Beware, Princess Elizabeth (2 page)

At that moment Edward Seymour stepped forward. "Set him down at once," he ordered Tom in a tone that brooked no refusal. "This is the king of England, you fool! Not some idle toy for your pleasure!"

The two Seymours stared at each other while my brother clung to Tom like a cub to its dam. Then, very gently, Tom set the young king on his feet again and knelt before him. "Your Majesty," Tom said reverently. Edward Seymour cast his brother a scornful look and turned away.

What interested me even more than the anger that flashed between the two men was something in the eyes of Queen Catherine. She gazed at Tom Seymour with an expression that could mean only one thing:
She loves him.

At once I wondered:
How long has she loved him? My father has been dead for less than a week!
This realization troubled me; I cared for Queen Catherine, and I could not bear to think of her as a disloyal wife. My mind raced on:
And what of Tom Seymour? Does he love the queen?

I
WAS KNEELING
in prayer by my father's coffin when my sister, Mary, arrived. Her entrance created a considerable stir. Unless we were called to court, we rarely saw each other, although we lived only half a day's journey apart and often exchanged politely formal letters.

I was surprised at how she looked. She would be thirty-one in a few days, but she appeared much older. Her skin was blanched, her face pinched, her once red-gold hair now faded and thin. She seemed shrunken inside her mourning clothes, and yet she glittered from head to foot with diamonds and pearls. In her love of jewels, at least, she resembled our father! We greeted each other as daughters of the king, as the occasion demanded, and wept in each other's arms. Yet there was no warmth in our embrace. We were not enemies then, but neither were we friends. For my part I felt no more than if I had been embracing a near-stranger.

As Mary and I stood by our father's bier, I recalled the summer our father had wed Catherine. After the marriage ceremony at Hampton Court in July of 1543, Mary and I, and Edward, had accompanied the bridal couple on a honeymoon progress through the countryside. Each summer my father made a royal progress to let himself be seen by his subjects, stopping for a week or a fortnight with noble families along the way and amusing himself each day with hunting. The purpose of this progress was to display his new wife as well as to hunt for deer.

No one paid me much attention that summer except Catherine, who was quite gracious to me. I was grateful for her kindness, for as a nine-year-old girl I did not like to be ignored. Wherever we went, little Edward, curly haired and adorable heir to the throne, was of course the object of much cooing and petting. But it was my sister, Mary, who received enthusiastic greetings from the crowds that turned out to hail us as we rode through hamlets and villages. This seemed to annoy my father, who took to teasing Mary about finding her a husband.

"Twenty-seven and still a virgin!" he would roar. "Perhaps I know of a German prince who would have you as his wife!" Then later it would be the French dauphin, or some Danish count. He teased her as one might taunt a dog with a bone.

"As my lord wishes," Mary would reply in her deep, almost manly voice, taking care not to show her hurt or embarrassment.

Mary might have hidden her true feelings from our father, but I caught a glimpse of them one day when we stopped to rest by the side of a stream. Our servants rushed about, setting up planks on trestles beneath the branches of a large oak. While our meal was being laid out, I saw Mary wander off alone along the banks of the stream. My father's leg was paining him, as it often did, and Catherine was busy tending to his needs. Edward had fallen asleep on the couch brought for him. Partly out of boredom and partly, I suppose, out of jealousy that she was the favored sister—my father didn't even bother to tease me—I decided to follow Mary and to spy on her. What I thought I would witness I cannot say.

After a time her footsteps slowed, then stopped. She flung herself down on the grassy bank and burst into tears. I watched from behind a tree as she sobbed as though her heart were breaking. Part of me wanted to flee back to the royal company, where perhaps I might now receive some of my father's attention. But Mary's grief touched something within me, and after a time I stepped out from my hiding place. I didn't know what to say, and so I simply stood where she might notice me.

When Mary realized that she was not alone, she stifled a startled cry. "Yes?" she asked irritably. "What is it, Elizabeth?"

"You seem so sad," I said.

Mary gazed at me thoughtfully. "I am twenty-seven years old. I have neither husband nor child, nor any hope of one. It is a terrible thing to live without love, Elizabeth."

"I love you, dearest sister," I murmured, and I moved to lay my hand softly upon her cheek.

"You!" she said harshly, pulling back, and I stepped away in surprise. "You!"

Stung, I turned and ran back to join the others. The board was laid with a meal of meat pasties and fish pudding and ale, but I had no appetite. Soon Mary joined us, her eyes puffed and reddened. My father noticed nothing, but I saw the new queen observing Mary carefully. Feeling rebuffed, I avoided Mary as much as I could for the rest of our journey. It was not difficult to do, for she seemed to avoid me as well.

When the royal progress ended at the close of summer, each of us returned to our homes. Mary went to her manor house at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire, north of London. Edward was taken to his palace at Ashridge and I to Hatfield Palace, also in Hertfordshire, accompanied by our various tutors and governesses. The king and queen returned to my father's favorite palace at Greenwich, on the River Thames, east of London. For a time I missed them, until I got caught up again in my studies and thought less and less of my family.

Since then I had seen little of the new couple or of Mary, except when we all were invited to court for Yuletide and New Year's, again at Easter, and once more at Whitsuntide. On those occasions I was careful not to approach Mary closely, no matter how genial she may have appeared. But now, at my father's funeral, I had no choice. I wondered what my sister's thoughts were as we stood side by side, her fingers entwined with mine.

The body of King Henry lay in state for twelve days. During the long hours that I was required to kneel beside his coffin, I had much time to think back upon my relationship with my father.

"You remind him of your mother," Kat once said when I complained that he paid me no attention. "Nothing will change that." And nothing did. He never spoke of it, of course. It was forbidden to utter the name of Anne Boleyn. It was as if my mother had never existed. Every trace of her had been removed—every trace, that is, but me.

I owe my understanding of my father and my mother to dear Kat. Night after night, as we lay side by side in the darkness with the bed curtains drawn closed around us, it was Kat who whispered answers to my deepest questions. Sometimes I asked about my father and often about my mother. Kat is the only person with whom I ever spoke of Anne Boleyn.

"She was beautiful, with hair black as a raven's wing and eyes black as jet, and she was intelligent and witty as well," Kat would say of my mother. "She fascinated your father from the first time he set eyes upon her."

She fascinated him, but he already had a wife: Catherine of Aragon, who was Mary's mother. I learned, when I grew older, that my father had had his marriage to Catherine annulled in order to marry Anne. That first Catherine (three of my father's wives were named Catherine) did everything in her power to prevent the annulment. But my father banished Catherine, and Mary, too, to force her to consent to it. Yet, to her dying hour, even after my father had married Anne Boleyn and made her his queen, Catherine of Aragon refused her consent. Perhaps Mary had inherited from her mother that same stubbornness.

According to Kat my father believed Anne Boleyn would give him the son that poor old Catherine could not. To his great disappointment I, the only child of his marriage to Anne, was not a son. I was Anne's failure. When he no longer loved her, he determined to rid himself of her. He had her locked in the Tower and then contrived to have her sentenced to death for charges of adultery and treason. There was not a word of truth in the charges.

Would King Henry have ordered my mother's execution if I had been a boy? I believe not. He might have found love with another woman, as he was wont to do, but he would have let Anne live, and I would have had my mother. And so my feelings about my father were never simple and uncomplicated. I did love him, because he was my father and a great king. But I also harbored a dark secret: I resented him deeply for depriving me of my mother. The darkest secret of all: At times I hated him.

Then, just weeks after my mother's death, my father married Jane Seymour. "The opposite of your mother," Kat replied when I pressed her for a description of a woman I scarcely remember. "Pretty, I suppose, but rather colorless. Quite prim." Kat pursed her lips. "Queen Jane had the good fortune to bear a male child, to the king's delight. And then she had the good sense to die almost at once, before he tired of her."

Kat should never have said such a thing, of course, but Kat had a talent for saying things she ought not. Her tongue often brought her trouble.

My mother was not the only wife my father sent to the Tower and then had put to death. I was eight years old when his fifth, Catherine Howard, was sentenced to die. All the nervous excitement of this latest execution could not be kept from me, and it was as if my own mother's execution were being repeated. I wept, I cried out, for days I could neither sleep nor eat. Kat, frantic to calm me, summoned the court physician to prescribe a sleeping draught.

When I awoke it was over. I listened as servants whispered how Catherine Howard's head had been caught in a basket, her blood sopped up by crones with handkerchiefs, her body carried off for burial.
The way it must have been for my mother,
I thought, and I have thought of it many times since that day. Remembering Catherine Howard's death has always struck terror to my heart.

T
HE TWELVE DAYS
of the lying-in-state ended. From the palace window Edward and Mary and I watched the somber procession that stretched for miles, following my father's coffin to Windsor Castle. By custom the monarch's heirs did not attend his funeral, but it seemed that nearly everyone else did. The wax effigy rode in a carriage drawn by eight black horses in black velvet trappings.

In the days that followed, I waited to learn what turn my life would take next. I had no control over events; I could only control my response to them. Wrapped in the silence of my own lonely thoughts, I paced the snowy paths in the bleak palace garden. My father was dead. My sister, Mary, was cold and withdrawn. My little brother, Edward, was now king.
What will become of me?
I wondered over and over.
What will become of me?
But I decided that, however much fear and worry now gnawed at my vitals, I would one day learn to rule my own life.

***

O
N THE TWENTIETH
day of February,
anno Domini
1547, I witnessed the coronation of my brother, Edward. Those who were there the day in 1509 when my father was crowned were determined that this celebration would surpass it in grandeur.

The day before the coronation, as the royal procession wound its way through London, trumpeters blew fanfares to proclaim the approach of the boy-king. My little brother, dressed in cloth of silver embroidered in gold and belted with rubies, pearls, and diamonds, was mounted high on a huge white horse trapped with crimson satin. He was followed by the nobility of the kingdom, according to rank. The two Seymour brothers, Edward and Tom, took the lead.

So much splendor on such a delicate young boy! He wore a look of proud hauteur, but I knew that was a mask to disguise his fear. For a little while I imagined myself in his place, arrayed in ermine and jewels, surrounded by members of the privy council in their rich velvet robes. Henchmen carrying gilded poleaxes and knights in purple satin riding fine horses would precede my royal litter.

But I was not the queen, and short of a miracle I would never be queen. I was assigned a place far back in the procession, behind my sister, Mary, who sat in a chariot with Dowager Queen Catherine, the highestranking woman in the kingdom. Beside me rode Anne of Cleves, my father's fourth wife, a German princess my father had decided to wed seven years earlier on the basis of a small portrait he'd seen.

Anne of Cleves had spoken only German when she'd stepped off the ship that brought her to Dover. She was stoutly built, her skin pockmarked, her gowns and headdresses drearily old-fashioned. The king immediately saw that the flesh-and-blood woman did not match the portrait, much less his dreams of her, but he married her anyway. Six months later he had the marriage annulled—and sent to the gallows his chief secretary, Cromwell, who had arranged the match. Since the divorce Anne had had the status of "the king's sister" and had lived comfortably in one of the country houses he had given her with plenty of jewels and money to soothe her injured feelings. We were often paired at official occasions. We were fond of each other, and I was glad for her company. We were two women, one old and one young, who counted for little in the kingdom. Anne may not have cared, but I confess that I did. I was the trueborn daughter of King Henry VIII!

That night Edward slept in the Tower of London, traditional for each monarch in the history of England, including my mother, who spent the night there before her crowning as queen. It amuses me to think that I was present for that event, less than three months before my birth, riding in her belly, beneath all her jeweled finery.

But now my thoughts were not of Edward's coronation, but of another matter entirely that had been troubling me for days: the look I had seen Queen Catherine bestow upon Tom Seymour. I knew that Kat would speak forthrightly once I had found a way to introduce the subject.