The Men Who Would Be King Read Online Free PDF Page B

there was no reason to expect that he would ever be free to marry Elizabeth, even had the protector and council withdrawn their fierce opposition to such a scheme. That a man newly married to a charming woman should deliberately have courted the death penalty by seducing a virgin of the blood royal also seems highly unlikely. The key to Thomas’s behavior lay in the streak of naïveté beneath his vigorous masculinity; his thought was for immediate benefits rather than the eventual results of a calculated course of action. He was happy with Catherine, but he enjoyed the teasing romps with Elizabeth, which transformed her from a grave, self-contained royal scholar into a giggling hoyden, and he saw no harm in indulging his inclinations and giving her an occasional surreptitious kiss, which he could easily pass off as play. That servants’ gossip might endanger Elizabeth’s reputation, or that it might be disturbing for her to be prematurely aroused by a man who stood for her in the role of stepfather, seemed less important to Thomas than his apparently harmless wish to gratify thus his strong attraction to the girl.
    â€œThe Admiral loved her but too well, and had done so a good while,” Kat Ashley afterwards confided to Thomas Parry, Elizabeth’s cofferer, “in so much that, one time the Queen, suspecting the often access of the Admiral to the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace, came suddenly upon them, where they were all alone, he having her in his arms, wherefore the Queen fell out both with the Lord Admiral and with Her Grace also.” The admiral’s flirtation had gone too far; the laughter was hushed. Catherine was angry and unhappy. It was decided that Elizabeth and her servants must leave the admiral’s household, and after a painful interview with Catherine, during which the fourteen-year-old girl stood almost mute while her stepmother gave her quiet words of advice and warning, Elizabeth, her governess, her cofferer, and the rest of her servants set off for Cheshunt, soon after Whitsun 1548.
    Although I could not be plentiful in giving thanks for the manifold kindnesses received at Your Highness’s hand at my departure, yet I am something to be borne withal, for truly I was replete with sorrow to depart from Your Highness, especially leaving you undoubtful of health, and albeit I answered little I weighed it more deeper when you said you would warn me of all evils that you should hear of me, for if Your Grace had not a good opinion of me you would not have offered friendship to me that way, that all men judge the contrary, but what may I more say than thank God for providing such friends to me.
    So wrote Elizabeth to her stepmother. It was a forlorn letter, but the style and the exquisite, even handwriting showed a control far beyond her years. The girl who answered little but stood weighing matters the “more deeper” was learning, painfully, to suppress her emotional responses.
    Catherine was pregnant and unwell at the time. During Thomas’s temporary absences she exchanged bantering letters with him about their “little knave”—they took it for granted that their baby would be a boy—and Thomas teasingly instructed his wife to “keep him so lean and gaunt with your walking and good diet that he may creep out of a mousehole.” Elizabeth wrote, with a sad attempt at lightheartedness, “If I were at his birth, no doubt I would see him beaten for the trouble he has put you to.” Kind and sensible as ever, Catherine kept up an affectionate correspondence with her stepdaughter after their parting, and encouraged Thomas to write to her as well. “He shall be diligent to give me knowledge from time to time how his busy child doth,” Elizabeth wrote gratefully. At the end of August 1548, the child was born; it was a girl. Eight days later, Catherine died, raving with puerperal psychosis. There was a pathetic little scene shortly