The Manner of Amy's Death Read online

  “The people will have whoever the Council says they will have and Robert says that King Edward wishes it to be Lady Jane. She’s Edward’s cousin and perfectly acceptable and both Mary and Elizabeth are the bastard daughters of divorced mothers.” Amy says this with a certain amount of relish and a satisfied smile.

  “Besides,” she says, “Jane’s an evangelical and follows the new religion, as does Edward and all of us. The people will not want a return to the old religion and Mary is a devout Catholic.”

  This isn’t quite what I’ve heard among the servants. They tell me that many people in London would welcome a return to the old religion just as long as the monarch was head of the church and not the Pope in Rome. And they have a lot of sympathy for Mary. I think, but I don’t say, that maybe the Dudleys are out of touch with the popular mood in the country.

  “Has the Duke told Princess Mary of her brother’s imminent death?” I ask.

  “No,” says Amy excitedly, “That’s the best bit. She still thinks her brother is ill but not close to death and Robert’s father has asked her to come to London to visit him at his sickbed.”

  “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 wide 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 tosses 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 husband 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 repla
ce 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 everything, 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 Anne 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.

  Oh yes, Amy and I agree, Jane has seen life in all its perverse vagaries and is no fool; she will not allow Northumberland to dominate her. She had been fortunate to have a very good teacher in Katherine Parr whose circle of intelligent and free thinking women friends had refused to be dominated by their husbands, even if poor Anne Askew had paid a terrible price for her courageous belief in the rights of women to hold an educated opinion.

  “If a woman can’t hold a view without fear of her husband calling her a heretic,” I say, “I think I’d rather not be married. Just imagine! You’re voicing your thoughts based on your studies of the new learning and the next thing your husband, whose probably got his eye on someone younger anyway, is turning you in to the religious authorities as a heretic so you can be burned and got rid of. Much to his convenience, of course! Very nice for him!”

  “Robert would never do that to me, Kate,” says Amy.

  “That’s because you got married for love, Amy, and not because your parents told you to. Do you remember Cecil’s pompous comment at your wedding? ‘I don’t believe in carnal marriages’ he said. It’s his favourite saying!”

  “Yes. He should talk! His first marriage was exactly that and his own parents didn’t even approve.”

  “Well anyway his first wife was lucky enough to die. Just imagine having to live with him, the old sour face,” I smile grimly. We both laugh.

  “But seriously,” Amy says, “Jane doesn’t seem to be averse to Guildford, even though it was an arranged wedding. But I know for a fact that she can’t stand her new father-in-law, Northumberland.”

  “There will be interesting times ahead,” asserts Amy as we walk around the gardens in the mid morning sunshine.

  She never spoke a truer word.

  Chapter Three

  The Dudleys Close Rank

  Just before midday Amy and I go into the house to eat dinner. We do not dine with the servants in the Great Hall, as is the custom when the master or mistress of the house is present. Instead we take our dinner in the withdrawing room upstairs. The cook has prepared a stew of young rabbit and with the fine manchet bread, it’s delicious. There are little tarts of preserved quince jelly to follow the meat.

  “You should not add sugar to your wine,” I reprimand her.

  “Why not? They do at court.”

  “Only because they c
an then drink more and be merry. The goings-on in the evenings at court are a scandal! Foreign visitors are disgusted.”

  Amy shrugs. “I don’t drink too much anyway,” she says. It’s true and I feel mean for spoiling her pleasure. Robert is often away on court business and, apart from me, she’s on her own and lonely.

  After our dinner we settle down to a game of cards but very soon we hear the sound of hooves outside. Amy leaps up.

  “Robert,” she says excitedly.

  But it isn’t; it’s his brother, Ambrose, and he’s alone. We watch from the window as he dismounts and strides towards the main entrance. Amy goes running down the Long Gallery to meet him.

  “Ambrose. What’s the news? What’s happening?”

  Ambrose puts a finger to his lips and looks over his shoulder to ensure we’re alone. We go back into the withdrawing room and Amy pours three glasses from the flagon ….. and adds sugar to her glass.

  “That’s a distasteful habit,” says Ambrose. Amy pulls a face and shrugs.

  “Well,” he says, “Let’s start at the beginning. Robert asked me to beg your forgiveness, Amy, for he can not return home this evening.”

  Amy’s face reveals her disappointment ….. and anger. But she keeps quiet, awaiting Ambrose’s explanation.

  “King Edward is within hours of death.”

  “God rest his soul,” says Amy and I say, “Amen” to that.

  “He will not live to see another day. Our sister Mary and her husband, Henry Sidney, are with him as we speak. Henry holds the poor boy in his arms and tries to comfort him. Edward is in terrible pain; he coughs up black, foul-smelling matter and is covered in sores. His death will be a merciful release.”

  We are all three silent as we reflect on the sad, short life of the poor young man. Jane Seymour, his mother, had died soon after he was born. His father, King Henry, had died when he was ten and then Edward had been prevented by his uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, from seeing his step mother, Katherine Parr, Henry’s sixth wife, who had been motherly and warm towards him. Then his cousin, Jane Grey, with whom he had grown up at court and of whom he had become very fond, was made a ward of his other uncle, Thomas Seymour, Earl of Sudeley, and his new wife – none other than Katherine, Henry’s widow. So Edward lost Jane’s company too.