Elizabeth of Bohemia

by David Elias

  I made my way to the chapel, my lengthy train carried by thirteen bridesmaids all dressed in white with flowing tresses of their own as I walked between my brother Charles and the Earl of Nottingham. Specially prepared tapestries adorned the floors and walls all along the way, where the guests were already seated, and three pieces of magnificent tapestry had been draped over the altar. Frederick, dressed in a Spanish hat and mantle, stood waiting for me there. I thought him passing handsome, wondered what Sir Raleigh would think of him if he were present at the ceremony. Frederick turned to me with eyes alight in amazed gratitude. I deserved none of it.

  The Bishop of Wells now launched into an interminable sermon, during which the audience fell into a fitful boredom, until the bishop, himself exhausted and about to buckle under the burden of his own pretense, at last gave over and withdrew from the pulpit. I should witness this same phenomenon at my own daughters’ weddings, and many others. Why must these clergymen always use such occasions to peddle their piety? I suppose it is a testament to the temerity of the church that even royalty may be held hostage to its petty excesses. I will say it did serve to forge a certain bond between Frederick and myself, in that we were obliged to suffer through it together. How often it is the wedding day that serves up the first test of a couple’s endurance.

  Now came prayers and hymns in great quantity, followed by a recitation of vows, after which we exchanged a pledge of love and honour. I had seen to it that for my part an avowal of obedience was conspicuous in its absence. Next the Archbishop saw to the benediction, and when that had been completed we turned to the audience and the herald-at-arms announced us by title, after which I was granted a brief interval to change out of my dress into a more comfortable garment, then join my new husband to accept round upon round of congratulations from various nobility while wine and wafers were served, at which there was much toasting. John Donne recited a poem to celebrate the occasion in which he likened the bride and groom to a pair of birds, two phoenixes coupled at the breast.

  At this I deigned to partake of some wine, and then a little more, which mitigated to some extent my lack of enthusiasm for the entire affair. What shall I say of my wedding night? There was a coupling, little more than perfunctory and less than vigorous, after which my new husband promptly if politely took himself to sleep, and I made ready to spend another restless night, something I had by then grown used to. Was I disappointed in the consummation? I had neither the experience nor the inclination to pass judgment on the matter. Did I feel I had been violated? That’s too strong a word. Frederick was thoughtful if somewhat awkward. I was compliant if less than enthusiastic. Yet amid all the discomfort and awkwardness, I had to admit to a certain satisfaction at having a man fill me up.

  Soon enough the act became a more bearable experience for me, one I might even look forward to from time to time, but in all the years, all the countless couplings that produced so many children, never once did I reach the height of ecstasy. As it was, I had always been able to manage things well enough on my own. The deepest pools of my arousal did ever spring from the well of imagination. I had only to conjure up an image of Sir Raleigh, for an instance, to achieve some such, and so its absence with Frederick did not become the progenitor of further difficulties.

  As we settled into our marriage, Frederick was ever ready to engage in the act of love at a moment’s notice and took immense pleasure in my body. A single kiss or touch from my hand would bring him to urgent readiness, and if I so desired, to a quick finish with but little effort. His emissions, intense and prodigious, could be repeated almost upon an instant if I gave him opportunity. He was always more eager than I, but never forced himself upon me, content to partake of me only as much as I deigned to offer. I would seldom find occasion to turn him down, as he was always prompt and tidy, after which I could get on with more important things. The babies would come early and often, so that quite a lot of the time my young woman’s body was busy with the manufacture of lineage.

  But even as I prepared to leave England and see my way across the channel, settle into a new life elsewhere, the question remained as to what course I should chart for myself. It was no longer a matter of asking what my heart yearned after. That had been rendered forfeit. Still, there had to be a way to put all this frenetic energy coursing through me to good use. It was only a matter of finding something worthy of my aspirations. In the end I settled for something less noble than I care to admit, but you must understand there wasn’t much to choose from. It came down to this: What should a princess seek to obtain? Why, to be a queen, of course. Frederick had told me from the start he had reason to hope for the throne of Bohemia. He would see to the means, and I should supply the resolve. I would be the sine qua non, the linchpin to his ascension, and in the process obtain a degree of sovereignty. There could be but one way to salvage some part of myself, one cause to rule my heart.

  Part Two

  Chapter Eight

  In the days that followed, the popular accounts of the trip Frederick and I made from London to Heidelberg gave the impression that the excursion amounted to little else but revelling and merriment. Granted, we made many stops along the way and were feted and fussed over by all manner of well-wisher, but the journey was arduous, and any number of irritants rendered it far from pleasant, considering that my state of mind was yet eager to shrink from conviviality.

  We crossed the English Channel in seven ships laden with cargo and passengers, put in at Amsterdam, and thereafter traversed over land, up rivers and down, by ship and boat and carriage, from one town to another, one castle to the next, one feast and festivity to another in such an endless orgy of excess that to have endured so many strange beds, dining rooms, halls, so much unwelcome food and favour, dance and drink, beggared belief. It was rendered all the more wretched by my utter disinterest at being entertained, yet it was forced upon me day in and day out. I suffered yet greatly from that affliction I have told you about, which left me wanting little else but solitude and silence.

  I wanted to rest, longed for the time when I should feel well enough again to get a proper night’s sleep. Every palace and manor we lodged in seemed to me a nightmarish labyrinth of theatres, ballrooms, and banquet halls. Here they had arranged an outdoor pleasure party, there a feast with every sort of exotic food and drink imaginable. And I was not the least bit hungry! The unfamiliar dishes laid out before me, rather than tweak my appetite, were as like to turn my stomach just by their smell and appearance, let alone taste.

  In The Hague the local guests praised a dish particularly dear to their hearts which they referred to as bitterballen. The ladies and gentlemen among whom I was seated at the banquet table simply would not accept my polite refusals. I was instructed to first dip what looked to be a small fried or baked croquette into a dish of mustard before taking a bite. I did so, chewed, tried to swallow, but it simply would not go down. I gagged before the mortified dinner guests, much to the embarrassment of the lord and lady of the manor. They should have been thankful I did not bring it all back up.

  We journeyed on, stepped from boat to carriage, ship to barge, ascended platform and stage, made our entrance into specially decorated banquet halls, courtyards adorned just for the occasion of our arrival, were escorted to our quarters every night, there to sleep in a strange bed. Lady Anne did her best to see I was not taxed too greatly, diverting attention away from me when needed, making apologies for my early departures.

  “I hardly know how to account for it,” I said to her one morning. It had been another restless night followed by repeated bouts of heaving that left me depleted. “Why should the little bit I ate last evening give me to suffer this heaving and retching only now?”

  Lady Anne listened, made no reply, her expression somewhere between sympathy and blame.

  “Perhaps it comes from lack of rest,” I went on. “I would give anything for a night in my own bed, not that it should give me to sleep much better.”


  Lady Anne continued to examine me closely, as though she were waiting for me to make some confession.

  “Why are you looking at me that way?” I asked. “If you are going to chide me for partaking of too much wine, I tell you I have of a sudden entirely lost my taste for it, I know not why, and have hardly touched a drop these last few days.”

  “And yet this sickness persists,” she said, as much to herself as to me. “Your bosoms,” she continued.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Tell me, are they changed in any way?”

  “I hardly think such a matter need concern you.”

  “They appear to me to be more fulsome.”

  “You really do exceed your bounds, Madam, but if you must know, they do seem of late somewhat tender.”

  “I thought as much.”

  “You know something of this? I take it to be part and parcel of the passage from maid to wife.”

  Lady Anne smiled wryly.

  “I think it a little cruel of you to make light of my situation.”

  “Forgive me, but I forget how young you are.”

  “I can hardly blame Frederick for it. The journey wears on him as well. We do little more than fall into bed each night exhausted, and yet these symptoms persist.”

  “Your naivety is endearing.”

  “Why do you mock me?”

  “There remains yet something of the child in you, even as you are in the first stages of begetting your own.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “This is something more than just a queasy stomach.”

  “Speak plainly.”

  “Madam, you are gravid.”

  “Gravid? What manner of expression is that? Do you speak of some malady?”

  “My dear, you are pregnant.”

  “Nonsense. It cannot be. It’s too soon.”

  “More than long enough, by my reckoning.”

  “You mean these discomforts I suffer have come about because I am with child?”

  I knew little of something any young woman should have received in good counsel well in advance of her marriage, for my mother had never spoken of such things to me, nor much of anything else for that matter, and it was not something I had come across in medical journals I’d studied, which could hardly be bothered to acknowledge maladies associated with the fairer sex. As it turned out, I would suffer the same fate in each and every one of my thirteen pregnancies. No sooner would my monthly cycle cease and my breasts begin to swell than I would commence to retching and puking.

  Had I allowed the physicians to attend me, they should doubtless have plied me with all manner of elixirs and cordials to abate my nausea, but the anatomical drawings I had pored over with such interest in my brother’s study gave me pause, for I remembered one in particular which depicted a child growing inside its mother’s womb. It seemed to indicate that substances ingested by the mother might readily pass from her to the child by means of the blood, reason enough to forgo such treatment.

  ***

  I was determined upon that first night at the castle to sleep in my own bed, a great four-poster behemoth of a thing which I had gone to great lengths to see carefully dismantled in London and transported along with some other furniture to the castle. It had been taken on ahead as instructed, but I was informed upon our arrival that it had not yet been reassembled. I refused all entreaties to take my rest elsewhere for the time being, and insisted Frederick summon workmen to assemble it then and there in the bedchamber. It was the same bed I should take with me to Prague Castle some years later, and thereafter on to The Hague. I would see to it that it travelled with me wherever I went, no matter the cost, no matter the inconvenience. There was going to be one thing in my life that I could count on, one thing that was permanent. It would be the only bed I slept on all my life, my children would be born on it, the lion’s share of my carnal acts would take place there, and I intended to die in its welcome and comforting bosom.

  And so, in the middle of the night, with the rest of the sprawling castle’s inhabitants already asleep, I sat and waited for them to put the heavy oak bed together. Frederick might have taken himself to bed in another part of the castle but instead, though none too happy about it, took up a hammer and threw himself in with the workmen. Together, accompanied by much groaning and heaving, for it was a monster of a thing, they assembled tenon and mortise, board and post, wrestled to lift the headboard into place, until finally the job had been completed. Then it was just a matter of the maids, who were standing by and should else long have been asleep in their own beds, arranging the sheets and blankets until all was ready. I threw myself upon the mattress with a final sigh and was not heard from again for the rest of that night and better part of the next day, at which I finally arose toward evening, thinking it should have done me a great bit of good, and yet even then I did not feel rested.

  One day fell into the next, one week into another. To be sure, I was not prepared for all the changes my body went through. I grew fat! Though I lost my taste for certain foods, I became ravenous for others. Soon enough I was hungry all the time, but there were only a few things I wanted to eat, in particular oranges, which I would eat three or four times a day often to the exclusion of all else, though Lady Anne was always there to harass me into eating helpings of other dishes as well.

  On the worst days the discomfort became such that I swore. To couch the experience of carrying a child as noble was naught but an affectation, a myth fashioned to depict us as beatific incubators, gregarious gestators, when in fact it is a squalid and bothersome business. New life requires a fissure, a gash. Something must be split. Even a small seed will rend and tear the earth to find the sun. What then of a baby writhing out of the womb, seeking to gain its first breath? There’s a ferocity about it. And to think I should suffer to undergo the ordeal thirteen times.

  If I were to add up all the months I spent waddling about in discomfort from one delivery to the next, it should stretch to the better part of a decade. What if instead I had devoted as much time to scientific study, searched for the cause of so many deaths in childbirth and the means to prevent them? I imagined a day when a woman might free herself of such an inconvenience, make use of a proxy, and thereafter have the baby dropped into her arms nine months hence. I never wanted much to do with them until they reached the age where they could carry on a decent conversation. Bringing children into the world was a dangerous enterprise for any woman, and I was lucky to survive it so many times. Far too often a young mother lived to enjoy her babe for but a few delirious hours, only to be been taken from this world by that same affliction so many suffer at the time of birth. I was convinced those tiny creatomies were to blame, invisible organisms allowed to invade the body at that moment. It was a simple matter of contagion. For my part I always insisted the midwives scrupulously scrub their hands, and no matter the pain or discomfort I was in, would not let them touch me until they had done so.

  As I went through the trials of that first birth, suffered the apparatus of my body to become distended, distorted, and when the time came at last, be made to endure such excruciating pain, it seemed to me only a cruel God would see fit to reproduce the human creature by turning a woman’s body into a meat works for nine months. By such means was my first child, a son, born on New Year’s Day, January 1, 1614. We named him Henry Frederick, and he would grow with each passing year to remind me more and more of my deceased brother.

  ***

  No sooner had I sufficiently recovered my strength than I left the baby’s care to others and turned my attention to more important matters. I had sworn to devote myself to Fredrick’s ascension to the throne. Childbirth did nothing to change that. If I could not live the life I had hoped for, I should see to one of my own making nevertheless, by such means as I had at my disposal. Soon enough Lady Anne took notice and called me to account for it.

 
; “Forgive me, Madam, if I say you seem less than eager to attend to the needs of your young son.”

  “I am content to employ those who toil at motherhood as well as and better than I am able.”

  “Your husband no doubt wonders too at your seeming lack of interest.”

  “The child is well cared for and wants for naught.”

  “Save his mother. It troubles me that you should be so unengaged.”

  “I have more pressing needs to see to.”

  “I fail to see what could be more urgent.” Lady Anne drew closer, looked at me intently. “Is this seeming indifference of your own making?”

  “Whose but mine should it be?”

  “Your mother was most cruelly forbidden from caring for her first-born. Your brother Henry was taken from her.”

  “What is that to me?” I turned and stepped away a little.

  “You have no such precincts placed upon you.”

  “Though I am suffered to endure plenty of others.”

  “By my reckoning you are free to devote yourself entirely to young Henry if you so desire.”

  “Yet I desire it not.”

  “I think you do.” Lady Anne pointed in the direction of the nursery. “I know your heart, and I know you love him.”

  “You must think me cold and unfeeling.”

  “If there is some other reason, I would hear it.”

  “You make too much of this. I will see him often enough.”

  “What is it you fear?”

  The question gave me pause, and I determined to answer as honestly as I could. “My own survival.”