The court travels to Greenwich, everyone’s favorite palace, downriver from the noise and smells of London, its golden quayside washed by the tide twice a day, shining like a heavenly shore. It would be a mirror of the kingdom of heaven, except for the almost total absence of the godly. Father and I are rowed with the king in the royal barge, but Edward lies back on the cushions, wrapped in furs as if he is shivering, and when the guns roar from the Tower and the ships at anchor fire their cannon, he flinches at the noise and turns his pale face away.
“He will get better, won’t he?” I ask my father quietly. “He looks terribly ill; but he will get better in summer?”
He shakes his head, his face dark. “He has made a will,” he says. I can hear the excitement tremble in his voice. “He has chosen his heir.”
“Doesn’t the throne have to go to the eldest kin?”
“Of course. It should be Princess Mary. But how can she be queen when she has sworn obedience to the Bishop of Rome? How can she be queen when she is certain to marry a papist foreigner and set him over us? No, the king has done the right thing; he has obeyed God’s will and excluded her from the succession—just as his father did.”
“Can the king name his heir?” I question. “Is it even the law?”
“If the throne is his property, then of course he can name his heir,” my father says. His voice is quiet so that the boy shivering in the furs cannot hear, but there is an edge to his tone that shows that he will not tolerate contradiction. These are arguments that are being carefully rehearsed in every corner of the court. “The crown is property: just as we all own property. A man must be free to dispose of his property, every man can choose his heir; Henry VIII chose his heirs. And—most importantly—a young man like Edward, raised in the reformed religion, with never a papist thought in his head, is not going to leave his throne to a servant of Rome. He would not tolerate it—and John Dudley will make sure that he does not.”
“Then who?” I ask, thinking that I probably know the answer to this.
“The king—and his advisors—would prefer the nearest in line, of the reformed religion, someone who is likely to have a son to take the throne.”
“There has to be a Tudor boy?”
My father nods. It is like a curse that has been laid on this family. The Tudors have to have sons to take the throne, and they are extraordinarily hard to come by. From King Henry’s six wives he got only one son: Edward. His older sister, Margaret, had only one son, James, who had a girl: Queen Mary of Scotland, who lives in France and is betrothed to the dauphin. Margaret’s daughter was from a Scots lord and is both papist and probably illegitimate; Cousin Margaret Douglas, so her son, Henry Stuart, hardly counts. King Henry’s favorite sister, Queen Mary, was my grandmother, and the king named her line to inherit; and her daughter, my mother, is still alive. Mother has just us three girls, and surely will never have another baby. Princess Elizabeth has no betrothal planned for her—who would take a royal bastard with uncertain parentage and so little dowry? Princess Mary has been promised and denied to almost every king in Europe. Clearly, not only is there no Tudor boy among all of us, there’s no prospect of one.
“But none of us is with child,” I say, thinking of all us royal cousins. “If they want the throne to go to a Tudor boy, there is none. None of us five heirs is even betrothed. None of us is married.”
“And that’s why you’re going to be,” he says briskly.
“Married?”
“At once.”
“I am?”
“All of you.”
“The Princess Mary, and Elizabeth?”
“Not them. You and Katherine and Mary.”