Page:The Queens of England.djvu/382

 342 THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND. which induced him to betray such enmity to them. A dislike had long subsisted between the queen and the wife of the pro- tector, which now, no longer concealed on the part of the lat- ter by respect for the station of the former, broke loose from all constraint. The Duchess of Somerset had the insolence not only to refuse to pay those honors to the queen which she had hitherto, as in duty bound, accorded to her, but positively pretended to take precedence of her. The slight and affronts offered to Katharine by her sister-in-law, and the injustice com- mitted towards her by the protector, could be ill brooked by one who had shared a throne, and who was by no means deficient in pride and spirit. The sense of these annoyances must have been bitterly aggravated by Katharine's conscious- ness that she had drawn them on herself by her ill-advised and indecorous marriage with the object of her former flame; and being, soon after her nuptials, declared, in a state that gave promise of her becoming in due time a mother, the anxiety and indignation to which she was often made a prey must have greatly tended to impair her health. Nor were these the sole trials and annoyances to which Katharine was exposed. Some infinitely more fatal to her domestic happiness assailed her. The Princess Elizabeth had resided with her since the death of Henry, as well as previously, and the familiarity to which a daily intercourse seldom fails to lead, by degrees became so marked between Seymour and the princess, as to occasion great pain to the queen. Elizabeth, a lively and attractive girl of fifteen, was a dangerous tempta- tion to have continually before the eyes of a man at all times more disposed to yield than to resist it ; and although no more blamable impropriety than romping may have ever been con- templated by Seymour, the evident pleasure it afforded him wounded her who had sacrificed so much to become his wife, and who, now in a state that demanded his affectionate atten- tions, found that her husband preferred a game of romps, often verging on, if not passing, the bounds of propriety, with her youthful stepdaughter, to a tete-a-tete with herself. It appears quite clear that, however Katharine might at first have permitted these indecorous familiarities between her husband and the Princess Elizabeth, they at length excited her jealousy, and she endeavored to check them. Finding this more difficult than she had anticipated, she took measures for the removal of the princess from her