None But Elizabeth

by Rhoda Edwards

  Elizabeth laughed. She linked her arm with her stepmother’s and laughed again. ‘Took two cows, Taffy,’ she echoed the wood pigeons, calling from the tall elms in Hanworth Park. ‘Took two cows, Taffy, took!’

  ‘You of all people, Elizabeth, should not slander the Welsh!’

  Elizabeth laughed again, and stooped to pick a single daffodil. ‘Then I shall wear a Welsh favour, instead. Today is St David’s Day.’ It was a lovely day, a foretaste of spring.

  The little flower, so dainty, soft yellow, was pinned to her gown of plain black cloth. A sober, dull gown, after a year had gone by, she still wore mourning for King Henry. Katherine had left off her black for garnet red.

  ‘I have news that will please you, daughter.’ Katherine seemed to bubble and sparkle herself, with her own pleasure. ‘You are to have Mr Ascham as your tutor, as you wished.’

  Elizabeth hugged Katherine, delighted that they had let her have her way, when Katherine and the Admiral had favoured another tutor. ‘Dearest mother,’ she said. She never called Katherine anything else now. ‘Thank you for him. He is the best teacher in England.’ Elizabeth always wanted the best. They were standing arm in arm by the old mulberry tree. Last year’s leaves and dropping fruit had made the lawn threadbare.

  ‘Katherine!’ The Admiral was coming into the garden, loud hailing his wife. ‘Have you told the Princess our news, love?’ he said, as he strode up.

  ‘Tom, you have forestalled me; it was on the tip of my tongue, only Mr Ascham came first!’ She turned to Elizabeth, for the pleasure and delight on her face had not been for her stepdaughter’s tutor. ‘I am going to have a child,’ she said. ‘I shall be a real mother for the first time.’

  Elizabeth hugged her again, sharing her happiness, but possessive all the same. ‘You are a real mother to me!’ she said.

  Tom, grinning, took out his knife, and began to carve on the bark of the old gnarled mulberry tree, T and K linked by a true-love knot. Katherine watched, half amused at the absurdity, half entranced — when she was young, she had never had a sweetheart who would carve her initials on a tree.

  Like a silly schoolboy, Elizabeth thought, suddenly sour. She remembered those H and As, those H and Ks at Hampton Court, and her face reflected her thoughts.

  ‘What a vinegar face! Why so sober today?’ Tom teased. ‘You should take off that horrible gown. Dull black is not becoming on girls of fourteen.’ In fact, Elizabeth thought that black suited her very well, with her red hair. She pouted, wishing that he had said so, and disliking being reminded of her age. She did not wish to be like ‘girls of fourteen’.

  ‘It’s more than a year now. Mourning is over.’

  ‘I shall never cease to mourn.’

  Tom rudely laughed at her high-flown sentiment. ‘Look at the sundial — Time’s hours are young — no black gowns. You shall have a new one, yellow as a daffodil.’

  Elizabeth was never one to refuse a gift, but she was unwilling to capitulate. ‘I shall wear this one!’

  ‘We’ll see about that!’ Tom was grinning, knife still in his hand. Elizabeth let out a sudden high-pitched giggle, and removed herself to the other side of the tree.

  The Admiral chased her round and round the mulberry tree, until she flung herself, giggling hysterically, into Katherine’s arms. But the Admiral’s wife held her tight, while he slashed her gown to ribbons. Elizabeth shrieked, and giggled. The sun caught on the blade of the little knife, and she put up her hand, as if she were afraid of where it might strike. When he had finished, the wind lifted up ragged black streamers like old crow feathers, revealing a white shift and endless petticoats.

  ‘Ruined!’ said Tom triumphantly. ‘Ah, Princess of rags and tatters!’ He bowed.

  ‘Kat Ashley will have a fit,’ Katherine said, but she was still laughing, too happy to be hag-ridden by the proprieties.

  Elizabeth went indoors, to change into a coloured gown, and took no notice of Kat’s fit.

  *

  It was cold in the Tower in February. So cold you got chilblains and rheumatism, and agues. Elizabeth cowered in her bed and hugged the warm brick wrapped in flannel. She was shivering, though a good fire burned in the hearth at Hatfield. Did prisoners in the Tower lie on straw, or hard damp beds, without hot bricks? That would depend on rank and means. The Lord Admiral would lie in a bed. Plain Mrs Ashley was so cold she had to stuff straw in the broken windows, and lie sleepless in the dark. Had they bedded poor Kat on straw, like a beast?

  Where would Elizabeth have been lodged in the Tower? Would she have suffered the prickle and rustle and fleas of a straw mattress? They put down straw on the scaffold, to soak up the blood — or was it sawdust? Elizabeth groaned. Pads of folded flannel soaked up her blood. Her head and belly ached. Elizabeth had escaped the Tower. But only a month ago, the time of the last head and belly ache, she had been in terror lest she were imprisoned in that dreadful place. She had waited hourly for men to come to Hatfield, to arrest her. But only Kat Ashley and Thomas Parry had been arrested.

  ‘Treasonably endeavouring to make a clandestine marriage with the Princess Elizabeth, second heir to the throne.’ The Lord Admiral’s secret treasons would send him to the block. He was already condemned.

  Marriage! She would never consent to marry one of his rank, even if he were the King’s uncle. The Seymours were upstarts. Besides, he was old — old enough to be her father. Thirty-three charges had been drawn up against him. She was number nineteen. It was true, he had plotted to marry her, but she had not plotted to marry him.

  Charge number twenty, of having married Queen Katherine indecently soon after King Henry’s death, was also true. He had given Katherine a child, and the child had killed her, that also was true. As for the rest, the suborning of the King from the care of the Lord Protector, the fraud, extortion, bribery and common piracy, that was all true, too.

  Elizabeth was disgraced, her virginity in doubt, and discussed as if public property. Rumour said that she was in the Tower already, carrying the Admiral’s child. But what was done out of wedlock appeared to matter less than what was done in it. She was not charged with treason. The depositions of Kat Ashley and Thomas Parry had cleared her of any complicity in marriage plans. But they had smirched her all the same. The things they told about her were true. That was the painful part, the truth. The happy days at Chelsea and Hanworth turned to dirty days, which should never have been. ‘There they tickled the Lady Elizabeth in her bed, the Queen and the Lord Admiral.’ ‘My Lord Admiral did cut her gown in a hundred pieces — the Queen held her while the Admiral cut it.’ The sober black gown. Elizabeth had laughed herself silly. Her mother’s laugh. The Princess of rags and tatters.

  At Seymour Place in London, he used ‘to come up every morning in his dressing gown, barelegged in his slippers’. To her bedroom. She remembered, in a cold, detached sort of way, how she had sometimes looked at his legs, all muscular in the manner of men’s legs, with a lot of ginger fur on them. Tom’s legs seemed to have little to do with the rest of Tom, who was so familiar. His eyes, such a bright, flax-flower blue, would outstare anyone. How would they meet the hard wooden eye of the block, or the hooded anonymity of the headsman? Eyes so often screwed up into laughter lines — or just the lines of age. Thirty-nine was, after all, old.

  The first excitement, Tom’s flax-blue eyes so close she could see the little holes in the lids where tears went. His ginger beard nestled softly, his high-coloured cheek a little less soft; a smell of sweet waters just like King Henry used to wear. His arms encircling her had hard muscles in them as round as ostrich eggs. His lips left nothing to chance. Then he had slid his tongue neatly in between her teeth, and tickled her own with it, very softly. It was just at this stage that his wife had caught them. Elizabeth had fled, run for her life away from what she imagined would be the harsh sound of quarrelling. In reality it was not a noisy denouement. She had spat out his spit from her mouth, washed it twice, scrubbed her teeth with tooth powder, and rinsed them three t
imes, as if this might render her wholesome again when her stepmother did catch up with her. She could not bear hard words from those she loved, and hard words there certainly had been.

  Tears poured from Elizabeth’s eyes. Her nose was so bunged up, her eyes so sore, and her headache so violent, she knew that she would have to be sick. She had shed more tears for Katherine Parr than she had even at the loss of her father. She had modelled herself on her stepmother’s intellect, tolerance and discretion. Their one indiscretion had proved to be the same man.

  Elizabeth leaned from her bed, and was sick into the waiting basin. Blanche Parry, Thomas’s sister, sponged her forehead and soothed her. Blanche was the only one left from happier days, a single woman, and determined to stay that way. ‘Never marry,’ was Blanche’s watchword. She was right. Elizabeth lay back, feeling like a stranded fish. More tears oozed from her eyes; she still smarted from the memory of those hard words.

  She curled upon her side, knees to chin, her face pressed into the pillows; pressure seemed to help. A carpenter’s gimlet bored into the centre of her right eyebrow, a pain reaching all the way from the top of her head to eye socket, to jaw and to aching neck. She sought the darkest core of the stuffy dark.

  Why had he wanted her? So he might be master of the Princess who was second heir to the throne. So that he could use her in his quarrels with his brother. That was not what Christian marriage was for. She had never wanted it. What had she wanted from him?

  This was a question so distasteful, so unanswerable, it drove Elizabeth to put out her head from the bedcovers, reach a hand under the pillow and pull out her watch. She peered at its tiny dial, squinting-eyed and bleary. Eleven. Dinner time soon. She did not want any dinner.

  A clock, the symbol of temperance, keeping the hours of a well-regulated life, untouched by scandal. In her innocent childhood Mary had given her this watch, set inside a pomander ball of filigree gold. She put it to her nose to try to drive away the headache with a sweet smell. Fourteen years of innocence had ticked away, and now in the fifteenth people said that Anne Boleyn, the Great Whore, lived again in her daughter. The sinful soul of her mother mirrored in her.

  Mary, whom she had once dispossessed, suffered from headaches too, but not from scandals. Elizabeth scarcely ever saw Mary now, or the King himself, for that matter. Between Mary and the King, the old affection of childhood had been destroyed by his sister’s obstinate adherence to the Roman Church. King Edward was eleven now, and committed to the New Faith as rigidly as Mary was to the old. What would he believe of these rumours spread about his sister Elizabeth? Would he think what Protector Seymour of the long nose told him to think? Elizabeth was not without friends at her brother’s court. She had two cousins, Harry and Kate Carey, children of her mother’s sister Mary Boleyn. Kate was married to Sir Francis Knollys, a friend of Cecil, and of the Protector. She would write to them. They would not abandon her.

  In the end, Elizabeth rose from her bed to defend herself ‘My Lord Protector, these are shameful slanders,’ she wrote, though the letters jumped about, as if composed of little black worms. ‘That I am in the Tower and with child by my Lord Admiral… I shall most heartily desire that I may come to court, that I may show myself there as I am…’ Slim, flat-bellied.

  ‘Elizabeth.’

  The Lord Protector’s personal secretary watched the signature’s progress. It was elaborated by various loops and twirls. The ‘b’ flew a long streamer, the ‘z’ looped to and fro like a skater, underlining the whole, and the ‘h’ flowered into a rosette like a professional scribe’s. William Cecil had come to Hatfield to observe.

  ‘Mr Cecil, will you bring me a reply?’

  ‘If the Protector replies, I will bring it.’

  He was in a position to speak for her, in an unobtrusive way, for he had access to many ears. He was already a friendly acquaintance, through the brotherhood of Cambridge scholars. He was an old friend of John Ashley, Kat’s husband, of John Cheke, the King’s tutor; he was a distant cousin of the unfortunate Thomas Parry. It was he who had written a preface to Queen Katherine Parr’s book, The Lamentations of a Sinner. Mr Ascham said that he was a young man of exceptional prudence, moderation and learning, a compendium of all the virtues that Thucydides found in the Athenian Pericles.

  As if to prove this testimonial, Cecil addressed three brief words into Elizabeth’s ear. ‘Video et taceo,’ he said. I see and am silent. That was borne out by the long straight looks he gave her, and his refraining from comment upon her situation.

  Cecil had already observed the Princess’s danger, her isolation, the hectoring manner of those sent to examine her. It was evident to him that his master and the Privy Council wanted not evidence of her culpability, but evidence to condemn the Admiral. This, Cecil estimated, was plentiful enough on other matters. He recognized steely will and needle wits, that would give nothing, and would fight until Ashley and Parry were released and all their good names restored.

  *

  ‘Elizabeth’. The signature was greatly admired by its owner. She looked at it, turned it this way and that, scattered sand over the letter, and blew it off again. She had created several versions of her signature, the one on this letter to the Privy Council restrained and elegant, the everyday one for the accounts quite plain. But the ones indulged in private were fantastic, adorned with loops and twirls.

  In deepest secret, in her head, she sometimes imagined how ‘Elizabeth R’ would look. This could never be written, it was too dangerous; the paper would have to be disposed of, eaten like the action of a desperate spy, or burnt and the ashes rubbed to powder in case even the shadowy ghosts of words incriminated. One day, perhaps, if she lived, ‘Elizabeth R’ would come into her own.

  ‘Over three thousand per annum!’ Elizabeth said, gloating.

  ‘No more than your Highness’s due,’ Kat Ashley replied.

  Now, in May 1550, Elizabeth had at last come into her own, the income promised to her under the terms of her father’s will. Thomas Parry was back, doing her household accounts as inaccurately as ever. Kat was back, but subdued, with more grey hairs. Elizabeth had won. The Lord Protector, and the Lord Admiral, had lost.

  Tom Seymour, the dashing, dishonest Admiral, had been beheaded. Protector Seymour, cursed like Cain, fell to his rival John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. Robert Dudley’s father.

  Robert Dudley was to be married to a Norfolk heiress with some money but no political importance whatsoever. Mr Cecil said that it was a love match. A love match! Elizabeth would have thought Robert had more sense. ‘Marry for love, live in sorrow,’ she thought, sourly. They were eighteen, she sixteen.

  A jolly wedding, graced by the young King’s presence, the meadows of the Seymour house at Syon all decked out with flowers; the music and feasting. Elizabeth looked out at the wooded park sloping away from her lodging in the palace of Hatfield. The woods enclosed her, cutting her off from the world of London, Westminster, Whitehall, the King — and from Syon. She would never know a love match. And no other match, if she could help it. Blanche Parry’s advice was sound. She would stay a virgin.

  *

  The Dudley brothers came forth together like five bridegrooms. Robert, with John and Ambrose on each arm, Guilford and Harry bringing up the rear. A little behind them came Warwick and his Countess, arm in arm also, and smiling upon everyone; then sisters Mary and Kate, Mary soon to be married herself to Henry Sidney. The Dudleys out in force were a formidable crowd, all the men around six feet tall, all handsome, whether dark like Robert or fair like Guilford. Warwick’s sons celebrated their weddings with roistering energy, which at the end of the feasting was likely to degenerate into horseplay. The only one missing was Henry, the eldest, who had been killed at the siege of Boulogne six years before. The others had closed their ranks in loyalty to John, now the heir.

  Yesterday John had been married himself, to Anne Seymour, the fair, learned and nervous daughter of his father’s enemy. Wednesday, 4 June was as glorious a day a
s the Tuesday and Robert thought that the Dudleys even had luck with the weather.

  In the gardens at Syon, the first roses were out; the great double white reared up in a phalanx of bushes taller than any of the Dudley men. At its feet, the red Apothecary’s rose, short, but not to be outfaced, was smothered in bloom. York and Lancaster roses; they must have been planted in honour of King Henry. Robert picked a red for his own hat and a white for his bride. Amy Robsart was very pretty.

  ‘My rose in June,’ said Robert, pinning the emblem of purity to her shoulder — well, a bit lower than her shoulder. She blushed.

  ‘Roses red and white,’ added Robert’s father gallantly, and touched Amy’s cheek. How she blushed; she was rather afraid of Robert’s father, because he was the greatest man in the realm after the King. Looking at her, all blonde tumbling curls and rosy cheeks and red cushiony lips, Robert could have eaten her like a sugar sucket. The curls, like a cornucopia of Norfolk barley, cascaded over a gown of cloth of silver lined with sky-blue satin. The fashion for squashing the female chest flat could not hide Amy’s round and delectable breasts, trussed up high into two bulging half-moons threatening to break loose from the restraint of her neckline.

  The bridegroom drew even more eyes than Amy. With his height, seemingly endless length of slim leg and incredibly arrogant set to his head, Robert was the best looking of the brothers. He wore white velvet with scarlet slashings, and shoes of scarlet leather with white satin peeping at the cuts across the toes. His father watched him with pride, and a last-moment misgiving that he had allowed this match, and that Robert should have waited for something better.

  In Syon meads, lean-to pavilions and bowers of green branches held long tables laid for dinner, with white damask tablecloths and silver-gilt plate. Roasting joints on spits over glowing fires mouth-wateringly scented the air. Musicians with viols, pipes and drums played romantic airs; the dancing would not start until after the feast, unless anyone began cavorting beforehand. The wedding guests all wore nosegays of rosemary, and knots of bride laces — multi-coloured ribbons — in their hats. Gifts of scented gloves had been distributed, and guests walked about sniffing and smoothing appreciatively.