Ned gives me a smile and my heart turns over. “It doesn’t matter who Elizabeth likes and dislikes. We are royal kin and so she should give her permission. You are her cousin and a Tudor, I am a Seymour. She cannot refuse our wedding.”
It will take him an hour to get to Sheen. I fuss over his saddle, the girth, the stirrup leathers, like a wife. “Be careful on the way!” I say, though I know he has men in his livery riding with him. There is no danger for him. There are many threats against the life of Elizabeth, but the rest of us, the royal family, are beloved. Everyone remembers that Queen Jane, who died so tragically giving birth to King Edward, was a good English Seymour. And my family, the Greys, are loved for our Queen Jane. The ordinary people speak of her as a saint. It is only Elizabeth who likes to pretend that Jane was never crowned queen. It is only Elizabeth who wants to pretend that she is the last Tudor.
“I’ll be back the day after tomorrow,” he says. “And I shall call you my wife within the month.”
I wave good-bye and I don’t care who sees me standing, watching him go. I don’t doubt him, I don’t doubt that my mother will give permission in a moment. She has always liked him, and the Seymours are a great family. His mother has reluctantly allowed our marriage on the condition that my mother speaks to Elizabeth. There should be nothing to stand in our way.
CHARTERHOUSE, SHEEN,
OCTOBER 1559
My mother is ill—she is much troubled by her spleen (I have to say, this is not surprising in a woman with such an evil temper). But as soon as she has heard Ned’s mission she orders me and Mary to join her and her husband, Mr. Stokes, and Ned at Sheen. She says I must tell her myself if I want Ned as my husband. She receives me in her presence chamber like the daughter of a queen that she is. Mary walks behind me like a miniature lady-in-waiting.
It is as formal as a betrothal. I tell my mother: “I am very willing to love my lord of Hertford,” and she rises from her chair, comes to me, smiles, puts my hand in his, and says that she would be glad to see me settled and well married.
Adrian Stokes, standing deferentially behind her, is no nobleman but a good sensible man, and he advises us, too. We all agree that Elizabeth the queen will have to be handled carefully. This summer she has been besotted with Robert Dudley and had no time for anyone else, but if I am asking to marry the cousin of the late king, she will turn her attention to me and observe me with more care. She is as prickly over her prestige as any bastard, and as fearful for her title as any usurper. We must never, never indicate that we know that we are better bred and more entitled to the throne than she. We have to hope that she overlooks the fact that I, a Tudor heir, want to marry Ned, a Seymour, a royal relation.
Everyone agrees that my mother must write to Elizabeth the queen and ask for permission and then go to court to persuade Elizabeth in person. Jointly, the five of us compose a courtly letter. We write:
The Earl of Hertford doth bear goodwill to my daughter the Lady Katherine, and I do humbly beseech the Queen’s Highness to be a good and gracious lady unto her and that it may please Her Majesty to assent to her marriage to the said earl.
I say—but what if she says no? She is spiteful enough to say no. And Ned takes my hand and promises me: “If she says no, we will marry in secret and she can say no to the wind.”
So the letter is drafted with Mary acting as clerk, and my mother is to copy it out fair in her best hand, but before she can do so, she takes to her bed and says she cannot go to court while she is so bloated and so sick, she certainly cannot bear to see Elizabeth when she is not in her best looks, we will have to wait until she is better.
“So what happens now?” I demand of Ned.
“I’ll go back to court myself and prepare for the letter,” he promises me. “I have friends; we are a family with influence. I can ask people to speak for us to the queen. We have my mother’s permission and yours. We don’t need anything more.”
WINDSOR CASTLE,
AUTUMN 1559
Ned and I return to court separately, so that no one knows we have been conspiring together, and then we hesitate. It feels impossible to break into Elizabeth’s whispered conversations with Robert Dudley and make her attend to our affairs. There is a queue of people before us: foreign ambassadors proposing marriage, William Cecil with handfuls of bills for her to sign, trying to persuade her to support the Protestant Scots lords who are arming against their French regent. Now Elizabeth is to be named as Supreme Governor of the Church, even though she is a woman. I think of what my sister Jane would have done with that chance to save the soul of the country, and save the Scots from papistry, and it is a bitter thought. At any rate, the queen has no time for Ned and me, and we cannot find a chance to interrupt.
The court is a place of nervous gossip. Elizabeth is so anxious about the French and the Scots that she cannot let Robert Dudley out of her sight; but still she entertains Sir William Pickering as a suitor, and speaks every day of the archduke Ferdinand as if she intends to marry him. It feels as if everyone, from the blackbirds in the apple-heavy orchards to the queen in her chamber, is with their mate. Ned and I are only one of very many couples kissing in shaded doorways.
The Scots Protestant lords rise up against the regent Mary of Guise and defeat her. They call on Elizabeth for help, and of course she dares to do nothing. If Jane were Queen of England, she would have sent a righteous army. But though William Cecil argues till he is exhausted in the Privy Council and the queen’s rooms, Elizabeth does not dare to send more than a secret fleet of ships to supply the Scots lords.
While everyone is arguing whether this is enough, or if the queen should send an army, Ned and I slip away and pursue our secret love affair, safely hidden from the queen and from her advisors, and known only to his sister Janey and my little sister Mary. The two of them conspire for us: Janey invites me to her rooms when Ned is there; Mary stands watch when we meet on the pier at the river or in the autumn woods of Hampton Court. We ride together, following behind the queen and her lover, as the leaves whirl down in gold and bronze all around us. We walk behind them, a careful pace apart from each other, the pug Jo trotting along behind us, while they walk whispering, arm in arm. Elizabeth clings to Robert Dudley during this new crisis. Clearly, she does not dare to do her duty by the people of her faith. Clearly, only Robert Dudley can give her confidence to defy William Cecil’s advice. I simply don’t care about it. I am in love, all I want is the rare alignment of the early stars on the autumn nights which will tell me that the queen is in a good mood and my mother is well enough to come to court to ask for permission for me to marry.
Perhaps only William Cecil, the queen’s long-standing advisor, sees our secret courtship, and I imagine that he approves. He is a quiet man who misses nothing. Now and then he gives me a little smile or has a polite word with me as we pass in the gallery, or our horses happen to be alongside each other, when the court is riding out. He is a staunch believer in the reformed religion, and he knows that I was raised in the same faith as my sister Jane and I would never choose any other. His scholarly Protestant wife, Mildred, loved Jane, and I think he looks for my sister in me. His strong faith inspires him to urge the Privy Council and the queen to support the Protestant lords of Scotland and free that kingdom from the Pope as well. I know he favors me as the Protestant heir, and he speaks for me to the queen’s advisors, if not to her. He would never accept my cousin Margaret Douglas, who is half papist and in disgrace anyway, and never, ever Mary Queen of France, where her mother’s family, the Guises, are persecuting those of our faith with the utmost cruelty.
WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON,
NOVEMBER 1559