by Karen Harper
SOMERSET HOUSE, LONDON
March 1549
The day I had an interview with Anne Stanhope Seymour, the Duchess of Somerset, John seemed as nervous as I. When Cecil and I rode in to Somerset House, two great wings of which I was surprised to see still being built, John was waiting with a warm greeting but words of warning.
“Kat, I’ve seen her close up, and the word shrew doesn’t do her justice,” he whispered to me, pulling me aside while Cecil spoke with others. “She’s a virago, a harpy. Nothing suits her. I swear, since the boy king is her nephew—by marriage only—she sees herself as queen!”
“Cecil says she and her husband have the queen’s suite of rooms at Whitehall, so I’m glad to be summoned here instead. I could not bear to see this ‘Queen Anne’ in Queen Anne’s rooms. I have to dare this. I know you understand. And, if she’s that way, can her husband or the Council abide her either? Perhaps if I grovel low enough, I can wheedle this favor from her.”
I kissed him again and was off to catch up to Cecil as he headed for the back door of massive Somerset House. As I said, it was still abuilding, and Cecil filled me in on how huge it would be when finished, and he added with a roll of his eyes, “That western wing they are working on is made of stones from the demolition of the cloister and library at St. Paul’s Cathedral. The Seymours have a talent for pulling things down and trying to build anew their own way. Wait here, and I’ll be certain you’re announced.”
This was to be like a royal audience, I thought, when I was escorted into a vast chamber by a man in Somerset livery. He announced my name to the cavernous room and left me alone. As I approached the duchess, my footsteps echoed doubly from the marble floor and lofty ceiling, making it sound as if I were being stalked. The room was impressively furnished, and out the bank of windows behind the duchess I could see workmen’s scaffolds and, through new-leafed trees, the busy Thames. Both within and without the vast mansion, I could hear sawing and hammering.
I curtsied low and stayed down, as I would for royalty.
“You may rise,” she said from her position on a heavily carved chair that might as well have been a throne. Alive with swirling dust motes, the spring sun streamed in upon me. I had the urge to sneeze. With the light in my eyes, I could barely make out her features, so I sidestepped, and our gazes collided.
The woman who was, no doubt, the most powerful female in the realm had a high forehead and deep-set, cold, blue eyes. Since her mouth was pinched to a tight line, it was her classical Roman nose that seemed to dominate her face—a nose, Mildred had said, she stuck in her husband’s business and that of everyone else. Suffice it to say she was richly garbed and laden with jewels, and in midday.
“I permit this interview,” she said, looking down that nose at me, “because I feel you should be told that, despite your release from the Tower, you will be watched. Well, whatever are you staring at, woman?” she demanded, I suppose, because it was not polite to stare at one’s betters.
“Forgive me, Your Grace,” I said, lowering my gaze, “but I heard you are descended from the great Plantagenet rulers of the realm and, as a student of English history, I thought a glimpse of you would give me some notion of their appearances, the queens at least.”
She fluffed out her skirts, preening. I thanked the Lord that wording did its intended work. Daring to look her in the face again, I saw her countenance soften and blessed Cecil’s advice: Treat her like royalty and perhaps largesse will fall the way of the groveling underling.
“Well, yes, English royal history,” she said, clearing her throat. “I hear you are well schooled and helped the Princess Elizabeth in her early days.”
“Despite the mistakes I have made, Your Grace, she and I are very close, and both of us would be eternally grateful to you if we might be reunited.”
“She has another governess now, one the Council and the Lord Protector approve of.”
“At her age and with her tutors, she is beyond needing a governess, but she does need loyal servants, especially ones who admire the strong Protestant leanings of the Lord Protector.”
“Ah, well, I must admit my husband thinks your husband’s talent with horses is a bit wasted since he is well read in the new faith too.”
“I assure you, my lord John and I—and the princess—have ever been loyal to her brother, the king, and to his Council, despite what Tom Seymour said or did.”
“That wretch was a terrible influence on everyone, may his soul be rewarded for his earthly deeds!”
That, as I heard it, was a far cry from May he rest in peace, and I heartily agreed, though I held my tongue on that. Did I dare to hope this interview I had so dreaded was going well?
“Since you knew of my royal Plantagenet blood,” she told me, lifting her chin even higher, “you may also know that I once served Her Majesty, Queen Catherine of Aragon, as a lady-in-waiting. You—I believe—served the woman who stole the queen’s affections, Elizabeth’s mother, the Boleyn.”
My temper almost flared, but I beat it down. As in the Tower, I decided to say as little as possible to questions yet to assert myself. “I did as I was assigned to do, perhaps as you yourself.”
Her eyes widened at the reply. “My point is,” she said in an exasperated tone as if I were a dolthead, “that the princess I am fond of, despite her clinging to her mother’s Spanish Catholicism, is the Princess Mary, who yet calls me her Nann for my early service to her mother.”
Doomed! This attempt to beg to be returned to Elizabeth was doomed, for the older they got, the less well Mary and Elizabeth seemed to get on. But, thank the Lord, I was reasoning wrong. Why had I not learned by now that surprises and shocks always surrounded the Tudors?
“So,” the duchess went on, popping a section of imported orange in her mouth and speaking while she chewed it, “Princess Mary writes that you once did her a good deed, or perhaps two, protecting her when all could have been lost. She gave me no details but will when we next invite her to court, no doubt.”
“Yes, Your Grace. She and I were allies years ago at Hatfield House, and I yet feel great affection for her.”
“Though the Princess Elizabeth has asked my husband and the Council to be good to you”—[that warmed me, for then I did not know this]—“I do so because the Princess Mary has asked me to be kind to you, though of your own accord, you deserve to be dismissed from royal service forever!”
I bowed my head as if her words had crushed me, but I held my breath, hoping to hear something good and thanks to Mary Tudor. Cecil had been right about this woman: She wanted to best even her husband and the king’s Privy Council. She wanted to do things her own way for her own reasons.
“So—for the Princess Mary as well as our poor, misguided Elizabeth, who was nearly taken in by my deceased brother-in-law’s seductive ploys,” the duchess droned on in her nasal voice, “I will see what I can do with the Protector and thus the Council. But if I give you this favor, you and your lord John will be loyal to us—and, of course, to the king for whom my husband rules.”
“As I said, we are already so, Your Grace! I am so grateful.”
When she nodded dismissively and went back to eating orange sections, I curtsied again and backed away. My joy almost went to my head. I fought the urge to keep from skipping, from twirling toward the door, thinking I had not only survived but succeeded. I had bearded the lioness in her den, the woman John had whispered was now “the power behind the power behind the throne.”
It took another month before we heard any word from the Privy Council. I had despaired of being returned to the princess’s service and was trying to talk John into our riding to Hatfield, just to catch a glimpse of her. As anywhere he tended horses, he had become a favorite with the Lord Protector, so I marveled indeed when word came that we were both to be sent to Hatfield. Not only were we assigned there, but Thomas Parry too, who feared Elizabeth would never want him back keeping her books after his confession in the Tower. But I knew her—I knew we had
all become her family in exile from her royal one.
When we arrived at Hatfield House on a bright, crisp spring evening in May, no one greeted us at first, and the windows were curtained. As if it had been long closed, the house wafted out musty coolness when we entered. No one bustled about. Even when Lord and Lady Tyrwhitt came from the great hall and greeted me coldly, I already felt chilled to the bone.
“Is the princess unwell?” I asked her, my voice quavering.
“She keeps much to her chamber and her bed.”
Even without their leave, I turned away and started up the staircase, lifting my skirts and taking two steps at a time.
“She’s stricken with melancholia,” she called after me, coming to the banister, “but we’ve had a physician out from London twice. She eats next to nothing. He says she’s anemic, but ’tis guilt that racks her.”
I almost expected a guard at her door but saw none. The hall smelled dusty and still. If she was locked in . . .
She wasn’t, and the familiar heavy latch lifted easily in my hand. Her withdrawing chamber and bedchamber beyond lay dark and still. Melancholia, anemia and guilt indeed! Elizabeth of England had survived the downfall of that bastard Seymour, and I had dealt with another Seymour devil to get back to her, so all must be well.
Pieces of clothing were strewn haphazardly about, anathema to her tidy habits. And each garment was black, as if a nun had stripped and gone to bed.
“Elizabeth! Lovey, your Kat is here,” I cried, and pulled the bed curtains a bit apart so I could see within.
At first, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I thought no one was there. But a slim form swathed in sheets moved slightly between two huge bolsters.
“Kat. Mm, Kat, am I dreaming?” came the muted words, not her voice. “Oh, thank God, you are here.”
I sat on the side of the bed and leaned toward her. She smelled of sweat, camphor and some other dosing herbs, I know not. But I beheld a ghost of my girl with her greasy hair pulled straight back so it seemed I peered at a skull atop a wasted form.
“Lovey, what have they done to you?” I demanded, and lifted her thin body to me.
“Not them, Kat,” she whispered, her voice like wind through dried leaves. “I’ve done it to myself.” And she burst into tears in my arms.
I did not scold anyone but took over with a vengeance. I hand-fed my girl hot broth and insisted she eat strawberries with cream. I aired out her rooms and let the light in. But by candlelight that very night I bathed her in water with lavender oil and washed and toweled her hair. I saw her mother’s precious ring was neither on her fingers nor on a cord around her waist, and she’d stripped herself of all other jewelry she so loved to wear. The next day, I brought first John and then Tom Parry upstairs so she could welcome them back, but she seemed a phantom of the girl she had been, and they went from her disturbed and grieving.
“Shall I ride to London for a different physician?” John whispered to me in the hall.
“Yes, get one Cecil trusts and bring him back. But I must get her to talk. She insists she’s done this to herself, so perhaps she can heal herself.”
Despite the Tyrwhitts’ insistence I keep to my own room, I slept in a truckle bed at the foot of Elizabeth’s. After my second night with her, dawn had barely dusted the mullioned windowpanes when she said, “Kat, are you awake?”
“Yes, lovey, yes, I’m here.”
“I am so very, very sorry—so sorry!” she burst out in a voice that was finally hers and dissolved into tears. I was up and to her in an instant, holding her, rocking her as I had done many times when fear or pain or bugaboos had assailed her as a child.
“If you mean sorry about us in the Tower, we don’t blame you,” I told her. “It wasn’t your fault, so—”
“Of course, it was. I adored him, trusted him, wanted him! I as good as killed Queen Katherine, who had been so good to m—”
“Stuff and nonsense. A childbed fever killed her.”
“But I had become like my mother. Flirty, wanton. Kat, I could have conceived a child out of wedlock as she did me. My father used to tell me to never be like her, and now my reputation—all I have but my royal blood—has been sullied for all England to see.”
“All England may go to hell in a handbasket if they think that of you. But,” I told her, rocking her again, holding her close, “it is in your power to keep that from ever happening again, to become and remain pure in all eyes. I see you’ve renounced all sorts of pretty things.”
She nodded against my shoulder. “Even my mother’s ring.”
“Lovey, you will always be Anne Boleyn’s girl, but you’re Henry Rex’s too. She made mistakes in her life but didn’t have time to correct them when she saw the error of her ways. But you do. You are young and bright and beautiful—”
“No more, Kat, no more, however much I want to be and want to have pleasant pastimes and be loved.”
“Now you listen to your friend Kat Ashley. When my lord and
I walked out of the Tower, we held our heads high. We had been scared and shamed, but we held our heads high. If you must dress severely, do so, but no hiding or moping, or people will think their English Elizabeth is guilty and grieving what could have been.”
“Between Tom Seymour and me?”
“No, good riddance to him! They will think you are mourning what could have been for the future of their Princess Elizabeth!”
Though much changed, as if she had grown wiser and older during these cruel winter and spring months, Elizabeth Tudor emerged from her self-imposed prison to almost be her old—or should I say young?—self. She put her mother’s ring back on a cord around her waist and managed to eat enough that she had hips to hold the cord up again. She accepted dosings from the physician John brought—especially a mint and borage elixir which helped to lift her melancholia and let her sleep. Despite the scoldings of the watchdog Tyrwhitts, she kept all her old servants close and relied on Cecil, too, for advice when he visited with the excuse of showing her the rural rent rolls she did not really need to see. But if 1549 was a better year than the last for Elizabeth of England, for England itself it was a terrible time.
Edward Seymour, the Lord Protector Somerset as we all called him now, turned out to be a disaster as a ruler. When protests arose against the new Book of Common Prayer, and pockets of Catholics—including in my home shire of Devon—rebelled, he ordered the rebellions brutally put down. Farmlands long leased by the lower classes were being enclosed to raise sheep, for the sale of wool lined the pockets of rich landowners, and vagrants by the hundreds streamed into the cities looking for food. The exchequer was empty, and Protector Somerset proved to be a claybrain about foreign affairs. For one thing, his miscalculations lost the future Scottish queen, Mary Stuart, to the Dauphin of France instead of her being betrothed to King Edward.
Though Somerset had been known as “the good duke” by the common people, even some of them turned against him, and no wonder why. When chastised by the Council, he had fled with the king in tow, first to Hampton Court, then to Windsor Castle. He had even shouted, “I shall not fall alone. If I am destroyed, the king will be destroyed. If I die, he shall die before me.” King Edward was scared and the Council was appalled, which made the rise to power of his chief rival, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, smooth and fast. The once-popular Protector Somerset was arrested and lodged in the very Tower where he had sent his brother and John and me.
It was an entire year after that, as 1550 slid into 1551, that Elizabeth received an invitation to come to court for Christmas. She had been briefly back and forth to visit her brother before, but not for such a long time and such a festive occasion.
“Oh, Kat,” she said, her eyes shining as she showed me the parchment her royal brother had signed in his own hand, “perhaps with the Earl of Warwick in control now, I can be with my family for more than brief visits!”
Though we would not leave for two days, she began to pack for herself the garments of somber
blacks and grays she yet favored. She still wore her hair pulled straight back under a severe headpiece and then spilling down her back in maidenly fashion. Her long, graceful hands she so loved to adorn bore but one plain gold ring. Yet my heart thrilled to see her animated and happy. Some color had even come into her cheeks, and I knew the winter wind would burnish that hue even more.
I was thrilled too when I observed the warm, even wild reception she met with along the roads to London, then at the court when she was presented to her brother. [If I recall aright, Mary, though invited, preferred not to come for Yule that year, since she knew her brother would have insisted she attend all the Protestant services. I was disappointed, for I had hoped to thank her for her support of me to the Duchess of Somerset. Oh, yes, by the way, John Dudley, the new power behind King Edward’s throne at court, had magnanimously pardoned Somerset and had him released to increase his own popularity with the people, though Cecil said he was just setting him up for another fall. At least the Somersets were not at court.]
But I must recount some of the hopeful things I heard amid huzzahs on the road and comments at court about Elizabeth: “Is this plain girl the one they whispered was a strumpet like her mother?” “Fie on such rumors, for look how humble she is.” “Anne Boleyn’s girl is pure English, the best of the reformed religion and the heritage of the Tudors.” “I swear I never saw a purer-looking maiden! What rot about her and that blackguard Lord Admiral!”
My clever girl! It was, I reckon, the harbinger of her brilliance to later create herself in the pure, powerful image of the Virgin Queen—but there was much, much more to suffer first.
WHITEHALL PALACE
Yuletide 1550-1551
Like Elizabeth, I favored the darkly handsome, virile John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, over the cold, bloodless Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset. Make no mistake, Warwick was as ambitious as they come, but he seemed somehow more human. He had five fine sons with whom he seemed to get on well, including Robert, the king and Elizabeth’s old schoolmate she had so favored when they were younger, the one she still called Robin. Now that they were both seventeen, he was the one she blushed at whenever he teased her or called her Bess or even turned her way. Though I was wary of all comers after the Tom Seymour debacle, surely this was harmless. Warwick kept a fatherly eye on all his boys, and two of them—Robin included—were soon to be wed.