The Last Tudor Read online

  We are a mismatched band. My stunted sister Mary’s promised husband, Arthur Grey of Wilton, towers above her. He is a young man already and thinks himself his father’s companion and fellow. He is far too old to be a playmate to Mary; she is far too young to be a wife to him. Of course she is too small to be wedded and bedded, and I think she will never be able to lie with a man and bear a child with her spine that was twisted at birth. Of course, Arthur Grey must secretly despise her. I thank God that they will live apart for some years and that she is to stay at home with our mother. I imagine they will get the marriage dissolved before she has to go to her husband.

  My new sister-in-law, Katherine Dudley, is a vain thing. They have given her to Henry Hastings, a highly educated scholar and courtier. He looks at his little bride bobbing up and down with a patient smile that will soon wear thin. My sister Katherine’s husband, Henry Lord Herbert, the young son of the Earl of Pembroke, never says one word to anyone throughout the whole two days. He is as white as a corpse and so sick that he can hardly stand. They say that they dragged him from his deathbed though he swore he could not walk to the altar. He is only fifteen years old. I hope that he does not make my sister a widow before she is a wife. Certainly, they cannot consummate the marriage while she is so young and he is so ill, so she is spared the ordeal that they force on me. These three unions that cannot be consummated only make me feel worse. I am the only girl who has to be both a bride and a wife, in deed as well as in name.

  “I don’t see why you have such a long face,” Katherine, my foolish sister, says. “You knew that if you were married you’d have to be fully married. It would be just the same for me if he were not ill.”

  “And me,” Mary says.

  “It wouldn’t be the same for you,” I say to Mary.

  “I don’t see why not,” she says stubbornly.

  I am too exhausted to argue with her. “And you’re too young,” I say to Katherine.

  “No, I’m not,” she says. “And anyway, you certainly aren’t.” She gives a little tweak to the kerchief I wear over my hair to indicate that I am now a married woman. “Come on, you’re to be first to go to your wedding chamber. Lucky you.”

  I feel unfairly forced, as my mother and new mother-in-law and all their ladies appear at the door and then come with me to the bridal chamber, watch as my ladies undress me, and then abruptly leave me with my new husband.

  It is not that he is unpleasant, not in any way. He is a handsome young man, fair and with a pleasing open face and bright blue eyes. He is far taller than I am. The top of my head does not even reach to his shoulder, and I have to crane my neck to look up at him, but for all his height he is light on his feet—a good dancer, they say—and he rides, hunts, jousts, just as he should. He has been raised in a godly household and is well read. If we were not married, I could say nothing against him but that he looks to his mother for every single thing. The big baby looks at her before he even opens his mouth, before he sits or stands.

  He is not my choice, he would not be my choice, and I am afraid that I am not free in the sight of God to marry him. But since we are married I can say nothing against him at all. A godly wife is obedient. He has been put over me as Adam was put over Eve. I shall have to be obedient to him, whatever I think of his judgment.

  Our wedding night is as awkward and as painful as I expected. I don’t even think it would have been any better if I had married Edward Seymour, though he might have been more confident than Guildford and perhaps would not have made me feel quite such a fool for not knowing what has to be done. The difficulty is that none of my books tells me anything about love, except in the most abstract sense. None of my books says anything about the pain, except the pain of sin. None of them warns me that the worst of it is the misery of having a total stranger struggling to do something to me—neither of us knowing exactly how it should be done, and when it goes all wrong, blaming me. I didn’t even know that anything was wrong except that at first it hurt and then it was disgusting. He is not inspired by desire or affection, and neither am I. I wait till he falls asleep and then I get up and pray for strength to bear this, as I have to bear everything else in this vale of misery, in the place which He hath set.

  Finally, the guests say their farewells, Katherine goes to her new family home at Baynard’s Castle to put her pale husband back in his sickbed, and nurse him like a mother, since his own mother is dead. My father and mother go home to Suffolk Place with little Mary; but I am left in a strange house, with the servants clearing up the mess of a two-day feast, with my mother-in-law locked in her chamber, and my new husband sulky and silent now that she is not here to tell him what to say or do.

  In the morning I am allowed to go home to my family but only to Suffolk Place. I am pining for the summer fields of Bradgate, but I have to stay in London.

  “My lady mother says you can go home if you want to,” my young husband says ungraciously. “But she says I have to dine with you the day after tomorrow and spend the night at your house.”

  “All my books are there,” I say, trying to excuse myself. “I need to go home to study.”

  “My lady mother says that you may.”

  I don’t ask him if they expect me to return soon. I think it better not to know. Perhaps I will be able to spin out a visit to our London house till the summer, and then if the king goes on progress, John Dudley and his sons may attend without their wives, and I may be able to go to Bradgate. The thought that I might get there, to ride in the woods and to see the harvest come in, to walk under a strawberry moon and take a boat out on the lake, is the only thing that keeps me at peace through the first days of my marriage. That, and my books, of course. I can always open a book and hide myself in that inner, private world.

  The idea that I would want to go to Bradgate, that I would seek my mother as a refuge from a home even less kindly than hers, makes me understand for the first time what God said to Eve: I will increase thy sorrow, when thou art with child: with pain shalt thou bear thy children, and thy lust shall pertain unto your husband, and he shall rule thee. Truly, it is a sorrow to be a woman; and Eve shows us that to be a wife is even worse.

  It is agreed between Lady Dudley and my mother that I can live with my parents at Suffolk Place, as long as I visit the Dudleys regularly and dine with them often. The first weeks of my marriage are spent like this. But Lady Dudley breaks this arrangement by coming into the privy chamber before dinner, as Guildford and I are sitting in awkward silence, and saying: “Now you must send for your clothes and all your things, Jane. You are to stay tonight and you must stay after. You will live here now.”

  I rise and curtsey to her. “I thought I was to go home,” I say. “My mother is expecting me home tonight.”

  She shakes her head. “It is all to be changed. My lord has written to me that you must be here. You have to stay here with us. We have to be ready.”

  Guildford, on his feet at the first sight of his mother, kneels to her, and she rests her hand in blessing on his curly head. “We have to be ready? He’s worse?” he asks eagerly.

  I look from the woman to her kneeling son. “Who’s worse?”

  She gives an irritated little tut at my ignorance. “Leave us,” she says to the ladies who have come in with her. “Sit down, Jane. Guildford, sweet son, you come here to me.”

  He stands behind her, like Mr. Nozzle clinging to Katherine, watching my face as his mother tells me: “The king, God bless him, is worse. You knew at least that he was ill?”

  “Of course I knew that. I often sit with him.”

  “Now he is worse. His doctors say that he will not survive the summer.”

  “The summer?” This is impossibly soon. I thought that he might live long enough to marry and have a child. I had no idea that they were saying that we might lose him within the year. “God save His Grace,” I whisper, shocked. “I did not know. But how can it be? I thought he was only—”

  “That’s not important,” she cuts me of