Free The Men Who Would Be King by Josephine Ross Page A

stayed where she was to await the outcome of the rebels’ rough wedding plans.
    Wyatt came near to success. So great was the general antagonism to Queen Mary’s choice of a foreign consort that peaceable Englishmen flocked to take up arms against their sovereign. Forces sent to fight Wyatt chose instead to support him; under the stirring cry “We are all Englishmen,” they marched on London. “Much noise and tumult was everywhere” as the fighting raged through the streets of the city. But the attempt to “resist the coming-in of the Spanish King” ended in failure. In the evening of February 7, 1554, Wyatt and his chief supporters were taken to the Tower, where, as they entered, they were greeted with manhandling and taunts; Wyatt, “holding his arms under his side, and looking grievously with a grim look upon the said lieutenant, said, ‘It is no mastery now.’ And so they passed on.”
    The mastery was Mary’s. “It seems to me that she ought not to spare Courtenay and the Lady Elizabeth on this occasion,” Renard urged, “as while they are alive there will always be plots to raise them to the throne, and they would be justly punished, as it is publicly known that they are guilty, and so worthy of death.” On February 12, 1554, Courtenay was committed again to the Tower from which he had so recently been released, and Elizabeth, now very ill indeed, was obliged to set out on the thirty-mile journey to London. The emperor was informed: “Wyatt cannot be executed until he has been confronted with the Lady Elizabeth, who is so unwell that she only travels two or three leagues a day, and has such a stricken conscience that she refuses meat or drink. It is taken for certain that she is with child.” It was as though all the austerity and caution of her years since the Seymour affair had been to no purpose. A week later Renard reported triumphantly that French plots had been uncovered involving Courtenay and Elizabeth—“who, they say, has lived loosely like her mother, and is now with child.” The flirting, giggling, bleeding specter of Anne Boleyn must have traveled with Elizabeth on the jolting journey from Buckinghamshire to London and the Tower.
    â€œThe Lady Elizabeth arrived yesterday, dressed all in white, and followed by a great company. She had her litter opened to show herself to the people, and her pale face kept a proud, haughty expression,” Renard reported. Even at such a moment of despair, Elizabeth was intensely conscious of what the people should think of her; the white dress of purity, and the air of regal dignity, may have suggested haughtiness to Renard, but even he could not describe her appearance as being that of a pregnant wanton. In the desperate, stricken letter that she wrote, a month later, when Mary’s deputation came to remove her from Whitehall to take her to the Tower, care for her reputation was an anguished theme, as she begged her sister to let her answer the charges before being imprisoned—“that thus shamefully I may not be cried out on as now I shall be,” being “condemned in all men’s sight before my desert known.” Thomas Seymour pressed upon her memory as she begged Mary to see her, and the words spilled from her pen like unchecked tears: “In late days I heard my Lord of Somerset say that if his brother had been suffered to speak with him he had never suffered but the persuasions were made to him so great that he was brought in belief that he could not live safely if the Admiral lived and that made him give his consent to his death. . . .” Her pleas were ignored, and on the following day, Palm Sunday, she was taken by barge down the Thames to the Tower of London. In pouring rain she was rowed through the dark arches below London Bridge, to where the water slapped against the slippery steps of the Privy Stairs, at which her mother had landed before