Chapter 5
I did not become a reformer in a single afternoon, the way court gossip likes to compress a woman’s convictions into a tidy story with a beginning and an end. It grew slowly, planted in a household that knew exactly what such convictions could cost, and grew them regardless.
Hugh Latimer came to Brandon’s house in the early years of my marriage, when I was barely out of girlhood and still learning which of my new husband’s opinions I was permitted to share aloud.
He preached with a bluntness that unsettled half the room and thrilled the other half.
More often than not, I found myself among the thrilled.
He spoke of scripture as something a person could read and understand without a priest standing between a soul and its own conscience.
Something in me recognized the logic of this immediately.
Perhaps it was because I had spent my whole life being told what other people had already decided was best for me.
And here was a man suggesting I might decide something for myself.
Brandon allowed it. I have wondered since whether he agreed with Latimer or simply recognized that I had found something worth keeping and valued me enough to let me keep it.
Either reason suited me fine. I began reading scripture in earnest. Then I moved to theology, and then to the arguments circling Europe about what a church was actually meant to be for.
I was not clever in the way scholars are clever, with Latin dropping easily from my tongue.
But I was stubborn, and stubbornness reads as intelligence often enough if a woman fully commits to it and refuses to apologize for the commitment.
Miles Coverdale, whose translation had given England its first complete printed Bible, found an immediate welcome in my household when other doors were more carefully weighed before they opened.
He came to sit at my table and argued scripture as though it belonged to all of us rather than to Rome alone.
My home became known as a place where the new thinking was not merely tolerated but wanted.
I enjoyed the reputation this earned me nearly as much as I enjoyed the theology itself.
Of everyone that reputation drew toward me, no friendship mattered more than the one I already had with Katherine Parr.
What Katherine and I found in those years, beyond the friendship, was a shared appetite for argument itself.
She read Greek and Latin more fluently than most men at court.
In the privacy of her own rooms, she had begun writing devotional works that pushed further than anything she dared publish under King Henry’s eye.
We spent hours together over pages she had translated, neither of us willing to let a weak argument stand simply because it was convenient. I loved watching her mind work almost as much as I loved her.
I remember one particular evening arguing with her over a single line in her own manuscript.
She had written that faith alone, without the weight of good works, was sufficient for a soul’s salvation.
I told her she had gone further than half the reformers on the Continent dared go in print.
I asked whether she meant to publish something that would give Bishop Gardiner exactly the rope he had been waiting years to find.
She said that a queen who could not say what she believed in her own rooms had already lost more than Bishop Gardiner could ever take from her.
I did not win that argument. I am not certain I tried very hard because I agreed with her completely, but I was also frightened for her, which was a different thing.
Katherine once told me, half laughing and half serious, that I argued theology as though my life depended on winning. I did not entirely disagree with her assessment. But on that evening, I had not wanted to win so much as I had wanted her to be careful.
***
My reputation grew alongside my convictions, and not always kindly.
Men accustomed to women listening quietly found me difficult, because I had stopped listening quietly some years before and had no intention of resuming the habit.
I was called outspoken by people who meant it as a caution.
I was called stubborn by people who meant it as an insult.
I collected all of those descriptions the way some women collect jewelry, and I wore them without much shame.
After King Henry died, his son Edward inherited a throne too large for a boy not yet ten.
And the tenor of religious life in England shifted overnight.
The men who ruled in his name were reformers themselves, eager to push England further from Rome than King Henry had ever quite dared.
For the first time in my adult life, I did not have to measure every conversation against the risk of a king’s temper. I could simply openly speak.
I used that freedom the way anyone starved of a thing uses it once it is finally offered without conditions.
My household became an open destination for reform-minded scholars and preachers.
My patronage was sought by men writing translations who understood that a duchess’s name attached to their work carried weight the crown could not easily dismiss.
I openly funded, I housed, and I wrote letters that grew sharper with every year Edward’s council pushed reform further into English law.
Katherine, too, found a freedom of her own that spring, though hers was more personal than mine. Within months of King Henry’s death, before the court had even finished performing its official grief, she married Thomas Seymour in secret.
The two of them settled at Chelsea, in the house that had been part of her widow’s dower from Henry himself. I visited so often in those months that I came to feel almost like a member of that household myself
But we were not entirely alone in that house.
Young Jane Grey had come to live under Katherine’s roof that same February.
Jane was not yet eleven years old, and her wardship had been purchased outright by Thomas Seymour for two thousand pounds and a promise.
It was the same kind of promise that had once moved men to buy and sell my own future.
He had promised to marry her so well that she would marry young King Edward himself.
Jane’s mother was Frances Brandon - my own late husband’s daughter by Mary Tudor.
She was the girl I had quarreled with over petty things at Westhorpe a lifetime ago.
Now she was a grown, ambitious woman. Frances had agreed to Jane’s wardship, and I’m not sure she found anything remarkable in it at the time.
It was simply how girls of a certain blood were disposed of, and I had lived the whole of my own childhood inside exactly that arrangement.
But Frances’ blood ran straight to the throne, and Jane had inherited every drop of it.
King Henry’s own sister was Jane’s grandmother.
Frances was close enough to the crown that Henry’s will had named Frances’s family in the line of succession, behind his own children but ahead of nearly everyone else in England.
None of that crossed my mind in those first few months at Chelsea, though. I did not think of the succession. I only thought that Jane was better-read than most well-educated adults and asked questions no one quite wanted to answer honestly.
The Princess Elizabeth was there as well. She was thirteen and watchful, the way a girl learns to be watchful once she understands that her position can be reduced or restored entirely apart from her own conduct. I did not know then how much either girl’s future would come to matter to my own.
I understood Katherine’s marriage. She had spent years married to a king whose temper rearranged a room before he had said a single word.
And Seymour offered her the one thing Henry never had - a man she had chosen for herself, without a council or a crown standing between her heart and her decision.
I did not begrudge her that. I had watched her survive a marriage that nearly cost her everything.
If she finally wanted to have a marriage that cost her nothing but a season’s scandal, I understood the impulse better than most.
But I did not trust him, and I told her so, which was not a thing many people were willing to tell Katherine Parr to her face.
Thomas Seymour had ambition enough for three men and the patience of none of them. His own brother, Edward Seymour, now ruled England as Lord Protector for the boy king. And Thomas seemed unable to look at that arrangement without calculating how he might improve his position within it.
Even after Katherine was with child, Thomas Seymour courted the young Princess Elizabeth’s household with an attention that unsettled everyone who watched it closely, myself included.
By the spring of 1548, the whispers about his early-morning visits to her chamber had gone on longer than any tutor thought proper.
And rumors about his tickling her inappropriately had grown loud enough that Katherine herself finally sent Elizabeth away to another household entirely.
This was a decision I believe cost my friend more than she ever admitted to me.
She had to choose between the husband she had risked scandal to marry and the child she genuinely loved.
I said as much to Katherine over one of our last quiet conversations before her pregnant belly grew too large for comfortable sitting.
“You married a man who cannot stop reaching,” I told her, “and I have watched men like that reach until they pulled down everything around them, including the people who loved them best.”
She laughed at me. She told me I had grown suspicious of every man in England since King Henry died, which was not entirely unfair. She told me Thomas loved her, which I did not doubt. She insisted that love counted for something, which I doubted rather more than she did.
I did not enjoy being right about him. There was no pleasure in watching a friend’s judgment fail her, however loudly I predicted it would.
Katherine died in September of 1548 at Sudeley Castle, Thomas’ estate, a year and some months after her marriage. A fever took her days after giving birth to the only child she would ever have. Katherine’s daughter, Mary, arrived in a household already unraveling around her mother’s death.
Jane was there when it happened, eleven years old and present in the room for a death no child that age should have had to witness.
Worse, the household let her serve as chief mourner at the funeral.
I have never been able to decide which detail of that arrangement troubles me more: that an eleven-year-old girl walked at the head of a queen’s funeral procession, or that those around her found this practical rather than strange.
I have come to believe, though no one ever said it outright, that Seymour found her participation useful.
She was paraded as a queen’s honored ward, walking at the head of a queen’s funeral, as proof of exactly how valuable Seymour’s investment had become.
I do not think anyone asked eleven-year-old Jane whether she wanted the honor.
I do not think anyone asked her much of anything before they finally asked her to be queen.
I grieved Katherine the way I had grieved very few people in my life. I did not yet know that her daughter would become my responsibility within the year. I could not have known that Thomas Seymour’s ambition would finish destroying itself not long after hers had already been buried.