Chapter 6
I want to be honest about what that request actually was, because I have found that people prefer the more touching version of this story.
They prefer the version where a grieving duchess opens her arms to her dead friend’s orphaned child out of love alone.
There was love in it. I had adored Katherine, and some of that affection transferred, unbidden, to the daughter she left behind.
But I had not asked for the responsibility of an infant.
I had not been consulted. And Parliament, in its infinite talent for promising money it had no intention of producing, assured me a pension would follow to cover the child’s keeping.
It did not follow. Not fully, and not for want of my asking.
I wrote to William Cecil in the Lord Protector’s office.
I explained the situation as clearly as I knew how.
The queen’s child, I told him, still lay at my house.
I stressed that her company and her keep were supported entirely on my own account.
I called myself a beggar, and meant it. I had a household of servants, nurses, and a baby who did not run on promises.
And I had exhausted my patience waiting for the government to make good on the one it had made me.
I do not think warmly of myself in that correspondence, reading it back now.
I sound like a woman keeping ledgers and tallying what was owed to her.
I sound like I was more concerned with unpaid accounts than the baby girl sleeping under my roof.
I have decided, in the writing of this, not to pretend otherwise.
Mary Seymour was not a burden I asked for.
And I did not pretend, even to myself, that I loved her the way I loved my own sons.
I fed her. I clothed her. I gave her a household, a name, and every practical thing a motherless infant required.
But I resented, quite openly, being asked to give all of it without the support I had been promised.
I do not know if that makes me far less kind than the story prefers me to be.
I only know it makes me honest, and I’d rather be remembered honestly than remembered well.
I have repeatedly wondered why I openly felt that way when I loved Mary’s mother so completely. I think now that this was precisely the trouble. Mary had Katherine’s eyes, and I could not look at that small face without seeing the friend I had just lost looking back out of it.
I was not comforted by the resemblance, as some women might have been.
I was undone by it. It was easier, God forgive me, to keep some distance than to grieve Katherine with every feeding and every cry.
I do not offer that as an excuse. I only offer it as the truth I have never said aloud until now: that I failed to properly love her because loving her would have meant grieving her mother every single day.
And I was not strong enough, or perhaps not willing enough, to carry both at once.
Mary did not live to see her second year.
I have never found the words to describe that loss without sounding as though I am defending myself, so I will simply say what I believe to be true.
Illness took children constantly in those years.
It took them swiftly and without warning.
A household as strained as mine had become understaffed, underfunded, and run by a woman fighting a government for money that never fully arrived. I could not fully protect her from it.
I have wondered whether a warmer woman might have kept better watch. I do not have an answer. I only have the guilt. And I have the late realization that resentment and guilt can occupy the same house.
I did not know, in the spring of 1550, that the worst of that year had not yet arrived.
My sons, Henry and Charles, were growing into young men by then.
They had gone up to St John’s College in the autumn of 1549 to study under Martin Bucer, the German reformer who had fled the Continent for England.
My sons were eager enough students to make the exile feel worthwhile.
Bucer wrote to me himself more than once about their progress.
My boys were becoming learned men, learning Greek, theology, and the discipline of an argument well made.
I believed they had decades left to use that knowledge. They already held such promise. Henry had carried the orb at Edward’s coronation in 1547, and both boys had been made Knights of the Bath before either had reached fifteen.
Henry carried his father’s title and something of his father’s ease in a room. Charles trailed behind him the way younger brothers do, half echo and half his own person. I loved them both with a ferocity I had never quite managed to summon for Mary, whatever guilt that admission still carries.
I was staying at Kingston that summer, a village near Cambridge. I was unwell, but close enough to visit my sons and far enough away to believe I had time to recover before I needed to.
The sweating sickness came through Cambridge in the summer of 1551. It came fast enough that a man could wake healthy and be dead by nightfall.
As it passed through, my boys were moved to the Bishop of Lincoln’s own Buckden palace in the hope that distance alone might save them. It did not. It reached them there on the fourteenth of July.
I rose from my own sickbed the moment word reached me and traveled to Buckden as fast as any horse could carry a frightened woman.
I arrived in time to sit with Charles before he died.
I did not arrive in time for Henry. He was already gone by the hour I reached the house.
I have spent countless hours turning over the cruelty of that.
I was given one son to hold and denied the other, as though grief required proof that it could always find a way to be worse than you’ve already imagined it.
They died on the same day. I have never found a way to write that sentence that makes it easier to read, and I no longer try.
Henry died in the morning, and Charles not long after.
They died almost six years to the season after their father died at Guildford.
It was as though the sickness had simply been waiting for both of them to grow old enough to be worth taking.
I do not remember much of the weeks that followed with any clarity. I remember understanding, somewhere in the fog of it, that the dynasty Brandon and I had built had ended in a single afternoon. I was the only one left standing in the wreckage of it.
I remember thinking of Mary Seymour, gone the year before, and feeling something close to shame at how differently I had grieved the two losses.
I grieved loudly and uncontrollably for the sons I had chosen to love without reservation.
For the daughter, I had grieved quietly and guiltily.
I had never quite let myself love her in the same way, and now I would never have the chance to.
I privately buried them together at Buckden.
I could not yet manage a public grief to match the private one.
It was two months before I could bear a formal memorial at all.
I remember none of the ceremony itself. I remember only that it took ten dozen escutcheons to say what I could not say myself, which was that an entire line had ended in the space of hours, and that I was all that remained of it.
There was an unwelcome thought that came to me more than once that autumn.
I have never spoken of it until now. In my worst hours, I wondered whether God had taken my sons because I had failed to love another woman’s daughter as I should have.
It was an ugly thought, and I am not proud of having had it, but I promised myself I would tell this story honestly.
And honesty requires admitting the thoughts that shame you, along with the ones that don’t.
I finally recognized that it was the same logic I had spent my whole life resisting.
It was based on the same ledger-keeping God I refused to believe in.
I did not believe salvation could be earned through good works, and I did not believe grief could be assigned as punishment for a woman’s failure to feel tenderness on command.
So, in the end, I chose not to believe it.
But I will admit that the choosing took effort.
And the uninvited thought returned more than once in the years that followed.
I spent that year losing children I had raised with entirely different hearts. I could not decide which loss frightened me more - the one that broke me open, or the one I was still not entirely sure I had allowed myself to feel.