Her Highness, the Traitor

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, had been an adulteress. He had had her put away in a house of religion, after which she had had the decency to die and leave him free to take another wife.

The attractive Anne, bearing his children almost yearly and loyally supporting his career, had been the balm he needed after the hurt and shame of having been cuckolded. But even in the early days of their marriage, Anne, with the smidgen of royal blood she had through her mother, had been prone to give herself airs, and when her sister-in-law Jane became Henry VIII’s third queen, it had well and truly turned her head. Yet she had good points: I just had to make an effort to remind myself of them.

Robert, who at fifteen was the third of my five living sons, entered my chamber and looked around. Then he called back, “It’s safe! The duchess is gone. Come on in!”

“Really,” I protested as my children ambled in, trailed by their uncle Jerome, “you should not speak of the Duchess of Somerset in that manner. She is a faithful wife, a loving mother, a pious woman, a—”

“Battle-axe,” said Robert. “They should have left the Duke of Somerset here and sent her to Scotland. The Scots would turn tail.”

“Robert!”

“Did she tell you about the Great Barge Incident?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“The lady Elizabeth told me what she said to poor Kat Astley.” Robert turned to his brothers, ten-year-old Guildford and nine-year-old Hal, and to his thirteen-year-old sister, Mary. Only my youngest child, Katheryn, napping in her nursery, was not here for the fun. He pitched his voice high. “‘An outrage, Mistress Astley, an outrage! Do you want a princess of the blood to marry a mere knight? For this is surely what will happen if you let her run around so!’ Poor Kat Astley was prostrated for a day after the duchess’s visit.”

“She means well.”

“What were you doing visiting the lady Elizabeth?” asked Hal.

“What’s the harm? She just likes seeing someone now and then besides her ladies and the queen and the Marquis of Dorset’s daughter. Now that is a frightening little miss, by the by. Deadly earnest. Knows at least three languages, they say, and can’t laugh at a joke in any of them. I pity the man who marries her. He’ll probably have to translate a passage from the Greek before he’s allowed in the lady’s bedchamber. At least the lady Mary wasn’t there.”

“Do the lady Mary,” my own daughter begged.

Robert crossed himself, dropped to his knees, and lowered his voice to a growl. “Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum—Oh, Jesu, my knees are sore!”

“Robert!” I protested, though not without first admiring the accuracy of the imitation. “I cannot have you treating the king’s sister with such disrespect, even in the privacy of our home.”

I could not be too angry at Robert, however, for I knew he spoke in part to distract me from my worry. Three years before, my husband and my son Henry had set off for war in France; there, my handsome, high-spirited boy, knighted just weeks before, had fallen ill and died during the siege of Boulogne. I had lost five other children to illnesses in early childhood, and I grieved for them still, but with them I’d had time to prepare for their deaths, to clasp them in my arms and offer them what comfort I could, to say good-bye. With Henry, I’d had to hear the news from a messenger, bringing what I had hoped at first was an ordinary letter from my husband. When my husband returned from France by himself a few weeks later, strained and grieving, I’d had to relive my misery again. Three years later, I now had to fear for the safety of my sons Jack and Ambrose in Scotland, not to mention that of my husband, for he was not a man to spare himself in battle. If there was fighting, they would be in the thick of it.

My husband’s brother Andrew was fighting for England, too; of the three Dudley brothers, only Jerome was at home. I smiled at Jerome, who as usual was sitting on his favorite stool, enjoying the hubbub around him without taking part in it. He had been very young when his father, Edmund Dudley, was executed, so young that Edmund had had hopes he could train for the priesthood. But it had become apparent in another year or so he would not have a career in the Church or any place else, for his mind would never be more than that of a young child. He had been a docile lad who had grown into a sweet-tempered man, and as he liked company better than anything and was no trouble, John had brought him from his lodgings in the country to live with us at Ely Place.

“Please let Robert do the lady Mary again, at least,” begged Guildford.

“Please,” echoed Jerome in his voice that always startled me, so much like John’s as it was.

I sighed. “Oh, very well. But only if he does the Duchess of Somerset again, too.”

***

“You are here to see the king, my lady?”

I nodded at Thomas Seymour, coming out of the king’s outer chambers at Hampton Court just as I was coming into them. “Yes. He summoned me. I hope nothing is wrong in Scotland.”

“Not that I know of,” Seymour said lazily. “Ned’s alive and well, as far as I know.”

“And my husband and sons? Have you any news of them?”

“No, but I imagine Ned would have told even me if there were any cause for concern. I daresay the king will tell you what you need to know.” Seymour bowed and hurried away.

“He could have been more forthcoming, don’t you think?” I asked my companion— Maudlyn Flower, one of the gentlewomen who served me. “But I suppose nothing can be so very wrong.”

King Edward awaited me in the chair where he received visitors, his feet dangling well above the floor. I dropped a curtsey. “Perhaps you have seen our uncle, my lady?”

Though I am a short woman, it was still necessary for me to take care when I arose that I did not look down at the king. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

“He brought us some money,” said Edward cheerfully. “He’s always bringing us money. But did he tell you the news?”

I bit my lip. “No, Your Majesty. I hope things are well with us in Scotland?”

“We had a victory!” the king announced. He slid off his chair and waved me over to a map lying on a table. “Here, at a place called Musselburgh. We killed ten thousand Scots. My lord of Warwick was ambushed before the battle,” he added.

I froze.

“But he escaped,” the king assured me quickly. “Oh, I would have told you immediately if he had not! He charged at one of them—Dandy Carr—and chased him for twelve score at spear point. He would have run Carr’s horse straight through if his horse had been just a little slower. They must have very fast horses there.”

“My lord was not hurt, then.”

“No, no. The battle was joined the next day. See, my lady?”

I gazed at the map as the king recounted the battle with boyish gusto, my mind focusing only on the news that my John was safe.

Only when I was on my knees in my chapel, giving thanks for my husband’s safety, did it occur to me to wonder why Thomas Seymour was giving the king money.