Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,130

short of money and men, and suffering from poor health, my husband had tried his best. With the help of his brothers, he had issued proclamations against the danger of the queen’s Spanish marriage and managed to get Leicester to shut its gates against the queen’s supporters. But the queen in her letters to the counties claimed he was trying to put Jane back on the throne, which was only too easy to believe. The Earl of Huntingdon, whom Harry had hoped would support his cause, arrived instead in pursuit of him. With the walls of Coventry closed against him, Harry had divided his money with his fifty followers and had determined to flee abroad. Aided by a servant, who brought him food, he had hidden in the hollow of a tree on our property at Astley until he could leave without being detected. But Huntingdon’s dogs had sniffed him out, as they also did his brother John, who was found hiding under a stack of hay. On February 2, Harry was Huntingdon’s prisoner; on February 10, he was back in the Tower, where he heard the news I had learned two days before: our daughter was to be executed.

I begged to see the queen. But this time her door, and her heart, were shut as firmly against me as they had been against the Duchess of Northumberland the summer before. My daughter would be given the chance to meet with the queen’s chaplain, John Feckenham, who would attempt to save her soul. That was all.

There was nothing stopping me from seeing my daughter die. Oh, I would have had to get permission to get into Tower Green, but surely a mother would have been allowed that privilege. But I did not dare. Perhaps I feared I could not stay sane after seeing such a sight; perhaps I feared something more mundane, that I might collapse and embarrass my daughter in her last moments. Instead, I spent the night, and much of the morning, in prayer, though I knew Jane hardly needed my intervention with the Lord. It was Adrian Stokes who went to the Tower that Monday, February 12, first to see Guildford Dudley die on Tower Hill and then to see Jane die on Tower Green.

It was past noon when Master Stokes arrived at Sheen, where Kate and Mary sat with me in my chamber. With him were my daughter’s waiting women, Ursula Ellen and Elizabeth Tilney, both of their faces creased with tears. We women came together in a wordless embrace as Master Stokes slipped from the room.

Later that day, when prayer had made me strong enough to hear about my daughter’s last hours, Jane’s women and Master Stokes told me of them. For three days, Feckenham, a kindly man, had disputed theology with Jane and found her intransigent. But approaching death had softened Jane, and when Feckenham, unable to convert Jane and unable to persuade Mary to pardon her, had begged to do her the last service of accompanying her to the scaffold, she had agreed. Wearing the same black dress she had worn to her trial, Jane had walked to her place of execution calmly, reading from the book of Esther as her ladies trailed sobbing behind her. Only the sight she had seen a little while before, that of her husband’s headless body being carted back from Tower Hill, had discomfited her, and that only for a short time.

On the scaffold, my daughter had given a speech, which Master Stokes had scribbled down himself for me. In my chamber, I listened as he delivered it in his Leicestershire accent:

Good people, I am come hither to die, and by a law I am condemned to the same. The fact, indeed, against the queen’s highness was unlawful, and the consenting thereunto by me: but touching the procurement and desire thereof by me or on my behalf, I do wash my hands thereof in innocence, before God, and the face of you, good Christian people, this day. And therewith I pray you all, good Christian people, to bear me witness that I die a true Christian woman, and that I look to be saved by none other means, but only by the mercy of God in the merits of the blood of his only son, Jesus Christ: and I confess, when I did know the word of God I neglected the same, loved myself and the world, and therefore this plague or punishment is happily and worthily