Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2: The Queen’s Fool, The Virgin’s Lover, The Other Queen. Philippa Gregory
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my voice will shake when I have to speak.
‘And yet I despise men who are weak. When I look at my cousin Edward Courtenay that the Lord Chancellor would have me marry, I could laugh out loud at the thought of it. The boy is a puppy and a vain fool and I could never, never debase myself to lie under such a one as him.
‘But if one married a man who was accustomed to command …’ She paused. ‘What a terror it would be,’ she said quietly. ‘To put your heart in the keeping of a stranger! What a terror to promise to obey a man who might order you to do anything! And to promise to love a man till death …’ She broke off. ‘After all, men do not always consider themselves bound by such promises. And what happens then to a good wife?’
‘Did you think you would live and die a virgin?’ I asked.
She nodded. ‘When I was a princess I was betrothed over and over again. But when my father denied me and called me his bastard, I knew that there would be no offers of marriage. I set away all thoughts of it then, and all thoughts of my own children too.’
‘Your father denied you?’
‘Yes,’ the queen said shortly. ‘They made me swear on the Bible to my own bastardy.’ Her voice shook, she drew a breath. ‘No prince in Europe would have married me after that. To tell you the truth, I was so ashamed I would not have wanted a husband. I could not have looked an honourable man in the face. And when my father died and my brother became king, I thought I could be like a dowager, like a favourite old godmother, his older sister who might advise him, and I thought he would have children that I might care for. But now everything has changed and I am queen, and even though I am queen I find I still cannot make my own choices.’ She paused. ‘They have offered me Philip of Spain, you know.’
I waited.
She turned to me as if I had more sense than her greyhound, as if I could advise her. ‘Hannah, I am less than a man and less than a woman. I cannot rule as a man, and I cannot give the country the heir that it has a right to desire. I am a half-prince. Neither queen nor king.’
‘Surely, the country only needs a ruler it can respect,’ I said tentatively. ‘And it needs years of peace. I am new-come to this land but even I can see that men don’t know what is right and wrong any more. The church has changed and changed again within their lifetimes and they have had to change and change with it. And there is much poverty in the city, and hunger in the country. Can’t you just wait? Can’t you just feed the poor and restore the lands to the landless, set men back to work and get the beggars and the thieves off the roads? Bring back the beauty to the church and give the monasteries back their lands?’
‘And when I have done that?’ Queen Mary asked, a strange shaking intensity in her voice. ‘What then? When the country is safe inside the church again, when everyone is well fed, when the barns are full and the monasteries and nunneries are prosperous? When the priests are pure in their living and the Bible is read to the people as it should be? When the Mass is celebrated in every village, and the matins bells ring out over all the fields every morning as they should do, as they always have done? What then?’
‘Then you will have done the task that God called you to, won’t you? …’ I stammered.
She shook her head. ‘I will tell you, what then. Then illness or accident befalls me and I die childless. And the bastard of Anne Boleyn and the lute player Mark Smeaton steps up to claim the throne: Elizabeth. And the moment she is on the throne she throws off her mask and shows herself for what she is.’
I could hardly recognise the hiss of her voice, the hatred in her face. ‘Why, what is she? What has she done to upset you so?’
‘She has betrayed me,’ she said flatly. ‘When I was fighting for our inheritance, hers as well as mine, she was writing to the man who was marching against me. I know that now. While I was fighting for her as well as for myself she was making an agreement with him for when I was dead. She would have signed it on my execution block.
‘When I took her into London at my side they cheered the Protestant princess, and she smiled at the cheers. When I sent her teachers and scholars to explain to her the errors of her faith she smiled at them, her mother’s sly smile, and told them that now she understood, now she would receive the blessing of Mass.
‘And then she comes to Mass like a woman forced against her conscience. Hannah! When I was no older than her I had the greatest men of England curse me to my face and threaten me with death if I did not conform to the new religion. They took my mother from me and she died ill and heartbroken and alone, but she never bowed the knee to them. They threatened me with the scaffold for treason! They threatened me with fire for heresy! They were burning men and women for less than I was saying. I had to cling to my faith with all my courage and I did not renounce it until the Emperor of Spain himself told me that I should do so, that I must renounce it, because to keep it was my death sentence. He knew they would kill me if I did not renounce my faith. But all I have done to Elizabeth is to beg her to save her own soul and be my little sister once more!’
‘Your Grace …’ I whispered. ‘She’s only young, she will learn.’
‘She’s not that young.’
‘She will learn …’
‘If she is going to learn then she chooses the wrong tutors. She conspires with the kingdom of France against me, she has a band of men who would stop at nothing to see her inherit. Every day someone tells me of another foul plot, and always, the tendrils come back to her. Every time I look at her now, I see a woman steeped in sin, just like her mother, the poisoner. I can almost see her flesh going black from the sin from her heart. I see her turning her back on the Holy Church, I see her turning her back on my love, I see her rushing towards treason and sin.’
‘You said she was your little sister,’ I reminded her. ‘You said you loved her as if she was your own child.’
‘I did love her,’ the queen said bitterly. ‘More than she remembers. More than I should have done, knowing what her mother did to mine. I did love her. But she is not the child that I loved any more. She is not the little girl that I taught to write and read. She has gone wrong. She has been corrupted. She is steeped in sin. I cannot save her; she is a witch and the daughter of a witch.’
‘She’s a young woman,’ I protested quietly. ‘Not a witch.’
‘Worse than a witch,’ she accused. ‘A heretic. A hypocrite. A whore. I know her for all these. A heretic because she takes the Mass; but I know her to be a Protestant, and she is forsworn with her eyes on the Host. A hypocrite because she does not even own to her faith. There are brave men and women in this land who would go to the stake for their error; but she is not one of them. When my brother Edward was on the throne she was then a shining light of the reformed religion. She was the Protestant princess in her dark gowns and her white ruffs and her eyes turned down and no gold or jewels in her ears or on her fingers. Now he is dead she kneels beside me to see the raising of the Host, and crosses herself, and curtsies to the altar, but I know it is all false. It is an insult to me, which is nothing; but it is an insult to my mother who was pushed aside for her mother, and it is an insult to the Holy Church, which is a sin against God himself.
‘And, God forgive her, she is a whore because of what she did with Thomas Seymour. The whole world would know it; but that other great Protestant whore hid the two of them, and died in hiding it.’
‘Who?’ I asked. I was appalled and fascinated, all at once, remembering the girl in the sunlit garden and the man who held her against a tree and put his hand up her skirt.
‘Katherine Parr,’ Queen Mary said through her teeth. ‘She knew that her husband Thomas Seymour had been seduced by Elizabeth. She caught them at it in Elizabeth’s chamber, Elizabeth in her shift, Lord Thomas all over her. Katherine Parr bundled Elizabeth off to the country, out of the way. She faced down the gossip, she denied everything. She protected the girl – well, she had to, the child was in her house. She protected her husband, and then she died giving birth to his child. Fool. Foolish woman.’
She shook