Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,109

I finally realized.

***

By mid-August, the council had ordered me to vacate Durham Place. My new home, at least until someone decided I could not live there any longer, was Chelsea, where Guildford and Jane had spent part of their married life together. It was from there I traveled on August 18 to Westminster Hall, where John and Jack, along with the Marquis of Northampton, were being tried for high treason.

“Forty-three years and a day before this, Dudley’s father perished on the scaffold,” a man behind me whispered happily. “Like father, like son, eh?”

Having been released from the Tower, the Duke of Norfolk had been put to work immediately; he was presiding as High Steward over John’s trial. On his right sat the Lord High Treasurer, the Marquis of Winchester, who had brought the crown jewels to Jane, and the Earl of Arundel, who had sworn to spend his own blood at John’s feet. On his left were John Russell, Earl of Bedford, George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and Richard Rich, all of whom had signed King Edward’s devise for the succession.

John, dressed in a black satin gown and preceded by a man carrying an axe, walked into the court under guard. Having touched his knee three times to the ground before arriving at his place before his judges, he stood impassively while his confession was read out, and then knelt again. Invited to speak, he asked, “I have confessed to the charges against me, and nothing I say is meant in defense of myself. I wish to understand the opinion of the court upon two points.”

Norfolk, who had been glaring at John throughout these proceedings, grunted. “Speak.”

“May a man doing an act by the authority of a prince’s council, and by a warrant of the great seal of England, and doing nothing without the same, be charged with treason?”

The Duke of Norfolk said coldly, “The great seal you speak of was not the seal of the lawful queen of the realm, but the seal of a usurper. It therefore can be of no warrant to you.”

I clenched my fists. John, I knew, had been speaking of King Edward’s great seal, placed on the devise for the succession. Norfolk had deliberately misunderstood him.

John, however, must have expected such an answer. His voice calm, he asked, “May such persons who were equally culpable in my crimes, and by whose letters and commandments I was directed in all of my doings, be my judges, or try me as my peers?”

Arundel had the decency to avert his eyes from John. Norfolk responded in the same voice as before, “If any are as culpable as you, it remains a fact that no attainder is of record against them. Therefore, they are able at law to pass upon any trial, and are not to be challenged except at the queen’s pleasure.”

“Very well,” John said. “I thank the court for its opinions on these matters.”

“As you have confessed, I now pass sentence upon you,” Norfolk said. He cleared his throat. “You are to be drawn to the place of execution, hanged, your heart and entrails cut from your body while you are still alive, and quartered.”

I had known this sentence would be given; I also knew it would most likely be commuted to beheading. Nonetheless, it was all I could do to keep my sickness inside me.

John asked again to speak. Given permission, he said calmly, “I beseech you, my lords, to be humble suitors to the queen’s majesty, to grant me four requests, which are these: first, that I might have the death which noblemen have had in the past, and not the other; second, that Her Majesty will be gracious to my children, who may hereafter do Her Grace good service, considering that they went by my commandment as their father, and not of their own free wills; third, that I might have appointed to me some learned man for the instruction and quieting of my conscience; and fourth, that she will send two members of the council to me, to whom I will declare such matters as shall be expedient for her and the commonwealth. And I beseech you all to pray for me.”

Norfolk nodded curtly and asked that the next defendant, Northampton, be brought to the bar. His defense, that he could not have defied Jane’s orders without committing treason, met with a chilly response, and he was likewise condemned to die. Jack, the last of the three, simply confessed his guilt and