Her Highness, the Traitor

41

Jane Dudley

January 1554 to February 12, 1554





I was at Whitehall, making my usual futile effort to see the queen, when someone hurried in and whispered something to the guard. “You’ll have to go home,” the guard said then, addressing all of us petitioners. “The queen can’t see you today.”

By this time, I had become friendly with most of the palace guards. “What is going on?” I asked when the other supplicants had stomped or shuffled away, depending upon their humor.

“Treason, my lady. On the part of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Don’t know exactly who else is involved, but they say the Duke of Suffolk is up to his knees in it.”

“Suffolk? Surely to God he is not trying to put his daughter on the throne again?”

“No, my lady. This is to stop the Spanish match, I hear. But you’d best get home. Wyatt’s approaching London, they say. This could turn nasty.”

I thanked him and hurried toward the landing. I no longer had my own barge, but my months of going back and forth to court had won me the acquaintance of many of the men who carried passengers on the Thames. One of those boatmen, seeing me, put in where I stood waiting. “Yes, Your Grace, there’s trouble about,” he said cheerfully as my page helped me into the boat and Maudlyn Flower helped to arrange my voluminous skirts in the little skiff. “This man called Wyatt raised a force in Kent, and the old Duke of Norfolk was sent out to stop him.”

“Norfolk? But he’s at least eighty!”

“Yes, and he fought as if he was ninety. Well, you can’t blame the man, I guess, shut up in the Tower as long as he had been. But it wasn’t his finest moment, that’s for certain. Got to Rochester with five hundred Londoners in white coats, and what do you think happened?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Deserted, most of them! Their own captain stood up and made a grand speech about how the Spanish would ravish their wives and deflower their daughters if the queen was allowed to marry Prince Philip. Sent the white coats right over to Wyatt, and sent the duke back to London with his tail tied in a knot. So now it looks like Wyatt will be paying a visit to London. There’s trouble elsewhere, I hear, but I can’t tell you much about it, Your Grace.”

“And the Duke of Suffolk is involved?”

“So they say. He’s clean left his place at Sheen. Something’s up, I reckon.”

“I thank the Lord my sons are shut up out of harm’s way,” I said grimly. “Or else suspicion could fall on them. Do these people really believe the Spaniards are going to snatch their daughters from their beds if the queen marries abroad?”

“This is what you get when a woman rules,” said the boatman philosophically. “Trouble.” He grinned as I glared at him. “No offense meant, Your Grace.”

“Mind your boat,” I snapped.

***

Back at Chelsea, I stocked up with supplies and ordered the gates shut—not that my house was fortified by any means. The news we got over the next few days was wildly contradictory. One hour, Wyatt and his men were vanquished in the field; the next, the country had plunged into civil war, like that between the houses of Lancaster and York of the previous century. Mary had been taken to the Tower; then the lady Elizabeth had been taken to the Tower. Someone even claimed Edward VI was being held there, and by the time the story came down the river to Chelsea, an octogenarian Edward V had been spotted in the Tower, as well, having been patiently waiting all of these years for an opportune time to reclaim the throne for the white rose of York.

Some truth, however, did leak through, and it was certain that on February 3, Wyatt’s men arrived in Southwark, where they found London’s great bridge tightly secured against them. For three days, Wyatt’s troops remained in Southwark, enjoying the hospitality of the residents there and behaving as decorously as a convent of elderly nuns on pilgrimage. Meanwhile, inside the walls of London, life went on in an eerily normal manner; the lawyers were even arguing in the courts at Westminster, albeit with armor under their robes.

At last, Wyatt, growing tired of this inaction, abandoned his post. He took his men to Kingston, where they managed to cross the river. By dawn on February 7, they were at Knightsbridge, not far from my house at Chelsea. I stood on the walk on one of my house’s turrets and watched them marching toward the city. Would this be the end of Mary’s reign?

For those inside the city, it must have seemed for a while as if it was. As Wyatt’s troops, exhausted from their all-night march and hungry, passed down Fleet Street, citizens in full harness stood immobile by their doors, letting them pass. At Charing Cross, Sir John Gage’s forces, a thousand strong, panicked when Wyatt’s men shot at them. Inside Whitehall, Mary’s ladies screamed and wailed, while Mary herself calmly prayed. Only Lord Clinton, John’s old friend, distinguished himself by making a cavalry attack on Wyatt’s main forces.

At Ludgate, Wyatt and his depleted army found the gates shut against them and retreated to Temple Bar. There, the queen’s forces at last brought him to surrender.

Suffolk, meanwhile, had been captured without ever being brought to battle. The other leaders were in captivity or had fled abroad. Mary was safe on her throne.

***

Even from a distance at Chelsea, I had anxiously kept up with the events in London, so after a few nights of barely closing my eyes, I slept later than usual on Thursday, February 8. I was breaking my fast, somewhat sleepily, when Lord Paget was announced. I rose as he entered, his dark eyes looking more like those of a sad dog than ever. “My lord?”

“My lady, I wish with all my heart I did not have to tell you this. You will recall that Lord Guildford lies under sentence of death.”

I felt myself begin to shake. “I recall,” I managed.

“Because of this rebellion, the queen has determined to carry out the sentences against him and the lady Jane. She has commuted their sentences to beheading.”

I opened my mouth. No words came out.

Lord Paget went on quietly, “I have asked the queen to spare them, as all know that they had nothing to do with the rebellion, and indeed had nothing to gain from it. But more powerful voices have prevailed.”

“But why? Surely she understands that they are innocent!”

“She does. I have told her this, and so have others. But there is the fear that others may rise in their names.”

“They are innocent.” These seemed to be the only words I could manage.

“I will ask her again to spare them, but I am in a minority. There have always been many on the council who believed that their lives should have been taken at the same time the Duke of Northumberland’s was, and this has given them a justification they lacked before. I can plead with the queen for mercy, but I can offer you no hope.”

“No. There is no hope whatsoever in this world.” I fingered my wedding ring. “My other sons? Does the queen feel the need to exterminate them, also?”

“No, my lady.”

Not yet. I managed to say, “Thank you, my lord, for telling me about this. I hope you did not put yourself at risk by doing so.”

“No. If there is anything I can do for you, please let me know. I shall pray for you.”

“You can if you wish. But I truly think that God has deserted me, so I will not ask you to waste your time.”

Paget put his hand on my shoulder as I stared stonily ahead. “I will anyway,” he said quietly.

***

The executions had been scheduled for the next day, February 9, but they were postponed three days while the queen tried to get the lady Jane to convert to Catholicism. It was just like the girl, I thought sourly, to prolong everyone else’s agony.

While the queen was working on Jane’s soul, I occupied myself as best I could. I still had Guildford’s belongings, save for those possessions that had been sent to the Tower for him. No one had deemed them incriminating enough, or valuable enough, to take away. Over the next several days, I sorted through them again and again, as if they would somehow furnish a clue as to why a young man with no claim to the throne had to die for someone else’s conspiracy.

I managed to go through the motions of life. I even composed a letter to the queen, begging for my son’s life. Unlike the letter I’d written begging for John’s, it was calm and coherent; I was vaguely proud of my effort when I looked at it afterward. But it produced no effect whatsoever. On February 12, as scheduled, my son, just a couple of weeks short of his seventeenth birthday, went to the block. I had not been allowed to visit him in the Tower. If I wanted to see him again in this life, I would have to go to Tower Hill to see him die, and so I did.

My ladies and servants begged me not to attend the execution, but I proved as stubborn as Jane had been on the question of religion. So on a freezing morning, I came early to Tower Hill so I could be as close to my son as possible. Jane was to be executed in the privacy of Tower Green as an acknowledgment of her royal blood and, I thought, as a precaution against the possibility of a volatile crowd taking exception to the death of a woman barely past girlhood.

“It’s still not too late,” Maudlyn Flower urged as the beat of drums shortly before ten in the morning signaled that Guildford was on his way. “Please, Your Grace, let us go home. Your health has been poor lately,” she added as a gust of wind made me shiver.

“No.” And then I saw my boy, being led to the scaffold by Thomas Offley, the sheriff of London. Some men, angry at the queen’s decision to execute him and anxious to show him sympathy, had been waiting to greet him as he was led out of the Beauchamp Tower, and they still trailed behind him, though he was surrounded by guards. He had no priest with him, and I felt a pang of satisfaction that he had denied the queen this concession. His expression was somber but not fearful, and he had his chin slightly up. Like a Dudley, I thought.

Guildford was dressed well, as I’d expected, in black velvet. Probably he had discussed what to wear with his brothers, who had all been moved to the Beauchamp Tower to accommodate the press of prisoners from Wyatt’s rebellion. I pictured them in their crowded prison quarters, laying out one gown, then another, my Robert snorting, “I wouldn’t be seen dead in that! Pick another.”

Taking leave of his well-wishers, Guildford mounted the scaffold steps quickly and nimbly, like the young man he was, leaving his guards behind. I caught myself wondering how Jane would mount her own scaffold. Would she shake out her skirts in the fastidious little manner of hers that had so annoyed me?

But it was not the time for thinking unkind thoughts.

“Why, he’s little more than a lad,” said a woman standing near me to her companion. A few minutes before, she had been happily munching on a hazelnut. She lowered her voice. “They’ll be executing babies next, for God’s sake.”

“He’s a young ’un, all right. His poor mother will be heartbroken.”

He is, and she will be, I thought. But I kept staring at the scaffold.

Guildford walked to the rail of the scaffold, just as his father and Somerset and countless others had done before him. He cleared his throat once, then twice; he had never liked it when his tutors forced him to make speeches. I found myself nodding at him encouragingly, willing the words to come out of his mouth as if he were in his chamber with his tutor instead of standing atop Tower Hill.

“Good Christian people, I am come hither to die, according to law,” he finally said, and I hoped he had not decided to appropriate Anne Boleyn’s execution speech for himself. But he continued in a voice that was louder and clearer than it had been at the outset. “I took no part in this recent unrest, but I am guilty of wishing to wear the crown matrimonial on my head, and for that arrogance and presumption I deserve to die. I thank the queen, who is good and gracious, for allowing me a nobleman’s death, instead of the traitor’s death to which I was sentenced. Oh, and I should say I was justly condemned by the law, and I bear malice to no one, and if I have offended anyone, I hope he will forgive me.” Guildford paused and stared at the crowd, plainly considering what to speak of next. “I guess that’s all I have to say,” he said after a moment and knelt quickly to say his prayers. They took considerably longer than his speech. Guildford prayed so earnestly and with so little self-consciousness, holding his eyes and hands up to his Maker again and again, I felt my own faith returning, if just barely.

My son rose, took off his gown and doublet, and neatly turned down his shirt collar. The black embroidery on it was my own handiwork. Then Guildford forgave his kneeling executioner—the lame one who had beheaded John—and considered the blindfold that was offered to him. He shook his head, refusing it, and laid himself on the block. The executioner slowly raised his axe.

“Spare him!” I pushed forward. A man was blocking my path to the scaffold, and I began to beat on his back. “For pity’s sake, don’t take my boy! He is innocent. He has done noth—”

The axe fell, and I crumpled to the ground.