The Manner of Amy's Death (4 page)

     “Why would he do that?”

      “So he can arrest Mary and imprison her in the Tower of course.  She won’t be able to cause much mischief there!”

      There’s someone at the door and Amy makes shushing sounds but it’s only her maid, Mrs Picto
, who is carrying her dress for the day, a riding outfit with a green velvet gown and a hat to match.  Amy’s very fond of beautiful clothes and likes to look her best on all occasions.  As Mrs Picto helps us on with our fine stockings, shifts, kirtles and bodices, another young servant comes into the chamber and curtseys to Amy, presenting her with a posy of flowers and lavender from “dear Robin” as Amy calls him delightedly. Among the flowers are two twigs from an oak tree.  It’s a joke.  The Latin words for oak are quercus robur; ‘oak Robert’, laughs his wife.

      It’
s not yet six in the morning but we’re to leave immediately.  We’ll be at Syon in just two hours time and will not eat until we arrive there.  Riding on a full stomach is most unpleasant.

     In the courtyard downstairs the grooms have the horses ready
and liveried men wait to accompany us.  Robert lifts Amy into the saddle of the horse he gave her just before they were married, a little grey mare he’d schooled himself.  He’s a fine horseman and, like all the men in his family, tall, athletic and handsome.  For Amy he was quite a catch!

      A groom lifts me onto my horse and Robert mounts Valiant, the high stepping black Spanish stallion that is his pride and joy.  No one can ride him but his master and even the grooms give his prancing feet a wi
de berth.  Half a dozen of Robert’s men are to accompany us on our journey.  The streets are quiet at this time of day but outside London brigands lurk in the woods and along the roadside.  With a clatter of hooves in the courtyard we’re off.

      At the house of Amy’s mother, Stanfield Hall, we led a pleasant but
not over-indulgent life.  She’d married Amy’s father when her first husband died and left her with young children.  Stanfield was hers and Amy’s father, a wealthy gentleman farmer called Sir John Robsart, left his own manor house, Syderstone, which was in a considerable state of disrepair, to live at Stanfield. 

     
I joined the Robsarts when my mother, a distant relative of Sir John, died and my father left for Calais.  I never saw him again.  Amy and her half brothers and sisters were my kin as I grew up and, because Amy and I were the same age, I went with her when she married Lord Robert to be her gentlewoman companion.

      At Stanfield we’
d learned to ride the two white mules owned by Amy’s mother, Lady Elizabeth.  Sir John rode one of the heavy horses, so popular in Norfolk, around his farm lands.  And there were also two ponies, Meg and Molly, which had been childhood favourites with all of us.  But neither Amy nor I could ride well until she met Robert Dudley.  He trained two quiet horses for us to ride and gave us riding lessons.  Now we canter along and go over small ditches and streams laughing and screaming (which Robert tells us we should not do if we are to become proper horsewomen!) but I doubt that we will ever hunt and ride the way the royal ladies, Mary and Elizabeth, do.

      As we ride out of the courtyard and
over the cobble stones we’re silent, lost in thought, but we’ve barely gone three hundred yards when there’s the sound of another person riding hard along the dirt road behind us.  His horse skids to an abrupt halt in a cloud of dust and Amy irritably brushes the dirt from her gown. It’s Robert’s brother, Ambrose.

      “Robert, things are happening.  Father needs you at
Durham Place – straight away,” says Ambrose after the usual courtesies to Amy and me.

      “Oh well I suppose it’s better than Syon,” remarks Amy, turning her horse’s
head back to Somerset House.

      “I beg your pardon, Amy,” says Ambrose, “But the Duke wants no one but Robert.  Some of the Privy Counsellors are there and this is not a meeting in which women can play any part.”

      Rebuffed
and annoyed, Amy rides her horse back along the road to Somerset House, passing the gate to Durham Place on the way.  She enters the courtyard without a farewell to either Robert or his brother and I follow her.  I can see she’s seething. The men follow us while Robert accompanies Ambrose through the gates of Durham Place.

      One of the grooms helps Amy down from her horse and she t
osses her reins over to him and goes striding back into the house removing her gloves.  I hasten to catch up.  When we get inside she flings her gloves down on the table and marches upstairs and down the Long Gallery to a small chamber overlooking the gardens.  I close the door behind me.

      “He’s always
doing this, always,” she rants, once we are safely inside and the door is closed.

      “Who is?”

      “The Duke.  Who else?  He thinks he can do as he pleases.”

      “Well, he can, can’t he?  And he must have a reason for wanting Robert so urgently.”

      “He uses him like an animal.  He may as well put a bridle on him.”

      I let her go on in this way.  I guess that, having said she didn’t want to go to Syon, she’d been curious to find out what was happening there and was looking forward to a ride out with her husb
and anyway; a rare pleasure, now missed, and her second disappointment in two days.  There’s a knock on the door.  Amy looks up eagerly.  Has Robert returned for her?

      Two servants come in with plates of cold meat, bread, honey cakes and warm spiced wine.  It should cheer her up but it doesn’t.  Amy looks around for the sugar to put into her wine.  It’s a disgusting habit she picked up at court.

      “At least we don’t have to have breakfast at Durham Place,” I say.  “I hope the cook doesn’t poison half the Council at the meeting.”

      Amy nearly chokes on her wine with laughter at this.  Her foul mood is
temporarily broken.

      “He may just serve them salad again!”

      We dissolve into fits of giggling at our private joke.  A few weeks earlier Robert’s brother, Guilford, had married Lady Jane Grey at Durham Place.  In fact it had been a triple wedding celebration with Robert’s youngest sister, Katherine, and Jane’s sister, also named Katherine, marrying at the same time.  Durham Place with its beautiful marble pillars was an opulent setting for the weddings – no wonder Northumberland was so eager to take the palace from Elizabeth!  What’s more the banquets were quite unbelievable with food of every kind, venison pies, roast beef, mutton, capons, pigeon and pheasant, larks and swans garnished with spices and salad leaves, almond tarts, jellies, junket and custards, marzipan in the shape of tiny fruits.  There were pageants and masques with dancing in the evening.  A wonderful celebration indeed!  Except for one thing!

      A good number of the guests were very ill afterwards and the shame faced Duke accused the cook
of mistaking one salad leaf for another leaf which was poisonous.  Amy and I were not at all ill; we hate salad!

      “William
Cecil’s face was green!” laughs Amy.

      “It’s a good thing the King was too ill to attend.  Can you imagine if your father in law had finished him off?  Everyone would have said it was a deliberate attempt to replace the
monarch by poisoning him.”

     
This sobers us up considerably.  It might just have happened too and the consequences would have been too dreadful to contemplate even though the Duke would never think of harming King Edward.  Some of the guests were still very ill two weeks later and many said that it was a bad omen for Guildford and Jane.

      Amy and I eat our breakfast
deep in thought.  Then we while away the morning talking about Jane Grey.  She’s a strange one and we find it hard to make her out.  First of all she’s so serious; it’s said that she’s the most highly educated woman in the country and she’s just sixteen!  Not much fun to be with though!

      “You can say what you like but I think you can have too much studying,” says Amy, who’s sensitive to the fact that, while she was well educated by
Norfolk standards, she’s quite a dullard compared to ladies such as Jane and Elizabeth.

    
Jane shared some of her lessons with the King himself; they are almost the same age and second cousins.  Elizabeth and Robert had also been educated at court and by the same tutors.  They were both bright and gifted scholars who were friends from the age of eight; Amy knows this and resents it.  She feels left out and Elizabeth, it seems, on the few occasions that she and Amy have met, takes great pleasure in talking to Robert in Latin in Amy’s presence.  Amy’s provincial tutoring means that her Latin is not up to their level.  What’s more she has a strong Norfolk accent, a subject of much amusement among some of Robert’s friends.  And Elizabeth knows this and delights in the fact that Robert’s wife is made to feel inferior. 

      “Jane says that her parents insisted that she had to be the best at everyt
hing, even when she was dancing,” I say.

      “
I feel sorry for her,” says Amy, “She says if she showed any pleasure she was criticised for enjoying herself too much and not trying hard enough.  She says they used to pinch her if she did anything wrong.”

      “Her parents have high hopes of her
.  She’s the eldest girl and they have no boys.  At least they’ve given her an education fit for ….”

      “A
Queen?”

      “I was going to say ‘fit for a boy’.”

      “They say the King wants her to be Queen after him and he’s written it in his will, his own device for the succession,” says Amy.

      “
Hm!  I wonder if that was Edward’s own idea. It sounds like Northumberland to me.  Is that why the Duke wanted her married to Guildford - so that his own son could be king?”

      “That’s what they’re saying at court –
not in front of Northumberland of course.  They say that the Duke persuaded Edward to choose Jane as his heir to make Guildford king.  King Guildford!  It doesn’t sound right, does it?”

      “
Not to me.  Where are Guildford and Jane now?”

      “Until
a few days ago they were living in Katherine Parr’s old house in Chelsea.”

      “And they’re still there?”

      “Who knows?  With Northumberland anything can happen.”

      We then
travel down another path in our conversation and start to discuss the mentor of Jane Grey, Katherine Parr, and her strange life, her marriage to Henry VIII and how close she came to execution for her strong evangelical views and for disagreeing strongly with Henry over this.  We talk about her friend, Anne Askew, who was tortured in the Tower in a failed attempt to make her implicate Katherine in holding treasonous views (that is to say, views contrary to Henry’s views) on religious reform. 

     
And then we recall in fascinated horror the story of how Anne’s broken body was finally tied to a chair and fastened to the stake where she was burned for her refusal to inform on Katherine Parr and the rest of her friends.

      Of course we cannot remember all this.  We were small children at the time.  But the people remembered and the story of Ann
e Askew passed into the realm of folk lore.  Never before or since has a woman been tortured on the rack.  It brought shame to Henry in the eyes of the people.

     
But it terrified Katherine Parr who apologised to her husband for her wayward views and was ultimately saved by Henry’s very timely death.  She then shocked everyone by marrying her old love, Thomas Seymour – the same Thomas Seymour, later to be Earl of Sudeley, who had indulged in scandalously inappropriate behaviour with the young Elizabeth while Katherine was pregnant with his child. 

     
Elizabeth left the house in disgrace but another person, loyal to Katherine Parr, stayed and this was their other ward, a very young girl - named Jane, the same Lady Jane Grey who is now Amy’s sister-in-law.  It’s a small world! 

     
Jane had been Katherine Parr’s most trusted companion, even though she was just twelve at the time, and had taken in Katherine’s very advanced views on religious reform.  Fortunately the new King Edward shared their views so they no longer had any need to fear the bonfire or the executioner’s axe.  Edward’s introduction of a new English Prayer Book had fulfilled all Katherine’s dreams.

      But, after the
Elizabeth scandal, tragedy struck.  Jane had travelled with the pregnant Katherine to Sudeley House in Gloucestershire and remained with her during her confinement.  Jane had loved the huge library there and the birth of the child was eagerly anticipated.  But her role was not to be that of older ‘sister’ to the baby; instead she became chief mourner at Katherine’s funeral when the poor woman died of fever soon after giving birth. 

  
   Jane had been in her twelfth year at the time of the funeral but she had learned many valuable lessons from the time spent in the care of the generous and kindly Katherine.  She became her own person, strong in her views to the point of rudeness to those who disagreed with them.  She grew into a mature woman and was old beyond her years by the time she married the much loved and doted upon Guildford, younger brother of Robert Dudley.