So, I am free, I am free and I am alive. When I embarked on this marriage nearly four years ago I did not think that this day would come when I would be free and a widow again. When I saw the warrant for my arrest in the hand of the king’s doctor I did not think that I would survive a week. But I have survived. I have outlived the king who abandoned two wives, left one to die in childbirth, and murdered two others. By betraying my love, my faith, and my friend, I have survived. By surrendering my will and my pride and my scholarship, I have survived. I feel like someone in a town terribly besieged for years, coming out of my house and looking wonderingly around at the breached walls and the broken gate, at the destruction in the marketplace and the torn-down church and yet being alive and safe, though others have died and the danger has passed over me. I have saved myself but I have seen the destruction of everything that I loved.

I sit in the window of my bedroom and wait for the dawn to come. Behind me the fire glows in the grate but I don’t allow them to come in and stir it up, bring hot water, or dress me for the day. I am going to watch out the rest of the night and think of them in Whitehall, like the dogs that he said they were, tearing the kingdom apart so that one pack gets one favor and one gets another. They have a will, or at any rate they have something that they are going to declare is the king’s will, or at the least they are cobbling together something that they can take as his will, and it honors those who were first at the corpse, as if it is the result of a running race, not the testament of a dying man.

Prince Edward is his heir, of course, but in this will I am not named as regent. There is to be a Privy Council that will guide Prince Edward until he is eighteen years old. Edward Seymour has been too quick for me, too quick for us all. He has named himself as Great Chamberlain of England and will guide the Privy Council with fifteen others. Stephen Gardiner is not among them, but neither am I.