Impulsively I hugged him once more, holding him to my chest with all my strength. My heart told me that he was wrong, that he must accept the ghastly truth that there would be no safety for him, no way out. But part of me called out, from some unknown place, show mercy. Show him a mother’s mercy, and let him hope.
And so I let go of his broad shoulders, his strong arms. I let go, and smiled—a genuine smile of joy—and called for the guard.
“Watch for me, mother. I may need you, once I am away.”
I nodded, continuing to smile, to look at his beloved face, wanting to remember every curve, every line, even as I heard the heavy footsteps of the guard approaching the door, the jingle of keys, Rob’s hasty words of farewell. For though my tears were falling, I knew that he was right. There would be release. His suffering would not last long. The dread end would come, and swiftly, with the dawn. And until it did, I would give my beloved son the only gift I could offer. The gift of hope.
Once I was outside, in the cold night wind, I wept, clinging on to the chill stones of the old prison in which he was being kept. I wept as never before or since. I was past thinking, I had no reason left. Only sorrow and dread.
Rob!
I looked up into the vast dark above me. Bright stars shone down on me, on the sleeping city. I cried to the unanswering stars, not caring who heard me or what I uttered.
I remembered what I used to say to Rob when I put him to bed, as a little boy, patting his head. Go to sleep, son, and may you dance with the angels! I said the words now, a dozen times, a hundred, until they blurred together and, feeling dizzy and lost, I let the queen’s messenger gently guide me back into the coach.
EPILOGUE
DRAYTON BASSETT, STAFFORDSHIRE
DECEMBER 20, 1634
It has finally happened: I have become the oldest person I know.
I am in my ninety-fourth year, I rejoice to say, and that makes me a full two years older than Mistress Vaux in Bishop’s Whittlewood and she is not likely to outlive me, not with her fainting spells and her two canes and her intemperate views on the king and his unruly Parliament.
I am old indeed, as my great-great-grandchildren would be quick to tell you, and proud, and some would say overly eager to make my voice heard. It is become a raspy voice, it quavers, and I cannot sing hymns properly any more, or Christmas carols. I leave that to the children, whose sweet voices reach me from St. Peter’s even now, across the quiet churchyard cemetery, as I write these words.
I write them sitting at my father’s old oak desk, with mementos of the past before me, surrounding me. Comforting me, like the heated bricks on which I rest my old feet in these wintry days. Miniatures of my children, all long gone, my small painting of Frank’s last ship, the Gift of God, a dried nosegay of roses and daisies brought to me last spring by one of the little girls—was it one of Dorothy’s long line of girls? One of the ones with my red hair, that rare shade so like the red-gold of the late autumn leaves? One of the pretty ones?
I confess I cannot remember all their names, there are so many little girls and boys now, and I have watched so many be born, and grow up, and love, and fall ill, and die. I am the oldest tree in the forest. The oldest stone in the churchyard. Or soon will be.
There is a stuffed pheasant in one corner on my father’s old desk, splendid in his fine red and gold feathers. A memento of Walter the great hunter. And Robert’s dear old eyeglasses. And my locket with the bit of Rob’s hair inside. Not his hair as a man, but his wispy blond hair as a baby. My child of the Evening Star.
Now to more vital things. It has seemed proper to me, as I embark on my ninety-fourth year, to bring to a close that record of my life begun so long ago and filled with my memories and my thoughts. I had meant to write an account of my entire life, but when I reached that ghastly day thirty-three years ago when my son Rob died I paused in my account—and until now, today, I have not been able to resume my story.
But today my great-grandson Gervase brought me a sobering reminder that time is not infinite—though if you are nearly ninety-four, it seems infinite—and that perhaps I ought to just write whatever I need to write in a few more pages (“if you can be so brief, dear,” he says with a smile and a pat on my shoulder) and then end this account.
I must note here that Gervase, for all his well-meaning tolerance of me and my high pile of pages telling the story of my life, is not a very good poet, though he fancies himself one. His verses are stale, almost as stale as his breath. I despise men who condescend to women. I am not a poet, but if I were, I would at least attempt to be original.
Gervase has attempted to write my epitaph in verse. He takes undue pride in his few lines. Pray God that when the hour comes, and I am laid in my grave, someone will have the good sense to prevent those lines from coming to light. What mediocre poetry could ever capture my life? That elusive, rapturous chain of hours, a chain that continues, even as my pen scratches.
A tumult outside. I must record it. A search is being ordered for suspicious persons, a watch set along the roads and chief highways. There is trouble at the court again. That faroff place, the royal court. Where Her Rough Majesty Gloriana reigned, and I shadowed her, dogged her, for so many years. And where now the coward in chief, our prince, King Charles the Undecided, casts his short shadow.
The tumult has reached the churchyard. They are searching for dangerous men, enemies of the crown. Renegades. But I, with my old ears, can still hear echoes of the renegades of Queen Elizabeth’s time, villains all. And among them, I am very sad to say, my own son. Of this I can write no more.
There is no memento of Queen Elizabeth on my father’s old desk. One might say—Gervase would approve this sentiment—that I am a living memento of her reign, her life. I knew her as few others did, though she hated me with a great and enduring bitterness. If there is a heaven, and she is in it (blasphemy! I know), then she is still hating me, even there. For one thing is sure in this world, and that is that love breeds hate, and envy, and the overwhelming desire for revenge. Fortunately it also breeds loving children, and grandchildren, and on and on. I have a fancy that one day, far into the future (for the world will not end, no matter what anyone may say), some auburn-haired little girl will read these ancient words of mine, and reach out to me across time, and bless me for sharing my self with her.
Are you that little girl? If so, I wish you well, child. I heartily wish you well.
But I am wandering. I have only one more thing to write, a trivial thing. It is that I wear the queen’s worn-out blue and purple garter still, strapped to my old leg. And I walk a brisk mile, and even dance a galliard or two of a morning, in her memory.
And now unto him whose birthday is at hand, whose carols the children are singing, whose enduring love embraces us all, I give these words, in hope and thankfulness.
—Letitia Knollys, Countess of Leicester
In this year of our Lord 1634
Read on for a preview of Carolly Erickson’s new book
THE FAVORED QUEEN
On Sale October 2011 from St. Martin’s Press
One
“HAS she lost her baby?”
My question hung in the air, unanswered.
The three Spanish midwives, brought from Legrogno especially to attend Queen Catherine at this, her tenth delivery, did not meet my steady gaze but looked down at the thick carpet at their feet. The queen’s closest friend and principal lady in waiting, Maria de Salinas, her expression somber and her shoulders rounded in defeat, stood loyally beside her mistress’s bed but said nothing. The surgeons who had been summoned by King Henry to attend the queen were nowhere to be seen.
Queen Catherine lay asleep in her high carved wooden bed, mouth agape, her sparse greying auburn hair spread out over her lace-trimmed pillow, the pillow sweat-stained and rumpled as were the bedclothes. Her face was haggard, weary. As those of us who served her knew well, she had been struggling to give birth ever since the previous evening, and it was clear to
me now, as I looked down at her, that the effort had taken all her strength. She looked like a woman nearer in age to sixty than forty, though her fortieth birthday had been celebrated by her entire household not long before.
As I watched, she began to murmur in her sleep, as if troubled by disturbing dreams. Her small white wrinkled hands, the fingers bent and swollen, clutched convulsively at the satin counterpane.
I glanced around the darkened bedchamber, taking in the closely drawn thick curtains of purple damask, the heavy, old-fashioned furnishings the queen had brought from Spain many years earlier when she came to the English court as a bride, the religious pictures and crucifixes on the paneled walls, the elaborately embroidered prie-dieu, embroidered by the queen herself, where I had so often seen her kneeling in prayer, the implements of torture (as I thought of them) used by the midwives and laid out on a table beside the bed. Knives, probes, metal clamps and pincers. Bowls and towels, powders and flasks full of medicines. Cruel tongs used, I knew, to reach in and grasp a resistant infant trapped inside a diseased womb. I shuddered at the sight of them, and looked away.
Another sight also made me shudder. A plain wooden chest stood against one wall of the room, its lid not quite closed. Protruding from one corner was a bloody cloth. A sheet, I thought. Hearing me approach, the midwives must have tucked the bloodstained sheets hastily into the chest, and left one corner out.
The pungent odor of lavender filled the room. Lavender, given to women after childbirth to induce a restful calm and sleep. And there was another odor as well. The sharp, unpleasant odor of opium. I had smelled it often, for my father’s physician prescribed it for him to ease the pains of his gout.
So the queen had been given opium to assuage her labor and to induce the sweat trance believed to lessen the fever that carried off so many women after giving birth. Opium, that helped the mother but often (so I had heard it said) cost the child’s life.
I was still waiting for an answer to my question. There had been a delivery, of that I was certain. But what of the child? We had not heard the cry of the newborn, the joyous shouts of welcome and triumph from the midwives and physicians when the newborn was a boy.
All was quiet in the room, except for the sound of the queen’s ragged breathing. Then I heard a stifled sob. One of the midwives had tears rolling down her olive-tinted cheeks.
“Will no one tell me plainly?” I demanded. “Has she lost her baby?”
After a pause, Maria de Salinas looked at me and gave the slightest nod.
“He lived for an hour,” she said. “Only an hour. He was baptized.” At these words Maria and the other women crossed themselves. “We prayed,” Maria went on. “But it was the Lord’s will to take him.”
My heart sank. Once more, I thought. Once more, to hope month after long month for a living child, and then to be so cruelly disappointed. I could only imagine the queen’s deep sorrow and dismay.
“Has the king been informed?”
“No, Mistress Seymour,” Maria answered in her heavily accented English. “It was the queen’s wish that he not be informed for a little while yet.”
But I had my orders. King Henry had insisted before leaving for the hunt that should the queen’s child be born while he was away, a messenger would be sent to him at once. It was my responsibility to follow the royal order.
I left the bedchamber and sought out Queen Catherine’s gentleman usher Griffith Richards, giving him the sad news and instructing him to send word to the king.
“I will go myself, Mistress Seymour,” he said. “I know where the huntsmen are today.”
“Ride slowly then,” I said softly. “The queen is in no hurry to let her husband know what has happened.”
He sighed and nodded. “Yet again,” he said. “Yet again.” He turned and left the room, and I noticed that he did not make haste.
Several hours later Maria de Salinas came to me.
“Mistress Seymour, Her Highness is asking for you.”
I followed her at once into the royal bedchamber where Queen Catherine, out of bed and dressed in a becoming, loose-fitting gown of soft magenta wool trimmed in miniver, was seated before her pier glass.
“Ah, Jane,” she said as I entered, “gentle, kind Jane. Soothe me. Brush out my hair.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
I took the soft brush from the dressing table and began to gently run it through the thin strands. I saw the queen’s eyes close in pleasure as I did so.
“I must not let the king see me in my tired state. I must try to be pleasant to look at when he comes, when I greet him. After all, he will be tired from his hunt, and in need of refreshment and rest. He will not be in a mood to hear bad news about our child.”
“May the Lord bless the little one and take him to His bosom,” I said.
“Amen,” was the queen’s soft reply. Her thin lips were curved into a wan smile.
“Another small shrine to be added,” she remarked, indicating a cabinet above the prie-dieu where were kept eight miniature portraits, one for each of the children she had lost. Above each portrait was a silver crucifix, below each a tablet with the name of the baby. “We had planned to name this one Edward—or Isabel, had she been a girl. After my sainted mother.”
Her voice, normally low and pleasant, trembled slightly and she was speaking so softly that it was hard for me to hear her. I felt as though I were listening to someone in a trance. I thought of the opium, the sweat trance… was the queen still under the influence of the strong medicine? She did not seem like herself. Though she often honored me with her confidences, the way she was talking to me now was more open and free than in the past. Almost as if I were her confessor, Fray Diego, and not her maid of honor, Jane Seymour.
She went on talking, as I brushed the long thin strands of hair and gathered them into my hand. I could not help but notice that the brush was filling with hair; there were thin patches where the queen’s scalp all but shone through. What did it mean, that her hair was falling out?
I looked into the pier glass and saw a slight frown pass across her features. “I was so certain that this time… this time… the Lord would give me a strong boy. I made a pilgrimage to Our Lady at her shrine at Walsingham. Afterwards I felt so certain that she would grant my wish.”
I knew well that the queen had made a pilgrimage to the shrine, for I had gone with her. Had she forgotten? Had the opium made her forgetful?
“Perhaps she will, Your Majesty. Next time,” I said.
She shook her head. “No. I cannot go through such a terrible labor again. No, this was the last time.” She made a small sound. I realized that she was laughing quietly to herself.
“My old duenna, Dona Elvira, used to tell me when I was a little girl that I never knew when to give up. I kept on doing the same thing over and over, she said, even though I never got the result I wanted. I guess she was right.”
“Your Majesty has been granted a beautiful, intelligent daughter, Princess Mary. Your jewel and delight, as you always say.”
“Yes. But she is not a prince. And England needs a prince.”
I had nothing to say to that, so was silent. Everyone knew the situation, the problem—many called it a crisis—over the succession. King Henry needed a son to inherit his throne. But he had only a daughter, only Princess Mary, who had been given the title Princess of Wales, the title traditionally given to the officially designated heir, but who could not be expected to reign. No woman could govern the unruly English, that was evident to all. The chronicles told of a queen in the distant past, Queen Maud, who attempted to rule but was overthrown. No woman had tried since. Better the throne should pass to the king’s natural son, the boy known as Henry Fitzroy. But should he be the one to inherit, there would be challenges to his rulership. There would be chaos, possibly civil war, as in the time of King Henry’s grandfather.
So the king’s loyal subjects prayed that the queen, despite her many failures in the past, would at last give birth
to a healthy boy. But those prayers—including my own—had gone unanswered.
Presently I said, “Shall I bind Your Majesty’s hair?”
“Yes, Jane. And put on my hood, the cheerful rose-colored one with the pearls.”
“That one is very becoming.”
“It brings a little color to these pale cheeks. Henry complains that I am too sallow. And then, Jane, it will be time to bring in the other ladies and the maids of honor. I must tell them my news myself.”
I did my best to complete the queen’s coiffure—normally the task of her hairdressers—and to put her hood in place. Together we regarded her image in the pier glass. She smiled. She had come out of her trance. Once again she was the serene, gracious royal wife, head of her extensive household. The signs of her recent ordeal were there to be seen, in her drawn features and the dark circles under her eyes, but her manner was more confident.
“Please tell Maria that I am ready. And send Fray Diego to me, to hear my confession.”
Her confession, I thought. What had she to confess? Surely bearing another stillborn child after undergoing many hours of heroic labor was no sin? Or did she imagine that the death of her child was a divine punishment?
I went out through the antechamber and into the room where the ladies in waiting and maids of honor were assembled.
“She is ready,” I told Maria de Salinas. “She asks for Fray Diego, to make her confession, and then she will speak to us all.”
I remember so well what happened later that afternoon. We had all taken our places in a reverent circle around the queen’s chair, where she sat in benevolent calm. There were her Spanish ladies, Maria de Salinas, Ines de Venegas, Francesca de Lima and others whose names I barely knew, not having occasion to speak with them or perform tasks alongside them. And there were the chief officers of her household, and her chaplains and confessor. And then there were the women I knew best, the ladies in waiting and, especially, the other maids of honor.
Rival to the Queen Page 24