Once, when the king was busy rough and tumbling with Edward, Katherine drew me close and toyed with my curls. I did not much like that, but didn’t protest. “I should like to have a daughter like you, Elizabeth,” she remarked. “After I have given His Majesty a son, of course. Would you like a sister?”
I already had a sister, but I nodded obediently. That was safer.
“Such a pretty child,” she sighed. “You look so much like Anne.”
I did not understand at first, thinking she meant the stepmother before her, whom I resembled not a jot. The name Anne, though, had belonged to another queen. Realising what she had said, Katherine pressed a hand to her mouth.
“Oh, Elizabeth,” she breathed. “Don’t tell the king.”
I never did. It was Katherine who didn’t know how to keep her secrets.
Those were the last good times. When she returned to London, the court was thick with ugly gossip, denouncing her as a whore and a traitor. It was all familiar; this was how Anne Boleyn fell, every tongue and hand turned against her, the king’s love crumbling to dust. They had been married not quite two years when Katherine was taken to the Tower, and the axe.
Love is a word I will never trust.
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Spring does not come to the Tower. There is, I suppose, no call for it among the condemned. From the height of the battlements I can see the scaffold, an omen of death ever on the horizon.
Thankfully, the Lieutenant of the Tower’s conduct remains cordial. Sir John remembers I am sister of the queen and daughter of the late king and grants me liberties no other prisoner might enjoy. I take my meals at his table, and on days when the weather permits I walk along the battlements with as many as five of my attendants. Kat is always among the number; she is more like herself in the open air, though never the same light-hearted, wicked-tongued friend I knew as a child.
The wind is chill this morning but I will not go inside. I brace my hands against the parapet and close my eyes, light speckles of rain stinging against my cheeks.
“I wonder what it is like,” I say aloud, “when the axe falls. Do you think it hurts?”
“My lady!” Kat is horrified. “What a thing to say!”
“I think it must. One hears that it is so often blunt. Perhaps I might apply to the queen, and ask that a swordsman perform the deed, as our father did for my mother. Surely she would not begrudge me a quicker end?”
“My lady.” Kat’s voice is choked. “I beg you, don’t say such things.”
I bow my head. “Oh Kat,” I whisper, “how many have passed through that gate and come out again alive?”
She places her hand on my arm and holds tight. “Why, I myself,” she says, her voice so thick the words can scarcely be discerned. “Did I not come out again?”
We both know the reassurance is hollow.
Later, as I lie awake listening to the rain, I wonder what proof of my innocence the queen will consider sufficient. She must know, if she knows me at all, that I would have no hand in this mad rebellion. Why would I ally myself with their plotting, when all I need do is quietly wait my turn? Mary is not young. Her husband has no love for her, and it grows ever more unlikely that she shall bear a child to take the crown after her death. Who should be her heir but me?
And in the dark the answer comes like the whispering of dead women at my bedside: any other, if the Queen sends you to the block.
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The king alternately raged and mourned the loss of his ‘rose without a thorn’. Mary was quietly relieved, for Katherine had never liked her; Edward echoed our father’s recriminations. I suffered bad dreams for many months afterwards and Kat held me as I wept.
Study had always been a refuge to me and so it was again now. “You have a most superior mind, my lady,” Kat sometimes sighed. “I wonder how I shall keep up with you.”
For once she was fully in earnest. That year my education was placed in the hands of Doctor Richard Coxe, tutor to Edward, so my brother and I were often in the same household. Mary, we saw less. I have never discovered whether this was our father’s choice, or her own.
There was always gossip about the king. Kat was at first convinced he meant to remarry Anne of Cleves, holding up the gifts they had exchanged at New Year to be positive proof, but all that came to nothing. Early the next year, an odd piece of news: the king had gone to see Mary, and seemed intent to stay awhile.
“A lady in her household has caught his eye, you may depend upon it,” Kat told me. “There will be word of an engagement before the spring is out.”
She was right. On the twelfth of July I was summoned to Hampton Court to witness my father’s sixth wedding. I was nine years old.
I do not know quite how to describe Catherine Parr. Her face was pleasant, her temper calm, and though I never had reason to suppose she loved—or even liked—my father, she hid any dissatisfaction with the greatest care. Her chief gift was the art of speaking well and her chief duty was to soothe the king’s increasingly capricious temper.
I was not inclined to love my new stepmother; I was, however, curious. Catherine was a well-educated woman. Observing that she preferred conversation above flattery, I did all I could to capture her attention, offering pretty speeches in French and Italian, and reciting verses from the great poets.
Though I was dismissed from court shortly after the wedding, she still took an interest in me. I was included in Edward’s lessons, studying logic and theology, rhetoric and philosophy. Edward was a boy and a prince, but he could not keep up with me. My stepmother soon found me a tutor of my own so I might learn at a quicker pace.
Even when not at our books, Edward and I spent much of our time together. There was so much we could talk of between ourselves, and so many interests we had in common, that we came to know each other better than we ever had before. It was good to have a brother, even if he did parrot my father’s complaints about ‘women’s arguments’ whenever I trounced him at debate.
Though Catherine had no ill will against Mary, I still saw little of my sister. In her letters her main concern was my study of theology. She had accepted the king’s changes to the Church with deep reluctance; nothing could sway her private principles, and she wanted mine to be the same. I did not know what to tell her. She could not keep me safe any more; my stepmother could.
Catherine did more than that.
For almost a year after the wedding I saw nothing more of the queen, and though Edward and Mary had both been summoned to court, I was troubled by pains in my teeth and could not go. It was an unlucky happenstance I felt most keenly and took without much grace. I was in the sullen state of lethargy that follows a grand tantrum when the letter reached me at St. James’s Palace.
My father had restored Mary to the succession, and me behind her.
I was, once more, a princess of England.
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Pox and plague on the Popish bastard! As if I have not enough reason to be miserable, the Constable of the Tower has taken it upon himself to correct Sir John’s lenience. My walks have been put to an end. If I wish to exercise I must walk in the royal lodgings, the windows all being shut first, so that I might not mistake myself as anything but a prisoner. Damn him. I feel as if I am being slowly nailed into a coffin.
Even in these straits, Kat hears things I do not. How she comes by her gossip I can’t say, but in my present circumstances I dare not disregard any scrap of knowledge. Yesterday, she tells me, Sir John received a warrant for my execution. Bless the man a hundred times over—I shall remember him in my prayers this night—for he doubted its veracity and instead of acting upon it, made haste to the queen to confirm her intentions. Mary denied sending any such order. But does she deny it because she wishes me alive, or because she fears what will happen if my head rolls at her word? The people of England remember their late king had two daughters—there may be unrest if I am seen to suffer injustice.
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I hold my hopes close.
Last night I dreamed I walked through the unlit halls of Hampton Court. I was not alone; skirts twitched out of sight at the corner ahead of me, and snatches of a woman’s singing drifted in the dark, a nonsensical lullaby as one might sing to an infant. I was seized by the conviction that I must catch her, but when I turned the last corner and ran out into the gardens, I found myself standing upon a scaffold, and a woman’s headless body gushed blood across my bare feet.
I woke choking on tears.
When I was a little girl my tutor would take me to watch cocks fight, and he taught me to handle a bow as well as any lady of the hunt. Surgeons have bled me with knives and leeches. I have witnessed more public executions than I can easily number. Blood holds no fear for me, yet in my dreams I drown in the horror of it.
They said my mother went mad in the Tower. Dear God, may that not be my fate.
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In the summer of 1544, the king resurrected his youthful valour to lead a military expedition into France and appointed his wife as regent in his absence. Women, I had heard a thousand times, were destined by the laws of Heaven to make poor leaders, but Catherine showed no qualm. When I was summoned to Hampton Court in July to join Mary and Edward, my stepmother was much engaged with affairs of state. It was a wondrous thing to see the great men of court defer to her, and her own calm acceptance of the role. It was, of course, all a reflection of the king’s glory; still, it did not sit ill on her.
Throughout the summer she kept me with her, and my brother and sister too. She was not motherly, as Anne of Cleves had been, nor as indulgent as Katherine Howard. She was an arbiter in disputes and a voice of consistent good sense. The contrast struck me greatly when the king returned, his health and temper both noticeably worsened by the French campaign. From his wife, he wished only smiles and soothing words; he never learned to appreciate the warmth of her true approval. What reason had he to look for it? He already owned her.
Queen Catherine liked to hear me read, but rarely when Mary was present. My sister was a staunch Catholic, my stepmother a quiet advocate of the Protestant faith, and the texts one woman deemed appropriate for my mind were necessarily opposed by the other.
As to the king’s convictions, they were as changeable as his tempers. He had renounced the Catholic church when the Pope refused to grant his first divorce, yet attended Mass as many as five times a day. The ceremony of English services changed with every royal decree. Catholics were hanged. Protestants burned. No one was permitted to question a passage of the Bible but the king himself.
The year I turned thirteen, a woman named Anne Askew was arrested for the disbursement of Protestant books and tortured in the Tower. Several of Catherine’s ladies were suspected to have been among her readers. My stepmother was shaken by the incident, and reacted less wisely than usual; she argued with the king and left him in such a rage he ordered her arrest. I was there that day, watching as her women whispered and wept and threw papers on the fire. Any disgruntled letter, any incautiously recorded thought—the least scrap of evidence might be enough to incriminate us all.
Familiarity does not make fear any more bearable. In a matter of hours I descended to frantic doubt. Should I leave, disassociating myself from all present, or would that only make me appear as guilty at the rest? How could I best present myself as blameless before my father’s eyes? Would my stepmother be granted the dignity of a divorce, or trumped up with a trial and beheaded at the Tower?
Then Catherine herself came in. “His Majesty believes it may rain,” she remarked serenely, and took up a book.
It was from Kat I heard what had happened. That morning, silver-tongued Catherine had gone to the king and persuaded him her argument had been but a ploy to distract him from the pain in his leg—that indeed, she knew he had been right all along.
Less than six weeks later, the king announced his intention to abolish Mass, and set about ridding himself of all Catholics.
Five months after that, he was dead.
All my life, I had tried to understand my father, as one might watch the clouds to predict a storm. What would please him? What would gain his favour? His presence had always been so intensely vital that to contemplate his death seemed almost sacrilegious.
The news was brought to my door by Edward Seymour, uncle of my brother. He came to Hatfield, where I was then in residence, with the prince at his side. He had not told my brother the reason for the urgent journey—he considered it more appropriate to tell us together. Edward was ashen when he arrived, half sick with dread. When Seymour spoke the words aloud we clung together, my brother and I, weeping uncontrollably. I will always remember him that way, a white-faced little boy with his arms around my neck, shaking with tears for the father who had loved him above all.
My stepmother met the event with her customary composure. It was arranged that I would live with her and continue my education—which is to say, a Protestant’s education. With the death of my father, the crown passed to my brother, but until he came of age the governance of England really lay in the hands of the Council of Regency. Most held strong Protestant sympathies. Catherine had no cause to hide any more.
Chief among the Council’s number was Edward Seymour, newly Duke of Somerset. He had carried me at my brother’s christening. I remembered him as a strict, stern-faced man—his brother Thomas, I had little memory of at all.
God knows I have had reason to wish that was still so.
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The Tower is crowded with the queen’s enemies. I am kept most carefully from reach of their eyes or words, but the guards can be amenable to a well-worded inquiry. On the eleventh of April, Thomas Wyatt was taken to the scaffold on Tower Hill. Even at the end, his loyalty held firm—he declared my innocence to the watching crowd. I weep when Kat tells me, for such a noble fool.
My interrogators are in a predicament. Their best hope of conviction lay in Wyatt’s testimony. Now, despite their cruellest efforts, I am exonerated by his word. Yet as the days drag on, my fate remains undecided.
It is not in Mary’s nature to act in haste. But it would be no more like her to forget a wrong—and never did she feel more wronged than by Anne Boleyn.
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Appointed Lord High Admiral of England shortly after my brother’s accession, Thomas Seymour was handsome, rowdy and recklessly ambitious. He had at one time wished to marry Catherine, but withdrew when the king made his own interest plain. With my father out of the way, he lost no time in resuming his suit, and Catherine—so wise in all other matters—lost her heart to him completely. It was shocking enough that the widowed queen would marry again; Catherine chose to marry Seymour in secret only months after the king’s death, and left the court dumbfounded when the truth was revealed. Mary was appalled, perhaps the more so because I was staying with my stepmother at the time and was therefore at great risk of moral decline.
The marriage did not quite take me by surprise. Living as I did in Catherine’s household, the odd comings and goings, voices raised late at night, all spoke eloquently of a secret and Kat was not long in uncovering it. Having just escaped one marriage, for Catherine to shackle herself into another! I could not understand it.
When the marriage was formally announced, Edward gave his pardon, and Seymour came to live with us at Chelsea. He was tall and brawny with an uproarious laugh that made even weak jokes sound hilarious. In his presence my patient, careful stepmother bloomed with girlish excitement. Elizabeth, she would cry, did you hear what Tom said?
Though Catherine owned several properties, we were most often at Chelsea. This household was much livelier than any I had lived in before, for my stepmother was fond of music and her new husband fond of fun. As for me, I had a pretty face, a keen mind, and a sharp tongue. Away from the intrigues of court, with a steady circle around me, I flowered.
I knew little of men, though there
had been one or two youths I had admired in the past. It was Tom who undertook my lessons in flirting, joking and jostling under Catherine’s fond eye, laughing at my blushes. Though his ribaldry shocked me at first, I soon learned to take each jest with an easy smile and a light retort. If sometimes I noticed the swell of muscle beneath his sleeve when he took my arm, or I shook a little when he suggested I measure his shoulders with my hands—well. I was fourteen, and he was handsome.
Nor did the horseplay end in the banquet hall. Tom liked pranks; nothing pleased him more than to shock and amaze. Early one morning he came suddenly into my room, before I was dressed, to wish me a merry ‘good morrow!’. I felt his eyes on my nightgown and gathered it close around myself, hot-faced with a mixture of gratification and shame. When he left, Kat burst into breathless giggles.
“Well, he makes no secret of his fancies, that’s a fact,” she whispered in my ear. “The Admiral planned to ask for your hand before your father died, you know, and afterwards he would have asked again if the poxy Council had not frowned so hard on the match. He settled for Lady Catherine at last…”
“Oh, stop it!” I swatted at her words, tossing my head. “He’s far too old. Besides, you shouldn’t say such things about my stepmother.”
Kat merely shook her head with a smile of satisfaction. “As you like, Lady Elizabeth.”
Tom’s morning visits to my bedchamber became a regular occurrence, and the more often he came, the more outrageous his behaviour. He so liked to surprise me that sometimes he would come before I was even out of bed, and lunged as if to leap in beside me. I’d laugh and shriek, alarmed and excited in equal measure, retreating beneath the covers until he left the room. Once, kneeling over me, he bent as if for a kiss, and only Kat’s startled admonition sent him away.
Cranky Ladies of History Page 37