A Dangerous Inheritance

Interlude

February 1562. Whitehall Palace.

‘Madam, I beg of you, if you will not marry, to name your successor,’ Cecil pleads, looking drawn with exhaustion. ‘The matter is now urgent.’

‘In a matter most unpleasing to me, your concern alone is welcome,’ Queen Elizabeth says doggedly. They have been wrangling for hours now, it is now two in the morning, and all Cecil wants to do is collapse into bed.

‘The choice remains an unenviable one,’ his mistress sighs. ‘Mary, Queen of Scots, Katherine Grey or Lady Le

‘Your father King Henry excluded the Scottish line from the Act of Succession,’ Cecil reminds her. ‘And even if he had not, Queen Mary is a stranger, born out of this realm, and ca

‘But Lady Le

‘It is not possible for her to succeed, under the terms of the Act,’ Cecil insists. ‘Will your Majesty now proceed against her?’

‘We will have her in the Tower for now, to teach her a lesson.’

‘That leaves the Lady Katherine and her son.’

Elizabeth fumes. ‘She should not have a son!’

‘In some quarters, he is seen as a likely successor,’ Cecil says cautiously. He could add that there have also been calls for Elizabeth to be overthrown, so that this Protestant boy can be raised as a king, with his mother as nominal regent. But he remains silent. Those offenders – and they are a minority – will be dealt with efficiently and their sedition punished. There will be a few ears lopped in the weeks to come.

‘Never!’ the Queen snaps. ‘I’ll not acknowledge a bastard as my successor. And I will never allow that false, vain girl to succeed me.’

‘Then, Madam, with respect, who is there? You have rejected all other possibilities.’

‘I’ll not have her. Her title to the crown is weak, as her right to the succession was invalidated by her father’s attainder. As the lesser of two evils, I would prefer Mary, Queen of Scots. I believe the majority favour her.’

Cecil sighs inwardly, exasperated. Tomorrow her Majesty will no doubt change her mind again. This wrangling is not so much about lawful right as about personal animosity – and fear. Elizabeth, he knows, has never felt secure on her throne.

‘What of the Lady Katherine?’ he asks gently. ‘What happens now?’

‘You say the minister can’t be traced, so we will have the findings of the Privy Council laid before the Archbishop of Canterbury. He can examine the prisoners again at Lambeth Palace, and judge of their infamous intercourse and pretended wedlock. Mind ye, Cecil, they are to be taken there under guard, and they are not to speak to each other, or anyone else.’

‘I will convey your Majesty’s orders,’ Cecil says. At last they are getting somewhere.

Katherine

February 1562. The Tower of London.

When Sir Edward Warner presents himself in the morning, I am hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, but eager to talk about Thomas More’s history. And I have something to tell him that is possibly of some import.

‘You have read it already?’ he asks in surprise.

‘I could not put it down. Sir Edward, you believe this to be a true account, don’t you?’

‘Aye, my lady. Sir Thomas More had a reputation for honesty and was renowned throughout Christendom for his scholarship. He would not have written this book just to please his sovereign; as you well know, he lost his head for defying Henry VIII. He was an independent thinker who lived by his conscience, even though you and I, being of the new faith, would hold him to be largely in error. So I am inclined to believe much of what he writes.’

‘Much? Not all, then.’

‘Only because he himself says he divined upon conjectures in parts. But he makes it plain where he does that. The rest of it, which he recounts as fact, sounds credible. Why make the distinction if it was all a fiction? Why would More have made it up? What motive could he have had?’

‘None that I can think of. But what I ca

‘It’s obvious that he got a lot of it first-hand, although, probably for obvious reasons, he does not name his sources. He would have known a wide circle of people at court. And listen to this, which he writes at the begi

‘It sounds as if he went to a great deal of trouble to find out the truth.’

‘He states he relied on a confession made by Sir James Tyrell,’ Sir Edward says. ‘Tyrell was executed by Henry VII.’

‘Because he murdered the Princes?’

‘No, my lady. It was for treason, because he had aided and abetted two malcontents, the brothers of the Earl of Lincoln. More says that when Tyrell was in the Tower, he confessed to the murder of the Princes, as did Dighton, but neither could tell their interrogators where the bodies were because they both believed they had been reburied secretly.’

‘I doubt Henry VII was happy to hear that.’

‘I’m sure he was not. But at least he now knew that the Princes were dead – too late, of course, to spare him years of anxiety over the pretender Warbeck, whom he had finally executed. It’s interesting that More apparently spoke with John Dighton, who was still alive when he wrote his book; More clearly thought him a villain, and predicted he was likely to be hanged.’

‘It’s odd that Henry didn’t have Dighton executed too. After all, he also confessed to the murders.’

‘Aye, but maybe, as we have said before, Henry feared to draw public attention to the Princes. Without any bodies, there was no proof that they were dead; and that very lack of proof might have been the spur for anyone else to set themselves up as a pretender. Henry had had his fill of pretenders by then.’

‘Sir Edward,’ I venture, ‘where do you think the Princes might have been buried?’

‘Well, More describes their first place of burial in detail. At the stair foot, deep under the ground, beneath a great heap of stones. Then they were supposedly dug up and reburied by Brackenbury’s priest.’ He frowns. ‘But would a lone priest be able to shift all that rubble and dig down deep to where the bodies lay? It doesn’t sound likely, unless Brackenbury aided him, but Brackenbury had made it clear he wanted no part in the murders. And involving anyone else would have been too risky. Even with two of them it would have been a mighty task. So I suspect this tale was put about to deflect attempts to find the bodies, and that they are still there, under a stairway in the Tower.’

‘That makes sense. But where?’

‘My lady, there are several staircases in Caesar’s Tower. If you will excuse me, I will go now and check for signs that any have been disturbed.’ And with that, Sir Edward hastens from the room, eager as a schoolboy dismissed from lessons.

It seems ages before he returns, his face downcast.

‘Nothing!’ he declares. ‘I checked the bottom of every stair, and there was no sign that any were ever dug up. Except perhaps for the one in the fore-building that houses the entrance to Caesar’s Tower. There was a cracked paving stone there, but that is only to be expected, with so many people coming and going.’

He sits down heavily. ‘I think we must accept that we are at the end of our quest, and that Thomas More’s history is the closest to the truth we are likely to get.’

‘If only we knew where he got all that information,’ I say. ‘I hate loose ends. But Sir Edward, before you go, I must tell you something that may be significant, or not – I don’t know. Pray sit down. I have been puzzling for some time about where I had seen the name Tyrell – other than in books. And Brackenbury too seemed familiar. Last night, it came to me.’ I have his attention now.