Her Highness, the Traitor

20

Frances Grey

January 1552 to February 1552





With the court festivities of Christmas over, the girls and I returned to Bradgate. I was glad to be there, for despite all of the determined gaiety, London was a gloomy place that January, the impending fate of the Duke of Somerset casting a pall over everything.

Even in the comfort of my home at Bradgate—my husband’s inheritance, but a house I had come to love as my own—I was despondent after the duke’s death, not so much for the duke but for the sake of his eldest son, Edward, Earl of Hertford. I had met him at court a time or two and had found him to be a charming yet serious-minded young man, who might be particularly suitable for Jane as a husband. Indeed, after the Thomas Seymour debacle, Harry, anxious to make amends with Somerset, had suggested Jane might marry Hertford, but the negotiations had been desultory at best and had died out altogether when Harry aligned himself with Northumberland. Now the Earl of Hertford, son of a traitor, was worth little as a husband, unless the council chose to restore him to his father’s forfeited estates. But I was sorry not only for the loss of the young man as a potential match for Jane, but also for his own bereavement.

Jane did not give any indication of what she thought about the loss of her potential suitor, and I did not ask her. Since I had overheard the conversation she had had with Ascham the previous summer, my manner to her had been more distant and cool. I no longer lost my temper with her, but I no longer asked the sort of questions about her studies that had always made her roll her eyes at me. My manner at times toward her had been so astringent, I had seen her blink in puzzlement, which I am ashamed to admit gave me a certain petty satisfaction. When Aylmer, distressed at the pleasure Jane had taken in decking herself out in fine robes and curling her hair for the visit of Mary of Guise, asked that his mentor in Zurich, Heinrich Bullinger, address a few words to Jane about the manner of dress suitable for a young lady professing godliness, I did not even protest that Jane hardly needed such instruction. Even when the lady Elizabeth was named—much to Jane’s annoyance—as an example to be followed, I kept my counsel. “Master Aylmer knows best about these things, and you must follow his advice,” I said sweetly.

“But he is telling me I spend too much time with my music, and you have always encouraged me to spend more time on it!”

I had, not only because I loved music, but also because it was something I could understand. “He knows best,” I repeated. “Not me.”

***

In early February, John Aylmer hurried into my chamber. It was about the time of the week that he usually reported on my daughters’ studies, and in which I tried to formulate intelligent questions, so I at first thought nothing of it when he was announced. Then I saw his face. “My lady, the lady Jane is acting very strange. I have never seen her thus.”

I asked no questions, but followed him to the chamber where Jane had her lessons. She was in her usual place, surrounded by books, pen, and parchment, but she was slumped over her desk listlessly. “I don’t want to study,” she said, lifting her head at my approach. “I’m tired.”

Her sulky voice was slurred. For a moment, I thought she might have smuggled some of our wine to her room and drunk it undiluted, as my sister Eleanor and I had once done in our youth on a mutual dare. But no. There was no smell of wine, and John Aylmer had been at university; he would know the effects of drink when he saw them. I looked at Jane more closely. She was perspiring, though the February day was a particularly bitter one. Suddenly fear clawed at my heart. “Don’t you feel well?”

“I told you, I’m tired.” Jane suddenly pulled off her French hood, revealing her fine auburn hair. She rose, unsteady on her feet. “I’m going to bed.”

“No, you are not.”

John Aylmer stared at me. “My lady!”

“She cannot go to bed. She has the sweat. If she sleeps within the next few hours, she will die like my brothers did.” I grabbed Jane, who had actually started to unfasten her gown, totally indifferent to the presence of a man in the room. “Stop that! You shall not go to bed. You must study. I insist.”

“But Mother…”

“Go inform the household that my daughter has the sweat,” I told Aylmer. “See if my other daughters are ill. If they are not, make sure they go nowhere near Jane and me, and make sure that their ladies watch them closely for any signs of the illness. And have a physician sent for,” I added. But physicians were next to useless against the sweat, I knew. “Then come back and help me keep my daughter awake.” I shook Jane, whose eyes were shutting. “Read to me.”

“I want to sleep.”

“Read to me. I care not what you read. Just read it.” I glared down at my daughter, grateful for my advantage in height. “Read, or I will take a switch to you.”

Jane picked up a book—I recognized it as Plato—and stumbled her way through its pages, half reading, half crying with frustration. When Aylmer came back, she looked to him for rescue but got none. When her voice grew hoarse, he hauled her to her feet and walked her in circles around the room, then sat her down after a while of this and ordered her to write out a translation of what she was reading. All this time, she was sweating and having the utmost difficulty catching her breath.

For a couple of hours, we kept up this parody of a normal day’s study, until the physician arrived to confirm what I had guessed for myself. He allowed Jane to take to her bed, but bade me to continue to keep her awake and to make her sweat even more. Obediently, I swaddled Jane as tightly as a newborn babe in layers of blankets, ordered that the servants who had bravely ventured into the sickroom stoke the fire, and poked and prodded Jane every time she showed an inclination to shut her eyes.

Late in the evening, Jane begged to use the chamber pot. The physician nodded in satisfaction as she did so. “Copious urination. A good sign.”

Settling back in bed, Jane glared at him as he studied her prodigious output. “I wish you would go away.”

“Disrespect to one’s elders,” the physician said. “An even better sign.”

Jane turned her glare on me as I tried to wrap her blankets around her again. “Would you stop that, Mother?”

I nervously touched Jane’s forehead. It was cool. The physician followed suit and gave another nod of approval. “I believe the crisis is over, my lady. If the lady Jane continues as she is for another hour or so, she may sleep.”

***

When the physician at last consented for Jane to sleep, I watched her nervously, expecting every breath to be her last. But she grew visibly better as she slumbered through the night, and when the sun rose, she looked almost her usual self, except that after waking she was content to loll back against her pillows and doze some more. Her condition was so promising, I, too, could sleep for the first time in four-and-twenty hours, leaving Jane under the eye of our servants. When I returned to her side, Jane was sitting up against her pillows, sipping ale and staring at what she had written when her tutor and I had kept her awake. “I wrote this? It’s barely coherent, complete nonsense.”

“I will have to take your word for it, because it all looks like nonsense to me.”

“Little Mary could have done better.”

“You were very ill.”

Jane looked up at me with eyes that were mercifully clear and bright again, if weary. Then she lowered her gaze. “The physician told me that you kept me awake,” she said to her paper.

“They say it is dangerous to sleep when one has the sweat.”

“He said that you probably saved my life.”

“The Lord saved your life. I did only what he enabled me to remember was necessary.”

Jane raised her eyes back to me and gave me a rare smile. “Thank you, Mother.”

“There is no need to thank me for doing what I desired most as your mother.”

Jane said nothing, and I did not want to break this happy moment by speaking further, and possibly saying the wrong thing. My daughter had lived, and lived to smile at me. That was enough.