The Other Royal Family
By Leanda de Lisle
The Express (Monday January 19th 2009)
‘Imagine you are 13. Your home is lost, your sister and father executed. And you live in the household of the queen who ordered their deaths, Mary Tudor.
So begins the story of Lady Katherine Grey, sister of Jane, the iconic Nine Days Queen. A life as packed with sex and tragedy as the TV series The Tudors – but the end of which hid a royal secret.
To uncover this secret we must go forward to the dying months of Bloody Mary’s reign. Katherine, blonde, beautiful and now 18, was permitted briefly to nurse a sick friend at the girl’s home.
Her friend’s 19=year-ld brother, “Ned” Seymour, Earl of Hertford, was also there, and during the course of that hot country house summer, they fell in love.
Katherine and Ned were warned their romance was dangerous.
Queen Mary was sick, and the love affair posed a threat to Mary’s successor Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn. Under the will of Katherine’s great uncle, Henry VIII, backed by English law, Katherine followed Elizabeth in line to the throne. But many Protestants did not approve of unmarried queens.
If Katherine was married and had a male heir, it was possible they would prefer her to the unmarried Tudor princess. Indeed they had form in this regard.
In 1553 King Henry’s son, Edward VI, had cut Mary and Elizabeth out of his will and bequeathed his throne to his cousin Jane Grey.
Other Protestants backed his decision, principally because Mary was a Catholic but also because the Tudor sisters were unmarried while Jane Grey had a husband.
Mary Tudor, supported by thousands of ordinary people, overthrew Jane only nine days after she was proclaimed Queen in London. But, as Elizabeth never forgot, the Greys had continued to plot against Mary.
According to modern accounts Lady Jane Grey died an innocent. The image of the helpless 16-year-old executed on the block is a poignant one that became mythologized, even fetishised. The writer Nancy Mitford told Evelyn Waugh it was the source of her sexual fantasies.
But the real Jane was someone we would recognise: a teenage religious ideologue who understands the weapons of propaganda and embraces death for her cause.
Jane was executed after her father led a failed rebellion against Mary. She died in 1554 proclaiming herself a Protestant martyr.
Within weeks of her death her letters were published as anti Marian propaganda. They included one written to Katherine, as her spiritual and political heir.
It is not surprising Elizabeth did not trust Katherine and believed that for her own security she would have to ensure Katherine never had a male heir.
At the time of Queen Mary’s death Elizabeth was blissfully ignorant of Katherine’s romance.
Besides, she remained too busy pursuing her own passion for the married Robert Dudley to notice the affair going in under her nose.
After two years Katherine and Ned married secretly. The transcripts of later interviews in the Tower describe their wedding night in intimate detail. They married in his bedroom at a house on the Thames, with only his sister as witness. They toasted their wedding quickly and rushed to bed. They made love twice, with Katherine naked save for a fashionable headdress. Then they dashed back to court so they wouldn’t be missed.
Over the following months the couple had sex in all the Queen’s palaces. Katherine became pregnant but, frightened of the possible consequences, she wouldn’t accept it. So when Ned was offered a trip around Europe, Katherine agreed he could go.
When she was eight months pregnant she confessed to the Queen’s love, Robert Dudley, that she was to have a child. Elizabeth promptly threw Katherine in the Tower and Ned, recalled from Europe, was also imprisoned.
The fact that Ned had some royal blood and was the son of the Protector Somerset, who had brought Protestantism to England, made Katherine’s marriage all the more threatening to Elizabeth.
In September 1561, a male heir was born. Elizabeth ordered a Church commission to find Katherine’s marriage invalid. But sympathetic warders in the Tower let Ned creep to Katherine’s cell and her satin bed. Just as Elizabeth had Katherine’s first son declared a bastard, she gave birth to a second.
Elizabeth had the Lieutenant of the Tower put in his own prison for his laxity, and the couple were separated in different country house prisons. Katherine was frank about how much she now missed their love-making. In a previously unpublished letter she tells Ned how “I long to be merry with you”, as they were when their son was conceived: “I remember it more often that you know.”
She looked forward desperately to seeing, “my sweet bedfellow, that I once lay beside with joyful heart, and shall again”. But Katherine never would lie beside Ned again.
The unmarried Virgin Queen left her fertile cousin to rot.
As the years passed Katherine fell into despair at her continued separation from Ned and her elder son.
In January 1568 her warder sent a letter asking for the royal doctor to help her. It was too late. The dying Katherine begged the warder to send Ned a last gift: a ring engraved “While I lived, Yours”.
Then she died. She was 28.
Katherine was buried in a little chapel in Yoxford, Suffolk. Local legend has it that her toy dog pined on her grave until he died. But Ned survived and was freed in 1571, still hoping his elder son, Lord Beauchamp, would one day be King.
But at 19, Beuachamp fell in love win the same house as his parents had – but with a gentlewoman not considered grand enough to be future Queen Consort. Elizabeth, delighted, gave the marriage her blessing – to destroy his chances for the crown.
She always hoped a Stuart would inherit the English throne. They were excluded under Henry VIII’s will and by law but, as descendants of Henry’s elder sister their royal lone was senior to that of the Greys, descendants of his younger sister.
To Elizabeth this represented the divine right to rule.
She got her way and James Stuart, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, succeeded her in 1603. Ned lived long enough to see how unpopular James I became. He died aged 84, over 50 years after Katherine. Their grandson, William Seymour, then disinterred Katherine and buried them together in a magnificent tomb in Salisbury cathedral. The engraved words celebrate the starcrossed lovers reunited: the Queen who never was lying above her husband to mark her royal status.
Katherine’s story was, and remains, a reminder of the argument that the Stuarts came to the throne illegally. So it was buried with her.
Who knows where Katherine’s heir is today? Under the will of Henry VIII – whose 500th anniversary falls this year – that person is the rightful King or Queen of England.’
Copyright 2009 Express Newspapers.
