Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,127
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