The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (10 page)

The Duchess of Somerset remained determined to humble her rival. She refused to hold the queen’s train when she came to court, declaring that ‘it was unsuitable for her to submit to perform that service for the wife of her husband’s younger brother’. On more than one occasion, as the two women walked uncomfortably side by side, the duchess physically shoved Catherine out of the way in order to pass through a doorway first. This was outrageous behaviour, and the queen refused to stand for it, declaring that ‘if she does again what she did yesterday I will pull her back myself’.
65
To add insult to injury, Somerset informed his brother that he supported his wife’s actions.

Thomas retaliated by dredging up unfortunate episodes from his brother’s past. Calling in his lawyers, he sought their opinion on reinstating the children of Somerset’s first wife as his heirs in precedence to his offspring by Anne.
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This reopened painful wounds. Somerset’s first wife, Catherine Filiol, was rumoured to have been caught
in flagrante delicto
with a certain gentleman – believed to have been none other than the Seymour brothers’ own father.
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Catherine Filiol had been repudiated and ordered to ‘live virtuously and abide in some house of religion of women’, and there must have been whispers over the paternity of her sons.
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Perhaps no one knew the true parentage of the two boys, although their ‘father’ Somerset paid them an allowance when he became Protector.
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He had ensured, though, that it was his third son – and Anne’s first – who would one day succeed to his lands and titles.

Thomas’s meddling only served to cause further strife between the brothers, while Queen Catherine soon began to retreat to her household at Chelsea and the peace of the suburbs. She could at least now bring her new husband there openly, as master of everyone in the house. And this included Princess Elizabeth, who was approaching her fourteenth birthday.

*1
‘Plummet’ denotes the workings of a clock.

*2
As mentioned by James (p. 276). This seems to have been something of a theme for the Duchess of Suffolk. She also had a dog named ‘Gardiner’ after her enemy, the conservative Bishop Stephen Gardiner (Evans, p. 187).

*3
In the 1540s, marriage had only been recognized as a sacrament by the church for a century. This helped to move ideas away from an ideal life of celibacy; yet there was still something furtive about marriage for the sake of love or sexual attraction (see Haynes 1999, p. 1; Vives, p. 155). Wives, in particular, were enjoined not to ‘contaminate the chaste and holy marriage bed by sordid and lustful acts’ (Vives, p. 227).

June 1547. Princess Elizabeth lay in her bed, alone in her locked chamber. She heard a key turn in the door.
1
The sound of it roused her, and she was still blinking as fingers reached in and forcefully pulled back the curtains from around her bed. To her surprise, it was a male hand, one she knew well. Her new stepfather was already sliding his personal key to her bedchamber back into his belt.

Only thin coverlets lay over the princess, for the summer heat at Chelsea made her room stuffy. Dressed only in her loose-fitting nightdress,
2
she sought to shield herself from Seymour’s gaze, pulling the sleep-tousled sheets further over her young body. This shyness only made her visitor smile. Leaning into the bed, he called ‘Good morrow’, before seeming to pounce, as though he would climb in with her.

Stunned and blushing, Elizabeth shrank deeper into the bed, pulling the covers up to her chin and well above the low neckline of her nightdress. She moved as far away as possible ‘so that he could not come at her’; but she made no attempt to rise. Thomas Seymour stepped back eventually. Surely it was only a playful game. But Seymour noted that the girl did not actually protest.

In the summer of 1547, the teenage Princess Elizabeth, still swathed in mourning black, spent much of her time at Chelsea sitting at her desk. There, she read silently from her books, favouring the classical writers such as Cicero, Plato, Aristotle, who were so popular in the universities. At other times she wrote, furiously copying out a piece of translation or amending some composition. At a second desk, which faced hers, sat her tutor, the young, solemn-faced William Grindal, who also took the opportunity for his own studies. He was kindly, diligent and approachable, and the princess was fond of him.

Grindal had made the journey to Chelsea with Elizabeth and Catherine in April 1547. He was just one member of a sizeable household of servants, many of whom, within a few weeks of Elizabeth’s birth, had been sworn to serve her. They wore her livery, thus marking them out as Elizabeth’s people. In later life, she would choose stylish black satin for her servants. During her brother’s reign, she provided her gentlemen with fine velvet coats, each identical in colour and style. Those inferior in rank were similarly, but more cheaply, attired.
1
Elizabeth’s household now entered the confusing hustle and bustle of Catherine’s new establishment, unpacking chests marked with Elizabeth’s arms, which were stored haphazardly among the queen’s own possessions.

Elizabeth’s servants provided stability in a troubled early life. Appointments were long-term: of the thirty-two people employed to serve her when she was three years old, many still remained with her in 1546 when a second census of her household was taken.
*1
Her establishment was always growing too, so that by her late teens her wage bill was enormous.
2

The centre of Elizabeth’s world, as a young girl, had been her ‘lady mistress’, Lady Troy, while five gentlewomen provided female company and support – Kate Champernowne, Elizabeth Garrett, Mary Hill, Elizabeth Candish and Mary Norris.
3
Below them in rank were two female chamberers, who would remain in her service for at least a decade, as well as gentlemen ushers and grooms of her chamber. Her chaplain, Sir Ralph Taylor, was a similarly longstanding appointment, as was William Russell, one of the grooms of the chamber, who served her all through her childhood. Russell was prosperous enough to maintain his own personal servant ‘Charles’, who was so skilled in stitching that he made the princess’s corsets, artfully lining the garments with fine silk.
4
Agnes Hilton, who arrived each day to take care of the princess’s laundry, was a familiar face too: she scrubbed Elizabeth’s clothing and linens from the time of the girl’s infancy.
5

By the time of Henry VIII’s death, Blanche Parry, earlier employed to rock the princess’s cradle, had been promoted to become one of the gentlewomen.
6
Gentle Blanche had left behind her childhood in the glorious countryside of the Welsh Marches to serve the princess. Her arrival heralded a lifetime of devoted service, and she was to prove the girl’s longest-serving attendant. She was the niece of the aged Lady Troy and owed her position to this illustrious relative, who was also her godmother.
7
Blanche, whose surname was more correctly ‘ap Harry’ following the Welsh naming tradition, was with Elizabeth for almost every day of her young life. She quietly adored the princess, entertaining hopes that she would, in due course, succeed her aunt as Elizabeth’s lady mistress.
8
With the appointment of Katherine Champernowne as governess in 1536, however, a smooth transition of authority became far from certain.

Henry VIII, who had been impressed by Katherine Champernowne’s learning and the ‘distinguished teaching’ she could provide, had made the appointment himself. She hailed from the West Country. With her round, puffed face, ‘Kate’ – as Elizabeth called her – was homely looking, and affectionate. Born at the turn of the century, Kate was a spinster without family of her own. Instead, she lavished affection on Elizabeth, whom she treated as a daughter. It was only after 1545, when the middle-aged Kate surprised everyone by marrying, that the princess even had to share her affections with another.

Kate socialized mainly within Elizabeth’s household, so it was no surprise that her choice of husband came from within its ranks: a pleasant-faced, fork-bearded fellow, who had used a very distant familial relationship with the princess to obtain a place in her service. John Astley had suffered tragedy as a child, when his mother, Anne Astley, died giving birth to twins during a visit to the Boleyn family seat of Blickling Hall, in Norfolk. Anne’s sister Elizabeth, Lady Boleyn, commemorated the triple tragedy in a pathos-filled monument in the parish church. Such calamities were all too common, but the shock of the loss, so far from home, must have been particularly difficult for John and his surviving siblings back in Kent. He was always quietly reflective, later musing on ‘the frail and transitory state of man in this life’.

When Anne Boleyn – Lady Boleyn’s niece by marriage – became queen, there was a place for John Astley in her household.
9
He shared his royal kinswoman’s reformist beliefs, becoming by 1547 an ardent Protestant. In these views he complemented his bride Kate. The couple, in spite of some disagreements, were close,
*2
but Kate nevertheless retained considerable independence following her marriage, even going so far as to adopt her own pronunciation of his family name. While her forty-year-old husband was always resolutely ‘Astley’, Kate, with her Devon accent, preferred ‘Ashley’.
*3
Her refashioning stuck.

Kate’s role had initially been to teach Princess Elizabeth her letters and provide her with the rudiments of a good education. The motherless girl was a pleasure to instruct, thriving under what the scholar Roger Ascham described as her governess’s ‘excellent counsel’.
10
But there were limits to what even the educated gentlewoman could teach. Kate gave up her place willingly to a new tutor in 1544, when Elizabeth was ready to expand her studies. The new appointee, Grindal, had been suggested to King Henry by John Cheke, who had already been appointed as tutor to Prince Edward.
11
Grindal, who most likely hailed from the north of England, was young and badly in need of a job to relieve his poverty, for although a gentleman he had no independent means.
12
He came to Cambridge to study under the renowned Ascham, who loved him dearly, calling him his ‘most familiar friend’. Grindal was particularly celebrated for his knowledge of Ancient Greek, but the paucity of his wages at Cambridge had given him ‘neither heart for study nor a sufficiency to live on’.
13

The position of royal tutor was, by contrast, a lucrative one, and much sought after, with rewards on top of the salary that could be paid by a grateful princess.
14
The tutor was expected to supply the princess with books and a rigorous curriculum, but in return the holder of the post received privileged
entrée
into royal society.
15
As a teenager, the princess spent more time with her tutors than almost anyone else, and real affection could grow. Even as an adult, Elizabeth remembered her old schoolmasters fondly, greeting one (as he claimed) ‘as if I were returning to my homeland after exile’.
16
All in all, the opportunity was an excellent one for Grindal.

With a heavy heart, Ascham agreed to send his protégé southwards when he was called. He offered a character reference for his friend, recalling that Grindal was ‘a man of mark, and promise’ and that Cheke ‘shall find him diligent and respectful, zealous in learning and love of you, silent, faithful, temperate, and honest, and in every way devoted and well fitted for your service’. The quiet, studious young gentleman slotted perfectly into Elizabeth’s household. He immediately introduced his royal pupil to a rigorous curriculum of Plato, treating her like a university student several years older than she was.
17
He was pleasantly surprised that Elizabeth had already been well schooled by Kate Ashley, and he reported favourably to Ascham on her methods.
18
Grindal convened lessons for the princess every day of the week, and as Elizabeth settled down to life at Chelsea the daily routine continued unchanged.
19
Grindal also befriended Kate’s husband – the men met up to discuss the works of Cicero and other weighty tomes.
20
John Astley was intelligent and had enjoyed some learning; but Grindal – and Ascham, who started corresponding with Astley – opened up a new world for him, enjoining him to read so that his ‘ears so resound with the noble precepts of the book’.