Katherine claps her hands over her ears. “I won’t listen to treason.”
“You never listen to anything.”
“Father has lost us everything,” she says. “We are all destroyed.”
“Worldly goods,” I say. “They mean nothing to me.”
“Bradgate! Bradgate doesn’t mean nothing to you! So why say so? Our home!”
“You should turn your mind to Our Father’s house in heaven.”
“Jane,” she implores me, “tell me one kind word, one sisterly word before I say good-bye!”
“I can’t,” I say simply. “I have to keep my mind on my journey and my joyful destination.”
“Will you see Guildford before he dies? He’s asked to see you. Your husband? Will you be together for one last time? He wants to say good-bye.”
Impatiently, I shake my head at her morbid sentiment. “I can’t! I can’t! I will see no one but Brother Feckenham.”
“A Benedictine monk!” she squeaks. “Why would you see him and not Guildford?”
“Because Brother Feckenham knows I am a martyr,” I flash. “Of all of you, only he and the queen understand that I am dying for my faith. That is why I will only see him. That is why he will come with me to the scaffold.”
“If you would just admit that this is not about your faith, this is nothing to do with your faith—it’s only about Father’s rebellion for Elizabeth—then you wouldn’t have to die at all!”
“That is why I won’t talk with you, or Guildford,” I say in a sudden storm of unsaintly temper. “I won’t listen to anyone who wants me to see this as a muddle by a fool, which leads to the death of his daughter, a pawn. Yes! Father should have rescued me; but instead he rode out for another pawn and his failure has condemned me to death!” I am swept with rage and sorrow. I have raised my voice, I am shouting at her, panting. I feel that I have to claw myself back to peace, to calmness. This is why I cannot argue about worldly things with worldly people. This is why I cannot bear to see her, to see any of them. This is why I have to think and not feel.
She looks at me with her mouth open and her eyes wide. “He has ruined us,” she whispers.
“I’m not going to die thinking about that,” I hiss at her. “I am a martyr for my faith, not for a foolish accident. I will never die, and my father will never die either. We will meet in heaven.”
I write to my father. I always knew he would never die and now I am setting off on a journey, and I don’t doubt that I will see him at journey’s end.
The Lord comfort Your Grace . . . and though it has pleased God to take away two of your children, my husband and myself, yet think not, I most humbly beseech Your Grace, that you have lost them, but trust that we, by leaving this mortal life, have won an immortal life. And I for my part, as I have honored Your Grace in this life, will pray for you in another life.
THE TOWER, LONDON,
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1554
Two of my ladies, Mrs. Ellen and Elizabeth Tylney, stand with me at the window, waiting for the news that my husband of eight and a half months is dead. They pull me away from the window, laying hold of my arms, my shoulders, as if I am a child, as if I should not see the truth. The lieutenant of the Tower, John Brydges, stands at the door, his face stern, trying to feel nothing.
“I can watch.” I shrug them off. “I have no fear of death.” I want them to know that even in the valley of the shadow of death I am quite without fear. I want them to note it.
God supports me, but I am still horribly shocked when the cart goes by my window, rattling back from the scaffold at Tower Hill. I knew he had been beheaded, but I had not thought that the body would be a head shorter than I remembered him. His actual head has been tumbled into a basket beside the bloodstained body. It is pitiful, it is like a butcher’s shambles where the animals are beautiful beasts no longer but only sliced, skinned parts. There is the only man I ever had in my bed, and who was to me such a threat, such a potency. There he is, cut up, like a banned book with chapters ripped out. His body is headless, it looks so odd. They have dropped his handsome face into a basket and tossed his corpse into bloodstained straw. This is a horror I was not prepared for. I always thought of death as the shining shore, never as a butchered beast, the stiffening of a familiar body, pieces of a boy in a dirty cart.
“Guildford,” I whisper, almost to remind myself that it is him and not some trick of playactors.
The executioner, robed in black, with a high black hood making his faceless head grotesquely tall, walks heavy-footed, behind the tailgate. The cart goes to the chapel, the executioner goes to stand beside the newly built scaffold on the green, his hands folded over his axe, his head bowed. With a start, I realize that he is here, not as part of Guildford’s procession, but for another purpose altogether. He has come to behead me. Although I thought I was prepared, this gives me a heart-stopping jolt. My time has come. However unjust—really, however illogical and contradictory—I, too, will be diminished, reduced, beheaded.
I pause to write in the prayer book for John Brydges. I write at length, lost in this last moment. I am myself. Words never die. I think: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word. I think that I understand this: my body will die but my words will live. The bloody wreckage of Guildford’s body has shaken me—but I still cling to the words that never die. My teacher and mentor Kateryn Parr understood this. She faced death without fear. I will do so, too.
“Forasmuch as you have desired so simple a woman to write in so worthy a book, good Master Lieutenant,” I begin.
I do so like “Forasmuch.” I think it has genuine dignity. I write a paragraph, and then another, and then I sign my name, and Brother Feckenham looks at me and says gently: “You can write no more. It is time.”
I am ready. I have to be ready. There is nothing more to write. I have written a description of my discussions with Brother Feckenham, I have written to the queen, to my father, to Katherine. Now, finally, I write a farewell and I have finished my work. I am in my black gown and I have my prayer book in my hands, open.
“I am ready,” I say, and I note the pitiful cringing that makes me want to say: “Wait! Just wait a moment! Something else I must do! One moment, one second, one heartbeat more . . .”
John Feckenham leads the way and I hold my prayer book—my English prayer book—before me, and I try to read from it as we go down the narrow stairs, through the little garden, out of the garden gate and slowly towards the scaffold on the green. Of course, I can’t really see the words as we walk down the stairs, or down the garden path: nobody could. But once again it shows everyone that I am walking to the scaffold with a prayer book before me. Kateryn Parr the queen wrote these prayers, translated them from the Latin. Here I am, going to the scaffold with this evidence of my righteousness in my hand. This is our work. I am prepared to die for it. I will die with it in my hands.
The ladies behind me sob and sob in strangled gulping weeping. I hope that everyone can see that I am not crying like them. I hope that everyone can see that I am praying as I walk, my book before me, my whole presence deeply devout, showing that I am certain of resurrection. We all climb the ladder to the scaffold and assemble on the platform. There are very few people come to watch me be martyred. I am surprised how few. I speak to them.
I was afraid my voice would tremble but I do not tremble. I pray for mercy and I tell everyone, clearly, that I will be saved by the mercy of God—not by prayers from a priest, not by paid Masses in a chantry. I ask people to pray for me while I am alive, I mean them to understand that I don’t need prayers after my death for I will go directly to heaven. “No purgatory,” I want to add, but everyone knows that is what I mean.