Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,128

were in captivity or had fled abroad. Mary was safe on her throne.

***

Even from a distance at Chelsea, I had anxiously kept up with the events in London, so after a few nights of barely closing my eyes, I slept later than usual on Thursday, February 8. I was breaking my fast, somewhat sleepily, when Lord Paget was announced. I rose as he entered, his dark eyes looking more like those of a sad dog than ever. “My lord?”

“My lady, I wish with all my heart I did not have to tell you this. You will recall that Lord Guildford lies under sentence of death.”

I felt myself begin to shake. “I recall,” I managed.

“Because of this rebellion, the queen has determined to carry out the sentences against him and the lady Jane. She has commuted their sentences to beheading.”

I opened my mouth. No words came out.

Lord Paget went on quietly, “I have asked the queen to spare them, as all know that they had nothing to do with the rebellion, and indeed had nothing to gain from it. But more powerful voices have prevailed.”

“But why? Surely she understands that they are innocent!”

“She does. I have told her this, and so have others. But there is the fear that others may rise in their names.”

“They are innocent.” These seemed to be the only words I could manage.

“I will ask her again to spare them, but I am in a minority. There have always been many on the council who believed that their lives should have been taken at the same time the Duke of Northumberland’s was, and this has given them a justification they lacked before. I can plead with the queen for mercy, but I can offer you no hope.”

“No. There is no hope whatsoever in this world.” I fingered my wedding ring. “My other sons? Does the queen feel the need to exterminate them, also?”

“No, my lady.”

Not yet. I managed to say, “Thank you, my lord, for telling me about this. I hope you did not put yourself at risk by doing so.”

“No. If there is anything I can do for you, please let me know. I shall pray for you.”

“You can if you wish. But I truly think that God has deserted me, so I will not ask you to waste your time.”

Paget put his hand on my shoulder as I stared stonily ahead. “I will anyway,” he said quietly.

***

The executions had been scheduled for the next day, February 9, but they were postponed three days while the queen tried to get the lady Jane to convert to Catholicism. It was just like the girl, I thought sourly, to prolong everyone else’s agony.

While the queen was working on Jane’s soul, I occupied myself as best I could. I still had Guildford’s belongings, save for those possessions that had been sent to the Tower for him. No one had deemed them incriminating enough, or valuable enough, to take away. Over the next several days, I sorted through them again and again, as if they would somehow furnish a clue as to why a young man with no claim to the throne had to die for someone else’s conspiracy.

I managed to go through the motions of life. I even composed a letter to the queen, begging for my son’s life. Unlike the letter I’d written begging for John’s, it was calm and coherent; I was vaguely proud of my effort when I looked at it afterward. But it produced no effect whatsoever. On February 12, as scheduled, my son, just a couple of weeks short of his seventeenth birthday, went to the block. I had not been allowed to visit him in the Tower. If I wanted to see him again in this life, I would have to go to Tower Hill to see him die, and so I did.

My ladies and servants begged me not to attend the execution, but I proved as stubborn as Jane had been on the question of religion. So on a freezing morning, I came early to Tower Hill so I could be as close to my son as possible. Jane was to be executed in the privacy of Tower Green as an acknowledgment of her royal blood and, I thought, as a precaution against the possibility of a volatile crowd taking exception to the death of a woman barely past girlhood.

“It’s still not too late,” Maudlyn Flower urged as the beat of drums shortly before ten in the morning signaled that Guildford was