Tudor Throne Read online

  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 tom
b 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.

  When Mary and I walked in the funeral procession, two of twenty-nine slow and solemn ladies—one for each year of Jane Seymour’s life—with bowed heads and hands clasped around tall, flickering white tapers, all of us clad in the simple, stark death-black dresses and snow-white hoods that meant the deceased had died in childbirth, I vowed that I would never marry. Later, when I told her, Mary shook her head and scoffed at this childish nonsense, hugging me close and promising that I would forget all about this foolish fancy when I was old enough to understand what being a wife and mother meant; it was something that every woman wanted. I bit my tongue and kept my own counsel, but I knew that my conviction would never waver; God would be the only man to ever have the power of life and death over me. And as I knelt in chapel before Jane Seymour’s catafalque, I looked up at the cross and swore it as a vow, a pact between God and myself. He would be my heavenly master and I would always bow to His will, but I would have no earthly master force his will upon me.

  Then came jolly German Anne of Cleves, always pink-cheeked and smiling, a platter of marzipan and candied fruits, like edible jewels, always within reach. She even wore a comfit box on a jeweled chain about her waist so that she would never be without her candy. I helped her with her English and she taught me German, and was the soul of patience when helping me with my much hated sewing. But I had no sooner learned to care for her than she was gone, supplanted by flighty, foolish, vain, but oh so beautiful Katherine Howard.

  I was amazed to learn that she was but a few years older than me; I was seven and she was a tender fifteen to my father’s half century when they married. When I heard that she was my mother’s cousin I was so excited and eager to meet her, I bobbed on my toes like an ill-bred peasant child, bursting with impatience and craning my neck to catch a glimpse of her. Yet when at last I stood before her I looked in vain for any resemblance to my slim, elegant mother in that plump-breasted, auburn-haired, green-eyed, pouty cherry-lipped little nymph whom my father called his “Rose Without a Thorn” in token of what he saw as her pure, untrammeled innocence. Though she was indeed beautiful, she had none of my mother’s elegance, intelligence, and sophistication; she was more like an illiterate country bumpkin dressed up in silks and satins. And though the court looked askance at her impetuous, impulsive ways, my father adored her.

  I remember once, one rare occasion when I was allowed to stay up as late as I wished for some court celebration—“Oh do let her!” my flighty young stepmother implored, and my father was so besotted he could not resist her. As the dawn broke, Katherine Howard suddenly tore off her shoes and stockings, flinging them aside with careless abandon, not caring where they fell or whether the servants pocketed the pearls and diamonds that trimmed the dainty white velvet slippers, and ran out onto the lawn, like a great length of green velvet spangled with diamonds spread out by an eager London mercer, to dance in the dew in her bare feet, reveling in the feel of the blades of grass tickling her naked soles and tiny pink toes. She threw back her head and laughed and laughed, a silly, giddy girl taking joy in life’s simple pleasures, twirling dizzily round and round, lifting her pearl-white skirts higher and higher, much more so than was proper, as she spun around, while my father slapped his thigh and roared with laughter at her antics.

  “Come on, join me!” she cried, and some of the more daring ladies shed their shoes and stockings and ran out to dance with her, uttering delighted, startled little shrieks and piglet-squeals at the chilly nip of the dew on their naked toes.

  Beside me, my sister Mary gasped, appalled, and looked fit to fall down dead of apoplexy when our stepmother’s swirling white skirts rose high enough to give a glimpse of plump dimpled pink-ivory buttocks, but my father clapped his hands and laughed all the harder.

  Dressed most often in virgin white dripping with diamonds and pearls so that she looked like an Ice Queen, my father’s “Rose Without a Thorn” would sit, stroking her silky-haired spaniel or a big fluffy white cat, or idly twirling her auburn curls around her fingers, and daintily nibbling sweetmeats or languorously trailing her finger through some cream-slathered dish and lingeringly sucking it off, always appearing distant and bored, yawning and indolent, unless there was a handsome gallant nearby whom she could bat her eyelashes at and exchange coy, flirtatious banter with. Children and female company often seemed to bore her, though she was always kind to me. The only time she seemed to ever really stir herself was to dance, and oh how she loved to do that, artfully swirling about, high-spirited, young, and carefree, as she lifted her skirts high to show off her legs and garters, pretending it was an act of exuberant mischance when in truth it was carefully choreographed and practiced for hours before a mirror in the privacy of her bedchamber. I knew this for a fact, for she had offered to teach Mary and me, but Mary had gasped in horror and dragged me out the door as fast as if we were fleeing the flames of Hell.

  I noticed that a certain courtier, a particularly handsome fellow called Thomas Culpepper, had a most curious effect on her. Whenever he was near, a flush would blossom rose-red in Katherine’s cheeks and her bosom would begin to heave beneath the tight-laced, low-cut bodice of her gown until I feared her laces would burst and her breasts spring out, and until he left her presence she would act more distracted and empty-headed than ever. Once when I sat embroidering beside her and Master Culpepper came in, she bade me go and play in the garden as it was such a lovely day when in truth it was pouring down rain.

  Then she too was gone, like a butterfly fated to live only a season—her head stricken off just like my mother’s, only by an English headsman’s weighty, cumbersome ax; there was no French executioner with his sleek and graceful sword for my father’s “Rose Without a Thorn.” And Master Culpepper’s head, I heard, and that of another man, one Francis Derham, adorned spikes on London Bridge, to be pecked and picked clean by the avaricious ravens. And people began to tell tales about Katherine’s white-gowned ghost running along the corridors of Hampton Court, uttering bloodcurdling screams, begging and pleading for mercy, pounding futilely on the chapel door, as she had done the day my father turned his back and a deaf ear on her.

  And I saw again how men and sex and marriage had destroyed another woman who was close to me, in blood if not in affection. My father, acting as a vengeful god on earth, had ordained her death, showing none of the mercy or forgiveness our Heavenly Father might have vouchsafed wanton little Katherine Howard.

  “I will never marry,” I said to my best friend, Robert Dudley, whom I called Robin, who laughed at me and said he would remind me of my words when he danced with me on my wedding day.

  Then, like the answer to a prayer, came Katherine Parr. Kind Kate, capable Kate, we all called her, a mature, twice-widowed woman with the gift of making everything all right, of solving every problem and soothing every hurt. Fearlessly, she went like an angel into the lion’s den and tended my father in his declining years. Never once did her nose wrinkle or disgust show upon her face when she tended his putrid, pus-seeping leg, applying herbal poultices of her own concoction and changing the bandages with comforting and efficient hands. Though it was an open secret that she harbored a strong sympathy for the Protestant religion, deemed heretical by many, including my staunchly Catholic sister, she won Mary’s affection and became a loyal friend and loving stepmother to her. And to me . . . She was my savior! She did more than any other to restore me to my father’s good graces. And she took a personal interest in the development of my mind; she was passionate about education for girls, and took it upon herself to personally select my tutors and confer with them over my curriculum. Unde
r her guidance, I studied languages, becoming fluent in a full seven of them, and also mathematics, history, philosophy, the Classics and the writings of the early Church Fathers, architecture, and astronomy. Nor were the female accomplishments neglected; equal time was given to dancing, music, and sewing, both practical and ornamental, and also to outdoor pursuits such as riding, hunting, hawking, and archery. But even she brushed her skirts perilously close to Death when she dared argue with my father, contradicting him about religion. A careless hand dropped the warrant for her arrest in the corridor and I found it and brought it to her.

  Careful observation had already taught me that my father would always distance himself from those he meant to condemn; he would not deign to face them lest their tears and pleas for mercy sway him. I urged her to go, to save herself before it was too late. I begged her to swallow her pride and throw herself at his feet—so great was my love for her that I implored her to grovel, though the very thought of it sickened me—to claim that she had only dared argue with him to profit from his superior knowledge, to learn from him, and also, as an added boon, to distract him from the pain of his sore leg.

  Though I was but a child, she listened to me, and was saved, but I would never forget how close she came to danger, or the power of life and death my father had to wield over her as her sovereign lord, husband, and master. Or the shame that she, one of the torchbearers of enlightenment and reformation, must have felt to have to lower herself in such a manner and humbly declare womankind, whose champion she was, weak and inferior, and that God had created women to serve men, and no female should ever presume to contradict, question, or disobey her husband, father, brother, or indeed any male at all.