The Last Tudor Read online

  In scraps and words, the gossip comes from London and goes on beyond us—all over the kingdom. Though Elizabeth the queen is apparently willing and prepared to marry for the sake of the country, though she has convinced the Holy Roman Emperor that she will take his brother, the council is divided and, using their uncertainty as her shield, Elizabeth hides her determination to live and die a single woman. Her cousin Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, says that there can be no danger to the kingdom but much benefit in marrying such a great prince, and his faith is no obstacle. The archduke has made such offers, and given such promises, that we can live with the queen’s husband as a papist who receives Mass in private. Not so, says the rest of the council: Francis Knollys, that staunch Protestant; Robert Dudley, that staunch Dudleyist. The Protestant lords Sir William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, and Sir William Parr, the Marquess of Northampton, join together to warn the queen that the country cannot tolerate a papist husband, will not drink the health of a half-papist baby in the cradle. Robert Dudley suggests that a foreign suitor is unattractive, too. Someone tells the queen that he is ugly, that all Habsburgs have terribly weak chins; does she want to marry a man who looks like a squirrel?

  Just before Christmas, Elizabeth sends to the Holy Roman Emperor and finally says that she cannot marry his brother the archduke Charles. Of course, the entire Habsburg family is hugely offended, and all of papist Christendom sees England as stubbornly and persistently heretical. It would have been better for us all if she had never gone through the charade of pretending that she was willing. Now they see us as perfidious. The French, who are persecuting every Protestant in their realm, are particularly bitter, and Elizabeth is without an heir once more, except for the deposed Queen Mary in her prison and my poor sister, in hers. We are back where we always seem to be—playing with the inheritance of the kingdom so that Elizabeth can remain free to love Robert Dudley.

  GREENWICH PALACE,

  SPRING 1568

  Sir Owen Hopton, Katherine’s new jailer, writes to William Cecil begging him to send a London physician into Suffolk. My sister, weaker every day from starving herself, is now desperately ill.

  Dr. Symondes has been sent to see the Lady, Cecil writes diplomatically, leaving it unclear who has taken the expensive decision to send the best doctor in London to my sister. But this is not his first visit and he is not optimistic. We should pray for her soul.

  “I have to go to her,” I say to my stepgrandmother. “You must write to Cecil and ask for permission for me to be at her side. He will not refuse. He will know she cannot die alone. I have to go.”

  She is pale with anxiety. “I know. I know. I will write to him, you can write yourself, too, and we will send it at once.”

  “Can I start without permission? Can I go now?”

  She clasps her hands together. “We dare not,” she says. “If the queen should hear that I let you leave my house without permission, you would be taken from me, and who knows where they would put you then?”

  “She’s dying!” I say flatly. “Am I not allowed to say good-bye to my dying sister? The last of my family?”

  She thrusts a sheet of paper at me. “Write,” she says tersely. “And we will leave as soon as we are allowed.”

  We don’t get permission. We get a bundle of papers forwarded to us by William Cecil’s office. On the top he has written a note in a steady hand. I am afraid that even if you had set out at once, you would have been too late. Lady Katherine is dead.

  I look at my stepgrandmother as if I cannot believe that such news should be told me in such brevity. Not one word of sympathy, not one word to recognize the tragedy of the loss of a young woman, aged only twenty-seven. My sister. My beautiful, funny, loving, royal sister.

  My lady grandmother unties the ribbon around the papers and says: “It is an account of her last hours. God bless her, the pretty child. Shall I read it to you?”

  I climb on to the window seat of her privy chamber. “Please do,” I say dully. I wonder that I don’t cry, and then I realize that I have spent my life in the shadow of the scaffold. I never expected any of us to survive Tudor rule. My lady grandmother smooths the paper on her knee and clears her throat. “It says that she prepared to die as the household begged her to fight for her life. She wasn’t alone, Mary—Lady Hopton was with her and told her that with God’s favor she would live. But she said it was not God’s will that she should live any longer, and that His will should be done and not hers.”

  She glances at me, to see if I am finding this unbearable. I know that I look calm; I feel nothing but an icy despair.

  “Early in the morning, just as it was getting light, she sent for Sir Owen Hopton and asked him to take some messages for her. She begged the queen to forgive her for marrying without permission, she said, Be good unto my children and not impute my fault to them.” My stepgrandmother glances up at me again. I nod for her to go on.

  “She asked for the queen to be good to Lord Hertford, her husband, and said: I know this my death will be heavy news for him. She asked for him to be freed, and sent him her betrothal ring, a pointed diamond, and a wedding ring with five links.”

  “I remember it,” I interrupt. “She showed it to me. She always kept it with her.”

  “She has given it back to him and a mourning ring as well.” My lady stepgrandmother’s voice is choked. “Poor girl. Poor sweet lovely girl. What a tragedy! It says here that she prayed him to be—even as I have been unto him a true and faithful wife, that he will be a loving and natural father to my children. It says here that she commissioned the mourning ring with her portrait months ago—she must have known she was dying. She had it engraved for him.”

  I am hunched up now, on the seat, my face to my knees, crouched like a hurt child, my hands over my eyes. I would almost put them over my ears so I cannot hear my sister’s last loving words. I feel as if I am sinking down into the deeps of loss. “What does it say?” I ask. “What does the ring say?”

  “While I lived—yours.”

  “Is that all?” I ask. I think I must have arrived at the very ocean bed of sorrow. It is as if the deeps have closed over my own head.

  “It says that they rang the bells for her and the villagers prayed for her recovery.”

  “Did she say anything for me?”

  “She said: Farewell, Good Sister.”

  I hear the words that Jane said to Katherine, that Katherine now says to me. But I have no one to bless. Now that Katherine has gone there is no sister for me. I am an orphan alone.

  “Then she said, Lord Jesus receive my spirit, and she closed her eyes with her own hands and she left us.”

  “I don’t know how to bear this,” I say quietly. I push myself to the edge of the seat and I drop down to the floor. “I really don’t know how to bear it.”

  My lady grandmother takes my hands but does not crush me in her arms. She knows that the grief I feel is far, far beyond the reach of any easy comfort. “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; the Lord hath done His pleasure, now blessed be the name of the Lord,” she tells me.

  Of course, our cousin the queen gives Katherine a magnificent funeral. How she does love a funeral, especially family! Katherine is buried in the village church at Yoxford, far from her home, far from the resting place of her mother, far from her husband’s family chapel; but Elizabeth orders the court into mourning and manages to paint into an expression of grief on her false face. Seventy-seven official mourners attend from court, along with a herald and court servants; Katherine’s arms are displayed in the chapel on banners, pennons, and banderoles. Everything that can exalt a Tudor princess is done for her. Katherine in death is recognized and honored, as in life she was persecuted and ignored.

  Elizabeth does not allow me to attend. Of course not. She only loves her heirs when they predecease her. The last thing she wants is someone pointing out that if Katherine was a Tudor princess then her little sister is one too—and the last of the line. The last thing she wants