My Just Desire: The Life of Bess Raleigh, Wife to Sir Walter Hardback - 2003

Excerpt

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“My One and Only Daughter”: Growing Up Under Elizabeth

She had been born in April 1565, a precious daughter to relatively elderly parents who had already produced six sons. Bess’s father, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, fifty at the time of her birth, would live only another six years. It was thus her mother, Anne, and one of her older brothers, Arthur, who were to exert the greatest influence upon Bess as a young girl. Anne Throckmorton harbored great hopes for her daughter, hopes rooted in her own traumatic childhood experiences and her intimate and perilous involvement with the power struggles and shifting regimes that characterized the mid-sixteenth century. Historian Alison Plowden, reviewing the early years of the future Queen Elizabeth (whose mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed before her daughter was three, and stepmother Jane Seymour died soon after giving birth to Prince Edward, and a second stepmother was executed for adultery), argues that “it would be hardly surprising if by the time she was eight years old, a conviction that for the women in her family there existed an inescapable correlation between sexual intercourse and violent death had taken root in her subconscious.” But this conviction may well have been shared by an entire generation of women, including the young Anne, who suffered, directly or indirectly, from the actions of their king as he slid into unhappy despotism in his search for a male heir and a loyal wife.

Anne’s father, Nicholas Carew, had been a loyal follower of Henry VIII, and, more problematically, of Henry’s first wife, Katharine of Aragon. Carew survived the dangerous years in which Henry abandoned Katharine because of his desire for Anne Boleyn, and then, when convinced of Anne’s adultery, swiftly married Jane Seymour, a mere eleven days after his second wife’s execution. Throughout this time, Nicholas Carew continued to be one of Henry’s closest friends, a “jolly gentleman” by all accounts. But the king was a dangerous friend, and with a suddenness that by this stage of Henry’s despotism probably surprised no one, Nicholas Carew fell from favor. Execution swiftly followed. One of Anne’s first, and by definition last, memories of her father would have been a visit to him the night before his death on March 3, 1539, to make her farewells. Her mother, Lady Carew, had done all she could to prevent her husband’s fall, exhorting him “to obey the king in everything,” but to no avail. Anne’s mother lived on for another seven years. She would be buried with her “traitor” husband, leaving a few pounds to one daughter, her clothes to another, and nothing to adolescent Anne.

Despite this traumatic start to life and her lack of a dowry, Anne made a respectable marriage, allying herself with another survivor of the troubled closing years of Henry VIII’s reign: Nicholas Throckmorton. Her new husband’s problem was not that he was one of nineteen children (although this would have minimized his inheritance prospects), but that his family remained loyal to the papacy despite England’s move toward reformed religion and eventual Protestantism. Nicholas’s father, George Throckmorton, a leading courtier in the early years of Henry’s reign and the pleased recipient of generous gifts of land from his royal master, opposed the king’s eventually successful plan to an- nul his marriage to Katharine of Aragon. This was politically unwise, and George was advised by Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Crom- well, to “stay at home and meddle little.” Over the following decades, Throckmortons were to fail, extremely conspicuously, to do just that. Home for the defiantly Catholic Throckmortons was (and still remains) Coughton House in Warwickshire: those nineteen children remain in brass effigy in Coughton Church.

The following lines, from a long and execrable poem in which Sir Nicholas looks back over his life (poetic license being deployed since the protagonist actually dies during the poem), give an impression of a childhood surrounded by anxious women:

No joys approached near unto Coughton House: My sisters they did nothing else but whine; My Mother looked much like a drowned Mouse. No butter then would stick upon our Bread: We all did fear the loss of Father’s Head.

Nicholas’s father kept his head, just, but his son presumably learned from the experience and turned his back on the dangerous Catholicism of his family and embraced the new reformed state religion. He was therefore eligible to join the household of Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife, the staunchly Protestant Catherine Parr, and so began his long career as a courtier in July 1543. In Catherine Parr’s house, Nicholas was joined by two young girls, Lady Jane Grey and Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth. Their futures would become entangled with his for many years, and both Jane’s and Elizabeth’s shadows would fall over Bess, Nicholas’s only daughter, years after his death.

Through the 1540s, young Nicholas would have witnessed the actions of Lord Thomas Seymour, Catherine Parr’s subsequent husband, as he attempted to control Princess Elizabeth both sexually and politically while she was still in her early teens. Historians are divided over the precise nature and extent of the relationship, but it is cer- tain that once Catherine Parr died, Seymour openly courted Elizabeth. Early in 1549, however, the tide turned against him, and his ambition to marry the young princess was construed as treasonous. He was executed in March of that year. Nicholas Throckmorton watched and studied what he saw and continued to rise. Three years later, he made the shrewd move of giving up an annuity of £100 in exchange for the manor of Paulerspury, thus establishing himself as a prominent landowner in Northamptonshire, independent of his Throckmorton relatives in Warwickshire. The deed for Paulerspury identifies him as a gentleman of the Private Chamber, and thus at the heart of the court of the boy king Edward VI, Henry VIII’s youngest child and only son, and thus, successor.

Although the precise date of their marriage is unclear, Anne Carew and the upwardly mobile Nicholas Throckmorton were certainly married when the still teenage King Edward recognized that he was dying and made moves to determine his own successor. Edward’s choice to follow him, or more important, the choice of the Earl of Northumberland, his chief adviser, was the young Lady Jane Grey, daughter of Frances, Duchess of Suffolk. Her tenuous claim to the throne rested on the fact that she was the daughter of the daughter of King Henry VIII’s sister, Mary. But her real value lay in her Protestantism and in the fact that Northumberland could marry her to his own son, Guilford Dudley. Edward VI himself encouraged this marriage as part of his continued attempts to set aside the claims of his older sisters, the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth. The accession of the fiercely Catholic Princess Mary Tudor to the throne was a disastrous prospect for Northumberland for good political reasons, and in ideological terms, King Edward opposed strongly the idea of a return to Rome. Between them, Edward and Northumberland overturned both Henry VIII’s will and the Succession Act of 1544, and a rash of dynastic marriages, orchestrated by Northumberland, took place that spring. As the historian Susan Brigden concludes, “Northumberland was kingmaker.”

The pace of events quickened still further as the young king’s health deteriorated. By June, Lady Jane Grey was suffering physically and mentally from the strain of expectation upon her. On July 6, 1553, Edward VI died, but the public announcement of his death was delayed for two days. A further two days later, Lady Jane was brought on a barge from Sion House, the Duke of Northumberland’s house, to the Tower of London, pausing at Westminster and Durham House. At the Tower she was proclaimed queen. Only nine days later, and in the face of a hostile response in London and elsewhere to Queen Jane, Princess Mary Tudor was proclaimed queen in London: “a conciliar conspiracy had put Queen Jane on the throne; a popular rising deprived her of it.”3 It appeared that the issue of legitimacy (Mary was Henry VIII’s daughter; Jane was only his great-niece) counted with the people, that Northumberland was widely distrusted if not hated, and perhaps most important, that the reformed religion that Jane represented had not taken as firm a root in the country as its Protestant leaders had thought or hoped. Lady Jane Grey became yet another casualty of the power struggles of the mid-sixteenth century, one of the many tragic ironies of her situation being that her own father ral- lied support for Queen Mary and renounced the regal claims of his daughter. Jane’s sister Catherine, who had been hastily married to Henry Herbert, was as hastily cast off by her new husband’s family when it became clear that she would not be sister to a queen. The convenient, and possibly valid, excuse was that the marriage had not been consummated.

Jane Grey’s father and mother, the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, were pardoned by the merciful new Queen Mary, but Jane’s own fate remained uncertain. Only a few months later, however, in the first winter of Mary’s reign, Jane’s father was involved in a new rebellion against the Queen’s authority. His change of allegiance ensured not only his own execution, but that of his daughter, and on February 12, 1554, Lady Jane was beheaded.

Young Anne Throckmorton had backed the wrong queen. She had been dangerously close to the Grey faction, even deputizing for Queen Jane as godmother, on the very day, July 19, 1553, that Queen Mary was proclaimed sovereign in London. The accession of Mary, and the subsequent execution of Lady Jane, were politically disastrous for both Anne and for her husband, Sir Nicholas. Only a week after the execution of Lady Jane, Nicholas was imprisoned in the Tower for his part in the Duke of Suffolk’s recent conspiracy. Anne was heavily pregnant with her first child at this time and preparing for her first confinement. Two months later, in April, her husband’s case came to trial at the Guildhall, the charge being treason. For Anne Throckmorton, daughter of executed “traitor” Nicholas Carew, this was disturbingly familiar territory.

Astonishingly, Sir Nicholas was acquitted by the jury. Queen Mary was so distraught at the decision, without precedent in a treason trial, that she apparently took to her bed for three days. Once acquitted, Sir Nicholas made moves to ensure that Anne would be provided for, in case of further threats to his life. She meanwhile had given birth to a boy, christened William.

Having survived these early months of Queen Mary’s reign, Anne and Nicholas maintained a low profile. Anne gave birth, safely, to two further sons, Arthur, born in 1558, and Robert, probably born a year later. The Queen, struggling, but failing, to produce children her- self with her husband, King Philip of Spain, was not overly vindictive towards what remained of the family that had attempted to usurp her. She had ordered the execution of the husband, brother-in-law, daughter, and son-in-law of Frances Brandon, the Duchess of Suffolk, but showed leniency towards the Duchess herself and her surviving daughters. Frances seemed quite ready to move on in her own life. With something like indecent haste, Lady Jane Grey’s mother waited a mere three weeks after her husband’s execution before she married again. Her first marriage had been made for her when she was sixteen. This time she appears to have followed her own desires, although whether those desires should be described as personal or political, or a combination of the two, is hard to tell. Her choice was a young, indeed a very young, man called Adrian Stokes: Frances was thirty-seven, Adrian twenty-one. To make the marriage even more titillating to contemporaries, Stokes had been Frances’s secretary and groom of the chamber. Princess Elizabeth, Queen Mary’s younger sister, allegedly focused on the class issue rather than the age gap, commenting with horror that “the woman has so far forgotten herself as to marry [that is, mate with] a common groom!” Frances may not have “forgotten herself”: indeed it is quite possible that this was a marriage of political expediency, signaling that the Duchess of Suffolk had no intentions of making another dynastic marriage, and thus no intention of attempting to place another of her offspring on the throne. Queen Mary was generous to Frances and her new husband, Adrian, and to Lady Jane’s younger sisters, Lady Catherine and Lady Mary Grey, who were allowed to live with the Queen at court although, as with Bess a generation later, there were good political reasons to keep the potential pretenders to the Crown where they could be watched.

Media reviews

“The extraordinary story of Bess Ralegh, wife to Sir Walter, has been
overlooked for four centuries. My Just Desire is a riveting tale of
intrigue, passion, skull-duggery and treachery. It provides a fascinating
glimpse into the tumultuous life of one of Elizabethan England's most
beguiling women.” -Giles Milton, author of Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America and Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened the East

Praise for My Just Desire

“Anna Beer has lovingly restored Bess Ralegh to her rightful place among Elizabethan heroines. Brave, energetic, and resourceful to the point of audacity—Bess was a successful gambler against the odds. She rescued the reputation of her own husband—Sir Walter Ralegh—and now, four centuries later, Anna Beer has returned the favor.”
—AMANDA FOREMAN
Author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire

“Beer has vividly recreated the period and added a wealth of wonderful detail . . . A gem of a book.”
—ALISON WEIR
Author of Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley

“The extraordinary story of Bess Ralegh, wife to Sir Walter, has been overlooked for four centuries. My Just Desire is a riveting tale of intrigue, passion, skullduggery and treachery. It provides a fascinating glimpse into the tumultuous life of one of Elizabethan England’s most beguiling women.”
—GILES MILTON
Author of Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English
Colonists in America

“Energetic and ambitious, Bess Raleigh was wife to the courtier-pirate-poet Sir Walter. Her tumultuous story is set against the plots and counterplots in the final years of the ageing Queen Elizabeth I, who presided over a glittering, corrupt and disintegrating court in which the Raleghs were always in favor or danger. Bess and her world come vividly to life in this fast-moving tale of a woman who had to be wife, mother, prisoner and politician.”
—JANET TODD
Author of Mary Wollstonecraft