The Men Who Would Be King Read Online Free PDF

being held by Catherine in the garden while Thomas, in mock anger, cut her black cloth dress to ribbons, was a kind of romping for which Elizabeth was a little too old, with overtones for which she was a little too young.
    Katherine Ashley watched the admiral’s behavior towards her charge with mixed feelings. She was impressed by him; just as he spent money in bribing young King Edward’s close servant Fowler, so the admiral spent time in charming Elizabeth’s fond governess, and even before the death of Henry VIII Kat had rewarded him by remarking artlessly that she wished he might marry Elizabeth. But now that he was married to the queen instead, Kat was perturbed by his familiarities with the thirteen-year-old girl. Once, disturbingly, he tried to kiss Elizabeth in bed, but Kat intervened and scolded him, telling him to “go away, for shame.” Another time, at Chelsea, a suspicious little incident was reported to the governess; Elizabeth had heard someone fumbling with the lock, and knowing it was Thomas about to come in, jumped out of bed and ran to hide behind the bed curtains with her maids, while he waited determinedly for her to emerge. Worried, Kat met him in the gallery of the Chelsea house, and told him that these things were being talked about, and Elizabeth’s reputation was in danger. Defiantly, “the Lord Admiral swore, God’s precious soul! he would tell my Lord Protector how it slandered him, and he would not leave it, for he meant no evil.” It was characteristic of Thomas to take it for granted that his brother would support him, and to persist in doing as he pleased.
    Kat Ashley told the queen of her anxiety; with her customary good sense, Catherine “made small matter of it,” and closed the subject by saying that she would accompany her husband in the romps in the future. However, it was Elizabeth herself who eventually quelled them, by taking care to be up and dressed and working at her books by the time Thomas came in to greet her. “At Seymour Place, when the Queen lay there,” the governess afterwards recalled, “he did use a while to come up every morning in his night-gown, bare-legged in his slippers, where he found commonly the Lady Elizabeth up at her book; and then he would look in at the gallery door, and bid my Lady Elizabeth good morrow, and so go his way.” Kat remonstrated with the admiral for coming bare-legged into the girl’s bedroom, and on this occasion he was angry, but stopped doing so—an indication that Elizabeth’s cooler reception of him was effective.
    The girl was unsettled by the unaccustomed physical encounters with a man. If at first she was delighted with the attention paid to her by her stepmother’s magnificent husband, and accepted his familiarities as friendly games, it cannot have been long before she became aware of the deeper element which so upset her governess and, eventually, her stepmother. There was a curious incident at Hanworth, when Catherine Parr told Kat that the admiral had looked through the gallery window and seen Elizabeth throw her arms around a man’s neck. Kat taxed the girl with it, and Elizabeth “denied it weeping, and bade her ask all her women. They all denied it.” On reflection, the governess knew it could not be true, because no man had been there, except Grindal the schoolmaster, and she finally came to the conclusion that the queen was jealous of Thomas’s interest in her stepdaughter, and had invented this report as a means of warning Kat to keep a close watch over the girl’s doings. Catherine was acutely aware of the dangers of scandal, even though Thomas apparently was not.
    The spreading ripples of disquiet in an otherwise happy household resulted rather from selfish irresponsibility in Thomas’s nature than from any better defined motive. His wife, the dowager queen, of whom he seemed deeply fond, was a healthy woman in her thirties, so