Chapter 11
My daughter Susan stood as chief mourner at her funeral since I was too far from London to make the journey myself. I have found some comfort in knowing that the last Grey sister was carried to her rest by a daughter who loved her almost as much as I did.
I had outlived Jane. I had outlived Katherine.
Now I had outlived Mary as well. She was the last of three Grey sisters whose whole lives had been decided by other people’s ambitions before any of them were old enough to have ambitions of their own.
I do not know what it says about a woman who can watch three sisters die across three decades and still find that she has grief enough left over for each of them individually. I only know that I did.
I was past fifty by then. Somewhere in the accumulation of all that grief, I had stopped expecting my own life to end predictably.
Richard and I built something at Grimsthorpe that I still find difficult to describe without sounding sentimental, which I have never had much patience for.
So I will simply say that we were happy in the ordinary, unremarkable way that happiness tends to arrive once a person stops waiting for it to announce itself.
Richard spent those years becoming something I had never expected a gentleman usher to become.
He became a genuinely useful man to the county that had once known him only as my staff.
He sat as a Justice of the Peace across Lincolnshire.
He served a term as sheriff, and he took his place among the local officials who kept England running while the court occupied itself with grander matters.
I found I loved watching this almost as much as I had once loved watching him manage my household as a young man.
There was something quietly vindicating in seeing a man the court had dismissed as beneath me prove himself more genuinely useful than half the lords who had sneered at our marriage.
In 1572, he tried to claim a seat in the House of Lords through my own barony.
Astonishingly, for a short while, the claim was allowed to stand.
I will admit I took a petty satisfaction in it.
I enjoyed watching a title that had once been used to acquire me as a girl of fourteen become the very thing that elevated the man I loved and had chosen for myself.
The claim did not hold in the end, but I have never regretted that he tried, or that I encouraged him to.
I never stopped being difficult. I should admit this, because I have noticed a temptation to soften me into someone gentler.
I did not soften. I argued theology at my own table well into my sixties.
I corresponded with reformers whose opinions grew sharper, just as mine did.
I continued speaking bluntly in rooms that would have preferred my silence.
I had been called stubborn my entire life, by men who meant it as an insult and women who meant it as something closer to envy.
I had earned every syllable of that reputation, and I saw no reason to begin apologizing for it.
Susan grew into a sharp, capable woman. She married, and I hoped for grandchildren that I planned to spoil without a shred of the guilt I still carried over Mary Seymour.
Peregrine grew into his father’s steadiness and something of my own stubbornness.
It was a combination that served him considerably better than it ever served me.
In my final years, I thought of everyone this account has already named.
Brandon, who taught me that a marriage built on transaction could still grow into something honest, given enough time and enough shared conviction.
Katherine, who taught me what it cost a clever woman to survive a dangerous man, and whom I still miss with an ache that has never fully dulled.
My sons, taken in a single afternoon that I have never managed to write about without my hand shaking slightly on the page.
Mary Seymour, whose loss still carries more guilt than grief, though I have made my peace with never separating the two.
Jane, executed for a crown she never wanted.
And Katherine and Mary Grey, the last two sisters of a family the crown seemed determined to destroy.
I thought of Anne Askew too. I have never stopped wondering whether the woman I became was in some part my answer to watching her refuse to give her interrogators the names they wanted. She taught me that some convictions are worth keeping even when keeping them costs everything a person has.
I do not know how many pages I have left in me.
I have tried, across everything I have written here, to give you the whole story rather than only the parts that flatter me.
I have recounted the marriage I did not choose and the one I did.
I have told you about the children I loved without reservation and the one I failed.
I’ve been honest about the moments I was brave and the moments I was only ever difficult because difficult was the only shape my fear knew how to take.
I do not know what they will say of me or make of what my life amounted to.
I never had much control over what people chose to say about me while I was living.
And I do not expect to gain that control simply by writing the last word myself.
But if I am permitted one final word on the matter, let it be this.
They called me stubborn. They called me proud. They called me scandalous. Perhaps they were right. I had been born into a world that expected women to bow. I simply chose when I would willingly bend and when I would not.