The Last Tudor Read online

  John Jewel, who is friends with all of my sister Jane’s old spiritual mentors, preaches the funeral sermon in reformist style, and I think that Jane might have been pleased to see that her mother was buried in the religion that she died for. It is odd and painful to think of Jane, a queen, her head in a basket, tumbled into the traitors’ vaults in the chapel at the Tower, and here is my mother laid to rest in the greatest of ceremonies, drowned in honors, with banners of arms over her hearse.

  The ladies of the court draped in black, their black leather gloves paid for by the queen, follow my mother’s coffin, which is shrouded in black and cloth of gold, to show her importance.

  Bess St. Loe takes my hand. “I loved your mother very much,” she says to me. “I will miss her. She was a great lady. You can call on me as your friend, Katherine. I will never be able to take her place, but I will love you for her.” For a moment, seeing her emotion, I could almost cry for the loss of a mother; but if you are a Tudor, you don’t really have parents. Your mother is your patron, your child is your heir, you fear the failure of them both. I don’t need Aunt Bess to tell me that my mother was a great lady, and nobody could say that she was a good mother; but it is consoling to see that the court finally recognizes her royalty and thus ours.

  But there is more.

  Elizabeth chooses this moment to restore our title as princesses of the blood. In death, my mother has achieved the ambition of her life: to have us recognized by Elizabeth, named as her cousins, defined as royal, titled as “Princess,” and so the first of all the possible heirs. My mother, God forgive her, would have thought it cheaply bought by her death, well worth the sacrifice. Jane died for claiming our mother’s rights; now they are given to us, her sisters, at her mother’s funeral.

  Mary and I are immensely dignified mourners, our heads held as stiffly as if we are wearing coronets already. I glance behind to make sure that she is upholding our new honors, and I give her a little smile. Her head is up, her shoulders straight, she looks like a miniature queen. We retire after the ceremony to the Charterhouse at Sheen, and I burn with impatience to get back to court to see if at last Elizabeth pays me true cousinly respect, grants me my proper place in the privy chamber, and precedence among the ladies. I should follow her, one pace behind her for the rest of her life, and at her death I should step up to the throne. Now, at last, I can speak to her as a cousin about my marriage.

  “I shall marry as soon as I am out of mourning,” I exult to Mr. Stokes, my stepfather. “We should ask for permission now, while the court is still in black and Elizabeth is in such a generous mood.”

  He looks exhausted. He is genuinely grieved at the loss of his wife. Unlike us, her two surviving children, he truly loved her. “I am sorry,” he says stiffly. “I spoke to Lord Hertford after the funeral. It must be he who speaks to the queen, now that your mother has gone.”

  “Oh, very well. What did Ned say?” I demand confidently. I have Jo the pug on my lap, entwined with Ribbon the little cat, and I gently pull her silky ears. “Does he want to wait till I go back to court after mourning? Or is he going to speak to her now, while we are still away?”

  Adrian Stokes shakes his head, his eyes on my face. “I am sorry,” he says awkwardly. “I am very sorry, Katherine. I know your mother would have been sorry, too. But I don’t think he will undertake it. He said as much to me, actually. Without your mother here to argue your case to the queen, his mother has changed her mind and does not want the match to go ahead. Lady Seymour does not want to speak to the queen without your mother to support her, and neither does he. Put it bluntly: neither of them dares.”

  I can hardly believe what he is saying. “But she has just made me a princess of the blood!” I exclaim. “She recognizes me as a member of the royal family! I have never been so high in her favor!”

  “That’s the very thing,” he replies. “Now you are named a princess she will be all the more determined to command your marriage, and she won’t want you to marry someone with a claim to the throne himself.”

  “To Hertford!” I raise my voice to my stepfather. “She should command my marriage to Hertford! And you should insist on it for me!”

  He shakes his head. “You know that I have no influence, Lady Katherine. I am a commoner without great wealth. But I know that the queen won’t want to marry you to a lord who has his own claim to the throne. And she won’t let you marry while she is unmarried herself, and risk you having a son who would have a stronger claim than she does. I can see what the Seymours are thinking: obviously the queen won’t want a Tudor-Seymour boy at court until she has a husband and son of her own. The Seymours don’t want to take the risk of offending her.”

  “None of you understand her!” I exclaim. “She doesn’t think like that; she doesn’t plan ahead like that! All she thinks of is being at the center of attention and holding Robert Dudley at her side.”

  “I think she does think very carefully,” he cautions me. “I think she is having you watched, and I think she will take no risks that might create an heir with a strong claim to her throne.”

  “Elizabeth doesn’t watch me!”

  “William Cecil does.” He sees the shock on my face and gives a helpless little shrug. “He watches everyone.”

  “Are you saying that she will not let me marry till she has married and given birth to her own son and heir?”

  He nods. “Almost certainly,” he says. “It would be to set up an heir with a stronger claim than her own.”

  “That could be years.”

  “I know. But I think she will not endure a rival.”

  “She will be the ruin of me,” I say flatly.

  His sandy eyebrows come together in a frown as he wonders what I mean by “ruin.” “I hope not,” he says. “I hope that you have been careful both with your reputation and with the queen.”

  I think of the arbor, I think of the moment of fierce pain and joy, I think of sobbing against his shoulder and whispering, “I am all yours.”

  “We are betrothed to marry!” I say.

  “It is traditional to have the queen’s permission,” he reminds me gently. “It was the law. The queen could restore the law. But anyway, the Seymours say they won’t ask for it.”

  “What about my mother’s letter, asking the queen for permission for Ned and me to marry? I can give it to Elizabeth if no one else has the courage to present it. We can say we found it in her papers, that it was her dying wish?”

  His tired face darkens. “That letter,” he says. “That’s how I know that you’re being watched. Your mother’s letter has gone from her private closet. Your mother was spied on, and someone has stolen her letter. For your own safety, Katherine, you have to forget all about this.”

  “They can’t just steal a letter to the queen! They can’t just go through our papers and take what they want. Who would do such a thing?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know why. But at any rate it’s gone, and we can’t get it back. I think you can do nothing but put him out of your thoughts and out of your heart.”

  “I can’t forget!” I exclaim. “I love him. I have given him my word! We are betrothed!”

  “I am sorry” is all he says. And then he says something even worse: “He is sorry, too, I know. I could tell. He was very sorry that he will never see you again.”

  “Not see me again?” I whisper. “He said that?”

  “He said that.”

  We are very quiet and dull at Sheen. Mr. Nozzle shivers in the cold drafts from the ill-fitting doors and Ribbon the cat will not go out for his business and get his paws wet, so I am always clearing up after him. Jo the pug whimpers the moment that I leave the room, as if to say she is lonely, too.

  At least I have not missed a merry Christmas at court. Janey writes to me and says that the place is as miserable as when Queen Mary was on the throne, for Elizabeth is sick with fright as to whether she dares to send English troops to support the Scots Protestant lords. Of course she should d