Was It God's Will?
At last, Mary is Queen of England, as she was born to be. The usurpers have been overthrown, her mother's marriage and her own legitimacy have been confirmed, and she is now seated upon the throne, as is her sacred right and duty, as is God's will.
For a short while, her future is bright as it has not been since she was in her mid-teens and declared a bastard. The country is slowly recovering from the Protestant heresy that has plagued it for decades, and her marriage to a good Catholic prince is on the horizon.
The traitors, of course, must lose their heads. No, not her poor cousins Jane and Guildford Dudley. They may have been the ones to claim her throne, they might have been raised in the false religion, but they were merely the figureheads, pawns in the hands of their ambitious parents. In her letters, Jane beseeches her to have pity on her, and tells her how she was cowed into taking a throne she knew she had no right to. Does Mary not know, after all, what it is like to be manipulated into going against her conscience by her own parents?
She has never known Jane, not really, but she knows her mother, who is only a year younger than her and was one of her closest friends throughout her turbulent childhood. Frances Grey rides all through the night her husband is arrested, so that she might come to her, nearly in tears, to plead for their lives. She does not mention Jane during their audience- who, despite her lack of consent, was a usurper Queen for nine days, in name if nothing else, and cannot be freed simply because her mother pleaded for her- but the implication hangs clear in the air as she begs for the lives of her husband and her other daughters.
John Dudley, of course, must die. He was the architect of the plot, and she is able to sign his death warrant with a clear conscience. Henry Grey, she feels, was just as neck-deep in the plot, but he is her cousin through Frances, so she allows him to go free, as long as he remembers the gratitude he owes her. Elizabeth, the half-sister whom she has kept at arm's length for so long, had feigned illness and lain low during the period in which the usurpers were in power. As a show of goodwill, she allows Elizabeth to ride into London beside her.
It is too early to free the puppet pretenders, to make any blatant gestures of mercy. She is, after all, England's first true queen in her own right and everyone, from the common people to her advisers to the Imperial Emperor will be scrutinizing her every move, and she cannot show herself to be too easily given to womanly scruples and weakness. There must be a trial and a sentencing, for the sake of appearances, but there is no reason their imprisonment should be an uncomfortable one. She allows them to live as honored guests in the Tower, pursuing their studies in peace, out of the public eye, and ready to be released in a few months when the country has settled down. They need not die, so that she might be free to carry out God's will.
Then the protests come in.
She had not expected them to yield so easily, after being misled by her father and her brother's intransigence, but she had not expected open rebellion either, least of all one led by Henry Grey, to whom she had shown such mercy. She had not expected that her loyal countrymen, whom she had saved from civil war and eternal damnation, would dare presume to question her decision that marriage to Prince Philip, a goodly Christian prince, was in the best interests of the country. Worst of all, she had not expected that her own sister, Elizabeth, with whom she had tried to make a new beginning, whom she had never reproached once for being the daughter of Anne Boleyn, would conspire against her. Perhaps Elizabeth isn't even her sister at all; she could very well be Smeaton's or Norris's brat, or even her own uncle's.
She had shown mercy, certainly more mercy than her father or any of her grandparents or even her sainted mother would have ever shown to such blatant treason, mercy that none of them deserved, and what does she get in return?
She had only been carrying out God's will, and how do they respond?
The envoys from her mother's country, the Spanish ambassador, and her own advisers all tell her that the marriage cannot be finalized until all threats to her throne, and, by extension, Philip's, have been neutralized, and this time, she agrees wholeheartedly with them.
This time it is much easier to sign the death warrants of those who plotted against her, the orders of imprisonment or exile. Thomas Wyatt, Henry Grey, Elizabeth (if her thrice-damned disloyal bastard sister were not the darling of the underground Protestant cause and thus a potential martyr for those insidious heretics to rally around, Mary is not sure she would be able to keep herself from signing her death warrant and purging the earth of all traces of Anne Boleyn for once and for all), Lord Thomas Grey, Edward Courtenay (her fickle cousin on whom she had doted), William Thomas...
Lady Jane Dudley.
Her pen stills.
It is natural, she tells herself, to want to show mercy, even where it is misplaced. It is only human nature to pity a young girl whose life must be sacrificed in order to protect the future stability of the whole country. But Jane and Guildford must die, if she is to marry Philip and have a son that will cut Elizabeth out of the succession. Her own grandparents, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, the great Catholic monarchs, knew this. They had not allowed her mother's betrothal to Prince Arthur to be finalized until all potential threats to their future throne were eliminated, including the young Earl of Warwick, who was executed. Her old governess Lady Salisbury's brother, even though he had been imprisoned in the Tower since he was ten and his only crime was to have Plantagenet blood in his veins and thus a potential claim to the throne. Sometimes the innocent blood of a few must be spilled in order to safeguard the blood of all the rest. Every successful monarch has known this, and if Mary wishes to follow in their footsteps, she must accept this. It is only God's will, and has she not been called to Earth so that she might do His bidding?
But there is more to it, she knows, more than just simple sympathy and pity.
She sees Jane in herself.
It has been nigh twenty years, but she will never forget the terrible day she was forced to sign away everything that she had ever held precious: the validity of her parents' marriage, her claim to the throne, her rank, her mother's honor, and her beloved Catholic faith. Even more cruelly, it had come a month after the harlot's downfall, and just after her father had married a much kinder lady, and just when she believed her world to be set to rights. How could she have known that she would have to wait another two decades for justice to be served? How could she have known that her father, the father who had cherished her and called her the pearl of his world, would stilldemand that she perjure her soul before God or else die on his own orders? To choose between God's will and her father's will?
The pope may have absolved her, but she knows that she will never forgive herself for submitting, or her father for cornering her like that and forcing her to deny everything right and holy.
Now she is the tyrant, holding her pen above a young woman's death warrant, ready to condemn her for obeying her parents and clinging to the beliefs that, all her life, she has been taught to uphold.
How can she do it, even if this is God's will?
She sends her trusted confessor, Dr. Feckenham, to turn Jane and Guildford to the true faith, even postpones the executions by three days, but to no avail. Jane is stubborn, thoroughly convinced of the rightness of her cause and will not deviate from her cause, not even as the shadow of the axe looms over her.
Just like me, when I was her age,Mary thinks, I was scarcely a few years older than her, and I was still so young and full of hope. I refused to give in, not when I was banished from court, stripped of my titles, forced to serve my own sister, separated from my mother and not even allowed a deathbed visit, but when the axe loomed over me, I gave in….
"If you were my daughter, I would beat your head against the wall until it was as soft as a baked apple"
"I believe in order to save Your Grace's life, it is necessary that you must make sacrifices and dissemble for a while. God looks more into the intentions than into the deeds of men, and you may sign this with a clear conscience, in the full knowledge that the pope will pardon you for it"
"I beseech you agree of God's pleasure with a merry heart; and be sure that, without fail, He will not suffer you to perish if you beware to offend Him"….
…"I do acknowledge that the marriage between His Majesty and my mother was by God's law and man's law, incestuous and unlawful"...
The words that she had thought she had suppressed so well, words of encouragement and submission and cruelty and reality, come bubbling to the surface, and soon the pain is as acute as it was when she was twenty.
She wants Jane to give in, so much, and not just because she wants the girl to live. She does not want to be the monster that her father became, able to send his kith and kin to the block or stake when it pleased him, able to threaten to condemn his own flesh and blood. She does not want to damn Jane to an eternity in hell, not if she cannot allow it. In a way, she does not want Jane to do what Mary never had the strength to do, what Mary has never forgiven herself for doing, for this unfortunate nobody of a girl to succeed where Mary, God's servant, had failed.
But Jane will not turn, and so the axe falls.
Mary stands at the window, watching the ships docking, the emblem of the Holy Roman Empire flapping in the breeze. Her husband is in one of them.
Dr. Feckenham comes to her the morning after the execution and tells her that Jane could not find the block when blindfolded and cried out for help, and had to be guided to find it.
She wonders if she'll hear Jane's hysterical pleas in her dreams tonight.
She wonders if this was truly God's will.
She wonders if she'll ever stop wondering.
She reaches deep within her, drawing from wells of inner strength, and clears her face of all distress, as her mother would have, as any true queen should be able to do.
Today is her wedding day.
In a year's time or less, she will be a mother.
She is content.
She turns from the window, her eyes sparkling with mirth and her pace brisk, feigning a confidence she does not feel.
She smiles and imagines she cannot taste the bile rising in the back of her throat or feel the blood soaking her hands or hear those words echoing in her ears…
Where is it? What shall I do? Please!...
… Bloody Mary… Bloody Mary… Bloody Mary…