To my everlasting shame, though I would hate myself for it ever afterward, I gave in to their barrage of threats. The Duke of Norfolk himself took a menacing step toward me and informed me that if I were his daughter he would bash my head against the wall until it was as soft as a baked apple to cure me of my stubbornness. And haunted by accounts of those who had already died for their resistance, including Sir Thomas More and cartloads of nuns and monks, I signed the documents they laid before me. “Lady Mary’s Submission,” they called it. I signed and thus declared my mother’s marriage a sin, incestuous and unlawful in the sight of God and man, and myself the bastard spawn born of it. Even though my most trusted advisor, the Spanish Ambassador, urged me to sign and save myself, assuring me that a victim of force would be blameless in God’s sight, and that since I signed under duress, in fear for my very life, the Pope would grant me absolution, such assurances did not ease my conscience or assuage my guilt, and my body began to mirror my mind’s suffering. My stomach rebelled against all food, my hair began to fall out, and I suffered the agonies of the damned with megrims, monthly cramps, palpitations of the heart, and toothache, and before I was twenty I was known throughout Europe as “the most unhappy lady in Christendom,” and the tooth-drawer had wrenched out most of the teeth Father had once called “pretty as pearls,” leaving my face with a pinched, sunken expression and a closemouthed smile that was purposefully tight-lipped. It was a miracle I survived, and I came wholeheartedly to believe that God had spared my life so that I might do important work in His name.
I betrayed everything I held sacred and dear just to walk in the sun of my father’s love again, but it was never the same, and that, I think, was my penance, my punishment. It wasn’t the old welcoming, all-embracing warmth that had enveloped me like a sable cloak on a cold winter’s day; it was a weak, wavering, watery-yellow sunbeam that only cast a faint buttery hue, a faltering wispy frail fairy-light of yellow, onto the snow on a bone-chilling day. Just a tantalizing little light of love that left me always yearning for more, like a morsel of food given to a starving man only inflames his appetite. It was never enough compared to what had been before. But when I signed I did not know this. I was full to overflowing with hope when, in a presence chamber packed with courtiers, I knelt humbly before my scowling, glowering father and kissed the wide square-toe of his white velvet slipper, slashed through with bloodred satin, reminding me of all the blood he had spilled and that it was always in his power to take my life upon a moment’s fancy. After I kissed his shoe I sat up upon my knees, like a dog begging, my tear-filled eyes eager and beseeching, and told him earnestly that I would rather be a servant in his house than empress of the world and parted from him.
But there were many years of pain and humiliation that preceded my surrender and self-abasement.
For seven years, and against all the odds, The Great Whore led my father on a merry dance that made him the scandal and laughingstock of Europe and turned the world as I had known it upside down. She swept through my life as chaotic, destructive, merciless, and relentless as the ten plagues of Egypt and
nothing
would ever be the same again. Like a mastiff attacking a baited bear, she tore away all that I held dear. “All or Nothing” was her motto and she meant it. She took my father’s love away from me and worked her dark magic to transform it into hatred and mistrust; she broke my mother’s heart and banished her to die in brokenhearted disgrace in lonely, neglected exile; she took my title of “Princess” and my place as heiress to the throne away from me and gave it to her own red-haired bastard brat; she even took my house away, my beautiful Beaulieu, and gave it to the brother who would loyally let her lead him to the scaffold after his own wife revealed details of their incestuous romance. I remember her sitting on the arm of Father’s golden throne, with diamond hearts in her luxuriant black hair, worn unbound like a virgin as her vanity’s emblem, whispering lies into his ear, poisoning his mind against me, exacting a promise, because she knew how much it meant to me, that in his lifetime he would never allow me to marry lest my husband challenge the rights of the children she would bear him. I remember how she laughed and threw back her head as he reached up to caress her swan-slender neck, encircled by a necklace of ruby and diamond hearts. The rubies glistened like fresh blood in the candlelight. The sight made me shudder and I had to turn away.
Like the “Ash Girl” in the story my nurse used to tell me, who was made to be a servant to her stepsisters, I was made to serve as a nursemaid to the puking and squalling “Little Bastard” who had taken my place in our father’s heart and usurped my birthright, my title and inheritance.
Elizabeth. I saw her come into this world with a gush of blood between The Great Whore’s legs at the expense of the heart’s blood of my mother and myself. I was made to bear witness to her triumphant arrival as Anne Boleyn, even on her bed of pain, raised her head to gloat and torment me, the better to conceal her own disappointment at failing to keep the promise she had made to give Father a son. But Father was still so besotted with her that, though disappointed by the child’s sex, he forgave her.
To please Anne, Father had heralds parade through the corridors of Greenwich and announce that I was now a bastard and no longer to be addressed or acknowledged as Princess; Elizabeth was now England’s only princess. My servants were ordered to line up and Anne’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk himself, walked up and down their ranks, ripping my blue and green badge from their liveries. And Anne’s father, Thomas Boleyn, announced that when they had been fashioned each would be given a badge of Elizabeth’s to replace mine, to show that they were now in her service. As I stood silently by and watched, my face burned with shame and each time another badge was torn away I felt as if I had been slapped.
Elizabeth. I should have hated her. But Christian charity would not allow me to hate an innocent child. No, that is not entirely true; my heart would not let me hate her. And no child should be held accountable or blamed for the sins of its mother, not even such a one as that infamous whore and Satan’s strumpet, Anne Boleyn.
At seventeen, the age I was when Elizabeth was born, I longed more than anything to be a wife and mother, and when I saw that scrunched-up, squalling, pink-faced bundle of ire, with the tufts of red hair feathering her scalp, my arms ached to hold her. I could barely contain myself; I had to almost sit on my hands to keep from reaching out and begging to hold her.
Even when I was stripped of all my beloved finery—even made to surrender the dear golden frog and enameled lily pad ring Father had given me, and the little gold cross with a splinter of the True Cross inside it that had belonged first to my grandmother and then to my mother before she had given it to me on that oh so special sixth birthday—and forced to make do with a single plain black cloth gown and white linen apron, and to tuck my hair up under a plain white cap just like a common maidservant, and made to sleep in a mean little room in the servants’ attic, cramped and damp, with stale air and a ceiling so low, even petite as I was I could not stand up straight, still I could not hate Elizabeth. Even when I sickened and wasted away to skin and bones for want of food—I dared not eat lest The Great Whore send one of her lackeys to poison me—I could not hate, blame, or resent Elizabeth. Not even when I was wakened from a deep, exhausted sleep and brought in to change her shit-soiled napkins, I did not protest and wrinkle my nose up and turn away fastidiously, but humbly bent to the task and did what was required of me. And when her teeth started to come in—oh what pain those dainty pearls brought her!—I went without sleep and walked the floors all night with her in my arms, crooning the Spanish lullabies my mother had sung to me. Even when I was forced to walk in the dust or trudge through the mud alongside, but always three steps behind, while she rode in a sumptuous gilt and velvet-cushioned litter, dressed in splendid little gowns encrusted with embroidery, jewels, and pearls, while I went threadbare and wore the soles off my shoes as I stumbled and stubbed my toes over ruts and rocks or got mired in the mud, still my heart was filled with love for Elizabeth.
I relished each opportunity to bathe, feed, and dress her, to change her soiled napkins, rub salve onto her sore gums, tuck her into bed, coax and encourage her first steps as I held on to her leading strings, promising never to let go, and the wonderful afternoons when I was allowed to lead her around the courtyard on her first pony. And when she spoke her first word, a babyish rendition of my name—“Mare-ee”—my heart felt as if it had leapt over the moon. I loved Elizabeth; her leading strings were tied to my heart. Serving her was never the ordeal they intended it to be, for I
knew
who I was—I was a princess in disguise, just like in a fairy tale, and someday the truth would be revealed and all that was lost restored to me.
Sometimes I told myself I was practicing for the day when I would be married and a mother myself, but I was also lying to myself as with each year my hopes and dreams, like sands from an hourglass, slipped further away from me even as I strained and tried with all my might to hold on to them until I felt all was lost and imagined I was watering their grave with my tears. For what man would have me? My father had declared me a bastard when his minion, the so-called Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, dissolved his marriage to my mother. And though I dreamed, I never really dared hope that someday someone would fall in love with me. Love was the stuff of songs and stories and, for me, as elusive as a unicorn. Sometimes, I know better than any who has ever walked this earth, no matter how much you want something, you still cannot have it.
And the promise of beauty I had, as a child, possessed had failed to ripen into reality; it had deserted me in my years of grief, fear, and peril. My first gray hair sounded the death knell to my last lingering hope that I might someday attract a suitor. I was seventeen, and a scullery maid who was secretly sympathetic to my plight was brushing out my hair before I retired to my comfortless cot for another miserable night. She gave a little gasp and stopped suddenly, and I turned to see a stricken, sad look in her eyes. Mutely, she brought my hair round over my shoulder so I could see the strand of gray, standing out starkly like a silver thread embroidered on auburn silk. I nodded resignedly. What else could I do but accept it? “Bleached by sorrow,” I sighed, and thanked her for her kind ministrations and went to my bed, but secretly, after I had blown the candle out, with the thin coverlet pulled up over my head, I cried myself to sleep as I said farewell to and buried one more dream.
But I had my faith to keep me strong. My mother always inspired great loyalty and love in those who knew her, thus she was able to find someone willing to take the risk and carry secret words of comfort to me. “Trust in God and keep faith in Him and the Holy Virgin and you will
never
be alone,” she lovingly counseled me. “Even though we are divided in body, remember whenever you kneel to say your prayers, I will
always
be right there beside you in spirit. Faith in Our Lord and the Blessed Virgin are the ties that bind. Always remember that, my darling daughter. And God
never
gives us more than we can bear. Sometimes He tests us, to show us how strong we really are, and that, as we have faith in Him, so too does He have faith in us, and wants us to have faith in ourselves.”
I was holding Elizabeth, then aged three, on May 19, 1536, when the Tower guns boomed to let Father, and all of England, know that he was free and the spell of the witch-whore had been broken. Elizabeth was now motherless, just like me. There we sat, a faded spinster in a threadbare black gown grown thin and shiny at the elbows and ragged at the hem, with a maid’s plain white cap to hide her thinning hair, and a porridge-stained apron, and a vibrant, precocious toddler in pearl-embellished sunset-orange and gold brocade to complement the flame-bright curls tumbling from beneath a cap lovingly embroidered in golden threads by The Great Whore who had given life to her.
Now it was Elizabeth’s turn to be a disgraced bastard accounted of no importance. And as fast as she was growing, soon she too would be in shabby clothes. Father wanted to forget, so I doubted money would be provided to keep her in fine array, so soon it would be good-bye to brocade and pearls. Our mothers were dead—mine a saint gone straight to Heaven and hers a whore and a witch gone straight to Hell—and our father had turned his back on us and called down the winter’s gloom and chill to replace the warm sun of the love he had once given in turn to each of us. Now all we had was each other.
I wasn’t with my mother when she died. When her body was laid open by the embalmers they found her heart had turned quite black and a hideous growth embraced it. I have often wondered whether it was some slow-acting poison administered by one of The Great Whore’s minions or a broken heart pining for her Henry that killed her. She died declaring that her eyes desired my father above all things.
On the day my mother was entombed, Anne Boleyn’s doom was sealed when she miscarried the son who would have been her savior. Father’s eye had already lighted on wholesome and pure, sweet Jane Seymour, a plain and pallid country buttercup to The Boleyn Whore’s bold and tempestuous red rose. Her earnest simplicity and genuine modesty had completely won his heart, and it was only a matter of time; we all knew The Great Whore’s days were numbered, and the number was not a great one. I saw it as divine retribution, an eye for an eye, a life for a life. Anne Boleyn, whether some lackey in her employ had administered a killing dose or not, was responsible for my mother’s death, for which she dressed in sun-bright yellow to celebrate and insisted that Father do the same, thus, it was only fitting that her own life be cut short and a truly worthy woman take her place at Father’s side.