but you can imagine who will have the real authority for the next nine years.”
This was not a surprise, for I had known from the moment my father’s death was announced that Edward Seymour intended to grasp the reins of power in England.
One more thing: Tom Seymour had acquired yet another new title. He was now called lord admiral.
I learned this during one of the many dinners and suppers I shared during the following weeks with Queen Catherine. At least half the time, the lord admiral had no navy to command, no ship’s crew to attend; he only had us. I was better prepared now for his rambunctious greetings, as he would jump out at me from behind a tapestry or a table, seize me and swing me once or even twice around, and call out, “Welcome, my lady Elizabeth!”
I confess that I was not only prepared for his unconventional greeting, but I now looked forward to it. Catherine always watched this little ritual with a benevolent smile. When the lord admiral happened to be away on business, as he often was, I was disappointed. Of course, I took care to hide my disappointment. It would not do to have my kind stepmother suspect how eagerly I awaited those few precious, playful moments in Tom’s arms. I knew from the looks they exchanged that Catherine was deeply in love with Tom. What was not so plain was the depth of his feeling for her.
I was, as I have said, thirteen years old at the time, and I had begun to think of love for myself. Marriage did not tempt me, although I assumed it was my fate, as it was the fate of all women. Marriage was about securing property or power, and seldom had anything to do with love. I had only to look at my father’s six marriages to shudder at the prospect. Queen Catherine herself had been married twice to men much older than herself before she married my father, also much older.
Yet, I thought, when I do marry, it must be to a man like Tom Seymour: handsome, charming, dashing. “And”, as Kat was quick to point out, “with a bit of the devil in him.” She made that sound like a good thing. Increasingly, I wasted time in daydreams about what it might be like to be the wife of the lord admiral.
Then, early one May morning, Queen Catherine called me to her chambers. I was instructed to come alone. As soon as I arrived, she dismissed her waiting women. The queen bade me sit by her side, which I did, quite mystified by this unusual meeting. “I have a secret for you, Elizabeth, and for you alone. For my sake you must tell no one, although in time all of England will know.”
“I swear that I will speak of this to no one,” I said breathlessly.
“The lord admiral, baron of Sudeley, and I have married,” she said, blushing prettily. “Tom Seymour will no longer be a frequent visitor to our house. He will be living here with us.”
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.
THERE 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 demeanour, Jane seemed a good match for my brother. But there were already rumours 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 manoeuvring 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