Her Highness, the Traitor

by Susan Higginbotham

  I had never heard this story, and I paused a moment to savor it. “Well, I am lucky. Most other men have their lapses. Have you considered sending the lady Elizabeth away?”

  “Yes, but it would surely cause talk. And I am half afraid Tom would follow her.”

  “Follow her? You saw him today. He is looking forward to his coming child. Why would he sacrifice that for a fourteen-year-old chit?” I patted the queen on her arm. “He is anxious about the babe, that is all, and this is his foolish way of putting his mind off it, I’ll wager. Let him have his horseplay for a few months. It will all be over soon, and you will be a proud mother, and he, a doting father.”

  “Perhaps you are right.”

  “Of course I am right! Now let us speak of happier matters. Where are you going to spend your confinement?”

  ***

  Despite Thomas Seymour’s folly, I could not help but feel rather smug as I rode in my barge toward home, for it was true John had never been unfaithful to me. It could be no great credit to my own charms, for I knew well I was not beautiful—not even pretty. Though my figure was tidy for a woman who had borne thirteen children, the most that could be said about my face was it was pleasant. On my best days, I could just manage something approaching prettiness, and that was only with the assistance of two ladies, the best tailor and hoodmaker in London, and a little bit of art.

  I smiled, ignoring the sights and sounds of the busy Thames as my barge lumbered along. My looks, or lack thereof, had never kept John from my bed; indeed, we had anticipated our wedding day, though naturally this was not a fact I had advertised to my sons and daughters, particularly my daughters. It was the Castle of Loyalty tournament that had been our downfall, so to speak. Over Christmas of 1524, when King Henry’s court was a more cheerful place than it became later, sixteen young men, including John, had proposed to defend their castle against all comers. The king had responded with enthusiasm, and soon after New Year’s of 1525, a team of workmen had dutifully built a mock castle, with a mount on which stood a unicorn. Standing on each of the castle’s turrets was a lady, who was expected to clasp her handkerchief to her heart at appropriate moments and in general look romantic and worried at the same time. It was a drawn-out tournament that took place over a series of days, so instead of the same four ladies sighing upon the turrets day after day, different ladies were used on each occasion.

  Having just recently been appointed as one of the first of Queen Catherine’s maidens, I was a newcomer to court, and not one of its ornaments. My father, however, was master of the armory, who helped arrange the king’s tournaments. He had said a word to the right people, and so I had been chosen as one of the ladies of the castle.

  I had never been dressed so thinly in my life. We were supposed to look like damsels from King Arthur’s court, which must have been a chilly place. I wore simply a flowing tunic with an under tunic, with a hooded mantle to keep the cold off. The garments clung, which was not a bad thing, as I had a pretty figure, but the idea of the entire court seeing just how pretty was so daunting to me that at the feast afterward, I was slipping away when a slender hand pulled me back. “Where are you going?”

  Anne Boleyn was about nine years my senior, and whatever people said about her afterward, she was never anything but kind to me. Perhaps because I was so much younger than she, and such a novice at court, she had taken a liking to me. It was Anne who had helped me arrange my costume after putting on her own robes in a careless, jaded manner that reminded all of us she had spent time in the splendid courts of Burgundy and France, where grand spectacles were the order of the day.

  “To change,” I said.

  “Change? What on earth for?”

  “I feel naked.”

  “You look fine. It’s a costume; everyone expects it. And what are you going to put on? That terrible gable headdress that you had on earlier, I wager.”

  “I had it made for me in Kent. It’s almost new.”

  “It should have stayed in Kent. It’s not a style that suits anyone under thirty, don’t you see? You should wear a French hood. Your hair is your greatest beauty; it should be displayed as it is now.”

  In my distress at my clinging costume, I had forgotten about my dark brown, hip-length hair, which was bared for all of the court to see. “But—”

  “It’s too late, anyway. Who is that young man staring at you?”

  “Sir John Dudley.” He’d been knighted by Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, while serving in France just over a year before. “He is my father’s ward. I am to marry him.”

  “Have you known him long?”

  “Since I was three. We were raised together. We are almost like brother and sister.”

  Anne snorted. “My brother assuredly does not look at me the way that Sir John is looking at you.” She raised her chin. “Get Sir John over here. Do this.” She tilted her head slightly and sent a signal with her eyes.

  I obeyed. My version of this was a poor one, but it actually did bring John over. I had not seen him in a number of months, as I was a recent arrival at court, and he had been there for some time now. At the tournament, he had just been another knight in armor; now that he was in his ordinary clothes, I saw he had grown lean and muscular. I felt the stirring of a feeling I did not fully understand, except to know it was not sisterly.

  Men’s eyes usually lingered upon Anne; John’s did not. Instead, he nodded to her politely and turned to me, barely acknowledging her departure as someone claimed her for the dance that was just beginning. “Jane?” he said as ladies and gentleman milled around and jostled us. “You’re beautiful.”

  “It’s just the dress.”

  “No. It’s you. Let’s dance.”

  This was odd, indeed. John was a passable dancer, but he had never been an enthusiastic one. I obeyed him without comment, however, and we joined the pavane.

  I could perform all of the intricate steps without thinking about them, which was fortunate, because John and I never took our eyes off each other. The odd feeling I had when I’d looked at John earlier was spreading throughout my entire body. I could not imagine how it was not visible to the entire company. When the dance was over and we had made our obeisances to each other and to the king and queen, John took my hand and we hastened, without a word, outside the great hall and into a dark corner, where we came instantly into each other’s arms and kissed until we were breathless.

  “Do you want to go back to the feast?” John whispered at last.

  “No.”

  John said nothing more, but took me by my hand and led me off. I knew instinctively where he was taking me, and I did not care. His chamber was not in the palace itself, but in some outbuildings built to handle the excess of courtiers. The twists and turns and flights of stairs we had to take to reach our destination did nothing to dilute our passion; indeed, once in a while we would stop our progress at a particularly inviting dark spot and kiss again. At last, John stopped in front of a door, turned a key, and guided me inside. It was the tiniest of chambers, just large enough to hold a stand and a narrow bed. There was nowhere to sit but on the bed, and after we had sat there and kissed a while, there was nothing for us to do but lie upon it and kiss some more. Nothing, once we lay down and the only thing that stood between John and me were two flimsy layers of cloth, for him to do but to strip me bare of them and then, at my soft urgings, to take my maidenhead.

  I blame the dress completely.

  The next day, John had a word with my father, and a month later, we were married. No one could have suspected, as we exchanged our vows and as the guests watched us shyly settle into our marriage bed after the priest blessed it, that we’d already consummated our relationship. No one, that is, except for Anne Boleyn, who had winked at me as I crept back in the direction of the maidens’ chamber late that night.

  I had winked back.

/>   ***

  “Mother, are you listening to me?”

  I blinked my way back from the twenty-three-year excursion into the past my thoughts had been taking. “No,” I admitted.

  “Well, it’s about the lady Elizabeth. She hardly said a word to me, and we’ve been friends for years.”

  “Yes, she seemed rather taken up by the Admiral.” I decided not to tell my son about the conversation I’d had with Catherine Parr. It was bad enough having the queen upset while she was great with child, and Thomas Seymour running around Chelsea bare-legged, without Robert deciding he had to uphold the lady Elizabeth’s honor. I envisioned him traveling down to Chelsea, sword in hand, while Thomas Seymour ran around in his nightshirt, and despite myself, I snickered at the sight my thoughts were presenting to me.

  “It’s not amusing. She’s hanging on every word the Admiral says, as if he weren’t thirty years her senior. It’s disgusting.”

  “I am sure she is merely being polite, as one should be to one’s elders.”

  Robert ignored the pointed tone in which I’d spoken the last part of my remark. “Even that little lady Jane goggles at the man. So does Kat Astley, for that matter, and she’s married, for God’s sake. You’d think the three of them had been shut up in a nunnery for twenty years, the way they act.”

  “He is an inveterate charmer, that is all. Don’t worry so.”

  Three weeks later, Queen Catherine caught Thomas Seymour with the lady Elizabeth in his arms. Her reaction could be felt all the way up the Thames to Greenwich. Elizabeth was sent in haste—or as much in haste as a princess and her entourage could be sent off—to Cheshunt, where Kat Astley’s married sister lived.

  I visited the queen at her manor at Hanworth, near Richmond, a couple of weeks later. The queen and Lady Jane were hard at work sewing baby things, while Thomas Seymour bustled around preparing for the queen’s move to Sudeley Castle, where she would spend her confinement. The queen and Seymour seemed their old selves; even when they railed about the still-ongoing battle with the Protector and his duchess about the queen’s jewels, they did so with a happy sense of mutuality. The Admiral beamed at the lady Jane paternally from time to time and effusively praised her stitches (which hardly deserved it, Jane not being much of a needlewoman), but otherwise kept his charm well within the bounds of propriety. The lady Elizabeth, the queen told me in private, had written a contrite letter expressing her gratitude for their friendship, as well as a friendly but entirely decorous letter to Seymour himself. I left Hanworth content in the thought that all had worked out and that I and the rest of Catherine’s friends would soon be hearing of the queen’s safe delivery.

  In September, we got the good news: Catherine had given birth to a girl, Mary, at the end of August. Then, just a few days later, another message arrived. The queen was dead.

  8

  Frances Grey

  September 1548 to October 1548

  Just a day after the terrible news arrived that Queen Catherine had died of childbed fever, a messenger rode up with a letter from Tom Seymour, written in his own hand. It was tear stained and barely coherent. His aged mother would be taking charge of his baby girl, and the Protector had invited him to stay with him at Sion House so he would not have to face his sorrow alone. Our Jane had been chief mourner at the queen’s funeral and had done her duty with much gravity and honor. Which brought him to his main point: with the queen gone, he could no longer maintain our daughter in his household. The very sight of the girl for whom his dear wife had had so much affection was too much for him to bear. In fact, Seymour said in a postscript, our daughter was on her way to Bradgate now.

  I had barely had time to make my daughter’s chambers ready for her, when I heard Jane was just a mile or so off. Not long afterward, my girl stood before me. She was dressed in mourning for the queen, which made her look older than her eleven years, and I could see she was beginning to develop a hint of a bosom.

  Jane allowed me to embrace her. “I was very sorry to hear of the queen’s death,” I said. “I know she was very fond of you.”

  “She was very kind to me. I shall miss her.”

  “When you are ready, we can talk more of—”

  “Jane! Come here, my girl!”

  Jane rushed to Harry’s arms. He ruffled her hair. “Tell me about the queen, lass. I know it must have been dreadful. Wasn’t it?”

  “It was. At first everything went so well. I didn’t see the poor little baby being born; the queen said I was too young. But it didn’t take that long, and I saw the queen soon afterward. She looked so happy, and the Admiral was so proud. He said he had the finest baby girl in all of England.”

  Harry said, “Well, he was wrong about that, because I had the finest baby girl in all of England, but we can make some allowances. Go on, child.”

  “Everyone thought the queen was going to be well, and then suddenly she fell ill. The Admiral said later the very same thing happened to his sister Queen Jane. She became feverish and started to rant—accusing him of treating her badly, of not allowing her to be alone with her own physician, so many foolish things she never would have said if she had been in her right mind, for he was never unkind to her. Anyway, he lay in bed beside her and tried to ease her, and toward the end, she did become calm. She dictated her will and left him everything. She said she wished her possessions were a thousand times more in value than they were. And then she started to fade away, almost, and in a few hours, she died.”

  Jane put her handkerchief to her eyes, and Harry patted her back. “She is in heaven, Jane.”

  “Oh, I know,” said Jane. “But I miss her, and I feel so sorry for the poor Admiral. He was crying—even when he shut himself away, we could hear him. I think he loved the queen dearly. I never saw them have an argument—well, only once. It was right before the lady Elizabeth left. They were shouting at each other—I don’t know about what. But later, the Admiral came to me and told me that he was sorry I’d overheard that, but that I shouldn’t worry, all married people fought once in a while, and that they usually made it up. And I think they did make it up after the lady Elizabeth left. The Admiral had the cooks make the queen’s favorite foods, and he sent for anything that she wanted that he couldn’t supply. He ordered magnificent things for the baby’s chamber. When he had to leave, he sent letters to her every day.” Jane brightened. “The queen did have a very nice funeral, though. Doctor Coverdale preached the sermon in English and said that the offering was not for the dead, but for the poor.”

  Harry nodded approvingly.

  ***

  In a few days, it was as if Jane had never left us. She approved thoroughly of our stripped-down chapel—I still found myself walking in there and thinking a thief had been to Bradgate—and she took it upon herself to improve her younger sister Kate, who was not entirely grateful for the attention.

  Jane had been back at Bradgate for several weeks when a messenger delivered a letter from the Admiral. Unlike the tear-laden missive he had last sent us, this was written in a clerk’s trim hand and came straight to the point. So grieved by the queen’s death that he had had little regard for his own doings, and believing his household would have to be broken up, he had sent our daughter home, but now he had reviewed the situation and felt he could retain the queen’s household. Therefore, he was able to take Jane back into his care, and what was more, his mother would treat her as her own daughter. As soon as he could manage it, he would come to talk to Harry and me in person.

  I frowned at the letter. Tom Seymour was planning to retain all of the women who had waited on the queen, plus a hundred and twenty gentleman and yeomen. How on earth could he keep up such a household, with no queen to justify it? Even I could see the impossibility of it all.

  Katherine Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk, my childhood companion who had become my stepmother, was paying us a visit at Bradgate
that day. “So, what does Tom Seymour want?”

  “He wants us to send Jane back to stay with him.”

  “So soon? I saw him at his brother’s house a couple of weeks ago, and he could hardly hear the queen’s name without weeping. Or maybe it was just the company of Somerset and his duchess. I declare, I shall be heartbroken if my two boys end up rubbing along as miserably as those two brothers do. I told Somerset that he really ought to give his brother a little more power, to keep him sweet.”

  “You told the Lord Protector that?”

  “Oh, I tell everyone everything, you know that, Frances. Not that everyone listens. Somerset didn’t, anyway. But at least I got the cold stare instead of the blank look, so I knew he heard me at least. Maybe one day he’ll actually remember what I said and act on it, thinking of course it was his own brilliant idea.” Katherine snorted. “Mind you, I like Somerset; he’s a kind man in that remote way of his. I trust him, which is more than I can say for his brother Tom.”

  “Harry trusts Tom Seymour.”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t know what to think. Harry—”

  “Why did the Lord give you a brain if not to think? Really, Frances! You’ve more common sense in your little finger than what’s in the whole of Harry Grey. It’s high time you realized that. So what do you think?”

  “I was going to tell you, if you’d allowed me to speak. I believe Harry is still keen on marrying Jane to the king, although he hasn’t said as much to me lately.”

  “Of course not. When does he consult you, and bring common sense into the picture?”

  “He consults me. It is not quite as bad as you say.”

  “Certainly he consults you. On what to serve your guests and where to lodge them, no doubt, and no more. And you allow it, even though I’ll wager this household would fall apart in days were its managing left up to your Harry.”