Beware, Princess Elizabeth (4 page)

My head whirled dizzily with this news. I managed to convey my good wishes, but I confess that I felt a sharp stab of jealousy. Would the raucous greetings and the loud kisses on my cheek come to an end, now that Tom Seymour was my stepmother's husband? It had been foolish of me to dream of him as someday being my own husband, although Kat herself had encouraged that fantasy.

I kept my pledge to the queen and said nothing at all, but finally the baron's presence at odd hours provoked palace gossip. At last the marriage was made public.

Kat Ashley appeared profoundly shocked when she learned of it. "It is much too soon for this," she declared, frowning in disapproval. "The dowager queen is bound to official mourning for a year. King Henry has been dead but three months!"

I did not mention that I had already heard the news from Catherine's own lips, but I did remind Kat that she herself had predicted this event, as well as the untimely suddenness.

"Do not be pert, miss," Kat admonished me, and I said no more.

T
HERE WAS ANOTHER
change in our living situation, this one more to my liking. With Tom officially part of our Chelsea household, he brought with him his ward, Lady Jane Grey, who was also my cousin—my father's sister Margaret was Jane's grandmother. As young children Jane and I and my brother—and, for a time, Robin Dudley—had shared lessons with our tutors. Jane was nine years old, Edward's elder by only a matter of weeks. Now Jane was under the lord admiral's guardianship, according to an agreement made with her parents.

Jane Grey joined in my studies with my tutor, William Grindal. Despite the difference in our ages, I found Jane entirely my intellectual equal. Her Latin was as fluent as mine, if not better, and she was already reading Greek and Hebrew, in which I had but scant interest. Jane was a brilliant student, and I enjoyed the challenge she provided.

But it appeared that something else was going on. Kat, walking with me in the gardens outside Chelsea Palace, said to me, "I believe the lord admiral intends to see his ward married to the king."

With her small bones and large, solemn eyes, rosy lips, and grave demeanor, Jane seemed a good match for my brother. But there were already rumors that the lord protector had chosen another of our cousins, five-year-old Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, to become my brother's wife. This struck me as a particularly interesting rivalry—not between the two young girls, who would not be consulted in such a matter, but between the two Seymour brothers. Tom and Edward were each maneuvering to promote his own interests. I had already concluded that Tom's greatest ambition was to replace his brother and become King Edward's lord protector.

My stepmother was caught up in her new marriage. Besides my governess, Kat, Jane was my only friend. She was a sweet-natured girl in addition to having an acute intellect, and we spent many amiable hours in each other's company.

Although I was older by four years, there was little I could teach Jane, with the exception of embroidery. Her keen mind, though, was more challenged by Greek translations than by the couching of gold threads on a piece of silk.

"Oh, dear Elizabeth," she would sigh. "Your stitches are so much finer than mine shall ever be!" And so on. Had she not been my only friend, the only young girl with whom I could speak and walk and ride in the park, I might have found her somewhat annoying at times. She was almost too perfect.

We were sitting at our needlework—I was embellishing the velvet cover of a book as a gift for Catherine, her initials entwined with the lord admiral's, worked in silver wire—when Jane abruptly turned to me and murmured, "I am so happy here, Elizabeth. You cannot imagine how it was."

"I, too, am happy," I responded.
Imagine what?
I wondered.

"I should not speak of it," she said.

"But do, dear cousin," I urged.

"My parents are so severe," she confided in a tearful voice. "Whether I speak or stay silent, sit or stand, eat, drink, be merry or sad, whether I am sewing or playing or dancing or doing anything else, I must do it perfectly. As perfectly as God made the world! If I do not, I am sharply taunted by my mother and cruelly rebuked with pinches and slaps by my father. I sometimes thought myself in hell, until the lord admiral took me as his ward and promised my parents that he would secure a bright future for me."

Jane was not the sort to wail and sob, as some might have done. Instead, after this recital of the terrors of her life with her parents, two perfect tears fell from her eyes, like pearls, and rolled softly down her pale cheeks. And when that was done, she returned to her needlework as though nothing unusual had been said.

"Perhaps it is better to be an orphan," I suggested. "Like me. There is not much that either of us can do with our lives just now, except when others decide to help us."
But someday,
I thought,
it will be different for me. The day will come when I will make my own decisions.
I did not voice my thoughts, for I didn't believe Jane would understand my determination.

"How fortunate for both of us to have the care and affection of the lord admiral," said Jane.

"How fortunate, indeed," I agreed. I wondered if she knew that Tom intended to use her to further his own ambitions.

Many times, I confess it, I simply wanted to be rid of Jane, because I wanted more of Tom Seymour's attention and affection for myself. I knew it was wrong. I knew that Tom was now a married man and that I was betraying my dear stepmother's trust in me.

And yet, how I yearned! I turned his least glance, his smallest joke, into something that meant that he returned my youthful passion. I'm certain that Lady Jane didn't notice the long looks I gave the lord admiral when he barged into our classroom (to the obvious irritation of Professor Grindal) and in his booming voice bade us read aloud to him. Or how, when we supped together, I contrived to sit closer to him.

Kat noticed, though. "For shame, madam!" she admonished me when I had been mooning after him too obviously. "It is apparent to all that you throw yourself in the baron's path at every opportunity. And he the lawful husband of your benefactress!"

But I could not stop myself. Nor did the lord admiral do anything at all to cure me of my lovesickness.

When summer came all of us moved from Chelsea Palace to the countryside of Gloucestershire. The baron of Sudeley had ordered the refurbishment of his castle for his bride, and my lovestruck fantasies continued to bloom there like summer flowers. If Queen Catherine noticed she said nothing, probably assuming I would outgrow my foolishness.

How many times in the months that followed did I wish that she had been right.

During the weeks and months after my father's death and the accession of my brother to the throne, I heard little from my sister, Mary. She did send me a gift on the occasion of my fourteenth birthday, in September, a pretty pair of kidskin gloves embroidered with pearls. I wrote to thank her, but otherwise I did not write to her at all.

I didn't see her until Christmas, when we were summoned to court by King Edward. Mary arrived adorned in jewels and all sorts of finery, and she looked in better health than she had at our father's funeral. We greeted each other as sisters must, smiling and exchanging pleasantries.

But they were
only
pleasantries. In truth Mary and I had little in common; a difference of seventeen years in age counted for much. Under other circumstances—had she not so hated my mother—Mary might have been a mother to me, as she had been to Edward.

Mary must have been as bewildered as I was by the changes that had taken place in our young brother. Edward at the age of ten was but a slim boy, still a long way from growing into manhood. Yet he appeared determined to live up to his role as our father's son. He behaved as though he already completely filled the shoes of our father!

I ran to embrace him, as I always had. But instead of welcoming me as he once would have, Edward folded his spindly arms across his chest and, frowning, made a sign to his uncle the lord protector.

"My lady Elizabeth," Edward Seymour intoned in that arrogant voice that I so despised, "you are ordered to kneel five times in the king's presence."

Five times!
Even our father, who demanded every display of respect from his subjects, had never required that I kneel more than three times! I had learned as a young child never to question the king's will, and so I did now as I was bidden. Only then did King Edward greet me, solemnly holding out his hand so that I might kiss the large ruby ring he wore on his thumb. My brother's behavior seemed ridiculous, even pathetic.
Perhaps,
I thought,
he must act this way in order to feel that he is really and truly the king.

At each of the nightly Yuletide banquets, my brother sat at the center of the long table with his little dog on his lap. Above him hung the cloth of estate, an elaborate canopy signifying that he—and only he—was the sovereign. Mary and I were led to stools placed far down the table, far enough away from Edward to make certain we weren't in any way covered by that cloth of estate. I wondered if Mary was as irked by this as I was, perhaps even wounded, but she gave no sign, and I decided to make no comment.

It was only when Edward and I were occasionally alone during the visit, when he forgot his posturing and once again called me his Sweet Sister Temperance, his affectionate name for me, that I felt I was with my own dear brother again. Yet the moment Edward Seymour or any of the privy councillors entered the room, Edward immediately became the imperious monarch again, and I was expected to play the role of the obedient subject.

When the season ended, after Twelfth Night, Mary and I left court and went our separate ways without once having spent any time alone together, and I wondered if I had lost my brother forever to the manipulation of his advisers.

I
N JANUARY
of 1548 London suffered another outbreak of the plague, which carried off my tutor, William Grindal. I mourned him, and then I set about persuading my stepmother that I wished to have the noted scholar Roger Ascham as my tutor in his stead. Catherine had someone else in mind, and so I took my appeal to the lord admiral. I was quite certain of my ability to cajole him, and I knew that Catherine would do whatever Tom decided.

"And do you always get what you want, my lady Elizabeth?" Tom asked in his teasing way.

"Whenever possible, my lord," I said, offering a sweet smile.

"Then you shall have your Master Ascham," he said, patting my arm. And so I did.

I
HAD BEEN
living under my stepmother's roof for a year when Catherine called me into her chamber one day when Tom was away. She looked tired. I was alarmed to see her lying listlessly on her couch.

"Are you unwell, madam?" I asked.

"I am quite well, Elizabeth," she said, and she smiled wanly. "I am with child." She reached out and grasped my hand in both of hers.

This was another shock to me. I was pleased for her—in her three previous marriages she had borne no children, although those marriages had brought her stepchildren. And now, at last, this. But Catherine was not young. Bearing a child would not be easy for her.

I uttered all the proper words to wish her well, but I'm ashamed to say that I still hadn't banished my yearning for the man who was her husband. More and more I invented excuses to be where he would notice me; I insisted that he must hear me play a new piece upon the virginals or admire a bit of my needlework. My laughter, when Tom was present, pealed a little too loudly.

It is impossible to imagine that Catherine had overlooked my behavior. Kat frowned. More than once even little Jane Grey raised her eyebrows, as though sensing something amiss. At times I feared that someone would write to my sister, Mary, who would censure me or—worse yet—speak to my brother, the king. Edward was becoming unbearably prudish; if he suspected that my heart raced and my hands grew damp in the presence of the lord admiral, what would Edward have said to me? What would he have
done
? He could have sent me to languish far away from Tom and the queen. I shuddered at the trouble in which I could have found myself. Yet I could not stop. Then I did an immensely foolish thing, and it changed everything.

One afternoon Lady Jane and I had labored at our lessons for hours. Professor Ascham prodded us relentlessly as we pored over our books. I had never thought our classroom gloomy before, but suddenly I could bear it no longer. It was late spring, and the weather was warm, sweet, tender. At last we closed our books, laid aside our pens, blotted our papers. While Jane lingered to debate some fine point of Greek grammar with the tutor, I escaped toward the outdoors and the fresh air.

As I rushed through a doorway leading to the stairwell, I collided headlong with the lord admiral. In his usual rambunctious way, Tom caught me in his arms. For a moment we stared at each other. The next moment I found my lips pressed upon his. I did not pull away from the embrace, nor did he.

Then suddenly I heard a shocked voice. "My lord!" Catherine cried. "Elizabeth!"

We drew quickly apart. My stepmother stood on the stairway above us. The lacings of her gown were already stretched tight across her belly, and she looked old and worn. Tom hurried up the stairs to her, protesting, excusing, making a joke. I could not even bear to look at her. I fled to my chambers, my legs trembling and my face hot with shame and embarrassment.

Kat was reading as I rushed in and flung myself miserably upon my bed. "My lady!" Kat exclaimed, dropping her book. "What is it? Are you ill?"

"My stomach pains me." I wept into my pillow. "The monthly curse."

"Let me bring you a potion of herbs," she said.

Obediently I drank the bitter liquid, which did nothing to ease what afflicted me.

That evening I sent word that I was unwell and would not join the others at supper. A servant appeared at my door with a tray. "The dowager queen has sent this for you," she said, and set the tray on my table. But I couldn't bring myself to eat even a morsel.