiting for the news that my husband of eight and a half months is dead. They pull me away from the window, laying hold of my arms, my shoulders, as if I am a child, as if I should not see the truth. The lieutenant of the Tower, John Brydges, stands at the door, his face stern, trying to feel nothing.

  “I can watch.” I shrug them off. “I have no fear of death.” I want them to know that even in the valley of the shadow of death I am quite without fear. I want them to note it.

  God supports me, but I am still horribly shocked when the cart goes by my window, rattling back from the scaffold at Tower Hill. I knew he had been beheaded, but I had not thought that the body would be a head shorter than I remembered him. His actual head has been tumbled into a basket beside the bloodstained body. It is pitiful, it is like a butcher’s shambles where the animals are beautiful beasts no longer but only sliced, skinned parts. There is the only man I ever had in my bed, and who was to me such a threat, such a potency. There he is, cut up, like a banned book with chapters ripped out. His body is headless, it looks so odd. They have dropped his handsome face into a basket and tossed his corpse into bloodstained straw. This is a horror I was not prepared for. I always thought of death as the shining shore, never as a butchered beast, the stiffening of a familiar body, pieces of a boy in a dirty cart.

  “Guildford,” I whisper, almost to remind myself that it is him and not some trick