Kate’s second son, Thomas, was born on the cold morning of February 10, 1563. By then, Kate, having observed two birthdays in prison, was sunk deep in a dark despair that not even her “little sunbeam” could lighten. It wasn’t right, she said. Her sons should be in a proper nursery, with games, toys, and pets, and nursemaids to look after them, and they should have other children to play with and be free to frolic in the fresh air and sunshine, and there was their education to think of, and when they were a little older they should have ponies to ride. “Will we ever be free to walk in the sun, to walk out and gather wildflowers?” she wondered.
Indeed, freedom, of a sort, would soon come. Elizabeth decided that she could keep them in the Tower no longer. But she would not bring them to trial either. I overheard her telling Cecil that the English people ever loved an underdog; her own mother, Anne Boleyn, had been hated and reviled, until she stood trial. She had emerged from that ordeal transformed into a tragic heroine. The English people would be apt to fall in love with Kate—a beautiful young mother in love with her husband, guilty only of having royal blood in her veins and marrying without the Queen’s permission. Better to consign them to a quiet country oblivion than to risk the public rising as their besotted champions.
She timed their departure well, during an outbreak of plague in London, when her subjects were more concerned with their own survival than the succession and scandal.
Until the very last moment, Kate thought her children would be going with her. Then a pair of white-capped and aproned nursemaids came out into the courtyard. Kate brightened at the sight of them, thinking they had come to join her little household. Without me or her loyal Henny she had realized just how much she missed female companionship. But no, the women showed themselves stern and unsmiling as each took one of the little boys and carried them to another litter. Kate barely had a chance to kiss them good-bye. They wept and reached out for her over the nurses’ hard and unyielding shoulders, and Kate had to be restrained from going after them. She would have fought those women with everything she had, but the kindly Sir John Bridges held her and let her weep in his arms, and bade her “take comfort, madame, they are going to be with their grandmother and your husband, their father; they shall not be reared up amongst strangers.” Only that, and the hope that they might someday be reunited, kept Kate from falling apart. “We just have to wait for the Queen’s anger to cool, and then we shall all be together again,” she wrote me hopefully, and I knew Kate well enough to know that by trying to convince me, she was also trying to convince herself.
Denied a proper farewell, not even a parting kiss or even a handclasp, Ned and Kate, kept apart and watched with all vigilance per the Queen’s decree lest Kate conceive again, stared longingly at each other across the courtyard, which suddenly seemed as wide as an ocean, Kate would later confide. One of the guards, moved by the gold Ned slipped him, or even genuine pity perhaps, brought Kate a bouquet of red and white gillyflowers, bound with red and white silk ribbons, with a note from Ned.
My sweet and lovely Kate,
My heart breaks that I cannot be with you. I will never forget you.
Yours until the day I die,
Ned
Kate buried her face in the flowers and wept, watering them with her tears. Then each climbed into a leather-curtained litter and took to the road, going their separate ways. Each was thoughtfully provided with a pomander ball filled with herbs to protect them from the virulence. Sitting up all night, burning the candles till the sun came up, so that it would be ready in time, I made my sister a petticoat embroidered around the hem with beautiful tussie-mussies, nosegays of sweet herbs believed to keep away the plague. I dearly hoped that my loving stitches would keep her safe. As long as she wore the garments I made for her, I hoped she would remember that she would be clothed in love.
Elizabeth chose to be kind in her own way, though it was very cruel to Kate. She could have sent the boys to board with strangers, but she gave them into the custody of their formidable grandmother, the Duchess of Somerset, and sent them to Hanworth, in Middlesex, where Ned would also be going to live, under house arrest, in his boyhood home, forbidden to cross its boundaries or have any communication with the outside world except by letter.
She might have done the same for Kate and sent her to Bradgate, but she did not. Elizabeth could never forgive Kate for her beauty or her impetuous nature that always let passion have free rein, for being a free spirit while Elizabeth was earthbound in chains of duty also forged by painful and bitter experience; Kate trusted blindly and followed her heart, but Elizabeth never could. So instead of going to a home familiar and dear, where she might see kith and kin every day, as Ned would their sons and his mother, Kate was sent deep into the English countryside, to Gosfield Hall in Essex, home of the aged and gallant knight Sir John Wentworth and his lovely silver-haired wife, Lady Anne. This elderly couple, both in their seventh decade of life, were given to plainly understand that Her Majesty “meant no more by this liberty than to remove the Lady Katherine Grey from the danger of the plague,” and that she was a prisoner, to be kept strictly isolated, and forbidden to have “any conference with the Earl of Hertford or any person being of his household either.” I could only hope and pray that these new gaolers would be kind to Kate and learn to love her. For I knew my Kate could never live without love. I could not be with her, except by letter, and she had lost her “Sweet Ned” and her little boys, so God must, in His infinite kindness and tender mercy, give her some other love; to deny her would be a death sentence.
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Redbrick and turreted, just like Bradgate, only larger, with wide glass windows that invited the sunlight in, surrounded by pretty pleasure gardens and fishponds stocked with golden carp and bordered with yellow irises, Gosfield Hall was heaven on earth compared to the hellish, horrible prisons Elizabeth could have sent her to, and I hoped Kate realized and was grateful for it. I was, but I could not even thank Her Majesty.
After Kate was sent from court, the first time I saw Elizabeth, in a pearl-embroidered ivory gown and one of her magnificent new red wigs festooned with pearls and white ostrich plumes, I trembled as I sank down into the requisite curtsy as she passed. She paused before me and reached down to cup my chin, lifting it so I would look at her.
“Do not think to plead for your sister, little gargoyle, for I will not hear you.”
“Yes, Your Majesty, I understand.” I nodded, gulping down my fear.
Elizabeth’s shrewd dark eyes bored into me like nails.
“Yes . . . I believe you do.” She nodded. She walked on, only to stop again and look back. “I have been a prisoner too, and I do not forget what it is like to be young and trapped behind thick walls and iron locks, to wonder if each day will bring death, and if you will ever be free to walk in the sun. I have a long memory, Lady Mary.”
Elizabeth would always put England first, and though it was of necessity hardened and often hidden lest others see it as a sign of vulnerability, she still possessed a heart. I truly think, after the hot temper and wounded vanity that had fueled her vicious attack on Kate had cooled, the only anger that remained was at Kate for being such a fool, for marrying Ned Seymour heedless of the consequences.
It is easy to say that Elizabeth, being Queen, with the power to condemn or pardon as she pleased, ruined Kate’s life, but that is not entirely true. Kate was a woman grown, not a child, and she knew the danger and the consequences, and she did it anyway. She willfully chose to make love in the arms of danger. By doing so, she left Elizabeth little choice. Elizabeth did what she had to do, but not without some care and comfort for Kate, though many angered and outraged by her fate forgot that. A queen who rules alone in her own right has to be ruthless if she wants to survive and hold her throne. It could have been much worse; she could have left Kate to rot and die in a damp, rat-infested cell, sleeping on lice-ridden straw, with water and moldy bread her daily meal, or killed her outright, but Elizabeth did neither, and I al
ways remembered that, even when others forgot.
The Wentworths—thank You, God, for answering my prayers!—adored Kate and doted upon her like a daughter. They did their best to make her comfortable, giving her a beautiful and spacious suite in the west wing overlooking the gardens. They tried, heaven knows they tried, to help her find peace and some measure of happiness in her new life.
When Kate arrived at Gosfield Hall she was already mired deep in black depression. She rejected her finery, shunning the bright colors she adored, and wore only black, like one in mourning. Ned’s miniature, worn on a black silk cord about her neck, the great tear-shaped sapphire on its long golden chain, which Kate would often sit and listlessly finger, calling it the “emblem of all my sorrows,” and the rings he had given her—the sky blue diamond and the golden puzzle of her wedding ring—were her only adornments. “I know every line of his dear, handsome face,” she wrote me. “I wear his miniature always over my heart and feel like it goes deeper, as though the lines were etched deep into my heart instead of Lavinia Teerlinc’s featherlight brush strokes barely caressing the canvas.”
At first, she slept a great deal. Sometimes she even took sleeping draughts, preferring the oblivion of sleep to wakefulness without Ned and her boys. “Sometimes I wish I could sleep the rest of my life away,” she wrote me. “Morpheus is very kind to me; he does not send me dreams to torment me, instead he gives me sweet oblivion, a refuge, a haven, where I can escape from the pain and rest in peace.” Time no longer meant anything to Kate, only that each dawn heralded a new day without those she loved most, and dusk meant another night alone in bed without her “sweet bedfellow” beside her.
Whenever she was not wearing it, she kept Ned’s picture on the table beside her bed alongside the miniature Lavinia Teerlinc had painted of the young mother, proudly displaying her baby son. Though it made her feel vain to pass so many hours staring at her own likeness, this was the only picture Kate had of her firstborn, and she often bewailed the fact that there had not been time to have a picture painted of little Thomas. When her own imploring letters received no answer, she begged me to write to the Duchess of Somerset and ask her to have a picture painted of Thomas, but I was also ignored.
When she was not sleeping or weeping, Kate spent hours bent over her desk, writing endless letters to Ned, pouring out her love, reminding him of the passion they had shared, always signing herself “your constant, loving Kate.” Even though they were too young to read them, she wrote often to her “sweet boys,” just so they would know how much their mother loved and thought of them every waking hour. It was the only way she could still be a part of their lives, to make sure they didn’t forget her, but she didn’t know that they would never be delivered, that she was just wasting time, paper and ink, and breaking her heart; her boys would never read her letters; their grandmother burned them.
She addressed countless missives to the Queen, begging her forgiveness, “for my most disobedient and rash matching of myself without Your Highness’s consent,” and to Sir William Cecil, imploring him to intercede on her behalf. And she wrote to me, “the only one to whom I can be true, and tell all, without having to pretend, feign a cheerfulness I don’t feel, or try to keep alive the hope that is fast dying inside my heart.” She sent me great, long, rambling letters, pages and pages, weeks in the making, thick as books sometimes, wherein she set down her every thought and deed, giving me a window into her life through which I could see her so achingly clearly as though I were right there at Gosfield Hall standing outside her window looking in.
In a strange way, I felt closer to my sister than I ever had before in all the years when I saw her almost daily. At any given hour of the day or night, I could picture her and feel the sorrow weighing her down, and I tried, so hard, to send my strength across the distance, to will her to fight this pain that held her more a prisoner than the Queen’s commandment. I even sent her a new petticoat, embroidered around the hem with healing herbs—white-petaled chamomile with cheery yellow suns at each flower’s center to calm and soothe her, delicate pink and white clusters of valerian for the banishing of nightmares and to give her restful sleep, pale purple thyme to give peace to a troubled mind, and yellow St. John’s wort to fight the melancholy, lift her spirits, and restore good cheer.
“Your life isn’t over, Kate, even if your life with Ned is,” I wrote her, even though I knew these words would hurt her and make her heart bleed anew, but she needed to face the truth and accept and learn to live with it. If she continued to live in this constant, unrealistic hope of a reunion, the wound would never heal; it would bleed and fester and spread a poison that would kill her in the end.
Lady Wentworth, such a kind soul, also took it upon herself to write to me about how “our Kate” fared. She was alarmed by the way the flesh was falling from Kate’s bones and was determined to save her. Resorting to what she called “sweet temptation,” she set about feeding Kate mint, lilac, and rose jellies, spooning these, and rich, creamy custards, or compotes of summer fruits and berries, into her mouth like a mother feeding a balky babe. She tempted her with dainty cakes too pretty to resist, moist golden cakes iced with rich cream, crowned with sugar-crusted violets and heart’s ease pansies, their vibrant colors sparkling through the sugar crystals, “like blossoms fallen on snow not yet wilted or withered by the frost,” she said, writing words worthy of Father.
She would rush in excitedly with the first strawberries of the season, or all manner of berries baked into tarts. She dosed her every day with thyme and St. John’s wort and gave her a draught of valerian and chamomile every night. She stirred spoonfuls of sugar into Kate’s milk and made her drink wines of honeysuckle, dandelions, cherry, and elderberry. She would, in time, succeed in luring Kate out of her bed, on the pretext that her rooms must be “aired, swept, and sweetened,” to help make meadowsweet beer, coaxing her out to gather the foamy white flowers, which the country folk called “kiss-me-quick” or “courtship and matrimony,” and the dandelions and stalks of starry yellow agrimony, then into the kitchen to boil and mix these blossoms with lemons, sugar, honey, and yeast.
When I heard this news I smiled and hoped it would remind Kate of the time we made gillyflower wine for Jane and Guildford at Chelsea. I could still see my Kate in the meadow that day, smiling at me over the rim of her cup as she sipped the sweet, syrupy golden “wine of love” we, acting as Cupid’s emissaries, had made.
Lady Wentworth kept Kate’s rooms, clothes, and person sweet and fragrant with rosemary, lavender, chamomile, and rose petals. Even as Kate winced and turned away, burrowing deeper into the bedclothes and hiding her head beneath the pillows, she would throw the windows wide and welcome the sunshine in. She refused to let Kate languish and lie about unwashed. She would pull her up, out of bed, and undress her as though she were a living doll, stripping off “that rank black rag,” and sending it off to the laundress for a good scrubbing, then roll up her sleeves, and plunge Kate into the tub. “I will not let you go, my lady, even if you would let yourself go,” she said as she scrubbed the stink and sweat, oil and grime, from my sister’s body and hair, bemoaning that it was “a sad and sorry sight to see so beautiful a lady mired so deep in the black mud of misery.”
Each and every week without fail, she washed Kate’s hair, which had darkened with her pregnancies, with chamomile and lemon juice to lighten it, and vigorously toweled it dry with silk to restore its shine and luster. She simply would not give up on her; she fought for Kate just as I would have, even when it meant actually fighting Kate herself, and for that I bless and thank Anne Wentworth every day.
After that first outing, to make meadowsweet beer, Kate began to slowly step outside her self-imposed solitude. Security at Gosfield Hall was lax, and she might wander where she wished as long as she did not venture beyond the estate’s boundaries.
Sometimes she was seen to sit listlessly by the fishpond. But instead of delighting in the golden carp and feeding them breadcrumbs, she woul
d create a little flotilla of leaves, bidding them “sail away, little boats, and carry my love to Ned and my sweet boys.” Other times she would be seen in the vegetable garden behind the kitchen, kneeling in the dirt, covering her face with her hands and weeping, for the sight of the tender new green shoots emerging from the earth reminded her of the joy she had experienced carrying and giving birth to her children, of seeing a new life come out of the red darkness of her womb into the light of the world. It made her even more aware that her sons were growing up without her. Even the sight of the fruit-laden trees in the orchard made her cry, for they reminded her that she would spend the rest of her life bereft and barren, she who loved being pregnant and longed to swell with the promise of new life and proof of the love she lived for. She would return from these excursions and fall weeping onto her bed, crying out, “What a life this is to me, to live thus in the Queen’s displeasure; but for my Sweet Ned, and our boys, I would to God I were dead and buried!”
The sight of little boys, the tenants’ sons and peasant lads, tugged and tore at her heart and made it bleed. Yet she would call them over to her and ask them questions, just to see what her sons might be like at that age. She took an avid interest in the servants’ sons, explaining that she had never had brothers, so she did not know what boys were like, and would beg them to tell her all about their boys, anything and everything, good and bad, funny and sad; her thirst for this knowledge was unquenchable. “The years go by,” she said sadly, as she watched the children of others playing and changing, growing up every day before her eyes. “You cannot get them back.”
There would be small glimmers of hope that Kate’s spirit was fighting back, endeavoring to slay the dragon called melancholy, but then they would of a sudden disappear, and the light would go out. Even after a year, then two, and three with the Wentworths her letters were filled with a deep and alarming sadness that made me fear for my sister’s life.
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