The Last Tudor

THE TOWER, LONDON,

SUMMER 1562

It gets hotter in the city and I am afraid of the plague. There is always illness in the summer, this is why the court goes on progress—so that the palaces can be cleaned and Elizabeth can hurry her barren body far away from any sickness. This is the first year that I have spent in London in summertime, and the stink from the river and from the moat around the Tower fills me with dread. You don’t need to be a great physician to recognize the smell of disease. London smells of death, and I am afraid to breathe the air.

Elizabeth’s childhood friend and lady-in-waiting Kat Ashley is moved from the Tower for her safety. She is still in disgrace but Elizabeth won’t let her beloved Kat be in the least danger. But we are left here to take our chances with the pestilential mists from the drains and the river. She leaves my baby here—where she knows there is disease.

“Should I write to William Cecil and ask him to move us?” I ask Ned one evening.

He has the baby in his arms and is singing him a little poem of his own making. The baby is cooing with pleasure, as if he understood the rhyming words, his dark blue eyes fixed on his father’s loving face.

“Not till we have news from court,” he says, glancing up at me. “There are great changes happening and they will affect us. The queen was trying to make an alliance with the Queen of Scots, but in France there has been a terrible attack on the reformers. The Protestants are in open rebellion against the ruling Guise family, and they are appealing to Elizabeth for her help. She was planning to meet with Queen Mary, but now I think she cannot. Not even Elizabeth has the gall to publicly befriend a woman whose family are executing her Protestants. When Elizabeth comes back to London in the autumn, the preachers and parliament will force her to agree that she cannot ally with France when they are stained with the blood of our faith. It is Mary of Scotland’s own kinsmen, the Guise family, who have put men and women of our Church to the sword in a merciless killing. Elizabeth cannot take England into an alliance with a daughter of Guise. Nobody would ever accept it.”

“If she gives up her alliance with Mary, then there is no one to be her heir but Margaret or me,” I observe.

“And his little lordship here,” his father says. “If you will be so good as to pass your right to him. Lord Beauchamp is the next man in line. See how sternly he looks at me? He’s going to make a great king.”

“She has named him as a bastard,” I say with steady resentment.

“Everyone knows it is a lie,” his father, my husband, says. “I don’t even consider it.”