Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,149

my daughter’s accession to the throne, and by John Hooper, the Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, who had given the Duchess of Somerset spiritual comfort while she was in the Tower. It had taken the bishop, crying out for more wood because that which he was provided had failed to ignite properly, forty-five minutes to die.

Yet even as the burnings continued, Mary sat serene and happy, her hands folded over her belly—for the queen was now expecting a child, a state of affairs many regarded as miraculous, as the queen was well in middle age. Each time I came to court before my own condition began to show itself, I saw the Mary I had always liked, the Mary who lost graciously at cards, the Mary whose women were comfortably housed and never overtasked, the Mary who visited the poor in disguise and never failed to make certain something arrived after she had left—a sum of money, a draught of medicine for an ailing child, some warm blankets. My daughter Kate, who like my Jane was strong in her likes and dislikes, never spoke of Queen Mary with anything other than warmth. How to reconcile this Mary with the one who roasted human beings to death?

“It’s not that hard to do,” said Adrian. “The government gives them the chance to recant. I doubt that the queen gets any pleasure from these burnings.” He shook his head. “But the fact remains, she goes on with them.”

And indeed she did. At the end of March, Robert Ferrar, the Bishop of St. David’s, was burned in Wales.

Two bishops in two months, I thought. And God only knew when it would all end.

***

In April, Kate, along with her new friend Jane Seymour, came to visit me at Sheen. “We thought we had better come while we had the chance,” Kate explained. “The queen’s going to go into confinement soon, and then we’ll be boxed up for weeks.”

“She is doing well?”

Kate frowned. “She’s not showing much more than she did a couple of months ago. You’re showing more than she is, in fact. I heard…”

“Well?”

Kate lowered her voice. “I heard one of her ladies, Mistress Strelly, asking her if she might not be with child at all. The queen was furious. She boxed Mistress Strelly’s ears. She hardly ever acts like that. But how could she be mistaken, Mother? She does have a great belly. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

“Of a woman growing a great belly, yet not bearing a child? Yes, I have. It happened years ago to our kinsman Arthur Plantagenet’s wife.” I was silent, not wanting to think of this possibility as it concerned Queen Mary—or me, for that matter. “But this is different. The queen has had the best physicians in England examine her.”

“True,” said Kate. She giggled. “Anyway, I have another piece of gossip, and it is about you, Mother! They say there are plans afoot to marry you to the Earl of Devon.”

The Earl of Devon was Edward Courtenay, the foolish young man who had been released from the Tower when Mary came to the throne. Although he had revealed to the queen what he knew about the Wyatt rebellion, or at least some of what he knew, he had later been imprisoned. A week or so ago, he had been released in the hope he had learned his lesson.

Kate continued, “Devon said he would rather leave the country than be married to a woman ten years his senior whose husband and eldest daughter had been executed as traitors.”

I snorted. The earl appeared to have forgotten that his own father had been executed as a traitor. “And who proposed this?”

“Some of the queen’s council, but others were against it. They said that if, God forbid, the queen should die in childbirth, along with the child, there would be a contest for the crown between the lady Elizabeth, the Countess of Lennox, the young Queen of Scots, and you. If Devon was married to you, they said, he might try to seize the crown in your name.”

“There will be no contest for the crown on my part,” I said. “It belongs to the lady Elizabeth.”

“It will be quite the joke when everyone finds out that you’re married already,” Kate said. During her last visit, I had told her of my marriage and of my coming child. To my relief, she had reacted with no more than an indulgent smile at the folly of her elders. She glanced