First, Elizabeth declared three days of mourning for her sister, who they said had died of a stomach tumor and quartan fever after another false pregnancy. Secondly, she dismissed several Council members she knew would yet be true only to the former queen and her causes. Thirdly, the new queen named Sir William Cecil her principal secretary and chief counselor and bid him always give her honest advice, no matter the cost. I wrote her wise words down, of which I was so proud:
“This judgment I have of you, Cecil. That you will not be corrupted with any manner of gifts, and that you will be faithful to the state; and that without respect of my private will, you will give me that counsel which you think best; and if you shall know anything necessary to be declared to me of secrecy, you shall show it to myself only; and assure yourself I will not fail to keep taciturnity therein.”
I took those words to heart for myself, that without respect of her private will, I would give her privy counsel I thought best. How was I to know that, though she had declared me her earthly mother, she might no longer heed me?
For she immediately ignored my first advice and named Robert Dudley, her Robin, Master of the Horse, a command that would keep him ever close to her. The annual salary for that post was fifteen hundred pounds annum with various benefits, unfortunately, I thought, including a suite of rooms at court. He would have servants of his own and could wear the coveted green and white Tudor livery. I heard murmurings that he was tainted by being the son of a traitor, but I had to admit he was a fine, handsome horseman, like my John.
I only hoped he would soon bring his rural wife Amy to court, because, without asking John or me to escort them, Elizabeth and Robin went riding alone in Hatfield park before we all headed for London.
Oh, well,
I tried to tell myself,
they have much in common and have both been deprived. It must, after all, remain only friendship. Surely, she has learned her lesson about married men in all she suffered—and I too—over Tom Seymour.
Meanwhile, John and I were overwhelmed by the bounty of what the new twenty-five-year-old queen showered on us that day and shortly thereafter. I was named Mistress of the Robes and First Lady of the Bedchamber. Yes, once a servant, then a gentlewoman, Katherine Champernowne Ashley from the fringe of the bleak Devon moors was now declared a lady by my dear Elizabeth’s command. I was to supervise the maids of honor, all from noble families.
I was also to oversee Her Majesty’s—it took me months to use that term for her—wardrobe, which, despite the fact she wore her plain garb for now, soon vastly expanded so that we took over a huge building in Blackfriars in London to store the pieces of her many gorgeous, many-hued garments. I soon enough devised a logical system for their storage: sleeves and bodices hung by color and cost; farthingales and petticoats by fabrics and width, collars and cloaks and shoes—a daunting task, so I soon took on many helpers, but I am jumping ahead of my story.
Before we left Hatfield for London, Elizabeth named John the Master and Treasurer of Her Majesty’s Jewels and Plate, ironically a lucrative appointment Thomas Cromwell had once held. It was a lifetime sinecure of much tradition and dignity with a salary of fifty pounds per annum and fourteen double dishes per day in the court bouche allotments—a lavish amount that allowed us to feed a retinue of servants and staff of our own. Free lodging at court included a lovely suite of apartments near the royal suite. The only thing that sat wrong with me was that we also had quarters (and John an office) in the Tower, but that was so he could visit to assess and protect gifts to the Crown as well as the royal jewels. And, of course, serving Elizabeth would entail my facing the Tower again—only under far finer circumstances than several times before. The moment we arrived in London, John began to prepare the coronation regalia, though that day was two months away.
He was also named Prime Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, while I was titled Chief Gentlewoman, so we had control of the domestic staff at whatever palace we visited with the queen. We had large stipends with those positions, too, and, better yet, lands that she had wanted to give me years ago now came into my possession: a house and acres in Dorset, properties at Abbotsbury and Milton, a manor at Osmington and the tenement of Chaldon, the rents of which would help to support us for the rest of our lives. From rags to riches, indeed, for both Elizabeth and me. I was a wealthy woman now and immediately sent two guards with a letter and pouch of coins for my father and his family in Devon.
And so, in slow procession, with both John and Robin Dudley riding behind her, the new queen’s courtiers and household journeyed to London to await her rule and to plan for Mary’s burial and Elizabeth’s coronation, both in Westminster Abbey.
Even on the rural road, people went wild as she passed. I sometimes smiled with relief and joy, sometimes cried. How the good Lord had protected and blessed us. Free from fear at last! Surely, only good times were to come to poor, ravaged England in this new age of Elizabeth.
THE TOWER OF LONDON
January 14, 1559
Two months later, again London cheered their new queen as our cavalcade rode to the Tower, by tradition the place from which Elizabeth’s coronation parade would set out toward Westminster the next day. John’s eyes met mine as we rode in through the same Tower entry we had exited after our imprisonment there, the day we had first met Cecil. I thought of that earlier time I had been there with Queen Anne, a quarter of a century ago, before her parade and crowning. I prayed Elizabeth would feel no fear, but how foolish of me. She was all smiles, waving at her people from the pure white steed Robert Dudley had selected for her to ride.
But when the doors had closed London out and we all dismounted, I saw her pause and look around at the Tower green, where the scaffold had stood, at the palace that had been refurbished for her mother’s coronation and had been both Anne’s and Elizabeth’s prison. But she went in and I hastened after her, with a quick kiss from John, while he stayed behind with Robert to see the horses were all led away and bedded down properly.
It was the fourteenth day of January, 1559. After our arrival in London two months ago, we had lodged first in huge Somerset House while Whitehall Palace was being prepared for her—Mary’s old furniture carted away, the rooms aired, the garderobes cleaned, and the many peepholes found under arrases closed up. Elizabeth had told the workers, however, to leave the secret backstairs entrances her father had built at Whitehall and Hampton Court.
Then for Christmas, we had moved into a much renovated Whitehall. She was looking forward, she’d said, to visiting her many palaces and homes. Yet John and I missed Hatfield and Enfield Chase, for their coziness and comfort. May the Lord God forgive us, but of all the bounty of lands Her Grace had showered on us, how John and I wished she had given us Enfield above all else.
When we were settled in the Tower that winter afternoon, as daylight waned, Elizabeth said to me, “I want to pray in St. Peter in Chains Church here, and I’ve sent for John and Robin to go with us.”
“Yes, Your Grace,” I said and went to fetch cloaks for both of us. She evidently intended to take no one else, so I told her ladies— Robin’s sister, Mary Sidney, had been newly appointed among them, and Elizabeth greatly favored her—that they would not be needed. They sighed with relief and went back to their chatting and roasting chestnuts, clustered by the fire, which hissed from time to time from snow spitting down the chimney.
I assessed Robert Dudley, her Robin, anew as he waited with John by the palace door to the central green of the Tower. [By the way, when we’d lodged two months earlier in the Tower for one night, Elizabeth had summoned Sir John Bedingfield, the constable who had been her gaoler there. She praised him for doing a good job to keep her close-confined while she was a prisoner and then promptly dismissed him.]
Robert Dudley was almost exactly Elizabeth’s age, and I’d heard some call him “The Gypsy” behind his back for his darker complexion than most Englishmen. Later, scandalmongers said the name was appropriate because he cast a spell on her. Always fashionably, almost fantastically attired, he was well featured with a neatly clipped reddish brown beard and mustache and heavy-lidded eyes, which made, I supposed, most ladies feel the impact of his charms. But his dark brown eyes were only on Elizabeth. As soon as she was crowned, I intended to remind her that being queen did not protect one’s reputation when gadding about with married men—if I did not, John said he would.
Robert Dudley could not only ride and joust well, he was witty and learned, skilled at tennis and archery and dancing—how Elizabeth loved dancing with him—all of which flaunted his well-turned, muscular legs. Oh, yes, at age fifty-two, I could still realize what she felt for him. My John and I yet reveled in each other’s arms and charms, and I could well recall those good old and bad old days when a man’s physical wiles could quite turn my head. And like John—and Tom Seymour too, curse him—Robert reeked of masculinity and magnetism.
But Elizabeth was queen and had worked for years to rebuild her reputation after the Seymour debacle that almost ruined us both, so I assumed she would soon come to her senses. But already her courtiers—and Cecil, who did not trust Robert—lifted their brows as their maiden queen smiled at and tarried with the traitor’s son whose wife was kept in the country.
But now, as the four of us headed for the church, it was a heady experience to see how the royal yeomen guards scrambled to open doors ahead of Elizabeth, doors we used to have to open for ourselves—or which were locked to hold us in. She was in a hurry now, perhaps so she would not change her mind to visit the site where her mother’s abused body lay. I had to stretch my strides to keep up with her.
Outside, the crisp river breeze bucked against us, as if to hold us back. I fell in directly behind the queen, with John and Robert bringing up the rear. We blinked at the snow, and the winter wind curled into our clothes. Puffs of our breath blew behind us. No one spoke as we approached the small, squat building, the church of St. Peter in Chains—so perfect a name, I thought, for a prison church.
John hastened to open one of the double doors. Some winter light filtered in through the windowpanes to cast half shadows on the stone-flagged floor and bare altar holding a stone statue of the crucified Christ. A few effigies of knights and their ladies, frozen in perpetual prayer, stared heavenward above their tombs as we all started down the short aisle. Elizabeth stopped and said, without looking at us, “Robin and John, please stay back to keep others from coming in. Kat, with me.”
Our skirts and cloaks rustled, and our footfalls echoed as we walked the aisle to the altar, before which sat four plain wooden benches, for the Tower yeomen guards sometimes worshipped here. We sat on the front one, side by side, not speaking until she said, not turning her head but staring straight ahead, “I know her coffin—that arrow box—lies under the floor here. It has been twenty-two years since I have been this close to her—to her body, I mean—but I feel closer than ever to her in my head and heart. I yet cannot fathom how things have changed, the power and position that is mine. Have you had the nightmare of her since I’ve become queen?” she asked, turning to me at last.
“No, Your Grace. Not once.”
She jerked her gloved hand over to my lap to grasp mine. “I neither. She is finally at rest, but she will always be with me, just as you must be. To be on my side in all things, Kat.”
I nearly brought up her foolish favoring of her Robin, but I held my tongue for now.
She went on in a rush, “I’m going to take the Boleyn badge of the white falcon on the tree stump for my own to let them know my pride in my Boleyn heritage as well as Tudor. Of course, I honor her memory by appointing my Boleyn cousins, Catherine and Henry, to serve me and will advance them over the years.”
She was referring to the adult children of her deceased aunt Mary Boleyn, Anne’s sister, the woman who had dared to wed the man she loved and had been exiled from court for it before I came to London. Elizabeth’s sweet and charming cousin Catherine had been named one of her ladies I oversaw, and the queen greatly favored and relied upon her cousin Henry, who became Lord Hunsdon and served her well.
“That all pleases me, and it would have greatly pleased your mother,” I assured her.
“He’s buried here, too, Tom Seymour.”
“Yes. Jane Grey, your cousin Queen Catherine Howard—others who made mistakes trusting or being ruled by the wrong men.”
She let out a rush of breath like a huge sigh. She was squeezing my hand so hard I thought to protest, but she said, “It’s different with me and Robin, Kat, no matter what you are thinking. Next to you, he’s my dearest friend from the past, and he’s going with me into the future.”
“Of course, you will need many strong men around you, both men of rank and reputation. But—”
“Like Cecil and like John,” she interrupted. “But Robin too.”
“Perhaps you should let his wife come to court to stop wagging tongues,” I dared.
She sighed again and let my hand go. “She prefers the country. And besides, she’s been ill.”
I held my breath as my mind raced. “What kind of ill? Is it serious?”
“Of course, we hope not. Kat, we shall kneel and pray here for the parade and coronation.”
And for Amy Dudley’s good health, I thought, as I got down on my knees beside her on the hard, cold stone floor. Elizabeth had vowed to me over the years she would never wed, so was Robert more or less safe for her to love, since he was wed? If something would happen to Amy, could the Council and the people accept him as a possible marital candidate? His family was still hated for being so arrogant to take the earldom of Northumberland, the first time non-nobles attained the ducal rank, though that title had died with Robert’s sire.