The Last Tudor

BRADGATE HOUSE, GROBY, LEICESTERSHIRE, SPRING 1550

I love my father because I know that he will never die. Neither will I. We are chosen by God and we walk in His ways, and we never swerve from them. We don’t have to earn our place in heaven by bribing God with acts or Masses. We don’t have to eat bread and pretend it is flesh, drink wine and call it blood. We know that is folly for the ignorant and a trap for papist fools. This knowledge is our pride and glory. We understand, as more and more do in these days: we have been saved once and for all. We have no fear, for we will never die.

True, my father is worldly: sinfully worldly. I wish he would let me wrestle with his soul, but he laughs and says, ‘Go away, Jane, and write to our friends the Swiss reformers. I owe them a letter – you can write for me.’

It is wrong of him to avoid holy discourse, but this is only the sin of inattention – I know he is heart and soul for the true religion. Also, I must remember that he is my father and I owe obedience to my father and mother – whatever my private opinion of them. God, who sees all, will be the judge of them. And God has seen my father and forgiven him already; my father is saved through faith.

I fear my mother will not be saved from the fires of hell, and my sister Katherine, who is three years younger than me, a child of nine years old, is almost certainly going to die and never rise again. She is unbelievably silly. If I were a superstitious fool I would really think she is possessed; she is quite beyond hope. My baby sister, Mary, was born into original sin and cannot grow out of it. She is quite tiny. She is as pretty as a little miniature version of our sister, Katherine, tiny as a doll. My lady mother would have sent her away as a baby to be raised far from us, and spare us the shame, but my father had too much compassion for his last stunted child, and so she lives with us. She is not an idiot – she does her lessons well, she is a clever little girl – but she has no sense of the grace of God; she is not one of the elect like Father and me. One like her – whose growth has been blighted by Satan – should be particularly fervent for salvation. I suppose a five-year-old is a little young to renounce the world – but I was studying Latin when I was four, and Our Lord was the same age as I am now when He went to the Temple and preached to the wise men. If you do not learn the ways of the Lord when you are in the cradle, when will you make a start?