The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (21 page)

The couple were blessed with sons and daughters surviving to adulthood. The sons, who were around the same age as Elizabeth, were still at home when the princess arrived. They were, like their parents, ardent Protestants. The eldest three – Henry, Anthony and Charles – were all clever boys, interested in learning; their parents were preparing them for university education and, in due course, the law.
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As far as Catherine was concerned, the Dennys would make excellent guardians. She immediately sent them a message, asking them to invite Elizabeth into their home. Catherine then summoned her stepdaughter to her, as the girl’s servants packed up her things. The queen – who had known Elizabeth for only five years but loved her like her own child – had decided to be kind. She was unwell, but left her sickbed for a private interview with her stepdaughter, who was ‘replete with sorrow to depart’.
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Elizabeth, red-eyed and tearful, stood in near silence. Catherine, who remembered Anne Boleyn as much as anyone did, had much to say. She was fearful for the girl’s reputation and promised to warn her of ‘all evils’ that she might hear of Elizabeth, something that she rather feared would arise. The princess, at least, took this as a sign of Catherine’s good opinion. At the end of their meeting, as the pair prepared to part, Catherine offered friendship to her. In spite of her hurt and anger, the heavily pregnant queen was determined that they would not part on bad terms. She informed the girl that she believed her when she promised that she and Thomas had gone no further than an embrace. This was a relief to the girl, who was already uncomfortably aware of rumours both within the household and without, in which ‘all men judge the contrary’.
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They might judge and whisper, but it was Catherine’s support that Elizabeth desired. The princess’s clothes and personal items were now carefully stored in wooden coffers before being loaded onto wagons. She left hurriedly, probably on 12 June 1548.

The reason for Elizabeth’s departure was kept deliberately vague; indeed, her own servants were uncertain of the cause. Thomas Parry, who dealt with the expenses of the move, could not remember whether his mistress ‘went of herself, or was sent away’.
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Setting her own feelings to one side, the queen allowed her husband to escort the girl at least part of the way towards Cheshunt.
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It was better for everyone if no hint were given that the princess went in disgrace. Even so, Kate Ashley – chastened – kept a close watch on Seymour, speaking with him on the road, although the older woman always refused to divulge what was said.
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She did not, though, break with the Lord Admiral. She still held considerable admiration for him and desired his friendship. She was certainly prepared to risk much for Thomas Seymour.

The journey to Cheshunt from Hanworth was a long one, taking most of the day on horseback. Coming from the west, Elizabeth passed the common, which, with its leafy fruit trees, made up much of the large parish.
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Three church spires rose up over the little town. It was a pleasant green settlement, its streets lined with small houses attached to market gardens. Elizabeth rode past the old manor house at Cheshunt, which, as with Hanworth, was circled by a picturesque moat. Sir Anthony Denny’s father had obtained control of a manor in the parish when he was just a boy. Sir Anthony himself had once been a landless younger son. But, ten years ago he had acquired the keepership of Cheshunt Park, allowing him to control hunting in the area. It must have felt like a homecoming. He secured the grant of Cheshunt nunnery following its dissolution under Henry VIII, allowing him to move his family into the building, which quickly took on a higgledy-piggledy character as rooms were fitted out for habitation.
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The family worshipped in the church at Cheshunt, a chilly stone space where Sir Anthony’s brother, two decades before, had asked to be buried under ‘a picture of death’, reciting the sobering legend ‘as I am so shall ye be’.
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It was in the courtyard of the old nunnery that Elizabeth finally dismounted, as servants hurried to take the reins of her horse and show her to her room. The house was welcoming. Kate was relieved to be away from Catherine’s hostility and in the company of her sister. Roger Ascham was also not displeased to move to Cheshunt, since he knew Sir Anthony Denny and had earlier sought his patronage.
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As the men conversed after dinner, there were opportunities for him to secure influence and, perhaps, a pension. The relocation also brought Ascham closer to his beloved Cambridge – though he would struggle to obtain permission from Elizabeth for a trip to the university, since (as he lamented) ‘she never lets me go away anywhere’.
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As whispers spread about the coquettish daughter of Anne Boleyn, Princess Elizabeth wanted her friends around her.

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Today’s Somerset House dates from the late eighteenth century. It was built on the site of the Protector’s palace, which was demolished.

*2
It is possible that the embrace witnessed by Catherine occurred earlier than the afternoon of 11 June, with Elizabeth’s departure for Cheshunt already planned before Catherine’s letter of 9 June was written. On the balance of probabilities, though, the sequence set out here seems more likely, particularly given Catherine’s friendly tone in the letter.

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In her later confession, Kate attributed Elizabeth’s departure to the week after Whitsun (the last week of May 1548), but Elizabeth’s inscription on Catherine’s letter to Thomas – dated 9 June (or at the latest, 10 June) – throws this into doubt as it indicates her presence in the household. Since Thomas only returned to Hanworth on the morning of 11 June and left for Sudeley on 13 June, then 12 June is really the only plausible date on which Elizabeth could have left her stepmother. Seymour is known to have accompanied her at least part of the way towards Cheshunt.

At Cheshunt, Kate Ashley was able to spend enjoyable hours with her sister and her family, but she was also anxious. She already knew that Elizabeth was ‘evil spoken of’, but hoped that with time and with her separation from Seymour this would come to an end. It did not. The rumours, once established, grew – almost with a life of their own.

To compound Elizabeth’s problems, her health took a downward turn. She had suffered from teething problems as an infant but had otherwise been remarkably healthy.
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This all changed in 1548 after she left Catherine’s household. At Cheshunt, she almost immediately took to her bed with the first of a series of illnesses that would affect her teenage years. She was unwell throughout the summer of 1548 and into the autumn. Her symptoms, which included migraines, headaches, digestive problems, jaundice and irregular menstrual cycles, have been identified as being stress-induced. Might there have been more to them?
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Many of her symptoms could also be attributed to pregnancy.

More than fifty years later, an old lady – almost Elizabeth’s exact contemporary – sat down with her servant to tell her story. Jane Dormer, the great and noble Duchess of Feria, had spent decades in her adopted homeland of Spain, but she did not forget the red-haired princess she had once known at court. The aged noblewoman, who hailed from Wing in Buckinghamshire, was familiar with the Seymour family too. Indeed, her father had very nearly married Jane Seymour before Henry VIII claimed her. Jane Dormer was ardently Catholic, which might be why her dislike of Elizabeth began to colour her recollections. She related her tale to her servant Henry Clifford, who diligently recorded it for the benefit of her English family.

Jane Dormer considered herself well acquainted with the relationship between the princess and the Lord Admiral. Thinking back over the decades, she recalled that there was a rumour, spread around, ‘of a child born and miserably destroyed, but could not be discovered whose it was’. She did not know the details of this murdered baby, only that there was ‘the report of the midwife, who was brought from her house blindfold thither, and so returned, saw nothing in the house while she was there, but candle light; only she said, it was the child of a very fair young lady’.

The midwife did not know whom she attended, and neither did the authorities when they investigated the matter. But, as Jane recalled, ‘there was a muttering of the Admiral and this lady, who was then between fifteen and sixteen years of age’. She could not say that Elizabeth was certainly the child’s mother, but ‘if it were so, it was the judgment of God upon the Admiral; and upon her, to make her ever after incapable of children’.
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To add to the authenticity of her source, Jane Dormer believed that ‘the cuckold’, as she called Somerset thanks to the disaster of his first marriage, ‘then made no great reckoning of the Lady Elizabeth’, actively showing his disapproval at court.
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Jane Dormer’s account, given before 1612 (when she died), is the earliest telling of a story that has passed into legend and has been considerably embellished over the years. In May 1616, a very similar story emerged in Flanders, where it was related by Ambassador Sir Dudley Carleston to his friend John Chamberlain, in England.
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In this version, two men came in visors to a midwife’s house and carried her away. She was led to a masked woman in labour in a great house. When the child was born, it was cast into the fire. On seeing this, the mother cried out at the cruelty, declaring that this was the fifth time that this had been done. The story carried an anti-Catholic message in its references to the ‘barbarous’ men and the unfortunate woman – ‘I expect before long to hear your Catholic gentlewomen put into the number of saints’. No mention was made of Elizabeth, and indeed the setting was entirely changed; but the essence of the story was the same.

The tale, in its most famous form, was related by the antiquary John Aubrey in the mid-seventeenth century, a hundred years after the events it was supposed to describe. Aubrey believed that one Sir William Darrell of Littlecote Manor, in Wiltshire, had impregnated his wife’s waiting woman, causing an understandable scandal in the household.
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Rather than turning the girl out of doors, Darrell ensured that she was cared for in his manor. When the time came for her confinement, a servant was sent with a horse to fetch a midwife and bring her blindfolded to the house. The child was delivered and brought to Darrell, who immediately murdered it and threw the body into the fire.

The midwife was then given a large reward and sent home again, with a heavy heart. She continued to reflect on what had happened for some time, considering how far they could have ridden and the fact that the room in which she was shown had a ceiling 12 feet high. She then went to a magistrate and a search was made, with suspicion immediately falling on Darrell. He was tried, but he bribed the judge – Sir John Popham (‘a huge, heavy, ugly man’) – with a gift of his house and lands. Aubrey’s purpose in writing was an attack on Popham, who was Lord Chief Justice in 1592–1607, and whom he considered to have ‘lived like a hog’ in spite of his vast wealth. But both Popham and the Lord of Littlecote were long dead by the time that Aubrey wrote – so why did he feel impelled to record the story as he did?

The story cropped up yet again at the end of the eighteenth century, when it was set ‘in a county verging on London’ and dated to the past hundred years.
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According to the writer, it concerned a ‘family of great opulence’, although now banished from the neighbourhood and ‘in a continual state of decay’. As this version ran, a young lawyer, at the beginning of his career, was called at short notice to hear a case ‘of the highest importance to the reputation, the happiness, not to say, the existence, of the ancient family alluded to’. Worse was to come when he learned the circumstance of the crime. It was murder, the accused being ‘no other than the daughter of an ancient baronet, one of the most beautiful young women of that day’ and her two relatives.

The facts were almost identical to earlier versions of the story. A midwife had just returned home, tired from a birth. When strangers arrived to attempt to engage her, she tried to send her assistant, but they had come specifically for her. In the face of her refusals, they bundled her onto a horse, with a handkerchief over her eyes, while informing her that ‘a lady of the first quality in that part of the country waited her help’. With the blindfolded midwife clutching the waist of her abductor, they travelled ‘at a smart trot’. She was terrified, but could sense that, during their journey of an hour and a half, they rode through fields, away from the main road. In ever-increasing alarm, she heard the horses’ hooves clatter into a courtyard, where she dismounted. She was then conducted to a chamber containing a lady in labour, where she was forced to perform her office still blindfolded. The midwife was sure that the mother was ‘a very young lady’, but could discover no other details. Unseeing, she delivered a boy and passed it to a female attendant. Only then was she permitted to rest, although she was soon disturbed by ‘a very uncommon and burning smell’. After her return home, she came to realize that the terrible stench had been the body of the poor murdered infant.