Her Highness, the Traitor

by Susan Higginbotham

  “It is pleasant here indeed.” Catherine hesitated then put her hand on my shoulder. “My lady, I have a secret I wish to confide in you. I trust you, and I know you can keep one very well.” The queen smiled a little archly at me. “As you did when the king lay dead.”

  “Your Grace, I beg your forgiveness. My husband—”

  “There is no need to do so. You are right to be loyal to him. And that is why I am telling you a secret that you can share with him. Tom Seymour and I have married.”

  “Married?” I squeaked in a manner suitable to my nickname of old.

  “We married at my sister’s chapel at Baynard’s Castle just a few days before. Well, my lady? Are not congratulations in order?”

  “Indeed they are,” I managed. The queen, married after just four months of widowhood! And in a secret ceremony! “I suppose the king doesn’t know?”

  “No, and neither does the Protector nor that shrew he has for a wife.” The queen’s eyes narrowed. “Do you know what that—that hell is doing? She has encouraged her husband to keep my jewels, the jewels the late king willed to me, on the ground that they are the Crown’s! I’ve no doubt she wants them for her own skinny neck.” Catherine glowered, then recalled herself. “No, I have not told them, and I shall not. Only my sister and her husband and the priest who married us and a couple of my ladies know. We want to secure the king’s approval for the match.”

  “A little late for that,” I ventured.

  Catherine shrugged. “We can always have a public ceremony.”

  “How long have you been courting?” I could not resist asking.

  “Since just days after the king’s funeral. Have I shocked you?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “But I understand the temptation.”

  “No, you probably don’t, having known your husband since you were three, and having been married to him since you were sixteen.” Queen Catherine was beginning to melt away before my eyes, and I was seeing Lady Latimer as I had known her years before, when she was newly arrived in London from the North and was eager for a taste of court life. “I wanted to marry him years before. Everyone knows it; why should I lie about it?” The queen settled back on her stool and smiled reminiscently. “Tom came to me not long after the funeral on the Protector’s business, as he put it. I knew there was no such thing, and I did not care. Soon we had picked up where we had left off before King Henry married me.”

  I was rather more grateful than otherwise that the queen’s confidence did not extend to telling me exactly what they had been doing with each other when they left off.

  Catherine was continuing, in a more regal manner than previously. “I am telling you these things because I know your husband is friendly with the Protector. Tom and the Protector have been at odds since they were boys, and you know what I think of his wife. How I detested having that woman in my household! So we are neither suited to the task of gauging his feelings. But if your husband could not tell the Protector, but sound him, getting a sense of how he would receive my marriage, I would be most grateful.”

  “I will speak to my husband.”

  “Thank you, my dear. I know he is clever enough to manage the business. In the meantime, my husband plans to write to the lady Mary, asking her to urge me to the match.”

  “She is no longer in the household here?”

  “No, she left in April. I don’t believe she suspected anything; her chambers are far off.” The queen’s eyes positively twinkled. “And Tom came at night and left in the morning.”

  I was only a few years older than the queen, yet I felt hopelessly old-fashioned. The intrigues and amours of King Henry’s court had passed me by; I’d lain with but one man in my life, even in my imagination, and I could not imagine lying with another, not to mention having someone sneaking to my house in the middle of the night. My distaste for the whole business must have shown, for the queen said, “We always did intend marriage, you know. And we are married now.”

  “Of course,” I said brightly.

  “In any case, he is coming for supper today, all quite in the open. Will you stay? He is bringing his new charge with him, the Marquis of Dorset’s eldest daughter, and she is quite an interesting little thing. Have you met her?”

  “Only in passing.”

  “Well, you and she ought to get on well together.”

  “I would be happy to stay.”

  “The lady Elizabeth will join us, too, of course. She never likes to miss a sighting of Tom.” Catherine shook her head. “Indeed, keeping her in the dark has been far harder than it was the lady Mary. The lady Elizabeth misses nothing.”

  ***

  The Admiral, as Thomas Seymour was known because of the position he’d been given when the new king came to the throne, kissed the queen’s hand decorously as two pairs of young eyes observed him: those of the lady Elizabeth, the king’s thirteen-year-old sister, and of Lady Jane Grey, Dorset’s ten-year-old daughter. Elizabeth’s alert eyes were indeed focused upon the Admiral, while Jane, dressed expensively but very plainly for a girl of her high station, crinkled her brow in disapproval at the queen’s bright summer gown.

  I turned my own attention upon Lady Jane. In the last century, it had been Jane’s great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Woodville, whose beauty had led Edward IV to make her, a knight’s widow and a mere commoner, his queen. This girl was descended from Elizabeth Woodville’s first marriage, to one John Grey, as well as from her royal marriage, and the family’s good looks had not been much diluted over the generations. Jane was a pretty child, with reddish-brown hair, much darker than that of her kinswoman the lady Elizabeth, and she was slender and pale skinned, like her mother, Frances, and her grandmother, the French queen. If she’d been my daughter, though—and I had two living—I would have put her in a gown of a more flattering color. If I’d not learned to play at the game of courtly love during my time at court, I had at least learned to dress well. But the Marquis of Dorset was a strong evangelical, more so than his wife, and evidently it was he who had influenced the manner of his daughter’s dress. “Are you enjoying staying with the Admiral, Lady Jane?” I asked when we were seated side by side at table. “He is a charming man.”

  Lady Jane looked toward her guardian, who was chatting animatedly with the queen and with the lady Elizabeth. “He is,” she allowed in a low tone of voice. It was clear she had never thought of such a thing.

  “They tell me you are quite a scholar,” I ventured.

  “My tutors say I get on well,” Lady Jane acknowledged.

  “You will like the queen, then. I suppose you have heard that she has written and published her own book of prayers? And the lady Elizabeth translated it just last year for the king, into French, Italian, and Latin.”

  Jane’s little nose wrinkled in unmistakable jealousy. “I know French and Latin, and I am to learn Italian.”

  “Of course you will,” I said reassuringly.

  My companion’s well-bred silence told me I had presumed.

  ***

  After my disconcerting trip to Chelsea, it was a relief to return to our new home in Holborn: Ely Place, which John had acquired after years of leasing lodgings in the city. It was the grandest house in which we’d lived, and we had been staying there for so short a time that I still could get lost in its tangle of staircases and corridors. I managed, however, to make my way to John’s chamber without incident and to tell him the news.

  “The queen has married?”

  “Yes, and I confess it made me uncomfortable.”

  “It should have,” said John. He shook his head. “Why couldn’t she have waited a year? I daresay the king wasn’t a model husband, but she owed him that much respect.”

  “So you won’t speak to the Protector?”

  “No. What can I say? If they hadn’t married already, I would have be
en willing enough to say a word; it’s none of my concern if the queen wants to marry a rascal. But now that they have married, I can hardly speak to Somerset as if they hadn’t done the deed already. All I can promise her is to keep silent. That is as much deceit as I care to practice. He is, after all, my friend.” John snorted. “And it won’t be a secret for long, with the Admiral going back and forth to the queen’s place night after night. Especially with the lady Elizabeth in her household, and Dorset’s daughter in his. The lady Elizabeth is too sharp to miss such antics, though I know little enough about the lady Jane.”

  I smiled. “The lady Jane would not approve of such romantic folly, but I doubt she pays much attention to anything that is not within the covers of a book. She’s very bright, but a rather frosty little creature.”

  “I wonder whom Dorset is considering as a husband for her?”

  “Someone with a good-sized library.” I snickered. “And with a great deal of patience, I daresay.”

  4

  Frances Grey

  September 1547

  I hardly recognized my Jane when I next came up from our home of Bradgate in Leicestershire to London. Not only had she had a slight growing spurt, but she also was dressed in the height of fashion, in a green that became her very well. “The queen gave me the material,” she said as she spun around, almost coquettishly, for me to better admire her. “Don’t you think it’s pretty?”

  “It’s lovely. But I have tried to get you to wear such colors before. You never would.”

  “The queen ordered it,” Jane said sensibly. “I could not refuse. And the Lord Admiral pressed it upon me, too. He hates dark colors.”

  Just as Harry had predicted, Tom Seymour had married the queen, having been allowed to do so by the king himself—unaware the couple had married long before the royal permission was obtained. That piece of news when it leaked out had been the scandal of the summer, and I had been all for removing my girl lest she be touched by it. I’d expected a proper marriage with the blessing of the king and the Protector, not this clandestine affair. Harry, however, had mandated that Jane stay put. “They’re properly married, after all, and any damage has already been done. And besides, Jane shall now be living in the same household as the lady Elizabeth, the king’s favorite sister. What better way to the heart of the king than that?”

  As usual, I had not been able to muster an argument. Instead, I had had to hope Jane would be so uncomfortable with the newlyweds, she would beg to be sent home when I visited. Perhaps the couple themselves might like some privacy, instead of having two young girls underfoot.

  But the visit did not match my hopes. Having shown off her new dress to me, Jane turned to Harry. “I like being here so much,” she bubbled. “The Lord Admiral is so pleasant, and the queen is so kind!”

  “How are your studies coming?”

  “Wonderfully,” said Jane, raising herself up on her toes to better emphasize her point. “The lady Elizabeth has an excellent tutor in Master William Grindal, and he teaches me as well on occasion. I know that your lordship sent me very good tutors,” she hastened to add. “But Master Grindal excels even them in Greek.”

  “We must not distract him from his duties to the lady Elizabeth,” I put in.

  “Oh, but the queen quite encourages it! And did you know that she will soon be publishing another book? Lamentations of a Sinner. She has even let me read the manuscript! I hope that the queen might even allow me to collaborate with her sometime,” Jane confided, her pretty brown eyes taking on a dreamy look. “When I am older and more accomplished, of course.”

  ***

  If I must say so myself, I sew a shirt beautifully. On many a New Year’s Day, I had presented my creations to my uncle King Henry, who confided to me once that they excelled his first queen’s handiwork, and she was a capital shirt maker. I also made smocks, which graced the forms of both the ladies Mary and Elizabeth. I did not neglect to keep my own family well supplied with these garments, and I was hard at work on a shirt for Harry when he joined me in my chamber later that evening. “I am doing something new with the embroidery this time. See?”

  “Lovely,” Harry agreed. “So what did you think? Were you pleased to see our Jane getting on so well in the queen’s household?”

  “It appears that Jane has become very fond of the queen.” I sighed slightly.

  “So what is wrong with that?”

  What was wrong with it, I longed to say, was that I wanted her to love me. “Nothing, of course. I just wish she paid the same respect to me as she did the queen.”

  “When has she been insolent toward you?”

  “Never in so many words. Well, not at all, really. She is a good girl. But—”

  “Collaborating with the queen when she gets older! Did you hear that? I say, this has opened up a world of opportunity for our Jane.”

  “I just hope it doesn’t give her an inflated idea of herself,” I ventured. “Modesty is an accomplishment in itself.”

  “Well, of course.” My husband yawned.

  I continued to work on my husband’s shirt, my thoughts not on my stitches but on my first child, my little Henry, born when I was still just sixteen. What a sweet baby he had been! But he had lived only six months, and at seventeen, I had watched as he was laid in his tiny grave. I had been too drained from days of watching him fade away to cry. Harry had stood beside me, weeping openly, and his hateful mother had stood there, too. She had let it be known I was a burden on her son, with the large retinue my father insisted I have as a duke’s daughter and his attempting to renege on his promise that he would support us until Harry came of age. This mother of several healthy grown sons had stared at the little coffin dispassionately, plainly thinking I was proving even worse of a bargain than she thought. I could not even bear her Harry a healthy male child.

  My husband and I had been too young to know how to offer each other the comfort we each needed. After our little boy was buried, he had turned to his books and to his gambling and to his life at court, and I had turned to my relations and friends, whom I had visited for weeks on end. Somehow, though, we had come together often enough for me to conceive a second child, who had lived only hours. But whatever God’s plan had been in depriving me of my first two babes, he seemed to have changed it with the birth of my third, for Jane and her sisters after her had been thriving infants, gulping their nurse’s milk and protesting vigorously against the indignity of being swaddled.

  Yet I could not stop thinking about my lost children—especially about my son. It was foolish, I knew, for he had died so young that I had no way of knowing what sort of boy he would have become, but I pictured him as an affectionate, kind young man who would have never scorned my ignorance and who would have written to me regularly from his place at court. I pictured him much like my younger half brothers, who were nearly as learned as my Jane but with a taste for archery and tennis, as well. Or perhaps Henry might have been like the lads of Jane Dudley, Countess of Warwick. The countess had lost several of her boys, two as young children and one during the siege of Boulogne three years before, but five had survived: handsome sons who outshone their plain little mother in every respect but who never treated her as an embarrassment.

  My little Henry would have proudly worn my shirts, I thought as I sighed and turned my attention to my work.

  5

  Jane Dudley

  September 1547

  In the summer of 1547, the Duke of Somerset had mounted a Scottish campaign, on which he was joined by my husband as second in command. I was left behind at Ely Place, undefended from the Duchess of Somerset as she spoke of her brother-in-law.

  “Thomas Seymour should be in Scotland, fighting alongside his brother, instead of lounging around London with the queen,” she informed me when she visited me early that September.

  “I can’t imagine why he chose to
stay here. He’s no coward.”

  “Can’t imagine? Let me supply your deficiency, my dear. He wishes to stay here so that he can work his malign influence over the king, and undermine my husband’s role as the Lord Protector.”

  “Surely not.”

  “Why, does Thomas Seymour have you under his spell, too?”

  “Certainly not,” I said. “But he is the king’s uncle as much as the Protector.”

  “You needn’t tell me that,” said Anne Seymour, glaring at a book that lay on a table near us. “Do you know what he keeps beating upon? The minority of King Henry VI, where one person had the governing of the kingdom and the other of the king’s person. Or so Thomas Seymour claims. And look how that king turned out.” She snorted. “Why, Thomas Seymour can’t even govern a young girl properly. Do you know what I saw the other night? The lady Elizabeth, floating down the Thames on a barge by herself, as though she were a wherryman. It’s a disgrace. The queen is too besotted with Seymour to chaperone the girl properly.”

  I decided not to mention that I myself had seen the lady Elizabeth in her barge; with her fine head of hair she was unmistakable, especially when she made a point of waving and calling out greetings to the occupants of the vessels that came near hers. “I’m sure it was merely a lark. The lady Elizabeth is a sensible girl, and it seems that her tutors are quite demanding. And the weather here has been so fine.”

  “I don’t see your girls being allowed to drift up and down the Thames on a barge all by themselves.”

  “Well, no. Mary prefers her books and her verses to the Thames, and Katheryn is but four years of age. How are your daughters doing, by the way?”

  Anne was undeterred from her course. “In any case, I gave that Kat Astley”—the lady Elizabeth’s governess—“a good scolding. What kind of governess calls herself ‘Kat,’ anyway? If the young lady is to make a respectable marriage, she can’t afford to have any blemish on her reputation.”