The Sisters Who Would Be Queen

by Leanda de Lisle

  Maitland knew very well that Mary would be appalled by Elizabeth’s offer. Her mother-in-law, Catherine de Medici, had sneered about Elizabeth considering a marriage with her “horse keeper.” Why would she marry a servant when she could marry any king in Europe? Maitland told Elizabeth that Mary would be very touched that “she was willing to give a thing so dearly prized by herself,” but that she could not possibly marry Dudley, “and so deprive [Elizabeth] of all the joy and solace she received from his companionship.” Elizabeth remained determined, however, to advance her proposal. For this to happen it was necessary first for her to bring the Parliament to a close and end its damaging attacks on the Stuart claim. To achieve this as quickly as possible she suspended rather than closed the session. But before dismissing them, on 10 April 1563, she also gave her promised reply to the Commons on the subject of their petition. The matter of the succession was a very difficult one, she told them blandly, and required further thought. The MPs were bitterly disappointed by this nonanswer. Elizabeth hoped, however, that by the time they reassembled she would be able to present them with the fait accompli of Mary’s marriage to Dudley. In the meantime, Elizabeth would ensure that Katherine felt just how painful the consequences could be if you angered a Queen.

  XXI

  Hales’s Tempest

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1563 THERE WAS AN EXPLOSION OF CASES of the plague in London. Elizabeth removed the court to Windsor and had a gallows set up on the edge of the town: anyone suspected of bringing the disease from the capital would be hanged. Katherine, her husband, and their children remained trapped in the Tower, meanwhile, waiting for the disease to breach the fortress’s walls. By August the fatalities in London were running at a thousand a week. The city was literally decimated, with one in ten succumbing to the outbreak. Katherine’s friends begged the Queen to allow the family to be moved elsewhere to spare their lives. Eventually Elizabeth agreed, but the family were to be separated and kept under house arrest, with their relatives bearing much of the cost.

  Katherine’s elder son, Lord Beauchamp, was to be sent to her mother-in-law, the Duchess of Somerset at Hanworth, along with Hertford. Katherine and the baby Thomas, were, meanwhile, to be sent to her uncle Lord John Grey, at Pirgo in Essex. Elizabeth insisted that he was to “plainly understand,” that he was now Katherine’s jailor, and that she had “meant no more by this liberty than to remove her from the danger of the plague.” Katherine was not to be allowed “conference with any person not being of his lordship’s household.” She could not contact even her husband or her sister Mary Grey, who remained at court. No letters between the sisters survive, although Mary Grey’s later actions suggest that the nineteen-year-old secretly admired Katherine’s bold gamble on happiness.

  Katherine arrived at Pirgo on 3 September with her son Thomas, his nurse, three ladies-in-waiting, and two manservants. The first thing she did was to write and thank Cecil for his help in saving her family from the plague. She was sure that he knew that Hertford, “my own dear Lord,” was equally grateful, and she asked Cecil to continue to seek the Queen’s pardon, “which with up-stretched hands and down bent knees, from the bottom of my heart, most humbly I crave.”

  In the Tower Katherine’s empty rooms presented a sad spectacle: the bed of “changeable damask” was “all broken and not worth ten pence;” much of the other furniture was “torn and tattered by her monkeys and dogs.” But she had known happiness there and, although Lord John described Katherine to Cecil as having arrived at Pirgo a “penitent and sorrowful woman for the Queen’s displeasure,” it took a short while for it to sink in that she was now a long way from her husband and her elder son. She played with Thomas, dressing him in little jackets of russet velvet and matching silk hats corded with silver. She had thick red petticoats made to keep him warm in the winter (boys were dressed in loose fabric, like skirts, to give them free movement in the first years of their life), and purchased new furs for herself. But the days soon began to drag. She lost her appetite and sank into depression, the illness from which so many Tudor women suffered. Less than a month after her removal from the Tower, Lord John expressed his concern for Katherine’s health:

  I assure you cousin Cecil (as I have written unto my Lord Robert) the thought and care she takes for want of her Highness’s favour, pines her away: before God I speak it, if it come not the sooner, she will not live long thus, she eats not above six morsels in the meal. If I say unto her “good madam, eat somewhat to comfort yourself,” she falls a weeping and goes up to her chamber; if I ask her what the cause is … she answers me “Alas uncle, what a life is this to me, thus to live in the Queens displeasure; but for my Lord and my children, I would to God I were buried.”

  Katherine’s torment grieved her uncle, “even at the heart roots.” But her suffering increased when four days after his letter was sent, her son Beauchamp enjoyed his second birthday without her.

  Cecil gave what practical advice he could to his old friend Lord John, to whose son he was godfather and whose daughter was his wife’s sister-in-law. He said that Katherine might petition the Queen and suggested the kind of phrases she might use. He even offered to read it in draft form first. The final version could then be delivered by Robert Dudley, the one man who could do so without risk of losing the Queen’s favor. On 7 November, the draft petition was ready and Katherine’s uncle forwarded it to Cecil for his approval, enclosing letters from them both. Lord John assured him that “if you will have any one thing amended there I pray you note it, and my man shall bring it back to me again. For I would be loath there should be any fault found with one word written therein.” Katherine’s letter reiterated her gratitude, along with that of “my own good Lord,” and expressed her regret that “all we can do is to bear you our assured good will, and to pray for you, and to wish you health.”

  Just under a week later, the final version was ready and delivered by Dudley to Elizabeth. Katherine’s petition abased her before her monarch. She did not dare “to crave pardon for my most disobedient and rash matching of myself, without your highness’s consent.” She could only beg for mercy, while acknowledging that she did not deserve it. She concluded, on her knees, “long continue and preserve your Majesty’s reign over us.”

  Katherine hoped, and believed, that the petition would be enough, and she wrote to Hertford expressing the hope that they would be together soon. The more passionate passages in this moving love letter have never been published before. A Victorian parson who printed part of the letter was shocked by its intimacy and before and since then it has lain forgotten.*

  It gives me no small joy, my dearest Lord, to hear of your good health. I ask God to give you strength, as I am sure he shall. In this lamentable time there is nothing that can better comfort us, in our pitiable separation, than to ask, to hear, and to know of each other’s well-being. Although recently I have been unwell, I am now pretty well, thank God. I long to be merry with you, as I know you do with me, as we were when our sweet little boys were begotten in the Tower, the 25th or 29th of May. I wish you to be as happy as I was sad when you came to my door for the third time, and it was locked. Do you think I can forget what passed between us? No, I cannot. I remember it more often than you know. I have good reason to, when I reflect what a husband I have in you. It is a hard fate to be deprived of so good a man. Well, I say good, although you have been naughty. Could you have found it in your heart not to give me a second child so hard on the heels of the first?

  No, but while I would have liked to rest my weary bones … I know our children are God’s blessing. I don’t doubt, also, that I would willingly bear the pain of further childbirth, such is my boundless love for my sweet bedfellow, that I once lay beside with joyful heart, and shall again … Thus humbly thanking you, my sweet Lord, for your husbandly concern in inquiring how I am, and in sending me money. I most lovingly bid you farewell: not forgetting my especial thanks to you for your book, which is no small jewel. I can understand it very well, for as soon
as I had it, I read it with my heart as well as my eyes; by which token I once again bid you farewell and good health, my good Ned,

  Your most loving and faithful wife during life, Katherine Hertford

  Katherine’s hopes of seeing Hertford were soon dashed, however. The message came that the Queen would not forgive them. Katherine began to wonder if she would ever see Hertford, or her elder son, again. “What the long want of the Queen’s Majesty’s accustomed favour towards me has bred is this miserable and wretched body of mine, God only knows,” she wrote to Cecil with desperation on 13 December; “I rather wish of God shortly to be buried, in the faith and fear of Him, than in this continual agony to live.”

  Her uncle Lord John wrote a few days later, fearing that Katherine was in a state of irreversible despair. She spent days refusing to get out of bed, “and I never came to her, but I found her either weeping or else saw by her face that she had wept,” he informed Cecil. Her servants were fearful of leaving her for the night, uncertain “how to find her in the morning, for she is so fraught with … thought, weeping and sitting still.” If these women were not watching her closely, he warned, “I tell you truly cousin Cecil, I would not sleep in quiet.”

  The disappointment in the failure of Katherine’s petition now triggered arguments between the Grey and Seymour families. Francis Newdigate blamed Lord John Grey for what had happened, telling Katherine’s cousin Lady Clinton that her uncle should not interfere in a husband’s place. When Lord John heard this he expressed outrage to Cecil. He had to provide everything for Katherine and her baby, he complained, they did not have so much as a cup to drink out of that he had not provided. Indeed, Katherine was so short of money that Lady Clinton had been obliged to purchase on her behalf a New Year’s gift of silk stockings for the Queen’s Boleyn cousin Lady Knollys, who was a vital ally. It was only after he wrote to Hertford at Hanworth to complain, that Katherine had been sent a measly twenty pounds and the promise of beds and sheets, which had not yet arrived, Lord John continued. A full inventory of the costs of Katherine’s personal servants, the laundress who washed her clothes, and the old woman who looked after the baby’s things, was enclosed with the letter, along with a list of the cloth that had been made up into clothing for Katherine and the baby:

  Two coats for Mr Thomas, whereof the one is russet damask, the other of crimson velvet

  Of white cloth to make him petticoats, two yards

  Of red cloth to make him like petticoats, two yards

  Velvet caps for him, two, a russet taffeta hat for him …

  Black velvet to make a gown for my lady Katherine, bound with sables, ten yards; russet velvet to make a gown and a kirtle; black and russet lace to the gown and kirtle …

  Damask to make a night gown for my lady; crimson satin to make a petticoat

  A petticoat of crimson velvet; a velvet hood for my lady; two pairs of black silk hose; black cloth to make a cloak two yards.

  Linen to make smocks was also listed, and cambric (also a form of linen) for ruffs and handkerchiefs. Cecil passed the account on to Hertford and it was paid promptly. He had no wish for further quarrels, having found no better luck in seeking a pardon. He had been sending the Queen small gifts and pleaded for further help from Dudley. But Dudley reported back, bluntly, that although “he had moved the Queen’s majesty of his behalf he did not find her in the mood, at present, to grant his prayer.” The bitterness of both families was now focused on what they perceived as Elizabeth’s cruelty. Francis Newdigate attributed it to Elizabeth’s desire to come to an accommodation with Mary Queen of Scots. Lord John, meanwhile, angrily observed that it was now Lent, a time “of mercy and forgiveness.” He wished he was the Queen’s confessor to exhort her to forgive and forget; “or otherwise able to step into the pulpit, to tell her Highness, that God will not forgive her, unless she freely forgive all the world.” Instead of forgiveness for his niece, however, Lord John shortly found himself in custody and returned to the Tower, whose cold walls he had last known during Queen Mary’s reign after the revolt of 1554.

  If Elizabeth had ever the slightest intention of releasing Katherine and Hertford, it had been botched by the discovery of the efforts being made to clarify Katherine’s rights to the succession, and undermine the Church commission’s decision on their “pretended marriage.” The Queen had learned of Hales’s book, with its promotion of Katherine as her rightful heir, and of the approaches made to clerics in Europe to declare on the legality of the marriage: approaches that had proved very successful. The clerics had concluded that since marriage was a matter of the consent between two people, and Katherine and Hertford had both advertised such consent and followed it with sexual intercourse, they were legally married and their children legitimate. Elizabeth was furious. Walter Haddon, the brother of the late Bradgate chaplain James Haddon, referred to her wrath as the tempestas Halisiana: the storm raised by Hales. That a subject should look abroad and seek the opinion of foreign clerics on a matter settled by her Church in England was bad enough. But that it should touch on the succession was worse. She particularly resented Hales’s “writing the book so precisely against the Queen of Scotland’s title.” It endangered her plan to marry Mary Stuart to Robert Dudley and threatened to further sour relations with her Scottish cousin.

  Katherine and Thomas were bundled out of Pirgo and placed under close arrest at the house of an Essex neighbor, Sir William Petre, at Ingatestone. Her uncle, meanwhile, was interviewed, as was Hertford’s stepfather, Francis Newdigate, and his servants. Several of the names that emerged from these interviews were familiar to Elizabeth, as either friends or clients of Cecil’s. They included Cecil’s heavyweight brother-in-law, the Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon, who appeared to have given Hales legal advice. According to the Spanish ambassador, de Quadra, Dudley believed that Cecil had actually written the book. But to Dudley’s irritation Elizabeth merely let Cecil know that she had noted the names of those involved who “had access to him in their suites.” She then allowed the Hales matter to drop. De Quadra reported that she felt there were “so many accomplices in the offence that they must overlook it.”

  Cecil was allowed to take charge of the investigation, and his enquiries proved to be not very probing. Elizabeth did not want to be embarrassed by the names that might have emerged. It would have highlighted her weakness. But her anger over the betrayals had to be satisfied one way or another. “Club-foot” Hales would spend a year in the Tower and a further four under house arrest, while Nicholas Bacon was banished from court and the Privy Council for several months. His health never recovered from the shock of his disgrace. Imprisonment in the Tower also had a devastating effect on Lord John Grey. He died on 19 November 1564, “of thought,” his friends said. Memories of his interment in the Tower ten years earlier must have crowded in: his two brothers had spent their last days here and his elder niece Lady Jane Grey was beheaded within its walls. Cecil preferred, however, to put his friend’s death down to gout.

  Of the principal protagonists at the center of the drama the now three-year-old Lord Beauchamp remained with his grandmother the Duchess of Somerset, while his father, Hertford, was removed from Hanworth. He was placed instead with the aged Sir John Mason, who detested him and had previously complained to Cecil that prison was too good for him. Katherine was left at Ingatestone, with the baby Thomas, lonely and brokenhearted. And while she was left to ponder that she might never see her husband or elder son again, it was her sister’s turn to follow her along the well-trodden path toward tragedy.

  * I have put the text into modern English to make it easier to follow.

  PART FOUR

  LOST LOVE

  “… Think ye see

  The very persons of our noble story

  As they were living: think you see them great,

  And followed with the general throng, and sweat

  Of thousand friends; then, in a moment, see

  How soon this mightiness meets misery:

  And
if you can be merry then, I’ll say

  A man may weep upon his wedding day.”

  Henry VIII, PROLOGUE

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  XXII

  The Lady Mary and Mr. Keyes

  WATCHING AT THE SIDELINES OF HER SISTERS’ LIVES, THE by now nineteen-year-old Lady Mary Grey had grown up into an intelligent, determined, and well-read young woman. Despite such qualities she was not, however, thought of seriously as an heir to the crown. It was expected that status be indicated, at least in part, in beauty of ornament and person. The social order reflected the divine order in which what was good was also beautiful, and ugliness and deformity were associated with sin and that which was base. The English thus placed a great deal of importance on appearance, and Mary Grey’s was unprepossessing. She was the shortest person at court, and described by the Spanish ambassador as “crook backed and very ugly.” Mary Grey, quite literally, did not have the stature of a future monarch—but she sought to turn this to her advantage.

  Mary Grey had admired her sister Jane and kept a copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, with its description of her brave death. But she also envied the happiness Katherine had enjoyed with Hertford—albeit briefly—and she too was now in love. The object of her affection was a widower twice her age, and with several children, called Thomas Keyes. He held the post at court of Sergeant Porter. This placed him in charge of palace security, a position given only to a man of unimpeachable loyalty and imposing physique, and Keyes was well-known for both. He was a former soldier and reputed to be the biggest man at court, capable of dealing with drunken spats or more serious disturbances. Mary Grey saw him nearly every day at the palace gate. He stood with the guard who served under his command, each carrying a black staff with which they ensured the entrances to the palaces were kept clear and peaceful. There he courted the spirited and diminutive Mary in the traditional manner, with tokens of affection. One day he gave her his ruby ring, on another a gold chain with a little hanging bottle of mother-of-pearl. The physical contrast troubled them no more, it seems, than the differences in their age, rank, and the potential danger of conducting their romance without the Queen’s knowledge.