“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 tomb 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