Princess Mary does not stay for long. Her brother’s palace is not a happy court. My cousin King Edward has a cough that he cannot clear. I can hear it rattle when I sit beside him and read to him from Plato—a philosopher that we both love—but he gets weary quickly and has to rest. I see my father’s hidden smile as he observes that I have been reading Greek to the King of England, but everyone else is only worried that he looks so ill.
Edward manages to attend the opening of parliament but then he takes to his bed. The councillors and the lawyers go in and out of his bedroom and the rumor is that he is planning the succession and writing his will. I find this hard to believe. He is only fifteen—we are the same age—I cannot believe that he is making a will. He is too young to prepare to die. Surely, the summer will come and he will go on progress and in the warm weather he will lose his cough and be well again? I think if he would just come to Bradgate and sit in the gardens and walk by the river and take a boat out on our wide, beautiful lakes, he would be certain to get well again. His will can be stored with all the great papers of the council and forgotten about. He will marry and have a son and all the calculations of which heir might attract whose support will be forgotten. He will marry a great princess from Europe with a mighty fortune, and I will become her friend and a great lady at court, probably a duchess. I might marry Ned Seymour despite his father’s disgrace. He might regain the title; I might still be a famously learned duchess and a light before the unworthy.
GREENWICH PALACE,
SPRING 1553
The court travels to Greenwich, everyone’s favorite palace, downriver from the noise and smells of London, its golden quayside washed by the tide twice a day, shining like a heavenly shore. It would be a mirror of the kingdom of heaven, except for the almost total absence of the godly. Father and I are rowed with the king in the royal barge, but Edward lies back on the cushions, wrapped in furs as if he is shivering, and when the guns roar from the Tower and the ships at anchor fire their cannon, he flinches at the noise and turns his pale face away.
“He will get better, won’t he?” I ask my father quietly. “He looks terribly ill; but he will get better in summer?”
He shakes his head, his face dark. “He has made a will,” he says. I can hear the excitement tremble in his voice. “He has chosen his heir.”
“Doesn’t the throne have to go to the eldest kin?”
“Of course. It should be Princess Mary. But how can she be queen when she has sworn obedience to the Bishop of Rome? How can she be queen when she is certain to marry a papist foreigner and set him over us? No, the king has done the right thing; he has obeyed God’s will and excluded her from the succession—just as his father did.”
“Can the king name his heir?” I question. “Is it even the law?”
“If the throne is his property, then of course he can name his heir,” my father says. His voice is quiet so that the boy shivering in the furs cannot hear, but there is an edge to his tone that shows that he will not tolerate contradiction. These are arguments that are being carefully rehearsed in every corner of the court. “The crown is property: just as we all own property. A man must be free to dispose of his property, every man can choose his heir; Henry VIII chose his heirs. And—most importantly—a young man like Edward, raised in the reformed religion, with never a papist thought in his head, is not going to leave his throne to a servant of Rome. He would not tolerate it—and John Dudley will make sure that he does not.”
“Then who?” I ask, thinking that I probably know the answer to this.
“The king—and his advisors—would prefer the nearest in line, of the reformed religion, someone who is likely to have a son to take the throne.”
“There has to be a Tudor boy?”
My father nods. It is like a curse that has been laid on this family. The Tudors have to have sons to take the throne, and they are extraordinarily hard to come by. From King Henry’s six wives he got only one son: Edward. His older sister, Margaret, had only one son, James, who had a girl: Queen Mary of Scotland, who lives in France and is betrothed to the dauphin. Margaret’s daughter was from a Scots lord and is both papist and probably illegitimate; Cousin Margaret Douglas, so her son, Henry Stuart, hardly counts. King Henry’s favorite sister, Queen Mary, was my grandmother, and the king named her line to inherit; and her daughter, my mother, is still alive. Mother has just us three girls, and surely will never have another baby. Princess Elizabeth has no betrothal planned for her—who would take a royal bastard with uncertain parentage and so little dowry? Princess Mary has been promised and denied to almost every king in Europe. Clearly, not only is there no Tudor boy among all of us, there’s no prospect of one.
“But none of us is with child,” I say, thinking of all us royal cousins. “If they want the throne to go to a Tudor boy, there is none. None of us five heirs is even betrothed. None of us is married.”
“And that’s why you’re going to be,” he says briskly.
“Married?”
“At once.”
“I am?”
“All of you.”
“The Princess Mary, and Elizabeth?”
“Not them. You and Katherine and Mary.”
GREENWICH PALACE,
SPRING 1553
Katherine is no help at all in defending us against this sudden plan. My lady mother commands her to come to court on a flying visit, and Katherine is thrilled by the rooms and the servants, the foods and her gowns. She dresses Mr. Nozzle in a coat of Tudor green and buys a pure white kitten with her ribbon allowance. She calls him “Ribbon,” of course, and takes him everywhere in the pocket of her cape. Her only regret is that she has been taken away from the horses at Bradgate, and the bear. She was hoping to tame the bear with kindness so that he could be a dancing bear instead of a killing one. She is not horrified, as a virgin maid should be, at the sudden prospect of wedlock; she is completely delighted.
“I’m to be married? Oh, God be praised! Thank God! At last! To who? To who?”
“Whom,” I say coldly.
“Oh, who cares? Whom should care? Whom am I marrying? Tell me!”
“Henry Lord Herbert,” I say shortly. “The Earl of Pembroke’s son.”
She blushes red as a rose. “Oh! So handsome!” she breathes. “And he’s young, our age, not some old heap of bones.” She has a pretty small bird clinging to her finger, and she lifts it to her face and kisses its beak. “I am to be married!” she tells it. “And to a handsome young lord!” The bird cheeps as if it understands her, and she puts it on her shoulder where it spreads its tail for balance and puts its head on one side to look at me, as bright-eyed as my sister.
“Yes,” I say levelly. “He’s perfectly pleasing.”
“And he’s godly,” she says to cheer me. “He’s Kateryn Parr’s nephew. Surely, you must like him.”
“Actually, I do.”
“How happy we shall be!” She gives a little twirl on the spot as if her feet have to dance for joy. The little bird flaps and clings on. “And I shall be a countess!”
“Yes,” I say dryly. “And his father will be locked down hard into an alliance with our father and with John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland.”
She doesn’t think about this, the three most powerful men in the country, the three leaders of the reformed faith, coming together and marrying their children to each other to provide against betrayal. Trusting each other so little, so faithless in their shared faith that they barter their children to confirm their agreement, like Abraham taking Isaac up the mountain with wood and a knife to burn him for God.
“Oh, but who are you to marry?” She pauses in her self-absorbed jig. “Who do they have for you? Are they staying with Seymour?” She gasps. “Oh! Not the king? Tell me! Tell me you’re not going to marry the king and be Queen Jane?”
I shake my head, glancing towards the door. “Hush. This is all because the king is so ill. Their greatest hope is that they can show him that one of us has a son, so that he can make that boy his heir. They want us both to marry at once, get with child, and show him the boy as his heir.”
“I could be the mother of the King of England?” she yelps. “Me? Not you? If I get a boy before you do?”
“Perhaps.”