Behind the Palace Doors (6 page)

Philip was somewhat less enamored with his bride. “To speak frankly with you,” his confidant Ruy Gómez wrote home to Spain, “it will take a great God to drink this cup.” Nevertheless, Philip made the best of it. “He treats the queen very kindly,” Gómez reported, “and well knows how to pass over the fact that she is no good from the point of view of fleshy sensuality. He makes her so happy that the other day when they were alone she almost talked love talk to him, and he replied in the same vein.”

Several months after the wedding Mary believed she was pregnant, the joy of which was matched by her kingdom’s reunion with Rome. With her husband by her side, and a baby in her belly (or so she thought), Mary began to burn heretics. Hundreds of men and women, many of them poor and uneducated, suffered agonizing deaths at the stake, while the queen solidified her place in English history as Bloody Mary.

During Easter Week, 1555, Queen Mary went into confinement at Hampton Court in anticipation of her delivery, which was expected early in May. The palace was a hive of activity in preparation for the arrival of the precious heir. “I warrant it should be a man child,” Charles V declared confidently. But the due date came and went, followed by fresh calculations by the queen’s doctors that she would deliver in June. Still no baby. As Mary became increasingly more anxious and depressed, people began mumbling that she may not have been pregnant at all. English diplomats searched for explanations for the delayed delivery as their queen was held to increasing ridicule in foreign
courts. Another due date passed in July, by which time the doctors and midwives had ceased making calculations. Still, the Venetian ambassador, for one, continued to hold out hope that a miracle would “come to pass in this, as in all her majesty’s other circumstances, which the more they were despaired of according to human reasoning and discourse, the better and more auspicious did their result then show itself.”
^†

By the end of August there were few believers left; Philip departed for the dominions in Flanders that he was about to inherit from his father. Mary wept as she watched him go. She believed at first that her husband would soon return to her, but as his letters tapered off, and rumors of his philandering began to reach her, she despaired.

As the months went by, Mary became increasingly desperate, even pleading with her father-in-law, the emperor, to make Philip come back. “I beg your Majesty to forgive my boldness,” she wrote, “and to remember the unspeakable sadness I experience because of the absence of the king.” Sadness sometimes gave way to anger, as on the occasion when the queen ordered a portrait of her wayward husband removed from the council chamber, kicking it on the way out. Then there was the resignation that Philip would probably not be coming back. According to one report, the queen “told her ladies, that she had done all possible to induce her husband to return, and as she found he would not, she meant to withdraw utterly from men,
and live quietly, as she had done the chief part of her life before she was married.”

As it turned out, Philip did return to England, but only briefly, and not to reconcile with Mary (though there was intimacy, and yet another false pregnancy). He needed her as an ally in a war he was fighting against France. The queen agreed to help her husband, but all she got in return was the devastating loss of Calais, the last of England’s once numerous territories in France. Philip had broken her heart, but, she said, they would find Calais lying upon it when they opened her up after her death.

Bitter and abandoned, with all her hopes for a Catholic dynasty in ruins, Queen Mary I was finally forced to endure the inescapable fact that her hated half sister, Elizabeth, would be the one to succeed her.

She was Gloriana, perhaps the greatest of all England’s kings and queens. But before Elizabeth I came to the throne and presided over that magnificent era bearing her name, she was a princess in almost constant peril. It was only with her formidable intelligence, and a little luck, that the young Elizabeth managed to survive—barely
.

In one of fate’s odd twists, Elizabeth Tudor enjoyed the most security of her early life during the reign of her father, Henry VIII. Sure, he was a monster who had her legally declared a bastard after beheading her mother, Anne Boleyn, but mostly the king ignored his precocious redheaded daughter and left her to her books. That kind of benign neglect had its benefits in those dangerous times, and Elizabeth grew up to revere her “matchless and most benevolent” father. After his death in 1547, though, she came under much more intense scrutiny, which nearly proved lethal.

The orphaned princess, just thirteen, was sent to live in the household of her fourth and final stepmother, Katherine Parr, who, after she managed to survive her marriage to Henry VIII,
wed the man she had always wanted: the dashing Thomas Seymour, Lord High Admiral of England and uncle to the new king, Edward VI.

Queen Katherine had always treated Elizabeth with loving kindness, but her new husband’s interest in the girl might generously be described as predatory. Half-dressed, Seymour would steal into Elizabeth’s bedchamber first thing in the morning, rouse the teenager with tickles, slap her rear end, and attempt to kiss her. The princess was at first flattered by the attentions of the older, extremely charismatic man. But adolescent infatuation gave way to probity. To avoid being vulnerable, Elizabeth was forced to wake up earlier and dress fully before Seymour burst into her room. Still, he persisted, and with Katherine Parr’s apparent acquiescence. In one bizarre incident, the queen even held Elizabeth down while Seymour cut her dress to shreds.

Perhaps Katherine genuinely believed that her husband was being playfully paternal with their young charge. He was, after all, gregarious by nature. But her attitude changed abruptly after she reportedly discovered her husband and stepdaughter in an embrace. Pregnant and sick at the time, Katherine sent Elizabeth away with a stern warning about the dangerous effects of scandal. She also promised the mortified girl that she would report to her if her reputation had already been compromised in any way.

A deeply chastened Elizabeth assured her stepmother in a letter from her new residence that she was “replete with sorrow to depart from your Highness, especially seeing you undoubtful of health; and albeit I answered little, I weighed it more deeper when you said you would warn me of all evilness that you should hear of me; for if your Grace had not a good opinion of me, you would not have offered friendship to me that way at all, meaning the contrary.”

Though the breach with Katherine Parr was quickly healed,
the episodes with Seymour would come to haunt Elizabeth and taint her with treason. After he was arrested and imprisoned for having tried to kidnap King Edward (see
Chapter 2
), Elizabeth was left to answer the charge that he had conspired to marry her. The danger was acute, especially if the princess was found to have cooperated in Seymour’s scheme. And all the more distressing, her devoted governess, Kat Ashley, who had been like a mother to her, and her servant Thomas Parry were sent to the Tower as co-conspirators. Anything Elizabeth said while being interrogated could put the lives of these beloved companions in danger as well.

Sir Robert Tyrwhitt, sent by the council to question Elizabeth, was pleased to report that she was “marvelously abashed, and did weep very tenderly a long time,” upon hearing of Ashley and Parry’s imprisonment. But behind those tears was the fierce determination and superior intelligence that would thwart and frustrate Tyrwhitt throughout his relentless interrogation.

“She hath a very good wit, and nothing is gotten of her but by great policy,” Tyrwhitt conceded. Nevertheless, he remained convinced that he could break the princess. By using “gentle persuasion,” he reported that he had already coaxed Elizabeth into admitting that her cofferer, Thomas Parry, had returned from a financial meeting with Thomas Seymour and had discussed the
possibility
of the Lord Admiral’s marrying her.

Despite all his threats and cajoling, that was about all Tyrwhitt could get from Elizabeth or her servants. “I verily do believe,” he confessed in frustration, “that there hath been some secret promise between my lady [Elizabeth], Mistress Ashley and the cofferer, never to confess to death.” The interrogator was reduced to informing Elizabeth of the rumors then in circulation that she was in the Tower and pregnant with Seymour’s child. The princess’s composure temporarily broke upon hearing this; her honor was at stake.

“My Lord, these are shameful slanders,” she wrote furiously to Seymour’s brother, Somerset. “For the which, besides the great desire I have to see the King’s Majesty, I shall most heartily desire your Lordship that I may come to court after your first determination, that I may show myself as I am.”

Elizabeth’s plea to vindicate herself publicly was ignored. Meanwhile, Tyrwhitt continued his assault, to no avail. “I … have practiced with my lady’s grace by all means and policies to cause her to confess more than she hath already done,” he lamented, “wherein she doth plainly deny that she knoweth any more than she hath already opened to me.”

Having been outwitted by the crafty teenager, Tyrwhitt settled on a new policy. If Kat Ashley could be made to talk, that would shatter Elizabeth and “make her cough out the whole.” As it turned out, Mrs. Ashley had long fantasized about a marriage between her royal charge and the charming Seymour, rhapsodizing about it endlessly. “If all the Council did agree, why not?” she had asked Elizabeth in the period following Katherine Parr’s death. “For he’s the noblest man unmarried in this land.” Parry, too, shared in the chatter after his meeting with Seymour to discuss Elizabeth’s finances. Now, in the dankness of the Tower, all their dangerous discussions were exposed.

Parry had sworn he “had rather be pulled with horses” than reveal any secrets. But confronted with very real terrors, he broke down and signed a detailed confession. “False wretch!” Kat Ashley cried when Parry and his confession were brought before her. She had languished in a grim dungeon—“so cold … and so dark”—but had said nothing. Now she had little choice but to tell what she knew as well, including details of those embarrassing morning romps in Elizabeth’s bedchamber. She admitted that she had frequently discussed Seymour with Elizabeth, and “hath wished both openly and privily that they two were married together.”

A triumphant Tyrwhitt presented the signed confessions to Elizabeth and reported that she was “much abashed and half breathless” upon reading them. Humiliating as some of the revelations were, though, Elizabeth was quick to recognize that they weren’t damning. Nowhere was she implicated in Seymour’s plot to marry her, and all Kat Ashley had to say about a potential union was merely foolish chatter, not evidence of criminal intent. The council was forced to agree. Only Tyrwhitt remained convinced that Elizabeth and her servants were holding back. “They all sing one song,” he wrote to the Protector, “and so I think they would not do unless they had set the note before.”

In the end only Thomas Seymour forfeited his life. Elizabeth, on the other hand, managed to survive her brother’s brief reign with only her birthright taken away. But she came close to losing much more than that when her sister, Mary, became queen in 1553.