The Last Tudor Read online

  “I can’t wait,” I wail. “I have been waiting every day since Father named Jane as queen. All I ever do is wait for something to happen to me, and hope that this time it’s nice. Janey Seymour says—”

  “I’ve heard more than enough of Jane Seymour,” my mother says brusquely. “Are you staying with them again this month? Aren’t they tired of your company?”

  “No, they’re not, and yes, I am staying at Hanworth unless you order me to be with you at court,” I say, defying her to forbid me the company of my best friend. “It’s not as if we will be drowning in favors from Elizabeth and should be there early to catch the bounty. I don’t see why I should be there as all Elizabeth’s friends come out of wherever they have been hiding. I don’t see that I should have to stand and watch all day as Elizabeth orders new gowns from the wardrobe that should have been mine.”

  “It’s not about gowns; gowns are not important,” my mother says, wrong again.

  HANWORTH PALACE, MIDDLESEX,

  SPRING 1559

  Instead of watching Elizabeth glorying in the treasures and the throne that once belonged to my sister and should have come to me, I go to stay with Janey and her mother, Lady Anne Seymour, at their lovely house in the country. I take Mr. Nozzle the monkey and the little cat Ribbon and the new puppy Jo, and everyone loves them at Hanworth, and nobody tells me to put them in their cages. I am sure that nobody at court misses me at all, except perhaps Henry Herbert, whose lingering glances tell me that now he thinks he made a big mistake when he let them part him from the queen’s cousin. My other former admirer, the Spanish ambassador, is very subdued, waiting to see how his royal master—safely far away on his own lands—manages the new queen and if she will have him in marriage as she promised.

  I doubt that she even notices that I am absent. Of course it is exciting that suddenly all the serious Spanish have vanished and the sorrowful Queen Mary is dead, and everyone is young and reformist and flirtatious. Elizabeth, in the plumb center of it all, with her head turned by her sudden safety and importance, goes everywhere with Robert Dudley, my sister Jane’s brother-in-law, as if they were sweethearts, suddenly given the keys to their own palace. They are practically hand in hand; they must be dizzy with relief. It is a miraculous transition from the prison rooms of the Tower to the royal apartments overnight. They both must have thought that they would put their heads down on the block and now they rest their cheeks on the finest of linen embroidered with coronets. Her mother was beheaded, so was his father. Both of them have carved their names on the walls of a Tower cell and counted the days till their likely trial. It must be heaven to come through that darkened gateway and find yourself on the road to court. My sister, of course, took the opposite journey—from royal rooms to the scaffold—and it was Robert’s father who was the cause of her imprisonment. The plot for Elizabeth was the final straw and reason for Jane’s execution. I don’t forget this when I see their triumph: beggars’ triumph. I wonder that they are not ashamed.

  But nobody thinks of it but me, and I try not to think of it at all. Elizabeth’s new court is crowded with people dashing back from Switzerland or Germany, or wherever they have been hiding from the Inquisition. The horses must be foundering on the roads all the way from Zurich. Our great friend Lady Bess Cavendish, widowed, married to another rich man, and a convinced Lutheran, turns up at court and is best of friends with us again, and a great adherent of Elizabeth. The Duchess of Suffolk, our young and beautiful stepgrandmother Catherine Brandon, reappears from exile with her commoner husband and two adorable little children. The whole world wants places and fees and favors, all of them suddenly the best friend of the loneliest girl in England. Elizabeth’s lady governess, Kat Ashley, is back at her side after a spell in the Fleet Prison for treason. No longer is Elizabeth the despised half-bred sister: she is the Protestant princess who has restored the reformed faith to England; she is the heroine of all reformers, as if my sister Jane had never been, as if I—a born reformer, born royal—did not exist.

  I get no credit for having been sister to a queen, a queen of only nine days but proclaimed by everyone who is now crowding into the Protestant court. Elizabeth has no sense of family feeling: she was terrified of her father, nervous around her half brother, King Edward, who loved Jane so dearly, and the declared enemy to her half sister, Queen Mary. While I was raised by a mother who spoke every day of our royal kinship, Elizabeth was raised alone, her mother dead, her father marrying other women. So I am not surprised that she doesn’t greet me with any pleasure, and I allow myself to raise my chin, to raise my eyebrows, and to speak to her as a near-equal. To outshine her in grace and beauty every day in these hours of her loudly acclaimed triumph is my only revenge. She is ridiculously vain, quite desperate to be thought the most beautiful girl at court, in England, in the world—but here am I: slim where she is dropsical, bright-eyed where she is tired, lighthearted where she has every day new responsibilities and learns of new things to fear, a survivor just as she is, but fair-skinned and blond where she is—to tell the truth—swarthy and ginger. I can drive her mad just by walking across the room, and so I do.

  It’s as well for me that she is surely too busy worrying about supporting the Protestants in Scotland, settling the religion of the English, struggling to get herself named as Supreme Governor of the Church of England—as if a woman could be such a thing!—to object to my little acts of defiance. It’s as well for me that I have Hanworth to run to, for my mother rails at me and calls me a fool to torment an anxious young woman newcome to her throne, but I think of it as Jane’s throne, and mine, and I think of Elizabeth as the vain scramblingly ambitious daughter of a lute player and a whore.

  She promises that she will name her heir, but she does not. She should name me, but she avoids my name. Until she behaves as a queen should do—marries and gets an heir or names one—she will win no respect from me, and for sure, she returns me none.

  “You’re so right,” Janey Seymour says emphatically. She turns her head to cough into her sleeve and her whole body shakes with the strength of the spasm. But she is smiling when she turns back to me, her eyes feverishly bright. “You’re right, everyone knows that she is not the true heir, everyone knows that she is illegitimate, but there is nobody to take your side. All the reformers believe that Elizabeth is the best that they can get, and not even the papists dare to suggest Mary Queen of Scots, half French as she is.”

  I have Mr. Nozzle on my lap and I am tickling his fat little tummy. His eyes are closed with pleasure. Every now and then he gives a little yawn or perhaps it is a silent laugh. “If I had been married . . .” I think of the Dudleys planning, campaigning, and fighting for Jane. Where might I be now, if I had a powerful family to conspire for me, if my father were still alive? If I had a husband and his father saw what we could be?

  “Oh, yes, but the Herberts aren’t going to risk anything against Elizabeth.”

  “I never think of Henry Herbert,” I lie, and Janey catches my eye and goes off into a peal of laughter that ends in a coughing fit.

  “Of course you don’t. But you’re still heir to the throne, and his father doesn’t forget that! He’s always so polite to you now!”

  “I don’t care!” I toss my head, and sit Mr. Nozzle up on his little bottom so he watches us with his serious eyes.

  “But you have to marry,” Janey says, when she has her breath back. “Elizabeth isn’t going to find you a good match. She wants nobody courting but her. She’d make us all into nuns if she could. Does your mother plan nothing for you now that Queen Mary did not name you as heir after Elizabeth, now that Elizabeth does not promise you?”

  “She’s hoping that Elizabeth will come to favor us,” I say. “I’d get a better match if Elizabeth would only recognize us, her family. But obviously, she thinks only of herself. I have been quite forgotten. I don’t even have my rightful place in the privy chamber. I’m not in the inner circle. You would think I am a complete stranger, waiting about outsid