England was turning upside down. And in two country houses, the echoings of it tortured the hearts of two who had, each in her own way, the same love for their people that had made their father the King he was. Mary—Elizabeth—the two heirs to the throne — and each could do nothing. They must sit and wait, as John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, swept all before him in the madness of his lust for power.
There was no balancing the scales for these two daughters of Henry. As one gained slight favor, the other fell out. For one brief balance of time, fate turned in favor of Elizabeth, to warm the cold household at Hatfield. They would not let her see Edward, but he was encouraged to write to her, and ask her to send him a portrait of herself. It was a gesture toward a reconciliation. She was ill, and it was no pretense. The Council knew it. She seemed no longer a threat. It was decided at last that she might have back the two loved persons who had betrayed her in fear, but for whom she never had a moment’s malice.
The day came when Robert Tyrwhitt and his lady came to take their leave. Like the little ferret he was, he bowed low, his ingratiating voice making a distasteful noise in her ear.
“Your Grace will not hold it against two of your most devoted servants that their charge, none of their seeking, came at a time when you were in grief and anxiety?” he insinuated.
“Good Sir Robert, how should that be? Am I not forever grateful for unselfish care?”
“Your Grace will not forget the … precepts … I have humbly striven to impart?” Lady Tyrwhitt petitioned.
“Lady,” Elizabeth told her, “I shall forget nothing! You may believe me!”
The words had the bite of ice on the tongue.
Left to herself, she put a considering finger to one cheek, and took her lower lip in her small, sharp teeth.
“I have rid my house of cockroaches,” she told herself. “What next? This assiduity, this fawning courtesy, in the place of insolence, leaves somewhat to think on. My poor Ned! You must be sicker than I knew of.”
And then came a knocking at the door, a timid tapping rather as though a dog begged for entrance. And it opened on Ashley and Parry.
Elizabeth looked at the two sagging, working faces, Ashley weeping, Parry, his lips slack and stammering without sound, his eyes turning awray from hers to the floor. She u'as across the room, she was flinging an arm round Ashley’s neck, putting out her free hand to Parry.
“God’s precious soul!” said Elizabeth, breaking into a round oath for the first time for many a long day. “Good friends! I am overjoyed at the sight of you! Give you welcome home.”
Ashley crumpled to her knees, her face buried in her young mistress’s skirts. Parry was making the strangest sounds: between a groan and a wheezing sniffle. It could have been a
“Lady—Iady-oh, my dear love, my dear Grace—” Ashley scene of grotesque degradation. It was not.
sobbed, her flaccid body shaking as with an ague. “I cannot, I am not—oh, God have pity!”
“Why now, why now—what’s this?” Elizabeth called, high and clear. “Rise, you dear fool, rise, I tell you. And give over blubbering. You are soaking my gown. You’ll give me rheu-matism, and then God pity you indeed! ”
“Your Grace—” Parry was stammering. “Your Grace—”
He shook his grizzled head helplessly, crouching on one knee, covering his eyes with his hands.
“Look you, now,” Elizabeth said, “enough of this! Stand up, man. Ashley, I say, stand up. I’d drag you up, but that you weigh a haystack.”
They shambled to their feet and stood there, two grayheaded, heavy figures, dissolving in shame and grief and incredulous joy, all in one.
“It was the fear—” Ashley choked. “The fear— Oh Bess, my Bess, I thought that I would die for you—but I’m a gutless coward when there is pain—”
Elizabeth grasped her by one shoulder and set a hand across her mouth.
“No more. Do you hear me, no more! Never a word of these things again. ’Tis done; and we’re together. You shall never hear a word from me, I swear it; nor will I from you. Ashley, blow your nose! Parry, sit you down. Fetch breath, the two of you, and wipe your faces. You cannot fancy what a sight you are!”
“But you will never trust us any more,” Ashley said with a gasping sob.
There was a moment of silence. Elizabeth said slowly, deliberately, “Know you what? I think that I have learned a true thing, that must never be unlearned. Trust is not for Princes … never! Nowhere! In no wise whatever! And having found this truth, I will wear it as a bright and hard jewel, against my heart… Now, give me news of my brother.”
Ashley was still sobbing, she could not stop. Parry said heavily, “The King is ill, my lady. The King is very ill.”
Elizabeth caught her breath. With her instinctive shrewdness, she went straight to the heart of the matter. If the Tyrwhitts, in their leave-taking, had shown such a sudden access of anxious politeness, they were showing it to the second in succession, and to the Protestant in succession!
While in another country house, the first in succession—the Catholic—was fighting for all she held dear. Day after day, emissaries came from Northumberland, the Council, demanding that her beloved religion be thrown out. She was forbidden to hear mass. She was urged, constrained, and commanded to capitulate to Protestantism. Still she would not give in. This Tudor too had a will, a strength of mind and a loyalty they could not reckon with.
And young King Edward languished—grew more and more ill, until reports of his approaching death were in every capital in Europe, and all eyes were on England with its precarious throne rocking between greed, poverty and religious strife — and the ever-tightening grip of the unscrupulous Northumberland.
Though Somerset had been released once after his first imprisonment in the Tower, he was soon to enter it again, for the last time, until he walked out to the public scaffold outside the grim walls of the Tower, on Tower Hill. There he died. And his body, as Tom’s had been, was tossed unceremoniously into the earth beneath the chapel flooring, in the Tower.
Now—for Northumberland—the last shred of opposition to himself and his full power over the throne of England was gone. His eyes swept across the lawful line of succession, and his ambition discarded it. Mary was Catholic—she would not refute her faith. She must be done away with. Elizabeth he recognized as no putty for his molding hands. She too must be set aside.
He would do it. He could. He knew the way. But first he must provide that tool for his own ruling of England — a puppet King or Queen to take the place of the dying one. Near at hand was a likely one, in the person of young Lady Jane Grey, daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, cousin to the King. Before she knew what was happening, this child found herself married to Northumberland’s son, Guildford Dudley. Docile to the will of her parents, as always, she could do nothing but obey when they spoke. Yet it must have seemed, for the time being, a release from bondage to be able to leave the strict, virtually sadistic rule of her home, to find a brief happiness with a boy who knew no more than she of the part Northumberland would have them play.
The stage was set. The raising of the curtain was merely a matter of time now. One thing was left to be done, and that was easy. No one will ever know if the young King Edward knew what documents he signed, as Northumberland’s strong hand guided his failing one at the bottom of the “will” that declared his own two sisters bastards, and named Jane Grey as his heir.
Nothing was left now but for that one event of God’s doing, which this mad ambitious man might twist for his own ends. On July 6th, 1553, it happened. Edward Tudor, Edward VI, King Henry’s dearest hope, died. But he died not as a King, with a loyal, sorrowing people hearing the news, remembering him, loving him. He died in secret, hidden behind doors that were guarded by the rats and ferrets who hoped to wrest England out of the maelstrom for their own. Two days went by, still no word leaked out.