The Last Tudor Read online

  HAMPTON COURT PALACE,

  SUMMER 1555

  While she is enduring a tiring pregnancy in hot weather, Queen Mary finds it in her heart to forgive her difficult half sister and succumbs to the persuasion of her husband, Prince Philip, to release Elizabeth from Woodstock Palace. Our kinswoman comes to court dressed very modestly with a small hood over her ginger hair, wearing Protestant black and white, as charming and enthusiastic as any spinster aunt-to-be.

  Her presence only adds another runner in the gallop to be first behind the queen when she walks anywhere. But surely, though Elizabeth may compete for precedence, she cannot truly think that she has any chance of being named as the queen’s heir? Her mere presence reminds everyone of the religious divide, for everyone knows that Elizabeth is the Protestant heir just as my sister was.

  When the court moves to Oatlands, my mother goes home to Beaumanor and, without a word of warning to me or Mary, puts off black and marries her master of horse, Adrian Stokes, who has served us and cared for the horses and hounds for as long as I can remember. Mary says that our lady mother could not afford his wages and could not bear to lose his care of her horses, but I think that she is glad to be rid of the name of Grey, which is blazoned over every illegal reformist pamphlet, and famous throughout Christendom. With Adrian Stokes she can bury her treasonous name with her traitorous husband and reformist daughter, and pretend, like everyone else, that they never existed.

  It’s all very well for her. She becomes Mrs. Stokes (though I know she will always demand to be called Lady Frances, and receive a deep royal bow), but I am still Lady Katherine Grey. Mary is still Lady Mary, and there is no way for us to change our names unless someone marries us too. There is no hiding that we, along with Elizabeth, Mary of Scots, and Margaret Douglas, are the last remaining Tudors, all of us with a claim to the queen’s throne, all of us hanging around court and waiting for the outcome of this speedy conception. One of us certain to inherit, unless she has healthy baby—a thing her mother did only once.

  OATLANDS PALACE, SURREY,

  SUMMER 1555

  God knows, not I, why nothing ever goes right for us Tudors. Queen Mary does not get the son she longs for. She goes into confinement with a good belly on her and all us ladies of honor are very charming when we sit with her and sew baby clothes, and when we come out we toss our heads and say that we really cannot discuss intimate female matters with the handsome Spanish courtiers. I make much of saying that a maiden like myself (never an abandoned wife, a girl whose marriage was annulled within weeks) cannot remark on how well the queen is doing today, such things are a mystery to a virgin like me. We keep this up—it is absolutely delightful—from the seventh month to the full nine, and then (with less conviction) for the tenth. Now it appears that it really is a mystery to all of us—maids and midwives alike. We conceal our growing anxiety as best we can and we say that she has mistaken her dates, and the birth will be any day now, but even I think this is a bit far-fetched.

  In this time of waiting Elizabeth is a complete lick-spigot, charming to all the ladies, thoughtful and attentive to the lords, breathlessly concerned as to the health of her beloved half sister, and seductive as an expelled nun to her sister’s own husband, Philip of Spain, who clearly sees her as the guarantor of his safety if his old wife dies in childbirth.

  I ask my lady mother what is happening with the queen and why she does not labor and bear her child like a normal woman—and she snaps at me and tells me that of all the stupid girls in the world I should be the last one to ask where the heir to the throne is, since every day that there is no birth, she is the first legitimate heir and so my position gets better and better. I whisper “Elizabeth?” and my lady mother says sharply, “Declared a bastard by her own father?” and raps me on the knuckles with her riding whip. I take it I am going to get no helpful maternal advice from her, and I ask her nothing more.

  Another month goes by and the queen’s belly simply goes down, as if it were nothing but pasture bloat in a greedy old sheep that broke into clover, and now we all say nothing at all as she comes out of confinement and rejoins the court as if nothing had ever happened.

  It’s agony for her, of course, because she is madly in love with King Philip and he is as polite and as patient as a man can be with an older wife who imagined herself pregnant and made them both look like fools; but actually it’s very embarrassing for all of us: all the English courtiers who made so much of our queen’s fertility, all of us maids who bustled around making ourselves important. Worst of all is Elizabeth, dripping with sympathy but walking into dinner behind the queen, right on her heels, as if Philip’s attention to her proves that she is heir, and everyone quite forgets about my mother’s claims, and about me.

  In these circumstances—ridiculous and unpredictable, and just typical of the stupidity of everyone—I find that I have had the misfortune to inherit my mother’s ambition. Really, I would have expected to despise it, seeing where it has got us so far. But I can’t help myself, I resent anyone suggesting that I am not the heir and I am starting to struggle in the nightly squabble for precedence.

  It’s not so much that I think I should be queen—I wouldn’t want to displace Queen Mary—but I do want to be her heir. I just can’t see that anyone else is fit for the crown. I can’t be happy at the thought of Elizabeth being queen; I can’t imagine her in Jane’s place; nobody could. She’s so unworthy! In every way, from her terrible yellow hair—it’s not golden at all like mine—to her skin, as sallow as a Spaniard’s, she is unfit to be Queen of England. I would have stepped back willingly for a little prince who was the heir to Spain and to England, born in wedlock to two ruling monarchs. But I will never step back for my great-uncle’s bastard—especially as nobody knows if Elizabeth is even that. Her mother was taken in adultery with five men! Elizabeth could well be the daughter of the king’s lute player—who knows?

  But during this dull time of embarrassed regret, with no Prince of Wales in the cradle and little prospect of another pregnancy, I am not the only one who is thinking of my rights. I seem to have become of great interest to two people—two men, actually. One is my former husband, Henry Lord Herbert, who always turns his head and gives me a little hidden smile when we maids walk past him. I don’t smile back exactly, I give him a look a little like Jane used to put on when she read something that she thought unlikely: a sort of skeptical raised eyebrow, a sort of looking down my nose. I think it’s rather charming, and I cuff Mary, my sister, when she remarks that I am gurning at Henry Herbert as if I wished we were still married.

  I say it hardly befits her, whose head comes only to the top of my bodice, to comment on my appearance. “You’re no taller than the queen’s dwarf,” I say crushingly. “Don’t tell me that I’m gurning.”

  “I am no dwarf,” she says firmly. “I was born small but royal. I am quite different from Thomasina. Everyone says so.”

  I can’t challenge her petite dignity. “Oh, and who are all these people who say so?”

  “I do,” she says with huge dignity. “And it is me who matters.”

  She has always been quite untroubled that she is so short and not growing anymore. Jane once told her that dwarfs in some heathen country were worshipped as gods, and it filled her with pride. She thinks very highly of herself for one who stands so low. I think it very odd that I should have had one sister who despised the world of the flesh, and one too tiny to desire it, and here am I, born between the two of them, tall and pretty, the most eager girl for worldly pleasures in all of the court.

  “I suppose you want to marry him again,” Mary says sagely. “I would have thought that the way they treated you would have put you off the Herberts forever.”

  I tell her, not at all! Not at all! We were never married, not at all! Just as she was never betrothed either. The marriage is denied and forgotten and I have no idea why he smiles so charmingly at me. He should have kept me as his wife if he likes me so much, if he had the sense to go again