Her Highness, the Traitor

4

Frances Grey

September 1547





I hardly recognized my Jane when I next came up from our home of Bradgate in Leicestershire to London. Not only had she had a slight growing spurt, but she also was dressed in the height of fashion, in a green that became her very well. “The queen gave me the material,” she said as she spun around, almost coquettishly, for me to better admire her. “Don’t you think it’s pretty?”

“It’s lovely. But I have tried to get you to wear such colors before. You never would.”

“The queen ordered it,” Jane said sensibly. “I could not refuse. And the Lord Admiral pressed it upon me, too. He hates dark colors.”

Just as Harry had predicted, Tom Seymour had married the queen, having been allowed to do so by the king himself—unaware the couple had married long before the royal permission was obtained. That piece of news when it leaked out had been the scandal of the summer, and I had been all for removing my girl lest she be touched by it. I’d expected a proper marriage with the blessing of the king and the Protector, not this clandestine affair. Harry, however, had mandated that Jane stay put. “They’re properly married, after all, and any damage has already been done. And besides, Jane shall now be living in the same household as the lady Elizabeth, the king’s favorite sister. What better way to the heart of the king than that?”

As usual, I had not been able to muster an argument. Instead, I had had to hope Jane would be so uncomfortable with the newlyweds, she would beg to be sent home when I visited. Perhaps the couple themselves might like some privacy, instead of having two young girls underfoot.

But the visit did not match my hopes. Having shown off her new dress to me, Jane turned to Harry. “I like being here so much,” she bubbled. “The Lord Admiral is so pleasant, and the queen is so kind!”

“How are your studies coming?”

“Wonderfully,” said Jane, raising herself up on her toes to better emphasize her point. “The lady Elizabeth has an excellent tutor in Master William Grindal, and he teaches me as well on occasion. I know that your lordship sent me very good tutors,” she hastened to add. “But Master Grindal excels even them in Greek.”

“We must not distract him from his duties to the lady Elizabeth,” I put in.

“Oh, but the queen quite encourages it! And did you know that she will soon be publishing another book? Lamentations of a Sinner. She has even let me read the manuscript! I hope that the queen might even allow me to collaborate with her sometime,” Jane confided, her pretty brown eyes taking on a dreamy look. “When I am older and more accomplished, of course.”

***

If I must say so myself, I sew a shirt beautifully. On many a New Year’s Day, I had presented my creations to my uncle King Henry, who confided to me once that they excelled his first queen’s handiwork, and she was a capital shirt maker. I also made smocks, which graced the forms of both the ladies Mary and Elizabeth. I did not neglect to keep my own family well supplied with these garments, and I was hard at work on a shirt for Harry when he joined me in my chamber later that evening. “I am doing something new with the embroidery this time. See?”

“Lovely,” Harry agreed. “So what did you think? Were you pleased to see our Jane getting on so well in the queen’s household?”

“It appears that Jane has become very fond of the queen.” I sighed slightly.

“So what is wrong with that?”

What was wrong with it, I longed to say, was that I wanted her to love me. “Nothing, of course. I just wish she paid the same respect to me as she did the queen.”

“When has she been insolent toward you?”

“Never in so many words. Well, not at all, really. She is a good girl. But—”

“Collaborating with the queen when she gets older! Did you hear that? I say, this has opened up a world of opportunity for our Jane.”

“I just hope it doesn’t give her an inflated idea of herself,” I ventured. “Modesty is an accomplishment in itself.”

“Well, of course.” My husband yawned.

I continued to work on my husband’s shirt, my thoughts not on my stitches but on my first child, my little Henry, born when I was still just sixteen. What a sweet baby he had been! But he had lived only six months, and at seventeen, I had watched as he was laid in his tiny grave. I had been too drained from days of watching him fade away to cry. Harry had stood beside me, weeping openly, and his hateful mother had stood there, too. She had let it be known I was a burden on her son, with the large retinue my father insisted I have as a duke’s daughter and his attempting to renege on his promise that he would support us until Harry came of age. This mother of several healthy grown sons had stared at the little coffin dispassionately, plainly thinking I was proving even worse of a bargain than she thought. I could not even bear her Harry a healthy male child.

My husband and I had been too young to know how to offer each other the comfort we each needed. After our little boy was buried, he had turned to his books and to his gambling and to his life at court, and I had turned to my relations and friends, whom I had visited for weeks on end. Somehow, though, we had come together often enough for me to conceive a second child, who had lived only hours. But whatever God’s plan had been in depriving me of my first two babes, he seemed to have changed it with the birth of my third, for Jane and her sisters after her had been thriving infants, gulping their nurse’s milk and protesting vigorously against the indignity of being swaddled.

Yet I could not stop thinking about my lost children—especially about my son. It was foolish, I knew, for he had died so young that I had no way of knowing what sort 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.