The Queen's Governess

by Karen Harper

  “They dare,” I told her, “because they are to advise you, and they fear great upheaval if there is no legitimate Tudor heir.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” She began to pace, her skirts swishing and belling out. Since she was on her feet, I started to stand. “Oh, Kat, do sit when I invade your own privy chamber. Since you are not remonstrating, shall I think you are on their side in this?”

  “In an objective way only. Subjectively, I understand your fears and feelings.”

  “If so, you are the only one! Tell me then—tell me the reasons I shall never wed, no matter how many of these pleas and petitions they send me now or forevermore.”

  I put my quill on the table, sat back in my chair and said, “Firstly, because you have seen women—queens, even—die in childbirth.”

  “Granted. My kingdom needs me as much as I need it—my people. I shall remain a virgin in truth and in my people’s eyes. I shall be wedded only to them. Secondly,” she went on, as if I did not answer her quickly enough, “men conquer women when they couple. I vow, men like to be on top in all ways, and I cannot have that. Then, once they are sated, they move on. Can you deny it?”

  “I cannot deny it with your own father, but . . .”

  “But what? Did not you tell me your own father paid no heed that his second, younger wife could have done away with your mother?”

  “Yes, but I was thinking about my husband. John—”

  “Your lord is a rare man. Now, if I could find one like that, who is strong in his own right but lets me do what I must in the way of duty . . . one who coddles me and does not try to rein in or bridle me . . . Strange, is it not, that both John and Robin are so good with horses?”

  My head jerked at that swift change of subjects. She had hardly breathed Robert Dudley’s name to me since he’d been back to court. She shook her head as if to clear it and, pacing again, plunged on. “Besides, I saw how painful marriage can be for reasons besides losing control of one’s self, one’s power. My sister loved King Philip with all her heart, and he could not wait to get her with child, only so he could leave her and return to his Spanish mistress. Mayhap all princes and kings are like that.”

  She was flinging gestures now, walking in circles around me and the table. “You were right that my own brother-in-law Philip wanted to seduce me that day we met and he looked me over as if I were a filly to buy. Worse, poor Mary would scream from her grave if she knew he quickly sued for my hand when she was gone. A necessary business, political business for a king and queen, that is what marriage is.”

  I finally got a word in: “My dearest, I do not like to hear you so bitter and jaded.”

  “Realistic, more like. Kat, I want to rule alone. Only alone will I be safe. Robin thinks you speak against him and that’s why I am publicly warm but privily cold to him, but I have tried to tell him no, that I am acting on my own and will never wed. Well, indeed, enough said.”

  She reached over my shoulder, picked up the parliamentary petition and tore it top to bottom.

  As for the rest of the queen’s hectic, exacting schedule, in the afternoon and evening she filled her time with receptions for foreign visitors, conversing in official Latin or in whatever was their foreign tongue. I saw more than one continental ambassador’s jaw drop in grudging admiration of the young, slender queen. Also, she spent extra hours, as she had not for years, practicing the lute or bending over the keys at her virginals. She drove herself hard, and I knew why. So it shocked me when she announced that she was going to elevate Robert Dudley to the peerage as Earl of Warwick, his father’s forfeited title, and that anyone who cared to see her sign the papers in her presence chamber was welcome to attend.

  “What’s her game here?” Cecil asked John and me sotto voce as others filed in, whispering, where the queen was already seated at a desk she’d had carried into the center of the room. Robert, in elaborate peacock blue velvet doublet and hose, stood before her, preening as if he’d just inherited the entire kingdom.

  “We are as taken aback as you,” I told Cecil.

  “Has she hoodwinked us?” he muttered, almost to himself. “She pretends to blow cold toward him but yet intends to have him so she must elevate him first? As the old adage says, ‘Fickleness, thy name is wom—’”

  I frowned at him, but Mildred appeared and gave him a good elbow in the ribs which stopped him midword. “I’ll not hear such disparagement of strong women from you, my love,” she told him. “Kat, how heartened I am to see you again,” she cried, and hugged me, then John.

  The four of us stood near the doorway as the queen began to read the petition aloud. The clusters of courtiers soon quieted. “Ah,” she declared in a dramatic fashion, lifting the parchment with the wax and ribboned seal as if to gaze close quarters at it, “papers for the earldom. And yet those in such lofty positions must be fully trustworthy and fully loyal. Were not your family once traitors against the Tudors, Lord Robert?”

  Silence fell with a thud. Staring at her aghast, Robert cleared his throat. “Your Majesty, I—Can you not just sign without publicly punishing me for things far past?”

  “And not so far past. I fear this might be premature or even reckless, so at least I admit publicly when I have misstepped.”

  Just as she had pounced in private on the parliamentary petition, she shredded the warrant, but with a little penknife from the desk, stabbing it, ripping it. With John, I fell back toward the door to the hall with Mildred while Cecil pushed his way forward.

  “You’ll not shame me so!” Robert roared at her.

  “I’ll do as I will,” she shouted back. “Hell’s gates, there will be but one ruler here, and it is this queen!”

  Robert spun away and made for the door. Some stepped back from his path, others bumped his shoulder. He said nothing else to anyone but glared at me and muttered in as menacing a voice as I have ever heard, “You put her up to this, and you will pay.”

  Robert still hung about the fringes of the court, but he was seething. I avoided him, though John said he’d had words with him twice, and once Elizabeth in a snit sent John briefly away again for disparaging words against Dudley. “I know how to calm all sorts of wild steeds but not Dudley or the queen,” John told me once.

  But when he returned—I had not pleaded for him, but had said hardly a warm word to her—I could tell she rued her hasty, head-strong behavior. How grateful we were when Her Majesty named John to a position she knew would please us above all else: the grant of the offices of steward and ranger of the manor of Enfield, north of London in Essex. In short, whenever she excused us from court duties, we now had the right to live on the estate we both had loved best for years.

  “For your love and loyalty to me, the both of you,” she told us as she presented us with the warrant for the titles and duties. For one moment, I wondered if she would rip it up as she had other documents of late, but I knew better. This was her love gift to us, proven by the fact she was letting me go with John for six precious weeks—August and part of September—when she oft said she could not bear to be parted from me.

  She hugged us both in turn, then kissed me on both cheeks. “I envy you a strong, happy marriage,” she told us, looking from one to the other. “Yes, do not fuss or mourn for me, because I mean it. In you two, I see such exists. God forgive me, though I still love Robin and ever will, I must show him my love only in the ways of a monarch and not of a woman.”

  Her dark eyes—Anne Boleyn’s eyes—filled with tears, but she blinked them back. “I shall think of you two riding the grounds and strolling in the meadows and—and so much more,” she said, and gave John’s arm a playful punch. “Go now and pack before I change my mind. I will see you both in summer progress when we all move to Hampton Court, for we must flee the vile pox in the city again this year.”

  I could tell she was going to cry. She pushed us from the room and closed the door on us. And just as I could read her thoughts and temperament after all these years, John could
read mine, for he said, “No, you are not going back to comfort her. She has Mary Sidney, for she’s never grown cold toward Robert’s sister as she did him. Come on, now, or I shall sling you over my shoulder and ride off with you, just as I yearned to do the first time I beheld you in all that mire and mud, heading for King Henry’s tent with Queen Anne’s handkerchief. Come, now!”

  I went. We had blessed, wonderful weeks. At our ages, both over half a century old, we enjoyed a second honeymoon. We loved each other, slept late and lolled about in various states of undress. We rode through the rich forests where oaks and beech turned to flaming crimsons and golds. Holding hands, we strolled Enfield’s gardens and threw acorns in the moat, where we also sailed leaf boats.

  John did his duties, we both worked on his book and I wrote more of my manuscript, now titled My Life with the Tudors. I remembered it was here at Enfield almost fifteen years before that Elizabeth and her brother Edward learned their royal sire was dead and the boy was king. That day I had stood up to Edward Seymour, the Lord Protector, telling him I had every right to comfort my Elizabeth.

  Even the next September, 1562 it was, Her Grace sent us to Enfield, so it seemed it was our own. Yet in those dreamy days of love and beauty, for the first time in several years, I had my Anne Boleyn dream again. This time, she drifted not in through a window as before, but opened a dark door and emerged from its depths.

  “Help her, save her,” came the whispered cry like sere autumn leaves shuffled by in the wind. “Help my girl . . .”

  As she turned away and started back toward the door, she beckoned to me. One must follow a queen . . . obey a queen, I thought. Yet, as ever in this dream, I could not move my feet. I was glad, for I did not want to follow her. What was down there? Deep blackness like a tomb? Was this a portent of my coming death?

  I must have moaned or screamed, for I awakened with John holding me, rocking me. “It’s all right, all right,” he crooned. “Not the old nightmare?”

  “Yes—yes, something like it, but changed.”

  “You’ve been missing Elizabeth. But in less than a week, we’ll rejoin her at Hampton Court, just like last year, so let’s enjoy this time, lest it doesn’t come again.”

  “But I—Queen Anne was gesturing me toward a dark door—down steps, I think. I’m not certain. Do you think she meant something dire will befall?”

  “No, my dear love. A figment of the imagination, a night fear, that is all. Here, turn your back and let me hold you until you sleep again.”

  I knew I was clutching at straws, but I had to keep talking. “The dream probably changed because yesterday I was thinking how blessed we are to have doors opened for us, not like the old days at Hatfield or worse, when I was in the Fleet Prison or the Tower.”

  “Brr!” he said, giving an intentional, dramatic shiver. “If you mention that latter place again, I’ll have nightmares too, and not because we were housed there once. I have a lot of work to do as Master of the Jewel House when we get back to London this fall,” he went on in an obvious attempt to take my mind off my fretting.

  “Or not till winter, if the pox does not abate there soon, poor souls,” I said, and snuggled back against him. His beard stubble rasped against my naked shoulder when he kissed me there; that felt so good, so real, as my beloved man always had. “Thank the Lord,” I added, “the queen and court are safe in the country. It was just a dream, that’s all.”

  The very next day, during a driving rainstorm, a young lad, not even an official messenger, came riding in. I saw it was one of the newer grooms John had been teaching to train horses in the new way. He stood dripping and shivering before the hearth as John threw a blanket around him and thrust a mug of hot cider in his hand. My stomach cramped; in several days we were to join the queen and court at Hampton Court Palace for the rest of September.

  “So, Geoff,” my lord said to him, “I told you to come to me if you ever needed help, so what is it?”

  “It’s not that, but Lord Cecil sent me with this,” he said, extending a wrinkled, damp piece of parchment. “Said he couldn’t send a reg’lar man, lest he be missed by the Master of the Horse. The whole court—London too—is scairt to death. But Cecil asks did Lord Dudley’s message reach you since you din’t come? The queen’s sore ill with fever and named him Lord Protector of the kingdom, if she don’t live.”

  “What?” John demanded. “If she doesn’t live? Do you mean Cecil or Dudley is Lord Protector, boy?”

  “Dudley, milord. Not always in her right mind, Lord Cecil said, but the queen been calling for you, milady.”

  I had gasped and clapped my hands over my mouth, but John leaped to action. “Chester!” he shouted for our house steward, who came bounding in. “Send word for three horses to be saddled, Gentry, Devon and Orion. And find this lad some dry clothes and a fast meal. We are off for Hampton Court in a quarter of an hour. Kat, pack only what goes in six saddlebags, including an extra cloak and hood. We’ll be drenched and mud spattered at best. Go, my love. We’ll get to her in time, and you will help to heal her.”

  The lad spoke again as I ran from the room. “It’s a risk to get too close to her. His lordship says she’s caught the pox.”

  The rest of that day and the early part of the next was a rain- and fear-swept blur for me. The roads were muck and mire, some almost impassable, but we pushed on, sometimes riding fetlock-deep through streams in ditches. Why had Robert Dudley’s message not reached us? I prayed Her Grace would not think we had delayed or even stayed away for fear of catching the contagion. The pox! There were several kinds: the French pox, of course, which was a sexual disease, and the swinepox, which often struck children. But the smallpox disfigured and killed hundreds. Not the queen. Not my beloved Elizabeth.

  When we reached the Thames, we hired a barge to row us upstream and paid dearly for it too. Not only was the going hard against the rain-swollen current, but the oarsmen had heard the queen had the pox and they wanted nothing to do with the area. They shoved off back downstream the moment we got our horses off their barge.

  I knew I looked as horrible as I felt, exhausted, fearful, bereft. In Cecil’s note to us he had said it was true that the queen had named Dudley as Lord Protector, should she be incapacitated or die.

  Die! Not if my life depended on it.

  Though I wanted to run straight for her suite upstairs, we stopped the first person we knew—I cannot recall to this day who it was—and asked the queen’s condition. “In extremis,” he said. “Coming to a crisis and may die.”

  Leaving the boy with the horses, we ran through the base court and clock court into fountain court nearest to the royal suite. Few people were about. John pulled me in a reception room to change our outer garments and wash our face and hands. We were soaked clear through, and my teeth were chattering from fear and chill.

  “I’m going to her now,” I told John. “They don’t need to announce me.”

  “Her bedchamber might be sealed.”

  “I’ll break down the door.”

  We started along the corridor toward the main stairs but saw Robert Dudley coming down the large staircase, no doubt to greet us, even to escort us. He looked finely garbed, all in silver and black. I recall he seemed to have new high-topped Spanish leather boots that creaked when he walked. He had an entourage of men behind him, but he held up his hand to keep them back and came over to us.

  “How is she?” I demanded. “We did not get your message. Surely, she hasn’t taken a turn for the worse! I’m going to her now.”

  “Impossible, Lady Ashley,” he told me. “My sister Mary is tending her and has quite replaced you in her affections. The Privy Council awaits just outside her door to know if she survives the crisis. Only I and Cecil go in, I as Lord Protector, of course, so in effect, I am in charge here now.”

  “I have heard she was calling for me,” I repeated, while John’s strong arm about my waist propped me up. “I am going to her.”

  “I and the Council must deny
you access to her person,” he said, frowning. Then his eyes lit, and his visage lifted. “The tables are turned now, are they not?”

  “You deceitful—” John began, before Robert cut him off.

  “Both of you keep quiet and keep back. I cannot have someone near the queen who might continue to turn her against me. With you away, she has named me to inherit her throne. I have left word with the guards at her door that you are not to enter. Now I have business to attend to.”

  He and his entourage swept off down the hall. I stood agape, my mind racing. “He blames me for her turning against him—even though she’s named him Protector.”

  “In her delirium and fever, named the wretch thus.”

  “But I must get to her somehow. For her sake, for mine—that is what Queen Anne was trying to tell me in the dream.”

  “Go back into the room where we washed up, and I’ll find Cecil. He’ll gainsay that power-hungry seducer.”

  “But what if you can’t find him, or he must do what Robert says, or she—she takes a worse turn without me with her when I’m so close,” I insisted, my voice breaking on a sob.

  He put me in the room and closed the door. For a moment I feared he’d locked me in, but it was only that the latch stuck when I checked it. Covering my head with my dry hood and cape, I took the single old cresset lamp which sputtered in the room and went back out into the corridor and then the courtyard. Now I knew what Anne’s spirit had been telling me in the dream: “Help my girl . . . save my girl. . . .” and that gesturing toward the dark door.

  Pelting raindrops drummed on the courtyard cobbles, but that suited me, as few were about in such weather, especially with the dread pox stalking all of us. Where was that door along here where ivy climbed, thicker now than years ago, thicker than that day my nine-year-old Elizabeth and her five-year-old brother Edward had found the door that led to the royal bedchamber? It had to be along here.