The Queen’s Fool

We sat in silence for long moments, and then I heard the door of the house bang open. I sat up and saw one of Lady Mary’s ladies burst out of the shadowy interior and look wildly around for her. Lady Mary waved and the girl ran over. It was Lady Margaret. As she came close I felt Lady Mary’s posture rise, her back straighten, she steadied herself for the news I had foretold. She would let her companion find her here, seated simply in the English garden, her fool dozing beside her, and she would greet the news of her inheritance with words from the Psalms that she had prepared. She whispered them now: ‘This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.’

‘Lady Mary! Oh!’

The girl was almost speechless with her desire to tell, and breathless from her run. ‘At church just now …’

‘What?’

‘They didn’t pray for you.’

‘Pray for me?’

‘No. They prayed for the king and his advisors, same as always, but where the prayer says “and for the king’s sisters”, they missed you out.’

Lady Mary’s bright gaze swept the girl’s face. ‘Both of us? Elizabeth too?’

‘Yes!’

‘You are sure?’

‘Yes.’

Lady Mary rose to her feet, her eyes narrowed with anxiety. ‘Send out Mr Tomlinson into Ware, tell him to go on to Bishop Stortford if need be, tell him to get reports from other churches. See if this is happening everywhere.’

The girl bobbed a curtsey, picked up her skirts and ran back into the house.

‘What does it mean?’ I asked, scrambling to my feet.

She looked at me without seeing me. ‘It means that Northumberland has started to move against me. First, he does not warn me how ill my brother is. Then, he commands the priests to leave Elizabeth and me from the prayers; next, he will command them to mention another, the king’s new heir. Then, when my poor brother is dead, they will arrest me, arrest Elizabeth, and put their false prince on the throne.’

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘Edward Courtenay,’ she said decisively. ‘My cousin. He is the only one Northumberland would choose, since he cannot put himself or his sons on the throne.’

I suddenly saw it. The wedding feast, the white face of Lady Jane Grey, the bruises at her throat as if someone had taken her by the neck to shake their ambition into her. ‘Oh, but he can: Lady Jane Grey,’ I said.

‘Newly wed to Northumberland’s son Guilford,’ Lady Mary agreed. She paused for a moment. ‘I would not have thought they would have dared. Her mother, my cousin, would have to step aside, she would have to resign her claim for her daughter. But Jane is a Protestant, and Dudley’s father commands the keys to the kingdom.’ She gave a harsh laugh. ‘My God! She is such a Protestant. She has out-Protestanted Elizabeth, and that must have taken some doing. She has Protestanted her way into my brother’s will. She has Protestanted her way into treason, God forgive her, the poor little fool. They will take her and destroy her, poor girl. But first, they will destroy me. They have to. Robbing me of the prayers of my people is only the first thing. Next, they will arrest me, then there will be some charge and I will be executed.’

Her pale face suddenly drained even paler and I saw her stagger. ‘My God, what of Elizabeth? He will kill us both,’ she whispered. ‘He will have to. Otherwise there will be rebellions against him from both Protestant and Catholic. He has to be rid of me to be rid of men of courage of the true faith. But he has to be rid of Elizabeth too. Why would a Protestant follow Queen Jane and a cat’s-paw like Guilford Dudley if they could have Elizabeth for queen? If I am dead, she is the next heir, a Protestant heir. He must be planning to forge some charge of treason against us both; one of us is not enough. Elizabeth and I will be dead within three months.’

She strode away from me by a couple of paces, and then she turned and came back again. ‘I must save Elizabeth,’ she said. ‘Whatever else happens. I must warn her not to go to London. She must come here. They shall not take my throne from me. I have not come so far and borne so much for them to rob me of my country, and plunge my country into sin. I will not fail now.’

She turned towards the house. ‘Come, Hannah!’ she threw over her shoulder. ‘Come quickly!’

She wrote to warn Elizabeth, she wrote for advice. I did not see either letter; but that night I took the manuscript Lord Robert had given to me, and using my father’s letter as the base of the code I carefully wrote out the message. ‘M is much alarmed that she is left out of the prayers. She believes that Lady J will be named heir. She has written to Eliz to warn her. And to the Sp ambassador for advice.’ I paused then. It was arduous work, translating every letter into another, but I wanted to write something, a line, a word, to remind him of me, to prompt him to recall me to court. Some line, some simple thing that he would read and think of me, not as his spy, not as a fool, but as me, myself, a girl who had promised to serve him heart and soul, for love.

‘I miss you,’ I wrote, and then I scratched it out, not even troubling to translate it into code.

‘When can I come home?’ went the same way.

‘I am frightened,’ was the most honest of all the confessions.

In the end I wrote nothing, there was nothing I could think of that would turn Lord Robert’s attention to me, while the boy king was dying and his own young white-faced sister-in-law was stepping up to the throne of England and bringing the Dudley family to absolute greatness.

Then there was nothing to do but to wait for news of the death of the king to come from London. Lady Mary had her own private messages coming and going. But every three days or so she received a letter from the duke to tell her that the fine weather was doing its business and the king was on the mend, that his fever had broken, that his chest pains were better, that a new doctor had been appointed who had high hopes that the king would be well by midsummer. I watched Lady Mary read these optimistic notes through once, saw her eyes narrow slightly in disbelief; and then she folded them and put them away in a drawer in her writing desk, and never looked at them again.

Then, in the first days of July, one letter made her snatch her breath and put a hand to her heart.

‘How is the king, my Lady?’ I asked her. ‘Not worse?’

Her colour burned in her cheeks. ‘The duke says that he is better, that he has rallied and that he wants to see me.’ She rose to her feet and paced to the window. ‘Please God he is indeed better,’ she said quietly to herself. ‘Better, and wanting to restore me to our old affection, better, and seeing through his false advisors. Perhaps God has given him strength to get well and to come to a right understanding at last. Or at least well enough to put a stop to this plot. Oh, Mother of God, guide me in what I should do.’

‘Shall we go?’ I asked. I was on my feet already at the thought of returning to London, to court, to see Lord Robert again, to see my father, and Daniel, back to the relative safety of the men who would protect me.

I saw her shoulders straighten as she took the decision. ‘If he asks for me, of course I have to go. Tell them to get the horses ready. We’ll leave tomorrow.’

She went from the room with a rustle of her thick skirts, and I heard her calling to her ladies to pack their clothes, we were all going to London. I heard her run up stairs, her feet pattering on the bare wooden treads like those of a young girl, and then her voice, light and excited, as she called back down to Jane Dormer to take especial care to pack her finest jewels for if the king was indeed well then there would be dancing and feasting at court.

Next day we were on the road, Lady Mary’s pennant before us, her soldiers around us, and the country people tumbling out of their houses in the small villages to call out blessings on her name, and holding up their children for them to see her: a real princess, and a pretty smiling princess at that.

Lady Mary on horseback was a different woman from the white-faced half-prisoner that I had first met at Hunsdon. Riding towards London with the people of England cheering her on, she looked like a true princess. She wore a deep red gown and jacket, which made her dark eyes shine. She rode well, one hand in a worn red glove on the bridle, the other waving to everyone who called out to her, the colour blazing in her cheeks, a stray lock of rich brown hair escaping from her hat, her head up, her courage high, her weariness all gone. She sat well in the saddle, proud as a queen, swaying with the pace of the horse as we made our way to the great road to London.

I rode beside her for much of the way, the little bay pony that the duke had given me stepping out to keep pace with Lady Mary’s bigger horse. She commanded me to sing the songs of my Spanish childhood, and sometimes she recognised the words or the tune as something her mother had once sung to her, and she would sing with me, a little quaver in her voice at the memory of the mother who had loved her.

We rode hard along the London road, splashing through the fords at their summertime low, cantering where the tracks were soft enough. She was desperate to get to court to discover what was happening. I remembered John Dee’s mirror and how I had guessed at the date of the king’s death, the sixth of July, but I did not dare to say anything. I had spoken the name of the next Queen of England, and it had not been Queen Mary. The sixth of July had been a guess to please my lord, and the name Jane had come to me from nowhere – both might mean nothing. But as Lady Mary rode to London, hoping that her fears would prove to be unfounded, I rode at her side hoping that my Sight was all the chicanery and nonsense that I thought it must be.

Of all of the nervous train who rode with her I was the most anxious. For if I had seen true, she was riding not to a reconciliation with her brother the king, but to attend the coronation of Lady Jane. She was riding fast towards her own abdication, and we would all share her bad luck.

We rode all the morning and came just after midday into the town of Hoddesdon, weary of the saddle and hoping for a good dinner and a rest before we continued the journey. Without warning, a man stepped out from a doorway and put his hand up to signal to her. Clearly, she recognised him. At once she waved him forward so he could speak to her privately. He stood close to her horse’s neck and took her rein familiarly in his arm and she leaned down towards him. He was very brief, and though I strained to hear, he kept his voice low. Then he stepped back and melted away into the mean streets of the little town and Lady Mary snapped an order to halt, and tumbled down from her saddle so fast that her Master of Horse could scarcely catch her. She went into the nearest inn at a run, shouting for paper and pen, and ordering everyone to drink, eat, see to their horses and be ready to leave again within the hour.

‘Mother of God, I really can’t,’ Lady Margaret said pitifully as her royal mistress strode past. ‘I’m too tired to go another step.’

‘Then stay behind,’ snapped Lady Mary, who never snapped. That sharpness of tone warned us that the hopeful ride to London, to visit the young, recovering king, had suddenly gone terribly wrong.

I did not dare to write a note for Lord Robert. There was no easy way to get it to him and the whole mood of the journey had changed. Whatever the man had told her it was not that her brother was well and summoning her to dance at his court. When she came out of the parlour she was pale and her eyes were red, but she was not softened by grief. She was sharp with decision, and she was angry.

She sent one messenger flying south down the road to London to find the Spanish ambassador, to beg for his advice and to alert the Spanish emperor that she would need his help to claim her throne. She took another messenger aside for a verbal message for Lady Elizabeth, she did not dare to write it down, she did not dare to give the impression that the sisters were plotting against their dying brother. ‘Speak only to her when you are alone,’ she emphasised. ‘Tell her not to go to London, it is a trap. Tell her to come at once to me for her own safety.’

She sent a further message to the duke himself, swearing that she was too ill to ride to London, but that she would rest quietly at home at Hunsdon. Then she ordered the main group to stay behind. ‘I’ll take you, Lady Margaret, and you, Hannah,’ she said. She smiled at her favourite, Jane Dormer. ‘Follow us,’ she said, and she leaned forward to whisper our destination in her ear. ‘You must bring this company on behind us. We are going to travel too fast for everyone to keep pace.’

She picked six men to escort us, gave her followers a brief leave-taking and snapped her fingers for her Master of Horse to help her into the saddle. She wheeled her horse round and led us out of Hoddesdon, back the way we had come out of the town. But this time we took the great road north, racing away from London, as the sun slowly wheeled overhead and then set on our left, as the sky lost its colour, and a small silvery moon rose over the dark silhouettes of trees.

‘Where are we going, Lady Mary? It’s getting dark,’ Lady Margaret asked plaintively. ‘We can’t ride in the dark.’

‘Kenninghall,’ Lady Mary crisply replied.

‘Where’s Kenninghall?’ I asked, seeing Lady Margaret’s aghast face.

‘Norfolk,’ she said as if it were the end of the world. ‘God help us, she’s running away.’

‘Running away?’ I felt my throat tense at the scent of danger.

‘It’s towards the sea. She’ll get a ship out of Lowestoft and run to Spain. Whatever that man told her must mean that she’s in such danger that she has to get out of the country altogether.’

‘What danger?’ I asked urgently.

Lady Margaret shrugged. ‘Who knows? A charge of treason? But what about us? If she goes to Spain I’m riding for home. I’m not going to be stuck with a traitor for a mistress. It’s been bad enough in England, I’ll not be exiled to Spain.’

I said nothing, I was feverishly racking my brains to think of where I might be safest: at home with my father, with Lady Mary, or taking a horse and trying to get back to Lord Robert.

‘What about you?’ she pressed me.

I shook my head, my voice quite lost in fear, my hand feverishly rubbing at my cheek. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. I should go home, I suppose. But I don’t know the way on my own. I don’t know what my father would want me to do. I don’t understand the rights and the wrongs of it.’

She laughed, a bitter laugh for a young woman. ‘There are no rights and wrongs,’ she said. ‘There are only those who are likely to win and those who are likely to lose. And Lady Mary with six men, me and a fool, up against the Duke of Northumberland with his army and the Tower of London and every castle in the kingdom, is going to lose.’

It was a punishing ride. We did not check until it was fully night, when we paused at the home of a gentleman, John Huddlestone, at Sawston Hall. I begged a piece of paper and a pen from the housekeeper and wrote a letter, not to Lord Robert, whose address I did not dare to give, but to John Dee. ‘My dear tutor,’ I wrote, hoping this would mislead anyone who opened my letter, ‘this little riddle may amuse you.’ Then underneath I wrote the coded letters in the form of a serpentine circle, hoping to make it look like a game that a girl of my age might send to a kind scholar. It simply read, ‘She is going to Kenninghall.’ And then I wrote: ‘What am I to do?’

The housekeeper promised to send it to Greenwich by the carter who would pass by tomorrow, and I had to hope that it would find its destination and be read by the right man. Then I stepped into a little truckle bed that they had pulled out beside the kitchen fire and despite my exhaustion I lay sleepless in the slowly dimming firelight, wondering where I might find safety.

I woke painfully early, at five in the morning, to find the kitchen lad clattering pails of water and sacks of logs past my head. Lady Mary heard Mass in John Huddlestone’s chapel, as if it were not a forbidden ceremony, broke her fast, and was back in the saddle by seven in the morning, riding in the highest of spirits away from Sawston Hall with John Huddlestone at her side to show her the way.

I was riding at the back, the dozen or so horses clattering ahead of me, my little pony too tired to keep pace, when I smelled an old terrible scent on the air. I smelled burning, I smelled smoke. Not the appetising smoke of the roast beef on the spit, not the innocent seasonal smell of burning leaves. I could smell the scent of heresy, a fire lit with ill-will, burning up someone’s happiness, burning up someone’s faith, burning up someone’s house … I turned in the saddle and saw the glow on the horizon where the house we had just left, Sawston Hall, was being torched.

‘My lady!’ I called out. She heard me, and turned her head and then reined in her horse, John Huddlestone beside her.

‘Your house!’ I said simply to him.

He looked beyond me, he squinted his eyes to see. He couldn’t tell for sure, he could not smell the smoke as I had done. Lady Mary looked at me. ‘Are you sure, Hannah?’

I nodded. ‘I can smell it. I can smell smoke.’ I heard the quaver of fear in my voice. My hand was at my cheek brushing my face as if the smuts were falling on me. ‘I can smell smoke. Your house is being burned out, sir.’

He turned his horse as if he would ride straight home, then he remembered the woman whose visit had cost him his home and his fortune. ‘Forgive me, Lady Mary. I must go home … My wife …’

‘Go,’ she said gently. ‘And be very well assured that when I come into my own, you shall come into yours. I will give you another house, a bigger and richer house than this one you have lost for your loyalty to me. I shall not forget.’

He nodded, half-deaf with worry, and then set his horse at a gallop to where the blaze of his house glowed on the horizon. His groom rode up beside Lady Mary. ‘D’you want me to guide you, my lady?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Can you take me to Bury St Edmunds?’

He put his cap back on his head. ‘Through Mildenhall and Thetford forest? Yes, m’lady.’

She gave the signal to move on and she rode without once looking back. I thought that she was a princess indeed, if she could see last night’s refuge burned to the ground and think only of the struggle ahead of her and not of the ruins left behind.

That night we stayed at Euston Hall near Thetford, and I lay on the floor of Lady Mary’s bedroom, wrapped in my cape, still fully dressed, waiting for the alarm that I was sure must come. All night my senses were on the alert for the tramp of muffled feet, for the glimpse of a dipping brand, for the smell of smoke from a torch. I did little more than doze, waiting all the night for a Protestant mob to come and tear down this safe house as they had done Sawston Hall. I had a great horror of being trapped inside the house when they torched the roof and the stairs. I could not close my eyes for fear that I would be wakened by the smell of smoke, so that it was almost a relief near dawn when I heard the sound of a horse’s hooves on cobbles and I was up at the window in a second, knowing that my sleepless watch was rewarded, my hand outstretched to her as she woke, cautioning her to be quiet.

‘What can you see?’ she demanded from the bed, as she pulled back the covers. ‘How many men?’

‘Only one horse, he looks weary.’

‘Go and see who it is.’

I hurried down the wooden stairs to the hall. The porter had the spy hole opened and was arguing with the traveller, who seemed to be demanding admission to stay the night. I touched the porter on the shoulder and he stood aside. I had to stretch up on tiptoes to see through the spy hole in the door.

‘And who are you?’ I demanded, my voice as gruff as I could make it, acting a confidence that I did not feel.

‘Who are you?’ he asked back. I heard at once the sharp cadence of London speech.

‘You’d better tell me what you want,’ I insisted.

He came closer to the spy hole and lowered his quiet voice to a whisper. ‘I have important news for a great lady. It is about her brother. D’you understand me?’

There was no way of knowing whether or not he was sent to entrap us. I took the risk, stepped back and nodded to the porter. ‘Let him in, and then bar the door behind him again.’

He came in. I wished to God that I could have made the Sight work for me when I demanded it. I would have given anything to know if there were a dozen men behind him, even now encircling the house and striking flints in the hay barns. But I could be sure of nothing except that he was weary and travel-stained and buoyed up by excitement.

‘What’s the message?’

‘I shall tell it to no-one but herself.’

There was a rustle of silken skirts and Lady Mary came down the stairs. ‘And you are?’ she asked.

It was his response to the sight of her that convinced me that he was on our side, and that the world had changed for us, overnight. Fast as a stooping falcon, he dropped down to one knee, pulled his hat from his head, and bowed to her, as to a queen.

God save her, she did not turn a hair. She extended her hand as if she had been Queen of England for all her life. He kissed it reverently, and then looked up into her face.

‘I am Robert Raynes, a goldsmith of London, sent by Sir Nicholas Throckmorton to bring you the news that your brother Edward is dead, Your Grace. You are Queen of England.’

‘God bless him,’ she said softly. ‘God save Edward’s precious soul.’

There was a short silence.

‘Did he die in faith?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘He died as a Protestant.’

She nodded. ‘And I am proclaimed queen?’ she demanded in a much sharper tone.

He shook his head. ‘Can I speak freely?’

‘You have ridden a long way to tell a riddle if you do not,’ she observed drily.

‘The king died in much pain on the night of the sixth,’ he said quietly.

‘The sixth?’ she interrupted.

‘Yes. Before his death he changed his father’s will.’

‘He had no legal right to do so. He cannot have changed the settlement.’

‘Nonetheless he did. You are denied the succession, the Lady Elizabeth also. Lady Jane Grey is named as his heir.’

‘He never did this willingly,’ she said, her face blanched.

The man shrugged. ‘It was done in his hand, and the council and the justices all agreed and signed to it.’

‘All the council?’ she asked.

‘To a man.’

‘And what about me?’

‘I am to warn you that you are named as a traitor to the throne. Lord Robert Dudley is on his way now to arrest you and take you to the Tower.’

‘Lord Robert is coming?’ I asked.

‘He will go to Hunsdon first,’ Lady Mary reassured me. ‘I wrote to his father that I was staying there. He won’t know where we are.’

I did not contradict her, but I knew that John Dee would send my note on to him this very day, and that thanks to me, he would know exactly where to look for us.

Her concern was all for her sister. ‘And Lady Elizabeth?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She may be arrested already. They were going to her home too.’

‘Where is Robert Dudley now?’

‘I don’t know that either. It has taken me the whole day to find you myself. I traced you from Sawston Hall because I heard of the fire and guessed you had been there. I am sorry, my l … Your Grace.’

‘And when was the king’s death announced? And Lady Jane falsely proclaimed?’

‘Not when I left.’

She took a moment to understand, and then she was angry. ‘He has died, and it has not been announced? My brother is lying dead, unwatched? Without the rites of the church? Without any honours done to him at all?’