The Fallen Queen. Emily Purdy

was so overcome by the Lord Admiral’s declaration of love that she couldn’t eat a bite, only gulp nervously at the ale, and the honey cakes grew cold as her face and heart grew hotter. And when they walked back to the house, arm in arm, this time at a more leisurely pace, the Lord Admiral paused to pluck a pink rose and present it to Jane.

      “Every morning when the dew appears upon the roses, always remember, my dearest, darling Jane, that they are weeping in envy because their colour cannot compare with the pink in your cheeks …” And then he bent his head and pressed a last lingering kiss onto her cheek. “And lips …” And he kissed her, long and deep, and she tasted the cakes and ale still fresh upon his mouth.

      When Jane ascended the stairs, she encountered Elizabeth upon the landing in a bold red gown that, coupled with the fiery unbound hair streaming down her back, made her look like a figure of flame. She was standing beside the window that overlooked the garden, idly tracing the CP and TS worked in red, gold, and green stained glass, moving her long, pale white finger in such a manner that, with a confident brush of her fingertip, the C acquired an extra appendage and became instead an E with a middle arm reaching out greedily for TS—Thomas Seymour. At Jane’s approach, she abruptly turned around and gave Jane such a blazing, burning stare, the fire in her eyes as bright as her Tudor red hair, that Jane was certain that Elizabeth had seen what had just passed between the Lord Admiral and herself, that looking from a window above she had witnessed that tender kiss and imagined the words of love that accompanied it. Then Elizabeth turned on her heel, her loose hair flying out like a curtain of flame, almost slapping Jane in the face, and, with her nose in the air and a impertinent flounce of her harlot-scarlet skirts, flounced upstairs to her room and gave such a resounding slam to her door that it echoed throughout the manor.

      The next morning, warm under the fringed velvet coverlet of her deep feather bed, Jane would smile to herself and wiggle her toes when she heard Tom Seymour creeping down the corridor and the door to Elizabeth’s room creaking open, happy and secure in the knowledge that it was herself that the Lord Admiral truly loved, not the brazen and fiery tart Elizabeth.

      “Elizabeth is just a toy, a peppery little tart to add spice to a man’s life, a dalliance that means nothing.” Thomas Seymour had shrugged when she dared to tentatively mention his seeming infatuation with the princess. “I am a man, with needs and urges, my darling,” he explained, “and, since I cannot have you, as there cannot be any hint of unchaste behaviour to sully the name of our future queen”—he lifted his handsome shoulders in a light, carefree shrug—“since I cannot have you … I amuse myself with Elizabeth, a little whore born of a great one, but I don’t love her. How could I? When I love you, Jane, only you! I love you with enough nobility, respect, and honour to renounce you, to lay my own heart on the altar as a sacrifice and set you free, to serve a greater purpose. I cannot hold you back, my darling, for I love you far too much to think only of my greedy pleasure and deny England the queen it both deserves and needs.”

      In her bed at Bradgate, under the covers, safe in the loving arms of her sisters, Jane shook with sobs. “But I did not ask him about Catherine, his wife; I could not! I could not forget her. I could never forget her. She was so kind to me, but in those happy moments when he professed his love for me, I did not want to remember her either! He loved me! Someone loved me, really loved me! And that was enough! We knew we could not have each other, and I tried to tell myself that in truth we did no wrong, but we did, we did! The thoughts, the feelings, the desires were real and true and thus worse than what he did with Elizabeth, which was base and false and meant nothing! And now Queen Catherine is dead, and I cannot confess and beg her forgiveness. I shall have to live with the guilt for the rest of my life!” She sobbed and there was nothing we could say to comfort or console her; all we could do was hold her and let her cry herself to sleep.

      After the Dowager Queen’s death it all began to crumble. Her baby daughter died, yet another unloved, unwanted, and inconvenient little Mary. And without Catherine Parr’s restraining hand to rein him in, the Lord Admiral cast off all caution and common sense and galloped headlong at full speed straight into the briar patch of disaster. His last flamboyant gamble cost him all when he crept into the King’s bedchamber late one night and tried to steal the sleep-befuddled boy away to marry him secretly to Jane, hoping to see the marriage consummated and thus legally binding before the first light of dawn. In the morning light, he planned to return to the palace with the King and his new Queen, and replace his brother, Edward Seymour, as Lord Protector of the Realm.

      But he had forgotten to factor a watchdog into his plans—upon spying an intruder, the King’s pet spaniel barked. The Lord Admiral tried to distract the dog by snatching off one of his soft-soled velvet slippers—eminently more suitable for creeping about the palace after midnight than the Spanish leather boots he usually wore—and tossing it across the room, but Edward’s vigilant pet showed no interest and instead ran at the intruder and lunged to bite. The Lord Admiral panicked and pulled out a pistol and shot the dog dead, and thus ruined any chance he had of charming his nephew into an act of royal clemency. The guards came rushing in as Edward howled and wept, his bare feet slipping in the loyal canine’s rapidly cooling blood as he pummeled his formerly favourite uncle’s chest.

      Thomas Seymour spent the rest of his life in the Tower as, one by one, all his crimes came to light, his intrigues with pirates, a coin clipping scheme to embezzle money from the Royal Mint, the stockpiling of arms, and, most interesting of all to a public avid for royal scandal, the sordid details of his dalliance with Elizabeth. And that was the emphatic end to all plans to make a royal match for Jane as our parents hastily moved to distance themselves from Thomas Seymour and his foolhardy schemes.

      Our lady-mother rushed in a state of feigned alarm to the Lord Protector and indignantly informed him that her eldest daughter was not a pawn in the Lord Admiral’s game, and she resented and hotly contested all who tried to make it so. She slapped her palm flat and firmly down upon the King’s proudest achievement, his Book of Common Prayer that was to grace every church in England. “I swear it is not so and never was!” Jane, she firmly stated, had been the Dowager Queen Catherine’s ward, and she had promised to arrange a suitable marriage for her; she had even hinted, our lady-mother with a demureness any who knew her would see through like the finest Venetian glass, that his own son, Edward Seymour the younger, had been one of the likely suitors Catherine had in mind, praising to the skies his wisdom, maturity, and charm, proclaiming him a promising young lad poised to follow in his father’s footsteps. After all, with Catherine dead, there was no one to contradict her but the Lord Admiral, and his own brother knew better than any that if Thomas said the sky was blue it was best to glance upward just to be sure. And our lady-mother was canny enough to add that the Dowager Queen had told her in confidence that she herself had no quarrel with the Lord Protector and his wife, that the unpleasantness over the ownership of some jewels, whether they were Crown property or the Lady Catherine’s, had been blown entirely out of proportion by the Lord Admiral; “knowing your brother as well as you do, my lord,” our lady-mother added in a low voice accompanied by a sympathetic nod, which she reenacted for our father later, “I am sure you understand.”

      While the storm was bursting over Tom Seymour’s head, Jane languished and moped around Bradgate. She tried to lose herself in the pages of her beloved books, to pound sense back into her head with Socrates and Scripture, struggling and fighting against her secret love for the Lord Admiral, now crushed like a flower under the hard boot heel of Truth, yet still stirring weakly with life, trying to revive itself even as Jane resisted. For all she disliked Elizabeth, many years later when I grew to know our sovereign lady better and witnessed personally her fight against her feelings for that charming, seductive scoundrel Robert Dudley, I would think that she and Jane had far more in common than either of them could ever have guessed.

      Finally, our lady-mother, “sick unto death of Jane’s sullenness and gloomy face,” decided to accept Princess Mary’s invitation to have us come spend Christmas and New Year with her at Beaulieu Manor in Essex.

      Kate and I were unable to conceal or curtail our excitement, bobbing up and down on our toes and fidgeting enough to provoke some sharp words from our lady-mother, until