Chapter 9
I named a dog Gardiner before I fled the country, and I have never once regretted the sequence of those two events, though I understood well enough that the first likely hastened the second.
Mary had been queen for over a year by then, and Gardiner - my Gardiner, the bishop whose hand I had once taken at a dinner table purely to insult him - had climbed to Lord Chancellor in the queen’s new government.
He was now a man powerful enough to make good on every grudge he had been patiently collecting against me.
I did not find that a reason for caution.
Perversely, I found it a reason for one final provocation before the walls I could feel closing around my household finally fell.
I took a small dog of mine, dressed it in clerical vestments cut to mimic that bishop’s own robes, and gave it his name.
I paraded that dog through my household in front of enough witnesses to guarantee that the story of my calling the dog Gardiner would travel.
Because a joke told in private accomplishes nothing, and I had never once in my life told a joke I wanted kept quiet.
I will not pretend I did not know what I was risking. I understood precisely what it meant to humiliate the second most powerful man in England at the precise moment he had every means of my punishment in his own hands.
I did it anyway. After everything the last several years had already taken from me, some part of me had already decided that I would rather leave England than swallow my tongue out of a caution I had never much respected in the first place.
The walls fell quickly after that.
Religious persecution had been tightening for months already. Reformers were being arrested and questioned. Some were burned for convictions I shared without apology. Gardiner did not need my dog to justify coming for my household. But I suspect it hastened his actions considerably.
He summoned Richard that winter, supposedly over an old crown debt Richard had inherited through service to the previous government.
We all understood the debt was merely an excuse.
The real charge, unspoken but unmistakable, was my religion and Richard’s loyalty to it.
Gardiner intended to use whatever leverage the law provided him to bring both of us to account.
We did not wait to discover exactly what that accounting would look like.
Richard left England first, in the middle of 1554.
He left months before I did, on a pretext official enough to survive scrutiny.
He would travel abroad to recover monies the crown still owed from Brandon’s old service.
It was a debt real enough to make the excuse plausible and small enough that no one thought to question why a gentleman usher needed to chase it personally.
I stayed behind and managed what remained of our household, moving myself to my house at the Barbican in London. I reasoned that it would be easier to slip away quietly from a city full of strangers than from Grimsthorpe, where every tenant on the estate would have noticed a duchess disappearing.
Richard and I had decided that flight was the only choice left to us that did not end in the Tower or worse.
It was not a decision made lightly. I had spent my entire life building something in England.
I had lands, my title, my reputation, and a household that had sheltered reformers when sheltering them was dangerous.
Leaving meant abandoning nearly all of it.
It meant trusting strangers on the Continent to shelter a duchess who would arrive with considerably less wealth and considerably more danger than any host might reasonably want.
Before dawn on New Year’s Day, 1555, I slipped out of my home with five others, disguised as a merchant’s wife. I was carrying Susan, not yet a year old, wrapped against a cold that seemed determined to test exactly how much a body could endure before surrendering.
I had worn silk and ermine as Duchess of Suffolk.
I wore wool that night, plain and rough against skin unused to anything but softness.
I found that the disguise unsettled me less than I expected.
There was a strange freedom in becoming no one important.
I was merely a woman carrying a child through the dark, indistinguishable from a thousand other women doing exactly the same thing for reasons no one troubled to ask about.
We made for the wharf and took a barge to the Essex coast, where Richard was waiting. We stayed there some days more, disguised still, before a ship could be arranged to carry us across.
Richard and I did not stop running, in one sense or another, for the better part of four years.
The crossing itself was the easy part. It was the journey after landing that nearly broke me.
There was driving rain the entire way. Roads had turned to a misery of mud, and when we finally reached Wesel, in the duchy of Cleves, we arrived with nowhere arranged to stay, and no way to find the contact we had been told would take us in.
I sat in the rain with an infant against my chest. I was in a foreign city where I did not yet speak the language. I understood for the first time in my life what it meant to have no household and no name that opened a single door.
Cleves took us in eventually. But it was cautious about harboring English refugees whose presence might complicate delicate diplomatic arrangements they had no interest in disturbing. We stayed there only briefly before moving on, into the Rhineland proper, toward Strasbourg.
We learned exactly how far a duchess’s reputation traveled once she no longer had land or title to back it.
In exile, I was simply a Protestant woman with a small child and a husband whose only real asset was his own resourcefulness.
Doors that would once have opened instantly now required considerably more persuasion.
Frankfurt very nearly finished us entirely.
I will not dwell too long on what happened there, because the details serve nothing but my own lingering horror at how close we came to disaster.
But I will say that we escaped a mob’s violence in that city.
I remember a crowd that had stopped being a crowd and had become something with a single, ugly purpose.
I remember Richard’s hand closing hard enough around mine to bruise it, and understanding that we were being hunted rather than merely disliked.
I remember believing that I would not see my children grow.
We got out. But not by any cleverness of our own.
It was only luck, and whatever mercy the men who might have killed us decided to extend instead.
I learned very quickly that exile was not simply a matter of reduced comfort.
It was a matter of survival in the truest sense.
It did not care what a person once was, only that they were still standing at the end of any given day.
We survived it. And survival, stripped of its dignity and its comfort, is still survival.
We lived simply and relied on the kindness of reformers who saw us as allies worth the risk of harboring.
I discovered, somewhat to my own surprise, that I did not miss the silk and the servants nearly as much as I expected to.
I missed safety. I missed certainty. I did not particularly miss being important.
My son Peregrine was born in Wesel that October of 1555.
The circumstances of his birth were considerably less comfortable than any of my previous children.
I labored in a household that was not truly ours.
And I was attended by women who spoke a language I did not know.
I remember thinking that I had traded a duchess’s confinement chamber for something closer to what most women in England actually experienced when they gave birth.
There was no guarantee of comfort and no certainty that either mother or child would survive the trying.
Thankfully, he arrived healthy and loud enough to announce himself to an entire household that had not been expecting quite so much noise from so small a person. I held him and thought that I had built an entire family out of nothing but conviction and the audacity to act on it.
We chose the name Peregrine because its literal meaning is wandering. His name meant one who comes from abroad. He would carry the reminder of that terrible year in his own name for the rest of his life, whether he ever understood why or not.
***
It was a reformer named Jan ?aski who finally found us a door that did not require persuasion to open at all. He had contacts at the Polish court, and word reached the King, Sigismund Augustus, that an English duchess and her family were fleeing Queen Mary’s persecution with nowhere left to turn.
I have already recounted that years before, I’d refused that same king’s marriage proposal.
I thought little of it at the time. I did not know that I was refusing a king whose kindness I would desperately need one day.
Thankfully, Sigismund did not hold the refusal against me.
He offered us refuge in his own territory without hesitation.
I still marvel at the mercy of a man who might reasonably have felt slighted.
Instead, he chose to save the life of the woman who had once turned him down.
Poland-Lithuania received us with a warmer welcome than either Cleves or the Rhineland.
Sigismund did more than shelter us. Before our exile ended, he appointed Richard and me as administrators of a portion of Lithuania itself.
I had gone from a fugitive with nothing but a merchant’s disguise to a woman entrusted with governing a piece of a foreign king’s territory.
I did it on the strength of nothing but a king’s own generosity and my husband’s competence.
We stayed as long as safety required. We watched from a considerable distance as Queen Mary’s reign continued its work of unmaking everything reform had built in England. We waited for news that never seemed to arrive quickly enough for people living entirely on a borrowed welcome.
In that year, I lost nearly everything I had once measured my worth by - lands, title, comfort, and the easy assumption that doors would open simply because I approached them.
But I gained proof of something I had suspected but never fully tested: that I could survive without any of it.
The woman underneath the silk and the servants had been considerably more capable than the court had ever given her credit for.
And I had married a man steady enough to build an entire life beside me out of nothing but resourcefulness and shared conviction.
I did not know, wandering half of Europe with an infant, a toddler, and a husband who had risked everything to stand beside me, whether I would ever see England again.
I only knew that I had chosen this life every bit as deliberately as I had once been denied any choice at all.
Whatever it cost me, I found I did not regret the choosing.