María de Salinas was suspicious. Francesco Grimaldi was hounding her for an answer that she wasn’t convinced she wanted to give. Every day he told her there was a messenger ready and waiting to carry her consent to her family in Spain. Every day, so far, she smiled and dissimulated and concealed her thoughts, and wrote home demanding more information. Grimaldi wanted to marry her, and it was getting harder to hold him at bay.
He had arrived in February 1508 with the new Spanish ambassador Don Gutierre Gómez de Fuensalida, both of them commissioned to conclude the financial arrangements for Princess Catherine’s marriage with Prince Henry. Ambassador Fuensalida was to lead the negotiations; Grimaldi, a banker originally from Genoa, was to put up the money for the rest of the dowry on behalf of King Ferdinand of Aragon.1 Apparently he had another, more personal, mission on his mind. He was on the hunt for a wife, and María’s letters reveal for the first time that she was his target. In fact, her brother-in-law Ochoa de Landa had suggested the match to Grimaldi before he ever left Spain. Ochoa was a royal treasurer and Grimaldi a financier; they knew and worked with one another. Ochoa had extolled María’s virtues, had shown Grimaldi her letters – she wasn’t pleased about this – and evidently told him to go and see for himself. But Ochoa had told María nothing about any of it. Faced now with Grimaldi’s ardent proposals she felt blindsided, her trust in her family shaken. Maybe Ochoa had thought it would be best to let Grimaldi speak for himself and win her over, but if so he reckoned without María’s quick intellect and courtier instincts.
In April she took up paper and ink to ask Ochoa what he had done behind her back – ‘you are the beginning of this business’ – and told him frankly that for her to say yes there would need to be more family discussion and she would need to be part of it.2 It was true that there was much to recommend him. Despite his Italian origin, Grimaldi must in some ways have been a reminder of home. He had long been involved with the Spanish court in matters of finance, and King Ferdinand trusted him, insofar as King Ferdinand trusted anybody where money was concerned. He could speak to her in Spanish; he knew her family. Though not noble or a courtier, he was respectable. And María was still desperate to find a way to get home.
Thus she prevaricated. With Grimaldi, she played a game of doublethink. She knew that he knew that she knew that he had spoken to her family, that marriage was under discussion, but she played her cards close to her chest. She wrote briskly to Ochoa that ‘he is very willing to do it [marry], and I conceal everything from him as I tell you’.3 She was careful with correspondence and letter bearers, telling Ochoa not to forward her letters to Grimaldi and to use a different route and courier to send his replies, because she did not want them to come into Grimaldi’s hands. With her family she played the role of dutiful sister, anxiously trying to do what was best for their collective honour. The acerbic, pointed remarks that she dripped into her letters, though, show that this was not the whole truth. She was annoyed at the position they had put her in, writing a little waspishly, ‘I am forced to do what was given to you gentlemen’, meaning that she had to deal with Grimaldi personally instead of referring him to a male relative.4
Trust was in short supply at royal courts, and María was a courtier to her bones. She sensed that her family was hedging its bets, perhaps waiting for her to make a decision, and she was extremely wary. Her uncle and sister had both written to her promoting Grimaldi’s suit, but she knew that they did this only because Ochoa told them to. She asked for more information, for an explicit instruction to go ahead, but despite her relatives’ recommendations she continued to behave as though she had not received this. While her normally anxious tone was surely not fabricated – this must all have been intensely stressful – it bought her time to work out just what was going on and where her own loyalties should lie.
Part of the problem was that she didn’t trust Grimaldi. She didn’t even like him very much. She said nothing complimentary about his person or personality, only that ‘he seems to me to be good for the little that I know of him’.5 Her considerations were of a purely practical nature, focusing on the things that would affect her the most as his wife; she noted approvingly, ‘of everything else, as I am told, both in lineage and in property, he is not lacking’.6 She was also concerned, or chose to appear concerned, about Princess Catherine’s reaction. When Ochoa suggested she speak to Princess Catherine she was loath to do so, ‘because I did not know the manner in which it was to be carried out’, and because she did not want to go to the princess ‘without some cause that I could put before her, telling her that you had already arranged the marriage for me and showing her the letter in which you told me so that she would do it willingly’.7 María was not going to go to the princess with a ‘maybe’.
Her instincts proved unerringly accurate. Grimaldi, though intense, had a short attention span. He wanted to marry a lady-in-waiting, probably because he thought that this was a good way to gain influence at the royal court, but he was not particularly fussed about which one. Princess Catherine’s household had become a place of power struggle once more, and this time the source was her charismatic, conniving, domineering confessor, Fray Diego Fernández. At this point in her life Princess Catherine was clearly someone who responded willingly, even blindly, to moral authority, however dubiously contrived, and the friar amply filled the gap left by the departure of the similarly dictatorial Doña Elvira Manuel. He wanted the princess’s entire loyalty and resented those who claimed any part of it. Particularly he disliked the lady-in-waiting whom he perceived to be her closest confidante, Francisca de Cáceres. According to Ambassador Fuensalida, Francisca saw Fray Diego for what he was; suspicious of his ‘ambition and pride and lightness’, she tried to mitigate his influence with the princess.8 Marrying Francisca off would get her out of the way, and there was Grimaldi wanting a wife. If Fray Diego knew about the match between Grimaldi and María, he did not care. He turned matchmaker and brought the princess on side.
Fuensalida wrote nothing about Francisca’s feelings, but it’s likely she was as desperate to leave England as María was. We know almost nothing of her family situation in Spain, which may well mean that her parents were not of very high status or favour. A good marriage would have been difficult to arrange and Grimaldi’s offer too good to turn down. Francisca is usually presented as domineering and scheming purely because she chose to marry a man instead of remaining with her mistress.9 But loyalty was difficult for all of these women, and for Francisca especially, because Francisca was a spy. She sent news to the Spanish monarchs through letters written in cipher. According to an account written by her descendants, her skill at Latin meant that she acted as the princess’s secretary, and was thus privy to more information than the other women. But her position came at a cost. She would wait in dread ‘for hours’ lest her letters be discovered, and she was allegedly threatened by Prince Arthur when he suspected her of writing about the princess.10 It’s easy to think of this as a betrayal of the princess’s trust, and to paint Francisca as a villain. We prefer to think of ladies-in-waiting as entirely dedicated to their mistresses. But what had loyalty to Princess Catherine brought Francisca, María, or any of them? Seven years, so far, of poverty and isolation.
And so when Grimaldi flirted with Francisca over long summer days in 1508 she returned his attentions, and it was probably at this point that the match between him and María died a death. María’s suspicions about Grimaldi were well founded, for he proved more than willing to turn the situation to his own advantage in a way that ultimately cost Francisca her position. When pushed to propose, Grimaldi asked Fray Diego how he was supposed to marry Francisca when he did not yet know what her dowry would be? The friar, most reprehensibly, told him to simply make out a warrant for however much he wanted, the princess would sign it and all would be well. Grimaldi thought he might as well try it on, and a warrant for 4,000 ducats was duly signed.11
Fuensalida was horrified. The princess’s mother Queen Isabella, he said, had never given more than 2,000 ducats to any lady-in-waiting as dowry.12 Francisca then wanted to have the wedding at court, as befitted her status as one of the princess’s ladies. Fuensalida thought this was not such a good idea, since the princess didn’t have the means to host those sorts of celebrations, and suggested that they have the wedding at his lodgings in London instead, which they did. This went down poorly with Fray Diego. He and Francisca had a stand-up row in public in front of the princess. Francisca then refused to make her confession to the friar, choosing instead to confess to Henry VII’s own chaplain, an extremely public snub.13
This so infuriated the princess that she dismissed Francisca that very day. In her own version of events the princess claimed that the marriage had taken place against her will, and that Grimaldi had threatened to take her own dowry money if she did not promise an unusually large sum to Francisca.14 Whether this was true or not is debatable. Grimaldi would have found it difficult to explain his actions to King Ferdinand had he done this, and evidence shows that he only ever received 1,000 ducats of the 4,000 promised.15 Regardless, María had skilfully sidestepped an extremely volatile situation. If she had said yes to Grimaldi it might have been she facing the princess’s wrath, not to mention finding herself married to such an unscrupulous opportunist. And yet this was cold comfort through another lonely winter. She had been deprived of yet another potential route home. Like her mistress, María was still unmarried; like her mistress, she was losing hope.
The wheel of fortune never did remain steady, and by 1510 María thanked God for it. The long, dark winter of 1508 had been King Henry VII’s last. April 1509 had seen the kingdom rejoice at the accession of his son, the golden prince, King Henry VIII. The sticking points over Princess Catherine’s dowry had only ever been plays for time; finally, she and her women could have their happily ever after. Even the sudden and violent rainstorm that soaked their gowns during the procession from the Tower of London to Westminster for the coronation could not dampen their spirits for long, for by now they were used to taking their blessings with a little salt.16 The coronation ceremony – unfamiliar to María and the other Spaniards, since coronations had not been performed in Spain since the fourteenth century – had gone without a hitch.17 Under the vaulted ceiling of Westminster Abbey, amid the soaring voices of the choristers and singing men, they knelt as one to their new queen, weighed down by their heavy crimson velvet gowns. The crowd were asked whether they would accept their new king and queen; shouts of ‘Yea, yea!’ filled the air. It must finally have sunk in that they were going to be ladies-in-waiting to the queen of England, fulfilling the role for which they had been sent here all those years ago.
Within a month, the many years of poverty were like a bad dream. King Henry VIII paid £840 in wages to ‘the Spaniards’, as well as £1,000 for the queen’s debts.18 The queen’s household swelled to include English ladies-in-waiting, many of them very experienced. Having spent years moving between the many royal female households during King Henry VII’s reign, they knew English court ceremony, factions and administrative processes inside out. While Catherine of Aragon and her Spanish women had eked out a miserable existence waiting for their lot to improve, her sister-in-law Princess Mary had been the principal royal woman at court, taking in many of her mother Queen Elizabeth of York’s ladies after the latter’s death in 1503. Now Queen Catherine’s household took that place, and many of those same ladies-in-waiting came to join her.19 Female experience like this played a vital role in the formation of a new queen’s establishment. Catherine and her Spanish women were not entering this new phase blind and unaided.
By 1510 the household was no longer really Spanish at all. María herself had written in 1507 that she had no intention of remaining in England after the princess was married, and clearly others were of the same mind.20 The majority of the Spaniards departed shortly after the coronation.21 María’s colleague Inés de Vanegas, daughter of the queen’s old governess of the same name, remained, but almost immediately married an English nobleman, William Blount, Lord Mountjoy. This was a positive move – Henry VIII wrote to King Ferdinand of Aragon that he considered it ‘very desirable that Spanish and English families should be united by family ties’ – but it did mean that Inés most probably left the queen’s service.22 Another, Catalina Fortes, went home to become a nun in early 1510.23 The only Spanish names routinely found amid ladies-in-waiting from this point are ‘Elizabeth’ Vergas – probably originally ‘Isabel’ – and María de Salinas herself.24
We don’t know why she stayed. None of her letters from this period have survived. If her family were still trying to arrange a marriage for her in Spain, it did not materialise. Being one of so few Spaniards left placed María in an intimate position with the new queen. At this point there were three ranks of ladies-in-waiting, corresponding broadly with social status: the ‘ladies’, usually peeresses; the ‘gentlewomen’, who might be the wives of knights or gentry; and the ‘chamberers’, the lowest status and most menial position, usually women of gentle but not aristocratic status.25 María was among the gentlewomen.26 While we might expect a queen’s closest friends (insofar as a queen could ever enjoy simple friendship) to be her highest-status ladies, this wasn’t necessarily, or even usually, the case. María and Queen Catherine don’t seem to have been especially close before 1509, but now it was a different story. Shared experience bound them together. María was one of the few women left who could remember Catherine’s mother, and indeed Catherine probably remembered María’s parents too. They could reminisce in Spanish, teach the English women their intricate ‘blackwork’ embroidery and, as wardrobe accounts show, María could tell English tailors and seamstresses how to make a proper pair of Spanish sleeves.27
Such intimacy could open ladies-in-waiting to deeply traumatic experiences. The winter of 1510 was a severe one, and even in palace rooms cocooned in woollen tapestries, carpets, velvet cushions and fur-lined coverings it was difficult to keep out the sharp frost. Ladies-in-waiting like María routinely shared a room and sometimes a bed with their mistress the queen when the king was not with her, especially in seasons of such icy cold. In the small hours of 31 January 1510 María found herself woken by groans of pain. Queen Catherine appeared to be in labour; but this was all wrong. She was only about seven months pregnant.28 She hadn’t even withdrawn into confinement yet, so nothing needful was ready. The queen’s confessor later wrote that it was kept secret, and that the only people who knew of it were himself, the king, a physician and two Spanish women, one of whom was almost certainly María.29 This means it must have happened overnight, before the queen rose in the morning, before there was anybody else to see her in pain and distress. This was just as well. For queens, miscarriages and stillbirths were shrouded with shame. What good was a queen who could not birth a live child? Such things were always her fault, not her husband’s, and were considered suggestive of physical or even moral or spiritual defect.30
The court was at Westminster, and the queen’s chambers were on the opposite side of the palace from the king and the rest of the court.31 Nobody would hear or see anything that they should not, but this also meant there was some distance to go for help. No doubt the three women consulted in panic, and one flew for the physician. María must have been terrified. As an unmarried woman she had probably never witnessed a birth before, never mind known what to do. What would happen if they were the only ones present and the queen of England died?
It was kept secret. Only the king was told. ‘Her Highness brought forth prematurely a daughter,’ her confessor Fray Diego would write later, but what happened next was almost as heartbreaking.32 Catherine’s belly remained round and so she was told, and believed, that she was still pregnant with a twin of her lost daughter, a fiction that remained in place even though her periods resumed. Either Catherine didn’t know enough about her own body to realise how unlikely this was, or she was so desperate to give birth to a healthy child, and probably so traumatised by her recent experience, that she was willing to convince herself that this was a fact.
In the midst of this, María had other pressures. Her elder brother Juan had come to England on business and to visit his sister. They hadn’t seen each other in nine years, or even corresponded much. In 1507 she had written sarcastically, ‘I hope that you will give me six years of patience to repay me all in one; Lord, you were willing to write to me at length.’33 By 1510, things had apparently improved. Juan travelled first to Tours, was in Bruges by November, and warned their brother-in-law from there that he thought his business in England would keep him longer than originally intended.34 Some of this business may have included María; the family had been dealing with various inheritance disputes for a number of years. By 6 February Juan had reached the royal court, then at Richmond. Awed, he described the white and gold turreted palace as ‘a pleasure place of this king’s’. He was, he said, ‘feted’ with many celebrations at his sister’s behest, and was impressed by the esteem in which she was held, even as he was wary of spies reading his letters.35 For her part, María was an accomplished actress. Juan wrote nothing of the queen or her situation because he clearly knew nothing to tell. María kept her mistress’s secret even from her brother.
Nobody knew until May, when it became clear that Queen Catherine was not still pregnant and clear, therefore, that the storm must break. Even the Spanish ambassador – not Fuensalida any longer but Luis Caroz de Villaragut, who had arrived in the summer of 1509 – had not heard. He waxed scornful in a long letter to King Ferdinand’s secretary. How Queen Catherine presumed herself still pregnant when her monthly bleeding had resumed was a mystery to him. Why on earth she had been made to go through the formal process of withdrawing into confinement to await the birth he could not fathom. What would happen now was anybody’s guess. Royal councillors were directing their anger and frustration at ‘the bedchamber women who gave the queen to understand that she was pregnant whilst she was not’, rather than the queen herself or her male physicians, and perhaps Caroz was not surprised, having contemptuously described both the English and Spanish women in the queen’s household as ‘rather simple’.36
Much of Caroz’s anger stemmed from his own feeling of impotence in the face of the all-powerful Fray Diego, the queen’s conniving confessor, who was still in England by her side. Caroz had struggled since his arrival to get accurate information about what was going on in the palace, or to advise the queen or get her help for Spanish concerns, and he blamed the friar for this. It was a feeling shared by many. Francisca de Cáceres, having married financier Francesco Grimaldi and been summarily dismissed, had not regained her position. She remained in London, but without her husband, who was on his way back to Granada. Caroz knew all about Francisca’s former situation as a Crown agent, but he didn’t see this as a division of loyalties. He wrote that she was not only ‘the most devoted’ to the queen, but ‘the most skillful for whatever suits the Queen or the King our Lord’. ‘The friar’, he noted grimly, ‘fears her more than can be said.’ Caroz wanted Francisca back in the palace, whether in the queen’s service or not, for ‘as soon as she is in the palace, she herself will recover her place, and even if she does not recover it, she will render the greatest services’. Without Francisca, he said plaintively, ‘I do not know, as I ought to know, what passes there.’37
Queen Catherine, though, was an expert at holding a grudge. Even three years later, when Francisca was still in London and still seeking to regain her position in royal service, she would not have her back, and she would not help her former friend to enter anybody else’s service either. In 1510 Caroz had wondered whether perhaps Francisca could serve King Henry’s younger sister, Princess Mary. In 1513 this was still a possibility; Princess Mary, betrothed to Charles, Prince of Castile, would need to learn Spanish. Alternatively Francisca could perhaps go to Margaret, Duchess of Savoy. King Ferdinand thought either of these a good idea, no doubt because he wanted Francisca’s skills as a loyal courtier.38 But Queen Catherine refused to give Francisca a recommendation. She did not trust her, writing that ‘she is so perilous a woman that it shall be dangerous to put her in a strange house’.39 Queen Catherine expected complete fidelity from her ladies-in-waiting and nothing less would do, even if it was for the ultimate service of the Spanish Crown. In the end, Francisca’s husband returned to England and took her and their son home to Granada.40 Queen Catherine did not want her devotion.
1510 was a year of many lessons of loyalty, if the queen’s women chose to learn them. The new regime of King Henry VIII took time to settle, and even without Francisca gossip spilled out beyond the palace. In May 1510 Caroz had more to report. Among Queen Catherine’s ladies were two sisters of royal ancestry: Elizabeth Stafford, Lady Fitzwalter and Anne Stafford, Lady Hastings, first cousins of the late Queen Elizabeth of York, both in their twenties. Elizabeth was a courtier of long standing and she took her role seriously. She had been at Queen Elizabeth Woodville’s funeral in 1492, had served Elizabeth of York and her daughter Princess Mary, and had moved seamlessly into Queen Catherine’s household, leading the rest of the women through the coronation ceremony in 1509.41 Her sister Anne was less experienced, having married early and lived away from the royal court. By 1510 she had been widowed and married again to a man with stronger court connections, so she joined the queen’s household as a visiting peeress in ‘extraordinary’ (as opposed to ‘ordinary’) service. Where Elizabeth was serious, Anne was light-hearted and took her fun where she could find it. King Henry thought this an excellent idea. Elizabeth was not so sure. The spring seemed to have got into Anne’s blood; she was behaving in a way that did not befit a married woman. What, Elizabeth wondered, did one do when the king, a married man with a pregnant wife, was illicitly courting one’s sister, a married woman?42
Elizabeth’s loyalty to her family won out. She spoke to their brother, Edward, Duke of Buckingham. It’s often assumed that the families of women who caught the king’s eye were flattered, or gleefully anticipating material gain. Not so the Staffords. The duke was not pleased. Stafford girls were not whores, even for the king of England. If the honour of the family was not to be dragged through the mud, this must be stopped.
It was decided that the duke would go and talk to Anne and find out the truth of the matter. But while he was in Anne’s rooms, they were interrupted: William Compton, the king’s most intimate attendant, arrived to speak to Anne in his capacity as go-between for the king. The duke erupted, and the quarrel between the two men was vicious, the duke reproaching Compton ‘in many and very hard words’.43 Inevitably, the king heard of this, and the duke was severely reprimanded. Unwilling to simply accept the situation, the duke played his trump card: Anne’s husband George, Lord Hastings was informed. The very same night, Hastings removed his wife from court and placed her in a convent sixty miles away, the early modern equivalent of being told to go and stand in the corner and think about what you had done.
Henry was, predictably, incandescent with rage. That rage was directed at Elizabeth Stafford, whom he saw as a self-righteous, interfering gossip. A day later he turned her and her husband out of the palace. Had Elizabeth told the queen what she suspected, and did she also act out of loyalty to her mistress? For the queen’s rage matched Henry’s. Caroz didn’t specify whether Catherine was angry about the dismissal of one of her favourites, or at her discovery that her husband was being unfaithful, but it may well have been both. For Henry it was all about the perceived power of women’s eyes and tongues. He was angry at the brouhaha caused, as he saw it, by Elizabeth, but he was also paranoid. ‘Believing that there were other women in the employment of the favourite,’ Caroz wrote astutely, ‘that is to say, such as go about the palace insidiously spying out every unwatched moment, in order to tell the Queen [stories], the king would have liked to turn all of them out, only that it has appeared to him too great a scandal.’44
Elizabeth’s Stafford’s ban was not permanent. She returned to court for various events in later years.45 But she probably didn’t serve the queen in ‘ordinary’, daily service again, and nor did her fun-loving sister Anne. We don’t know whether Anne and Henry ever did carry their affair to its logical conclusion, but in either case she gained more by it than the king’s fancy alone. Over a decade later in 1527 it transpired that she and William Compton, the king’s go-between in this affair, had developed a close relationship as a result, so much so that Cardinal Wolsey denounced the pair of them for adultery.46 When Compton died a year later, he left money in his will specifically to pray for Anne’s soul as well as those of the king and queen, and he also left her the income from certain manors, which would have given her a small amount of financial independence.47
All women knew that this was worth having. Even Queen Catherine had suffered long and hard for lack of money, a pawn in the hands of men. If she felt bitter about her many years of misery under the late King Henry VII, former lady-in-waiting Jane Vaux, Lady Guildford was no whit behind her. Her late husband Richard Guildford had been one of Henry VII’s most loyal and trusted supporters. He’d suffered attainder for him; been in exile with him; invaded England, fought many battles, kept the nation safe with his networks of spies. But he was a poor financial manager, and this was the one thing that Henry VII refused to overlook.48 Jane had raised the royal children, taught them right from wrong, taken them to their marriages, mourned Prince Arthur’s death along with his family, but such loyalty was worth nothing now. Richard Guildford, disgraced and removed from office, had embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and died there, far from home, in 1506. Jane had been left to deal with the fallout.
Four years later, in 1510, things were a little less desperate. Her connections with the king’s mother Lady Margaret Beaufort had meant she’d been able to borrow money, and she’d inherited a substantial sum from that lady after her death the previous year.49 Like Anne Stafford, Jane had been wise in making friends wherever she could find them, and one of those she found was the king’s master of the horse, Sir Thomas Brandon. Sir Thomas’s court service and royally sanctioned marriages with two wealthy widows had made him rich. His favourite house in Southwark was set back from the road amid private orchards and parkland on the major route into the south of the city of London, and he had plenty of time to enjoy it when he fell sick in 1509.50 Jane did not care that he already had a wife. She sent her own servants to nurse him. As María tried to comfort the terrified, labouring queen on that freezing January night, Jane mourned: Sir Thomas had died.
But his death had also set her free. Sir Thomas didn’t appear to care that he already had a wife either. His will provided for her dutifully, but, that out of the way, he focused his attention on Jane. She inherited all of his plate not otherwise bequeathed. She was to have the revenues of his estates in Norfolk and Suffolk, and others in Kent. Her servants were rewarded, her priest forgiven his debts, and the crowning glory: the beautiful house at Southwark was hers, with all of its priceless hangings, beds and carpets.51 If Sir Thomas’s will raised any eyebrows, Jane ignored them; she had learned to take any advantage offered to her. Jane planned carefully. Sir Thomas’s heir was his nephew Charles Brandon, a close friend of the new king’s, and it would not do to alienate him. He wanted to live in the family house, and she decided to let him – for a costly rent.52 That would keep the wolf reliably from her door.
Still, like many others, she could not have thought of the late king’s financial rapacity without anger. Two men in particular had been the king’s instruments in enacting the kinds of policies that had brought Jane’s family low, and at the height of a scorching summer they were finally to be brought to justice. Chancellor Richard Empson and royal attorney Edmund Dudley were so viscerally hated by Londoners that Dudley had taken the precaution of laying in a stock of weapons and employing extra men-at-arms at his opulent house in Candlewick Street.53 It had availed him nothing. Before the old king’s death had even been announced, both men had been quietly arrested and imprisoned in the Tower on charges of treason. There they had festered for over a year, scapegoats for an unpopular regime, protesting their loyalty, frantically insisting that they had only been following royal orders. Goaded by the continual demands for justice while on his summer progress, the king at last gave the order for their deaths.
In the early morning heat-haze of a bright August day, crowds of jeering Londoners watched as, one after the other, the last symbols of the old punitive regime were excised in a spray of blood. The savage satisfaction felt by one widow was mirrored by the grim resignation of another. Edmund Dudley’s wife was now left, like Jane had been, to raise their children alone under the spectre of her husband’s conviction for treason. Could this new reign really be different? Might royal service provide security once more? Or would loyalty, for women, always lead eventually to loss?