Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,110

begged that the queen pay his debts out of his confiscated property, so the innocent should not suffer from his treason. My son was sentenced to the same horrid death as his father had been.

Norfolk, to give the customary signal that he had completed his task, reached for his white staff of office. He cracked it in two pieces, the snap of it like a human heart breaking.

***

John was condemned on a Friday. A few hours after I returned home from his trial, I heard his execution was set for Monday.

In three days, the man who had been my companion since I was three years of age would no longer walk the earth. I wanted to hang my head and weep. Instead, I said, “Have pen and paper brought to me immediately.”

In my own uncertain hand, shaking from anxiety, I wrote to Lady Anne Paget. Lord William Paget and John had quarreled after the Duke of Somerset’s fall, and he had been one of the first to desert John after he left London, but Lord Paget had taken it upon himself to assist me in recovering some of my goods from Durham Place and Sion, and his wife and I had been friendly. She had even contacted Susan Clarencius, Mary’s most trusted lady, in hopes of getting me an audience with the queen. Lady Paget was my last chance to save John.

Now, good madam, for the love you bear to God forget me not, and make my lady Marquis of Exeter my good lady, and remember me to Mistress Clarencius to continue as she has begun doing for me. And, good madam, desire your lord as he may do in speaking for my husband’s life. In way of charity, I crave him to do it.

Madam, I have held up my head, for all of my great heaviness of heart that all the world knows cannot be light, so that now I begin to grow weak, and also have such a rising in the night from my stomach upward that in my judgment my breath is like clean to go away, as my women well can say. They know it to be true by the pains they take with me.

Good madam, of your goodness remember me, and so God keep your ladyship with long life with your lord and yours.

Your ladyship’s poorest friend, Jane Northumberland as long as it please the queen.

The tears beginning to blind me, I wrote a postscript:

And good madam, desire my lord to be a good lord unto my poor five sons; nature cannot do otherwise but sue for them, although I do not so much care for them as for their father, who was to me and to my mind the most best gentleman that ever living woman was matched with all, as neither those about him nor about me can say the contrary and say truly. How good he was to me that our lord and the queen’s majesty show their mercy to them.

That last sentence did not make much sense, even to me, but I had no time to make it better. I summoned a servant and watched as he sped away.

Two days later, a response came in the person of Lord and Lady Paget themselves, standing in my chamber at Chelsea. “We are very sorry, Your Grace,” Lady Paget said quietly, touching my hand. “We have done our best. The queen is adamant. The execution will go on as planned.”

So on Monday, August 21, all was ready on Tower Hill: the scaffold, the executioner, the sand to soak up my John’s blood, the coffin in which to lay his broken corpse, the crowd of ten thousand to cheer and gloat. I was ready, too, standing in the throng to see my husband give up his life while those who had betrayed him and his king lived on. But as I stood there, my face veiled closely, an armed man mounted the scaffold and cried, “There will be no execution today! Go back to your homes.”

The queen has agreed to pardon John after all, I thought wildly. A surge of hope knocked me to the ground in a faint. When I came to myself, my man John Rogers was bending over me. “Is it true? John will not die today?”

“Not today. The duke has declared his faith in the Catholic Church.”

“Then he is saved?” I sat up slowly. Though I had followed the new religion for years, I cared not a jot for that