Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (32 page)

Why, then, we kill all our women:

we see how mortal an unkindness is to them;

if they suffer our departure, death’s the word.

We were all silent for a moment out of respect for two if not more of Henry VIII’s wives.

Mary quoted:

Under a compelling occasion, let women die;

it were pity to cast them away for nothing;

though, between them and a great cause, they should be esteemed nothing.

“It is germane to my mother’s fate in the king’s Great Matter, as he liked to call his divorce and the English Reformation. It also sounds like your mother, though, Elizabeth, doesn’t it? I mean, later on, when she was cast aside as a nonstarter in father’s sire-a-son project.”

“Agree,” Elizabeth conceded.

“I should think Katharine of Aragon’s wily adversary, Cardinal Wolsey, might have been in on the action of that last quote as well,” I commented. “Wolsey was tossed aside as readily as Catherine was, when he ceased to be sire-a-son proactive.”

Mary’s expression changed suddenly; it was hard to describe what it showed. Not quite pain, not quite anger, not quite guilt. Disquiet probably best summed it up.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have reminded you about Wolsey,” I said to Mary. “A man with big enough balls to tussle with your immovable mother! I can see why a mention of the Cardinal would make you see red.”

“The Cardinal being as fat as he was, it was hard
not
to see red when he was around,” Mary said. “And your mentioning him and his relationship with my mother dredges up painful feelings that I have harbored about her.”

“Her tragic fate as a castaway first wife; her end-of-life exile in a drafty and remote castle; her final illness and death, endured alone except for a faithful few. It was a sad fate indeed for a princess of Spain, daughter of the legendary Ferdinand and Isabella.”

“Actually, Dolly, that wasn’t what I was referring to at all,” Mary said sheepishly.

Chapter Eighty-Five

Of Druthers and Mothers

It pained me to see Mary looking so discomfited, so I attempted to buck up her feelings.

“You are said to have adored your mother, Mary, and understandably so; what an example she was of noble steadfastness! And you certainly did your level best to hove to her party line on Catholicism and the validity of her marriage. She’d surely have been proud of you.”

“It was almost immediately after Mother’s death that I started having feelings of anger about her expectations of me, Dolly. I wondered time and again what my life—and hers—would have been like had Mother taken the path of least resistance. What if she had bowed to the inevitable and exited her marriage by taking the veil as an abbess, for instance, instead of digging her heels in for a protracted divorce? She could have preserved her position and mine that way and saved us both so much misery.”

“I’ve wondered that about the convent option myself,” I admitted.

“Then, of course, after having such thoughts, I would emotionally flagellate myself for being so weak and pusillanimous a daughter to such a powerfully staunch and devoted mother. My emotions were in a constant state of agitation about it, Dolly. And once I’d felt the relieving outlet of getting my emotions about my father and Ann Boleyn out on paper with
Antony and Cleopatra
, I decided to apply the same form of therapy to my feelings about my mother.”

I trolled my mind for Shakespearian works in which mothers prominently featured.

“
Hamlet
?” I ventured.

“No.”

“That should have been obvious, shouldn’t it? When it came to attitude, the voluptuous Gertrude wouldn’t have had much in common with Katharine of Aragon. How about
The Winter
’
s Tale
, with poor Hermione undeservedly cast aside by her royal husband?”

“A better guess, Dolly, but still not correct.”

“One of the ‘absent mother’ plays, then—reflections on the mother you lost?”

“No, Dolly,” Mary answered. “Try again.”

“And if I may,” Margaret Douglas suggested, “I’d advise you to think big this time, Dolly. Really big.”

“I don’t remember any Shakespearian mothers making particularly big names for themselves,” I said. And as I said the words
big
and
name
, it came to me.

“Voluminous!” I said. “Or rather, Volumnia, the mother of the poor, harried Coriolanus.”

“I’d read about Coriolanus in Plutarch,” Mary explained. “His inability to deviate from his devotion to his mother’s wishes, and what it cost him, resonated with me.”

“Yes, I can see where Coriolanus’s pivotal ‘Pray, be content: Mother, I am going to the market-place’ would pretty much be Renaissance-speak for ‘Yessss, Mother,’ and all it implies,” I said.

“‘Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck’dst it from me,’” Mary said, quoting Volumnia’s words to her grown child, the martial Coriolanus. “My own mother said very similar words to me before we were parted. There is no forgetting something like that, Dolly.”

“I suppose that your mother, who is said to have sent Henry VIII a jacket soaked in his dead enemy’s blood at one point in their marriage, had more than the usual stomach for discussing bodily functions and fluids,” I said. “There is more to that quote, though, isn’t there? ‘But owe thy pride thyself,’” I mused aloud.

“Which brings me to another way I could identify with Coriolanus, Dolly,” Mary said. “We shared the burden, he and I, of pride—or at least the appearance of it—and a woeful lack of what has been called the common touch.”

“We can’t all be
Miss Congeniality
, Mary,” I said, trying to soft-pedal the fact that the woman has come down through history as one of the least charming queens ever.

“Of course, I rode into my reign on a tide of popular approval and love,” Mary said. “Just like the hero of one of my other plays:
Julius Caesar
.”

“You are responsible for
Julius Caesar
as well as
Coriolanus
?”

“Yes, Dolly. I wrote
Julius Caesar
toward the end of my reign, when I could see the vultures circling around me, metaphorically speaking. Everyone who was anyone at court wanted nothing more than for me to be dead and out of the way during the final months of my reign,” Mary said. “What a comedown from the triumph of my taking the throne!”

I thought of the middle-aged Mary of that time. She’d convinced herself that she was pregnant, but it was clear to all around her that she was really terminally ill.

“That had to have been hard for you, Mary,” I said. I got unduly emotional as I thought about Mary’s sad end and spoke through tears. “You were so alone! Your husband had bolloxed off to Spain, and your only immediate relative, your sister Elizabeth, was the flashpoint of all the courtiers who were against you.”

“Yes, indeed, Dolly. ‘There are more that look,’ as it is said, ‘to the rising than to the setting sun,’” Mary quoted.

It sounded very familiar, but in my emotional state, I could not quite place it. “
Julius Caesar
?” I ventured.

“No, Dolly; me!” said Elizabeth. “
I
said it! It was no easier for me to be the rising sun, than it was for Mary to be the setting sun. My sister and I had our differences, but I in no way wanted to be involved in action against her. Of course, with the politics of the time being what they were, Mary and I were very much at odds, but I had no way of convincing her that I meant no harm to her.”

“I admit to being quite paranoid about my sister, at the end,” Mary said, “and that was painful. I was so convinced that she, like everyone else, was against me.”

Someone had to say it; I figured it might as well be me. “‘
Et tu, Brute?
’”

“Exactly,” Mary said. “That final paranoia was the denouement to an adult lifetime of bad feelings about my relationship with my sister. Being as alone as I was in the crowd of the court, I wanted nothing more than a sister I could confide in. Of course, the political and family situations we were in made that impossible. And I resented the person who was responsible for that.”

“You know, Mary, as the Bard said, ‘Resentment is letting someone you despise live rent free in your head.’”

“I think you will find that was Mistress Ann Landers, Dolly,” Margaret said. “Another one of our guests, you know. She was brought here for career advice but wound up giving more advice than she received.”

“I’m not surprised,” I remarked.

“Anyway, Dolly, your point, or rather hers, on resentment, is well taken,” Mary said. “The longest lasting resentment I ever
bore was toward my father for separating me from my sister. Elizabeth and I were the last two survivors of our family debacle but separated so cruelly by circumstances that persisted long after the deaths of our parents. I had few friends in life, Dolly, and a close sisterly relationship with Elizabeth would have meant so much to me! “

“This is an interesting revelation, Mary, especially as history has largely come down on the side of you wishing Elizabeth had never been born at all.”

“Elizabeth started out in the whole sorry affair of our family dysfunction by being born into it; unlike my mother or anyone else involved, she had no choice in the matter. My sister’s heart cried out for a relationship with Elizabeth, while as a queen, I feared and resented her as a threat to my throne, if not my life. As a Catholic, I bemoaned her religious leanings. I resented my father for creating this situation between me and my only sister! There was a time when I decided to get all those feelings out on paper as well, because they were cutting at my heart like a knife.”

“Or perhaps more ‘
like a serpent
’
s tooth
’?” I asked. I was pretty confident that I was about to hear that Mary Tudor was responsible for the last, or perhaps the first, word on daddy issues and sister acts from the dark side.

Chapter Eighty-Six

The Concussed and the Nonplussed

The story, of course, is well known. In his dotage, King Lear makes the fatal mistake of misreading his three daughters and inadvertently setting them against each other, creating chaos in general. He eventually winds up on his uppers and pretty much naked on a stormy heath. In the fallout that follows, the old man loses his mind and learns too late the value of a true and faithful daughter. By the time it’s all over, the entire family and their retainers, both faithful and otherwise, have bitten the dust.

“Am I correct in assuming that
King Lear
was the result of the cathartic exercise you just mentioned?” I asked Mary, just to be sure.

“You are, Dolly,” said Mary.

“You couldn’t have gotten that one from Plutarch though; King Lear was an ancient British king.”

“I was inspired by the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth,” Mary said. “My grandmother, Elizabeth of York, owned a copy of his work. I never knew her, of course, but I had access to the book. I’m told she treasured it because of its telling of the Arthurian legends.”

“Yes, she gave me quite an earful about that the last time I was here,” I said, recollecting Elizabeth of York’s startling revelations about her life, the Arthurian legends, and her brothers, the mysterious Princes in the Tower.

“The story of Lear and how his unsound ideas ruined the relationship of the three sisters, Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia,
was just begging to be retold, it seemed to me,” Mary said. “So I retold it.”

“You were prescient, Mary, in telling a tale of a king of unsound mind,” I said. “Or at least that is what some modern historians would say.”

“How so, Dolly?”

“It has been suggested that Henry VIII’s jousting injury of 1536 was at the bottom of a lot of his, shall we say, otherwise inexplicably vicious behavior,” I said.

“That fall was a bad one,” Mary said. “I remember it well. Father was unconscious for hours, it seemed, before he came to. We feared he would die.”

“The shock of it caused my mother to have a miscarriage,” Elizabeth recalled. “And the lost child was, ironically, the much-wanted royal boy.”

“Well, in the modern era, we’ve learned that the seat of emotions as well as thoughts is in the brain. An injury such as that which your father suffered is called closed-head trauma. Such injuries can bruise the brain or cause bleeding within the skull that puts pressure on the brain. The sufferer of such an injury may be subject to changes in behavior, thought, and emotion. Issues with controlling impulses, anger, and suspicion can occur, and judgment and cognition can suffer.”

“Well, Father’s judgment was questionable
before
that injury, at least as far as the whole Ann Boleyn affair goes,” said Mary.

“Can we leave my mother out of this, please?” asked Elizabeth, coming at Mary again with that feather.

“Well, moving on from there, Father seemed to degenerate in kingship after that fall, even in matters
not
related to Ann Boleyn,” Mary admitted. “And certainly, his temper got worse.”

“And what you say about suspiciousness and impulse control rings a bell, Dolly. Kat Ashley told me that my parents had always had an up-and-down kind of quality to their relationship but that things changed after Mother had that miscarriage—all downs from then on out. Everyone at the time, including Kat, blamed Father’s general churlishness from that point forward on disappointment about losing that boy. But perhaps there
was
more to it than disappointment. A paranoid quality, would you say, Mary? I, of course, was too young to remember the immediate postfall period,” Elizabeth pointed out.

“Well, I was all for Father’s casting off Ann Boleyn, of course, and given her actions in relationship to my mother, I did not think much of her personal integrity and chastity. I have to admit, though, that the things father suspected her of and executed her for were a bit over the top. Even
I
don’t believe she was guilty of relations with all of the men father eventually had arrested and questioned as her lovers. What you said about pathological suspiciousness fits the picture, Dolly. Father was downright paranoid a lot of the time after that jousting fall.”

“Thomas Cromwell would have seconded that, I am sure,” Elizabeth said, recalling the friend and right-hand man that Henry VIII also had executed because of his incipient suspiciousness.