The Queen's Governess

by Karen Harper

  My head snapped up. They had asked John all this, trying to snare us in a trap. But, by the grace of God—and my John’s bold spirit—he must have stood up to them too, and, even though he had said he was jealous of Tom, he did not give up on me. That was all I needed to give me even more courage—that and knowing my lovey was safe from these wretches.

  “I ask you to record something, though, sir,” I said, my voice now more my own. He filled his pen again and sat alert. “Put down that it is so cold here that I cannot sleep at night and have the chilblains, and it is so dark I cannot in the day see to read, for I must stop the window with straw—put that down, sir.”

  He actually wrote my complaint down. “And you may end with this,” I added. “For if it were possible that I might be with Her Grace again, never would I speak of marriage to her—no, not to win all the world. As touching Parry’s secondhand account of Thomas Seymour’s boldness in the princess’ bedchamber, the Lord I take as my witness, I spoke roughly to the Lord Admiral to get out of her chamber and leave off his untoward play. But he swore he would tell my lords of the Council, ‘So what if I do? I would they all saw it!’

  At last I told the queen of it, who made a small matter of it to me and said she could come with him herself, and so she did ever after. Do you have that all, sir, crossing the t ’s and dotting each i ?”

  “Yes, yes, sign here then, for I weary of your denials of any guilt.”

  “Denials? I have told you all the truth, and not a bit of it conflicts with Thomas Parry’s words—or, I warrant, my husband John’s!”

  So I signed boldly in my best hand, Katherine Ashley, and prayed to be done with it—and that on Elizabeth’s end, harried at Hatfield, Her Grace was holding up well.

  January 28, 1549

  Princess Elizabeth to Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector:

  To my Lord Protector’s grace, My very good lord:

  As concerning Kat Ashley, she never advised me unto marriage with your brother but said always (when any talked of my marriage) that she would never have me marry—neither in England nor out of England—without the consent of the king’s majesty, Your Grace’s and the Council’s. Others have told me that there goeth rumors abroad which be greatly both against mine honor and honesty, which above all other things I esteem: that I am with child by my Lord Admiral. My lord, these are shameful slanders, for the which, besides the great desire I have to see the King’s Majesty, I most heartily desire Your Lordship that I may come to the court, that I may show myself there as I am. Written in haste from Hatfield this 28 of January.

  Your assured friend to my little power, Elizabeth

  March 7, 1549, to my very good lord, my Lord Protector:

  As for Kat Ashley, I request that it would please Your Grace and the rest of the Council to be good unto her. First, because that she hath been with me a long time and many years, and hath taken great labor and pain in bringing of me up in learning and honesty. The second is because I think that whatsoever she hath done in my Lord Admiral’s matter as concerning the marrying of me, she did it because, knowing him to be one of the Council, she thought he would not go about any such thing without he had the Council’s consent. For I have heard her many times say that she would never have me marry in any place without Your Grace’s and the Council’s consent. The third cause is because that it shall and doth make men think that I am not clear of the deed myself, but that it is pardoned in me because of my youth, because that she I love so well is in such a place as the Tower.

  Also if I may be so bold, not offending, I beseech Your Grace and the rest of the Council to be good to Master Ashley, her husband, which because he is my kinsman.

  Your assured friend to my little power, Elizabeth

  [It was years after I suffered in the Tower that I found copies of my testimony and of the letters Elizabeth had written on my behalf, for she had them in her things, which I cared for. Without her pleas, despite my standing up for myself and John’s saying nothing incriminating even in the face of Tom Parry’s confession and threat of torture, I might have perished there. As it was, I spent weeks within, suffering not only from that cold, cruel place but from having been separated and dismissed from my lovely, bright girl, who—God help me, though I never told a soul then, though she was royal and I of lower rank—was like a daughter to me.]

  CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH

  Mrs. Ashley,” Sir Leonard Chamberlain, Lord Lieutenant of the Tower, informed me, poking only his head in the door of my cell, “good news for you and Master Ashley, for word has come you are both to be released today.”

  So great was my shock and relief, I gasped and broke into tears. “And to be returned t-to Her G-grace’s household?” I stammered. By my reckoning, this was the nineteenth of March, and I had been in this place for nigh on four months. I dashed tears from my face and waited for news of the second-most-desired dream, a reunion with Elizabeth.

  “Hardly that,” he told me, “but you are to be released into the custody of one William Cecil, privy secretary to Edward Seymour, the Lord Protector Somerset. I’ll be back for you within the hour,” he added, and closed the door.

  Freedom! A reunion with John, though not with Elizabeth. I must be grateful for this blessing, yet I cursed those who would keep me from my girl. Would John and I ever be permitted to serve her again?

  I was tempted to leave all my worldly goods here, for I had worn out my three gowns, which now looked and smelled of this fetid place. But I had no idea whether John would be reinstated at his post either. We might be forced to go north to beg bread and board from his stepbrother. So I rolled up my soiled, tattered garments and tucked them under my arm. I washed my face in my drinking water, since it was the only clean I had. I spit on the floor and, when the Lord Lieutenant came for me, followed him out with my head held high.

  Ah, to breathe fresh air again. But where was John and in what condition would I find him?

  “Kat, sweetheart,” came his voice behind me, and I turned to see him—thinner than he had been but even taller than I remembered—hurrying toward me. He looked unkempt with ragged beard and shaggy hair, but I would not have cared one whit had he turned blue. He hugged me hard, then set me back at once, turning to Lord Lieutenant Chamberlain and the turnkey Gib. “I warrant,” John said, glaring at them, “I was in a cell just above hers these months and never knew it. But I felt you close, my Kat. If you have no objection,” he told them, “let us be going.”

  We walked past the green where Queen Anne had met her fate. I had a hundred questions about Tom Seymour’s treason trial, about why we were released now, and the well-being of my princess, but I said naught. I knew Tom had been convicted, and that the penalty for the charges was beheading.

  As we traversed the central cobbled courtyard, I shivered with excitement, though it was a mild weather day, so different from the ones I’d suffered within these cold stone walls. Moving only my eyes, I glanced up and around, vowing I would never be in this vile place again, unless I came here before her crowning should my Elizabeth ever mount the throne.

  And then I saw him.

  At first, I thought it must be a ghost or a trick of the noontide light, but a gaunt, bearded face peered from a narrow window three floors up, in a different tower from the one where John and I had been held. Tom Seymour! I stubbed my toe on a cobblestone, but John held me up. The Lord Lieutenant, then John, evidently saw Tom too, but no one so much as paused.

  “He’s to die a traitor’s death tomorrow on Tower Hill,” Master Chamberlain said. “So sad that the king’s uncle betrayed him.”

  Neither of us said a word. I tried to summon up some sympathy—after all, Tom must have not betrayed us in his trial. But whatever I had once felt for him lay already dead, beheaded and bled out. Truth be told, I detested the man I once thought I had loved. And more than that, though revenge was not a Christian virtue, after all I had suffered from him, I could have suddenly danced beneath his prison window. I had to stop
myself from cheering he was finally getting what he deserved, from jeering at him for his lies and pompousness—and for his brutal rape of me so long ago.

  But I feared this might be a trap, to see what we would say or do when we heard of his coming demise and caught a last glimpse of the man. Nor could I budge to so much as quickly thumb my nose at Tom, for John grappled me tighter to his side, and we walked out through the gate toward the street without breaking stride. At least, I thought with nearly as much relief as in leaving the hellhole that was the Tower, Elizabeth and I and this kingdom were rid of Tom Seymour forever.

  I gasped when the two guards there lowered their pikes to stop us. John’s body tensed as if he would spring at them, but the Lord Lieutenant nodded to them and, pointing, said, “They may pass. Over there, William Cecil to see that you are well tended.”

  “I am sick to death of being well tended,” John whispered out of the side of his mouth, but he greeted the young man who strode toward us with a strong handshake.

  William Cecil was young, at least by my standards, late in his second decade mayhap, though he sported a short, shovel-shaped beard, which made him look a bit grave. His sharp eyes were alert in his face, such intelligent, lively eyes, not flat, like Cromwell’s. Yet I was done with trusting men who owed their souls to the great powers of this kingdom, and this man served Edward Seymour, the cold, cruel Lord Protector I had seen at far too close range, a man who ruled the young king and was evidently content to see his brother Tom go to his death.

  Still, the wooden coach to which Cecil showed us looked so inviting, as did the mugs of ale one of his two men—guards?—offered us. I warned myself that the ale might be drugged, but John drank it straight down while he patted the closest of the four horses harnessed to the coach.

  Once we were inside, I saw a repast of bread and cheese laid out for us on a tray, but I was too excited and upset to eat. Master Cecil climbed in behind us, then called out, “To the Great South Road!”

  As the coach lurched forward, I could bear the suspense no longer. “I pray your orders are not to take us to exile, Master Cecil.”

  “I swear to you both by all that’s holy, you are in good hands. Not only those of my master the Lord Protector, but I vow you can count me among the future protectors of the woman you both served. Here,” he muttered, digging in his leather purse, “my formal introduction. I am also the newly appointed land accounts manager for the Princess Elizabeth—the estates her father left her, including Hatfield, Woodstock and Enfield Chase. I assure you that took some doing with the Protector. I have a letter from her here, sadly not a personal one to you, for she was afraid to risk that, but one which beseeches me to do all in my power to see you were freed and cared for. Hence, we are off to my country house at Wimbledon, where my wife awaits her guests with a chamber and hot meal.”

  My hands shook as hard as the coach rattling down the graveled street. I opened the first of two letters and recognized Elizabeth’s handwriting, asking her “recorder of the rents, the trustworthy William Cecil,” to see that two unnamed prisoners were well cared for. I sighed and leaned back into John’s embrace against the hard leather seat.

  “Thank you, Master Cecil. Thank you that I know she is well,” I cried, and pressed to my breasts her signature I knew intimately, for I had taught her to write it.

  CECIL’S HOUSE AT WIMBLEDON, NEAR LONDON

  So that was my introduction to the man who would become my princess’s and my queen’s most important and loyal adviser, though I hardly knew that then. Still, hints of William Cecil’s fierce loyalty and ambition for himself—but also for England and Elizabeth—abounded, so I decided he was a far different sort of man than Thomas Cromwell had been.

  That evening, after we had bathed, Cecil and his wife, Mildred, dined with us and told us all they knew of Tom’s trial. He had been obstinate and insulting to the end. But, though Elizabeth was still under house arrest, Cecil said she had admitted to no wrongdoing and so had saved us all.

  “Elizabeth of England may be young and yet untried,” he told us, “but she has her father’s mettle and, I pray, the morals of a good Christian, something that seemed to slip from His Majesty’s grasp the more power he claimed for himself. Poor Prince Edward is so controlled by the Lord Protector, he can hardly be himself. And the Princess Mary—should she ever mount the throne, I fear that England will be turned topsy-turvy in religious matters once again.”

  John and I slept the clock round that night and were only awakened by Cecil’s seven-year-old son by his first marriage, calling to his dogs in the gardens behind the house. After making certain there was no trouble outside, we fell back into the bed in each other’s arms and held tight. With my back pressed to John’s chest as though I sat in his lap, we were yet unable to believe we were together and free. I thought we had talked ourselves out last night, sharing all that had happened to us during our time in the Tower, but John said, “He dies today, the third person you have known well whose life is forfeit as a traitor.”

  “But the difference is Queen Anne was innocent, and, like the charges against her, that devil Cromwell’s charges were overblown. But Tom Seymour has made his own bed, and—I did not mean it that way.”

  “To hell with the wretched past. You and I have made our bed, my love, and will lie in it together.”

  He turned me to him and so it was that we were one again.

  You might know that demented Tom Seymour fought his captors on the scaffold and had to be hacked down. Just before that horrid scene, so Cecil said, the wretch had the gall to tell one of his servants, “Remember the charge I gave you!”

  The servant was questioned, and two letters in crude, scribbled code were found in the man’s shoe, one to each of the king’s royal sisters, urging them to press on against the Lord Protector, the brother Tom had always hated.

  And speaking of hatred, the entire thing made me sick to my stomach. Picturing the scene of Tom’s death appalled me, for, as different as it was from Anne Boleyn’s execution, it brought all that back to haunt me. I wished I could forgive Tom for his wretched treatment of me and Elizabeth—I prayed I could—but I could not, even though he’d paid the ultimate price.

  I lay abed for several days while John tended to Cecil’s horses and I longed to tend Elizabeth. I felt both better and worse when John said Cecil had reported that, upon hearing of Seymour’s death, Elizabeth had shown no emotion to those watching her closely and had said only, “Today died a man of much wit and little judgment.”

  However clever and strong she sounded, I knew she was yet tormented, not for the loss of Tom Seymour, but of her reputation and whatever shreds of safety and privacy she had once enjoyed. And when I learned that the Lady Tyrwhitt, the governess who had replaced me, was Katherine Parr’s stepdaughter, I knew how Elizabeth must yet be suffering in lonely, desperate silence, fearful she had lost a future.

  John and I desperately needed an income, and I hesitated to rely on the Cecils’ goodwill much longer. So Cecil arranged for John to work at the Lord Protector’s stables at Somerset House in London. It was then, when Mildred saw my despair, that she proposed a possible plan for me to receive permission to return to the princess.

  Mildred had become a fast friend and support to me, especially after John left for London. Indeed, we had acquaintances in common, for she had been tutored by Roger Ascham, who had also tutored Elizabeth. Like me, she valued learning, however different her family and past were from mine.

  And, truth be told, Mildred longed for children of her own. Cecil’s boy was her stepson, and one obviously not interested in learned or serious pursuits, though he was the heir of brilliant and ambitious parents. I shared with Mildred how I, too, had longed for a child with John, but at my age I knew that was never to be. Like us, the Cecils had not been wed for many years, though Mildred was but twenty-three and I, forty-two. At least John seemed well enough content as we were. I told her that my childlessness made me yearn even more for the only chi
ld I had ever reared.

  “I have an idea,” she said, “but one fraught with risk—and it might mean you will have to eat crow.”

  “Anything worth having is worth risking,” I told her. “Besides, when my family was so poor when I was growing up, I might have already eaten crow.”

  We smiled and nodded, almost in unison.

  “Your idea just might work,” Cecil admitted that night after Mildred broached it to him at supper. “When I see John in the city tomorrow, I will ask him what he thinks. Though it appears no one in the kingdom gainsays the Lord Protector, the exception to that is his wife, Anne. I swear but she is a shrewish harridan, willing to demean anyone to elevate herself. But you’d have to swallow your pride, Kat, take her scolding and, above all, find something in it for her. The woman’s passion for power knows no bounds.”

  “I am well acquainted with that ilk.”

  Looking wise beyond his age, he nodded. “No doubt, after years with the Tudors and those who try to climb into their favor. Kat Ashley, I pray for you—and myself—many more years of honest service for the good of the ruler and the realm. Our rewards can be great, but the sacrifices greater.”

  So it was that John agreed, and Cecil arranged that I should have an interview with the woman I recalled had insisted she take precedence over Katherine Parr, the widow of a king, no less. I had no illusions she would not abase and abuse me, but I had hopes she might put in a good word for me to return to Elizabeth’s service. Besides, I had already survived the terrors and torments of the Tower.