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 favoured 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 realised 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 favourite 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 harboured 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 colourless. 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