Then she stood and, in a rare display of kindness, turned back to help the old man rise. Impulsively, she bent and kissed his cheek and whispered, “I pray to God that He abundantly reward you for your kindness to me.”
Turning hurriedly away, as though she feared she must move fast lest her courage falter and cowardice well up to take its fragile place, she faced the block and fell to her knees in the straw. She motioned urgently for Mrs. Ellen to quickly bring forth the blindfold and bind her eyes to blot out the world she was about to leave. Just before her eyes were covered, she gazed once more, fearfully, at the headsman and implored, “I pray you dispatch me quickly!” To which he nodded. “Aye, my lady.”
But Jane had misjudged the distance between herself and the block, and when, blindfolded, she moved to lay her head down, she found only empty air. This nigh chased her courage away. Her hands rose, frantically groping before her.
“Where is it? Where is it?”
she sobbed plaintively.
It was such a sad and pitiful sight. Everyone felt sorry for her. But no one dared move. And then history records that “one of the standers-by took pity,” but I can tell you that it was my brave Kate, unrecognized in her serving woman’s disguise, with the fire of her hair doused and hidden by a borrowed linen cap, who broke from the crowd and clattered up the wooden steps in her clunky, cumbersome clogs. She laid a comforting hand on Jane’s shoulder, letting it linger there one long and loving moment. Those watching never knew they were witnessing two sisters saying farewell. Then, moving swiftly, Kate gently guided Jane’s hands and helped her lay her head down on the hard, scarred wooden block that had seen so many deaths.
“We love you, Jane,” Kate afterward told me she had whispered.
Jane had whispered back, “Don’t cry for me, Kate; by losing this mortal life, I gain an immortal one!”
Swallowing down her tears, Kate clattered back down again, and while her back was yet turned, Jane cried bravely, “Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!” and the ax fell with a great thud, cutting through Jane’s skin and bones to bury its blade in the wood.
I was watching Kate’s face, not the scaffold, when the ax fell. She shut her eyes, but the tears seeped out. She breathed deeply, shakily exhaled, and whispered, “Fare thee well, my dear Jane!” Then she squared her shoulders, opened her eyes, took my hand, and began swiftly pulling me back through the crowd, away from the scaffold. “Don’t look back, don’t look back,” she kept saying until the words lost all meaning.
I didn’t. So neither of us saw, though we heard, when the executioner held our sister’s head aloft by her hair and spoke the traditional words, “So perish all the Queen’s enemies! Behold the head of a traitor!” Behind us we heard the crowd marveling that so vast a quantity of blood had come out of one little girl.
Jane was gone, but she would live on, and posterity would indeed favor her. Almost overnight it seemed poems, ballads, and pictures celebrating her courage and faith, her youth and beauty, were sprouting up like weeds, recited and sold on every street corner. She had captured the public’s imagination and become a tragic heroine. Had she been a toothless, gray-haired hag of fifty, instead of sixteen and beautiful, it might all have been a different story, but there’s something about that scene that fascinates and titillates, that excites and ignites, stirs the blood and kindles lust—the blindfolded beauty kneeling there, neck and shoulders bare and white as snow, as a sacrifice to the spinster queen’s lust for a golden Spanish prince, and the fountain of blood gushing out of that frail, slender neck to stain the pure white snow, like the red blossoms of a maiden’s blood on the sheets of her bridal bed. That is how the world, and posterity, will remember my sister.
Mrs. Ellen, who had faithfully remained to tend Jane’s corpse, came to the palace that night and brought us each a long, wavy lock she had cut from Jane’s head before she tenderly wrapped our sister’s poor, broken body in a sheet and laid her, beside Guildford, in the musty, dusty crypt of St. Peter ad Vincula, the Tower’s sad and bloody chapel, where Anne Boleyn and other condemned traitors lay entombed. Later I would have Kate sit, hang her head low, with her hair falling like red gold rain around her face, and snip from the nape of her neck a long strand. She would do the same for me. I would braid and weave them together, forming a pair of roses, one for each of us to keep and cherish, comprised of three shades of hair cut from the heads of three sisters—“the brilliant one,” “the beautiful one,” and “the beastly little one”—skeins of ruddy chestnut, fiery, blazing copper, and ebony harboring a secret scarlet, together forever, bound and united, divided not even by Death’s cruel scythe.
Mrs. Ellen also brought us Jane’s treasured Greek Testament. After she had gone, we found, written inside the cover, upon the blank pages, a letter addressed to Kate. I was a little hurt. Was there nothing for me? I flipped to the back, hoping to find a message for me on the last blank pages, but there was nothing.
“Maybe there’s something here for both of us?” Kate suggested as I gave the book back to her and we sat, side by side, on the fireside settle and she read it aloud.
I have here sent you, good sister Katherine, a book the which, although it be not outwardly trimmed with gold, yet inwardly it is worth more than precious stones. It is the book, dear sister, of the law of the Lord. It is His Testament and Last Will, which he bequeathed unto us wretches, which shall lead you to the path of eternal joy. And if you, with a good mind, read it, and with an earnest desire follow it, it shall bring you to an immortal and everlasting life.
It shall teach you to live and learn you to die. It will win you more than you should have gained by the possession of your woeful father’s lands. Within these covers are such riches as neither the covetous shall withdraw from you, neither the thief steal, nor the moth corrupt.
Trust not the tenderness of your age shall lengthen your days, for as soon, if God will, goes the young as the old. Wherefore labor always to learn to die. Defy the world, deny the Devil, and despise the flesh, and delight yourself only in the Lord. Be penitent for your sins and yet despair not. Be strong in faith and yet presume not and desire with Saint Paul to be dissolved and to be with Christ, with whom even in death there is life.
Rejoice in Christ as I trust I do and seeing that you have the name of a Christian, as near as you can follow in the steps of your master, Christ, and take up your cross. Lay your sins on His back and always embrace Him. And touching my death, rejoice as I do, good sister, that I shall be delivered of this corruption, and put on incorruption, for I am assured that I shall for losing of a mortal life win an immortal life.
Pray God grant you and send you of His grace to live in His fear and then to die in the true Christian faith from which in God’s name I exhort you that you never swerve neither for hope of life nor for fear of death. If you will deny His truth to lengthen your life, God will deny you and yet shorten your days. And if you will cleave to Him, He will prolong your days to your comfort and His glory to which glory God bring me now and you hereafter when it shall please Him to call you.
Farewell good sister, put your only trust in God who alone can help you. Amen. Your loving sister,
Jane
Kate flung the book to the floor and threw herself into my arms.
We clung together and wept, both of us surprised to discover that we had any tears left.
“I would rather my brains rattled around in my head like seeds in a gourd than live a scholar and die a martyr!” Kate cried. “I want to
live,
Mary, to
love
and
be loved!
I must embrace the flesh; I
cannot
despise it, no more than I could ever follow in Jane’s footsteps!”
As I retrieved the book, I noticed the ribbon tucked inside that Jane had used to mark her place. It was a broad glossy bloodred satin ribbon. I drew it out and beheld the words
For my sister Mary
embroidered across the top, and beneath it, also in neatly stitched gilt letters that seemed to shimmer and dance in the firelight, these five verses:
Death will give pain to the body for its sins, but the soul will be justified before God.
There is a time to be born and a time to die; and the day of our death is better than the day of our birth.
Live to die, that by death you may gain eternal life.
If my faults deserve punishment, my youth at least and my imprudence were worthy of excuse. God and posterity will show me greater favor.
Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
She had not forgotten me after all. Every time I read a book and needed to mark my place, Jane would be right there with me.
Then, long before we were done weeping, while our eyes and faces were yet red and tear-swollen, it was Father’s turn to lay his head upon the block and die. We could not be there for him. Though our royal cousin, to our surprise, never said a word about our disobedience the day Jane died, the night before Father’s execution we were summoned to sleep upon a pallet at the foot of her bed, as two of her ladies-in-waiting always did, and she kept us close all the morrow, reading aloud to her and embroidering until the deed was done. But afterward we were allowed to go into his cell and claim his personal possessions.
Upon his desk, amidst drawings of cakes, candies, pies, pyramids of fruit, and great, fantastical marzipan and spun sugar subtleties with copious notes below mouthwateringly describing them all, we found a crumpled, tear-stained letter. It was from Jane, written the last night of her life.
Father,
Although it hath pleased God to hasten my death by you, by whom my life should rather have been lengthened; yet I can so patiently take it, as I yield God more hearty thanks for shortening my woeful days, than if all the world had been given into my possession, with life lengthened at my own will. Albeit I am well assured of your impatient dolours, redoubled manifold ways, both in bewailing your own woe, and especially, as I am informed, my unfortunate state. Yet, my dear father, if I may without offense rejoice in my own mishaps, herein I may account myself blessed, that washing my hands with the innocency of my fact, my guiltless blood may cry out before the Lord, “Mercy, to the innocent!”
And yet, though I must needs acknowledge, that being constrained, and, as you know well enough, continually assayed; yet, in taking the Crown upon me, I seemed to consent, and therein grievously offended the Queen and her laws; yet do I assuredly trust, that this my offense toward God is so much the less, in that being in so royal estate as I was, my enforced honor never blended with mine innocent heart.
Thus, good father, I have opened unto you the state in which I presently stand, my death at hand, although to you it may seem woeful, yet to me there is nothing more welcome than from this vale of misery to aspire to that heavenly throne of all joy and pleasure, with Christ our Savior, in whose steadfast faith (if it be lawful for the daughter so to write to the father) the Lord that hitherto hath strengthened you, so continue to keep you, that at last we may meet in Heaven with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen. I am,
Your Obedient Daughter Until Death,
Jane
I thought it was rather harsh—even if it was true. And Father was such a sensitive man, a great overgrown boy really, no wonder it had made him weep. Yea, it was true that he should not have sought the Crown again on Jane’s behalf, in a rebellion she knew nothing about, and would have wanted no part in if she had, and by doing so he had sealed her doom and his own. Yet seeing her letter, stained with Father’s tears, made me cry.
Oh, Jane, how could you?
Father must have felt she was pouring salt into his wounds!
Yet, perhaps her thoughts had traveled the same lines. Perhaps Jane had regretted her harshness. After she sent him this letter, Father asked his gaoler to take her the pretty prayer book bound in gilt-embellished yellow leather Guildford had inscribed and given him, before the tragic power play that had turned our world upside down, and ask his daughter to please write some words of comfort inside it and send it back to him with all speed.
As Kate and I stood peering down at the book as it lay open in my hands, I could not help but wonder what Jane had thought when she opened it and read Guildford’s own elegantly writ inscription.
Your loving and obedient son wisheth unto Your Grace long life in this world, with as much joy and comfort as I wish myself, and in the world to come, joy everlasting.
Your most humble son to his death,
Guildford Dudley
But did it
really
matter anymore what Guildford and Father had been to each other, and who was to blame, and for what? The time for cattiness, cruel reminders, blame, and malice had passed. Like the obedient daughter she had been brought up to be, Jane dipped her quill and wrote beneath her husband’s words:
The Lord comfort Your Grace and that in His word wherein all creatures only are to be comforted. And though it hath pleased God to take two of your children, yet think not, I most humbly beseech Your Grace, that you have lost them. But trust that we, by leaving this mortal life, have won an immortal life. And I, as for my part, as I have honored Your Grace in this life, will pray for you in another life.
Your Grace’s humble daughter,
Jane Dudley