Elizabeth's Women

by Tracy Borman

  This latter fact, which was backed up by Kat Astley’s and Thomas Parry’s confessions, was what saved Elizabeth. However improper her relations with Seymour had been, she had never given any indication that she would be so foolish as to marry him without the council’s permission. It was therefore impossible for them to convict her of treason. Her relief was short lived, however, for the council subsequently decreed that Mistress Astley was “far unmeete … to se to the good Education and Government of your Parson.” Kat was hauled before them and told “rowndeley” that “she hath not shewed herself so moche atendant to her Office in this Part, as we looked for at her Hands.”38 She was therefore dismissed from her position as governess and replaced by Lady Tyrwhit, the wife of Elizabeth’s interrogator.

  When Elizabeth heard of this, she was devastated. “She took the Matter so hevely, that she wepte all that Nyght, and lowred all the next Day,” reported Sir Robert Tyrwhit, who was dismayed that the girl could so mourn the loss of one who had been such a bad influence upon her. “The Love that she beryth her [Kat Astley] ys to be wondert at,” he told Edward Seymour, Lord Somerset and Lord Protector of England. When Elizabeth eventually emerged from her bedchamber, red eyed and pale faced, she defiantly told him that “Mestrys Aschlay was her Mestrys, and that she had not so demened her selffe, that the Counsell shuld now need to put eny mo Mestressys unto her … the Worlde wold nott [note] her to be a great Offender, havyng so hastely a Governor appointid to her.” Refusing to submit to Lady Tyrwhit’s authority, she stubbornly clung to the conviction that she would be able to “recover her old Mestrys agayne.”39

  But as time wore on, it became clear that this would not be the case, and Elizabeth had no choice but to accept Lady Tyrwhit as her new governess. Her reluctance to do so was driven by more than her loyalty to Kat, strong though that was. Lady Tyrwhit had a reputation as a religious firebrand, and her fiercely puritanical views would have been anathema to Elizabeth, who favored a much more pragmatic approach. Even Sir Robert admitted that his wife was “not sane in divination.” How such a sternly pious woman must have viewed the disgraceful impropriety of Seymour’s relationship with Elizabeth can well be imagined. But in Elizabeth she had met her match. Far from being bowed by Lady Tyrwhit’s self-righteous condemnations, Elizabeth would not hear a word spoken against Lord Seymour, and if ever her new governess criticized her predecessor, Mistress Astley, the girl would be “very redy to make answer veamently.”40

  In early March, shortly after Kat’s dismissal from her service, Elizabeth received the news that Lord Seymour had been found guilty of treason and condemned to death. Quite apart from any feelings she might have had toward him, Elizabeth was distraught at the prospect that her beloved Kat and Thomas Parry, who were still prisoners in the Tower, could meet the same fate. Putting aside her grief for Seymour, she therefore resolved to write to the Lord Protector and plead for Kat’s release. It was the most important letter she had ever written: the life of her beloved governess—the woman who had been a mother to her for more than twelve years and had shared all of her grief, joys, hopes, and fears—now depended upon every word she wrote.

  Elizabeth began with a show of humility, thanking Somerset for issuing a proclamation of her innocence, as she had requested him to do. She then turned to the main subject of the letter. Shrewdly realizing that she would get nowhere by simply insisting on Kat’s innocence, as she had done so many times in the past, she acknowledged that her governess had been somewhat at fault. “I do not favor her in any iuel [evil],” she wrote, “(for that I wolde be sorye to do), but for thes consideracions wiche folowe.” Numbering these “consideracions” in turn, Elizabeth proceeded to put the case for Mistress Astley with as much skill and eloquence as the most highly trained lawyer. First, she asked the Lord Protector to consider Kat’s service to her: “she hathe bene with me a longe time, and many years, and hathe taken great labor, and paine, in brinkinge of me up in lerninge and honestie.” Second, she pointed out that whatever Kat did to further Lord Seymour’s cause with Elizabeth, she did on the assumption that he would have kept the council fully informed of it, being a member of it himself. Finally, she claimed that if they continued to detain her former governess, “it shal and doth make men thinke that I am not clere of the dide [deed] myselfe, but that it is pardoned in me bicause of my youthe, bicause that she I loved so wel is in suche a place.”41

  In writing all of this, Elizabeth was putting herself at great risk. She had not been charged with treason because there had been insufficient evidence that she had acted without the council’s knowledge and consent. But it had been a close call, and she knew that her favor with the Lord Protector and his councillors was tenuous at best. She had already succeeded in persuading them to proclaim her innocence, but all the signs were that this had exhausted their scant reserves of goodwill toward her. In trying to persuade them to now pardon and release the woman who had been unquestionably at fault in the whole sordid affair, Protector Somerset could well have decided that Elizabeth was pushing her luck too far and ordered her arrest. But the gamble paid off. To Elizabeth’s joy and relief, Kat was released from the Tower, along with her partner in crime, Thomas Parry. Her triumph was not quite complete, for upon one matter the council would not relent: Mistress Astley would never be restored to her old post of governess during its watch.

  For the time being, though, it was enough for Elizabeth to know that Kat was safe. She therefore settled into a quiet and orderly routine at Hatfield under the auspices of Lady Tyrwhit. Relations between the two women gradually began to thaw as Elizabeth resigned herself to this new authority. Although she lacked Kat’s warmth and humor, Lady Tyrwhit was not without sympathy, and she gave her charge much-needed stability after the turmoil of the preceding months. Elizabeth even grew to appreciate the strength of her religious convictions, and she benefited from the routine of prayers, meditations, and devotions that her new governess introduced in the household. She learned from Lady Tyrwhit’s own “godly sentiments” that she had written down as a guide of conduct for daily life. One of her favorite maxims—“Be always one”—so inspired Elizabeth that she translated it into Latin as “Semper eadem” and adopted it as her own motto.

  For all her goodwill toward Lady Tyrwhit, Elizabeth had by no means forgotten her old governess, and she continued to work toward her reinstatement. Eventually, some two years after her release from the Tower, Kat was restored to Elizabeth’s household, along with her husband, John.42 The reunion between Kat and Elizabeth was an emotional one: After spending almost every day together for twelve years, the separation had seemed endless. The closeness of their relationship was restored immediately, and Kat remained at Elizabeth’s side throughout the remainder of Edward’s reign.

  Once more, Elizabeth’s life seemed to have settled down into a more comfortable pattern. She was even able to welcome a new addition to her household. Lady Katherine Howard was the daughter of Henry Carey, later first Baron Hunsdon, the son of Mary Boleyn.43 The date of Katherine’s birth is uncertain, and could have been anywhere between her parents’ marriage in 1545 and 1550. Katherine was raised in Elizabeth’s household from a very early age, and she quickly formed a close attachment to her. Philip II of Spain’s envoy, the Count de Feria, would later remark that the young girl “was brought up with her [Elizabeth] and is devoted to her.”44 Like Elizabeth Fitzgerald, who had also spent time with Elizabeth as a child, Katherine grew up to become one of her most trusted ladies at court when Elizabeth became queen.

  Elizabeth also paid regular visits to her former stepmother, Anne of Cleves. Anne’s status had diminished upon the death of Henry VIII. Edward’s council viewed her as an irrelevance, not to mention a drain on its resources, and confiscated two of the manors that Henry had given her—Richmond and Bletchingly. Forever the pragmatist, Anne resolved to make the most of the life that she had left. She established her house at Hever as a lively social center—a kind of miniature court, where she could receive esteeme
d guests from across the kingdom. Through these guests, she kept abreast of events at court and solicited invitations to visit it herself. But her favorite guest by far was Elizabeth. Anne provided the young girl with a much-needed mother figure away from the confines of her household. She may not have rivalled Kat Astley’s place in Elizabeth’s heart, but she was a more sensible and level-headed role model. Through her visits to Hever, Elizabeth also became better acquainted with her own mother’s history. There would certainly have been mementos of Anne Boleyn at the castle.

  Now that Elizabeth was established in her own household and Katherine Parr was no longer a factor in her life, there seemed to be the chance of a reconciliation with her elder sister, Mary. In fact, the situation became worse. While Elizabeth suffered from a tainted reputation, Mary, pure as ever, gained the moral high ground and exploited it to full advantage. She no doubt derived some satisfaction from being proved right about the unsuitability of Elizabeth’s choice of guardian. Her younger sister’s behavior might also have reminded her of Anne Boleyn, whose notorious flirtatiousness had landed her in similar trouble. Like mother, like daughter—not a thought to render Elizabeth more pleasing to Mary than she had been before their separation the previous year. Their growing hostility was noted by the Venetian ambassador, who reported that Mary “demonstrated by very clear signs” that she no longer loved her half sister.45

  Although Elizabeth had displeased her brother the king by going to live with their disgraced stepmother and by her involvement in the Seymour scandal, she was soon back in favor. By contrast, Edward had little time for their elder sister. Even before he had become king, he had come to resent Mary’s presence at court. On one occasion, he had complained about her to Katherine Parr, asking that she should “attend no longer to foreign dances and merriments” because it was “not becoming a Christian princess.”46

  By the time of his accession, Edward had become a strictly devout Protestant and reformer, and deeply resented Mary’s intransigence on matters of religion. She had resisted the Lord Protector’s Act of Uniformity, continuing to celebrate Mass with great ceremony at her residences. This was an open defiance of Edward’s authority, and he was not prepared to tolerate it. He ordered that she was no longer to hear Mass, even in the privacy of her own house, and made her unwelcome at court. “Your near relationship to us, your exalted rank, the conditions of the times, all magnify your offence. It is a scandalous thing that so high a personage should deny our sovereignty; that our sister should be less to us than any of our other subjects is an unnatural example,” he raged. “Truly, sister, I will not say more and worse things because my duty would compel me to use harsher and angrier words. But this I will say with certain intention, that I will see my laws strictly obeyed, and those who break them shall be watched and denounced.”47 Accordingly, it was noted that “the care they [the king and the council] had of her [Mary] is decreasing daily, and is principally shown in making her move from one house to another.”48

  This treatment, together with her brother’s reprimand, enraged Mary and sparked a show of that same stubbornness that had caused her such trouble during her father’s reign. Although she claimed that Edward’s letter had “caused me more suffering than any illness even unto death,” she continued to defy his commands, and as a result became a figurehead for opposition to his regime.49 Religious opinion was still very much divided in England, and while many welcomed the reforming zeal of the new king, others regretted the demise of the monasteries and longed for the country to return to the Roman Catholic fold. In courting the support of the religious conservatives, Mary was playing a dangerous game. But she was driven more by a genuine passion for that faith than by any sense of political advantage, and she refused to give way. She had withstood the terrifying wrath of Henry VIII; in her eyes, the displeasure of Edward VI was probably no more than a little brother’s tantrum.

  During the remaining years of Edward’s reign, Elizabeth and Mary saw little of each other. They continued to exchange letters, but they were seldom at court together, and there is no evidence that they visited each other’s houses. With her dogged conservatism, Mary increasingly represented the past, while Elizabeth and Edward represented the future. Although the latter referred to Mary as “our nearest sister,” he was furious at her stubborn nonconformity and increasingly demoted her to second place behind Elizabeth, whose views and beliefs were so much closer to his own. As the reign progressed, the younger of his two half sisters was treated with ever-greater honor. Upon one of her visits to court, she rode into London “with a great suite of ladies and gentlemen,” and was received by an impressive delegation of councillors and noblemen. This was a studied gesture on the part of the young king to “show the people how much glory belongs to her who has embraced the new religion and is become a very great lady.” It was subsequently noted that Elizabeth was “continually with the King,” and that he and his councillors “have a higher opinion of her for conforming with the others and observing the new decrees, than the Lady Mary, who remains constant in the Catholic faith and stays at her house 28 miles from here without being either summoned or visited by the Council.”50

  By 1553, when Elizabeth was nineteen, everything augured well for her future. She had survived the crisis of the Seymour scandal and was now in great favor with the king. Knowing of his growing disapproval toward their half sister, she may even have hoped that he would alter the succession to give herself precedence. Any such hopes were incidental, however, for there appeared every chance that Edward would go on to marry and produce a long line of male heirs to succeed him. He was still only fifteen years old and had always enjoyed good health. But if her life thus far had taught Elizabeth anything, it was how quickly fate could turn against her. In the spring of that year, her young brother suddenly fell ill. An apparently minor chest infection had turned into something altogether more serious, and within weeks it was clear that the boy was dying. The cause is not certain, although the symptoms were consistent with tuberculosis. Knowing that Mary would undo all the reforms for which he and his council had worked so hard, Edward was loath to leave his throne to her. Persuaded by ministers, he therefore altered the succession, not—as Elizabeth might have hoped—in her favor, but in that of his young cousin, Lady Jane Grey.

  This was not just unexpected, it was illegal, and Mary knew it. When Edward died on July 6, she immediately sent the council letters claiming her right to the throne. For once, her characteristic stubbornness won her the day. Convinced of the justice of her cause, she mustered considerable forces in East Anglia, where she had fled upon hearing that her brother was close to death, knowing that the council in London was against her. Setting up camp at Framlingham Castle, the ancient fortress of the Dukes of Norfolk, she attracted ever-greater numbers to her cause, most of whom were staunchly traditional men opposed to both the religious reforms of Edward’s reign and the attempts to overthrow the rightful Tudor succession.

  Meanwhile, Elizabeth remained at Hatfield, hedging her bets by refraining from showing support either to Mary or to Jane, her former companion at Chelsea. She did not have long to wait. On July 19, barely two weeks after Edward’s death, Elizabeth received the news that Mary had triumphed. Terrified by rumors of the forces that were gathering in ever-greater numbers to support her, the council had capitulated and abandoned its plot to place Lady Jane upon the throne. It was with mixed feelings that Elizabeth contemplated Mary’s new status. Her half sister, with whom she had never enjoyed an easy relationship, was now her queen.

  CHAPTER 6

  Sister

  Mary Tudor ascended the throne on a wave of popular rejoicing. There were street parties across the capital and lively celebrations throughout the realm. A woman she might be, but she was also a Tudor, and as such the only true heir in the eyes of most Englishmen. Elizabeth wrote at once to offer her congratulations. Showing all due deference, she also humbly craved Mary’s advice as to whether she ought to appear in mourning clothes out of r
espect for their brother, Edward, or something more festive.1 Although relations between them had soured during Edward’s reign and Elizabeth had failed to throw her support behind Mary’s campaign for the throne after his death, Mary was apparently prepared to be magnanimous in her triumph. She therefore invited Elizabeth to accompany her to London.

  On July 29, flanked by a magnificent retinue that included the two thousand soldiers whom she had refrained from offering to her half sister in her time of need, Elizabeth rode through the city of London. Mary had evidently advised her against wearing mourning, for she sported the Tudor colors of green and white. Having taken up residence at Somerset House on the Strand, she and her company set out the next day to meet Mary at Wanstead, to the east of the capital. Her reception was so cordial that any uninformed observer would have thought that the pair had long been affectionate sisters. Mary embraced her half sister warmly and proceeded to kiss each of her ladies in turn. She subsequently presented them with gifts of jewels and gave Elizabeth an exquisite necklace of white coral beads trimmed with gold, together with a ruby-and-diamond brooch. In the celebrations that followed, the new queen accorded her half sister first place after herself and appeared anxious to keep her by her side at all times. It seemed that Mary’s accession had healed the old wounds between the two sisters and that thenceforth they would enjoy mutual affection and harmony.