I knew Archbishop Parker when he was all but chaplain to Jane’s father-in-law, John Dudley. He and other reformers met constantly to discuss the theology of the reformed Church of England, and Jane was in correspondence with their religious advisors. I daresay he never noticed me, I was so much the unimportant younger sister, but I remember him at Jane’s court when she was proclaimed queen, and I remember him fading away as fast as the others, sliding from the Protestant queen to the papist—despite all his promises. Then I didn’t think much of him as an advisor to a saint, and I don’t think much of him as an archbishop now.
He has the impertinence to keep me waiting in his privy chamber, and when he comes in, there is a dark-faced clerk with him, who sits down at a table without asking my permission, dips his nib in a pot of ink, and waits to write down everything that I am to say. If I had failed to observe that they sent a discreet barge to fetch me, which flew no standard, if I had overlooked the chilly anteroom, and the cool greeting from my sister’s onetime friend and coreligionist, I would know, from the poised nib of his clerk, that this is not a conversation between a spiritual advisor and a young woman who has had the misfortune to displease a bad-tempered queen. This is an interrogation, and he has been told exactly what to report. His difficulty—though he doesn’t know it yet—is that I am never going to deny my honorable marriage, forswear the man I love, or condemn my child the viscount to a new title of Ned Seymour’s by-blow.
Archbishop Parker looks at me gravely. “You had better tell me all about this pretended marriage,” he says kindly. “You had better confess to me, child.”
I take a breath to speak and I see the leap of hope in his face. If he can go back to Elizabeth and tell her that I have confessed to him that I am unmarried, that I was never married, then she will be pleased with him and continue to ignore the half-hidden presence of his own loyal wife, though she hates the idea of a married clergy. If he can tell her that I have a little ailing bastard in the Tower, then she need not feel rushed into marriage and childbed herself. If he can assure her that the reform cause has no son and heir, then she can promise Mary Queen of Scots that the inheritance of England is still unsettled, and dangle before that young woman the prospect of peace and inheritance.
“I will confess to you,” I say sweetly, and see the clerk dip the nib of his quill pen and wait, hardly breathing. “Though I believe, my lord, that you and my sister Jane agreed that a troubled soul should confess directly to God?” I give him a moment to note that; and then I continue: “However that might be, I confess that I loved a young man of noble birth and that both his mother and mine knew that we were in love and intended to marry. They were going to ask the queen for her permission when my mother died. I confess that we were betrothed before a witness, and then married before a witness, and by a minister, but without the permission of the queen. I confess that we laid together in the married bed and he used me as a wife. I confess that we have a handsome boy baby who is as copper-headed and willful as any Tudor. I confess that I cannot understand why I am imprisoned nor why you invite me to confess to you.”
It’s a robust start to a questioning that goes on all day, and the clerk scribbles page after page as the archbishop takes me through everything I have answered before. Clearly, there is nothing illegal about what we did. Their only hope is that I break down and lie for my freedom. After a day of questioning it is the archbishop who is drawn and pale, and I am flushed and furious. He demands that I lie on oath, and I refuse. More than this, I despise him for trying to force me, a young woman newly risen from childbed, to name my son as a bastard and my husband as a blackguard.
“We will stop for the day. I must go to pray, and you—madam—should consider your obstinacy,” the archbishop says weakly.
I give him a little nod of the head, as if I am dismissing him, and I turn for the door. “Yes, do pray,” I recommend to him.
“I will see you again the day after tomorrow, and I hope then you will give me a true account,” the archbishop says.
I pause at the door as my guard holds it open for me, and he can hear what I say and repeat it all over London if he wishes. “I have told you the truth today,” I say clearly. “I will tell you the same tomorrow or whenever you ask me. I was married in honor, and my son is Viscount Beauchamp.”
THE TOWER, LONDON,
WINTER 1562
By pressing my cheek to the cold glass and colder lead of the window in the lieutenant’s house, I can see the steps leading down from the green to the watergate, and I wait here, with my cheek getting more and more chilled, from dawn till sunrise, when I see the guard come from our front door to take Ned to the barge.
My love, the only man I will ever love, is between four guards, two leading the way, two following behind as if they think he would escape and leave me and his baby imprisoned. I guessed that they would take him to Archbishop Parker today, the very day after my testimony, and I turn from the window when he has gone, and I go to my Bible and lay my frozen face on it and pray that he is true to me.
Of course he could be true and still make some mistake that allows the archbishop to find against us. If Ned has forgotten the minister’s furred robe or his foreign accent, then his account will not tally with mine. If he thinks to protect my reputation by denying that we were lovers before our marriage, then they will seize on his lie. If we differ on any point, then they will try to make out that the marriage was false and our story concocted to save face.
I can’t help but fear this. It is such a long time ago! A year ago, and we snatched at the time together and were so rushed. I have lost the papers, and Ned never knew the name of the minister. We have lost Janey, who was our only witness and only friend. It is so likely that Ned will forget something—he has been to France and Burgundy and Italy since last year, and then suffered the shock of being summoned home. But I have his two rings, and I have his poem by heart. No one could truly think that this was all invented. But no one really cares for the truth. All they want to do is to make my son a bastard so that Ned and I and Teddy can be bundled out of sight and shamed and forgotten.
They keep Ned all day. It is fully dark by the time they bring him back, and then they don’t return him to the lieutenant’s house. I am waiting for him to turn in at the gate, and I have a candle at my window and I am going to wave to him. But I cannot see him at all at first, only the bobbing flames of the torches of his guards as they lead the way from the dark archway towards the high White Tower, where it stands, bleak against the night sky. But he halts as he comes out from the archway, and puts back his hood and looks directly up to my window. I hold my candle out of the window so he can see the tiny light guttering in the wind and know that it shines for him, that I am true to him as I trust that he is true to me.
They speak to him to make him go on, and he raises his hand to me and goes past the lieutenant’s house, past my doorway, and across the green to the looming tower. Up the steps he goes to the entrance doorway, and it opens as he comes near and bangs shut behind him, and I know that he has said something, or they have made something up that allows them to keep him in the royal prisons, confined in a cell. He’s not in the lieutenant’s house anymore, like an honored lord confined under house arrest. Now he is in the Tower where they keep the traitors, and torture them, too.
For four days we go back and forth to the archbishop and each time that he has seen Ned he asks me about another detail: some of them are real, some of them fabricated, I am sure, and some I simply cannot remember or never knew. I feel more and more troubled and my early defiance melts into fear. I beg him to understand that we were married, that we undertook a marriage in good faith before God. I beg him to understand that if I cite God as my witness, I cannot lie. I am sister to Jane Grey—am I likely to take the Word of God in vain? I hear my voice change from scorn to pleading. The archbishop looks less and less anxious, and more and more like a man who is getting the answers he wants. The clerk scribbles faster and faster. I dare not think what is going to happen next.
THE TOWER, LONDON,
SUMMER 1562