Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,22
twenty-three-year excursion into the past my thoughts had been taking. “No,” I admitted.
“Well, it’s about the lady Elizabeth. She hardly said a word to me, and we’ve been friends for years.”
“Yes, she seemed rather taken up by the Admiral.” I decided not to tell my son about the conversation I’d had with Catherine Parr. It was bad enough having the queen upset while she was great with child, and Thomas Seymour running around Chelsea bare-legged, without Robert deciding he had to uphold the lady Elizabeth’s honor. I envisioned him traveling down to Chelsea, sword in hand, while Thomas Seymour ran around in his nightshirt, and despite myself, I snickered at the sight my thoughts were presenting to me.
“It’s not amusing. She’s hanging on every word the Admiral says, as if he weren’t thirty years her senior. It’s disgusting.”
“I am sure she is merely being polite, as one should be to one’s elders.”
Robert ignored the pointed tone in which I’d spoken the last part of my remark. “Even that little lady Jane goggles at the man. So does Kat Astley, for that matter, and she’s married, for God’s sake. You’d think the three of them had been shut up in a nunnery for twenty years, the way they act.”
“He is an inveterate charmer, that is all. Don’t worry so.”
Three weeks later, Queen Catherine caught Thomas Seymour with the lady Elizabeth in his arms. Her reaction could be felt all the way up the Thames to Greenwich. Elizabeth was sent in haste—or as much in haste as a princess and her entourage could be sent off—to Cheshunt, where Kat Astley’s married sister lived.
I visited the queen at her manor at Hanworth, near Richmond, a couple of weeks later. The queen and Lady Jane were hard at work sewing baby things, while Thomas Seymour bustled around preparing for the queen’s move to Sudeley Castle, where she would spend her confinement. The queen and Seymour seemed their old selves; even when they railed about the still-ongoing battle with the Protector and his duchess about the queen’s jewels, they did so with a happy sense of mutuality. The Admiral beamed at the lady Jane paternally from time to time and effusively praised her stitches (which hardly deserved it, Jane not being much of a needlewoman), but otherwise kept his charm well within the bounds of propriety. The lady Elizabeth, the queen told me in private, had written a contrite letter expressing her gratitude for their friendship, as well as a friendly but entirely decorous letter to Seymour himself. I left Hanworth content in the thought that all had worked out and that I and the rest of Catherine’s friends would soon be hearing of the queen’s safe delivery.
In September, we got the good news: Catherine had given birth to a girl, Mary, at the end of August. Then, just a few days later, another message arrived. The queen was dead.
8
Frances Grey
September 1548 to October 1548
Just a day after the terrible news arrived that Queen Catherine had died of childbed fever, a messenger rode up with a letter from Tom Seymour, written in his own hand. It was tear stained and barely coherent. His aged mother would be taking charge of his baby girl, and the Protector had invited him to stay with him at Sion House so he would not have to face his sorrow alone. Our Jane had been chief mourner at the queen’s funeral and had done her duty with much gravity and honor. Which brought him to his main point: with the queen gone, he could no longer maintain our daughter in his household. The very sight of the girl for whom his dear wife had had so much affection was too much for him to bear. In fact, Seymour said in a postscript, our daughter was on her way to Bradgate now.
I had barely had time to make my daughter’s chambers ready for her, when I heard Jane was just a mile or so off. Not long afterward, my girl stood before me. She was dressed in mourning for the queen, which made her look older than her eleven years, and I could see she was beginning to develop a hint of a bosom.
Jane allowed me to embrace her. “I was very sorry to hear of the queen’s death,” I said. “I know she was very fond of you.”