A Dangerous Inheritance

Katherine was unsure for a time whether she was pregnant or not with her first child, and when she knew she was, she took pains to conceal it for as long as possible. During this period, she did come to fear that Ned had abandoned her, which was when she began seriously to consider remarrying Lord Herbert. His furious rejection of her is well documented.

It was Lord Robert Dudley who revealed Katherine’s pregnancy to the Queen. There was no confrontation: Elizabeth ordered Katherine to be placed under arrest and taken to the Tower. Bess of Hardwick’s role in the affair – as Lady Saintlow (or St Loe) – is recounted in the depositions taken after Katherine’s arrest.

It is possible that William Cecil did take a broader view of Katherine’s marriage, and that he approved of her being named Elizabeth’s heir. He himself said, ‘I have been noted a favourer of my Lady Katherine’s title.’ However, as David Loades points out in The Cecils(The National Archives, 2007), Cecil did not declare for Katherine’s succession when the Queen was thought to be dying of smallpox in 1562. Instead, he seems to have ‘favoured an interim solution while further thought was taken’ – which suggests he had doubts, although certainly he desired to see the matter of the succession settled. His enquiries persuaded him that Katherine’s union with Hertford was no more than a love match – he called it ‘that troublesome, fond matter’ – and not part of a plot against Elizabeth, yet whatever his private feelings, he followed the Queen’s lead in punishing the couple.

Katherine’s prison in the upper chamber of the Bell Tower still exists. During the Second World War, Rudolf Hess was briefly imprisoned there, and a lavatory was installed for the convenience of another expected Nazi guest: Adolf Hitler. Katherine was later moved to rooms in the Lieutenant’s Lodging, where her infant and her eight servants could be accommodated. The list of decayed furnishings sent by Queen Elizabeth still survives.

Sir Edward Warner did prove a sympathetic gaoler. It was he who allowed Katherine and Edward Seymour to meet on two occasions, and when the Queen found out that Katherine’s second pregnancy had been the result, she had Warner dismissed from his post and imprisoned.

In Tudor times, many people referred to the White Tower, the keep of the Tower of London, as Caesar’s Tower, in the mistaken belief that Julius Caesar had built it.

It has long been thought that Katherine died of tuberculosis. The references to her suffering from heavy phlegm and being unable to eat may account for that. Recently, it has been suggested that her poor eating was symptomatic of anorexia, and that she literally starved herself to death. Certainly she was under immense stress for much of her life. The only telling symptom we have to go on is her nails turning purple just before she died. Commonly that indicates a lack of oxygen in the extremities, poor circulation, a respiratory or lung disorder, a cardiovascular problem and/or congestive heart failure. That might indicate tuberculosis, towards which malnutrition can be a major contributory factor. It is possible that Katherine caught it from Jane Seymour; she had been closely exposed to Jane for some time, as she would have needed to be to catch the disease, which is passed by droplet infection through sneezing or coughing. Sometimes the body’s immune system fails to destroy those bacteria, and latent tuberculosis becomes active years later. This is more likely to happen if the immune system becomes weakened by other problems, such as being undernourished and underweight, as Katherine was, and influenza and other infections can play their part; her phlegm may have been a symptom of that kind of illness. Therefore I have adhered to the traditional theory in this book. The account of Katherine’s death is closely based on fact.

Over the years, I have consulted numerous sources for the Tudor period, which inform my fiction, and the reader is referred to the bibliographies in my non-fiction books, Children of England: The Heirs of Henry VIIIand Elizabeth the Queen, for those. For this novel, however, I am indebted particularly to the following works:

Ashdown, Dulcie M.: Tudor Cousins: Rivals for the Throne(Stroud, 2000)

Borman, Tracy: Elizabeth’s Women(London, 2009)

Chapman, Hester W.: Two Tudor Portraits(Oxford, 1960)

Lisle, Leanda de: The Sisters Who Would Be Queen(London, 2008)

Lovell, Mary S.: Bess of Hardwick(London, 2005)

Plowden, Alison: Lady Jane Grey: Nine Days Queen(Stroud, 2003)

Somerset, A

Stevenson, Joan: The Greys of Bradgate(Leicester, 1974)

While there are numerous sources for the life of Katherine Grey – although she never kept the journal mentioned in the story – we know very little about Katherine Plantagenet, who is mentioned in just four contemporary documents. The earliest reference to her is in her marriage covenant, dated 29th February 1484. In this, William Herbert covenanted with Richard III to take Dame Katherine Plantagenet to wife before Michaelmas (29th September), and to make her a jointure in lands of £200 per a

The couple were married by May 1484, when, at York, Richard III granted ‘William, Earl of Huntingdon and Katherine his wife’ the proceeds of various manors in Devon, Cornwall and Somerset.

In this period, couples could be married in childhood, and the Church permitted a girl to cohabit with her husband at the age of twelve. We do not know Katherine’s date of birth, but I have placed it in 1470, on the premise that she married at fourteen, an age at which many girls were married in those days. She ca

The last reference to Katherine in contemporary sources occurs on 8th March 1485, when a cash a

Aside from these sources, I have reconstructed Katherine’s life largely through external evidence, inference and probability. Her mother was possibly Katherine Haute, wife of James Haute, who was the son of William Haute by Joan Wydeville, a cousin to the Queen. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, made a grant of an a

Some genealogies describe James Haute as being of Waltham, Kent, but documents in the National Archives show that he held lands in Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, his chief seat being the manor of Kinsbourne Hall (or A

James Haute died before 20th July 1508, when his will was proved. A court roll dating from the early sixteenth century refers to ‘silver and stuffs, etc. at my house in my wife’s custody’, so Katherine Haute was still alive then. Although Kinsbourne Hall remained in his family until 1555, James leased it to a Thomas Bray in 1506. There were two sons of the marriage, his heir Edward Haute of London, who was his father’s executor in 1512 and died in 1528, and Alan.