The Queen's Governess (28 page)

“Now you listen to your friend Kat Ashley. When my lord and

I walked out of the Tower, we held our heads high. We had been scared and shamed, but we held our heads high. If you must dress severely, do so, but no hiding or moping, or people will think their English Elizabeth is guilty and grieving what could have been.”

“Between Tom Seymour and me?”

“No, good riddance to him! They will think you are mourning what could have been for the future of their Princess Elizabeth!”

Though much changed, as if she had grown wiser and older during these cruel winter and spring months, Elizabeth Tudor emerged from her self-imposed prison to almost be her old—or should I say young?—self. She put her mother’s ring back on a cord around her waist and managed to eat enough that she had hips to hold the cord up again. She accepted dosings from the physician John brought—especially a mint and borage elixir which helped to lift her melancholia and let her sleep. Despite the scoldings of the watchdog Tyrwhitts, she kept all her old servants close and relied on Cecil, too, for advice when he visited with the excuse of showing her the rural rent rolls she did not really need to see. But if 1549 was a better year than the last for Elizabeth of England, for England itself it was a terrible time.

 

 

 

Edward Seymour,
the Lord Protector Somerset as we all called him now, turned out to be a disaster as a ruler. When protests arose against the new Book of Common Prayer, and pockets of Catholics—including in my home shire of Devon—rebelled, he ordered the rebellions brutally put down. Farmlands long leased by the lower classes were being enclosed to raise sheep, for the sale of wool lined the pockets of rich landowners, and vagrants by the hundreds streamed into the cities looking for food. The exchequer was empty, and Protector Somerset proved to be a claybrain about foreign affairs. For one thing, his miscalculations lost the future Scottish queen, Mary Stuart, to the Dauphin of France instead of her being betrothed to King Edward.

Though Somerset had been known as “the good duke” by the common people, even some of them turned against him, and no wonder why. When chastised by the Council, he had fled with the king in tow, first to Hampton Court, then to Windsor Castle. He had even shouted, “I shall not fall alone. If I am destroyed, the king will be destroyed. If I die, he shall die before me.” King Edward was scared and the Council was appalled, which made the rise to power of his chief rival, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, smooth and fast. The once-popular Protector Somerset was arrested and lodged in the very Tower where he had sent his brother and John and me.

 

 

 

It was an entire year
after that, as 1550 slid into 1551, that Elizabeth received an invitation to come to court for Christmas. She had been briefly back and forth to visit her brother before, but not for such a long time and such a festive occasion.

“Oh, Kat,” she said, her eyes shining as she showed me the parchment her royal brother had signed in his own hand, “perhaps with the Earl of Warwick in control now, I can be with my family for more than brief visits!”

Though we would not leave for two days, she began to pack for herself the garments of somber blacks and grays she yet favored. She still wore her hair pulled straight back under a severe headpiece and then spilling down her back in maidenly fashion. Her long, graceful hands she so loved to adorn bore but one plain gold ring. Yet my heart thrilled to see her animated and happy. Some color had even come into her cheeks, and I knew the winter wind would burnish that hue even more.

I was thrilled too when I observed the warm, even wild reception she met with along the roads to London, then at the court when she was presented to her brother. [If I recall aright, Mary, though invited, preferred not to come for Yule that year, since she knew her brother would have insisted she attend all the Protestant services. I was disappointed, for I had hoped to thank her for her support of me to the Duchess of Somerset. Oh, yes, by the way, John Dudley, the new power behind King Edward’s throne at court, had magnanimously pardoned Somerset and had him released to increase his own popularity with the people, though Cecil said he was just setting him up for another fall. At least the Somersets were not at court.]

But I must recount some of the hopeful things I heard amid huzzahs on the road and comments at court about Elizabeth: “Is this plain girl the one they whispered was a strumpet like her mother?” “Fie on such rumors, for look how humble she is.” “Anne Boleyn’s girl is pure English, the best of the reformed religion and the heritage of the Tudors.” “I swear I never saw a purer-looking maiden! What rot about her and that blackguard Lord Admiral!”

My clever girl! It was, I reckon, the harbinger of her brilliance to later create herself in the pure, powerful image of the Virgin Queen—but there was much, much more to suffer first.

 

 

 

 

WHITEHALL PALACE

 

 

 

Like Elizabeth, I favored the darkly handsome, virile John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, over the cold, bloodless Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset. Make no mistake, Warwick was as ambitious as they come, but he seemed somehow more human. He had five fine sons with whom he seemed to get on well, including Robert, the king and Elizabeth’s old schoolmate she had so favored when they were younger, the one she still called Robin. Now that they were both seventeen, he was the one she blushed at whenever he teased her or called her Bess or even turned her way. Though I was wary of all comers after the Tom Seymour debacle, surely this was harmless. Warwick kept a fatherly eye on all his boys, and two of them—Robin included—were soon to be wed.

But most of all, both Elizabeth and I admired Warwick for the fatherly way he treated the thirteen-year-old king. He gave him duties to instruct him in the role of kingship and let him play instead of just study and work. He knew Edward loved pageantry, so sometimes Warwick staged a parade through the streets with the boy dressed in the rich fabrics and jewels he loved. No doubt, he spent more time with him than his Seymour uncles or even King Henry ever had, and Edward seemed to blossom into young manhood under his wing.

“But there is one thing that bothers me about the earl, Kat,” the princess told me when I came to her bedchamber to bid her good night on the Twelfth Day of the Christmas celebrations.

“What, my dear?” I asked, anxious to join my John down the hall for our own privy New Year’s celebration.

“I see he’s out to make my sister’s life a horror again, since she won’t relent on her strict Catholicism. I believe that there is only one Jesus Christ and all the rest is trifles. Why cannot we just come together in our Christian faith and not argue among ourselves? Each man should keep his own soul and conscience as long as he or she is loyal to the king.”

“No wonder the people see you as their figurehead for Protestantism, but if only the Catholics of our land would know they could too,” I told her, and kissed the top of her tousled head. “That would be the best of all worlds. Perhaps, someday, you can make that world come true, by helping to support and advise your brother.”

I hugged her good night, grateful to feel her form was filling out even more with all the rich holiday food we’d had here at court. Yet it made me sad too, for I knew so many were cold and hungry in English cities and towns, and I yet grieved for the brutal way Lord Russell, under Somerset’s orders, had put down the Prayer Book Rebellion in Devon. I prayed that my father and his family had not been involved or harmed. Strange, but the older I got, the longer I was away from Devon, the more I thought of him.

Elizabeth flopped back in bed with her hands over her head and sighed. “If I had one whit of power, I’d advise the king and Warwick not to marry Robin off to that country girl, Amy Robsart. They say she brings him a few lands but not much else.”

“Perhaps it is a love match,” I blurted, my thoughts on my husband again, keeping our bed warm for me.

She snatched up and threw a pillow at me. “Ah, well,” she said as she turned on her side and pulled the covers up, “I shall never wed anyway—ever. I mean it, Kat.”

“Just because you dress like a nun lately, best not start thinking like one.”

“There are no nuns in the true faith, the new faith,” she told me, her eyelids heavy. “My father and your old friend Cromwell sent them all away, and my black trappings are but play, and Robin likes me anyway, and that’s all I have to say, but I could not do without you any day,” she rhymed, “and that’s that, Kat.”

It was the most lovely Christmas greeting I had ever had. As I snuffed out several candles and tiptoed out, I prayed for good, safe times to come for England and my Elizabeth in the future. But, I warrant, considering all that came soon after, the Lord God had his own plans for all of us.

HATFIELD HOUSE

 

 

 

S
uch a blustery day,” Elizabeth said with a shudder as we gathered in the solar. “The chill is creeping inside the house and inside my bones.”

I put my palm on her forehead to see if she was feverish. No, normal as could be. “Perhaps those winds shrieking like a banshee mean a cold winter, but we’ll be safe and warm here—I pray we will,” I told her as we sat down in the usual chairs in our familiar circle.

Each late afternoon before supper, we gathered by the hearth and took turns reading aloud or discussing many things: Greek plays, English history or some new book on religion. Though I never said so but to John, our cozy little coterie lulled me into complacency. I oft pretended he and I were the parents, and Elizabeth—now just turned eighteen by one month—our daughter. Tom Parry seemed like an uncle, and Blanche Parry, her Welsh nurse from years ago, was like a maiden aunt, though Tom and Blanche were only distantly related. Her tutor, Roger Ascham, seemed a sort of older brother who knew everything. And Cecil, now secretary of state, who owed his allegiance no longer to the once-again imprisoned Somerset but directly to the king and his adviser Warwick, was like a visiting cousin from time to time.

Unfortunately, the Tyrwhitts had not yet been recalled by the Privy Council. The two of them hovered, but we oft took no heed of them. We were doing naught amiss, at least openly. If Warwick kept them or others as spies—for I was certain they had been such for Somerset before he fell from power—I cared not. I finally felt safe and happy, despite the fact John sometimes sent and received Her Grace’s secret messages to and from Cecil. Yet he sometimes came in person, supposedly just passing by while coming from or going to his ancestral home in Stamford, Northamptonshire, which he was then rebuilding.

On that windy day, I proudly listened to my girl espouse her ideas about why followers of the Lord Jesus should pray directly to Him and not to a panoply—yes, that was the very erudite word she used—a panoply of so-called saints and the Virgin Mary.

“Still, I can see why her image is venerated,” she admitted. “All those idealized statues and paintings of her are powerful tools to sway people.”

At eighteen, Elizabeth Tudor was a striking young woman, but still somewhat severe-looking, which was her choice. Even indoors at Hatfield, she dressed plainly and kept her bright red hair covered by modest caps. Her eyebrows and lashes were so pale that her penetrating Boleyn black-gray eyes dominated her face, along with her high-bridged nose she had inherited from her father. The child had finally become an adult; her body was catching up with her precocious mind.

It was, I recall, that very afternoon of October 18, 1551, that Cecil rode in with several men and changed my reverie of coming warm winter afternoons before our hearth to cold reality again.

“I shall go outside to greet him!” Elizabeth declared when a servant announced Cecil’s arrival.

I rose also; unfortunately, Lady Tyrwhitt jumped to her feet too. “But,” she protested, “you just said, Your Grace, that you are chilled and glad to be inside. Let the chief secretary come in before us all with his news, for, heaven knows, we hear little of London here.”

“Shall I again write the Earl of Warwick that you yearn to be sent back there, then?” she parried as she wrapped her shawl tighter about her shoulders and nodded to me to follow her. John closed the book of maps he’d been perusing and came too. Lately he’d been much enamored with the idea of visiting Italy someday. But Her Grace could not spare him and I certainly could not. She had made him her privy secretary—more privy than the Tyrwhitts knew. If they managed to read what formal correspondence passed between the princess and her royal brother or Cecil, they did not know that John sent messages to Cecil, and received others, secreted within saddles custom-made for particular horses. John oft acted as a guard for Her Grace’s royal person, too, though we usually managed to make it look as if he were just with me and I were with her.