Her Highness, the Traitor

13

Jane Dudley

December 1549





The council has agreed that you can see your husband on Christmas Day,” I told the Duchess of Somerset.

“Only for that one day? I had hoped for more.”

“It is the best I can do,” I snapped. “Really, as there are members of the council who would like to put him to death, I consider it a victory of sorts.”

Anne lowered her eyes. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I am sorry. I truly am grateful beyond words for what you have been able to do for us. It is just that I miss him so much, and I fret so about him. You cannot know what it is like, not knowing whether he will be alive a month from now.” She brushed a hand across her eyes, which did show the signs of many sleepless nights.

I patted her other hand. “The men who want his death are in the decided minority, I am told.”

The duchess bristled. “Why should anyone want my dear Edward’s death? He has done nothing, except to be too kind and forbearing to the peasants.” She rose from the chair in my chamber in which she had been sitting. “But I must go and make ready for my visit. There is so much to do. Do you think the guards will let me bring in my jam for him? And some new shirts and handkerchiefs?”

“I am sure of it. In fact,” I added archly, “you might want to get some new things for yourself, as well. You will want to look your best. The council has agreed that you may be alone with him when you visit.”

Anne let out a girlish squeal of pleasure. Then she kissed me lightly on the cheek and hurried away.

***

A few days later, John developed a fever, which confined him to his bed. After a miserable day, he was at last on the verge of resting for the night when a knock sounded on his chamber door and William Paulet, Lord St. John, was announced. “Tell him to come back at another time,” I said to our servant. “My lord is ill.”

“My lady, Lord St. John says it’s urgent.”

I sighed. All the commotion at our house that had taken place since Somerset’s removal had given me a certain appreciation for the man’s burden of office. I might have protested further, but John said sleepily, “Well, send him in, then,” and sat up. Quickly, I helped him adjust his nightcap to more statesmanlike effect.

“My lord—my lady—I apologize for coming at this bad time. But I did not think this could wait.” John nodded for him to keep talking, and Paulet continued, “Today I accompanied the Earl of Southampton and the Earl of Arundel to the Tower, to interrogate the Duke of Somerset, as you instructed. To several questions, he stated that he had acted by your advice and counsel.”

“No doubt he did, in some instances,” John said wearily. He coughed.

“After we left the duke, my lord, the Earl of Southampton said that you and he should both be found traitors, and that you were both worthy to die.”

I rose. “My lord!”

“Go on,” John said.

“The Earl of Arundel agreed. They talked a little more and decided that on the day the Duke of Somerset was executed, you would be arrested and put in his chambers at the Tower. Then you would soon be tried yourself, and, undoubtedly, executed.”

“Undoubtedly,” agreed John. “Is there more?”

“They talked of having the lady Mary made regent, my lord, but I didn’t get the sense that they had approached her. The long and short of it, they want Somerset dead, and you with them.”

“That information was worth disturbing my sickbed for,” said John calmly. He squeezed my trembling hand and smiled at Paulet. “I shall keep it in mind. But for now, my lord, I must get some sleep, or the Earl of Southampton won’t have to take the trouble of plotting against me.”

***

John slept that night; I didn’t. It was the Earl of Southampton—Thomas Wriothesley—who had interrogated Anne Askew, even turning the rack himself, it was said, when she was not forthcoming with the information Wriothesley sought. What he had sought was information that would link Catherine Parr herself, and some of her ladies as well, to what had then been regarded as heretical practices. I had been one of those women who stood in danger, for I had possessed books, passed around among us ladies-in-waiting and read aloud in the queen’s chambers, that were illegal then. Anne Askew’s brave silence in the face of torture had surely saved some of the rest of us from the flames.

Unable to get Anne Askew to implicate anyone, those who wished to see a return to the old religion had tried another tack—turning King Henry against the queen herself, even to the point of procuring an order for her arrest. It had failed miserably when the queen, advised of her enemies’ schemes, had groveled so humbly, and so cleverly, before the king, he had turned on the ones who had sought to destroy her. It would have been almost comical to see the king throwing the arrest warrant in Wriothesley’s own face, had we not been aware of how close Catherine might have come to sharing the fate of her predecessor: poor Katherine Howard.

And now Wriothesley had my husband in his sights. “Why would they want to execute you and the duke?” I demanded the next morning as soon as John awoke.

John shrugged and obediently swallowed the physic he had been given. “Terrible stuff. Simple, my dear. Wriothesley has held a grudge against Somerset since being deprived of his office as Lord Chancellor after the old king died. I stood with Somerset at that time, so he bears a grudge against me, as well. As for Arundel, he’s probably hoping for a restoration of the old religion—hence the lady Mary.”

“John, what shall you do?”

“Enjoy the Christmas festivities as much as I can in my state of health.”

“I don’t—”

“Wriothesley’s a fool. If he could only count, he’d know that there aren’t enough men of his stamp on the council to send Somerset to the block, or me either. I shall beat him at his own game, never you fear.” John looked at me straight on, and for the first time I saw real anger in his eyes. “And speaking of fear, I have never forgotten the fright he gave Queen Catherine, or you and the rest of her ladies. When I take him down, I promise you, you shall be there to see it.”

***

The Duke and Duchess of Somerset had their Christmas visit, and afterward went to hear a sermon at the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula—sitting on the same pew, the guards later told us, without so much as an inch between them, and gazing into each other’s eyes more than into their respective prayer books. The next day, Somerset’s children by Anne—he had eight living at the time, all of them under the age of twelve—paid their father a noisy visit. Uxorious as the duke was, he was rather less at ease among the brood of offspring that had resulted from his marriage, and I suspected he might have found his Tower lodgings peaceful after the last of them straggled out of the fortress’s walls.

Then, as December was about to fade into January, the council met once more in a conference chamber at our house, where John, wrapped from head to toe in furs against the sharp cold, croaked his way through the proceedings as I, at his bidding, brought physic in from time to time and plumped the pillows at his back. The meeting had been droning on for some time, the pillows were no longer plump but downright fat, and I was beginning to run out of excuses to stay in the room, when Wriothesley said, “My lords, now that the New Year is almost upon us, we must decide what to do about the traitor.”

“Traitor?” asked Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset. A newcomer to the council, he had contributed little to it thus far, but did occasionally make remarks like this to remind the rest of the council he was still breathing.

“I refer, of course, to the Duke of Somerset.”

“He’s an incompetent,” said William Parr. A flush passed over his handsome features as he remembered his own ignominious performance at Norwich before John had been appointed to clean up the situation. “But not a traitor,” he continued lamely. “And I say this as a man whose own marriage he tried to invalidate.”

“He is a traitor,” said the Earl of Arundel. “What else would you call a man who all but handed the government over to the rabble?”

“Look at these,” said Southampton. He waved a sheath of papers: the charges to which the duke had agreed to plead guilty. Everyone in the council room looked up obediently, as did I from placing a warm brick against John’s feet. “Are these not the admissions of a traitor?”

“There is no treason in any of the charges against Somerset,” said John. “Only folly and mismanagement.”

“The man has acted traitorously; he must suffer the fate of traitors. It is time we started proceedings to attaint him, and to sentence him to death.”

“You seek his blood, my lord?”

“Haven’t I made it clear enough? I do.”

“Do you seek mine also?”

“I—”

John rose and placed the hand on the sword that was propped up against his chair. “Know this, my lord: I am well aware that he who seeks his blood seeks mine, as well. You shall have neither, I tell you.”

He had never raised his voice. No one else in the room spoke. Then Southampton rose from his seat, his chair scraping the floor as he moved it backward the only sound in the room. Without a word, he left the room. Another chair scraped backward, and the Earl of Arundel followed.

No one else stirred from his seat. After a moment or two, John sat back down. “Shall we turn to the next order of business, gentlemen?”

***

That night, I saw John off to bed as I always did when he was ill, not trusting his comfort to our servants, devoted and competent as they were. Having seen that everything in his chambers was to my satisfaction, I kissed him good night and walked to my own chambers, where my ladies helped me to undress. (It amused me sometimes to remember there was a time not so long ago when I’d done that and almost everything else for myself.) It was an ordinary night, and yet as my ladies brushed out my long, heavy dark hair and braided it for bed, I sensed what had happened in that council meeting had changed our lives forever.

My husband, John Dudley, son of a man who had died upon the scaffold, held the rule of England in his hands.