Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,15

of boy he would have become, but I pictured him as an affectionate, kind young man who would have never scorned my ignorance and who would have written to me regularly from his place at court. I pictured him much like my younger half brothers, who were nearly as learned as my Jane but with a taste for archery and tennis, as well. Or perhaps Henry might have been like the lads of Jane Dudley, Countess of Warwick. The countess had lost several of her boys, two as young children and one during the siege of Boulogne three years before, but five had survived: handsome sons who outshone their plain little mother in every respect but who never treated her as an embarrassment.

My little Henry would have proudly worn my shirts, I thought as I sighed and turned my attention to my work.

5

Jane Dudley

September 1547

In the summer of 1547, the Duke of Somerset had mounted a Scottish campaign, on which he was joined by my husband as second in command. I was left behind at Ely Place, undefended from the Duchess of Somerset as she spoke of her brother-in-law.

“Thomas Seymour should be in Scotland, fighting alongside his brother, instead of lounging around London with the queen,” she informed me when she visited me early that September.

“I can’t imagine why he chose to stay here. He’s no coward.”

“Can’t imagine? Let me supply your deficiency, my dear. He wishes to stay here so that he can work his malign influence over the king, and undermine my husband’s role as the Lord Protector.”

“Surely not.”

“Why, does Thomas Seymour have you under his spell, too?”

“Certainly not,” I said. “But he is the king’s uncle as much as the Protector.”

“You needn’t tell me that,” said Anne Seymour, glaring at a book that lay on a table near us. “Do you know what he keeps beating upon? The minority of King Henry VI, where one person had the governing of the kingdom and the other of the king’s person. Or so Thomas Seymour claims. And look how that king turned out.” She snorted. “Why, Thomas Seymour can’t even govern a young girl properly. Do you know what I saw the other night? The lady Elizabeth, floating down the Thames on a barge by herself, as though she were a wherryman. It’s a disgrace. The queen is too besotted with Seymour to chaperone the girl properly.”

I decided not to mention that I myself had seen the lady Elizabeth in her barge; with her fine head of hair she was unmistakable, especially when she made a point of waving and calling out greetings to the occupants of the vessels that came near hers. “I’m sure it was merely a lark. The lady Elizabeth is a sensible girl, and it seems that her tutors are quite demanding. And the weather here has been so fine.”

“I don’t see your girls being allowed to drift up and down the Thames on a barge all by themselves.”

“Well, no. Mary prefers her books and her verses to the Thames, and Katheryn is but four years of age. How are your daughters doing, by the way?”

Anne was undeterred from her course. “In any case, I gave that Kat Astley”—the lady Elizabeth’s governess—“a good scolding. What kind of governess calls herself ‘Kat,’ anyway? If the young lady is to make a respectable marriage, she can’t afford to have any blemish on her reputation.”

“She told my boy Robert once that she didn’t want to get married.” I smiled reminiscently. “They have known each other since they were young, you know. Robert says she was quite determined.”

“Bah! A girl of that age is too young to know her own mind about anything. But it may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, if she’s not more carefully guarded. The lady Elizabeth already has the stigma of being that Anne Boleyn’s daughter.”

Try as hard as she might, Anne, as sister-in-law to the queen who had supplanted that Anne Boleyn, could not help but sound rather smug.

***

I saw Anne Seymour off, feeling guilty as I watched her barge, only a shade less grand than the king’s, pull away. Our husbands had been friends since 1523, when as young men they had served together in France under Charles Brandon, so it had been natural when Edward Seymour married Anne as his second wife that the two of us would spend time together. He was very fond of her, for good reason: his first wife, pretty but ill suited temperamentally to her solemn husband,