by Karen Harper
God save me, women were not exempt from torture here and, as the so-called weaker sex, were considered easy marks to talk. I knew the once bold Queen Anne when brought here babbled much out of fear for her life. Last week a guard had made a cruel jest that Queen Anne and, later, Queen Catherine Howard had “talked their heads off ” once they were enclosed within these walls. I fought such temptation every moment I was entombed here.
In faith, I knew far too much of the history of this place. Now not just I but the only two men I had ever loved—may the one be cursed, the other blessed—were imprisoned somewhere here beside the misty, murky Thames.
The cold river wind slapped me as we walked the green toward the White Tower. The gray sky—all was gray upon gray in this wretched place—shuddered with sleet. When I blinked, my eyelashes were wet—from tears or the weather, I knew not. At least out here I could breathe fresh air and hear city sounds. The bells of several churches clanged the time—three of the clock. Carters and peddlers shouted their wares from across the moat and tall walls, much sweeter sounds than the rattle of keys, or worse, the echo of disembodied voices from the dungeons of this place.
How I wished for an omen I would soon be safe and free. But one of the black-as-night Tower ravens screeched at me. A fierce beast from the royal menagerie in the Lion Tower roared just before the iron portcullis at the end of the Middle Tower slammed its teeth into the pavement as if to keep me in and salvation out. When I stumbled on a crooked paving stone, Sir Thomas put his hand to my elbow and spoke.
“No more cobbled-up excuses. Time to tell true, and you know it, Mrs. Ashley.” He squeezed my arm before he let loose. His eyes seemed to pierce through me. Whatever abilities had brought him to the young king’s Privy Council, I knew what talents made him their examiner: the man’s mere presence chilled one to the bone, and he could twist and record the merest sigh or slip of the tongue faster than summer lightning. I drew back; they pushed me on. I feared—I knew—they were taking me to torture. I would be maimed for life; I would never live through such; I would blurt out all.
Just ahead of us sat the stone church of St. Peter in Chains, a name so perfect for this place. Under the paving stones within, Anne Boleyn’s body lay yet today, stuffed in an old wooden chest for arrows because no one had thought to bring a coffin for her. St. Peter’s lay just across the now frost-blighted green where had stood the scaffold for beheadings.
Even now I could see the swing of the sword that cleaved Anne’s head from her body. I felt the bile rise in my throat again. Though I had only served Anne off and on in my earliest years at court, I had felt a bond with her, for she had needed me and trusted me with her confidences, with the ring for her child—and with Elizabeth’s well-being. That time she had ordered Cromwell to bring me to the Tower she had demanded the promise of him that I be sent where Elizabeth went, at least until her majority. Though Anne and Cromwell were long gone, I had taken Anne’s wish as my passion to protect Elizabeth. I felt close to Anne because I had become the mother Elizabeth had lost. Oh, yes, Anne Boleyn had given Elizabeth Tudor life, but I had given her love.
And so, in my deepest dreams, I had somehow been haunted by Anne. Worries I would let her down kept me awake some nights, and I fancied she sometimes spoke to me in my sleep, desperately, passionately, even as she had that last moment when she hugged me farewell in her prison room here at the Tower and I vowed to be her girl’s good teacher and friend always.
But what was to become of us now? Would my lovey’s interrogators charge her and imprison her? What if I shared Anne’s fate here in the place she died? For indeed, it was now my turn to face the terrors of the Tower, ones I could not escape even in sleep.
For, though Anne had died more than twelve years ago, in a dream last night, I had seen her again. She’d come into my cell, crying, “I beg you, tend my girl. Red-haired, the hue of my martyr’s blood spilled for her—see?” she’d cried, touching her neck, then holding out beseeching crimson hands to me. “Innocent, I was innocent. I praised the king from the scaffold when I should have cursed him . . . all, all so he would not harm Elizabeth. Innocent . . . tell them you are innocent and she is, too . . . take care of my girl. . . .”
I shook my head to clear it, so exhausted I was seeing apparitions even now. Light-headed, I was floating, barely putting one foot before the other.
We entered the White Tower, which stood in the very center of the walls, then down we went, down narrow, twisting stairs below the ancient chapel. I gasped when they swung open the small, creaking door of a fetid-smelling cell, small and dark as an arrow-box coffin. The short, narrow door had no grate; all was dark within. I expected to be shoved inside and ducked to avoid banging my head.
Behind me, the Lord Lieutenant’s voice boomed out, “We call it the Little Ease, so small no one can stand erect in it nor sit, and ’tis as black as the pit of hell down here. So easy for one to be forgotten . . .”
His words struck me hard. One of my worst fears, even long before I made a devil’s bargain to be brought to court from distant Devon, long before I began to serve the magnificent and terrible Tudors, was that I would be of no account in this life. I was living my life on the fringes of Dartmoor, which I now longed for with all my heart. Its mists could hide one, its desolation, loneliness and hauntings were naught compared to this looming horror.
Instead of Anne Boleyn’s singsong pleas in my head, I heard a voice chant words I used to sing as a child: Devon, O Devon, in wind and rain, my heart returns to you again. Was I going mad in this place?
To my shock and utter relief, they turned me about and led me up and away from the dungeon of Little Ease to another of the towers. There they showed me the rack, which pulled one’s joints asunder, the very rack where they had broken the Protestant martyr Anne Askew before her death. In other soot-smoked chambers, they paraded past my wide eyes dreadful instruments they called thumbscrews, obscene-looking knives, pincers and pokers heating in a brazier full of glowing coals. I dry-heaved when they displayed for me the collection of gleaming teeth that had been extracted from hapless prisoners. I began to shake so hard my own teeth chattered.
Worse even were what they boasted would be best for a “woman’s tender mercies, for they are named for womankind.” The Scavenger’s Daughter was an iron ring that brought the head and feet and hands together in a backward circle of wrenching bones and muscles. The Iron Maiden, a life-sized case hammered out in a female form, pierced the person with iron spikes until their screams echoed “clear across the green to my very lodgings hard by the Bell Tower,” the Lord Lieutenant observed with a sad shake of his hoary head. I could hear the very Tower walls echo with silent screams of lost souls.
“I will brook no excuse, so I pray our guest takes these things to heart—a word to the wise, Sir Thomas,” the Lord Lieutenant said as if trying to keep a naughty child in line or as if I were not even present. How often had men treated me thus, speaking in my earshot as if what I thought was of no matter in the grand scheme of things. “And, no doubt,” he went on, “the governess of a Tudor has learned to be wise, however dense they both have pretended to be of late.”
“Aye, appointed to the Lady Elizabeth by King Henry himself, weren’t you, Katherine Champernowne Ashley?” Sir Thomas asked, using my whole name as if he were familiar with the entire record of my life. “With a nod from clever Cromwell, I hear.”
Now I could only nod. That question I could answer with impunity, at least. Lord Cromwell’s sharp visage floated before me, then Henry Tudor’s florid face—even my father’s, as if I were reviewing my life before my impending death. Why did men ever seem to rule my life, rule the world? From my first days it had been so, but I had fought it and had helped my sweet, strong Elizabeth learn to fight it too. Even the Lord Jesus valued women, for to whom did He first appear after His resurrection but a woman? And three women boldly kept a vigil near the cross as he was tortured and died . . . was tortured and died. . . .
I s
hook my head to clear it. I must cling to the vow we, Her Grace’s loyal friends who had been her family in her cruel exile, had made. We would not answer their vile, accusatory interrogations. John, I knew, would hold to that, no matter what, so—through my death or his—I might lose him for good. Parry, Her Grace’s treasurer, had sworn wild horses would pull him apart before he would divulge the goings-on he had seen between our royal charge and that blackguard Tom Seymour. And therein, in all that I knew about Tom, all I had buried deep within me—not only of him and Her Grace, but of him and me—lay my deepest terrors. What would I blurt out if they tortured me?
But again, to my utter shock and relief, they escorted me away, back to my own cell. Despite the dank straw I had stuffed in the cracks around the window in a vain attempt to keep out the cold, despite the moldy walls and reeking chamber pot, it had never looked so grand or welcoming. I assumed these men meant to give me one last chance before they used their horrid instruments upon my tender woman’s body.
“Such a beautiful body, full breasts, lush hips and strong legs to ride a horse—or a man,” John had whispered once, when he was wooing me. Unlike John, Tom had always just taken what he wanted and never with pretty words, for he thought women on their backsides at his feet were his birthright. I could hurt him now for all he had done with but a few comments, yet then my Elizabeth might be pulled down even more into the mire, her slim prospects ever to sit England’s throne forever gone.
“Sit,” Sir Thomas said, and shoved me onto one of the two stools in the room. He perched behind a portable desk that had not been there today, though he had brought it with him twice before. “I believe you see what awaits you if you refuse to answer our queries. I would read this to you, but I hear you are not only a fast reader but a good one—one who reads from the heart, I heard Queen Mary herself say once. Do not think to so much as bend that paper, Mrs. Ashley, for we have two copies already, one en route to the Lord Protector to share with the Council. Quick, now. I’ll brook no more of your delays or clever bantering. Here is the confession.” He held out to me a piece of parchment, written top to bottom, and I took it from his hand.
Whose confession? I thought, fearful at first they had forged one for me to sign. Surely not one from Her Grace or my lord John. No, Parry’s signature was here at the end, his writing indeed, but shaky. Dear Lord, had they tortured Parry to get this confession, and now they will do the same to me?
Despite the dim light, I skimmed the piece. Dictated, evidently to Sir Thomas, was line after line of incidents and snippets of conversation Parry claimed to have witnessed between Her Grace, the Lady Elizabeth, and Sir Thomas Seymour, Baron Sudeley, in the Chelsea household of the Queen Dowager, Katherine Parr, widow of our gracious sovereign, King Henry VIII of recent memory, and then the wife of said Baron Sudeley.
Some of it Parry had indeed seen; some was secondhand hearsay, just a bit off, tittle-tattle from others. Plenty of it implicated me for, as governess, I knew I should have stood up to Tom more than I did. Yet I had even gone to his wife, the king’s widow. I had lectured Elizabeth and warned Tom away, but neither of them had heeded me. Should I not now at least tell them those things in my own defense? Parry had given up what he had vowed wild horses would not drag out of him, so I, too, was surely doomed.
My insides almost let loose. My heartbeat kicked up to a canter, then a wild gallop. My hands shook so hard, the piece of parchment rattled.
“The game is up,” Sir Thomas said as he dipped his quill in the inkwell and poised it over fresh paper. With his other hand, he pulled Parry’s confession from me and set it beside his blank paper with a flourish. “So,” he prompted, when I yet sat still as a stone, staring at nothing and everything before me, “let us begin at the beginning and tell the truth, all of it. You have seen the torments that await liars and those who defy us!”
The Privy Council’s examiner’s words resounded in my ears and brain and soul. Another powerful man held sway over my life. How I wish I had found the courage to stand up to Cromwell, even to the king, and above all, to Tom Seymour. I know not what inner stamina then stoked my heart and head, but I decided then I must do my best to stand up to him, even in this fearsome place, for myself and for Elizabeth.
“That is mere hearsay and quite slanted,” I dared, with a nod at Parry’s confession.
“Are you calling the princess’s bookkeeper, Thomas Parry, a liar for this confession he has written out for us?” he demanded, waving it in my face. “I warrant Elizabeth Tudor has confessed to all of this and more by now. It is obvious she was in collusion with the Lord Admiral to harm the king and overthrow the power of the Privy Council and the Lord Protector!”
“Is it you, Sir Thomas, who is giving testimony or me?” I spit back at him. As frightened as I was, his hectoring got my hackles up, especially his insinuating that my princess would admit to treason. “Cease trying to put words in my mouth, and I will tell you what happened—none of it to be held against a fourteen-year-old girl who was in the care of the Queen Dowager—to whom the Council sent us—and her husband, the Lord Admiral, who was given his rank and estates by King Henry, or by King Edward, who then held him in high and fond regard, or by that very Council!”
He puffed out his cheeks and leaned back from the table. I held my breath, amazed I had come up with those words. “Enough about the princess who is not my duty,” he insisted. “Do you favor the Lord Admiral or his cause then, Mrs. Ashley?”
That set me back, but I prayed he knew naught of my past with Tom. Even though John had ferreted it out, he surely would not tell these examiners, for that could doom me.
“Favor that blackguard in what way?” I challenged, stalling for more time to think.
“Once, while at Chelsea, you were overheard to say to the princess that the Lord Admiral, if not wed, could be the highest ranking unmarried male in the kingdom—implying he could be a suitable husband for her.”
“More hearsay, obviously gathered by an eavesdropper who hoped to ingratiate himself with those who hired him. I was assuring myself she knew to keep clear of him, and she assured me at that time she would not want to wed him, even if he were free to do so. And if your spy was of any account, sir, he no doubt would have told you I warned her that any marriage she considered would need permission of the Council and the Lord Protector! Write that all down, sir, every word of it!”
“All right then, Mrs. Ashley, take your time and tell me more in your own words. You are well spoken, madam, and no one’s fool, and I respect that. I am ready if you are,” he said, and, after scribbling all that down, dipped and poised his pen again. When I just glared at him, he said, “Let us go on to this, then. Master Parry says in his deposition—”
“A much better term than calling it a confession, sir.”
“He says you rode in great haste to London three or so weeks before Christmas after a hurried conversation with the princess. Did you seek out Thomas Seymour that day and discuss his plans to capture the person of the king or pass on information about his wedding Elizabeth Tudor?”
“I did not, sir, but I shall recount for your ears and pen—and any eavesdroppers you yet here employ—exactly what happened.”
Examinations and Depositions of Katherine Ashley, Governess to Princess Elizabeth, Regarding Possibly Questionable Dealings with Thomas Seymour, Lord High Admiral. The answers of Mistress Ashley. What communication she had with my Lady Elizabeth’s grace as touching the marriage with the Lord Admiral:
Mrs. Ashley saith she came to London but only to speak with her husband Mr. Ashley. There came home with her William, Mr. Ashley’s servant and his horsekeeper; and one Hornby, Yeoman of the Chamber; and William Russell, Gentleman. But indeed the very matter was because there had been a jar betwixt her husband and her, and he parted from her in a displeasure, as she thought, and therefore she could not be merry till she had spoken with him. For she had sent him a letter, but he had made no answer. And so she stayed for him, and he did tarry with h
er all that night. Her errand was done when her husband and she were agreed. She saith she did not speak at that time neither with the Lord Admiral nor no one of his men.
“I must say, I understand marital quarrels, Mrs. Ashley, but you yet insist you did not carry a message from or to the princess concerning the Lord Admiral?”
“I believe if you must ask that question again after I have answered it, your ears need a good cleaning out, Sir Thomas.” [I must admit, at this point, I was becoming more emboldened. Even though I am recalling this dreadful day from memory, I assure you I am not telling more here than was truly said.] “As I have oft done that for the princess when she was small, I could oblige you. Let me see what you have written, to be certain it is correct.”
“I am not your pupil, and you are to take orders from me.”
“Then move on to your next topic.”
“Very well. What was the argument between you and your husband about?”
My hard-won facade of bravado almost crumbled. For if he could pry that from me, I was doomed. All the Council needed was to hear I had been enamored of Tom Seymour years ago. Could Tom himself, interrogated here in the Tower or at his trial for treason, have even lied that our liaison was ongoing, as he had threatened to tell my John?
“Are you wed, Sir Thomas?” I countered. Lord help me, how my voice shook, despite my brazen plan.
“Many years, Mrs. Ashley. But I need to know—”
“Then you fully realize how petty arguments can become large ones. It began as a trifle, but I was so emotional that I reacted overmuch, and he stalked out and then we heard the news that the Queen Dowager had died, which greatly grieved us both as well as the princess, and then he went off in a huff before I could explain . . .”
“Yes, yes, all right,” he said, starting to scribble all that, then just giving up. “Mr. Ashley said it was a petty squabble too.”
