The Men Who Would Be King (6 page)

Parry and Ashley could not match their young mistress's skillful elusiveness. In the Tower, Parry broke down first; he told of the long confiding talk he had had with Kat Ashley, on Twelfth Night, during which the governess had foolishly let him know a good deal too much about the “familiarity” between the admiral and Elizabeth. He recalled,

But after that she had told me the tale of finding Her Grace in his arms, she seemed to repent that she had gone so far with me as she did, and prayed me in every wise that I would not disclose these matters. And I said I would not. And again she prayed me not to open it, as ever she might do for me; for Her Grace should be dishonoured for ever, and I likewise undone. And I said I would not; and I said, I had rather be pulled with horses than I would.

Kat Ashley steadfastly confessed nothing until she was brought face-to-face with Parry, and then, when he reaffirmed his statements in her presence, she proved it all by bursting out that he was a “false wretch,” and crying that he had promised that “he never would confess it to death.” After that she could make no more denials, but revealed what she knew of the admiral's intimate romping with her charge, of rumors, of tidbits of information, of the admiral's hopes of marriage with Elizabeth.

Triumphant, Tyrwhitt produced the statements for the girl to see, yet even in that daunting moment her courage and presence of mind did not waver. “She was much abashed and half-breathless,” he reported, but she bought a few vital seconds in which to collect her thoughts by pretending to scrutinize the signatures for forgery—though, as Tyrwhitt commented cynically, “She knew both Mistress Ashley's handwriting and the Cofferer's with half a glance.” She must have been scared and embarrassed to see set down as cold-blooded evidence the details of the admiral's behavior, his bare-legged visits to her chamber, the smacking and teasing and furtive flirting that had ended in her having to leave Catherine's happy household, but still she did not drop her guard; when she had read the confessions, and Tyrwhitt had told her of Parry's betrayal, her only comment was the simple, unassailable truth: “That it was a great matter for him to promise such a promise, and to break it.”

Tyrwhitt found himself baffled. “In no way she will confess that either Mistress Ashley or Parry willed her to any practice with my Lord Admiral, either by message or writing,” he complained. Her willfulness was not to be tolerated; the council decreed that she must have a new governess in place of Kat Ashley, and they appointed Tyrwhitt's wife to the task. Elizabeth was furious, snubbed Lady Tyrwhitt, cried all night, and sulked all the next day. She was determined to have Kat back—“The love she yet beareth her is to be wondered at,” Tyrwhitt remarked. The strain had begun to tell; Tyrwhitt went on,

She beginneth now a little to droop, by reason she heareth that my Lord Admiral's households be dispersed. And my wife tells me now that she cannot hear him discommended but she is ready to make answer therein; and so she has not been accustomed to do, unless Mistress Ashley were touched, whereunto she was very ready to make answer vehemently.

Her loyalty and resistance were of no use to Thomas Seymour; on February 23 he was charged with high treason. Among the thirty-three articles produced was the following accusation:

It is objected and laid to your charge that you have, not only before you married the Queen, attempted and gone about to marry the King's sister, the Lady Elizabeth, second inheritor in remainder to the Crown, but also being then prevented by the Lord Protector and others of the Council, since that time both in the life of the Queen continued your old labour and love, and after her death by secret and crafty means practised to achieve your said purpose of marrying the said Lady Elizabeth; to the danger of the King's Majesty's person and peril of the state of the realm.

He was condemned to death. The protector, “for natural pity's sake,” was not present when the Bill of Attainder was put through Parliament, but he headed the council meeting of March 17, when the date of his brother's execution was to be decided upon. The eleven-year-old king, for whom Thomas had been an endless source of play and presents, gave willing consent to the beheading of “the Lord Admiral mine Uncle,” and so on Wednesday, March 20, “betwixt the hours of nine and twelve in the morning,” Elizabeth's first love and first suitor was led out of prison to die on Tower Hill.

Londoners were familiar with the scaffold scene—the dull, crunching thump; the head bouncing down, comic and disgusting, from the raw neck; blood drenching the crisp straw and darkening into pools as the crowds, their interest fading, began to move away. “He died very dangerously, irksomely, horribly,” thundered Latimer from the palace pulpit. “I have a little neck,” Elizabeth's mother had giggled, putting her elegant fingers around it. “That woman had never such delight in her incontinency as she shall have torment in her death,” Henry VIII had sworn of Catherine Howard. Love and marriage, love and shame, love and death: the conclusion was inescapable.

Physically Elizabeth was intact, but emotionally she was rifled and despoiled. In addition to all the private pain she had to bear, she was faced with the threat of public ignominy; Tyrwhitt had lost no time in informing her that there were sordid rumors about her, and these she was determined to halt. “There goeth rumours abroad which be greatly both against my honour and honesty,” she wrote to the protector, “which be these: that I am in the Tower, and with child by my Lord Admiral. My Lord, these are shameful slanders.” It was masterly diplomacy, to place the damaging allegation after the obviously false and easily disproven assumption. She asked to be allowed to come to court, saying proudly that she wished to visit the king, and, incidentally, to show the world she was not pregnant. Her request was refused, and she became more anxious than ever to rout out public belief in her “lewd demeanour,” pressing the protector to send out a proclamation declaring the tales to be lies and forbidding the people to repeat them. In her alert, capable mind, Elizabeth was conscious of the possibilities which the future might hold, and, unlike her half sister Mary, she was acutely aware that public opinion was a force which might play a part in shaping that future. Prurient eyes would be peering at Anne Boleyn's daughter as she grew to womanhood; if she were to win and hold the love of the English people, Elizabeth knew she must keep her reputation spotless. That was to be her first concern as the Seymour affair faded into the past. Even at fifteen years old, beset with intense personal difficulties, she was deeply concerned with her public image, and anxious not to gain “the ill-will of the people, which thing I would be loath to have,” as she informed the protector, with pathetic dignity.

Her first personal encounter with love and courtship had ended in tragedy, like the marriages of her mother and stepmothers, and only her own quick, clear wits had saved her from disgrace. For the rest of her life Elizabeth would carry with her the memory of her first suitor; she would always be attracted to vigorous, ambitious, hardy men such as the admiral had been. But she would never dare to entrust herself wholly into any man's keeping.
Noli me tangere
would be her safeguard against the tragedies of love and marriage.

3

“The Question of the Day”

Y
outh must have some dalliance,” Henry VIII had written, early in the century, in the most joyous of his songs, but Elizabeth's shadowy youth was not a time for dalliance. In the nine years that followed her first tentative love affair, her constant concern was not to give herself but to guard herself, against threats to her status, her independence, and her life. She had learned to fear physical capture, and the disastrous political marriages that her cousin Lady Jane Grey and her sister, Mary, were to make would deepen the scars of her early impressions. She was a political prize, and as such she was courted, but those who were to pursue her in her sister's reign, on behalf of a dissolute English nobleman and a warlike foreign prince, would be setting nets to catch the wind.

Elizabeth had been profoundly shaken by Thomas Seymour's emotional and political assault. Under the strain of the affair and its aftermath her health gave way, and at the country palace of Hatfield, for weeks and months after her suitor's death, she suffered from torturing headaches, she was troubled with catarrh, and often she felt too weak even to write to her brother, the king. “Whilst I often attempted to write to Your Majesty, some ill health of body, especially headache, recalled me from the attempt,” she apologized. Protector Somerset put aside his sarcastic rebukes and treated her gently, showing that she was exonerated from blame in his brother's treason by sending doctors to her and writing what she gratefully referred to as “comfortable letters.” But the pallor, breathlessness, and fainting persisted, and as she grew older there were constant references to swellings in her face and body. The illness, which almost certainly developed into the serious kidney ailment known as nephritis, was to recur throughout her youth in times of stress.

“She was first sick about midsummer,” Kat Ashley had recalled during the investigation of the admiral's treason; perhaps it was “about midsummer” 1548, that puberty had begun for the younger daughter of Henry VIII. She had been “sick” again immediately after the death in childbed of Catherine Parr, an event that cannot have heightened her desire for marriage and motherhood, and which Kat Ashley tactlessly enlarged upon in a morbid remark which so haunted Elizabeth that she quoted it later, in the sparse confession that Tyrwhitt elicited from her: “She said she would not wish that I should have the Admiral, because she that he had before did so miscarry.” Relentlessly, the association of the sexual relationship with fear and danger seemed to meet Elizabeth at every turn.

As though to combat the stings of tears and scandal and the ache of illness, she applied herself, when well enough, to long hours of study, finding refuge in books, toiling to build herself a reputation for self-discipline and scholarship that should supplant the old rumors. It was still only twelve years since the scandal and death of Anne Boleyn, and in palace galleries and crowded alehouses the same colorful comparisons must have been drawn and the same interesting forecasts made for the daughter as for the mother. The Duchess of Somerset had been scandalized to hear that Elizabeth had gone down the Thames by night in a barge, and there were “other light parts,” equally shocking, for which she scolded Kat Ashley. An old country tale was revived, about a midwife who was mysteriously called one night to attend a very young lady with red-golden hair as she gave birth to an unwanted child. The lord protector's proclamations could not quench every spark of hot talk, but the fifteen-year-old girl who had been made the subject of such gossip was painfully determined that her own virtuous conduct should give it the lie.

Deliberately rejecting finery, Elizabeth adopted a simple, virginal style of dress, so that eminent Protestant scholars such as her own tutor Roger Ascham praised her for her admirably restrained taste in clothes as well as for her intellectual achievements. Ascham, to whom the lonely princess clung with unreasonable dependence after leaving Catherine Parr's household, wrote enthusiastically of his royal pupil, “Numberless honourable ladies of the present time surpass the daughters of Sir Thomas More in every kind of learning, but among them all my Lady Elizabeth shines like a star, excelling them more for the splendours of her virtues than for the glory of her royal birth.” As the pale, quietly dressed girl worked at Greek and Latin with her tutor in the country, the stains of the Seymour affair faded; gradually, as she intended it should, the name of the Lady Elizabeth came to be associated less with the old scandal than with the New Learning.

In this sober, studious existence she found tranquility, but it was a way of life in which the sister of the King of England could not continue indefinitely. Thomas Seymour's matrimonial maneuvers had provided bitter proof of her desirability as a wife; she was young, attractive, and second in line to the throne of England, and others would surely seek her as he had done. “He was an ambitious man; I would there were no more in England,” Latimer had thundered from the pulpit, but it was a vain hope. While the English succession lay with a delicate boy and a series of marriageable women, there would always be bold, unscrupulous men such as the admiral who would try to turn the political situation to their own advantage, and their plans would have to take into account the slender person of the Lady Elizabeth.

It was John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who came to dominate English politics in Edward's reign, succeeding where Thomas Seymour had failed. Dudley, who acquired the title of Duke of Northumberland in 1551, was as able as he was treacherous; he ousted Protector Somerset, sending him to the block in 1552, and he became, in all but name, governor of the boy king and the realm, with hopes of becoming something greater still. Those hopes depended, even more than Thomas Seymour's had, upon his gaining control, through marriage, of a female heir to the throne.