The Last Tudor Read online

  I have other visitors. My stepgrandmother and her children come to me whenever they are in London, and I often dine with them and stay overnight. My brother-in-law, Ned, writes with news of my nephews, and I will visit them at Hanworth in the summer. The youngest, Thomas, is a scholar like my sister Jane, a poet like his father. I send him books that are recommended by the preachers who visit me to study and talk of the new theology that is demanding that Elizabeth’s half-papist Church goes further with reform and purity. I buy the new books and go to hear sermons and keep myself informed of the twist and turn of the debate.

  Aunt Bess, that fair-weather friend of our family, visits me when she is in London. She cannot bring herself to speak of the division in her household, but everyone knows that “my husband, the earl” has wasted his huge fortune in entertaining and securing the safety of his royal guest, and still she drains his coffers as Elizabeth neither sends the queen back to Scotland in honor nor dumps her on France in shame. Bess lives apart from her husband as much as possible but she could not save the fortune and that is perhaps her greatest grief.

  She speaks fondly of her children and of her great house-building projects. She hopes to rescue her fortune from the earl’s debts and keep enough money of her own to build a great new house beside her great old house Hardwick Hall, and found a dynasty. Her earl may have failed her; but her ambition will never fail. God Himself only knows who she will choose as a husband for her poor daughter.

  “What d’you think of Charles Stuart for my Elizabeth?” she asks. “He is kinsman to the queen herself and brother to the late King of Scotland.”

  I look at her, completely aghast. “You think you would get Elizabeth’s permission for such a marriage?”

  She makes a little puffing sound, as if she were blowing out a candle and, for some reason, it makes me freeze. “Oh, no, so maybe nothing,” she says. “But tell me, how much do you pay your chief steward here? Are London men not terribly expensive?”

  I let her move the conversation away and I let myself forget that she spoke of it. My aunt Bess was well represented when she had a rampant lion as her crest. Nobody knows where she and her family will end.

  Before she leaves I show her all around my little house, from the servants’ bedrooms in the attics to my bedroom and privy chamber below. She admires my library of books, she prods my great four-poster bed. “Everything very good,” she speaks to me as one woman who has come up from nothing to another who lost everything and has won it back.

  I show her my hall and my silverware in the cupboard. Twenty people can dine off silver at my table, and a hundred people can be seated below us in the hall. Sometimes I give grand dinners, I invite whomever I choose. Mr. Nozzle watches us quietly as we admire my treasures.

  I take her through to the kitchens and show her the spit in the fireplace and the charcoal burning tray for the sauces, the bread ovens and behind them the storerooms, the flesh kitchen, the subtlety room, the dairy, the cellar, the brewhouse, and buttery.

  “It is a proper house,” she says, as if she thought that a small person would need only a doll-sized house.

  “It is,” I say. “It is my house, and I have been a long time coming to it.”

  I have a stable behind the house, and I ride out when I please. I go as far and for as long as I like. Nobody will ever tell me again that I may walk only to the gate or only see the sky through a small square of glass. I think of my sister Katherine and her sweetness and her silliness, her faithful constant love for her husband and her courageous defense of him and her sons. I think of my husband, Thomas Keyes, and how they kept him, trapped like the bear at Bradgate, a huge beautiful beast cramped by the cruelty of his keepers. I think of Jane and her determination to speak for God when she could so easily have kept quiet for life, and I think that she chose her destiny, and I have chosen mine.

  I am glad I did not choose a martyr’s death like Jane, and I am glad that I did not break my heart like Katherine. I am glad that I loved Thomas and that I know that I love him still. I am glad that Elizabeth did not destroy me, that I defied her and never regretted it, and that my little life, as a little person, has been a life of greatness to me.

  I smooth down my black gown. I always wear black as an honorable rich widow. I remember people telling me that Mary Queen of Scots wore black, embroidered with silver and gold thread, for her wedding gown and I think—that is how it is to be a stylish widow! That is how it is to be a queen. Underneath my black brocade I wear a petticoat of scarlet, as she did, that shows in glorious flashes of color as I walk around my good house, or when I step outside in the street. Red is the color of defiance, red is the color of life, red is the color of love, and so it is my color. I shall wear my black embroidered gown and my red petticoat till the day that I die—and whenever that is, if that poor loveless thing Elizabeth is still on the throne, then I know at least that she will give me a magnificent funeral, fit for the last Tudor princess.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is called The Last Tudor and it may be the last novel about a Tudor woman that I write. I am starting a new series of novels and I do not know when I will return to this wonderful era that has been of such intense interest for me for so many years.

  I started my work in the Tudor period with the story of an almost unknown woman, Mary Boleyn, sister to the more famous Anne, and the title posed the question as to which was the most important Boleyn and which was the other—The Other Boleyn Girl. This inspired an interrogation of their history, and indeed the history of women, the relatively unknown beside the celebrated and controversial.

  This new novel also has a famous sister, one of the most famous Tudor women, Lady Jane Grey—condemned for her father’s persistent and unsuccessful treason against Mary I—who chose to die rather than recant her faith. Her sisters are hardly mentioned in the general histories of the period but they were unlucky, in that their elder sister defied the religion of the Catholic Tudor, without earning them the favor of her Protestant heir. Katherine Grey’s story is an account of a woman inside the Tudor family but outside Tudor favor. Her younger sister, Mary Grey, is almost unknown but I think she is of great interest—a Little Person, said to be under four feet high, she does not even appear in the specialist histories of little people. She was a woman of persistent courage, showing a powerful instinct to survive where her sisters did not; and while this novel narrates her life as a fiction, her marriage and the dates and places of her confinement are historically accurate, as is her survival and her defiant red petticoat!

  The names given to reformers of religion vary throughout this period, and carry very different meanings now, so I have referred to them all with the later catch-all name of Protestants and Reformers, for the ease of the general reader—I hope theologians will forgive me. Quotations from original letters and poems are shown in italics.

  The other element in this book that reminds me of The Other Boleyn Girl is the theme of sisters. I seem to have written about sisters in many of my books—the bond is a significant one for women who are born with few natural allies in a hard world, and it is a powerful concept for a feminist: we should all be sisters. So this is the book I dedicate to my own sister, with love.

  A Touchstone Reading Group Guide

  The Last Tudor

  Philippa Gregory

  This reading group guide for The Last Tudor includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Philippa Gregory. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

  Introduction

  Bestselling author Philippa Gregory tells the captivating story of Lady Jane Grey, who held the throne of England for nine days, and her lesser-known but equally fascinating sisters—the beautiful and romantic Katherine and Mary, small in stature but not in spirit—all of whom de