The Heretic Wind: The Life of Mary Tudor, Queen of England

by Judith Arnopp

  I snort rudely and turn my face away. It will not do to speak of such fears now, so I focus on his misapprehension that I am allowed the liberty of the park.

  Although I had once loved to be out on the chase with Mother and Father, I am now forbidden the freedom of the hunt. When the household makes up a party, I am left behind. As they ride out, I make sure Lady Shelton notes my wan expression but, as soon as they have gone, I hurry to the nursery. It is the only room in the house where I find one small consolation to being left indoors. When the household rides out, Elizabeth remains behind with me.

  The women left in charge of my sister are less hostile than Anne Shelton and Lady Clere. When I creep into the nursery they smile and bid me welcome, sometimes offer me wine and draw me into conversation. Words do not flow from my tongue as they once did. Nowadays I am wary, afraid of condemning myself, afraid of spies.

  On this particular day, I refuse their offer of refreshment and show them a plate of sweetmeats that I’ve brought for Elizabeth’s treat. There is nothing she likes better.

  “Is she awake?” I ask.

  “Yes, she is, my lady. She woke a half hour ago; her linen is being changed. She will be here soon. Please, sit with us.”

  Unaccustomed to kindness, I take the stool beside them. The chamber is warm, gaily decorated with tapestries and cushions, and a scattering of toys lies on the floor. It is a far cry from my own apartment. It is the chamber of a princess, an heir to the English throne.

  I smile nervously and the nurse begins to talk of the weather, the litter of kittens that was found behind the settle. Friendly welcomes seem so strange; surely any moment someone will disparage me, call me a bastard.

  I take so long thinking up a safe reply that the door opens before I have time to speak. Elizabeth enters, clutching the finger of her nurse, her tiny steps light and unsteady. I stand up and when she sees me her face lights up, her tiny teeth glinting like a necklet of pearls.

  She is like my father, golden-haired and determined, a fat, merry, lively child. She totters forward and tries to clamber onto my lap.

  “Mary,” she says, and the way she pronounces the word makes it sound like ‘merry’. I scoff at the irony for I am the least merry person in all England. Even contact with my infant sister, whom I have come to love, does not fill me with joy. Instead, the battle between my affection and resentment of her steals the pleasure we might have had.

  I love her, but how I wish I didn’t. I begrudge her usurpation of my position but I hope she never knows the pain I live with every day. I admire her fine Tudor looks but also despise the spirit of her mother that sometimes lurks behind her eyes. I hold her close, both loving and hating her as her fine red hair tickles my nose. I pray the future will be kind to her … but not at my expense.

  For a moment she tolerates the embrace, but soon grows tired of it and pulls away. She glares up at me with eyes that have become exactly like her mother’s. Hastily, I let her slip to the floor. Once more, her whore of a mother has spoiled what should have been a good day. Elizabeth is Tudor and Boleyn in equal parts – I imagine the love I bear her will always be conflicted.

  January 1536

  “Lady Mary?”

  I am in the garden when the voice intrudes on my thoughts. I turn and raise a hand to shield my eyes from the low-lying winter sun. Anne Shelton is standing at the junction of the dissecting paths; I cannot properly see her face for she is obscured by the brightness of the day. I move closer and see she is not scowling for once. When she speaks again, her voice lacks its usual impatience.

  Suspicion creeps upon me and I know beyond doubt that she brings me news that is bad indeed. My heart sets up a low and heavy beat as a feeling of dread spreads in a swathe of goosebumps. I take a hesitant step but stop when she holds out a letter. I stare at it and notice her hand is trembling.

  I take the parchment between finger and thumb, as if I fear it is poisoned. I cannot read it. I shake my head and hand it back, scarcely able to find the words to ask her to read it.

  “Tell me,” I say, and wait like one condemned for her words to slay me.

  Mother has been ailing for weeks, both she and I begged the king to allow me to visit her for one last time but … it seems it is not to be. Long before Anne begins reading, I am wincing. I know what she is going to say.

  “It is your mother, the dowager Princess of Wales. I regret to tell you that she has passed…”

  Her words drop away and the garden spins. The skies above my head, so blue and bright and promising a few moments before, are now filled with storm clouds. I really am alone now. A great tempest gathers, it builds in my heart and inflates my lungs; my belly churns and I vomit the grief from me.

  The world spins; I lose my mind and fall. The gravel is sharp beneath my cheek. A dozen pairs of hands lift me and bear me back to the house, to the detested solitude of my chamber. Someone is sobbing.

  The mattress is soft, the air musty with damp, and all around me I hear voices, as if in a dream. They murmur of her death and the consequences it may bear upon the king and his.… The concubine’s hated face floats before me.

  “Whore!”

  I sit bolt upright, screaming the word at the ring of white, frightened faces. I see my own madness reflected in their eyes but I cannot stop it.

  How can she be gone? How can the world still be turning? I tilt back my head, open my mouth and wail like a lost infant, howl like an abandoned puppy. I want my mother. I need my mother.

  I am alone. I have lost the fight and am fatally wounded. I will never be the victor now. My resistance against the king is futile. With her gone, there is no point in continuing to stand against him and claim the marriage was false. It will serve no purpose. Mother will not come back; my father and she will never be reconciled. Whether I admit to it or not, I am a bastard, and Elizabeth is the princess now. I can never win.

  The only refuge I find is in my bed. I refuse to let them draw back the heavy curtains or open the shutters. I merge into the darkness until it becomes part of me. The bed hangings screen me from unkind prying eyes and in a small way, the blackness soothes the pain that daylight makes unbearable. The darkness helps me see clearly.

  A miserable year. While the king and his concubine celebrate my mother’s death and the courtiers kneel to their every wish, I am left at Hatfield while Elizabeth is summoned to court.

  Cruel as ever, Anne Shelton ensures the stories of Father’s contentment filter back to me. I battle to conceal my hurt but when Chapuys tells me how the king paraded my sister before the company while Anne Boleyn, fat with child again, looked on as smugly as a cat, I feel my heart will break. Nothing will ever be right again.

  While the court dances and the Boleyn woman grows larger, preparation for my mother’s interment is carried out.

  I am forbidden to attend.

  With her gone, I no longer belong here. I have no place in England. I need to escape. This land is not safe. It is the domain of Boleyn, not Spanish princesses. I have no place here among them and I never will. Chapuys promises to write to my kin in Spain and urge them to help me escape. I prepare for a life of exile.

  “If this fails, sir, then you must help me to a nunnery where I might take the veil, but even then I will not be safe from the concubine. She will not rest until I am dead. She will get me in the end.”

  I hear the hysteria in my own voice and breathe deep and slow in an attempt to calm myself. His cool dark eyes look into mine.

  “Have peace, my princess. I will do all in my power to free you from this place. In the meantime, very soon you are to be moved to Hunsdon; perhaps things will be better there.”

  “I pray it is so, Chapuys. I pray that is so.”

  The twenty-sixth day of January dawns bright and cold. I have left my chamber and crept to the terrace where I once waved farewell to my father. With a shawl clutched tightly about my shoulders, I watch the sun rise. Slowly, the park lightens. I see an owl flap silently home, and I am stil
l standing there when the first rabbits emerge to dance in the pink mist. The household is just beginning to stir when I turn away and make the stealthy journey through the corridors to my chamber.

  Today, my mother is to be interred at Peterborough Cathedral; the name that marks the grave will make no mention of the twenty or more years she spent as Queen of England, no mention of her victory at Flodden, or the proud day she sent the head of the defeated Scottish king to my father in France. No mention of her unfaltering devotion to a country that mistreated her in youth, and again in age and sickness. No mention of me.

  For the first time, revulsion for my father consumes me. He could have stopped this any time he desired. He could, even now, curb the actions of his detested wife and reconcile himself with me. I close my eyes and, as I picture my mother’s coffin lowering into the eternal darkness of her tomb, I feel I am buried with her. If only I had the power to curse the name of Boleyn, and cast a hex of misery upon the king.

  The very next morning, a messenger arrives from court. He slides from his mount and hurries into the great hall where Anne Shelton has been haranguing me over some small misdemeanour. She snatches the letter. I see her face turn white and her hand creeps to cover her mouth. The message falls to the floor and I pick it up.

  Father has fallen from his horse. His life is despaired of and his whore, for fear of losing him, has miscarried of a son.

  I turn stunned eyes upon the messenger. He grows discomforted beneath my glazed stare but cannot seem to look away. It is as if I have been turned to stone. Last night I wished misfortune on them both and now it has come to pass, but … I am no witch.

  “The – the king will live?”

  I mean it as a question but it emerges as a statement. The messenger shuffles his feet.

  “I understand so. His physician is hopeful, and my lord of Norfolk is furious that word of the accident was taken to the queen without his leave. She lost the child, but her…”

  “I have no interest in the state of her health unless…”

  I want to add ‘unless she should die’ but I know my words will be carried to the king, so I allow the sentence to trail away.

  My mouth turns up at the corner. The king has been spared and the heir she carried, the hub of all her hopes, is dead. I remember again my bad-wishing of her yesterday and bite my lip, momentarily fearful of my own powers, but then I shake my shoulders and emit a puff of breath. If I were a sorceress, the concubine would not merely be bereaved of a son. She’d be dead.

  In the weeks that follow I feel as if God, who was certainly deaf to my entreaties before, can suddenly hear my prayers. It is as if Mother is sitting at His right hand, whispering directly into His ear.

  Rumour reaches me from court that the king is tiring of the great whore. I hear that his eye has fallen upon another and Anne Boleyn, unschooled in queenly manners, scolds him for it. Their relationship that once simmered with desire is now ripe with rancour and recrimination. I am glad of it and keep my ears perked for further gossip.

  Anne Shelton goes about her day with a worried frown and although her manner toward me remains cool, it lacks its former venom. My life becomes subtly easier. The household continues to shun me but I keep within hearing distance, eavesdropping on their conversation which is usually very dull.

  Something in my bones tells me that change is imminent and I am eaten up with curiosity about events at court. If I am not praying for my mother’s soul, I pray for the concubine’s rapid decline. She belongs in Hell. I long for her to fall completely from Father’s favour and suffer such torment as I have known, exiled from his heart for so long.

  Sensing change, my supporters creep from the shadows and work against her, and her status suffers. At last, God is showing His disfavour of her and all her ilk. I am sure that soon, all those who flirt with the new learning will face the consequences. One day soon, things will be as before.

  I wish the changes would come swifter. There are many days when nothing happens, days when I doubt it will ever come to pass. I am impatient for the end. I act out scenarios in my mind in which the whore is shut away in a house of nuns, shut off from the world, away from Father, away from Elizabeth, away from me!

  At last, Chapuys is allowed to visit me. I greet him warmly and retire with him to an antechamber. He brings assurances of affection from the king. Father loves me still. His desire for the concubine is waning. Her days are numbered; soon she will know the ignominy of displacement. She will be exiled from court and forced to live out the remainder of her days in misery … as I have done. I cannot wait to forget her existence and wipe her from the record.

  The new apple of Father’s eye, Chapuys informs me, is one Mistress Seymour, a pious, kindly woman and a lover of the true church. I sigh with relief, a light in the everlasting darkness winks at me. With the witch out of the way, Mistress Seymour will lure the king back to the true faith and the equilibrium will be restored in the realm.

  Justice, it seems, is not dead after all.

  St James’ Palace – October 1558

  “They took the concubine’s head, didn’t they? Do you think she was guilty or was it a plot of Cromwell’s?”

  “Eh?”

  I turn stiffly. Anne is at my bedside, her arms linked about her raised knees, her eyes enraptured. She has forgotten to whom she is speaking but I can’t blame her for that … for a while, I too had forgotten who I am. For a brief moment, I’d been Princess Mary again, young and vigorous, full of lost hope. I am surprised to find myself back in this weary old body.

  I look down at my age-stained hands, the veins standing proud, the skin marred by rusty spots and wrinkles. I rub them, trying to erase the damage of years, and the skin moves beneath my touch, loose and dry.

  “What did you say?”

  “Oh.” She lowers her eyes. “I – I asked if she was guilty but of course she was. She was found so – and paid for it justly … with her life.”

  “Yes.”

  I pause and travel back along the years. Most of my old emotions have faded away with the passage of time. Sometimes I can scarce recall the deeds that evoked them, but the hatred I felt for Anne Boleyn is unchanging. It rises on the back of my neck like hackles and rage makes me feel young again. My heart skips and jumps. I cough, clearing my throat of phlegm.

  “Yes, she deserved to die. She lied. She stole my father, killed my mother and turned me into her daughter’s slave, and all the while she was making my father a laughing stock and sleeping with half the court. That was the main reason she had to die, of course. No one mocked my father and lived to tell the tale – oh no.”

  I laugh as I knuckle away a tear. It is not a sign of emotion, just a weakness of age. “I was surprised though.”

  “Surprised? At her lewd behaviour? I thought she was a … you know … a w….”

  “A whore? Oh, she was, but she was intelligent too. I’d have thought she’d be wiser than that. To give in to lust was weak and it was foolish, and that was out of character somehow, but I lost no sleep over it. I was just glad she was gone. Out of my father’s hair once and forever. There’s no coming back from the scaffold.”

  That is the greatest lesson I learned from my father. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. Anne Boleyn dominated his life for many years but when her spell weakened and he was finally able to see her for what she truly was, he eliminated her, without hesitation or regret. Or if he did regret it, he never let it show.

  In the years that followed, when someone offended me I would remember how my father dealt with Anne. He didn’t hesitate. As soon as he realised her duplicity, her evil, he had her dealt with. From their first offence, I always picture my enemies dancing on the end of a rope. Often as not, that is how they end up, leaving me able to move forward. The past is the past, move on, assume the new, don’t look back.

  “Ha!” My sudden bark of laughter makes the girl jump. She leaps to her feet.

  “What is it, Your Majesty?”

  I
wave a hand for her to sit again.

  “Nothing, I was laughing at myself.”

  It seems I didn’t learn that last lesson too well; all I’ve done these past weeks is look back and regret. She breathes out, smiles at me like an intimate friend, and retakes her seat.

  “Were things better after that? After the concubine was dead?”

  “I expected things to be better. For a while I thought I’d never know trouble again, but I was young, do you see? For all I’d been through I couldn’t imagine fortune would not turn the full strength of her smile on me at once, but … the wheel turns, and then it turns again. One day sunshine, the next it comes on to rain.”

  Hunsdon – May-June 1536

  We are at Hunsdon when we hear the news about the concubine’s death. The May sunshine streams through the windows, echoing the joy in my heart that I am finally free of her. The surprising thing is that with the concubine gone from my life, everything remains the same. I walk the same corridors, brush aside the same servants, eat the same food, play the same lute…

  Elizabeth is miserable with a back tooth, her cheeks red and her eyes wet from weeping. As I watch her knuckle her eye and snuffle in pain, I realise she is the royal bastard now. Her status is as nebulous as mine. I should feel triumphant but instead the only emotion I hold in my heart is pity. I know exactly how she feels, for her life has become an echo of my own. We have both lost our mothers and our father hates us.

  I sweep her into my arms, kiss her sweaty forehead and begin to sing discordantly to distract her from her woe. One day she will be old enough to understand that she is the product of a king’s lust for a concubine, and nothing more. I close my eyes, squeezing her so tightly she squeaks in surprise.

  Her nurse looks up from the fire and frowns. I suddenly realise that the nursery is unusually quiet; the attendants who habitually fawn upon Elizabeth’s every whimper are no longer here.