6

Amy: Sheen Palace, June 1550

I met her first on my wedding day.

Robert’s elder brother John had married the day before us, in a great ceremony of pomp and display. The boy King Edward had attended and had taken much pleasure at the masques and banqueting which had surprised me for I’d known him only as a studious youth not much given to laughter. Robert had presented me to him when first I had come to court. I had already divined that he was serious to the point of tedium, which I suppose was all very well for a king but made him a dull companion. Robert told me he was very clever but that did not impress me; intelligence without wit seemed dry to me. He had been flanked by his advisers, Robert’s father Lord Warwick, all elegance and dark intensity, and the Duke of Somerset. The two men seemed to tower over the boy king like tall trees above a sapling, blocking out the light.

John Dudley had married the eldest of Somerset’s daughters, Anne Seymour, a pale and pious creature who was very aware of her own value. My marriage to Robert was an altogether smaller affair as befitted his status as a younger son and mine as a gentleman’s daughter. There were sore heads and dull eyes from the previous night’s revels but all the nobility was there for this pale echo of a Dudley marriage. It should have been the best day of my life.

Amongst that congregation of the nobility in St George’s Chapel I saw her at once, the Princess Elizabeth. It was not that she was particularly animated, or brightly dressed or hung with jewels. She was quiet and pale and demure, her skin like fine Chinese porcelain, but her hair blazed like fire and the contrast of that red gold with the dark brown of her eyes was arresting, a physical shock. I knew her immediately: the Princess Elizabeth was half-sister to the King, daughter of the scandalous Queen Anne Boleyn, her life already mired in bloodshed and treason.

Robert had spoken of her a little, for they had shared a tutor when young. “She is clever,” he had said. “As clever as any man, and witty and sharp as a needle.”

He had not mentioned that she was beautiful and for some reason this disturbed rather than pleased me. Perhaps Elizabeth’s looks were not of such conventional prettiness as mine but it was a woman’s lot to be prized for her beauty and sweet nature rather than her wit. King Henry had worshipped Anne Boleyn for the quickness of her mind and that had not served her to any great purpose. Yet suddenly I was not so pleased with the portrait that Robert had commissioned of me from the King’s miniaturist as a wedding gift. It seemed that with me he saw only the surface but with the Lady Elizabeth he saw and valued what was beneath.

Telling myself that I was full of foolish imaginings, I concentrated on the words of the marriage service and on my new husband. He looked gravely handsome; although he smiled at me, on one occasion I saw him glancing over the heads of the congregation as his gaze sought her out. Yet it was nothing, or so I told myself. There were many women present and many of those smiled at Robert. I could not be jealous of them all.