by Susan Kay
“What an avaricious young lady you are!” he remarked, looking down on her from a smiling height. “Remind me never to owe you any money.”
She looked at him anxiously, suddenly suspicious.
“You will come, won’t you?”
“If I can remember the way.”
“Elizabeth!”
They both looked round with a start, and Tom swept a mocking bow to Mary Tudor’s unsmiling figure. Reluctantly Elizabeth bobbed a curtsey and went to take her sister’s stiffly outstretched hand. The look she gave him over her shoulder, the oddest mix of trust and coquetry he had ever seen, was enough to decide him. He determined to find his way back to the nursery at the earliest convenient moment. He considered teasing Ned with his new conquest, but looking round saw, with a frown, that his brother was with the King. Henry’s great voice boomed around the crowded chamber, trumpeting victory like a cockerel, and Hertford stood there, looking so smug, one might have thought he had borne the brat himself. It was insufferable the way Ned pushed himself forward, grabbing all the honours because of a few years’ seniority! Automatically Tom began to elbow his way towards the Queen’s bed. At some point in the night, between making his royal brother-in-law bellow with laughter and his own brother glare with jealous envy, he spared a glance for his sister and saw with a shock of horror that she looked half dead.
* * *
Less than a week later they buried her, and for a while both Seymours feared they might be burying their influence on the King with her. Slowly, in the months that followed, they began to realise that this was not the case. For once, a woman had been taken from Henry before he had had time to grow tired of her charms, a woman, moreover, who had martyred herself to give him the one thing he had wanted and lacked all these years—a legitimate son. He was maudlin and sentimental and enjoying a certain degree of reverent self-pity as he strolled one afternoon in his privy garden with the brothers of his late wife.
“Your sister was the only woman in this world I ever loved,” he said, and waited for the tactful words of condolence which bolstered his ego.
“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, Your Majesty,” said Tom, and the sarcasm with which he said it took his brother’s breath away like a blow in the crutch.
The King halted, examining the young man with eyes grown hard and shrewd with ruling. He had strolled in this same garden earlier with some pretty little nobody, whose name he had already forgotten, hanging on his arm and on his every word. His ministers were already combing Europe for a suitable bride. They were simple facts of life that no one else at court would ever dare to draw attention to, except this arrogant young devil who had as good as told him to his face that he made a remarkably merry widower. And slowly the corners of Henry’s thin mouth curled into a smile of grudging admiration.
“God works in a mysterious way,” he remarked smoothly, eyeing Edward’s lean white face with a certain satisfaction, watching him sweat discreetly beneath his collar, terrified that his fool of a brother had ruined all they had worked for. “And as you say, Tom—as you so rightly say—who are we mere mortals to question His will?”
Edward Seymour’s breath of relief was clearly audible, the glance he cast at his brother venomous as a snake’s. Henry saw it and was amused. Divide and rule was a principle he took seriously. He put an amiable arm about the young man’s shoulders and strode on between the two of them, strongly reminded of the way chained bandogs strained to savage each other. The aim of a good master was to keep them wanting to savage each other rather than the man who held them in their chains; and Henry was a good master; he knew all the tricks. While he lived there would be fair balance held between the ambitious dogs about his court who jostled for power; but he was no longer young and the Tudors were a short-lived, unhealthy stock. A festering sore was creeping steadily up one leg and the stench of it was beginning to permeate his rooms. The Seymours had taken the scent of his weakness, like the good bloodhounds they were. They padded after their master and looked to the future, to the possibility of a child upon the throne and a long period of minority. But only Tom followed the trail as far as the nursery door, and made a pleasure out of political necessity by courting the affection of Henry’s son.
He had a chameleon quality which made him fit unobtrusively against any background. In foreign courts the suave diplomat; on high seas the respected captain; in the nursery the devoted uncle; in all of these roles he was genuinely at home, without any conscious effort. There was no need to feign affection for his royal nephew; he had an infinite capacity for light-hearted love. And among those many little loves which gathered about him, like a collection of semi-precious gems, there was Elizabeth, that amusing, lively, acquisitive little girl, whose greed for life reminded him so fondly of his own. “What have you got for me?” said her eyes each time he appeared fresh from a voyage to foreign parts and the attitude never gave him offence, for he also asked that same silent question of everyone he met.
It was grand sport, this playing for power in virgin territory, a highly enjoyable mixture of business and pleasure. There were pleasant byways along the stony roads of ambition for those who were sharp enough to read the map.
Tom Seymour took many a profitable detour down them; and enjoyed the scenery.
* * *
Elizabeth was six when the King chose her next stepmother. He had been nearly three years without a wife, a merry widower, and he was reluctant to exchange his freedom for marriage with an insignificant German princess named Anne. Indeed, the name itself might have put an end to the negotiations before they started but for Cromwell’s thick-skinned persistence. They needed the alliance with Cleves—and the woman was comely, said Cromwell slyly, one had only to look at Holbein’s miniature, specially commissioned for the purpose, to see that.
Henry looked and was appeased, yet still his vague sense of unease remained. Another Anne! However fair the creature, how could he help but make unhappy comparisons? So, when he heard of Elizabeth’s hot impatience to meet this new stepmother he was touched on the rawest of nerves.
“Tell her,” he snapped, turning on those who had thought to please him with news of the child’s delight, “that she had a mother so different from this woman she ought not to wish to see her.”
It fell to Mr. Shelton, governor of the household, to deliver the King’s unkind message to his daughter. He saw her eyes widen in hurt astonishment before she turned away slowly and climbed up into the window-seat to watch the rain teeming down the little leaded panes. She sat very straight and still with her back to him and though he knew she was crying he dared not go and take her on his lap. She was too old now for familiarity from a distantly related man-servant. Mr. Shelton went out of the room, leaving her alone, and felt sadly that that was how he would always leave her now. He kicked the wall savagely when the door had closed behind him and wished it was his sovereign lord and master.
Yet when Anne of Cleves arrived in England Elizabeth was at court with her sister Mary to greet the lady after all. In decency Henry could not leave her out—it would look so pointed. And once he had set eyes on this new wife he decided rashly that he ought not to wish to see her himself. He went to his wedding squealing like a staked pig, “What remedy, hey? None but to marry this fat Flanders mare!” and the look he gave Cromwell as he said it told that unfortunate man that he was not long for this world.
Anne of Cleves was a warm, compassionate, sensible woman. Everybody liked her, except the husband who flatly refused to share her bed, but then Henry had not been led to expect an amiable virgin sow. He was loud in his disappointment and already in love with his new wife’s maid of honour, Katherine Howard. This time it took Archbishop Cranmer only five months to dissolve another unfortunate marriage for his master. Cromwell laid his head on the block for bungling the affair, and on the morning of that execution Henry married Anne Boleyn’s little Howard cousin.
The
fat Flanders mare had escaped to comfortable retirement at Richmond Palace, considerably happier to be known as the King’s “good sister.” She had shown almost indecent relief at the annulment and had indeed made only one condition to it. She desired to see Elizabeth regularly because “I would rather have been her mother than your Queen.”
Only a foreigner could have hoped to get away with such insolence, and Henry, not daring to endanger relations with Cleves any further, chose to turn the other cheek with astonishing restraint. Let her have Elizabeth! Let her have anything she wanted provided he gained his freedom without armed hostilities. So Elizabeth went often to visit “Aunt Anne” and learnt sufficient cookery in the kitchens at Richmond under the tutelage of that extremely practical German lady to justify her later boast that should she be turned out of the realm in her petticoat, she would make her living anywhere in Europe.
When she was not at Richmond, she was at court, having her pert head turned by the attentions of Henry’s Rose without Thorns, the reckless, penniless, wanton little Queen who welcomed her with open arms. At seven years old she had never been in such demand and she was ready to worship the lovely, laughing girl, just on eighteen, who made so much of her.
For a little over a year the court sunned itself in the warmth of Katherine Howard’s youth, and it began to be said, with some reason, that the King was in his happy dotage at last. Whoever Katherine favoured found a place in the King’s circle; whoever she loved was automatically admitted to his affection. And Katherine loved Elizabeth, her cousin’s child, and made no secret of it. A place of honour at the royal table, a wardrobe fit for a princess and the attention of the father she had always adored—all this and more Elizabeth owed to the young stepmother who chose to make an especial friend of her. The reign of Katherine Howard was the high-water mark of Elizabeth’s turbulent childhood, one unending party which, like her reckless little stepmother, she believed would never end—
* * *
Sunlight filled the deserted Long Gallery, winking on the massive stones that adorned the King’s vast chest and fat fingers.
He was hot and short of breath to the point of tetchy irritation as he lumbered over the wooden floorboards like a clumsy baited bear, watching the two maddening figures darting further from his reach. He had no hope of catching them in the fair contest he had demanded as proof of his rejuvenated youth, and even as he thought it, he saw Elizabeth turn her head, met the cool considering glance, and knew she knew it too.
A moment later she was sprawling full length in the dirty rushes. The little Queen exclaimed and began to run back, but Henry reached his daughter first, picking her up with the effortless movement of one hand, and brushing the clinging straw from her bodice with lingering fingers. There was an odd expression in his eyes as he turned her chin up and kissed her slowly and deliberately on the mouth.
Anne!
Elizabeth shivered. He released her.
“Are you hurt?” asked Katherine, touching her arm.
“She’s not hurt,” said Henry strangely. “She knows how to fall. She has been well taught.”
Beneath his compelling gaze, Elizabeth flushed and muttered something about catching her foot in her gown. But still the King smiled at her strangely, with mocking tenderness.
“Take care of that foot, Bess, it has discretion. Only find a tongue to match it and you’ll be a politician.”
Katherine laughed lightly, a little tinkling note of affectionate indulgence, sweet and shallow, like herself.
“Ah, my lord, she speaks so well, better than I. What could possibly be amiss with her tongue?”
“That tongue,” said Henry shrewdly, “is the tail that wags the dog, too long and too impudent by half. It would answer the Devil himself as pertly as it answers me—isn’t that so, child?”
“Assuredly, sir.”
Elizabeth looked up; her eyes were black and hard, crazy with daring, no longer a child’s. “But then—some would say it was the same thing.”
She had gone too far.
Even ignorant, tactless little Katherine caught her breath as the King’s eyes narrowed to slits and the veins bulged at his temples.
Do you mock me still, you devil’s strumpet?
Her gaze wavered, crumpled, became a bewildered tearful amber stare. Henry saw it and softened.
Anne, you bitch, only you could use a child against me!
He reached out and touched his daughter’s pale cheek.
“You should have been a boy,” he said softly. “Why were you not a boy? Why?”
Elizabeth bowed her head guiltily and stared at his huge jewelled feet.
“You will be wasted,” he said resentfully and turned away.
The cruel sunlight etched a score of tiny lines in the sagging skin around his eyes and mouth. He felt old and petulant as the dead past rushed upon him and a dark murderous mood, inseparable product in him of any prolonged contact with Elizabeth, was growing steadily.
Wasted! Six years of his prime, his lovely glowing virile life, and nothing to show for it but a haunted conscience and this strange, frightening little girl. Why in God’s name hadn’t the child died at birth, like her brother, and spared him the continual torment of a hideous memory? How narrowly he had got her born in wedlock, this love-child conceived in the triumph of Anne’s artful capitulation. Her unborn promise had been the final spur that made him brave the break with Rome. For her sake he had taken on the world, torn down the English Church, chopped off the heads of loyal friends who could not stomach the change—More, Fisher, all good men—got himself excommunicated, everlastingly damned after death. For her sake he had lost his immortal soul, and though the mother had died for it, the child lived on to torture him, telling him with every movement of her body and every flicker of her bold, clever eyes, that she, not his pale puny son, was the heir he wanted.
But she was useless to him. Women were not fit to rule kingdoms. He had built his life around that simple axiom, murdered to justify his belief in it. If he questioned it now, he made a mockery of his whole existence. All he had done, he had done for England, to save this wilful little half isle from the hazardous rule of a woman. His greatest achievement, as man and monarch, must be the siring of Edward. He could not, would not see the seed of greatness in Elizabeth. He did not want to see it: the thought turned his brain.
She will never be Queen, he told his restless conscience. Edward will marry and sire many sons. And after Edward there is Mary. Should I replace her in the succession she will never rule. You waste your soul in vain, Anne. She will never be Queen. Your day is done—
Defiance eased his spirit and the grey mood lifted a little; he lowered himself stiffly into a chair and beckoned the living forward. They sat on cushions at his feet and he smiled at them smugly, for it gave him a perverted pleasure to see them together, Anne’s cousin and Anne’s child, both his, to use as he pleased.
He was doubly blessed in Katherine, his Rose without Thorns; she was his jewel of womanhood, lusty but pure. “No other will but his” she had chosen as her motto, and every man at court knew what it meant. None had loved his Rose as he did and none would ever dare. By God, they knew the price!
Elizabeth leaned against his knee and her flaming hair spread like a silk cloak across his thigh. Beautiful hair! He liked to stroke and twine it round his fingers while he lolled sleepily in the great chair and his thoughts, like little imps, danced him back to Hever Castle, to the first wild days of his pursuit of Anne. He had never loved that way before and he never would again. No man would. Anne was a unique experience.
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind.
Wyatt had written that of her, Thomas Wyatt her cousin, who had made no secret of his love for her. Bitter and public had been the rivalry between himself and the King for her favours, until at last Wyatt bowed to defeat, not through fear of Henry but because he saw at las
t he had nothing to offer Anne that could compete with a crown.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain;
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written her fair neck round about,
“Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.”
Wyatt had relinquished her, written his famous poem of farewell, and Anne had shown it to Henry as proof of the man’s integrity, to quiet his jealousy. But he had never been sure after that, never quite sure, whether she had come to him unsoiled as she swore. And he was jealous of Wyatt, jealous of all those stolen moments of her extreme youth, of every moment in her life which he had been unable to share. Jealous, jealous, murderously jealous. Sometimes, in painful moments of honesty, he wondered if that were not the reason he had insisted on her death, a grim determination, after she had agreed to all his terms, that no one else should enjoy her. He had wanted to kill her and only regretted that, in common decency, he could not wield the axe himself.
At the time of her arrest, he had sent Wyatt to the Tower, along with those five other men; it had seemed the perfect moment to be revenged for all those years of uncertainty and anguish. And he would have sent Wyatt to his death, along with the rest, if it were not for those wretched lines of verse.
“Nole me tangere, for Caesar’s I am—”
No, he knew Wyatt had not committed adultery with her, no matter what they had done together before the marriage. He knew Wyatt too well, the stubborn courage which had made him challenge his monarch on man-to-man terms, the honest integrity which had made him keep his distance once he retired from the field of honour. He could not square Wyatt’s death with his conscience and so the man had been released. Whenever he woke now from guilty, terrified dreams he could point to Wyatt’s existence and assure himself that he was a just and honourable man who had killed his wife in good faith.
