The Fallen Queen - Emily Purdy

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like a metal-barbed whip; she accused the Lord Admiral of wanting her dead so he would be free to marry Elizabeth, his little wanton strumpet of a stepping stone leading straight to the throne. And Jane had with her own eyes seen him pour a white powder into a goblet of wine and press it to Catherine’s lips, forcing her to drink, tightening his grip and pressing the golden rim harder against her lips when she shook her head and tried to pull away, and afterward holding his hand over her mouth to make her swallow when he thought she might attempt to spit it out. She died with small, round, livid purple-red bruises from his fingertips marring her cheeks and jaw. When the time came to bathe and clothe her corpse, her favourite lady-in-waiting, a stepdaughter from Catherine Parr’s first marriage, Lady Tyrwhit, had painted over them with a paste of white lead and powdered alabaster to restore her complexion to pearly consistency.

      Before Catherine died, a lawyer was summoned—Jane herself opened the bedchamber door to let him in—and the Lord Admiral prompted his fading wife to dictate a new will leaving all her worldly goods to him, thus making him a very rich man. He even gripped her hand and guided it across the parchment to sign her name, leaving bruises upon her knuckles that Lady Tyrwhit would also lovingly conceal. It disturbed Jane to recall how hard he had held her hand, hard enough to make the bones crackle and grate as if his bride’s very bones protested his cruel, duplicitous ways. “There was naught of love in his touch, no tenderness, only cruelty and a determination to have his will,” Jane said. “I wanted to do something, I wanted to stop it, but I was as helpless and powerless as the Dowager Queen was in the end. He as her husband had all the power.”

      But there was more, much more—the kinds of secrets that weigh so heavily upon a young girl’s heart.

      “I too sinned against the Dowager Queen,” Jane, in a voice suffused with shame, confided. “She was more like a mother to me than our own—patient, loving, encouraging, and kind, so very kind—and I wronged her just as Elizabeth did, only she never knew it; I was not found out.”

      She went on to tell us how Thomas Seymour had fanned the flames of our parents’ ambition by concocting a grand scheme to marry her to the young King Edward. Outwardly it seemed a perfect match, Jane and Edward both being the same age, English, and devout Protestants, of serious rather than merry mind, and Jane had been named in honour of the King’s mother, Jane Seymour, the third and most beloved of Henry VIII’s six wives. Though the young king, who was after all only a pale, frail boy trying hard to ape his splendid sire, in padded shoulders and plumed hats, posing with fists on hips and feet in slashed velvet duckbill slippers planted wide apart, pompously proclaimed that he wanted a “well-stuffed and jewelled bride” for himself, his “jolly Uncle Tom,” who provided the young monarch with pocket money to earn his favour and gratitude, was certain he could persuade him that “what England needs most is a homegrown Protestant queen, a true English rose, like the Lady Jane Grey, who will uphold the Reformed Faith, not a French Catholic princess hung with jewelled crucifixes, dripping pearl rosaries, kneeling on an embroidered prie-dieu, and throwing boons to her pet cardinals and confessors.” Brash Tom Seymour had so much confidence in his own schemes he “could sell fire and brimstone to the Devil,” our lady-mother used to say as she toed a cautious line while our father wholeheartedly embraced the dream of seeing his firstborn daughter crowned queen.

      But no one asked or cared how Jane herself felt about the future that was being planned for her. She did not want to marry Edward; she felt the coldness emanating from him like a great blast of icy air so that even in summer she shivered and longed for her furs whenever she was in his presence, and she saw cruelty glinting in his eyes, and that made her tremble and fear the man he would grow up to become. And she didn’t want to be queen either. All Jane wanted—or thought she wanted—was her books, to spend her life quietly engaged in study.

      Like a nun taking the veil and becoming the bride of Christ, Jane wanted to dedicate herself to the Reformed Faith; she wanted no man or marriage to interfere and had no time or patience for romance and even turned up her nose and scoffed derisively at the very idea. Many a time I heard her chastising Kate for being more avid for love than learning and urging her to “despise the flesh.” Jane thought carnality was a vile, evil, disgusting thing and didn’t want it to sully her life in any way, not even in songs or stories; anyone she caught indulging in either she told to their faces that they should be singing hymns and reading Scripture instead. Rather fanatical upon this subject, she urged everyone to “despise the flesh” and resented any carnal intrusion into her life, even if it were only by accident.

      I remember once when we were going riding and walked in on one of the stable boys coupling with a wench on a bed of straw in a horse stall, Jane turned right around, strode straight back into the house, even as the boy and girl ran after her, half dressed, pleading for mercy, that they were in love and planned to be married soon, and reported the incident to our lady-mother and had them both dismissed from our service. And another time when she caught Kate sighing dreamily over a pretty picture of lovers kissing in a garden, Jane snatched the book from her, tore and broke its binding, and flung the whole thing into the fire and ran to wash her hands in scalding water, claiming they were as soiled as though she had just handled manure.

      Such heated reactions were all too typical of Jane, and our lady-mother said she pitied the man who would one day marry her as he would no doubt find Jane a very cold bride with “a cunny like ice.” Then Thomas Seymour came along like a whirlwind, sending books, papers, pens, and Jane’s own thoughts flying every which way in wild disarray, leaving all so disordered she didn’t know which way to turn or how to begin to put it all right again.

      It all began with a walk in the garden at Chelsea, Catherine Parr’s redbrick Thames-side manor, a talk about self-sacrifice and destiny, and one perfect pink rose. Catherine was busy with the dressmaker, having extra panels and plackets sewn into her bodices and skirts to better accommodate the child growing inside her, and she had asked Elizabeth to bear her company and help in the selection of materials for some new gowns she had impulsively decided to have made, complimenting her stepdaughter’s sense of style and colour, the bold choices she made that another woman with ruddy-hued hair might shy away from. “I need to borrow a little of your bravery, my dear,” Jane heard her say softly as she reached out a hand for Elizabeth’s. Perhaps it was only a charade to keep her stepdaughter in her sight and away from her husband, but sincere or feigned diversion, either way Elizabeth couldn’t say no without appearing impolite and ungrateful to her stepmother and hostess.

      So Jane, who had no interest in such fripperies and believed that “plain garb best becomes a Protestant maid,” was left to amuse herself and nurse the still healing bruises from a recent visit to Suffolk House in London where she had dared show herself “balky and sulky” at the prospect of becoming King Edward’s bride, boldly proclaiming that she didn’t want to marry at all, but to remain a lifelong virgin and give all the devotion a girl is expected to give her husband and children to the Reformed Faith instead.

      Our lady-mother had worn out her arm and painfully pulled a muscle trying to horsewhip such “nonsense” out of Jane and had to have the doctor in to poultice and bind it. She was angry as a baited bear for a week afterward since her injury forced her to stay home and forgo the pleasure of several hunting parties. And without her restraining presence, Father had gained several pounds at the picnics and banquets that attended these events and had to have most of his clothes let out.

      When our lady-mother heard that he had devoured the entire antlered head of a marzipan stag at the banquet following a royal hunt, she nearly screamed the house down and yanked several of his hunting trophies, his treasured collection of heads and antlers, from the wall and hurled them downstairs. Poor Father only narrowly avoided being impaled by the magnificent antlers of the king stag he had slain at Bradgate. And whenever our father came home, cheeks ruddy from riding hard in the bracing wind, the blood of the kill staining his hunting clothes, in a high good humour ready to boast of his prowess, our lady-mother would send a goblet of wine or a platter of food flying at his head and sulk all the more because she had missed all the fun, the thrill of being in the lead herself, the knife clutched in her hand, seeing the blade glinting in the sun, the scent of blood hovering like perfume in the air accompanied by the music of buzzing flies as she closed in for the kill, and woe to Jane, the cause of

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