A Dangerous Inheritance (71 page)

“Good madam, how are you?” he asks, gazing down with pity on me.

“I am going to God as fast as I can,” I tell him. “I pray you all to bear witness that I die a good Christian. And I ask God and all the world forgiveness for my sins.” I pause, breathless. “I beseech you, Sir Owen, to promise me this one thing: that you yourself, with your own mouth, will request the Queen’s Majesty that she forgive her displeasure toward me. I confess I have greatly offended her, but I take God to witness that I never had the heart to think any evil against her. And I entreat her to be good to my children, whom I give wholly unto Her Majesty; for in my life they have had few friends, and they shall have fewer when I am dead, except Her Majesty be gracious to them.”

Sir Owen bows his head. “I will do it,” he promises.

“Another thing, sir,” I whisper. “I desire Her Highness to be good unto my lord, for I know that my death will be heavy news to him; and I beg Her Grace will be so good as to send him his liberty to comfort his sorrowful heart.”

Again my custodian nods, a touch reluctantly this time.

I make a final effort. There is one last thing I can do for my love.

“Sir Owen,” I say, “I ask you to deliver from me certain tokens to my lord. Give me the casket wherein my wedding ring is.”

I take out the ring I had for my betrothal. The diamond is as glittering and unfathomable as it was on that day, eight years ago, when Ned first put it on my finger. “Good Sir Owen, send this to my lord. This is the ring that I received of him when I gave myself to him, and pledged him my troth.”

“Was this your wedding ring?” my custodian asks.

“No. This was the ring of my assurance to my lord. This is my wedding ring.” And I lay in his palm the five-hooped band. “Deliver this also to him, and pray him, even as I have been unto him a true and faithful wife, to be a loving and natural father to my children. And here is the third ring you must give him.” I bring forth the death’s-head memento mori. “This shall be the last token unto my lord that ever I shall send him. It is the picture of myself.”

As I hand him the ring, I catch sight of my fingers. The nails have turned an ominous purple. My hour is upon me.

I turn my eyes to the door.

“He is come,” I say, and smile.

Lady Katherine Grey was first buried in Yoxford Church, with the Queen affording her a lavish funeral. She was mourned by many Protestants who had hoped to see her acknowledged Elizabeth’s heir. Elizabeth expressed formal sorrow at her passing, but the Spanish ambassador observed, “It is not believed that she feels it, as she was afraid of her.”

Ned outlived Katherine by fifty-five years. He did not remarry until 1596, his second bride being Frances Howard, daughter of Lord Howard of Effingham, the hero of the Armada. For years he fought to have his sons declared legitimate, but Queen Elizabeth remained obdurate. When she was dying in 1603, it was suggested that Katherine’s son Edward be named her successor. “I will have no rascal’s son to succeed me!” she retorted.

Edward and Thomas, who were brought up to honor their mother’s memory, were finally declared legitimate the following year, by a statute of James I. In 1608, the priest who had married Katherine and Ned finally came out of hiding and testified to the legitimacy of their union. Edward, Viscount Beauchamp, died in 1612; his brother Thomas had passed away in 1600.

In 1611, Ned’s grandson, William Seymour, made another misalliance with a lady of royal blood when he married Lady Arbella Stuart, the granddaughter of Margaret Douglas, Lady Lennox. Seymour escaped to France, but Arbella was imprisoned in the Tower and died there. Ned was still alive then. He heard the news of their elopement in the very room in Hertford House where he had married Katherine. He died in 1621, aged eighty-two.

Under Charles I, William Seymour was restored to favor and created Duke of Somerset. He died in 1660. It was he who, on his father’s death, had Katherine’s remains moved to Salisbury Cathedral, where
she was laid to rest with her husband in a great “Golden Tomb” with effigies of herself and her “sweet lord Ned,” with their two sons kneeling at either side.

The Latin epitaph on the tomb describes Katherine and Ned as “Incomparable consorts, who experienced the vicissitudes of fortune, and at last rest together here in the same concord in which they lived their lives.”

In telling this fictional version of the story of Lady Katherine Grey, I have adhered closely to the facts where they are known, although I have taken some dramatic license. For example, Katherine’s stormy confrontation with Ned over his flirtation with Frances Mewtas was acted out in letters; here, I have shown it taking place face-to-face. Much here is quoted from contemporary documents, and the letters are genuine; although some passages in Katherine’s letters have been used out of context, the sentiments relate accurately to the narrative. Archaic language has been modified to blend in with a modern text, although I have made use of many contemporary sources and idioms.

The long-accepted view of the Suffolks as harsh parents has recently been challenged, but there is no credible explaining away of Lady Jane Grey’s own bitter testimony to that, as recorded firsthand by Roger Ascham, and at least one contemporary source records Jane being beaten and cursed when she resisted her betrothal to Guilford Dudley. New research undertaken by historian Nicola Tallis suggests that the traditional view of the Suffolks is correct. It is conceivable that a chastened Frances mellowed after Jane’s execution, as portrayed in this novel, and that Katherine and Mary never suffered the rigor and expectations that their parents imposed on Jane. I would question the theory that there has been a deliberate attempt down the centuries to blacken Frances’s character.

Hester Chapman put forward the theory that Katherine’s head was so turned when she saw her sister made Queen that forever after her ambitions were focused on wearing a crown. Chapman believes that this is the only theory that makes sense of Katherine’s behavior, but I
think she was a self-obsessed girl who let her heart rule her head. Her instincts were emotional rather than logical, and because of that, she ended up out of her depth, in deep trouble.

Katherine
was
turned out of Pembroke’s house immediately after Mary I was proclaimed Queen. I have done my best to make sense of her religious persuasions and her dealings with the Spanish ambassadors.

Confusion surrounds the date of Frances’s second marriage, to Adrian Stokes, and the number of their children, yet an Inquisition Postmortem of 1600 dealing with Frances’s estates gives the date as March 9, 1554, only weeks after Henry Grey’s execution, and records their only issue as a daughter, Elizabeth, who was born in July 1555 at Knebworth and died there in February 1556. This Inquisition is listed in Vol. 34 of the
Calendar of State Papers: Domestic, Elizabeth I
(
www.british-history.ac.uk
). (I am indebted to Nicola Tallis for this reference.) Various historians have questioned Frances remarrying so soon after the death of her first husband, citing a report of the Spanish ambassador, Simon Renard, who, in April 1555, mentioned a proposal that she marry a descendant of the House of York, Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, although he added that the earl was unwilling. Courtenay’s biographer, Horatia Durant, suggests that the marriage to Stokes, made over a year before, had been a well-kept secret, which is likely. William Camden, Elizabeth I’s earliest biographer, wrote that Frances remarried “for her security.” As Dulcie Ashdown says, Frances would have been aware that, as a widow, she was “a tempting match for an ambitious nobleman who saw in her a means to future power”; being in line for the throne, her position was potentially dangerous, so she may have regarded a speedy second marriage to a man with no pretensions as the safest option.

As the law stood, Katherine was Elizabeth I’s heir, and many people supported her claim. I do not think she wanted to supplant Elizabeth, only to be acknowledged as her successor. To Elizabeth, though, she appeared a deadly rival whose very existence threatened her throne. If Elizabeth had had her way, Katherine would never have married. The Interludes in the book are there to show Elizabeth’s point of view; without them, she comes across as a cruel persecutor.

Some sources state that Katherine was demoted from Lady of the Bedchamber (the highest rank) to Lady of the Privy Chamber, others that it was from Lady of the Privy Chamber to Lady of the Presence Chamber, and some even claim she was demoted upward from the privy chamber to the bedchamber! It seems that she was actually downgraded from the bedchamber to the presence chamber.

The course of Katherine’s courtship by Edward Seymour, and his sister’s role in it, was much as it is portrayed here, and the account of their wedding day—and ‘night’—is based closely on their own depositions. Katherine’s love for Edward was the overriding passion of her life, and she remained staunchly faithful through every trial, until her death.

Katherine was unsure for a time whether she was pregnant with her first child, and when she knew she was, she took pains to conceal it for as long as possible. During this period, she did come to fear that Ned had abandoned her, which was when she began to seriously consider remarrying Lord Herbert. His furious rejection of her is well documented.

It was Lord Robert Dudley who revealed Katherine’s pregnancy to the Queen. There was no confrontation: Elizabeth ordered Katherine to be placed under arrest and taken to the Tower. Bess of Hardwick’s role in the affair—as Lady Saintlow (or St. Loe)—is recounted in the depositions taken after Katherine’s arrest.

It is possible that William Cecil did take a broader view of Katherine’s marriage, and that he approved of her being named Elizabeth’s heir. He himself said, “I have been noted a favorer of my Lady Katherine’s title.” However, as David Loades points out in
The Cecils
(The National Archives, 2007), Cecil did not declare for Katherine’s succession when the Queen was thought to be dying of smallpox in 1562. Instead, he seems to have “favored an interim solution while further thought was taken”—which suggests he had doubts, although certainly he desired to see the matter of the succession settled. His inquiries persuaded him that Katherine’s union with Hertford was no more than a love match—he called it ‘that troublesome, fond matter’—and not part of a plot against Elizabeth, yet whatever his private feelings, he followed the Queen’s lead in punishing the couple.

Katherine’s prison in the upper chamber of the Bell Tower still exists. During the Second World War, Rudolf Hess was briefly imprisoned there, and a lavatory was installed for the convenience of another expected Nazi guest: Adolf Hitler. Katherine was later moved to rooms in the Lieutenant’s Lodging, where her infant and her eight servants could be accommodated. The list of decayed furnishings sent by Queen Elizabeth still survives.

Sir Edward Warner did prove a sympathetic jailer. It was he who allowed Katherine and Edward Seymour to meet on two occasions, and when the Queen found out that Katherine’s second pregnancy had been the result, she had Warner dismissed from his post and imprisoned.

In Tudor times, many people referred to the White Tower, the keep of the Tower of London, as Caesar’s Tower, in the mistaken belief that Julius Caesar had built it.

It has long been thought that Katherine died of tuberculosis. The references to her suffering from heavy phlegm and being unable to eat may account for that. Recently, it has been suggested that her poor eating was symptomatic of anorexia, and that she literally starved herself to death. Certainly she was under immense stress for much of her life. The only telling symptom we have to go on is her nails turning purple just before she died. Commonly that indicates a lack of oxygen in the extremities, poor circulation, a respiratory or lung disorder, a cardiovascular problem and/or congestive heart failure. That might indicate tuberculosis, toward which malnutrition can be a major contributory factor. It is possible that Katherine caught it from Jane Seymour; she had been closely exposed to Jane for some time, as she would have needed to be to catch the disease, which is passed by droplet infection through sneezing or coughing. Sometimes the body’s immune system fails to destroy those bacteria, and latent tuberculosis becomes active years later. This is more likely to happen if the immune system becomes weakened by other problems, such as being undernourished and underweight, as Katherine was, and influenza and other infections can play their part; her phlegm may have been a symptom of that kind of illness. Therefore I have adhered to the traditional theory in this book. The account of Katherine’s death is closely based on fact.

Over the years, I have consulted numerous sources for the Tudor period, which inform my fiction, and the reader is referred to the bibliographies in my nonfiction books,
Children of England: The Heirs of Henry VIII
and
Elizabeth the Queen
, for those. For this novel, however, I am indebted particularly to the following works: