Chapter 11
Queen Elizabeth came to the throne when I was well past fifty. I remember thinking that I had already lived through enough reversals of faith and fortune that one more should hardly have troubled me. I was wrong about that, as I had been wrong about a great many things across my long life.
The new queen did not move against the old faith immediately.
It was said that she had no wish to make windows into men’s souls.
And for the better part of a decade, those of us who kept quietly to the old faith found we could do so without much interference, provided we conformed outwardly and kept our private devotions private.
I heard Mass in my own house behind closed doors during those years. For a long while, that quiet arrangement seemed to satisfy everyone involved. The Crown did not ask what I believed, and I did not trouble the Crown by declaring it.
That easy arrangement began to change as the years wore on. And I felt the change the way one feels weather shifting before a storm arrives. The Scottish queen’s presence in England had a great deal to do with that, I think.
I never met her, that other Mary, the Queen of Scots.
She had fled her own kingdom and was forced from her Scottish throne by her own nobles.
She’d arrived in England seeking her royal cousin’s protection.
Instead, she found herself a prisoner in all but name - watched and moved from house to house while men on both sides of the border debated what her presence would eventually mean for England’s peace.
I felt something for her I had not expected to feel.
It was not quite kinship, since our circumstances differed enormously.
But it was a familiar, uncomfortable recognition all the same.
She was a queen, and I was merely a countess by marriage.
But we were both women whose fates had been shaped by other people’s calculations rather than our own.
Her Catholic faith turned her into a banner other men could rally beneath whether she wished it or not. Her very existence was a threat to Queen Elizabeth simply by virtue of her blood, regardless of anything she herself might have chosen.
It was only a matter of time before someone tried to rally beneath that banner.
The Rising of the North came in the autumn of 1569.
It was an uprising meant to tear the Protestant reign out by its roots, restore Mass to every church in England, and free the Scottish queen from her confinement and place her on the throne.
Charles Neville, Earl of Westmorland, led it alongside another man whose name struck me harder than any other name in that whole affair could have struck me.
Thomas Percy, seventh Earl of Northumberland.
My husband’s own nephew, who had inherited the very earldom Percy had once so carefully tried to keep from passing to anyone who shared his blood.
There was a strange, cruel symmetry in it.
Percy had disinherited his brothers rather than let the earldom fall to their line.
He had died believing that he had closed that door for good and handed everything to a Crown that would never trouble itself over old northern loyalties the way a Percy heir inevitably would.
And yet, decades later, the earldom had found its way back into that same blood regardless. And the very nephew Percy had tried so hard to exclude had taken up arms in the name of restoring the old faith and placing the Scottish queen above the one who currently held the throne.
I never fled across any border or plotted with any conspirator.
I never did anything beyond holding a quiet loyalty to the old religion and a certain sympathy for the Scottish queen, neither of which I ever spoke aloud.
But the rising changed the climate around all of us who shared those beliefs, openly or otherwise.
The queen’s early reluctance to inquire too closely into private conscience began to harden into something more watchful.
And a papal decree the following year changed what that private conscience was even permitted to mean.
It declared that the queen herself was no true monarch, and it released her Catholic subjects from any duty to obey her.
This meant that a private Mass could no longer be read as simple, harmless devotion.
Rome itself had just told every English Catholic that loyalty to the old religion and loyalty to the queen could not both be true at once.
And any quiet Mass I had ever heard in my own house now looked closer to treason than to piety.
I was never charged with anything. I believe I was watched and named in reports I never saw and could not have answered even if I had.
I believe I was suspected of hearing Mass and of favoring the Scottish queen’s cause.
But suspicion, however persistent, is not the same thing as proof.
And I lived out my final years in the narrow, uneasy space between the two.
I was neither punished nor cleared, but simply watched from whatever careful distance the Crown keeps for women it cannot quite decide are truly dangerous.
Thomas Percy did not share that luxury. He was eventually captured and faced execution. Sometimes, I wondered whether my own suspected sympathies might have earned me the same fate had anyone ever thought me worthy of acting against rather than merely watching.
I have thought about these types of ironies often, in the long, quiet years of my old age. I began my adult life bound to a marriage that existed only because a young woman at court caught the eye of a king who needed a male heir, whatever she herself had wanted.
At the very end of my life, I found myself invested in another fight over succession, and another argument over who would inherit a crown.
This time it was the crown of Anne Boleyn’s own daughter, contested by a foreign queen I had never met.
The same forces that had once decided my fate without consulting me were still turning, decades later, grinding out the same old questions of legitimacy and fate and blood.
But this time, I chose which side I wished to stand nearest to. No one arranged this for me. No one negotiated this. I chose it myself, quietly and dangerously, in the privacy of my own conscience. Whatever the outcome, it was mine, finally chosen rather than assigned.