“The Lord Admiral came to me ... and desired me to write a thing for him. I asked him what. He said it was none ill thing; it is for the Queen’s Majesty. I said if it were good the Lords would allow it; if it were ill I would not write on it. Then he said they would take it in better part if I would write. I desired him to let me alone in that matter. Cheke said afterwards to me, ‘Ye were best not to write.’”[60]
The boy’s letter to the Queen proves that he had subsequently yielded to his uncle’s request; and in June the fact of the marriage became public property.
The progress of the love-affair will have been watched with interest by the curious and jealous eyes of Elizabeth, the half-grown girl, who, placed by the Council under her step-mother’s care at Chelsea, had ample opportunities of forming her conclusions. Lady Jane Grey may, not improbably, have been likewise a spectator of what was going forward. There is no evidence to show whether it was before or after the public avowal of the marriage that she took up her residence under the Queen’s roof. But, having obtained his point and gained her custody, it is not unreasonable to imagine that the Admiral may have found a child of ten an encumbrance in his household, and have taken the earliest opportunity of consigning her to Katherine’s care.
A passive asset as she was in the political reckoning, the debates concerning her guardianship must have done something to bring home to her mind the consciousness of her importance; and she had doubtless been made well aware of her title to consideration by the time that she became an honoured inmate of the Lord Admiral’s house. But concerning the details of her existence at this date history is dumb, and we can but guess at her attitude as, fresh from her country home, she watched, under the roof of her new guardian in Seymour Place, the life of the great city around; or within the more tranquil precincts of Chelsea Palace, with the broad river flowing past, shared in the studies and pursuits of her cousin Elizabeth, ready-witted, full of vitality, and already displaying some of the traits marking the Queen of future years.
Did the shadow of predestined and early death single little Jane out from her companions? Like the comrades of whom Maeterlinck tells, “children of precocious death,” possessing no friends amongst the playmates who were not about to die, did she stand in some sort apart and separate, regarding those around her with a grave smile? We build up the unrecorded days of childhood from the few short years that followed; and reading backwards, and fitting the fragments of a life into its place, we find it difficult to believe that Jane Grey’s laughter rang like that of other undoomed children through the pleasant Chelsea gardens, that she shared with a whole heart in the games of her playfellows, or that the strange seriousness of her youth did not envelope the small, sedate figure of the child.
CHAPTER VII
1547-1548 Katherine Parr’s unhappy married life—Dissensions between the Seymour brothers—The King and his uncles—The Admiral and Princess Elizabeth—Birth of Katherine’s child, and her death.
The belated idyll of love and happiness enjoyed by “Kateryn the Quene” was of pitifully short duration. During the first days of September 1548, some fifteen months after the stolen marriage at Chelsea, a funeral procession left Sudeley Castle, and the body of the wife of the Lord Admiral was carried forth to burial, Lady Jane Grey, his ward, then in her twelfth year, acting as chief mourner.[61]
Jane had good cause to mourn, in other than an official capacity. It is hard to believe that, had Katherine Parr been living, the child she had cared for and who had made her home under her roof, would not have been saved from the doom destined to overtake her not six years later.