Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,151

her later years.

In 1557, the surviving Dudley sons, Ambrose, Robert, and Henry, fought for King Philip at St. Quentin, where Henry was killed. Following this, the Crown reversed the attainders of Ambrose, Robert, and their sisters.

The Dudley children and the Grey children fared very differently in Elizabeth’s reign. Robert Dudley became the Earl of Leicester. His volatile but enduring relationship with the queen, which ended only with his death in 1588, has fascinated readers for centuries. Elizabeth marked the final letter he sent to her before his death as “His Last Letter” and kept it for the rest of her life. Ambrose Dudley became the Earl of Warwick. He survived his younger brother Robert, to whom he was devoted, by two years, dying in 1590. Ambrose had no children.

Mary Sidney and her sister Katherine Hastings (which I spelled “Katheryn” in my novel to distinguish her from the many other Katherines of her day) each attended Queen Elizabeth. Mary lived until 1586. Her firstborn son, Philip Sidney, gained fame as a poet and critic and as an embodiment of the chivalric ideal. His literary works are still studied today. Her daughter Mary, who eventually married Henry Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, was both a poet and a literary patron. Katherine Hastings’s long marriage to Henry Hastings, who inherited his father’s earldom, was happy but childless. As Countess of Huntingdon, Katherine took many well-born young girls into her household and prided herself on her ability to “breed and govern young gentlewomen.” Widowed in 1595, she outlived her husband by a quarter of a century and was buried in 1620 at Chelsea’s Old Church alongside her mother.

For Katherine and Mary Grey, Elizabeth’s reign was disastrous. Katherine Grey fell in love with Somerset’s son, the Earl of Hertford. Frances, approving of the match but recognizing the need to gain royal approval, drafted a letter to Elizabeth seeking permission for the couple to marry. Before she could send the letter, she died. Instead of seeking another means of gaining the queen’s approval, the couple secretly married in 1560 with the assistance of Hertford’s sister Jane. When their marriage came to light, both spouses were imprisoned in the Tower, where the pregnant Katherine gave birth to a son. Katherine spent the rest of her life in custody, first at the Tower and later in various private homes, though a sympathetic Tower guard had allowed the couple to meet, resulting in a second son. Katherine died in 1568, at about age twenty-eight. Hertford eventually was freed and was allowed custody of his two sons by Katherine. Having remarried, he died an octogenarian in 1621. Hertford and Katherine Grey were finally reunited that same year when their grandson, the new earl, moved Katherine’s body to Hertford’s tomb at Salisbury Cathedral.

In 1565, Mary Grey likewise made a secret marriage, hers to Thomas Keyes, a widower who was a sergeant porter at court. The match also resulted in the couple’s imprisonment. Although the spouses were eventually freed, they were never allowed to resume living together as a married couple. Keyes died in 1571. Mary, who had set up her own household at Aldersgate, died in 1578. She was buried at Westminster Abbey in her mother’s tomb.

Except for Mary Sidney’s letter to her mother and the letters mentioned by Katherine Hastings, all of the letters and other writings quoted in this novel are genuine, although I have modernized spelling and punctuation in some cases. Likewise, all of the execution speeches are taken from contemporary accounts, except for Guildford Dudley’s speech, the substance of which was not recorded.

My depiction of the Lord of Misrule’s antics is based upon contemporary accounts of the festivities. The December 1551 celebration featured “an infamous tabernacle, a representation of the holy sacrament in its monstrance, which [was] wetted and perfumed in most strange fashion, with great ridicule of the ecclesiastical estate.” This is as good a place as any to make clear (if anyone is in doubt) that the religious bigotry expressed by various characters echoes their own beliefs, not mine.

There is no evidence that Jane and Frances attended the trials or the executions I have depicted them as attending, but there is nothing putting them elsewhere at the time. Likewise, the execution-eve visits each woman makes to her husband are products of my imagination, but it is possible such visits were allowed. Mary’s refusal to give an audience to Jane Dudley in July 1553, and Frances’s arrival at Beaulieu at two in the morning to see