2
Elizabeth
Nothing lasts forever, and everyone says “good-bye,” even if they don’t actually say it because they don’t have the chance or choose not to out of cruelty, cowardice, or spite; it is not a question of “if,” it is only a matter of “when.”
L’amaro e il dolce
—the bitter and the sweet. Life is not a banquet; we cannot always pick and choose of which dishes we wish to partake; we have to take the bitter and the sweet, the bland and the savory, the delicious and the detestable.
S
age? Philosophical? Poetic? Lofty? Call them what you will. These thoughts have often run like a raging river through my life. As my father lay dying they crashed violently against the rocks of my mind until I thought the pain would knock me to the floor, gasping and clutching my head in the throes of a violent megrim. He had, like a river himself, mighty and majestic, beautiful and horrible, tranquil or terrifying, the power to destroy any who dared cross him, sweeping them aside or pulling them down to drown. When I was a little girl I thought he was invincible, but by thirteen I was old enough to understand that Time and Death conquer all that live; kings are no exception to the rule, merely mortals God infuses with a little of His divinity and power. A crown is a God-given gift, and the one to whom it is given wields the power that comes with it for the good of all, not just for personal wealth and glory.
I could still remember a time before the very mention of my name, let alone a glimpse of me, was enough to make my father roar and lash out like a wounded lion. For the first three years of my life I was adored, a true princess, in title, and in the way others treated me, with bows and flattery and words spoken in soft, deferential tones.
I vividly remember a day when all the court was dressed in sunny yellow, all was jubilation and celebration, but I couldn’t understand why. When I asked her, my lady-governess said “No, My Lady Princess, today is not a holiday,” but would not say more and sternly forbade me to ask my parents. I too was dressed in a gown of gaudy yellow, sewn all over with golden threads and sparkling yellow gems like miniature suns themselves that seemed to wink mischievously at me whenever the light struck them. I loved watching the big round yellow jewels set in golden suns on the toes of my shoes peep out and flash and wink at me with every step I took so that my lady-governess had to scold me to walk properly like a princess and hold myself erect instead of stooped over like a hunchback as she escorted me to the Great Hall where my great golden giant of a father, as big and bright as the sun itself he seemed to me then, swept me up onto his shoulder and paraded me about, showing me off to all his court.
My mother was there too, her belly bulging round like a ball beneath the sunshine-yellow brocade of her gown. My father smiled and patted her stomach and said this, at long last, would be the Tudor sun the soothsayers had predicted would come to shine over England.
“It was supposed to be you, Bess,” he smilingly chided me. “My son has certainly taken his time in coming, but he is well worth waiting for.”
He patted my mother’s stomach again. “Herein sleeps your brother, Bess, England’s next king. Guard him well, Madame, guard him well,” he told my mother, and though the words were said in a laughing, jocular tone there was no laughter in his eyes; they were as hard as blue marble. And there was fear in hers when she heard them, racing like a frightened animal trapped in a room it yearns to flee, running frantically from end to end, across and back, up and down, even though it knows there is no escape. Though she tried to hide it behind her smile I saw the fear full plain even though I did not understand it at the time.
Then we were off again, parading round the room. My father tore the little yellow cap from my head and tossed it high into the air.
“Take off that cap and show the world that Tudor-red hair, Bess, my red-haired brat!”
And I shook my head hard, shaking out my curls to show them all that I was Great Harry’s red-haired brat and proud of it.
Even the marzipan was gilded that day and he let me eat all I wanted. Then a big yellow dragon came prancing in, all trimmed with red, gold, and green, with the players’ dancing legs in motley-colored hose with bells on their toes peeking out from beneath the swaying yellow silk and gilded and painted body. But it was no ordinary dragon like I had seen at other revels. Instead of a fearsome, toothy gaping mouth and menacing red eyes, its painted papier-mâché face was a woman’s, sadly serene like the face of Our Lord’s mother, the face of a woman who would feel deeply the sorrows of the world and feel its weight profoundly perched upon her shoulders. I heard someone say her name was Katherine. I didn’t know it then, I was too little to understand, that it was my sister Mary’s mother, Katherine of Aragon, the proud princess from Spain who had died vowing that her eyes desired my father above all things. Instead of mourning a strong and valiant woman, who had been despite her petite stature a tower of strength and conviction, we were celebrating her demise by eating gilded marzipan, laughing, dancing, and cutting capers, while dressed in the brightest gaudy yellow imaginable. Years later when I discovered the truth about that day I felt sick; every time I thought of it after that I wanted to vomit up all the marzipan I had eaten that day even though it had all happened years ago.
My father swept me up and bounded over to the dragon. He drew his sword and gave me the jeweled dagger from his belt.
“Come on, Bess, let’s slay this dragon!” he cried, and laughing, we both struck out at the dancing, capering beast until it fell with a great groan onto the floor, sprawling conquered at our feet.
“That’s my girl!” He hugged me close and kissed my cheek, and buried his face in my bright red curls. “My Bess is as brave as any boy!” he declared. Then he threw me up into the air and caught me when I came down, my yellow skirts billowing like a buttercup about me. “Praise be to God,” he cried as he spun us round and round. “The old harridan is dead and we are free from all threat of war! The Emperor Charles can kiss my arse!” he shouted, causing all the court to roar and rock with laughter. And I laughed too even though I did not understand.
But I wasn’t just Great Harry’s red-haired brat; I was Anne Boleyn’s daughter too. I have seen her portrait hidden away in musty palace attics, and when I look at myself in the mirror, only my flame-red hair, and the milk-pale skin that goes with it, are Tudor. All the rest of me is Anne Boleyn—the shape of my face, my dark eyes and their shape, my nose, my lips, my long-fingered musician’s hands, even my long, slender neck. That is why, I think, for so many years my father could not stand the sight of me, and even after I was welcomed, albeit reluctantly at first, back to court, I would catch him watching me, and there would be something in his eyes, as if he were a man who had just seen a ghost. I was the living, breathing shade of someone he had loved enough to change the world to wed and then hated enough to kill; in my parents’ marriage the pendulum swung from love to hate without the middle ground of indifference in between. I think that was also why I had the ability to so easily provoke his rage, even when I did not mean to, thus giving him an excuse, when the sight of Anne Boleyn’s living legacy became too much for him, to send me away from court, back to Hatfield.
“Back to Hatfield” was a phrase I heard many times throughout my childhood, spoken morosely by me, my lady-governess, or stepmother of the moment, or in a thundering roaring red-black rage by my father.
I’m not supposed to remember her, but I do. Everyone thought I was so young that I would forget. Most of my memories are blurred and fleeting, the kind where I strain and strive to hold on to them and bring them into sharper focus but, alas, I cannot. It is like gazing at one’s reflection upon the surface of a still, dark blue-black pool onto which someone then abruptly drops a stone, causing the image to break and blur. But there is one day I remember very well, though some of the details are lost or hazy. I cannot recall it moment by moment, word by word, but what I do remember is vividly crisp and clear, etched diamond-sharp into my memory.
A spring day in the garden at Greenwich, my mother was dressed all in black satin, and her hair, long, thick, and straight, hung all the way down to her knees like a shimmering, glossy cloak of ink-black silk. She knelt and held out her arms to me, and I toddled into them, a baby still uncertain on my feet, learning to walk like a lady in a stiff brocade court gown, leather stays, and petticoats, with pearls edging my square-cut bodice “just like Maman!” I crowed happily when I noticed the similarity.
She laughed and swept me up into her arms and spun round and round. Suddenly she stopped, looking up at the window above, where my father stood frowning down at us, his face dark and dangerous, like a thundercloud. Even from far away I felt the heat of his anger. I whimpered and started to cry, the murderous intensity of his gaze having struck such terror into my little heart. And in my mother’s eyes . . . a wild, hunted look, like a doe fleeing from a huntsman and a pack of hounds. In later years, when I first heard the poem by Thomas Wyatt, the poet who was said to have loved her, in which he likened her to a hunted deer, I would be catapulted back to that moment and the look in her eyes, and see my father as a mighty huntsman poised to strike the killing blow.
“Never surrender!”
my mother said to me that day, an adamant, intense, ferocity endowing each word. “Be mistress of your own fate, Elizabeth, and let
no man
be your master!”
Uncle George, her brother, was waiting for her. She beckoned to my lady-governess and set me down and went to join him. He put his arms around her and she laid her head upon his shoulder, and leaned welcomingly into him as they walked away. I never saw her again.
Then there came a day when I heard the Tower guns boom, rattling the diamond-paned glass in the windows like thunder. I was sitting on my sister Mary’s lap. She hugged me close and kissed my brow.
“We are both bastards now, poppet,” she whispered, and told me that my mother was dead, but I didn’t understand. Mary shook her head and refused to say more. “Not now, poppet, not now; later, when you are old enough to understand.” Then she began to sing a Spanish lullaby as she rocked me on her lap.
But I knew something was very wrong, I felt it in my bones, and when the servants started addressing me as “My Lady Elizabeth,” instead of “My Lady Princess,” that confirmed my suspicions that something was very wrong indeed. And when they thought I was beyond hearing, some even referred to me as “The Little Bastard,” though when I asked what that word meant, faces flushed and voices stammered and the subject was hastily changed or I was given candy or cake or offered a song or a story or a new doll to distract me.
My world had changed overnight but I could not understand why and no one would tell me. “Where is my mother?” I asked over and over and over again, but all those about me would say, with averted eyes, was that she was gone and I must forget her and never mention her again. She never came to visit me anymore, when she used to come so often, and the gifts of pretty caps and dresses stopped, and when I outgrew those I had there were lengthy delays before other garments, nowhere near as fine and not crafted from a mother’s love, finally came to replace them. I used to feel her love for me in every stitch, but now that was gone; these new clothes were made by a stranger’s hands. I didn’t understand it; did this mean she no longer loved me? And there were no more of the music lessons where either she or Uncle George—and where was he?—would take me on their lap and guide my fingers over the strings. And she had only just begun teaching me to dance. Where was she? Why did she not come visit me anymore? Why wouldn’t anyone tell me?
Then one day I heard the chambermaids gossiping as they were making my bed. I had come back to get the pretty doll, the last one she had given me, in a gown made from scraps left from one of her very own dresses, its bodice and French hood trimmed with pearls just like hers. I stood there silent and still, with tears running down my face, unbeknownst to them, and heard it all. When they told how the French executioner—imported from Calais as a token of the great love my father had once felt for her—had struck off her head in one swift stroke, I screamed and ran at them, kicking and biting, pummeling them with my tiny fists, and scratching them with my little fingernails. The physician had to give me something to quiet me. That was the last time I let my emotions get the better of me; it was also the last time I mentioned my mother. I put my doll away, at the bottom of a chest, tenderly and lovingly wrapped in a length of red silk with a lavender and rose petal sachet, and vowed never to surrender and never to forget. I would never give any man the power to act as a living god and ordain my fate—life or death at his sufferance or fancy.
Never surrender!
I burned those words into my brain and engraved them on my heart.
Afterward, a parade of stepmothers passed fleetingly through my life. Most had pity in their eyes when they looked at me, and tried, though it was not their fault, to atone for what my father had done, and give me their best imitation of a mother’s love.
First pale, prim Jane Seymour, whose shyness made her seem cold and aloof. She died giving my father the son he had always longed for. When Mary took my hand and led me in to see our new little brother, lying in his golden cradle, bundled against the cold in purple velvet and ermine, Jane Seymour lay as listless and quiet as a corpse upon her bed, as still and white as a marble tomb effigy. Her skin looked so like wax I wondered that she did not melt; the heat from the fire was such that pearls of sweat beaded my own brow and trickled down my back. I was four years old then and fully understood what death meant. And in that moment my mind forged a new link in the chain between surrender, marriage, and death—childbirth. It was another peril that came when a woman surrendered and put her life in a man’s hands.