Her Highness, the Traitor (2 page)

Mary took the letter and read it slowly, a flush on her pale complexion the only betrayal of the anger she must have felt. “Take me to see my father’s body.”

Followed by her most trusted attendants, Jane Dormer and Susan Clarencius, Mary left the room. As the sound of conversation filled the chamber, the Countess of Hertford whispered to me, “You knew.”

“Yes. Surely you did, too?”

“Yes, but I am the new king’s aunt, after all. It is different. How long have you known?”

“Since John told me this afternoon.”

The countess shook her head. “And he swore you to secrecy.”

“No.” I resumed the work I’d left behind, a handkerchief for the young prince—no, the young king. “He didn’t have to
swear
me to anything. He is my husband.”

***

The old king’s death had been officially proclaimed, and the young king was on his way to the Tower to take up his duties. As the executors of the king’s will and their wives collected to greet their new sovereign, Thomas Seymour, the younger of the king’s maternal uncles, hurried up to John and me. “Fool bargemen,” he panted. “Why, the king and my brother are not here yet? It’s not like my brother to be unpunctual.”

“The clock has not struck three yet,” I said as John nodded distantly. Like many men, he was somewhat cool toward Thomas Seymour, although Seymour never flirted with me as he did with some women. I could not help but feel slightly insulted by his neglect in this regard.

“No, my lady, but it is my brother’s habit to always be slightly ahead of his time. So when a lesser man might be punctual for arriving on time, my brother is late for arriving on time. A deeply irritating habit, don’t you agree?” Without waiting for my reply, he asked, “The queen is not coming to greet King Edward, my lady?”

“No. She and the lady Mary have gone into seclusion until King Henry’s funeral, as they thought was proper.”

“Pity,” said Thomas Seymour thoughtfully. “I was hoping to offer my condolences in person.”

John quirked an eyebrow.

Just as the clock struck three, a distant rumbling announced the arrival of the king. As we ordered ourselves into tidy lines and sank to our knees, King Edward VI, accompanied by his uncle the Earl of Hertford and a host of other dignitaries, rode through the gate.

Ginger-haired like his father and sisters, the new king was a handsome child, well grown for his age and looking around him with obvious interest. He listened patiently as the Constable of the Tower, Anthony Kingston, welcomed him. When we had all paid our respects, the king asked, “Where shall we stay?”

“Why, in the palace,” the Earl of Hertford said. Plainly puzzled by the king’s unwonted ignorance, he stroked his brown beard, which grew less luxuriantly than his younger brother Thomas’s, and added, “That is where kings usually await their coronation, of course. The rooms are ready and are quite spacious. Were you never told?”

Thomas Seymour pushed forward. “I believe Your Highness was pointing at the Garden Tower as you rode in.”

“Yes!” Edward looked up at the younger of his uncles eagerly. “Where the princes were murdered by Richard III. Can’t we stay there? Or at least see it?”

“That is hardly appropri—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Brother, what’s the harm? I was always keen to look at it when I visited the Tower as a youngster; isn’t any boy? I am sure that it is too small for Your Highness to lodge in”—the constable nodded—“but I daresay Sir Anthony will allow you to go inside.”

“It is ill omened,” said Hertford dismally. “And probably full of lumber.”

“We have read much about it,” said the king in a good approximation of his father’s tone. He squared his legs in the manner that had made King Henry’s courtiers quake. “We have never been inside it, as it happens, and we wish to see it.”

“And so Your Highness shall immediately,” Thomas Seymour promised. “I shall take you myself. Do you trust yourself there with your wicked uncle Thomas?” Seymour contorted his stance to give the appearance of a hunchback.

The king unsquared his legs. “Oh, yes!”

“I shall come, too, then,” said Hertford resignedly.

“Ah, see? Now Your Highness has
two
wicked uncles. What king could want more? Lead on then, Sir Anthony.”

***

I supposed it was an honor that the queen, usually the most self-contained and dignified of women, thought highly enough of me to include me in the small circle of ladies who were privileged to hear her rant like a fishwife. “The nerve of my husband! Letting me think for months—nay, years—that I would be regent for King Edward in case of a royal minority, and what does he do? Changes his will without a word to me.”

“The king mentioned Your Grace in his will with great affection,” I said.

“Dry bones!”

“It was not ingratitude, Your Grace, I am sure of it, or lack of natural affection. The king merely wanted a man—men—to have the guiding of the kingdom.”

The queen scoffed. “Say ‘man,’ Jane. The Earl of Hertford seems to have grabbed all for himself.” The queen flicked her elegant hand, adorned with a mourning ring in the shape of a death’s head. “Oh, they had the right to elect Hertford as protector, I suppose. But that’s not what the king planned. If he had wanted a lord protector, with a council to guide him, that’s what he would have created in the first place. And I am not the only one who has been treated shabbily in this business. Sir Thomas Seymour is every bit as much the king’s uncle as Hertford, and just as capable, I daresay, and he is not even a councilor! Only an advisor to the council. He might as well be a stick of wood.”

A knock at the door sounded, and the stick of wood himself was announced.

Thomas Seymour, dressed more somberly than was his wont, entered the room, measuring his usually buoyant steps to the solemnity of the widow’s bereavement. “Your Grace, I wanted to give you my condolences on the king’s death,” he said, brushing his lips against the queen’s hand. “I know my brother will do his utmost to be of service to you, as well.”

“On the contrary, the Earl of Hertford—or the Lord Protector, as we must call him now—has been of no service to me whatsoever,” the queen said. Resentment lit up her face, making her appear rather younger than her five-and-thirty years. “He sent his man to inform me of King Henry’s death only the night before the news was proclaimed to the public. Two solid days after he died. He should have told me and the lady Mary immediately, as a courtesy.” She nodded at the lady Mary, who had joined her in her seclusion, which would continue until the old king was buried. “After all, the lady Elizabeth was told at the same time as King Edward.”

“My brother moves in mysterious ways,” Thomas said. “Much like the Lord, and trust me, the comparison is not one that would displease him.”

The queen let out a sound much like a snort of laughter and clapped her hand to her mouth.

Mary was not so easily amused. She said, “It does not auger well, if those who have the keeping of the kingdom cannot be bothered with the common courtesies.”

“I could not agree more,” Thomas said, inclining his head.

“Why, you have been treated shabbily yourself,” said the queen. “We were just saying.”

“Well, I am to be a baron.” He glanced at me with more interest than was his wont. “By the way, my lady, I understand congratulations are in order.”

“My lord?”

“You mean your husband hasn’t told you?”

“I have been attending the queen over the past few days, and have not seen or heard from him.”

“Oh, yes. Well, it’s known by all and sundry now—except here, I suppose. There was a clause in King Henry’s will stating that gifts which had been promised but not perfected were to be fulfilled. Well, lo and behold! Lord Paget came before the council, and what do you think he announced? He announced that the king would have doled out new titles and lands if he had lived a little longer to amend his will. I myself am to be Baron Seymour of Sudeley—so I can hardly complain, I suppose. Your Grace’s brother is to be Marquis of Northampton.”

The queen blinked. “Why, he has told me nothing!”

“It has only just come out. And as for you, Lady Lisle, your husband is to be an earl.”

“An earl?”

“Old title, dating back to Anglo-Saxon times,” Seymour said cheerfully.

“I believe Lady Lisle knows the origin of the title,” said the lady Mary, who had a certain literal cast of mind.

I said nothing but gripped the sides of my chair.

The queen asked, “That is well deserved on Viscount Lisle’s part, I daresay. But what, pray tell, is the Earl of Hertford gaining out of this?”

“Merely a dukedom. Of Somerset, to be precise.”

“Your brother to be a duke, and you to be a mere lord,” mused the queen. “Something is wrong there.” She turned to me. “But I will not keep you here. You have matters to discuss with your husband. You may go home—Countess.”

***

It was a bitterly cold day, but I barely noticed the wind biting into my cheeks as I made my way to the house we’d rented in London. It was a large place, but it seemed much smaller, for John liked having the children residing with us in town instead of staying on our estates in the country. All seven of them were waiting for me as I entered. “Father is to be an earl!”

“An earl, Mother! You are to be a countess!”

“That means Jack is to be Lord Lisle. Doesn’t it?”

“Do we get new clothes?”

“Will there be a ceremony?”

“What is an earl?”

My husband pushed past the mob surrounding me and embraced me.

“When were you going to tell me?” I asked after we had hugged for a long time.

“Tonight, as a matter of fact. I was going to send for you and break the news to you over a private supper.” He glanced at our brood, whose ages ranged from four to twenty. “Quietly.”

***

“You have well and truly deserved this earldom.”

John smiled. “Do you know where I went today after the news was announced? Candlewick Street, my father’s house. I remember the day he was arrested, just after the seventh King Henry died. I was five years of age, full of excitement about the new king being crowned, and my father had said he would find a good place for me to see the coronation procession—he was sure the king would oblige, as he’d been in such good favor with Henry VII. Instead, I woke one morning to hear my mother crying, our servants shouting—absolute chaos. The king and his council had ordered their men to surround the house just before the break of day. They seized my father like a common criminal. My nurse tried to keep me from seeing them rough handle him out of the house and into the street, but I was too quick for her. Then a few days later, the rest of us had to leave. I loved that house. They had to drag me out kicking and screaming.”

“John, in all the years we’ve known each other, you’ve never talked of this.”

He shrugged. “You know I’ve never cared to speak of those days. Father was guilty of nothing more than collecting money too well for Henry VII, but he’d made enough men angry doing that, and the new king couldn’t resist such a sop to the people. So my father had to lose his head, after he had spent more than a year sitting in the Tower, hoping the king would change his mind. I never saw him again after they took him out of Candlewick Street that day, and I never saw his house again until this morning. It’s strange. They say the places you’ve been in childhood look smaller when you see them as an adult, but this place didn’t. It was just as I remembered it. I found myself missing it again, just like I had when I first had to leave.”

“Maybe you could buy it or lease it. We surely could afford it.”

“No,” John said dryly. “Too small for us now. Besides, some other young boy might be attached to it. I wouldn’t want to be the one who took him away from it, even in exchange for a handsome sum.”

He fell silent. I indeed had never heard him speak of his father before, save in passing. Instead, John, after his first evening at Halden, had thrown himself into country life: learning to ride and to hawk and hunt, going for long outings with my older brother and returning muddy and cheerful. After my brother died, John had become practically a son to my father. At age thirteen, he had gone with my father to court, where he had made a good impression and fit in easily with the other youths his age; it was I, when I came to court, who had felt awkward and shy.

John continued. “You once asked me if I hated King Henry for executing my father. Yes, until I saw him for the first time. Then I couldn’t. He was kind to me, interested, pleasant. I didn’t feel like a lowly page in his company. Sometimes I wondered if he remembered who I was, the eldest son of the first man he had executed. But he never forgot things like that. I’ve wondered if all of the honors he gave me over the years, all the trust he placed in me, weren’t his way of apologizing for putting my father to death. But it’s not the sort of question one can ask a king.” He squeezed my hand. “Do you know what else is amusing? I never did see King Henry’s coronation, of course, following my father’s arrest as closely as it did. So when King Henry died, the first thing that popped into my head was that this time, I would get to see the new king’s coronation. It shall be my first.”

It is dangerous to speak of my daughter Jane today, at least here in England. Men can die, and have died, for holding the beliefs she held. Nonetheless, people sometimes turn up at my house to tell me of their admiration for my daughter. Some ask me for a memento of Jane. I hand them the few things I can—a hair fastening, an old pen—while hoarding a few such mementoes myself. As I do, I sometimes ask myself, are these things really much different from the relics of the saints these people scorn? Are they not pilgrims of another sort?

Whatever I give them, however, my visitors leave disappointed. The mother of an extraordinary daughter, they think, must surely be extraordinary herself. How wrong they are! For wherever my daughter got her great gifts, I know it was certainly not from me. As a young woman, I could embroider beautifully, carry a tune respectably, play a pretty melody upon my virginals—but I could barely speak French, much less the ancient languages. Indeed, my French was atrocious, which was a matter of some embarrassment for me, because my mother, Mary, had been that country’s queen.

How my sister, Eleanor, and I loved hearing my mother tell about her days in the French court! Her brother, King Henry VIII, had married her at age eighteen to Louis XII, a man in his fifties. Not a robust man, and nearly three times her age, Louis had nonetheless done his best to make the wedding celebrations as lively and festive as possible for his vivacious new queen. There had been tournaments, dancing, and feasting, and while it all delighted my young mother, it had proven the undoing of poor Louis, who, after just a few months of all of this, dropped dead from sheer exhaustion, leaving his son-in-law Francis as the king and my mother fair game to be married off to some French nobleman or the other. But having married one aging man for policy, Mother was not inclined to do so again.

Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, an Englishman, was a fine jouster and a handsome man and the king’s closest friend; he was also, it was noted, an upstart duke who had not a jolt of noble blood in him. But he had caught my mother’s eye long before she married the King of France, and when King Henry sent Suffolk to England to check on his newly widowed sister, my mother wasted no time in renewing her acquaintance with the duke. My mother had the rare ability to look pretty while she cried, and when she turned her tears upon Charles Brandon, they were so effective that in just days, the pair were secretly married, to the scandal of the French court and the fury of King Henry. But in those days, the king did not bear a grudge for long, and soon all was right once again between the king and my parents.

My nurse loved to tell my younger sister and me about this runaway match, so naturally, I would dream of making a romantic marriage like that of my mother and father. But what my parents had practiced in their own case was very much different from what they practiced in mine. At age thirteen, I was dangled before the Duke of Norfolk, who to their great chagrin (and mine, for I could not help hearing about it) thought my dowry too meager for his son. Then my father turned to the young Marquis of Dorset. There was an impediment in that the marquis was already contracted to the Earl of Arundel’s daughter, but this obstacle was quickly surmounted for the benefit of the king’s close friend, my father. So a couple of months before my sixteenth birthday, I was married to Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset, who was just a few months my senior.

I had heard that my new husband was careless with his money and fond of gaming, which I had expected, and that he had a strong interest in the New Learning, which I had not. The first I could cope with readily, as my father was such a man; the second I found more daunting. My husband had been educated in the household of the late king’s natural son, the Duke of Richmond, and there had learned Latin and Greek. Though in many ways we were compatible, he scoffed at the handful of English books, prettily illustrated and teeming with romance and chivalry, which I brought to our marriage. To them, he would not even grant space in his study.

But my Jane—my poor, dear Jane—surpassed him. By the time she was four, she was well beyond the instruction I could give, and my husband was obliged to get a master just for her. Her special gifts, I think, were what reconciled him to God calling our little son to Him. For our younger daughters, though they were loved by my husband, are pretty, ordinary creatures.

Much, as those pilgrims who came to Sheen years later would discover, like me.

February
1547

By the time Jane was almost ten, our household had divided into two unacknowledged but distinct sets: my husband and Jane, and me and my two younger daughters, Katherine and little Mary. That was how it was in the days after God called my uncle, Henry VIII, out of the world.

There was but one aspect of Jane’s studies upon which I was qualified to instruct her—sewing. Every day at the appointed time, Jane would take out her hated workbasket and join me and her younger sister Kate in my chambers, where she alternated between pricking her finger and casting baleful looks at Kate, who, despite being more than three years younger than Jane, already exceeded her as a needlewoman. Even my Mary, who at a year and a half was too young to do more than empty my workbasket of the bright cloth it contained and then fill it again, showed more promise, I thought.

As Jane sat beside me, frowning as she sewed a shirt that would surely have to go to the poor, as it was by no means worked well enough to grace my husband, the door to the chamber opened slowly. In walked my husband, Harry, clad in black and pulling a long face. At a funereal pace, he plodded from one end of our solar to the other, then turned to Jane and Kate, sitting side by side on the window seat. “Well, chickens, do you think I’ll pass muster as chief mourner?”

“Oh, yes!” Jane clapped her hands together, letting her work fall to the ground. Kate dutifully applauded in turn. “You’ll be splendid, Father.”

“I am relieved to hear that.” He nodded toward me. “Now, take yourselves off, chickens. I have something I must discuss with your mother.”

“Really, Harry,” I said as the girls dropped a curtsey and left, “I wish you would treat my uncle’s death with more solemnity.”

“I am merely practicing for my role. As it’s the only role of substance I’ve been given in living memory, I must perform it well, don’t you agree?”

“More will come, Harry, with this new reign.”

“Well, we shall see. In any case, that brings me to what we need to speak about.”

Inwardly, I groaned, expecting yet another diatribe about ceasing to hear Mass. In the past few months, Harry had become almost as bad as my friend and stepmother, Katherine Brandon, who could not so much as look at an innocuous loaf of bread without holding forth on the sheer stupidity of the doctrine of transubstantiation. The Mass was still heard in our household, but I knew its days were numbered. “What is it, Harry?”

“King Henry’s will. Quite interesting. He lays out the order of succession, as Parliament allowed him to do by testament a couple of years back. There aren’t any surprises in the first part. If King Edward dies without heirs, the crown should go to the lady Mary, and then to the lady Elizabeth.”

“And then to Queen Margaret’s line?” Margaret, King Henry’s older sister, had married King James IV of Scotland. Her little granddaughter, Mary, was now that country’s queen.

“No. That’s where it concerns us. He knocked that line out altogether. Didn’t want a little Scottish lass on the throne, I suppose.”

I did a quick calculation. “So that means
I
am next in the succession?”

“No, it means Jane is. King Henry passed you over, but he willed that if the lady Elizabeth died without heirs, the crown will pass to your heirs.” Harry forestalled my next question. “I don’t know why he chose to skip over you, but my guess is that he preferred not to have a woman on the throne, and was hoping you’d have a son by the time that contingency came to pass. But for now, that leaves our Jane as third in line to the throne.”

“Such a thing might never come to pass. It is bound never to come to pass. King Edward will certainly marry and have children, as will the lady Elizabeth. The lady Mary—well…”

“She’s missed her chance,” Harry said bluntly. “She might yet get a husband, but a child at her age?”

“It hardly matters, with a healthy young brother and a healthy young sister.” I resumed my sewing. “Jane’s chances are as remote as mine ever were. And I am glad of it. A woman should not rule.”

“Spoken like a good niece of King Henry,” Harry said. “But I am surprised to hear you hold your own sex in such low regard. And Jane is a brilliant girl. Perhaps most women could not rule, but she could be an exception.”

“I pray it never comes to that.”

“But with Mary a Catholic, and both she and the lady Elizabeth still officially bastards…”

“Harry! Men have died for saying such foolish thoughts aloud.” I looked around to make sure we were alone.

Harry stared out the window. “Well, it’s very remote, as you say,” he said briskly, with the appearance of pulling himself back to earth. “But I do know this: a girl with as good a claim to the throne as our Jane should be able to make a very good marriage. A very good one.”

“That idea, I like,” I confessed.

“I thought you would. Now, let me tell you what else I have heard. The Earl of Hertford—or the Duke of Somerset as we must begin to learn to call him—is giving consideration to ceasing to hear the Mass. Don’t you think it’s time we thought more seriously about doing the same ourselves, my dear?”

***

The old king had been buried; the new king had been crowned. A few days after the latter event, Harry came to me again. “Tom Seymour’s man has been to see me.”

“Since when did Tom Seymour become too important to come himself?”

“Since he asked for our Jane to come live with him. He wants to broker a good match for her.”

“What match could he broker that you could not broker yourself?”

“One to the new king.”

I stared at my husband. “He is offering to make Jane Edward’s queen?”

“That’s the sum of it, my dear. Think of it. They’re the same age, they’re well educated, and they’re Protestant. And then there’s the matter of the succession. What better bride for King Edward than the girl who’s third in line to the throne?”

“What does the Duke of Somerset have to say about it?”

“Oh, nothing, because Tom hasn’t mentioned it to him. No doubt he’d disapprove if Tom did, just by dint of the fact of Tom being the one to mention it.”

“Tom Seymour is unmarried. Is he suitable to care for a young girl?”

“Why not? We’d be sending her suitably attended. But why not express your concerns to him yourself? He has asked us to meet him at his place.”

***

Seymour Place, as Tom Seymour had renamed Hampton Place when it was granted to him several years before, was just a short ride down the Thames from our own house, Dorset House. The smile Tom bestowed upon me far exceeded the one he gave to my husband. “Doubly blessed! My friend Harry and his lovely lady. I suppose your lord has told you why we are here, my lady?”

I nodded. “Yes. You wish to marry my daughter to the king.”

“Can you think of a worthier bride, my lady, than your fair daughter?”

“No, but there will surely be others pushing a foreign bride upon the king.”

“The king will remember that his own mother was an English bride, as were his grandmother Elizabeth of York and his great-grandmother Elizabeth Woodville.” Tom Seymour turned another smile upon me. “And believe me, I shall be active in reminding him. Mind you, I don’t plan to push your daughter upon him, as he’s so young; I want to ease them into marriage slowly. Give the young people a chance to get better acquainted, for the king to see your daughter’s fine points, so he naturally thinks of her as his first choice. That shouldn’t be hard. After all, she’s a brilliant girl, and a pretty one, too. She takes after her mother in that respect.”

I took the wine cup that was offered to me, embarrassed to find myself actually blushing at this compliment. Though I had never matched my own mother in beauty, and was approaching my thirtieth year, I knew myself to still be comely, with reddish-gold hair and a slender figure, and it was pleasant to be reminded of it occasionally by a man not my husband. But Tom Seymour, I reminded myself, was no doubt profligate in paying his compliments, as he was rumored to be in other matters, as well.

“And, of course, she is third in line to the throne,” said Harry. “And indisputably legitimate, not to mention having received a godly upbringing. That can only increase her appeal to the king. He has decided views as to religion, I understand.”

“Indeed he has,” said Tom Seymour rather gloomily.

“What of the Protector?” I asked.

“What of him?” Seymour’s good-natured face darkened, and I realized I had made a conversational misstep. “He can’t rule the king, as much as he’d like to. Or England.” His face cleared, and he said more lightly, “He might be the king’s protector, but I’m the king’s favorite uncle. Always have been. That counts for a great deal, whatever Ned might say.”

“Ned?” I asked. “You are still speaking of the Protector?”

“Yes. It’s what they called him at home when he was a boy.” He anticipated my next question. “No one calls him that now but me.”

“I am surprised he tolerates it.”

“Oh, he hates it,” Seymour said breezily. “So what of it, my lady? Will I have the privilege of welcoming your daughter into my house?”

***

“I think it’s a fine idea,” Harry reiterated as we rode back to Dorset House.

I pulled my cloak closer around me. “I know. You all but agreed to it.”

“So what’s the harm? Our Jane’s of the right age to go to another household, after all. The worst that can happen is that the king marries someone else. Even if Seymour can’t bring it off, it’s bound to lead to a good match.”

“Harry, have you considered that Tom Seymour might mean to marry her himself?”

“You would think that, with your father’s history,” Harry said, grinning at me. Just three months after the death of my mother, my father, nearly fifty, had shocked his family by marrying fourteen-year-old Katherine Willoughby, whose wardship he had acquired. Katherine, to whom I’d become close after she had joined our household, had been intended for my brother. Father, on due consideration, had decided that matching himself with the young heiress was too advantageous to be passed up, especially as my brother had long been ailing (and indeed died not long afterward). If he had thought to have the upper hand in the marriage, he was sorely mistaken. Katherine, as Duchess of Suffolk, had used her status to fill the house with clergymen who shared her reformist religious views. Poor Father had eventually found himself surrounded by them. “But in this case, you’d be wrong.” Harry lowered his voice. “I have it on good authority that Tom plans to marry, but it’s not to our daughter.”