Behind the Palace Doors by Michael Farquhar Read Free Book Online Page A

meeting with Seymour to discuss Elizabeth’s finances. Now, in the dankness of the Tower, all their dangerous discussions were exposed.
    Parry had sworn he “had rather be pulled with horses” than reveal any secrets. But confronted with very real terrors, he broke down and signed a detailed confession. “False wretch!” Kat Ashley cried when Parry and his confession were brought before her. She had languished in a grim dungeon—“so cold … and so dark”—but had said nothing. Now she had little choice but to tell what she knew as well, including details of those embarrassing morning romps in Elizabeth’s bedchamber. She admitted that she had frequently discussed Seymour with Elizabeth, and “hath wished both openly and privily that they two were married together.”
    A triumphant Tyrwhitt presented the signed confessions to Elizabeth and reported that she was “much abashed and half breathless” upon reading them. Humiliating as some of the revelations were, though, Elizabeth was quick to recognize that they weren’t damning. Nowhere was she implicated in Seymour’s plot to marry her, and all Kat Ashley had to say about a potential union was merely foolish chatter, not evidence of criminal intent. The council was forced to agree. Only Tyrwhitt remained convinced that Elizabeth and her servants were holding back. “They all sing one song,” he wrote to the Protector, “and so I think they would not do unless they had set the note before.”
    In the end only Thomas Seymour forfeited his life. Elizabeth, on the other hand, managed to survive her brother’s brief reign with only her birthright taken away. But she came close to losing much more than that when her sister, Mary, became queen in 1553.

    Elizabeth was right by her sister’s side when Mary triumphantly rode into London to claim her crown after Northumberland’s defeat. But it wasn’t long before the new queen’s deep-seated resentments toward her sister began to aggressively spew forth. It was Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, who had, after all, supplanted Mary’s own mother, Katherine of Aragon, and who had viciously abused Mary, threatening at one point to poison her or “marry her to some valet.” And when Elizabeth was born, Mary was deprived of her rank as princess, declared a bastard, and relegated to a lowly status within her exalted half sister’s household. Her protests were met with Anne Boleyn’s order to “box her ears as a cursed bastard.”
    The numerous indignities Mary had endured as a young woman were now heaped upon Elizabeth, whose rank at court was often superseded by lesser royals, like her cousin Margaret,Countess of Lennox. * The queen even questioned whether Elizabeth was really her sister, noting cattily that she had “the face and countenance of Mark Smeaton,” the musician executed as one of Anne Boleyn’s alleged lovers, “who was a very handsome man.”
    Fueling Mary’s animosity toward Elizabeth was Simon Renard, the ambassador of the queen’s cousin Emperor Charles V. Renard perceived Elizabeth and her Protestant base of support as a threat, and was quick to exploit Mary’s innate suspicions about her sister’s loyalty. Elizabeth was “clever and sly,” he insisted, and possessed “a spirit full of enchantment.” Her very presence at court was dangerous, given that she “might, out of ambition or being persuaded thereto, conceive some dangerous design and put it to execution by means which it would be difficult to prevent.” Mary hardly needed convincing.
    To placate the zealously Catholic queen, Elizabeth adopted a submissive posture and requested instruction in her sister’s faith so that she “might know if her conscience would allow her to be persuaded.” Mary was at first delighted by Elizabeth’s apparent willingness to convert, but soon she saw how halfhearted it really was. Before her first mass, Elizabeth complained loudly all the way to church that her stomach ached, Renard