Just Flesh and Blood

by Caro, Jane;

  ‘You should be very proud of her, my darling, and of yourself. She is a living tribute to her father and the Tudor House. Here, let me read you some more.’

  Which she did.

  ‘Ha!’ My father gave a great bark of appreciation at one deft translation. I flushed with delight.

  ‘You are right, Catherine. This is a work of excep-tional erudition. Why, I doubt even Master More’s daughters could produce something as fine.’

  Thomas More, who had been dead for many a year, was famous for his brilliant daughters, educated to as high a standard as any man. I think my father had always felt a rivalry with More, and that I could match the man’s daughters was important to him.

  ‘Come here, Madame Isabeau.’

  I came closer, suffused with silent pleasure that he had used my nickname. Even more thrillingly, my father then chucked me affectionately under the chin.

  ‘It is such a pity you were not a boy.’

  My father terrified me and yet I hope to be reunited with him in the afterlife. My father made me feel bad more often than good, but I also knew that in his own way he loved me and that no actual bodily harm would come to me while he was alive. But, if I do see him in heaven (or, God forbid, the other place), will he praise me and tell me that I have made him proud? I have created a peaceful and prosperous England. More than that, I have made our little island formidable to its enemies and important to its friends. If we meet, will he call me Madame Isabeau and stroke my hair as he sometimes did when I was very small? Or will he berate me because I did not become some man’s wife? My failure to marry and bear children means that the Tudor dynasty he was so desperate to secure dies with me.

  Would his spirit be right to be angry? Did I refuse to even try to produce further generations of Tudors out of spite? Was I unconsciously determined to thwart my father’s greatest desire? It sometimes seems to me that we do not understand all the reasons we do what we do, and that is why our actions surprise us as often as they surprise others.

  I give another of my great sighs. No matter how I regard what I have done with the life he gave me, I suspect that my father is much more likely to berate me for my failings than praise me for my successes.

  ‘The queen is stirring.’ Archbishop Whitgift has stood up from his prayers to lean right over me. ‘Is there something you wish to say, Your Majesty? I am right beside you. It is I, John Whitgift, your Archbishop of Canterbury, here to take your final confession.’

  I open one eye and glare at him. Confession! As if I would bare my soul to a fool like him! The only man I will confess to is my God.

  ‘Do not be afraid, Your Grace. It is a glorious thing to ascend to heaven, as a virtuous queen is sure to do. You will be greeted by all you loved best, made young again – and whole – when you arrive at St Peter’s gates. Your ears will be soothed by heavenly choirs, the weight of the world will lift from your shoulders and you will float like a dandelion from place to place. No rough roads any longer, no mountains to climb, no difficulties or hardships of any kind. Just eternal bliss and peace from now until Judgment Day.’

  Unfortunately for the archbishop my imagination has been rather captured by the picture of me floating on air, so I do not listen very closely to the rest of his well-meant words. Instead I close my eyes again and my mind drifts away just like the dandelion he has imagined.

  I am alive. My heart beats, my skin is warm, I breathe, my limbs still move. I am alive, but I am dying. I am dying in my own bed with my head still attached to my neck, my skin unpierced by any blade, my stomach untainted by any poison. I am dying at the time of God’s choosing and not of any man’s. Such a fate has not always been as certain as it is now.

  I am alive and I am awake. I do not know the o’clock. I do not know what day of the week it is or even what month of the year. I am alive, but whatever this day may be, it is certainly the day on which I will die.

  I am alive and I am afraid. I do not know what awaits me only a few minutes from now, or in an hour or so (surely no longer than that). My world has shrunk to this darkened room, this soft and warm bed. The only sounds that now assail my ears are the faint murmur of prayers. I cannot make out the words of those who pray. I cannot muster the energy required to understand.

  Is this what it feels like when you are about to be born? In our end is our beginning, or so they always told me. A new baby is squeezed and pummelled by titanic forces beyond their control, propelled from the warmth and darkness of the only world they have ever known into the wide, cold brightness of earth. Like a baby being born, I only know the world I am leaving; I have no knowledge of the world I am about to enter.

  I hear my heart beat; thump, thump, thump. It is the noise that has accompanied me for every moment of my existence. It will cease soon.

  I do not know why my thoughts return to the very beginning of my life just when my weary journey is so near its end. I seem to have no control of my wayward brain. It has a mind of its own – if a mind can be said to have a mind.

  I have but a few early memories and I was so hungry for them all the way through my life that I often begged those who witnessed my infancy to tell me what they knew. I persuaded them to repeat their words so often that I can no longer separate genuine memory from a story I have absorbed so thoroughly I merely think I remember it.

  I think I remember the rustle of skirts and the bright flash of dangling jewellery. I think I remember my infant hands reaching for the glittering objects that hovered so enticingly before my eyes. I think I remember soft skin, a sense of warmth and safety and a low, lilting voice, speaking to me in French. But do I remember this? Or do I simply wish that I did?

  I do remember receiving a letter from the Scottish Protestant theologian and scholar Alesius. I was a grown woman when his epistle arrived and I had been many years a queen, yet the story he told me took me back to my lost infancy.

  Alesius had been a great admirer of my mother and he happened to be with her in London during the few short weeks of her downfall. There was nothing planned about this; he was simply unlucky enough to be caught up in events that neither my mother nor her admirer could have anticipated. It took a scant three weeks for my mother to fall from queen to executed traitor.

  Alesius’s letter was one I delighted in receiving and which I have kept in the little box beside my bed alongside Robin’s last letter. The box is beside me now, and after I die no doubt it will be opened and all my secrets rifled through. Only a little while ago such a thought would have horrified me. I have no interest now. Let them think what they think – it is out of my hands.

  In his letter, Alesius told me that he had watched as the danger my mother was in slowly dawned upon her. At first, she could not believe what was being said about her and how the rumours of infidelity were being used to blacken the mind of the king. However, Alesius wrote, as the precarious nature of her position began to sink in my mother did all she could to save her own life. Alesius described in great detail how one terrible day he watched my mother desperately appeal to my father using the only lever she had left – me, her infant daughter.

  ‘Alas,’ he wrote, ‘I shall never forget the sorrow I felt when I saw the sainted queen, your most religious mother, carrying you, still a baby, in her arms, and entreating the most serene king, your father. It happened in Greenwich Palace, where he was looking through an open window onto the courtyard when she brought you to him.’

  I wept as I read those words. Although the infant me was too young to have any memory of the event itself – as an adult queen I was transported back in time. I knew exactly which window Alesius was referring to and even remembered seeing my father looking out onto that courtyard whenever we were in residence. I had even looked out of it myself. I could easily imagine my mother scurrying towards it, desperation and hope doing battle in her breast. Had she planned this ambush or had she merely seen my father at the window and grasped h
er opportunity?

  As I read further, I could almost feel what the infant me might have experienced being jolted across the courtyard in my mother’s arms. Did she hold me up towards my father as she stood below him outside the window? Did she thrust me towards him as she beseeched him for mercy? I do not know. I do not even know what words were spoken between them, because Alesius could see the interview unfold well enough, but he could not hear what was said. What he could tell for certain was that whatever she said, however urgently she proffered my infant self, her words had no effect.

  ‘The faces and the gestures of the speakers plainly showed the king was angry.’

  Alesius could not hear but he could see. Indeed, thanks to his letter, I could see the king and the queen too, the one so high, the other so low, as one beseeched and the other rebuffed. That she tried to use me to soften my father’s heart was devastating. Of course, using my existence to plead her cause was to no avail. I was the living evidence of the curse my father believed God had placed upon him and my presence would merely have confirmed his desire to be rid of my mother.

  I cried as I read about this desperate conversation all those years ago, but did I cry at the time? It would be strange if I did not. Babies are made anxious by adult anger, understandably so, but my distress would not have helped my mother’s cause. The noise I made would no doubt have irritated my father, who never liked to deal with the pain of others.

  It breaks my heart to think of my mother, so desperate, so courageous, so determined to try and save her own life. It touches me to think that whatever my father might have thought about my existence she still believed that I had some chance of softening his resolve. She loved me – that is clear. I suspect she even loved him, but all in vain. Maybe he still loved her and that is why he treated her so harshly. His own jealousy and pain were overwhelming his reason.

  I cannot bear to think of her after my father closed the windows in her face. I cannot bear to think of her left standing in the courtyard, clasping me to her breast and perhaps sobbing in despair and humiliation as she realised that she could no longer move the man she had once had such power over. I cannot bear to think of all the courtiers who, like Alesius, must have witnessed this exchange. I have seen how quickly former friends disappear when a man falls from royal favour. I hope that at least I was a comfort to her. I hope my existence gave some moments of joy to the little bit of life she had left.

  Why do I regret the loss of my coronation ring so much? Why do I feel its loss as an amputation, rather than a liberation? I clasp my hands over the bedclothes once more to worry at the space where my ring once sat.

  ‘The queen is praying!’ John Whitgift is kneeling beside my bed and is alert to my every move. He begins to pray with redoubled vigour, but he is wrong. I am not praying. I am beyond prayer. If my experience as an earthly judge is any guide, God has already made His determination about me. I am not so arrogant that I do not tremble at what He may have decided. I have broken many commandments. That is the truth of it. Will He, as wise rulers usually do, take the context of my sins into account? Or does He demand that each of us poor sinners stick to the letter of holy law?

  If He forgives me my trespasses and allows me to enter heaven, all I really want is to see my mother. She is the reason I miss my coronation ring so utterly. She is why I grieve its loss almost as if it were an actual person. Inside my ring, in a hidden compartment, with me every moment of every day, was the image of my mother. The ring’s broken remains are also in the little box beside my bed. (Odd how my most precious possessions are not the rich jewels or priceless objects and books I have owned. They are letters, broken rings, mementos and fripperies of no value to anyone but me.)

  Many people lose their mothers. Many never know their mothers – so many women die in childbirth. But I have never met anyone who lost their mother the way I lost mine. It is something I have tried all my life not to think about and yet the terrible circumstances of my mother’s death have dogged me, waking or sleeping. I was the cause of my mother’s demise. There, I have said it. When I was born, just a girl, the wrong sex, wrong in just about every possible way, my mother mourned while her enemies celebrated. Had I been a prince, her position as my father’s queen would have been unassailable. Because I was a girl, she was suddenly much less secure. Eventually, she gave her life for the sin of creating mine. I have carried this burden with me always.

  When I see her, if I see her, will she be proud of me? Will she feel that her sacrifice was worth it? Will she think that I, her daughter, a mere girl, have lived my life in such a way as to do her proud?

  Just as I am certain that my father will not be proud of my achievements but blame me for failing to carry on his dynasty, so I hope that my mother will feel the opposite. Some have called me a great queen (even my sworn enemy the Pope confessed his admiration) and I have certainly tried to do my best and choose the wisest course. Always I kept the safety and prosperity of my people at the centre of my decisions. Perhaps it was easier to do so because I had no family of my own, no personal investment in making sure my children ruled after me. I concentrated on the present, doing the best I could while I sat on the throne.

  I have remained faithful to my mother’s Protestant religion. Those who knew her told me the new faith was very dear to her. I have done what I could to support her beliefs, but without fanaticism and with as little bloodshed as I could manage. When I said I did not want to make windows into men’s souls I meant it.

  I think also that my long and prosperous reign has vindicated her ambition as well as her sacrifice. After death, through me, she bested her great rival, my father’s first queen, Katharine of Aragon. The different legacies of my reign and that of Katharine’s daughter, Mary, are profound. Mary sought to see England returned to what she and her fanatical mother called ‘the true faith’. She failed. I think that after forty-five years of Protestantism, peace and prosperity, England will never become a Catholic country again.

  Moreover, despite all the forces that wanted me to desert my mother and pretend that she never existed, I stayed true to her memory (if memory of her is what I have). Quietly (I could not do it loudly, not even when I was queen) I have maintained my loyalty to the disgraced and despised woman who gave me birth. I may have no memory of her, but I have loved her all the same.

  When I was ten years old my father decided to have a painting done of his entire family. We did not sit for this portrait together. After all, we had our own households and although my father’s last queen, Catherine Parr, did all she could to bring us to court, she did not always succeed. I was told that I was to be ready for my sitting at a certain time on a certain day. The painting was not done by Master Holbein, but by the artists employed in his studio.

  ‘The artist is here, my lady.’

  Kat Ashley poked her head around the door. ‘Is that what your father’s messenger instructed you to wear?’

  I had been sent clothes for the sitting. When I saw the finished portrait later, I noticed that my sister Mary was wearing the same dress so that the two of us looked like matching bookends on the edge of the central group. The dress was nice enough, with a deep red velvet underskirt and sleeves, slashed to reveal the white linen shirt beneath. A richly embroidered gold and silver surcoat completed the outfit. My hood was also red, trimmed with gold. When Kat stuck her head around the door, Blanche Parry was just securing my headdress.

  ‘Yes, Kat, it is the dress that I was sent.’

  ‘I had to let it out a bit in the back,’ grumbled Blanche. ‘Your father doesn’t realise how much you have grown.’

  ‘What are you to wear around your neck, my lady?’

  ‘My instructions were a double-stranded silver chain with a gold pendant of some kind. And I have just the one.’

  When I was informed about the forthcoming portrait, I was not pleased. I had been sent some preliminary sketches so I could see how I mus
t stand to fit the design. Several things displeased me. My sister and I were both placed on either side of the central group and quite some distance from them too, but I was the furthest out of all. A sharp, icy sliver of pain ran through me when I saw how publicly my lowly position in my father’s affections was to be displayed. But there was another reason I was dismayed. The woman at the centre of the picture, my father’s queen, was not his current Queen Catherine Parr, whom I loved and adored, but the mother of my brother Edward, Queen Jane Seymour, even though she had been dead and buried for more than seven years. I hated the slap in the face that this painting represented to my gentle and learned stepmother. My father made no bones about how he saw his family and who he favoured and who he did not. In one way, this made things easier to deal with; in another it was constantly belittling and humiliating.

  I was so angry about the slight to myself and to my stepmother that my first instinct was to refuse to be painted at all. I would plead ill health when the artist arrived and retreat to my bed, but when the initial shock wore off, I realised that this was not possible. Nonetheless I wanted to subvert the painting somehow. It took me days of wondering before I finally hit upon the perfect way to make my point.

  ‘Here, Blanche, can you do this up for me?’

  Blanche picked up the necklace I had handed to her, but when she realised which one it was, she hesitated. ‘Oh, my lady. You have given me your mother’s necklace, the one with the “A” for Anne on it.’

  ‘Yes, I have. Could you please do it up for me?’

  ‘But this painting is by order of your father – of His Majesty – of the king and, forgive me for saying so, my lady, but he will not, he won’t—’

  ‘It fits the brief perfectly and it is the necklace I want to wear. If you won’t do it up, I will. Give it here!’

  I took the bauble from her hands and quickly put it around my neck.