by Jane Caro
‘My lord!’ I heard my stepmother expostulate, but the king raised his hand imperiously to silence her and spoke once more.
‘Get you gone from my sight,’ he said to me, his voice low and dripping with utter distaste. ‘Take yourself and your household to Hatfield and come not to the court again until you are bidden. And wait not upon that invitation, my fine lady; likely it may never come more.’
He was almost as good as his word and banished me from court for nigh on half a year, and it was only with the help of the wise and noble Queen Catherine Parr that I managed to return to his favour. I missed the court, particularly my brother and my stepmother, but I regretted the loss of that cheap and silly trinket almost as much. I miss my mother – or at least the idea of a mother, because it is hard to mourn a woman I never knew. I have no memory of Queen Anne Boleyn; no memory I can trust. I think I remember a low-pitched voice and high-pitched laughter. I think I remember her sweet smell and a sparkling bauble she wore around her neck. I have a sense of rustling skirts and gentle hands, but did they belong to her, or to some other woman? I cannot recall her face. My memory of her, if memory it is, is as headless as are her remains. I do not remember when I discovered how my mother died. It seems to be something I always knew, a horror I absorbed through my skin. I have heard stories about her; people delight in telling me what they think and what they know. I have heard from some – those who loved her and consequently loved me – of her wisdom and her grace, of her elegance of costume and eloquence of speech. Some have also told me – Blanche Parry, Kat Ashley, Elizabeth Shelton – how fiercely she loved me. I was just a girl, true enough, but I was healthy and proof of her fertility, and hope, at least, of her potential to bear sons. Alas, she did not bargain on my father’s lack of patience.
From others, from my sister Mary especially, I have heard other stories. I have heard her called Great Whore – not just by my father. I have heard rumours of witch’s marks, a sixth finger, a disfigurement on her neck, even webbed feet. They claimed her to be so wanton that she disported lewdly with her own brother. Some tried to imply that I was not really Henry’s daughter, not just bastard by circumstance, but bastard in fact. As I grew, I heard less of this. I reminded them so of Henry’s father, my grandfather Henry VII.
We did not talk of our mothers much, my brother, sister and I. Mary was thirteen when I was born and must have been one of the few at court well pleased that I was a girl. Perhaps that is why she was almost always kind to me when we were children, except she could not hide her hatred of my mother.
I soon learnt to hold my tongue when people slandered the woman who gave birth to me. I knew from a very early age it was worth almost more than life itself to name Queen Anne Boleyn within my father’s hearing. He certainly never mentioned her by name to me and after the dreadful day in the gardens at Hampton Court, I certainly never wanted to remind him again of her existence, and I do not wish to remind people of it now, even though I am queen. Anne Boleyn is a name that still raises great passions; it is better people think of me only as bluff King Hal’s daughter. And even though I can at last wear her likeness on my person, I have learnt to keep it well hidden. Her miniature (a finer portrait this time) rests in a secret compartment of my ring. When I am alone I can open it and allow myself the luxury of imagining how it might have been for me had she lived. But this is a private speculation, for Elizabeth the woman, not Elizabeth the queen.
Poor Mary never learnt that lesson. Of the three of us she was the only one who knew her mother, and, as long as Katharine lived, they were all the world to one another. The love she bore her mother, and the love her mother bore her in return, gave Mary the courage to stand up to my father against acknowledging her parents’ divorce, her own illegitimacy and my mother’s right to the throne. Edward’s mother, Queen Jane, died within weeks of his birth. He used to beg me for memories of her, though I was nought but four myself and remembered her no more than my own. When Mary’s mother died, they say Mary’s grief was terrible to behold. She alone of my father’s children knew what it was to receive a mother’s love. Perhaps that is why she came to love me at least a little, because we were both made motherless girls within weeks of each other, I was so small and Mary always had a weakness for little children. She needed someone to love and I needed someone to love me.
More, she knew what it was to fall from beloved princess to shunned bastard. Indeed, I am ashamed to think of it now, although I was nought but a tiny child at the time and unable to even comprehend what was going on, let alone do anything about it. But while my mother was alive and queen, she made my poor sister suffer very much. After my birth, they tell me, poor Mary was compelled to share my household and give me precedence. My mother called her bastard and, no doubt, alone in her chamber, Mary attached the same epithet to me. Worse, my household was managed by my mother’s cousin: a woman who was given direct instructions to make my sister’s life a misery. Knowing all this, it is even more remarkable that Mary managed to find room in her heart for a small usurper like me. Perhaps sympathy for me was made easier by the speed with which my fall from grace followed upon my mother’s.
They say that the first time my title changed (the day, no doubt, my mother lost her head) and the governor of my household came to tell me the same, I said, ‘How haps it, my lord – yesterday my lady princess, today but my lady Elizabeth?’ I do not remember it – I was but three – however Mary liked to repeat the story, barking with laughter. She recognised both the feeling and the situation very well.
The world is not kind to princesses, nor to queens. My sister retained some love for me, I believe, even when we were full grown, despite having few reasons to do so. It was not as if she had many others on whom she could lavish her affection. But it was the memory of Elizabeth the little girl she loved, not – in her eyes, at least – the dangerous woman I became. All our lives, as I have said, our world was constituted so: as one sister’s fortunes rose, the other’s declined. At the hour of her death it must have been bitter gall for her to know that all her great plans, her hopes and her dreams of a Catholic England and the many souls she meant to save, would crumble to dust on my accession to the throne, faster even than her own mortal remains.
But see how my thoughts leap like crickets from place to place! My intention by the light of this great fire was to count my blessings, to remind myself of how it was that God in his wisdom brought me here. I meant to start at the beginning and move forward strictly in the order that events unfolded; yet already I am spinning in a disorderly fashion through memory and time. Faces crowd in on me, beloved faces, hated and feared faces. Why is it so many of them live no longer, while, despite great peril, I still breathe? Some say it is a miracle and proves that God is a Protestant. I do not dispute the miracle, but doubt the explanation. Some must live while others die. They say, do they not, that God helps those who help themselves?
Before Edward was born, my father knew himself capable of making sons. My bastard half-brother the Duke of Richmond was evidence of that. So he saw the long years of nothing but miscarriages, still births and daughters as God’s punishment. Punishment for what sin, however? He decided he was cursed for marrying his brother’s betrothed and, eventually, for allowing himself to be bewitched by my mother, she whom the world called Great Whore. For myself, I doubt any curse. Girls are born as often as boys, not to frustrate or condemn, but because the world would be unable to go on if they were not.
When my father praised me for my wit and my scholarship, it spurred me on to master yet more of my Latin, Greek and mathematics. It was my greatest joy to hear him shout with laughter at my words. Yet, even as I performed for him, twirling my understanding, my scholastic ability this way and that, as if they were some new garment I wanted him to admire, my discomfort grew. I knew what he thought as he laughed at some witty translation into the Greek, or as he clucked his appreciation at some new-mastered skill, as he clapped me on the shoulder wi
th his fat, be-ringed hand. I knew what contrary thought sat in his head as he called to his minions and councillors, his latest queen and his keeper of the stool to admire his clever daughter. He thought – if only this bookish, serious-minded girl had been a boy. And I could not resent his thought, because I thought it too. It was the truth: if God had but chosen to make me a boy, my mother would still live and, perhaps, so would many others.
My father’s eyes haunt me still. Intensely blue, they flickered from this place to that anxiously, as if he feared danger was about to approach but he knew not from which direction. For myself, despite the oaken doors of my chamber and the armed guards on the other side of it, this night, as on all other nights these few months past, I begin to understand the prickling, crawling sensation that infects the skin of princes, the nervous itch we cannot scratch. Perhaps it was to escape his own goose-pimpled flesh and cringing humanity that my father raised so many up, then dashed them down so low that he felt compelled even to sever their heads from their bodies. An act, it must be said, that, once done, set them lower in death than they had ever stood in life. Yet no matter how much blood he spilt, the feeling that evil eyes watched for opportunities above hands that rested on daggers, grew, year after year, wife after wife.
The same fear sits on my shoulders too. At my birth, my mother wept, my father cursed, and an icy blast of fear came between them. I was no beloved son. I offered no redemption or security for the future of the Tudor line, no hope for the peace and stability of England. As a princess, my only use was to be a portal through which future kings might enter the world. Worse, as a princess whose hand in marriage was a bargaining piece in the great game of alliances between rulers, the future kings I might produce were likely not for England, but for some foreign place. Ten times worse, my birth was yet another sign from God that the curse the king thought had lifted, the sin he thought he had made more than ample penance for, was not, as yet, expiated. All his herculean efforts had been for nought: the divorce, the break from Rome, the years and years of waiting, all wasted. God’s face remained implacably turned away. At my birth, father looked at mother, husband looked at wife, king looked at queen and thought: perhaps marrying you was also a sin. And with the birth of that doubt, the dreadful fates began to write a grim new future for the woman who had just survived the travails of childbirth. In my birth were the seeds of my mother’s death. They grew to maturity with the miscarriages and stillbirth of what would have been my brothers. Had any of those boy children lived, my mother would have lived also, but – and here is the rub – I would never be queen.
God forgive me, despite my terror, now that my great destiny is inescapable I cannot regret my mother’s fate. I cannot fully regret any of the terrible events that have brought me here. The axe that severed my mother’s head made it possible for the crown to eventually rest upon my own.
On the birth of my brother, Edward, my father must have truly believed that God had forgiven him, yet, tragically, his relief was to be short-lived – as short-lived, it turned out, as the mother of the prince, his favourite, well-beloved Queen Jane. She died, poor lady, only days after she was delivered of this fine son and my father was plunged into mourning once more. He mourned so deeply that it was years before his advisors could persuade him to even contemplate taking another wife.
They say it is the duty of princes to marry, to form alliances and produce heirs. They say it is our duty to secure the future of our kingdom through the sacrifice of our bodies and hearts. God’s blood, sometimes it seems my future husband is all my privy councillors think of. I like to remind them of the fate of Thomas Cromwell when they press me too hard. It keeps them at bay for a day or two. Master Cromwell believed, conventionally enough, that a widowed king was not useful, unless he was in search of a wife.
But my father was weary of wives and, no doubt, the princesses of Europe were wary of a man who had divorced one wife, beheaded another and lost a third. My father wanted youth and beauty (aye, if only men saw in the mirror what we see when we look at them), but all the most eligible princesses found gracious reasons why they could not be tempted by the throne of England. In the end, they found the obscure and impoverished Duchess of Cleves and sent Master Holbein to paint her portrait. Like my father, I saw the portrait before I met the lady. The portrait hung in the chamber outside my father’s apartments and when he was away, visiting Thomas Cromwell, perhaps, or hunting at another great lord’s invitation, my sister and I gained permission to enter the chamber with the excuse that we had gifts for him: fine needlework from her, a translation in Latin from me. We placed the gifts on our father’s table, then stood in front of the portrait. We could see why he had selected this lady. She was not beautiful exactly, but her face was pleasing and kind. She seemed to smile out at us from the canvas and we began to harbour hopes that she might take pity on us and help ease our way with our father. We giggled a little at her strange headdress, but felt less dread about her arrival than we had hitherto. And as Mary said, we needed a queen, someone who might notice us and pity us and have the ear of our father.
‘A Flanders mare?’ he raged. ‘You have chained me to a Flanders mare!’
Thomas Cromwell’s face turned pale. ‘You caught her unawares, Your Majesty. She was not prepared. She will improve on acquaintance. Her brother and Master Holbein assure me so.’
‘Master Holbein? Bah! The wench bewitched him.’ And then he dropped his voice. My father was always at his most terrifying when he ceased to bellow. ‘Tell me, Thomas.’ He was now about an inch away from his trembling councillor’s face. ‘Do you see any resemblance between the grease-smeared goose I am married to and the woman that Master Holbein painted? The woman, Thomas, you persuaded me to choose?’
‘Yes, Your Majesty – no, Your Majesty – but perhaps she just needs more time – this is a strange country, she was not at her best–’
‘Not at her best? She stank, Thomas. She was unwashed and rank! And she is old and fat and ugly. I doubt her virtue: there is a looseness about her breasts and belly that lead me to suspect she has lain with a man before. What have you done to me, man? What have you done?’
Thomas Cromwell, Lord Chancellor of England, fell to his knees, whether by design, or because his knees gave under him, I know not. ‘Forgive me, Majesty, forgive me. I was as deceived as you are.’
My father turned from the white-faced blacksmith’s son and dropped his voice once more. This time he sounded weary to the death, as if all the fire and fight had been sucked out of him. ‘Get out, Thomas, get out of my sight. I never want to see you again.’
Poor Queen Anne. The rumour flew round the court that the king and queen spent their wedding night playing cards, and the people who mattered quickly shunned her. She spoke little English and seemed content to cling to the company of her ladies. She found her way to us, though. I remember the door to our schoolroom opening to reveal the gaggle of Flemish ladies who preceded her everywhere. One of them did speak passable English.
‘Ze qveen!’ she announced with a flourish, and Mary and I dropped into the expected curtsy. My eyes downcast, I watched as the queen’s wide and odd-looking skirts swept into the room. I did not look up until I saw she was standing in front of Mary.
‘Ah, ah, ah,’ she said, and the tone of her voice was so kind I dared to peek through my eyelashes. She was holding her arms wide to Mary, motioning her to stand up. As she did, a little warily, this strange German lady looked over at me and caught my eye. She broke into a wide smile. ‘Elisabet,’ she said, making the same motions to me. I stood also, clasping my hands modestly behind my back, with my head lowered. But she had such a broad and generous smile, it was impossible not to smile back at her. When I did, she began laughing.
‘Gutt, gutt, mein liebchen.’ Then she spoke in rapid German and we all looked to her lady to translate.
‘Ze qveen says she is very pleased to meet you, and vants to be your friend
.’
‘Your Majesty is too kind.’ Mary dropped again into a curtsy, but before she could complete her movement, the queen had reached out and handed her up.
‘Your Majesty,’ I said, ducking my head, but resisting the urge to curtsy a second time. She looked at her ladies and spoke quickly once more, then turned and indicated that we should follow. We followed her through Hampton Court to the queen’s apartments; it had been a long time since either Mary or I had set foot in those splendid rooms. It must have felt strange to Mary. She had spent time with her mother there. This new queen had gifts for us: beautiful Flemish linen and lace, and, best of all, a length of richly embroidered cloth each. It seemed that our clothing problems would not recur for some time. Such was our pleasure and hers in our company, when I remember that day, it seems as if we could understand one another. I no longer remember her words being translated; they seemed to enter my ears in heavily accented but perfectly understandable English, as they did in our later lives.
Sensible Lady Anne gave my father the annulment he wanted, easily and without obstruction. Gratefully, he settled a pension on her and she, in her turn, settled in England, learnt our tongue and remained a good and faithful friend to all of us until she died. I miss her still. She died less than a year ago, and I could speak to her as I could to no other.
I am sorry she will not be in the Abbey tomorrow when I am crowned. She was at Mary’s coronation. We stood side by side in my sister’s procession and took our places together in the pews. Poor Mary. We were the closest thing she had to family, two women of the wrong religion: one a half-sister who by that time was regarded more with suspicion than love; the other a stepmother – kindly, but irrelevant. Still, she was more richly served for kin than I will be on the morrow.
Haunted as I am this night by faces from the past, what would I not give to see the Princess of Cleves’ broad, friendly face? Queen Anne taught me much – more, perhaps, than any save Master Ascham and Master Cecil and, of course, Queen Catherine Parr. She taught me good phlegmatic commonsense – a gift sadly lacking in my own family. By refusing to stand on principle or pride, by looking at her potentially disastrous situation with clear eyes, she created a good and independent single life for herself, and was able to contribute much to three motherless children. Her comfortable home was always a haven for me, her affectionate disinterest a boon and a blessing. But her good example came too late for Mary.
