The Last Tudor Read online

  Still, I don’t understand him. I think that I don’t understand anything. I can’t hear. That is the trouble: that I can’t hear what he is saying. The bells are so loud, the ravens so noisy, I must have misheard him.

  “What have we lost? I knew we were withdrawing. I knew she was defending Framlingham. Has there been a battle? Was John Dudley’s troop defeated?”

  “No battle. She won without a sword unsheathed. London has proclaimed Mary,” he says. “Despite everything I have done for you. That’s why they’re ringing the bells.”

  I drop my hand from the rein and stagger back from the big horse, and my father immediately takes it as his signal to go. Without another word he spurs his horse towards the open stable-yard gate. I run after him.

  “But what are you doing?” I shriek up at him. “Father! Where are you going?”

  “I’m only one man,” he says, as if that explains everything.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to proclaim Mary as queen, and then I will go and beg her pardon.”

  I am running beside his horse as he rides to the gateway, but I can’t keep up. I am falling behind. The gate is thrown open and I can see, outside, people dancing in the street and embracing each other, throwing coins in the air, people hanging out of the windows to shout the news down to those in the street, and all the time the terrible racket of the bells of hundreds of churches all clanging and clattering all over London at once.

  “Father, stop! Wait for me! What am I to do?”

  “I will save you,” he promises me, and then he spurs his horse on and canters through the open gate and gets through the crowd before anyone can recognize him as the father of the girl who was queen for less than two weeks.

  I stand like a fool looking after him. He will save me: that must comfort me. He has ridden out to save me. We have suffered a great reverse but my father has gone to make it right again. I must wait here and he will come back and tell me what I must do now. Whatever we were doing here—and now it seems to me like a dream when you wake and almost laugh, and take the nightmare to God in prayer for it was so strange and wild—whatever we were doing here, it is over. Or at any rate, I suppose it is over. Unless it is a temporary reverse and we will be restored.

  My father will save me as he has promised to do. John Dudley will have a plan. I had better get back to my rooms and make sure that no one else leaves. We don’t want to look disorderly. We don’t want to be Laodiceans, a people condemned for indifference as neither hot nor cold; we don’t want to shame Our Lord in the sight of His enemies. I had better look as if I am as sure of my father on earth as I am of my Father in heaven.

  I begin to think that it is as if they made me queen for a day like a Lord of Misrule, a fool in a paper crown, while I really thought that I was the true queen, and my tinsel scepter was heavy and my duties great. I begin to think that I have been capering. I am afraid that people have been laughing at me.

  I will die of embarrassment if this is the case, I can bear to be anything but ridiculous, and so I must stay in my rooms and order my ladies to stay with me, and Guildford’s court to stay with him. The cloth of estate was thrown down by my own father and I don’t tell anyone to put it up again. The throne is taken away without a word being spoken, the great seal of office is missing somewhere, the keys of the Tower are gone from the hook, and my rooms are empty.

  And now I find I was far too slow to keep my ladies with me. It is like the end of summer when one moment at Bradgate I notice that the swallows are circling the turrets faster and faster, and then suddenly there are none, and I don’t even know the day when they left. Just like the swallows, my ladies are vanished from my rooms. I did not know that they would go; I did not see them leave. Even my mother is missing, disappeared like a dark-backed swift. She went without telling me, taking Mary with her. I think worse of her than I do of Katherine, for at least that bruised reed came to me to say that she would have to leave. The only women left in the Tower are some lowly wives, the servants, the wife of the constable of the Tower who lives here, and my mother-in-law, Lady Dudley. Abandoned here, she looks ghastly, like a whale marooned on a cold beach, accidentally aground. She sits on her stool, her hands empty, no Bible to read, no shirts to sew, an idle woman with her plans in wreckage around her.

  “Have you heard from your husband?” I demand.

  “He has surrendered,” she chokes, her voice thick with grief. “At Cambridge. Surrendered to those who were proud to call him their lord only the day before.”

  I nod rapidly, as if this makes any sense to me, as if I am hearing her, but this is far beyond my understanding. I have never read anything to prepare me for a reverse like this. I don’t think there has ever been a reverse like this, not in any history that I have studied. A complete defeat without a battle? No defense at all? A great army mustered and marched out, but then turned around to go quietly away? It is more like a fairy tale than a history.

  “Well, I shall go home,” I decide. I sound determined, but secretly I am hoping she will order me to her house in London, or command me to wait here for my father to rescue me.

  She shakes her head. “You can’t. They’ve closed the gates on the Tower,” she says. “D’you think I would be here with you if I could leave? You were a queen; but now you are a prisoner. You bolted the gates to keep your people in; now they are bolted to keep you in. You will never see your home again. God grant that I do.”

  “I shall be the judge of that!” I snap; and I turn and go out of the room to Guildford’s great chamber.

  It is all but empty. I pause in the doorway as a wave of nausea overcomes me at the smell of old roast meats. A few men gather at the fireplace at the far end. A few servants collect goblets and some dirty plates. Guildford is alone, sitting on his great chair, the posts for his vainglorious cloth of estate leaning drunkenly to one side and another. He is like a jester playing at being a king, but with no court.

  “Everyone’s gone,” I tell him as he stands and bows to me.

  “Are we to go?” he asks. “Does my mother say we can go home now?”

  “She says they have bolted the gates to keep us in, and they have arrested your father.”

  He looks aghast. “I should have warned him,” he says. “I should have gone with him. If only I had ridden with him, at his side, as his son!”

  “You’re drunk,” I say viciously. “And you know nothing.”

  He nods, as if this is interesting information. “You’re right,” he tells me. “Right on both points. I am drunk. And I know nothing.” He gives a little giggle. “You can be very sure that half of London will be drunk tonight, and they will all know nothing. Especially, they will know nothing of us: us Dudleys.”

  Guildford remains drunk for days, in his new rooms in the Beauchamp Tower where he is confined, without his court, without his friends, with only two servants to pull him out of bed in the morning and push him back into it at night. He is not allowed beyond his rooms, so I suppose he is a prisoner until Lady Mary pardons us. His mother keeps a silent vigil in my rooms. She is very poor company.

  I study my books. Strangely, there is nothing for me to do. I am not allowed to leave the Tower, the gates are closed, but inside the high walls I can go where I like—across the green to the chapel, to the muniments rooms, to the gardens, to the stables. I like to walk on the ramparts between the towers overlooking the river in the evening. The cooler air settles my churning belly. I am still bleeding, I am still sick. Something is poisoning me. I don’t think I will be well till my father takes me back to Bradgate. I have started to dream that I am in my bedroom at home, overlooking the lake, but then I wake and hear the noise of the city and the flat light of the morning skies and realize that I am still far from my home.

  I hear a clatter from the Byward Tower gate and peer over the wall to see who is entering. They are prisoners, there is a guard around them, and there are half a dozen men. I can hear the jeers of the crowd outsid