Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,7

the first time. Then I couldn’t. He was kind to me, interested, pleasant. I didn’t feel like a lowly page in his company. Sometimes I wondered if he remembered who I was, the eldest son of the first man he had executed. But he never forgot things like that. I’ve wondered if all of the honors he gave me over the years, all the trust he placed in me, weren’t his way of apologizing for putting my father to death. But it’s not the sort of question one can ask a king.” He squeezed my hand. “Do you know what else is amusing? I never did see King Henry’s coronation, of course, following my father’s arrest as closely as it did. So when King Henry died, the first thing that popped into my head was that this time, I would get to see the new king’s coronation. It shall be my first.”

2

Frances Grey

December 1555

It is dangerous to speak of my daughter Jane today, at least here in England. Men can die, and have died, for holding the beliefs she held. Nonetheless, people sometimes turn up at my house to tell me of their admiration for my daughter. Some ask me for a memento of Jane. I hand them the few things I can—a hair fastening, an old pen—while hoarding a few such mementoes myself. As I do, I sometimes ask myself, are these things really much different from the relics of the saints these people scorn? Are they not pilgrims of another sort?

Whatever I give them, however, my visitors leave disappointed. The mother of an extraordinary daughter, they think, must surely be extraordinary herself. How wrong they are! For wherever my daughter got her great gifts, I know it was certainly not from me. As a young woman, I could embroider beautifully, carry a tune respectably, play a pretty melody upon my virginals—but I could barely speak French, much less the ancient languages. Indeed, my French was atrocious, which was a matter of some embarrassment for me, because my mother, Mary, had been that country’s queen.

How my sister, Eleanor, and I loved hearing my mother tell about her days in the French court! Her brother, King Henry VIII, had married her at age eighteen to Louis XII, a man in his fifties. Not a robust man, and nearly three times her age, Louis had nonetheless done his best to make the wedding celebrations as lively and festive as possible for his vivacious new queen. There had been tournaments, dancing, and feasting, and while it all delighted my young mother, it had proven the undoing of poor Louis, who, after just a few months of all of this, dropped dead from sheer exhaustion, leaving his son-in-law Francis as the king and my mother fair game to be married off to some French nobleman or the other. But having married one aging man for policy, Mother was not inclined to do so again.

Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, an Englishman, was a fine jouster and a handsome man and the king’s closest friend; he was also, it was noted, an upstart duke who had not a jolt of noble blood in him. But he had caught my mother’s eye long before she married the King of France, and when King Henry sent Suffolk to England to check on his newly widowed sister, my mother wasted no time in renewing her acquaintance with the duke. My mother had the rare ability to look pretty while she cried, and when she turned her tears upon Charles Brandon, they were so effective that in just days, the pair were secretly married, to the scandal of the French court and the fury of King Henry. But in those days, the king did not bear a grudge for long, and soon all was right once again between the king and my parents.

My nurse loved to tell my younger sister and me about this runaway match, so naturally, I would dream of making a romantic marriage like that of my mother and father. But what my parents had practiced in their own case was very much different from what they practiced in mine. At age thirteen, I was dangled before the Duke of Norfolk, who to their great chagrin (and mine, for I could not help hearing about it) thought my dowry too meager for his son. Then my father turned to the young Marquis of Dorset. There was an impediment in that the marquis was already contracted to