The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots: A Novel

by Erickson, Carolly

  But Jocelyn, who was very brave, and very learned, a scholar from Magdalen College and a student of the ancient texts of the church, was not satisfied. To pretend allegiance to the pope and the mass was wrong, he said. To disguise the truth. And so he had spoken out against the queen and her Catholic mass, and had been seized and thrown into a dungeon. And now, on this day, he was condemned to die.

  I had watched him, looking thin and gaunt, as they made him walk across the damp grass to where the reeds and split branches were being piled knee-deep. In the center of the pile was a three-legged stool, and he had been made to stand up on it. But before he did so he reached down to pick up some of the reeds and kissed them reverently.

  “See how he blesses the reeds! See how he embraces his martyrdom!” I heard people in the crowd exclaim. “Surely he will be with the Lord in paradise!” But they kept their voices low, for they did not want to be put in prison or forced to submit to punishment, and we were all aware that there were guards and soldiers everywhere, listening for blasphemous words against the church of Rome.

  Then the torch had been put to the twigs and branches, and the fire had blazed up, and Jocelyn, praying loudly for the queen who had condemned him and for my father and the servants who had built the fire, had at last been overcome by pain and began screaming.

  I heard my father, in anguish, call out to Jocelyn, asking his forgiveness. But the only response was a loud wail of agony, and hearing it, I saw my proud, stern father shed tears.

  Young as I was, only sixteen on the day Jocelyn was condemned to die, I realized that my father was being punished alongside our tutor. Queen Mary was making him suffer. She knew well that he had been a faithful servant of the crown ever since he was a very young man, serving in King Henry’s privy chamber and, after the old king’s death, serving King Edward as an envoy and councilor. He was unwaveringly faithful to the monarchy—but he did not, in his heart, profess the old religion, and she resented him for this. She was vengeful, everyone said so. Now she was taking vengeance against my father by forcing him to carry out the sentence of death against the young man she knew he was fond of, Jocelyn Palmer.

  All of a sudden a strong wind blew up, I felt it lift my skirts and draw its raw breath against my neck. I let go of Frank’s hand for a moment as he pulled away from me, escaping the glowing sparks that blew toward us.

  The wind was putting the fire out. I dared to look at Jocelyn. His hair was burnt away as was most of his clothing, and the skin of his face was scorched and blackened, but his lips were moving.

  He was singing, a hymn tune. His voice was scratchy but I recognized the tune. Others joined in the singing as the fire died to embers.

  “Dear Jesus, Son of David, have mercy upon me,” Jocelyn cried out. “Let it end!”

  Soldiers approached my father and spoke to him, standing so near to him that I could not hear what they were saying. I looked up at the darkening sky. Surely it would rain soon, a hard rain. The sign of God’s mercy.

  Then my father was giving orders and fresh loads of brushwood and branches were being brought and the fire rekindled. But not before a burly guard had reached up to strap two swollen sheep’s bladders around Jocelyn’s waist.

  “No,” I cried to my father. “Spare him! Let him live!”

  Once again my father grasped my arm, bending down so that he could speak to me, and to me alone.

  “I must do as the queen commands. Otherwise we all face Jocelyn’s peril. But there is one last mercy I can show him. The bladders are filled with gunpowder. When the fire reaches them, they will explode, and he will die. He will be spared much agony.”

  Torches were put to the wood and the fire began to blaze up, though I could feel drops of rain falling now, the rain I had prayed for, and smoke rose with the fire, black, choking smoke that was blown into our faces, and with it, the stink of Jocelyn’s flesh. I thought then, I cannot bear this.

  I felt my gorge rise. I doubled over. My legs felt heavy, and it was hard to breathe. Minutes passed. All around me I could hear people weeping and sighing and coughing from the thickening smoke. I glanced at Frank. He had closed his eyes and bowed his head. His fists were clenched at his sides.

  With a bright flash and a loud crack the bladders of gunpowder exploded, but there was to be no mercy for Jocelyn. The blasts went outward, tearing away part of one of his arms but leaving his blackened torso intact.

  How I found the courage to look at Jocelyn then, in his last extremity, I will never understand. His legs were burnt, blood seeped from the fingers of one arm and his eyes were charred sockets. Yet his swollen tongue moved within what was left of his gums, and I knew that he prayed.

  “Lord Jesus,” I heard my father say in a broken voice, “receive his spirit!”

  Then with another loud crack the skies opened and rain began to pour down in thick sheets, flooding the grass and quenching the fire and turning the ground to thick squelching mud underfoot.

  It was the rain I had prayed for, but it came too late. What was left of Jocelyn’s body hung limp and lifeless, the flesh of his face—a face I had loved—so burned away that I could not have said whose face it was.

  I felt Frank reach for my hand and we clung to each other, standing there in the drenching rain, until the crowd scattered and my father gave the order to wrap the body in a burial cloth and take it away.

  TWO

  We left England shortly after Jocelyn died. We had no choice, father said, and mother agreed. England was no longer a safe place for the Knollys family.

  It was not just that my father, Francis Knollys, could not bring himself to preside over any more cruel executions of fellow Protestants—or of Catholics either, for that matter—for he was, deep down, a tenderhearted man. Or that Queen Mary was growing more and more vengeful, ordering more and more men and women to their deaths because they would not conform to her Catholic beliefs. Or that some said she was mad, crazed by anger and sorrow over her inability to give birth to a living child to succeed her on the throne.

  It was more than all these things, a deep-rooted taint of blood that made us vulnerable to the queen’s wrath. For we were related to Queen Mary’s half-sister Princess Elizabeth, and Elizabeth, just then, was imprisoned in the Tower of London, accused of treason.

  My beautiful mother Catherine was Princess Elizabeth’s aunt, and I and my brother and sister were the princess’s cousins. Queen Mary believed that everyone related to her half-sister was suspect, and probably dangerous to her throne and to the peace of the realm, and certainly immoral.

  My mother had explained our family history to my sister Cecelia and Frank and me when we were quite young. It all began, she said, early in the reign of our famous King Henry VIII, many years before we were born.

  “You see, our late King Henry, when he was married to Queen Catherine, his Spanish wife, needed a son to inherit his throne. But all Queen Catherine’s baby boys died, and nearly all the baby girls too, all except for Mary, who is now queen.

  “If only Queen Catherine had died!” she went on, a little wistfully. “Everything would have been so much easier. But she did not die, she just went on having more and more babies, and they kept on dying. The poor king thought that God was cursing him, and maybe He was. So in time King Henry honored other women and let them become the mothers of his children. One of those women was my mother, your grandmother Mary Boleyn.”

  Our grandmother Mary Boleyn had died when I was a very small child, far too young to remember her, but I had seen portraits of her, painted when she was young. A lovely girl, with light brown hair and blue eyes. An innocent girl, or so one would have thought from the look of the portraits. Yet I knew from what my mother said that she had the reputation of being far from innocent.

  “She had a husband, William Carey,” mother was saying. “Yet she also had the king’s love. And his was the stronger.” The last words were almost whispered, as though mother were confiding to us a precious secret.

  “So you
are the king’s daughter!” I cried. “And we are all his royal grandchildren!”

  My mother smiled, an enigmatic smile.

  “Some people say that, but only my mother knew for certain. And she would never say. I think the king made her swear to keep everything about our birth a secret. Certainly King Henry always favored me, and your uncle Henry too.”

  Our mother’s brother Henry was a frequent visitor to our family home at Rotherfield Greys. He was a tall, muscular man, an exceptional horseman and fine athlete. Yes, I thought. Uncle Henry could very well be the son of the late King Henry, who had the reputation of being able to match or exceed any man at his court for height and strength and was a champion riding at the tilt.

  “So you are a princess, and Uncle Henry is a prince,” I said. “You should be granted royal honors.”

  My brother and sister nodded enthusiastically. “You should, mother,” they urged.

  But mother only laughed. “I am no princess—at least I was never acknowledged as such. I am plain Catherine Carey, daughter of Mary Boleyn Carey and Will Carey of the privy chamber. And brother Henry is of the same lineage—officially. In truth I do not know who my father was, the king or my legal father Will Carey, who died when I was very small. Or possibly some other man, for my mother was said to have other lovers. I have no desire to make exalted claims to the throne, or to be a rival to Queen Mary.”

  “Yet you look like him,” I insisted. “You have reddish hair and blue eyes and are very fair, just as he was.” I knew only too well what King Henry had looked like, all the royal palaces were full of his portraits, and there was a sculpture of his head and shoulders in a place of honor in our family home.

  At this my mother nodded, but then she went on, in quite another tone.

  “Whoever my true father was, there is a far darker aspect to our family story. It concerns your grandmother Mary’s sister Anne.”

  We all knew of Anne. The witch. The harlot. The evil woman who had cast a spell on King Henry and used her magic to force him to divorce good Queen Catherine and marry her instead. The wicked queen who had been beheaded.

  I had heard the servants gossip about Queen Anne for as long as I could remember. They often crossed themselves—in the Catholic fashion—when they spoke of her, as if to ward off her potent evil that lingered on, even though she had been dead for many years. My parents never spoke of her at all—at least not in my hearing—so mother’s mention of her made me pay particular attention to her words.

  “My aunt Queen Anne Boleyn never liked my mother. They were very different. Mother was a soft and comforting sort of woman, who liked to laugh and dance and had a sunny nature. She loved to eat and drank more wine than was good for her.”

  Hearing this I glanced at my sister, and caught her eye. We quickly looked away again, but each of us knew what the other was thinking: our mother also drank more wine than was good for her.

  “My aunt Anne was a shrewd woman,” mother was saying. “I liked to think that she saw the world through narrowed eyes. She thought Mary was a fool—though in truth I think it was Anne who was, in the end, the more foolish. My mother was happy most of the time, while Anne, for all her shrewdness, never was. At least I never saw her when her face was lit with happiness.”

  Smiling, she reached down and cupped my face in her two hands, then Cecelia’s. “That is what I wish for you girls,” she said. “That your pretty faces will be lit with happiness, all your lives long.”

  “Did you watch Queen Anne die?” Frank asked mother, “like we had to watch Jocelyn die?”

  “No. Brother Henry and I were away, living in the country. We were in disgrace, as were all the Boleyns. As we still are. But it was Anne who mattered. Anne and her brother George and all those in their households. Oh, that was a horrible time. Everyone I knew was frightened, and my mother most of all.”

  “Was Queen Anne really a witch?” Frank asked.

  Mother looked thoughtful. “It was said that she practiced alchemy. Mother told me about a room she had, where she kept potions and powders. The servants thought she was turning lead into gold, though if she did, she never gave any to us. She may have made poisons. But as to witchcraft—” She broke off, shaking her head and looking dubious. “It was said the king loved her with an uncommon hunger. But I think it was the hunger of great lust, and not of witchery. In any case,” she concluded, “Queen Mary never forgave her stepmother Queen Anne for being so alluring to the king that he divorced her mother. Mary hates all Boleyns, and no doubt she always will.”

  Mother’s words were much in my thoughts as our family boarded the Anne Gallant at Dover, leaving Queen Mary’s Catholic England and bound for the safety of Protestant Frankfurt, where my father had acquaintances who he said would take us in. I held my head high, convinced, as I was, that I had the royal blood of the Tudors in my veins. And I remembered what my mother had said, that it was far better to be happy than shrewd, and above all to be wary of the wrath of kings and queens.

  THREE

  Whether it was because of my newfound certainty that I was of royal ancestry or simply because, at sixteen, I was coming into my years of promised beauty, I was much admired when we arrived at our new home in Frankfurt.

  I had been a beautiful child, everyone had always agreed on that, though my father had frowned on all talk of my loveliness and said “You’ll make her too full of herself” or “Too much praise makes the devil’s playground” when my mother and others spoke admiringly of how pleasing my looks were. My younger sister Cecelia, my father’s favorite, tended to burst into tears and leave the room when I was the center of attention; this made him vexed at me, though it was hardly my fault that my hair was the rare red-gold of autumn leaves and my skin as flawless and as translucent as the finest ivory. (Cecelia’s hair was a mousy brown and her skin, while smooth, tended to be the color of sand. But she had very good teeth, as I often reminded her.)

  We were lodged in the grand house of Jacob Morff, a member of the Consistory and an elder of the Lutheran church, the dominant influence and authority in Frankfurt. The four-storey gabled house was near the Old Bridge, where a few Catholic sisters continued to operate a foundling home and to take in unwanted infants. We heard the babies crying at all hours, in fact it seemed to mother and me that their numbers were growing with each passing day. But beyond this nuisance all was comfortable in the Morff household, and we were shown a courteous if impersonal hospitality.

  It was the custom for Protestants to shelter one another, for as our numbers grew we were persecuted mercilessly, and there were many English Protestants coming to the continent, fleeing Queen Mary and her burnings, when I was a girl. Herr Morff had several English families living in his large house, though he was not a genial host, rather he kept a grave distance, as though unsure what to make of us foreigners. In time I was to understand why.

  At first I quite enjoyed myself in our new town, a large and bustling place, its narrow streets crowded with horses and carts and peddlers on foot. The sprawling marketplace was bursting with commerce, except on Sundays, when all business transactions were forbidden by the Consistory as were all amusements. The ancient cathedral with its tall spire towered over all other city structures, and the massive stone bridges that spanned the Main river, the thick brick walls that surrounded the town and the weighty, many-storied houses centuries old gave the entire place an air of solidity, if not of grandeur. London was older than Frankfurt, father said, but Frankfurt was richer—and much more moral, now that the Consistory governed all.

  That it was a moral place we knew from the abundance of hymn-singing that went on, not only in church, where the services were long and tedious (though no one was allowed to complain about this out loud), but in the streets and squares. When we went out in the afternoons, we often walked or rode past group after group of townspeople who had gathered to sing hymns or other pious songs.

  “We must join in,” father said. “We must not appear strangers in their mids
t.” So we learned to sing “How lovely shines the morning star” and “My trust in Thee can nothing shake” and “From depths of woe I cry to Thee” in our English-accented German and we tried our best to imitate father’s expression as he sang, his heavy-lidded eyes sad, his lined, narrow face full of a dark longing.

  We did our best to look and act pious, but true religious feeling cannot be feigned, and in truth we were young and full of pent-up energy and had few outlets for our restless physical vigor. Hymn-singing was not the activity we needed.

  But the elders made and enforced strict rules about what we could and could not do. We were not allowed to swim, lest it lead to “promiscuous bathing” with men and women, boys and girls all joining in together. Long walks were forbidden, because they made the blood flow more rapidly and heightened the passions. Athletic feats promoted pride in the body, and the body was the prime portal of sin. Dancing, which led to frivolity and flirtation, was condemned with especial rigor.

  One Sunday there was a scuffle in the square near the Old Bridge, in front of a tavern called the White Lion. I had often seen men quarreling and fighting in our village of Rotherfield Greys and on our visits to London but until that afternoon I had never seen men attacking one another in hymn-singing Frankfurt. Then I noticed that at the center of the brawl was Jacob Morff’s sturdy, blond son Nicklaus, a boy I liked for his jokes and a way he had of imitating the cleaning women in the Morff household. These maids walked with their knees together, taking short steps and always looking down at the floorboards, never at each other or objects in the room or other people. They were not shy, nor furtive, merely inconspicuous to an extreme degree. Nicklaus Morff, despite his girth and strong young muscles, could squeeze himself down and assume the appearance and carriage of one of these maids, pressing his knees together and walking in a way that made me laugh out loud, and Cecelia too if she was nearby.