The Sisters Who Would Be Queen

by Leanda de Lisle

  Hertford arrived in Paris on 13 May and became quickly immersed in the many distractions France had to offer. With the ambassador, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, he left for Reims and the coronation of the ten-year-old Charles IX, brother of the late Francis II. He wrote to Cecil on the 20th, describing all his news—how the boy King was anointed by the Cardinal of Lorraine, the Queen of Scots’ uncle, and how he preferred the look of the King’s younger brother, the Duke of Orléans, who was tall and “about the stature of the writer’s little brother.” It sounded like an excellent educational experience and Cecil promptly packed off his nineteen-year-old son, Thomas, to join the earl. The teenager arrived in Paris soon after, armed with a long “Memorial” from his father. It instructed him what prayers he was to say daily, how to study the Bible, and when to make a general confession of his sins (exhortations ignored from the minute he met up with Hertford). The earl and Master Thomas Cecil visited “Orléans, Blois, Amboise, Tours, Angers, and sundry fair castles and houses situate upon the Loire.” They hunted, partied, and spent money like water. When the pious Cecil found out, he was livid. He had “known many young men of better degree [than his son] spend a full whole year beyond the seas with much less [money].” Hertford, however, was making an excellent impression where it mattered.

  The earl was introduced to Catherine de Medici, the mother-in-law of Mary Queen of Scots, and “courteously embraced.” Then he was presented to the young King, who told him that while he remained in France he should “be bold” in asking of him whatever he wanted. Ambassador Throckmorton was impressed, but Cecil was more concerned to hear news of Mary Queen of Scots. She had refused to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh, which had required her to recognize Elizabeth’s right to be Queen of England, and was intent on returning to Scotland. By July there was a mood of near hysteria in the Privy Council. Cecil was certain that if Elizabeth did not marry soon, great evil would befall the state. He had discovered, he confided in Throckmorton, a secret plan to guarantee Mary’s place as Elizabeth’s heir if she agreed to recognize Elizabeth’s claim to the throne. For Cecil it appeared that England was threatened by a world turned upside down, one in which women rulers passed the crown to women rulers. “God send our mistress a husband, and by him a son, that we may hope our posterity shall have a masculine succession,” he prayed. But it was Katherine who was about to have a child.

  Katherine’s pregnancy was in its eighth month. She could feel the baby moving inside her, and see the ripple of a spine, hands, and feet pushing out from the womb, but, almost paralyzed with fear, she could not think what to do about it. Since Hertford had left, the Queen was showing “a great misliking with her.” Perhaps Elizabeth had been persuaded to give Hertford the licence to travel after being told of her affair with him. In any event, Katherine did not want to face the Queen’s wrath alone and her efforts to contact Hertford had failed. Letters sent to France addressed “To My Loving Husband” had received no reply. Had he been warned not to communicate with her; had he abandoned her? She had no way of knowing and, as she faced the shame of having a child unrecognized by the father, her old fears and jealousies returned. What proof was there she was married at all? The only witness, Lady Jane Seymour, was dead, and Katherine did not know how to find the priest, who had vanished into the country. She began to concoct a desperate plan. Her former father-in-law, Pembroke, had approached her in June suggesting a remarriage to his son Henry, Lord Herbert. With Hertford out of the way, he was sure Herbert stood a good chance of regaining her affections and, as Elizabeth’s heir under current statute, she was a catch once more. Katherine had brushed Pembroke off. Now, however, she reconsidered her position.

  While Hertford, in blissful ignorance, planned to spend the summer in Paris before traveling to Italy, Katherine wrote to Lord Herbert to tell him that, as far as she was concerned, their marriage remained valid. Herbert, delighted, began the traditional courtship ritual of sending pictures of himself and items of personal jewelry as tokens of his love and devotion. Katherine still hoped, however, that Hertford would come for her. As she packed and prepared for the Queen’s summer progress into Essex and Suffolk, she asked Jane Seymour’s former manservant, Mr. Glynne, to take Hertford the urgent message “that for troth she was quick with child.” Perhaps Mr. Glynne spoke of this a little too freely, for at this point Herbert became aware of the real reason for Katherine’s renewed interest in him. Hurt and humiliated, Herbert sent Katherine a note demanding she return his tokens. She, however, did nothing. On 14 July, the Queen’s summer progress began and Katherine, as a member of the Privy Chamber, left with it for Wanstead, clutching a devastating letter from Herbert: “I perceive your mind to keep my tokens back,” he wrote,

  but if I can not have them at your hands, I will seek them at that companion’s hands … by whose practise to cover your whoredom and his own knavery and adultery you went about to abuse me … Having hitherto led a virtuous life I will not now begin with loss of honour to lead the rest of my life with a whore that almost everyman talks of. You claim promise madam of me when I was young, and since confirmed as you say at lawful years, but you know I was lawfully divorced from you a good while ago. And if through the enticement of your whoredom and the practise and device of those you hold so dear, you sought to entrap me with some poisoned bait under the colour of sugared friendship; yet (I thank God) I am so clear that I am not to be further touched than with a few tokens that were by cunning slight got out of my hands both to cover your abomination and his likewise.

  Their so-called marriage was clearly over. Katherine had been up the previous night until after midnight at a dinner given for the Queen by Cecil at the Savoy Palace. She was tired and did not want to reply to the letter on progress. When the court arrived at Wanstead and Havering later that day, her hopes rose that Hertford had, at last, replied to her letters. There was a package from him brought by his brother Henry Seymour. It contained, however, only a pair of bracelets for her, along with several like them for other ladies at court. Elizabeth had requested Hertford to commission a French goldsmith to make chains and bracelets for herself and the ladies, “to be gay in this court, towards the progress.” He had simply done as she asked.

  On Monday, 16 July, the progress reached Pirgo, the seat of Katherine’s uncle Lord John Grey. Robert Dudley was there, his servants in a new green livery. But Katherine said nothing to her uncle or Lord Robert. Her uncle, she knew, had laid out a heavy investment to entertain the Queen and she did not want to ruin his efforts. As for Robert Dudley, he had never shown Katherine much affection: perhaps he remembered how his younger brother Guildford had been accused of trying to bully Jane Grey into making him a King, a story that may have cost him his head. So the court’s progress continued through Essex, with Katherine keeping her fears to herself. They stayed at Ingatestone for the weekend, before proceeding to the royal mansion of Beaulieu. There, Katherine received another letter from Herbert, this one laced with threats:

  Like as a good while ago I was your friend madam, so your deserts now … makes me right sorry for that which is past of my part … Wherefore, without delay I require you madam to send me, by this bearer, those letters and tokens with my tablature and picture that I sent you … or else, to be plain with you, I will make you as well known to all the world as your whoredom is now, I thank God, known to me and spied by many scores more.

  The weather was hot and humid on 25 July as the court left Beaulieu for Felix Hall and Colchester. It was the oppressive forerunner of a summer storm. On the night of the 30th, when the court was at a private house called St. Osythe, the storm broke. For three hours there was violent thunder and lightning, followed “by great rains till midnight, insomuch that the people thought the world was at an end, and the day of doom was come, it was so terrible.” But the next day the court was on the road again, with Katherine’s growing baby pushing up to her rib cage, the bump hidden under the pleats of her dress, as the horses, carriages, and carts rattled along the rough road
s. On 5 August the court reached Ipswich, a town that was a hotbed of the kind of Protestantism with which the Greys were associated and which Elizabeth disliked. The Queen was infuriated to see that the ministers there were not wearing surplices and that many were married with children. On the 9th she issued an order. Women were forbidden henceforth from living in cathedrals or colleges, and those clerics who ignored her orders would lose their ecclesiastical promotions. Cecil moaned to his friend Archbishop Parker that if he hadn’t put his foot down, she would have banned priests from marrying at all and made those who had them put away their wives altogether. It was an inauspicious time for the ill-tempered Queen to now learn about Katherine’s pregnancy.

  That night Katherine turned to her friend Mistress Sentlow (the sister-in-law of Frances’s former lady-in-waiting Bess Hardwick) for advice. Young Sentlow was considered at court to be as stable as “a rock within the sea.” But when Katherine told her that she had married Hertford and was pregnant by him, the rock crumbled, and Sentlow “fell into great weeping saying she was very sorry she had done so without the consent or knowledge of the Queen’s Majesty or any other of her friends.” The next day Katherine attended a Communion service with all the members of the Privy Chamber and the Queen. Whispers hissed among the pews and she realized by “the secret talk she saw amongst men and women that her being with child was known and spied out.”

  Katherine urgently needed someone to intercede on her behalf with the Queen. Robert Dudley seemed to her the best choice. Despite everything that had passed, he was family. She knew, furthermore, that he had been helpful to her sister Jane’s former tutor, John Aylmer, in 1559 after he had angered the Queen with his demands for more preachers. Late that evening, Katherine went to Dudley’s lodgings in Ipswich and begged him “to be a means to the Queen’s highness for her.” He agreed to do so, hoping, perhaps, that the news would spur the Queen to reconsider marrying him: Elizabeth would now need a child more than ever. When he delivered the news to Elizabeth the next morning, however, her reaction was one of fury. She had believed that the Grey sisters were “two sole and silly ladies, destitute of parents, marriage and endowment.” Now, however, the eldest threatened Elizabeth with the possibility of a legitimate royal, male heir. Katherine was ordered to the Tower under armed guard and messengers were sent to France demanding Hertford’s immediate return. Elizabeth suspected a plot, but had little idea who was involved or what course it might take. She fired off a letter to the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edward Warner, commanding him to “examine the Lady Katherine very straightly, how many have been privy to the love betwixt the Earl of Hertford and her, from the beginning.” Katherine, she continued, was to “understand that she shall have no manner of favour, except she will show the truth.”

  Warner was ordered also to interview Mistress Sentlow over two or three nights in the Tower, more if “ye shall think meet,” and, Elizabeth suggested, Warner might put the fear of God into her by sending for her secretly and hinting at “diverse matters confessed by the Lady Katherine.”

  As Katherine arrived at the Tower the diplomatic community was aflame with rumor. Like Elizabeth, the Spanish ambassador, de Quadra, suspected there had to be more to the story than a simple love affair between Katherine and Hertford, a “young man of little enough substance, although very heretical.” He had heard that the Earl of Arundel was somehow involved, and recalled his interest in Jane Seymour. Other names would also soon crop up. Among them was that of John Jewel, the bishop who gave the sermon at Frances’s funeral. The most significant, however, was that of Sir William Cecil. He had begun his career as servant to Hertford’s father, the Duke of Somerset, and was related to the Grey family (Lord John Grey’s daughter Frances was married to Cecil’s brother-in-law). De Quadra believed Cecil had arranged Katherine’s marriage in the immediate aftermath of Amy Dudley’s death, fearing Elizabeth would marry Dudley with the backing of Philip II and hoping to strengthen Katherine’s claim to the throne. He had then dropped the matter when he was back in the Queen’s good grace.

  Cecil, for his part, was shocked by the discovery of the marriage and deeply worried by Katherine’s imprisonment. Mary Queen of Scots had returned to Scotland, as she had said she would. Her advisers had since sent notice to Elizabeth of the proposal that Cecil had outlined to Throckmorton in July: that Mary would renounce her immediate claim to the throne in exchange for recognition as Elizabeth’s heir. Cecil believed that Elizabeth might agree to it. “Thus is God displeased with us,” Cecil wrote to one of his friends as he delivered the news of Katherine Grey’s disgrace. Katherine was interrogated in the Tower on 22 August 1561. She was now in her ninth month of pregnancy, tired, and uncomfortable. She would give up little, however, by way of information. Warner reported that “as to the love practises between her and the Earl of Hertford[,] She will confess nothing.” In her own way Katherine was as rebellious and determined as her sister Jane had been.

  * A person or creature that brings ill fortune.

  XIX

  First Son

  HERTFORD KNEW HE WAS IN TROUBLE EVEN BEFORE THE Queen’s messenger arrived. He had spoken to Mr. Glynne, the manservant Katherine had sent with her letters. Hertford needed to devise a plan, however, before he returned home. His first priority was to stay in the Queen’s good graces as much as he could. Having sent the Queen the bracelets she had requested for her ladies, he found an excellent flute player to replace a French musician who had died in her employ. He wrote with the good news. He also needed to contact friends at home. But on 15 August the Queen’s messenger arrived in Paris.

  The ambassador, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, went directly to Hertford’s lodging and “declared her pleasure for his immediate return.” Hertford, anxious to delay a while longer, whimpered that “he was sick in bed of a fever, and was grieved that he could not with all diligence perform her commandment, and trusted that she would not interpret the worse if he delayed his setting forward for two or three days.” Throckmorton asked why the Queen wished to see him so urgently. Hertford claimed he had no idea. In fact, not only did he know from Glynne that Katherine was pregnant, two of his own servants had arrived from court and described her arrest. Official letters soon followed informing Throckmorton of all the details. He was sorry to see Hertford in trouble. Throckmorton saw that “in him are many good parts,” and although unconvinced by Hertford’s “illness,” he informed the Queen that it would be diplomatic for Hertford to stay long enough to say his farewell to the French King.

  Hertford refused to discuss with Throckmorton his marriage to Katherine, save to say “that he will declare to the Queen and none other the whole bruit thereof.” But when he finally said his good-byes on 26 August, Throckmorton put in another good word for him with the Queen, assuring her that “his good behaviour here has been greatly to her honour and service.” In England, meanwhile, Hertford’s mother, the Duchess of Somerset, had written to Cecil distancing herself from “the wildness of mine unruly child.” It did not seem to concern the duchess that foreign observers were picking up reports that the lovers might be executed. But then, if the duchess were out of the Queen’s good favor she would be in no position to help them. Her letter, insisting she was “one that neither for child nor friend shall willingly neglect the duty of a faithful subject,” was not, therefore, as heartless as it may first appear, and there were others willing to help the couple.

  When Hertford reached Dover he breakfasted in the house of the mayor of the town with his friend Thomas Sackville. A well-known court poet, Sackville was the son of one of the few grandees to take to the field in arms in support of Jane Grey in 1553. He also had links to Cecil. But then the captain of Dover Castle arrived to arrest Hertford, and the earl was taken directly to the Tower. He arrived on the afternoon of 5 September, and was there confronted with the full horror of the situation in which he had left Katherine. It was here that her sister had been executed and their fathers had spent their last days. Remorseful, he sent her pos
ies and asked his jailors to find out from her servants how she was. Doubtless also, he sought to coordinate their testimonies in order to protect their friends and to ensure the validity of their marriage was recognized so that their child would be legitimate.

  The interrogations the couple endured over the following days were rigorous. Even the most intimate details of their lives were addressed. Their accounts tallied closely, save, tellingly, in those areas where the facts would indicate who knew what and when. To protect Stokes, for example, Hertford claimed that Frances had had no idea that he wanted to marry Katherine, something Stokes admitted was untrue when he was interviewed. Katherine, equally, would not produce the will that Hertford had given her, claiming it was lost during the progress—which still continued through the eastern counties; Elizabeth was not going to be diverted from her plans by Katherine’s actions. When, however, Mary Queen of Scots’ adviser, William Maitland of Lethington, arrived at court on 8 September, it was clear that the stress of discovering Katherine’s pregnancy had taken its toll on the Queen. Elizabeth was, ironically, at the ancient moated royal castle of Hertford when Maitland caught up with her. Like her late half sister, Mary, Elizabeth suffered bouts of depression, and like Mary, when she did so her weight dropped. Maitland described Elizabeth as “To all appearances … falling away … extremely thin and the colour of a corpse.”

  The messages Maitland had brought with him would only pile more pressure on the Queen. While the letters from Mary Queen of Scots to Elizabeth were full of warmth, “tending all to express the love and affection she bare unto her,” the rest, from the Scots nobility, warned her that the surest way to keep Scotland’s friendship was for Elizabeth to name Mary her successor: something she knew she could never do. When Maitland urged this last point during his interview, the Queen became visibly irritated. She retorted that she had expected a different message from Scotland, one concerning Mary’s willingness to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh, in which Mary would recognize Elizabeth’s right to be Queen despite her illegitimacy. As her speech continued, however, Elizabeth’s preference for Mary’s claim to that of Lady Katherine Grey emerged strongly. “I have noted,” Elizabeth told Maitland, “that you have said to me … that your Queen is descended of the royal blood of England and that I am obliged to love her as being nearest to me in blood of any other, all which I must confess to be true.” She assured Maitland she “never meant ill towards her.” Even when Mary had offended her “by bearing my arms and acclaiming the title of my crown” she had imputed “the fault to others than to herself.” The succession was not a matter she wished to meddle in, in part, Elizabeth hinted, because it risked provoking a debate in England that would not be in Mary’s interest. She declared, however: “I here protest to you, in the presence of God, I for my part know no better [claim than the Queen of Scots’] nor that I myself would prefer to her, or yet, to be plain with you, that case that might debar her from it.”