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.
CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH
HATFIELD HOUSE
October 1551
Such 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.
Despite the wind buffeting us, Elizabeth, John and I made it outside to Cecil just as he began to untie his saddlebags. “My lord Cecil!” she greeted him as the Tyrwhitts scrambled to keep up, turning back only to tell a servant to fetch their cloaks. [Once, I recall, when Lady Tyrwhitt came out with a cloak, Elizabeth thanked her for her kindness and put it on herself, forcing the woman to run back inside for another while Elizabeth learned what privy news and advice Cecil brought.]
But on this day, he frightened the three of us, the only ones who could hear what he whispered in the whipping wind, especially as John managed to turn four horses into a snorting, stomping fence around us.
“Somerset is no doubt going to follow his brother Tom Seymour from the Tower to the block,” Cecil said without ado after he bowed to Elizabeth and she hastily raised him. “I have just been knighted to keep me in line, and Warwick has co
nvinced the king to elevate him to the title Duke of Northumberland.”
“He dares?” Elizabeth whispered. “He dares to take the dukedom of the powerful Percys for his own? I feared his hail-fellow-well-met appearance was a guise, so I fear for my brother who admires him. Is treason against Somerset the charge?”
“Yes,” he said as the Tyrwhitts managed to finally work their way in among the horses. Elizabeth turned away from them, her arm now through Cecil’s as she mimed showing him the bounty of fallen leaves they scuffed noisily through. “But the thing is,” Cecil said, still speaking quickly as John and I fell in behind again to cut the Tyrwhitts off, “he’s elevated Jane Grey’s father to a dukedom too, Duke of Suffolk. He’s obviously planning more than Somerset’s demise, and making certain that I am not privy to those plans. By the way, the charges against Somerset are not that he threatened the king’s life months ago but that he was plotting to assassinate Warwick this time. Your Grace, whatever chance we have to talk today, keep this in mind. If Warw—I mean, if Northumberland summons you to London, lie low. Feign illness, find a way, but do not go! I fear he would like to get you and the Princess Mary in his clutches too.”
“I shall take that to heart, my friend Cecil, now Sir William Cecil,” she said, turning toward the Tyrwhitts as they hurried around John and me. “Good news,” she told them, “for I have just been informed that this is now Sir William Cecil, elevated for service to the king and to John Dudley, the newly created Duke of Northumberland!”
“And more good news from the new duke, Your Grace,” Cecil said, falling right in with her playacting. “Northumberland bids me inform you that he greatly regrets that Somerset took your London residence, Durham House your father left you, but he now offers you Seymour House instead, should you go to London soon.”
I feared Elizabeth’s countenance would betray emotion at that. It had been Tom Seymour’s house, and we had all spent time there together. Was some hidden message in that offer, other than a bribe to stay in her favor? For it was a fine, large house in the Strand, close to Whitehall Palace.
“How kind and generous of him!” she said only, smiling and clasping her hands together. “You bring us naught but good news today, Sir William!”
She kept up that facade until long after dark, when I went in to bid her a good night.
“Cecil’s right,” she told me, keeping her voice down. “The former Earl of Warwick, now the vaunted Duke of Northumberland, is planning something, and he’s buying us all off to favor him. But what could he have in mind, what higher honor and post than that historical dukedom and as favorite adviser to my brother? And why did he elevate Jane Grey’s father to a dukedom too? Oh, I hope Robin and his brothers have no part in this, but something’s coming. Those winds battering this house today are winds of change, betrayal and death!”
I comforted her, even chided her, as I recall, that she was over-reading the signs. Which soon only proved to me, and probably to her, that, as educated and well read as was her Kat, I was sometimes still unlearned and stupid too. For within a fortnight, she received a letter from the imprisoned Somerset begging that she plead for him. Her reply, written to avoid angering Northumberland, whom we all now feared, read: Being so young a woman, I have no power to do anything in your behalf. Not only had Cecil taught her to avoid involvement, but she told the truth: the king’s sister or not, she had no power but was yet a pawn on a chessboard with shifting rules.
’Twas bitter winter weather but with no snow upon the ground the day I heard I had a visitor. John looked up from writing a letter for Elizabeth as I said to the servant standing at our bedchamber door, “You mean, Her Grace has a visitor, and I’m to come down too?”
“No, Mistress Ashley,” the kitchen lad said. “The man come to the back door and says his last name in Champer . . . Champer—something.”
I gasped and dropped my needlework. I had not heard my maiden name spoken for years. Sir Philip Champernowne of Modbury had been dead nigh on six years, so had one of his sons come calling—perhaps Arthur, who had favored me once?
John and I went downstairs together. The moment I saw the man, whom they had put in the great hall by the hearth and, thank the Lord, had given a steaming mug of cider, I knew who it was. Older, stooped, gray-haired, it was my father.
“Father!” I choked out, and hurried to him.
“My Kat,” he said only, and banged his mug down so hard on a bench, some of the cider sloshed out. He hugged me hard and swept me off my feet for a spin. The years flew away; tears blurred my sight of him when we stepped apart to behold each other.
I introduced him to John, and they eyed each other before a hearty handshake. “Is all well?” I asked him as we three huddled by the hearth. “How are Maud and the children? It has been—let’s see, nigh on twenty-six years now.”
“Aye. All of them wed, glad for you too, Kat,” he told me, with a nod at John. “I’m a grandsire, seven times over. I had to see you afore I die.”
“You’re not ill? You don’t look ill.”
“No. Maud’s dead.”
“Oh, I didn’t know.”
“ Course you didn’t, living with the Tudors all these years.”
“When—how did she die?”
“A tumor inside her last summer. But she told me you’d accused her once of—of harming your mother.”
“I was young and bitter that you had married again so soon, and—”
“On her deathbed, she said it was true.”
Frozen in place, I stared at him. John’s big hand reached out to squeeze my knee through my skirts. “She—she,” I stammered with a voice not my own, “hit her over the head, then drowned her, didn’t she?”
He nodded. “I shoulda knowed, maybe did, but we got on like cats and dogs, Cecily and me, and—God forgive me—I wanted Maud. Kat, I’m asking if you can forgive me. God as my judge, I’m glad you got away from Maud, from us. I can never make it up to you, but wanted you to have this.” He dug in the pouch he had belted to his waist and extended to me, dripping through his gnarled fingers, my mother’s garnet necklace I had loved, her final gift to me before she died. Ninnyhammer that I was, I burst into tears again.
Both men let me cry. Finally, with a nod from my father, John clasped the necklace around my throat, and I thought again about the ruby ring I’d saved for Elizabeth from her mother, and the red ring of blood around Anne Boleyn’s neck the day she died. The nightmare of her ghost had not haunted me for several years, but that night she was back, begging me to protect and tend her girl.
My father stayed that night. Her Grace kindly ordered a fine dinner for us in her withdrawing room and stopped by to meet him afterwards, shook his hand and even tried and praised the honey he had brought in pottery jars in his saddlebags. Though she looked plain and pale, I could tell he was bedazzled by her. After she left, Father, John and I talked much of the night and, more than once, he told me he was proud of me. I assured him I forgave him for not knowing Maud was a murderess. The fact my mother had her life cruelly and unjustly taken made me feel even closer to Elizabeth.
She came back in to bid us good night and, the next morn, as I brushed her long hair, she said, “Kat, you have come much farther in life than I.”
“But, lovey, you have much farther to go.”
“But I heard your father say he was proud of you.” Her voice broke. “I vow I would have given anything in Christendom to have heard my father say that of me.”
When my father said he must leave, she gave him a gold sovereign, for he would not take anything from us. She insisted it was payment for the delicious honey, carried all those miles. A fine snow was falling when I waved good-bye to him, but John rode with him part of his long way home. And ever after, each time I fingered my mother’s necklace about my throat, I thought how sad it is that some people leave the earth before their sins can be forgiven them and family amends can be made. Despite my father’s humble life and his faults, I felt he was a far better man than
Her Grace’s royal sire had ever been.
The very next day, we had a message for everyone from Cecil that Somerset had been beheaded and all his properties forfeit. What would become of his proud duchess now? I wondered. No doubt, her many enemies they had lorded over rejoiced. She had lost everything and gone into exile in the country. Worse, that spring, we saw clearly what we had been dreading from the Duke of Northumberland. The king had fallen ill, but worse, he had for some unfathomable reason struck down his royal father’s Act of Succession and disinherited both his sisters.
“I cannot believe it,” Elizabeth said over and over as she paced in her withdrawing chamber, flinging gestures. “Edward loves both of us. I knew Northumberland was up to something! No sign of this from either him or His Majesty, and then a strike out of the blue! Out of the blue, that is, except I feared for all of us—including my cousin Jane, when I heard Northumberland had elevated her father then wed her to his own son Guildford Dudley, and she most unwilling! So what does the damned duke have in mind now?” she demanded of John and me, then answered herself. “Will he declare Jane Grey as the king’s sister in our stead and Edward’s new heir? Blast him! My father would kill him for this, kill him with his bare hands!”
When I was a girl, there was an old wives’ saying in Devon that deaths or tragedies come in scores. I warrant that was true, for in July of 1553, His Royal Highness Edward Tudor, but sixteen years old, died a dreadful, painful, scabrous death, whether of the French pox or some other malady, we did not know. Some even whispered it was from poisoning, but that was never openly charged. Northumberland summoned Elizabeth to London both before and after her brother’s death, but she took to her bed, claiming to be ill as well as stricken with grief. She was careful, as Cecil had long counseled, not to fall into Northumberland’s clutches—or even into Mary’s, now that she would be declared queen.