Mary & Elizabeth

Those were the happy days before the sad years of ignominy and disgrace, penury, indifference, and disdain, the callousness and cruelty he learned under the tutelage of The Great Whore, Anne Boleyn, the threats and veiled coercion, followed by a sort of uneasy tolerance, a truce, when he offered me a conditional love wherein I must betray my conscience, my most deeply cherished beliefs, and my own mother’s sainted memory, and capitulate where she herself had held firm, if I wanted to bask in the sun of his love again.

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 close-mouthed 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 blood-red 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 laughing stock 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 enamelled 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 practising 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 grey hair sounded the death knell to my last lingering hope that I might someday attract a suitor. I was seven teen, 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 grey, 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 counselled 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 goodbye 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 saviour. 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.

As I sat there rocking Elizabeth, hugging her tight against my breast, I remembered the last time I saw my mother. Dressed for travel, in the courtyard, with her litter and a disrespectfully small entourage awaiting nearby, she knelt and pressed into my hands a little book of the letters of Saint Jerome and her own treasured ivory rosary, which had belonged to her own mother, the beads grown creamy with age and the caressing fingers of these two strong and devout Spanish queens.

“God only tests those He cherishes, in order to strengthen them and their virtues,” she said to me, and then she embraced and kissed me. I never saw her again.

It was Jane Seymour who would work a miracle and persuade Father to see me. And as I knelt to kiss his foot, I saw from the corner of my eye her rust-red velvet gown and gold and black lattice-patterned kirtle as she stood meekly beside him. It was she who nodded encouragingly and looked at him with pleading eyes as I knelt there with bated breath awaiting my fate.

And then, after a tense glowering silence that seemed to hover like an executioner’s axe above my head, he gave his hand to me, and I saw upon his finger the great ruby known as the Regal of France, famous for its brilliance that was said to light up even the dark, that had once adorned the now desecrated and demolished shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Father had had it made into a ring, and for the rest of his life would wear it as a symbol of his mastery over the Church, flaunting the fact that he had kicked the Pope out of England and had enriched himself with “Papist spoils” when the monasteries were dissolved and the lands parcelled out, sold or gifted to favoured courtiers, and the monks and nuns who had done so much good, dispensing alms, succouring the poor, and tending the sick, were turned out to become beggars and vagabonds themselves. I recoiled, sickened, at the sight of that glowing blood-red ring and feared I would vomit all over his feet; it took all of my will to take his hand and kiss it. I knew my submission was yet another betrayal of God, my mother, and our beliefs.

But I did it. And his face broke out in a triumphant smile. He raised me to my feet, embraced me, and kissed me. And, at his urging, Jane Seymour did the same. I was allowed to sit on the dais, on the top step, at their feet, and the woman Father called his “Gentle Jane” soon became one of the dearest friends I have ever had. She did much to further my cause. In time, all my manor houses and lands were restored to me, the jewels that had been taken from me were returned, along with some that had belonged to my mother that The Great Whore had stolen, my old servants came back, and Father personally selected fine horses for me. I was given pets, Italian greyhounds and a parrot, and even for my first birthday after my return to favour, a female fool to entertain me and enliven the dull hours, and Father also chose a talented band of musicians to join my household. Queen Jane helped me with my wardrobe; old gowns were refurbished, and many new ones ordered. We sat together for hours scrutinizing the wares the London mercers laid before us. And she gave me a diamond ring from her own finger that I would forever cherish.

She had a generous heart and was kind to everyone, even Elizabeth. Treading with great delicacy and care, she engineered Elizabeth’s return to court and had her too-short-even-with-the-hems-turned-down bursting-at-the-seams gowns and pinching, parchment-thin-soled shoes replaced. What fun we had dressing her, each of us pretending that our deeply cherished dream of motherhood had come true and she was our very own little girl to clothe and choose pretty things for.

When I thanked Queen Jane for her kindness, she said to me: “Verily, I could not do otherwise. When I look at her I think if I had a daughter and some misfortune were to befall me, and I could not be there to see her grow up, I would hope that my successor, whoever she was, would be kind to her. There but for the grace of God, My Lady Mary, there but for the grace …”

When she was with child and craving cucumbers and quails, Father took care of the birds, sending as far away as Calais for them, while I sent her baskets brimming with cucumbers from my own country gardens.

I wept an ocean when she died. Even though her death gave Father his most heartfelt desire – a son, my brother, Edward – I still keenly felt her loss. Because of her kind heart, I was a princess again in all but name.

Other wives followed, but none stayed very long. And in between queens I was the first lady of the land, privileged to sit at Father’s side, presiding over the court, with everyone bowing, smiling, and deferring to me, and there was even occasionally talk that a marriage might be arranged for me, but, alas, nothing ever came of that.

After Jane Seymour came the Lady Anne of Cleves, a German Protestant princess, a heretic, but a merry soul with a heart of gold. One could not help liking her, even though the cleanliness and odours of her person and the dowdiness of her clothes left much to be desired. But Father could not stomach to lie with her and she obligingly, no doubt fearing the headsman’s axe if she did not graciously acquiesce, exchanged the role of queen for that of adopted sister and a substantial income that would allow her to lead the life of an independent lady of means.

And after Anne came the one people chuckled behind their hands about and called “the old man’s folly”, pert and wanton Catherine Howard with only fifteen years to Father’s fifty. I felt so embarrassed for him! I marvelled that he could not see how she demeaned his majesty. She made him the butt of jests and remarks that ran the gamut from pitying to lewd. She meant to be kind, I am sure, but she could not curb her exuberance; she did not under stand that being a queen meant one must comport oneself with dignity. Though I was some years older than she, and to call her my stepmother felt supremely awkward, she tried to befriend me, being overfamiliar as though she were my own sister, one with whom I had grown up in close intimacy, sharing everything. She would brazenly and openly discuss the most intimate things with no regard for modesty or propriety.

She could not believe that I had reached the ripe old age of twenty-four without ever having had a sweetheart, and would prod me incessantly, over and over again, asking incredulously, “You mean you never had a sweetheart, never?” And when I answered, alas, God had not so deemed to bless me, she embraced me and bemoaned the tragedy of my fate, then, blinking away her tears and tossing back her auburn curls, determinedly said we must do something to remedy it.

She arranged a masque for my birthday wherein a number of particularly handsome young men, whom she had chosen herself, were costumed as various flowers, dressed in shimmering satins and silks of the proper colours festooned with lace and embroideries and intricate silk renditions of the blooms they had been chosen to represent.

“We need a little springtime even in the chill of February!” the hoydenish young queen declared as she whooped and kicked up her heels and bade this garden of living posies to encircle and dance around me.

I remember there was a graceful pink gillyflower, a deep red rose who was rather bold, a haughty regal violet, a jaunty daffodil, a bluebell whose costume was cunningly devised to include tiny tinkling bells, a marigold whose tawny locks brought back memories of my youth, a flamboyant heart’s-ease pansy, a perky pink, a bashful buttercup, a profusely blossoming lavender, a rather indecent goldenrod who brushed me from behind to draw my attention to the prominent golden bloom sprouting from his loins, and a demure – by comparison to the rest – daisy. As they danced around me they each offered me silken flowers taken from their attire and sang, “Choose me, pretty maiden, do!”

Roses of vivid pink embarrassment bloomed in my cheeks and I desired nothing more than to break the dancing ring moving around me and escape to the privacy of my bedchamber. I disliked being the centre of such attentions, and there was a nagging suspicion at the heart of me that they were mocking and making cruel sport of me, the pathetic Lady Mary who was no longer young and had never been pretty like the Queen. Katherine crept up behind me and tied a kerchief over my eyes and spun me round and round until I staggered dizzily and feared I might disgrace myself by being sick, then gave me a shove into the arms of the nearest gentle man.

“Ah, heart’s-ease, that brings back memories, does it not, my dear Derham?” she teasingly addressed the vividly costumed gentleman who held me in his arms and had just removed my blindfold so I could see him smiling down at me with a set of very fine, even white teeth.

She drew me aside for a moment before we paired off for dancing and whispered wicked but kindly meant words in my ear, telling me that if I were so minded to meddle with a man, she knew of ways to prevent conception. I was appalled that she would speak of such, and even more so that she would possess such knowledge, and with flaming cheeks I pulled away from her and fled, forsaking the chance to dance with Master Derham.

Time would later disclose that, despite her youth, Catherine Howard had been a rather enthusiastic gardener herself, and that of the bevy of handsome fellows who had danced around me that night, two of them were known to have been her lovers. Francis Derham was purposefully costumed as heart’s-ease as a reminder of a silken flower he had once given his common-law wife – the Queen – a fact unbeknownst to Father, who called that wanton little guttersnipe his “Rose Without a Thorn”. And even at that time she was dallying with the daffodil – Thomas Culpepper, Father’s favourite bodyservant, who so tenderly ministered to his poor, sore and ulcerated legs.