Chapter 10
I outlived two kings and a queen before I ever considered myself old.
Widowhood suited me better than marriage ever had.
This is not the confession polite society expects of a woman recalling her years alone.
But I have never written this account for polite society, and I see no reason to do so now.
King Henry lived another decade past Percy’s death.
I spent those years quietly, at my father’s house.
And after his death, I managed what modest independence my small inheritance allowed me.
Between that, my own thin jointure from Percy, and the Crown’s grant of abbey lands, I found I had enough to keep a household of my own without wanting for much.
It was never anything close to what a countess’s life was meant to provide, but freedom was worth any trade.
I did not remarry. No one pressed me toward it particularly hard, and I confess I did not press myself either. I had spent sixteen years learning exactly what a contract could cost a woman who had no say in its terms. Once I was finally free of that arrangement, I had no appetite to repeat it.
I watched the King’s own marriages unfold from the same distance that I had once watched Anne Boleyn’s rise and fall.
Jane Seymour died within days of giving him his long-awaited son.
Queen Anne from Cleves was set aside almost as quickly as she arrived.
Queen Catherine Howard, Anne Boleyn’s cousin, was executed on the same ground where Anne lost her head.
Queen Katherine Parr survived him. By the standards of that court, she was a triumph.
Watching the list of King Henry’s wives lengthen year after year, I found myself thinking of Anne Boleyn differently. I had once believed she was the one woman capable of unmaking a marriage, a cardinal, and the settled order of England by simply existing.
I came to understand that I was wrong in that belief.
She had merely been the first name on a list that kept growing long after her.
One wife after another was summoned and discarded by the same appetite, the same court, and the same king who could not seem to tell the difference between wanting a woman and wanting whatever she represented that year.
Anne had not been rare. She had simply gone first.
The king died in early 1547. I was just past forty by then, and I felt immediate relief at the news.
The constant weight that had always pressed on my adult life finally lifted.
King Henry was the reason for much of it.
His own desire for Anne was the reason Wolsey tore her and Percy apart in the first place.
He was the reason Percy was forced to marry me instead.
In one fashion or another, all of it traced back to that one King’s appetites and anxieties.
I did not weep at his death. I do not think many women did.
The king’s son, Edward, inherited the throne. His reign brought significant changes. The Mass I had grown up hearing without question was abolished. The saints’ days and the familiar Latin rhythms of my childhood began disappearing from the churches around me.
I did not resist this openly. I want to be honest about that, since I am aware of the suspicions that attached to me in later years.
I do not wish to claim a courage that I did not actually possess.
I attended the services I was required to attend.
I kept my private thoughts private. I used the same skills I had learned as a girl crouched in a hallway, listening rather than speaking, and gathering rather than revealing.
But I felt something harden in me during those years.
I still felt some quiet loyalty to the old ways.
Perhaps it was simply the accumulated weight of everything I had lost by then.
But the old religion, unchanging and familiar, offered something the rest of my life had never offered me: a fixed point.
King Edward died young, and his half-sister, Mary Tudor, took the throne.
The old religion came flooding back into the churches almost as quickly as it had drained from them a few years before.
I remember the relief of openly attending Mass again.
But that relief did not sit easily beside everything else Mary Tudor’s reign asked me to hold at once.
Holding the lands the Crown had granted me after Percy’s death grew steadily more uncomfortable.
I want to record the irony of that, since I have come to find it almost unbearably fitting.
I held lands stripped from the old church even as I clung to that same church’s rites in whatever ways I could get away with.
I do not think I ever fully reconciled that contradiction.
And I have decided that I no longer need to.
I spent my whole life being moved by forces other than myself.
I was married off for advantage and granted land by a Crown that had no interest in my private conscience.
I took what was given, and I kept what I believed.
If those two things sat uneasily together, I was hardly the only woman forced into that same situation.
Uneasy as that land was to hold, it was also the first real means I ever had of managing anything entirely on my own.
I managed it with no father left to write on my behalf, and no husband left to overrule me.
I had no contract to satisfy, no man’s temper to manage, and no one’s permission required before I acted.
Bess of Hardwick was managing her own accounts by then too.
I wrote to her once, during those years.
She was Lady Cavendish then and on her second marriage.
She was still years from the fortune and fame she would eventually build.
The letter was about nothing grander than a dispute over cattle.
A tenant of mine had run afoul of one of her servants over some parcel of ground at Pentrich.
I wrote to ask her, woman to woman, to see the cattle released and the tenant’s land left to him as he’d paid for it. I do not recall now whether she obliged him. What I do recall is that I was a widow writing to settle a dispute on her own land and expecting to be heard.
I had spent my life learning that my voice carried no real weight of its own.
It was implied that I required a father’s negotiation, a husband’s name, or some man’s authority standing behind me before anyone troubled to listen.
Here, finally, there was no one standing behind me at all.
There was only my own hand, my own name, and a servant somewhere in Derbyshire who released a tenant’s cattle because a woman named Mary Percy had asked him to.
I think of the girl in Sheffield sometimes, the one who crouched in a hallway and listened to grown women weigh her future like a coin.
I think of her with a distance that surprises me.
That girl believed that a title would make her matter to someone.
She believed a husband’s attention could be earned through patience and the correct behavior.
She believed that suffering quietly was its own kind of virtue that would eventually be rewarded.
I do not blame her for believing these things.
She had no evidence yet to teach her otherwise.
But I look back at her now, and I want to reach backward across those years and tell her what took me decades to learn myself.
No one was coming to rescue her. Not her father, who loved her in his own limited way but valued the contract more than the girl bound inside it.
Not her husband, who spent their entire marriage proving exactly how little her comfort mattered against his own grievances.
And not even the annulment she once believed might finally set her free, which failed the moment it met a sworn lie from a man who preferred his own convenience to her liberty.
She rescued herself, in the end, though it took the better part of a lifetime and required nothing more heroic than simply outlasting everyone who had ever tried to define her.
Two kings and a queen came and went across the years of my widowhood. And I remained exactly where I had chosen to plant myself: loyal to my old faith, while managing my own modest affairs.
I did not know, sitting through those three reigns, that a fourth was coming. I could not have known that this final reign would ask me to make my own genuine, dangerous choice. It was still waiting for me, somewhere just beyond the horizon of everything I had already survived.