Rival to the Queen

by Carolly Erickson

  Smiling, she reached down and cupped my face in her two hands, then Cecelia’s. “That is what I wish for you girls,” she said. “That your pretty faces will be lit with happiness, all your lives long.”

  “Did you watch Queen Anne die?” Frank asked mother, “like we had to watch Jocelyn die?”

  “No. Brother Henry and I were away, living in the country. We were in disgrace, as were all the Boleyns. As we still are. But it was Anne who mattered. Anne and her brother George and all those in their households. Oh, that was a horrible time. Everyone I knew was frightened, and my mother most of all.”

  “Was Queen Anne really a witch?” Frank asked.

  Mother looked thoughtful. “It was said that she practiced alchemy. Mother told me about a room she had, where she kept potions and powders. The servants thought she was turning lead into gold, though if she did, she never gave any to us. She may have made poisons. But as to witchcraft—” She broke off, shaking her head and looking dubious. “It was said the king loved her with an uncommon hunger. But I think it was the hunger of great lust, and not of witchery. In any case,” she concluded, “Queen Mary never forgave her stepmother Queen Anne for being so alluring to the king that he divorced her mother. Mary hates all Boleyns, and no doubt she always will.”

  Mother’s words were much in my thoughts as our family boarded the Anne Gallant at Dover, leaving Queen Mary’s Catholic England and bound for the safety of Protestant Frankfurt, where my father had acquaintances who he said would take us in. I held my head high, convinced, as I was, that I had the royal blood of the Tudors in my veins. And I remembered what my mother had said, that it was far better to be happy than shrewd, and above all to be wary of the wrath of kings and queens.

  THREE

  Whether it was because of my newfound certainty that I was of royal ancestry or simply because, at sixteen, I was coming into my years of promised beauty, I was much admired when we arrived at our new home in Frankfurt.

  I had been a beautiful child, everyone had always agreed on that, though my father had frowned on all talk of my loveliness and said “You’ll make her too full of herself” or “Too much praise makes the devil’s playground” when my mother and others spoke admiringly of how pleasing my looks were. My younger sister Cecelia, my father’s favorite, tended to burst into tears and leave the room when I was the center of attention; this made him vexed at me, though it was hardly my fault that my hair was the rare red-gold of autumn leaves and my skin as flawless and as translucent as the finest ivory. (Cecelia’s hair was a mousy brown and her skin, while smooth, tended to be the color of sand. But she had very good teeth, as I often reminded her.)

  We were lodged in the grand house of Jacob Morff, a member of the Consistory and an elder of the Lutheran church, the dominant influence and authority in Frankfurt. The four-storey gabled house was near the Old Bridge, where a few Catholic sisters continued to operate a foundling home and to take in unwanted infants. We heard the babies crying at all hours, in fact it seemed to mother and me that their numbers were growing with each passing day. But beyond this nuisance all was comfortable in the Morff household, and we were shown a courteous if impersonal hospitality.

  It was the custom for Protestants to shelter one another, for as our numbers grew we were persecuted mercilessly, and there were many English Protestants coming to the continent, fleeing Queen Mary and her burnings, when I was a girl. Herr Morff had several English families living in his large house, though he was not a genial host, rather he kept a grave distance, as though unsure what to make of us foreigners. In time I was to understand why.

  At first I quite enjoyed myself in our new town, a large and bustling place, its narrow streets crowded with horses and carts and peddlers on foot. The sprawling marketplace was bursting with commerce, except on Sundays, when all business transactions were forbidden by the Consistory as were all amusements. The ancient cathedral with its tall spire towered over all other city structures, and the massive stone bridges that spanned the Main river, the thick brick walls that surrounded the town and the weighty, many-storied houses centuries old gave the entire place an air of solidity, if not of grandeur. London was older than Frankfurt, father said, but Frankfurt was richer—and much more moral, now that the Consistory governed all.

  That it was a moral place we knew from the abundance of hymn-singing that went on, not only in church, where the services were long and tedious (though no one was allowed to complain about this out loud), but in the streets and squares. When we went out in the afternoons, we often walked or rode past group after group of townspeople who had gathered to sing hymns or other pious songs.

  “We must join in,” father said. “We must not appear strangers in their midst.” So we learned to sing “How lovely shines the morning star” and “My trust in Thee can nothing shake” and “From depths of woe I cry to Thee” in our English-accented German and we tried our best to imitate father’s expression as he sang, his heavy-lidded eyes sad, his lined, narrow face full of a dark longing.

  We did our best to look and act pious, but true religious feeling cannot be feigned, and in truth we were young and full of pent-up energy and had few outlets for our restless physical vigor. Hymn-singing was not the activity we needed.

  But the elders made and enforced strict rules about what we could and could not do. We were not allowed to swim, lest it lead to “promiscuous bathing” with men and women, boys and girls all joining in together. Long walks were forbidden, because they made the blood flow more rapidly and heightened the passions. Athletic feats promoted pride in the body, and the body was the prime portal of sin. Dancing, which led to frivolity and flirtation, was condemned with especial rigor.

  One Sunday there was a scuffle in the square near the Old Bridge, in front of a tavern called the White Lion. I had often seen men quarreling and fighting in our village of Rotherfield Greys and on our visits to London but until that afternoon I had never seen men attacking one another in hymn-singing Frankfurt. Then I noticed that at the center of the brawl was Jacob Morff’s sturdy, blond son Nicklaus, a boy I liked for his jokes and a way he had of imitating the cleaning women in the Morff household. These maids walked with their knees together, taking short steps and always looking down at the floorboards, never at each other or objects in the room or other people. They were not shy, nor furtive, merely inconspicuous to an extreme degree. Nicklaus Morff, despite his girth and strong young muscles, could squeeze himself down and assume the appearance and carriage of one of these maids, pressing his knees together and walking in a way that made me laugh out loud, and Cecelia too if she was nearby.

  Now, however, Nicklaus was pounding the head of another boy onto the rounded stones of the square, and shouting “No, you won’t! You can’t!” as the cluster of squabbling men and boys grew larger, drawing a crowd.

  “Stop this at once!”

  It was the voice of a big man I had seen once or twice at Jacob Morff’s house, a senior member of the Consistory who, as he began to speak, seemed to cleave a path through the crowd until he stood amid the fighters, pulling them apart and shouting at them. Several other older men joined the leader in putting a halt to the violence. The brawlers, disheveled and dirty, several of them bloody, stood stiff-limbed and scowling. I heard Nicklaus swear angrily under his breath at the boy he had been scuffling with.

  “Each of you, take note! This is your warning. If you are seen lifting your hands against each other again, you will be publicly denounced by name. Come out, saith the Lord, lest the body be cankered by its weakest members. Now, speak! What is the cause of this rioting and drunkenness?”

  At first no one spoke. Then a man was thrust forward by some of the others.

  “It is the White Lion, Elder Roeder. It is to be closed!”

  “That is correct. There are to be no more taverns in this city from now on. Only Christian eating houses. With a Bible on every table. The Consistory has ordained it.”

  A loud moan of outrage arose from th
e crowd.

  “Silence!”

  But the moan of protest went on, and there were shouts of “Beer! Beer!” and a few people began singing a drinking song.

  Elder Roeder drew from his long black gown a tablet and a charcoal-tipped stick, and began writing down names. Meanwhile I saw, somewhat to my amazement, that Bibles were being flung out of the door of the White Lion, landing on the cobblestones and raising small puffs of dust. I thought to myself, are these the same citizens of Frankfurt who meet to sing hymns in the streets? Or are there two Frankfurts, the city of the pious and the city of the others, who do not sing hymns and who drink in taverns and, most likely, engage in promiscuous bathing and athletics and card-playing and dancing.

  “Sacrilege!” shouted the elder, and he wrote more furiously on his tablet. “You are all denounced! You will all appear before the Consistory!”

  “Well, if we must,” shouted Nicklaus Morff, “then we must. But we can all get drunk first!”

  And before anyone could stop him he darted into the White Lion, and a good many of those in the crowd followed him in, leaving Elder Roeder to his writing and shouted threats.

  Father led us all away before we too could find our names recorded on his tablet. But the elder’s angry shouts followed us as we made our way along the river, past the bridge and the foundling home, and began to hear, as well, the strains of a raucous drinking song.

  FOUR

  Nicklaus Morff began to intrigue me. Not because of his looks, which were quite ordinary—heavy-lidded, pale blue eyes, a broad unlined brow, a nose too wide and shapeless for handsomeness and thin lips, nearly always creased into a grin—but because he and his friends dared to defy the iron grip of the Consistory and were showing the rest of us a path toward a freer and more adventuresome life.

  The strictures of the governing elders did not frighten him, though he suffered his share of beatings for defying the rules and was eventually expelled from the congregation, much to his father’s disgust. He had a group of friends, mostly Catholic boys, I assumed, for I never saw any of them in our Protestant church, who loitered near the Old Bridge waiting for him after dark and then went with him to the public gardens where, according to Elder Roeder, wickedness kept its kingdom.

  I watched from the window of the small bedroom Cecelia and I shared on an upper floor in the Morff house as the boys clustered near the torchlit bridge abutment and leaned against the stonework, laughing and poking each other and occasionally looking up toward me.

  “Put out that candle,” Cecelia whispered one night when I was watching the boys. “Don’t you know those boys can see you?”

  I did know, and I did not snuff out the candle. I wanted them to see me. I wanted to be down among them, laughing and joking and flirting.

  “Those godless worthless boys!” Cecelia was saying. “Worse than Nicklaus, at least Nicklaus has been baptized.”

  Cecelia, I knew, was quite infatuated with Nicklaus. I could tell by the way she kept her eyes on him whenever he was in the room, and the way she tried to inch closer to him. Once I had seen her brush up against him as they passed through a doorway and I noticed that she never again wore the pair of blue sleeves she had been wearing that day. I supposed she had made a shrine of them, a shrine to her infatuation, and the thought made me laugh.

  As for Nicklaus, he kept his eyes on me. There was no question about which of us had attracted his interest. He had not yet spoken to me, he had only smiled at me rather shyly once or twice, though he was not shy with anyone else. But I knew who it was that he liked, and it wasn’t my sister.

  “They are not godless. They are Catholics. And all Catholics are baptized when they are babies.”

  Cecelia sniffed. “Elder Roeder says they go to the public gardens, where the bad women wait for them. And they drink and fornicate there.”

  “If the White Lion had not been shut down, they would not be forced to go to far worse places to get their beer.”

  There were footsteps outside our door, and in a moment the door was opened and our mother came in.

  “It’s past time you were in bed, girls. Letitia, put that candle out!”

  “She’s watching the boys by the bridge. She does it every night.” Cecelia’s tone was querulous, but also plaintive.

  “She knows the rules. She will obey them.”

  I carried the candle from the window ledge to my bedside, and slipped into bed beside Cecelia, snuffing the candle out. Mother pulled the thick counterpane up to cover us both, bent down to kiss us, then left.

  I waited until I heard Cecelia’s breathing become slow and even. Then I got out of bed, careful not to wake my sleeping sister, and went to the window again.

  The sky had grown darker. The stars were out, and the flickering lights on the bridge shone on the rippling surface of the river. A light rain was beginning to fall, but the boys, still waiting where I had last seen them, seemed not to care. Before long I saw Nicklaus run out of the house and join his friends, who whooped with joy at his approach. Together they all set off half-running, half-leaping across the bridge, in the direction of the public gardens.

  The city was in furor over the arrival of the Anabaptists.

  They swarmed into Frankfurt like bees, colonizing and swarming and gathering in large numbers in the weavers’ districts and wherever the ragged people lived.

  They were a religious group, my father said, but they were not like us. Nor were they like the Catholics. They had no churches but preached in cellars or out in the open air. Poor people flocked to hear them preach, for they deluded the poor by speaking of a pure and simple belief in following the path of Jesus. They did not talk of sin, but rather of leaving the world behind and seeking a sweeter home. Of making this world into a better one.

  The Anabaptists did great harm, according to my father and the elders, who preached against them every Sunday and during the week as well. They threatened to destroy the true faith—our Protestant faith. They ignored sin, and the wages of sin. They were like a horde of locusts swooping down on crops and destroying them, the elders said, only the crops were the Christians, we Protestant Christians whose task it was to destroy in turn every Anabaptist who crossed our path.

  “Death to the Anabaptists!” the Consistory declared. Soon we began seeing evidence that the crusade against the invaders was having its effect.

  In the square near the White Lion—now renamed the Soldiers of Christ eating house—six Anabaptists were burned at the stake. Others were rounded up by the town authorities and taken to the dungeons and garroted, their corpses piled in the gutters. Severed heads rotted on the Old Bridge, hanging from the tall lantern posts, open-mouthed and swaying ghoulishly. Worst of all, so it seemed to me, Anabaptist women, many of them mothers, were denounced and condemned, and then brought to the riverside quite near the Morff house. On orders from the elders, the women were bound with ropes, their arms pinned to their sides, their legs tied together. Then their feet were cut off, and they were thrown into the river to drown.

  We could not help being aware of these horrifying executions, though I did my best to avoid witnessing them.

  Each evening Jacob Morff led his entire household, including our family, in prayer, and thanked the Lord that the crusade against the wicked Anabaptists was resulting in so many deaths. I had to join in these prayers, but I could not contemplate what was being done without feeling a crushing weight of pain. I had nightmares about the executions, especially the drownings of the women and the sight of their small children, abandoned and weeping, along the river’s edge. I told my father about these nightmares, and he said that I must think of these Anabaptist enemies of Christ not as humans, but as monstrous beings sent to test our faith. That would help me surmount my feelings of pity, he said.

  “But it is not just pity I feel, father. It is horror.”

  “Then thinking of them as monsters will prevent you from feeling horror. These are times that go beyond our understanding, Letitia. Only God under
stands. And he leads the elders of our congregation. Where he leads, we must obey.”

  I could not help but argue. “Is he leading Queen Mary in England?” I asked.

  He paused, and when he answered, his voice was quiet. “She believes that he is.”

  “Then I don’t understand, father. And I need to.”

  He shrugged. His shoulders sagged, as they always did when he had lost an argument, especially when he argued with my mother.

  “I don’t either. I just pray. And I am thankful that God has let me endure, and keep my family safe.”

  I saw then that he was indeed bewildered and saddened by all the cruelty made necessary by faith, just as I was, though he had to believe that what the Consistory was doing was right and necessary and even holy.

  The burnings and beheadings and drownings continued in Frankfurt for months, and still the Anabaptist scourge did not abate. I kept imagining that in time I would become hardened to these acts, that my feelings would grow coarsened or even numb. But that did not happen. Instead I felt myself becoming even more sensitive to the horrors around me, and it became my prayer that I might find a way to live with them. To endure them.

  Late one afternoon as the shadows were lengthening and the river was turning from the deep grey-blue of noon to the muted ashen grey of evening, an Anabaptist woman was brought to the riverside near the Morff house to be drowned.

  Usually, when this happened, I went down into the cellars and hid there for an hour or two until I could be certain the execution was over. But on this afternoon I felt a different impulse. I stayed by the bedroom window and forced myself to watch.

  The woman who was being led to her death, a plump, apple-cheeked woman wearing a sacklike shapeless gown, was young and blond. The executioner had cut her hair very short. She was pale, but her hands and arms were brown, the hands and arms of a peasant who worked in the fields during the warm months and who was accustomed to a life without comforts. There was no one with her. No one, that is, who appeared to be a relative or friend. But she carried a small bundle, hugging it close to her heart. It had to be a child.