“The young king reigned only a few years,” Audrey said. “Upon his death, the country was very nearly plunged into civil war. That was averted, but more plots against the new queen, Mary, were quick to surface.”

“I remember,” Hester said. “I was old enough by then to know something of what was happening. You and father were both taken away. Did Father conspire against Queen Mary?”

“Never! No more than he knew of the Lord Admiral’s plans to kidnap King Edward. But innocence does not guarantee safety. You will remember that I spoke of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger?”

Hester nodded.

“He attempted to march into London and capture Queen Mary to prevent Her Grace from marrying Philip of Spain. People were in great fear of Spanish rule in those days.”

And of the return of Catholicism to the land, Audrey added to herself. That fear had been well founded. They were all good Catholics now, under the rule of Mary and Philip, no matter what they believed in their hearts.

“The Duke of Suffolk was to raise the Midlands,” she continued. “That was the Marquess of Dorset, Lady Jane Grey’s father. He’d been elevated in the peerage two years earlier, when his wife’s brothers died. Poor Lady Jane was already in the Tower of London, for she’d been a pawn in an earlier scheme to keep Mary Tudor from claiming the throne. At the time of Wyatt’s uprising, your father was at Cheshunt. He had just delivered a letter to Princess Elizabeth at Ashridge when two of the duke’s brothers, on their way to join Suffolk, stopped there for the night. They tried to convince Jack to join with them. He refused, but the mere fact that they’d spent the evening together was sufficient to condemn your father in the queen’s eyes.”

“Did Wyatt mean to put Elizabeth on the throne in Mary’s place?”

“Some say he did. No one really knows.”

From what Audrey had heard since, the leaders of the rebellion had been a confused lot with conflicting goals and little in the way of organization. Any well-trained housewife could have mounted a better campaign.

“It scarce matters what his goal was,” she continued. “Queen Mary was suspicious of her half sister and that suspicion extended to everyone associated with her, including your father. He was accused of being a conspirator and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Then the queen ordered Elizabeth to come to London and lodged her, under guard, in a secure corner of Whitehall Palace near the privy garden.”

Hester listened attentively, her eyes wide. Audrey prayed for the strength to make her understand what the rest of her story meant. Hester had not asked again to go to court and meet her royal aunt, but that did not mean she had given up her ambition to be a maid of honor. In telling her daughter the next part of the story, Audrey hoped to dissuade her, once and for all, from ever trying to trade on her royal inheritance.

She drew in a strengthening breath. She needed her wits about her now more than ever. When she’d begun, her only goal had been to make certain that her daughter did not grow to adulthood in ignorance of her heritage. Audrey would not have wished that fate on anyone. But now there was more she must do. The simple truth was out but it was not enough. Now she must shape her remaining memories into a cautionary tale, to prevent Hester from misusing her newfound knowledge.












45

Whitehall, March 1554

When word came that Jack was back in the Tower, I at once made plans to leave Somerset for Stepney. We’d acquired our house there some three years earlier. Even though he’d just spent many months imprisoned for no greater crime than being one of the Lord Admiral’s loyal retainers, he’d laughed when he first noticed that we had such an excellent view of his former prison. Then he’d recited the epigram he’d written on the subject of treason:

Treason doth never prosper. What’s the reason?

Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

That was how he passed his time while incarcerated for the first time—writing. He translated Cicero’s The Book of Friendship and composed verses, including a sonnet to the Lord Admiral that, had anyone seen it, would most likely have added to the length of Jack’s imprisonment. The poem ended with a couplet:

Yet against nature, reason, and laws

His blood was spilt, guiltless without just cause.

I did not like to think what new verses my husband might be composing. He was temperate in speech, but he seemed to believe that expressing his thoughts as poetry gave him license to say what he would. The day after my arrival in Stepney, I applied to visit him. When that request was denied by the constable of the Tower, I presented myself at court and begged an audience with Queen Mary.

King Henry’s eldest daughter had been at Ashridge the one summer I went on progress with the court but I had never been presented to her. I did not think she had noticed me. For the most part, I had stayed well in the background, even though I was made welcome in Queen Kathryn’s household.

When I arrived at Whitehall Palace with my petition for Jack’s release I expected to spend days, if not weeks, awaiting the opportunity to plead my case. I was not the only suitor hoping to see the queen on behalf of a loved one. Between those who’d been involved in the futile attempt to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne in Mary’s place when King Edward died and the rebels who’d joined with Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger and the Duke of Suffolk in this more recent rebellion, a great many men were currently locked away.

It was already too late for some. The Duke of Suffolk had been executed. So had his daughter, Lady Jane Grey, despite the fact that she’d had naught to do with this latest uprising. Wyatt yet lived, no doubt because the queen hoped to persuade him to implicate her half sister, Elizabeth, in his treason.

On the second day of my vigil at court, one of the queen’s ladies, recognizable by her russet and black livery, came for me. She led me into the queen’s privy chamber, where Queen Mary sat not on a throne, but on an ordinary chair, her hands busy with needlework. She was beautifully dressed, in a gown of violet velvet. Her skirt and sleeves were embroidered in gold. At first glance, all this magnificence disguised the fact that in her person she was rather plain.

Filled with trepidation, I approached Her Grace. Now that the moment was upon me, I was terrified that I would say the wrong thing and make things worse for Jack.

She squinted at me when I rose from my curtsey—she was notoriously shortsighted—and bade me come into the light shining through the window beside her. Even though the queen was seated, I could tell that she was of low stature, much shorter than I was. I tried not to stare, but I could not help but think that she had not inherited much from her father. Her hair was a dull reddish brown instead of the true “Tudor” red. She did have King Henry’s fair skin, but her face was as lined as that of a much older woman—she was thirty-eight at that time—and her lips were thin and bloodless. Her eyes were her most prominent feature, large and dark.

When she spoke it was in a powerful, almost mannish voice. “We are told, Mistress Harington, that you have a petition for us.”

“Yes, Your Grace. I have come to beg you to release my husband from the Tower. He has done nothing wrong.”

“Has he not? We have met John Harington, madam. He is a most pernicious fellow. This is not the first time he has attempted to meddle in the succession. He acted as a go-between when the late Lord Admiral conspired with the Marquess of Dorset, as he was then, to marry the Lady Jane to King Edward.”

“I know nothing of that, Your Grace.”

I lied with a straight face. I knew all about the messages he’d carried back and forth between the two men, and that Lady Jane Grey had been sent to Seymour Place and the keeping of the Lord Admiral’s mother in order to be closer to court and the young king. Shortly after I married Jack, the Lady Jane had gone to live at Chelsea with the queen dowager. She’d remained with Queen Kathryn until Her Grace’s death and had served as chief mourner at her funeral.

The queen continued to stare at me, making me so nervous that I burst into speech. “My husband spent nearly a year in the Tower for no other reason that he was one of the Lord Admiral’s gentlemen, but in the end he was freed and pardoned.”

“Pardoned for what crime, madam?” She leapt on that like a dog on a bone. “To have been pardoned, he must have been guilty of something. Come, we know he played a role in the Lord Admiral’s schemes. And then there is his faith. He composed a certain scurrilous hymn that the late king our father did like to sing.”

“He was a very young man when he wrote that, Your Grace. At the time, the Church of Rome had been banished from the land.”

My fervent defense caused an ugly red color to suffuse the queen’s face. I bit my lip, wishing I had kept silent.

Queen Mary leaned forward to peer more closely at my features. “You seem familiar to us, Mistress Harington. Have you been at court before?”

“My father was John Malte, the royal tailor.”

The queen jerked back as if she had been struck. In that instant, I knew that she had heard the old rumor about me. I’d have suspected Sir Richard Southwell of repeating it to her, except that I’d already heard that he’d fallen out of favor in the new regime. Uncertain what to say, I said nothing. The queen was silent, too. Then she waved me away.

“Return on the morrow. We will speak with you again then.”

I backed out of the privy chamber in a state of profound confusion.

I was no less befuddled when I returned the following day. Another of the queen’s ladies was on the lookout for me. She escorted me to a small room furnished only with a prie-dieu and the large, ornate cross on the wall in front of it. She instructed me to wait there.

Obedient, I stood and stared at the low desk. It had a space for a book above and a cushioned kneeling pad below. Once every home had had one of these, but they had gone out of fashion after King Henry broke with Rome in order to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Queen Mary, Catherine’s daughter, had steadfastly refused to give up her faith. Now that she was on the throne, she intended to restore the religion her father had tried so hard to replace.

Tentatively, I knelt. The cushion felt odd beneath my knees but I folded my hands in front of me and bowed my head. If ever I had needed my prayers to be answered, this was the day, but no words came to me. I did not know what to pray for. That Jack be innocent? I feared he was not. That the queen would pardon him? Would that be enough? While I was still wrestling with this quandary, the door behind me opened and closed.

When I tried to stumble to my feet, the queen’s gruff voice ordered me to remain on my knees. Having shifted onto the bare floorboards, I froze, half turned away from the prie-dieu.

“It is good to find you at prayer,” Queen Mary said. “Do you accept the true faith?”

“I . . . I am in need of instruction, Your Grace. Much has been forgotten. Even the priests do not seem to remember what to do.”

She nodded, accepting the truth of that assessment. Her religious practices had been outlawed for more than fifteen years. “Instruction will be provided for you. And for your daughter.”

I swallowed convulsively. It frightened me that the queen knew about Hester but I thanked her for her consideration. Then I waited, so nervous of what she would say next that I could scarce hold still.

“There are some who say you are not John Malte’s daughter at all.”

I had tried to prepare myself for this line of questioning. I knew I must continue to deny that I had any trace of royal blood. Furthermore, I must make the queen believe me. I cleared my throat.

“It is clearly stated, in both John Malte’s will and in a royal grant given him for loyal service, that I am Malte’s bastard daughter by Joanna Dingley. On the one occasion when I spoke to my mother about rumors to the contrary, she assured me that John Malte had fathered me.”

“So you did have doubts?”

I managed a weak smile. “I heard the rumors, too, Your Grace. But I am satisfied that they are untrue.”

“You bear a strong resemblance to the Lady Elizabeth.”

“A coincidence only, Your Grace.” My nervousness increased at the form of address the queen chose to use. Not Princess Elizabeth but the Lady Elizabeth. What did it mean that the queen would not call her half sister, the heir to her throne under King Henry’s Act of Succession, by her rightful title?