Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (21 page)

I think the glare was the first thing that sent me reeling backward. Candelabra were everywhere, and very strategically placed, as were the mirrors that reflected the glow of the candles. The second thing that knocked me off my feet was the sheer amount of color in the room. This large, round room most certainly lived up to its reputation. The walls were studded, at eye level and slightly below and above it, with portraits, all of the Renaissance era. “Studded” is actually probably too weak a word; “packed” would be more accurate.

There was no one else in the room yet save Blanche and me. There were, however, seven chairs arranged in a semicircle, facing a single chair at a distance of a few feet. The proxemics of the room brought me back to my first visit here and my interview with the six wives of Henry VIII; the chairs had been similarly arranged on that occasion. The room was also amply furnished with cushions and contained several salvers set up with pitchers—of wine, I supposed—and goblets.

“You may be seated while you await Elizabeth, Dolly,” Blanche said, motioning me to what I already knew was to be my seat.

“Thank you, Blanche, but if it is all right with you, I would rather browse the portraiture a bit.” It seemed like most of the prominent folk of the Tudor era were represented, but the preponderance of the portraits were of Elizabeth I in various regalia. I pondered for a moment whether it was a blessing or a curse for the world at large that the woman had missed the selfie era by several centuries.

I was roused from my reverie by a familiar voice from behind me.

“My portraitists did me proud, didn’t they, Dolly?”

“Elizabeth!” I said, turning to see that my old friend, the Virgin Queen herself, had entered the ring.

I had learned during my last visit here that the resident ladies could present themselves to me as they had looked at any age; the choice was theirs. I had interacted back then with both Elizabeth the young princess and Elizabeth in a somewhat blowsy middle age. The Elizabeth I that I saw today was the woman in her prime. She was grown out of teenage skinniness but was far from the slackening and thickening of late middle life. Tall, stately, slender, but with feminine curves in evidence, she looked lovely. Her eyes had not quite lost all the restlessness of adolescence.

We hugged as old friends do when they meet again.

“I do admire your outfit, Dolly!” Elizabeth began. “An unusual choice, to be sure, but it suits you right down to the ground.”

“And I am in awe of your outfit, Elizabeth. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t have thought a gal of your strawberry blondness could get away with wearing such a rich red, but I stand corrected. You’ve captured what makes an old-fashioned Christmas
both warm and elegant with your ensemble. I recognize it from the
Hampden Portrait
, I think.”

“Well, Dolly, I see you’ve not lost your penchant for putting your foot in your mouth; most would not point out to a queen regnant that she has been caught wearing the same outfit twice.”

“Yes, but what an outfit! The red velvet puts me in mind of the outfit your grandmother, Elizabeth of York, was wearing when I met her. You’ve definitely taken red velvet a step further, though, with the gold-and-white embroidery. I like that it is simple and understated stitching; it lets the full impact of that red glow through. The golden hue of your ruff continues the theme beautifully and makes the perfect frame for that burnished red-gold hair of yours. And the touches of green on the flora on your hat and flower brooch; genius!”

My assessment of her couture seemed to assuage Elizabeth’s pique. She went from offended fashionista to woman-in-charge in an instant, as she addressed herself to Blanche Parry.

“Blanche, you may leave us now, and tell the others to come in here and take their seats in the semicircle. The business of the evening is about to begin in earnest.”

Chapter Fifty-Six

Genial Genealogy

As promised, the seven chairs opposite me were occupied in good order. Elizabeth herself, not surprisingly, took the center seat.

The two ladies who occupied the seats immediately to either side of her were women I had met on my last visit here: Jane Grey, the Nine Days Queen; and Mary Tudor, aka Mary I or Bloody Mary. Another old friend, the one and only Mary, Queen of Scots, graciously deferred sitting until the remaining three ladies who had joined us had seated themselves. I’d not met any of those three on my last visit here. They all had a Tudor look to them; I wondered which members of the family they were. My curiosity was soon satisfied.

“Dolly,” said Jane Grey, rising and gesturing to two of the ladies, “allow me to introduce my sisters, Mary and Catherine.”

I did not need to ask Jane which was which; history has handed down descriptions that our meeting proved quite accurate. The tiny little gal with marked scoliosis was no doubt Mary. The woman next to her, who might have been called the flower of her family back in the day when such sibling rating was permissible, I took to be Catherine.

“And allow me, Dolly,” said Mary, Queen of Scots, following suit and gesturing to the remaining unidentified lady, “to introduce my aunt and mother-in-law, Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox.”

“Allow me to recap the relationships of my old and new acquaintances now present from the starting point of their relationship to Henry VIII and his progeny.”

“As you wish,” Elizabeth said graciously.

“I have Henry’s two daughters, Elizabeth and Mary.”

“Your hostesses, if you will,” Elizabeth said.

“Likewise,” I continued, “I have their cousin, Margaret Douglas, the daughter of Henry’s eldest sister, Margaret Tudor. And, from this same elder-sister line of descent, Mary, Queen of Scots.”

“Correct.”

“And via Henry’s younger sister, Mary, we have the Grey girls: Jane, Mary, and Catherine.”

“Our cousins, as we like to think of them,” said Elizabeth, as her sister Mary Tudor nodded agreement.

“Of course,” I pointed out to Elizabeth, “Mary, Queen of Scots, Jane Grey, and Jane’s sisters are not your direct cousins; they are cousins once removed.”

“Dolly, really!” said Mary, Queen of Scots. “Execution awareness, if you please!”

“Hear, hear!” said Jane Grey.

Leave it to me, I thought, to start off on the wrong foot in such a big way with two women who had been executed at the orders of Elizabeth and Mary Tudor, respectively. A diversionary tactic was well in order.

“Well, the Tudor gang’s all here, at least in latter-generation distaff terms, isn’t it?” I asked Jane.

“Among those missing tonight are my mother, Frances Brandon; my aunt, Eleanor Brandon; and Eleanor’s daughter, Margaret Clifford.”

“Eleanor and Frances were the daughters of Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary Tudor Brandon,” I confirmed.

“Exactly, Dolly. None of these women enter directly into the history you are about to be told,” Jane said authoritatively.

“Yes, Auntie Eleanor and her daughter were a couple of bores compared to the rest of us,” Catherine Grey offered.

“And as for our mother,” Mary Grey piped in with spirit, “the less we see of her, the better we like it.”

“Amen to that!” seconded Jane Grey.

While Eleanor Brandon and her line pretty much faded from the pages of history, Frances Brandon made a place for herself among its footnotes as the mother of the Grey sisters. Having this historical light shone upon her, however, illuminated some rather unpleasant aspects of her character (e.g., high-handedness, a bent for scheming, and not being above using physical abuse with her children). Frances, like all the Tudors, has had her apologists down through the years. The last two comments from her daughters, however, seemed to confirm that the traditional view of the woman was spot-on.

“Rumors about your mother’s heavy hand with you have made their way down through posterity, Jane. All those ‘pinches, nips and bobs’! I can’t say that your comment about your mother today surprises me.”

“It was Mother’s nature, I suppose, to be bad-tempered,” Jane said, “although I don’t know where she got it from. I never met my grandmother, Mary Tudor, but I have been told she had a rather docile temperament.”

“I don’t know where that temperament came from in the line of our Tudor forebears, but Frances was not the only one in the family to inherit it,” Margaret added. “My mother, Margaret Tudor, certainly had her share of difficult temperament.”

“So I recall,” I said, harking my mind back to my meeting with that lady on my last visit here.

“Yes, and thereby hangs a tale, quite literally,” commented Elizabeth. “Margaret, you shall start things off by elaborating on the statement that you just made.”

Margaret Douglas appeared to be in late middle age. She was known as the beauty of the Tudor court in her heyday, and one could still see the vestiges of pretty, red-gold hair among silvery strands and of a winning smile within the laugh lines. Like her great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, she favored rather severe dress, and black at that. She took full honors for having the smallest ruff in the room.

“It will be my pleasure to commence,” she said. “How exciting to be the one to begin our story!”

I wondered silently about the pronoun “our,” as Margaret settled in to speak her piece.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

One Tear More or Less and the Devonshire MS

“You are familiar, of course, with my mother’s story, Dolly,” Margaret began.

“Yes, indeedy!” I affirmed. “Margaret Tudor started off well enough as an English Rose making a successful marriage into Scottish royalty. It all went downhill with the death of her first husband, King James IV of Scotland. She made two politically and personally disastrous marriages after that. She managed to gain the upper hand politically at times and then would be ousted from power as a result of her own bad choices. She was downright pathetic when pleading with her brother, Henry VIII, for resources after her own had been plundered by her husbands.”

“My mother was a loving parent, Dolly; let us not judge her harshly on that account, at least,” Margaret said.

“I’m not surprised to hear it,” I said, remembering the glimpses I’d had into the emotional nature of Margaret Tudor. “She seemed to me, when I met her, one of those ladies who could love well even if not too wisely.”

“Yes, but Mother’s lack of judgment made my life as her daughter something of a trial,” Margaret confessed. “There were her skids into and out of power as the guardian of the young King James V of Scotland, who was her son by her first marriage. There was Mother trying desperately to keep custody of the boy and not let him fall into the hands of her second husband, my own father, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus. My mother actually fired cannons at my father in her efforts!”

“That’s domestic violence and then some. You poor thing!” I said to Margaret, who continued her tale of family dysfunction.

“I think the worst was my half brother, James, king of Scotland, elevating my mother’s motley third husband, Henry Stewart, to the earldom of Methven and then allying himself with that misguided couple. Insanity!”

“It’s wonderful how you managed to crystallize the Scottish politics of your day into one word,” I said.

“English politics was no maypole dance either,” Margaret said. “Neither was my mother’s status as a welfare case when she eventually made her way to the court of my uncle—Henry VIII—in England. It wasn’t easy living with my mother and the fallout that surrounded her, I can tell you.”

I hated to see Mama thrown under the bus that way.

“What you say is true of course, Margaret, and I can only imagine what that was like for you, when you were young. I can’t help but recollect, though, what I know of Scottish Renaissance history. All the chaos and infighting of the clan system; bloodshed and murder; religious division; the quixotic battles fought, and for the most part lost, with England. More savvy politicians than your mother were done in by the Scottish politics of the day.”

“As an older woman, I learned to understand that,” Margaret said, walking over to a portrait of Henry, Lord Darnley, and looking at it admiringly. “Marrying my oldest son, Lord Darnley, to Mary, Queen of Scots, made me understand all too clearly the quagmire one could get in when love, familial loyalties, and Scottish politics mixed. Such,” she said, looking like my friend Marge did when she talked about either of her sons, “a promising boy!”

“And such a sad end,” I added. Said Lord Darnley met his death at a very young age in the contemporary equivalent of his boxers,
in the courtyard of a building that had been blown up to kill him. When he managed to survive the blast, his enemies resorted to strangling him. Darnley had not been much of a man, as his wife, Mary, Queen of Scots, could attest. Nevertheless, it saddened me to think that his mother, the lady before me, had to come to an understanding of her own mother’s troubles in such a traumatic way.

“You know our history, Dolly, so you know that as a young woman living at the English court, I reacted to the chaos in my family life by acting out myself. First it was with Lord Thomas Howard, to whom, against all the rules set out for royalty, I became secretly engaged.”

“Just your luck that he was Ann Boleyn’s uncle and that the news of your relationship with him broke
after
Henry VIII had gone sour on Ann.”

“Yes, Thomas and I were both imprisoned; I, unlike Thomas, eventually emerged.”

Margaret wiped away a single tear, as she remembered her lost love. As I recollected the story, though, there was one more lost love to go. After a moment, Margaret continued her story.

“In 1540, Dolly, I fell in love unwisely once again; it was as if I were modeling my mother. The object of my affection this time was Sir Charles Howard.”

“He was the brother of Catherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife, wasn’t he?” I asked, pondering, as I had on my last visit here, the Tudor predilection for members of the Boleyn-Howard clan.

“Yes, and of course, the relationship did not endure,” Margaret said, again wiping a single tear.

“Your eventual marriage, though, is said to have been a success,” I reminded Margaret, hoping to give the conversation some positive tone. “The Earl of Lennox, of course.”