Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,2

with something.”

“Yes, Father,” I said, but I could not resist looking back at the boy as I scurried away. I had good reason to look back, after all; without knowing it, I had met my husband.

No, I was not born to high estate, and neither was my husband, the eldest son of a man who had been executed as a traitor. The titles we held were gained, and will die, all in a single generation. Yet if we were upstarts, we were no different from many others of our day. Dukes, earls, even queens—the court of Henry VIII was plentiful with those who had owed everything to one man, and in January 1547, five-and-thirty years after little John Dudley entered my life, that man, King Henry, lay dying at Whitehall. Henry VIII was an upstart in his own way, as well: his dynasty had sat on the throne for only two generations.

Upstart he might be, but I could not remember another king; I’d been but a babe in arms when Henry VIII came to the throne. I had known all six of his queens, if only well enough to bend a knee in some cases.

I mused upon this as I made my way from the queen’s side of Whitehall, where I had been attending the sixth and last of the king’s wives, Catherine Parr. There was no sign here that anything was amiss: meals were still being brought into the sick man’s chamber, accompanied by the sounds of trumpets. They would stay in the chamber for a decent interval, I supposed, before being brought out and distributed to the poor, who surely by now must have been wondering about all of this extra bounty they were receiving.

As I had hoped, my husband was inside the chamber we had been allotted at court. He rose from the desk at which he had been working and kissed me. “What brings you here?”

“I came to check on the king’s health.”

“Did the queen send you?”

“No, but I expect she will be glad to hear a report.”

“Then you must keep this secret, my dear, at least for a little while longer. King Henry is dead. He’s been dead for two days.”

I stared. “Why has no one been told?”

“The Earl of Hertford wished there to be no difficulties until King Edward was brought to Westminster. He, of course, has been told, along with the lady Elizabeth. The earl brought the news himself. Tomorrow it will be announced in Parliament.”

King Edward. It seemed a strange title for the nine-year-old I’d known since he was christened, whose mother’s funeral procession I’d ridden in. “Why was the queen not told? Why not the lady Mary?”

“They will be, very shortly.” My husband gave an uneasy cough. “I suppose Queen Catherine is expecting to be made regent.”

“Yes.”

“Then she will be disappointed, I fear. The king did not wish a woman—even a woman as able as the queen—to have the rule during the king’s minority. Don’t glare at me so, my dear. I am only the messenger. In truth, the council won’t have the rule of England either, not completely anyway. The council has agreed. There will be a protector.”

For a moment, I paused to admire the industriousness of the men who had settled all of this in just two days, while keeping up this façade of a living king. But I knew my chronicles. I frowned. “A protector?”

For the first time, my husband smiled. “Shades of Richard III! And yes, it is to be an uncle. But Hertford has no kingly ambitions, and it’s wise to have a single man in charge, even though he will be answerable to us on the council. And in any case, it’s a different world now than it was in 1483.”

“Well, it is that,” I conceded. I sighed, thinking how disappointed the queen would be not to be named regent for the young king. She’d been closer to him than any of the other queens, for Jane Seymour, Edward’s mother, had died soon after giving birth, the good-natured Anne of Cleves had lasted only a few months as queen, and poor Katherine Howard had been badly in need of a wise mother herself. Catherine Parr had been on good terms with all three of King Henry’s children—no easy task, as each was as different as their respective mothers. Surely she had deserved the honor of a regency after putting up with her increasingly lame and ill-tempered royal husband. Worse, Anne Seymour, Countess of Hertford, was