In the middle of the cold bright month of January a messenger comes from the Privy Council to inform me that Henry Howard has been beheaded on Tower Hill. His father remains in prison awaiting his own sentence. We hear the news in silence. The king’s determination that there should be no more burnings of reformers does not extend mercy to other suspects. Nobody thinks that Henry Howard was more than a foolish braggart, a poet who was too prodigal with his words; but he died for that.

Princess Elizabeth comes to me and puts a cold hand in mine. “I hear terrible things of my Cousin Howard,” she says, her dark eyes questioning me. “He was planning to overthrow you, and put another woman in your place. They tell me that he was going to put his sister on the throne.”

“It was wrong of him to hope for that,” I reply. “Your father and I were married in the sight of God. It would be wrong for anyone to drive us apart.”

She hesitates—she has heard enough about her own mother to know that Anne Boleyn did exactly this to Henry’s first queen, and her kinsmen were planning to do it again to his sixth. “Do you think it was right that he should die?” she asks me.

Not even for Elizabeth, with Jane Grey standing so solemn and silent, listening behind her, am I going to risk expressing an opinion that is different from the king’s. I have kissed the rod. I have lost my voice. I am an obedient wife.

“Whatever your father the king thinks best is the right thing to do,” I say.

She looks at me, this bright, thoughtful girl. “If you are a wife, can you not think for yourself?”

“You can think for yourself,” I say carefully. “But you need not speak. If you are wise, you will agree with your husband. Your husband has power over you. You have to find ways to think your own thoughts and live your own life without always telling of it.”

“Then I had better not marry,” she says without a glimmer of a smile. “If to be a wife is to give up your own opinion, I had better never marry.”

I pat her cheek and I try to laugh at this thirteen-year-old girl forswearing matrimony. “Perhaps you are right in this world,” I say. “But this world is changing. Perhaps by the time you are old enough to marry the world will hear a woman’s voice. Perhaps she will not have to swear to obey in her wedding vows. Perhaps one day a woman will be allowed to both love and think.”

HAMPTON COURT PALACE,

WINTER 1547