Her Highness, the Traitor

by Susan Higginbotham

  “I never really thought about it.” My husband tipped my chin up gently and brushed his lips against mine. “I’ve got some time to spare before I return to the council. Do you have to hurry back to the queen?”

  I smiled. It was not uncommon of my husband to avoid talking about a topic by making love to me. It was a tactic that might have been employed more often than I realized, and generally with success, for I had borne him thirteen children.

  ***

  To a man’s eyes, I must have looked seemly enough as I returned to the queen’s lodgings at Whitehall. To a woman, it was obvious that unskilled hands had put me back into my clothes; all my fastenings were slightly awry. I hoped I had sent John back to his council meeting in somewhat better repair, though he had servants nearby who would probably step in to make him presentable.

  Anne Seymour, Countess of Hertford, gave me a knowing look as I entered the outer room of the queen’s private chambers. The queen was in an inner chamber attending to business, it being the time of the day when she did this, but most of the other great ladies of England were here: the lady Mary, the new king’s eldest sister; the lady Frances, King Henry’s niece; a dozen or so others. I had known them all for years: together we’d buried Jane Seymour; greeted Anne of Cleves; watched helplessly as poor Katherine Howard giggled and flirted her way to the scaffold; speculated on who would be the king’s sixth, and it would prove, final, bride.

  “Did you hear anything, Lady Lisle?” asked the lady Mary. Just shy of her thirty-first birthday, she was still reasonably attractive, despite her voice, which was oddly gruff for a woman’s.

  I quaked at lying to a princess, but I did it anyway. “I have heard nothing new, Your Grace,” I said smoothly, sensing Anne Seymour’s eyes upon me. If I knew, she must certainly know, as well; her husband would no more leave her out of his confidence than mine would me. “I saw my husband, but he could tell me nothing more than that the king was doing poorly.” That, I consoled myself, could be viewed more as a gross understatement than as an outright lie.

  “I can’t believe they have told us nothing. I know my father wished to make his peace with the Lord in private, but he is dying, for mercy’s sake! I simply cannot fathom that he would not want his queen or his children by his side.” Mary’s thin face hardened. “I am not putting up with this lack of communication any longer. When the queen finishes her business, we are going to go to the king’s lodgings togeth—”

  A knock sounded upon the door, and a grave-looking man entered the room. “My lady,” he said, kneeling to Mary. “I am grieved to tell you that His Highness King Henry has departed from this life.”

  Mary closed her eyes, then opened them again. What went through her head? After King Henry had repudiated her mother, Catherine of Aragon, and married Anne Boleyn, he had treated Mary horribly, declaring her a bastard. Only in the past several years had she been treated as a princess ought to be. Even after that, her father had been lacking: he’d not made a suitable marriage for her, so she was a maid at an age when many women were mothers ten times over; he’d not given her a household of her own, but seen fit to subsume hers within the queen’s. Her voice gave nothing away. “Has the queen been told?”

  “Yes, my lady. She is being brought the news as we speak.”

  “When did my father die?”

  The man bowed his head even farther, perhaps as much out of caution as respect. “The king died two days before, my lady. Parliament will be informed tomorrow morning. The Earl of Hertford is aware that your ladyship might find the delay unsettling, and he has given me a letter explaining why he acted as he did.”

  Mary took the letter and read it slowly, a flush on her pale complexion the only betrayal of the anger she must have felt. “Take me to see my father’s body.”

  Followed by her most trusted attendants, Jane Dormer and Susan Clarencius, Mary left the room. As the sound of conversation filled the chamber, the Countess of Hertford whispered to me, “You knew.”

  “Yes. Surely you did, too?”

  “Yes, but I am the new king’s aunt, after all. It is different. How long have you known?”

  “Since John told me this afternoon.”

  The countess shook her head. “And he swore you to secrecy.”

  “No.” I resumed the work I’d left behind, a handkerchief for the young prince—no, the young king. “He didn’t have to swear me to anything. He is my husband.”

  ***

  The old king’s death had been officially proclaimed, and the young king was on his way to the Tower to take up his duties. As the executors of the king’s will and their wives collected to greet their new sovereign, Thomas Seymour, the younger of the king’s maternal uncles, hurried up to John and me. “Fool bargemen,” he panted. “Why, the king and my brother are not here yet? It’s not like my brother to be unpunctual.”

  “The clock has not struck three yet,” I said as John nodded distantly. Like many men, he was somewhat cool toward Thomas Seymour, although Seymour never flirted with me as he did with some women. I could not help but feel slightly insulted by his neglect in this regard.

  “No, my lady, but it is my brother’s habit to always be slightly ahead of his time. So when a lesser man might be punctual for arriving on time, my brother is late for arriving on time. A deeply irritating habit, don’t you agree?” Without waiting for my reply, he asked, “The queen is not coming to greet King Edward, my lady?”

  “No. She and the lady Mary have gone into seclusion until King Henry’s funeral, as they thought was proper.”

  “Pity,” said Thomas Seymour thoughtfully. “I was hoping to offer my condolences in person.”

  John quirked an eyebrow.

  Just as the clock struck three, a distant rumbling announced the arrival of the king. As we ordered ourselves into tidy lines and sank to our knees, King Edward VI, accompanied by his uncle the Earl of Hertford and a host of other dignitaries, rode through the gate.

  Ginger-haired like his father and sisters, the new king was a handsome child, well grown for his age and looking around him with obvious interest. He listened patiently as the Constable of the Tower, Anthony Kingston, welcomed him. When we had all paid our respects, the king asked, “Where shall we stay?”

  “Why, in the palace,” the Earl of Hertford said. Plainly puzzled by the king’s unwonted ignorance, he stroked his brown beard, which grew less luxuriantly than his younger brother Thomas’s, and added, “That is where kings usually await their coronation, of course. The rooms are ready and are quite spacious. Were you never told?”

  Thomas Seymour pushed forward. “I believe Your Highness was pointing at the Garden Tower as you rode in.”

  “Yes!” Edward looked up at the younger of his uncles eagerly. “Where the princes were murdered by Richard III. Can’t we stay there? Or at least see it?”

  “That is hardly appropri—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Brother, what’s the harm? I was always keen to look at it when I visited the Tower as a youngster; isn’t any boy? I am sure that it is too small for Your Highness to lodge in”—the constable nodded—“but I daresay Sir Anthony will allow you to go inside.”

  “It is ill omened,” said Hertford dismally. “And probably full of lumber.”

  “We have read much about it,” said the king in a good approximation of his father’s tone. He squared his legs in the manner that had made King Henry’s courtiers quake. “We have never been inside it, as it happens, and we wish to see it.”

  “And so Your Highness shall immediately,” Thomas Seymour promised. “I shall take you myself. Do you trust yourself there with your wicked uncle Thomas?” Seymour contorted his stance to give the appearance of a hunchback.

  The king unsquared his legs. “Oh, yes!”

  “I shall come, too, then,” said Hertford resignedly.

 
“Ah, see? Now Your Highness has two wicked uncles. What king could want more? Lead on then, Sir Anthony.”

  ***

  I supposed it was an honor that the queen, usually the most self-contained and dignified of women, thought highly enough of me to include me in the small circle of ladies who were privileged to hear her rant like a fishwife. “The nerve of my husband! Letting me think for months—nay, years—that I would be regent for King Edward in case of a royal minority, and what does he do? Changes his will without a word to me.”

  “The king mentioned Your Grace in his will with great affection,” I said.

  “Dry bones!”

  “It was not ingratitude, Your Grace, I am sure of it, or lack of natural affection. The king merely wanted a man—men—to have the guiding of the kingdom.”

  The queen scoffed. “Say ‘man,’ Jane. The Earl of Hertford seems to have grabbed all for himself.” The queen flicked her elegant hand, adorned with a mourning ring in the shape of a death’s head. “Oh, they had the right to elect Hertford as protector, I suppose. But that’s not what the king planned. If he had wanted a lord protector, with a council to guide him, that’s what he would have created in the first place. And I am not the only one who has been treated shabbily in this business. Sir Thomas Seymour is every bit as much the king’s uncle as Hertford, and just as capable, I daresay, and he is not even a councilor! Only an advisor to the council. He might as well be a stick of wood.”

  A knock at the door sounded, and the stick of wood himself was announced.

  Thomas Seymour, dressed more somberly than was his wont, entered the room, measuring his usually buoyant steps to the solemnity of the widow’s bereavement. “Your Grace, I wanted to give you my condolences on the king’s death,” he said, brushing his lips against the queen’s hand. “I know my brother will do his utmost to be of service to you, as well.”

  “On the contrary, the Earl of Hertford—or the Lord Protector, as we must call him now—has been of no service to me whatsoever,” the queen said. Resentment lit up her face, making her appear rather younger than her five-and-thirty years. “He sent his man to inform me of King Henry’s death only the night before the news was proclaimed to the public. Two solid days after he died. He should have told me and the lady Mary immediately, as a courtesy.” She nodded at the lady Mary, who had joined her in her seclusion, which would continue until the old king was buried. “After all, the lady Elizabeth was told at the same time as King Edward.”

  “My brother moves in mysterious ways,” Thomas said. “Much like the Lord, and trust me, the comparison is not one that would displease him.”

  The queen let out a sound much like a snort of laughter and clapped her hand to her mouth.

  Mary was not so easily amused. She said, “It does not auger well, if those who have the keeping of the kingdom cannot be bothered with the common courtesies.”

  “I could not agree more,” Thomas said, inclining his head.

  “Why, you have been treated shabbily yourself,” said the queen. “We were just saying.”

  “Well, I am to be a baron.” He glanced at me with more interest than was his wont. “By the way, my lady, I understand congratulations are in order.”

  “My lord?”

  “You mean your husband hasn’t told you?”

  “I have been attending the queen over the past few days, and have not seen or heard from him.”

  “Oh, yes. Well, it’s known by all and sundry now—except here, I suppose. There was a clause in King Henry’s will stating that gifts which had been promised but not perfected were to be fulfilled. Well, lo and behold! Lord Paget came before the council, and what do you think he announced? He announced that the king would have doled out new titles and lands if he had lived a little longer to amend his will. I myself am to be Baron Seymour of Sudeley—so I can hardly complain, I suppose. Your Grace’s brother is to be Marquis of Northampton.”

  The queen blinked. “Why, he has told me nothing!”

  “It has only just come out. And as for you, Lady Lisle, your husband is to be an earl.”

  “An earl?”

  “Old title, dating back to Anglo-Saxon times,” Seymour said cheerfully.

  “I believe Lady Lisle knows the origin of the title,” said the lady Mary, who had a certain literal cast of mind.

  I said nothing but gripped the sides of my chair.

  The queen asked, “That is well deserved on Viscount Lisle’s part, I daresay. But what, pray tell, is the Earl of Hertford gaining out of this?”

  “Merely a dukedom. Of Somerset, to be precise.”

  “Your brother to be a duke, and you to be a mere lord,” mused the queen. “Something is wrong there.” She turned to me. “But I will not keep you here. You have matters to discuss with your husband. You may go home—Countess.”

  ***

  It was a bitterly cold day, but I barely noticed the wind biting into my cheeks as I made my way to the house we’d rented in London. It was a large place, but it seemed much smaller, for John liked having the children residing with us in town instead of staying on our estates in the country. All seven of them were waiting for me as I entered. “Father is to be an earl!”

  “An earl, Mother! You are to be a countess!”

  “That means Jack is to be Lord Lisle. Doesn’t it?”

  “Do we get new clothes?”

  “Will there be a ceremony?”

  “What is an earl?”

  My husband pushed past the mob surrounding me and embraced me.

  “When were you going to tell me?” I asked after we had hugged for a long time.

  “Tonight, as a matter of fact. I was going to send for you and break the news to you over a private supper.” He glanced at our brood, whose ages ranged from four to twenty. “Quietly.”

  ***

  “You have well and truly deserved this earldom.”

  John smiled. “Do you know where I went today after the news was announced? Candlewick Street, my father’s house. I remember the day he was arrested, just after the seventh King Henry died. I was five years of age, full of excitement about the new king being crowned, and my father had said he would find a good place for me to see the coronation procession—he was sure the king would oblige, as he’d been in such good favor with Henry VII. Instead, I woke one morning to hear my mother crying, our servants shouting—absolute chaos. The king and his council had ordered their men to surround the house just before the break of day. They seized my father like a common criminal. My nurse tried to keep me from seeing them rough handle him out of the house and into the street, but I was too quick for her. Then a few days later, the rest of us had to leave. I loved that house. They had to drag me out kicking and screaming.”

  “John, in all the years we’ve known each other, you’ve never talked of this.”

  He shrugged. “You know I’ve never cared to speak of those days. Father was guilty of nothing more than collecting money too well for Henry VII, but he’d made enough men angry doing that, and the new king couldn’t resist such a sop to the people. So my father had to lose his head, after he had spent more than a year sitting in the Tower, hoping the king would change his mind. I never saw him again after they took him out of Candlewick Street that day, and I never saw his house again until this morning. It’s strange. They say the places you’ve been in childhood look smaller when you see them as an adult, but this place didn’t. It was just as I remembered it. I found myself missing it again, just like I had when I first had to leave.”

  “Maybe you could buy it or lease it. We surely could afford it.”

  “No,” John said dryly. “Too small for us now. Besides, some other young boy might be attached to it. I wouldn’t want to be the one who took him away from it, even in exchange for a handsome sum.”

  He fell silent. I i
ndeed had never heard him speak of his father before, save in passing. Instead, John, after his first evening at Halden, had thrown himself into country life: learning to ride and to hawk and hunt, going for long outings with my older brother and returning muddy and cheerful. After my brother died, John had become practically a son to my father. At age thirteen, he had gone with my father to court, where he had made a good impression and fit in easily with the other youths his age; it was I, when I came to court, who had felt awkward and shy.

  John continued. “You once asked me if I hated King Henry for executing my father. Yes, until I saw him for the first time. Then I couldn’t. He was kind to me, interested, pleasant. I didn’t feel like a lowly page in his company. Sometimes I wondered if he remembered who I was, the eldest son of the first man he had executed. But he never forgot things like that. I’ve wondered if all of the honors he gave me over the years, all the trust he placed in me, weren’t his way of apologizing for putting my father to death. But it’s not the sort of question one can ask a king.” He squeezed my hand. “Do you know what else is amusing? I never did see King Henry’s coronation, of course, following my father’s arrest as closely as it did. So when King Henry died, the first thing that popped into my head was that this time, I would get to see the new king’s coronation. It shall be my first.”

  2

  Frances Grey

  December 1555

  It is dangerous to speak of my daughter Jane today, at least here in England. Men can die, and have died, for holding the beliefs she held. Nonetheless, people sometimes turn up at my house to tell me of their admiration for my daughter. Some ask me for a memento of Jane. I hand them the few things I can—a hair fastening, an old pen—while hoarding a few such mementoes myself. As I do, I sometimes ask myself, are these things really much different from the relics of the saints these people scorn? Are they not pilgrims of another sort?

  Whatever I give them, however, my visitors leave disappointed. The mother of an extraordinary daughter, they think, must surely be extraordinary herself. How wrong they are! For wherever my daughter got her great gifts, I know it was certainly not from me. As a young woman, I could embroider beautifully, carry a tune respectably, play a pretty melody upon my virginals—but I could barely speak French, much less the ancient languages. Indeed, my French was atrocious, which was a matter of some embarrassment for me, because my mother, Mary, had been that country’s queen.