The Men Who Would Be King (2 page)

Noli me tangere
. . . the lascivious incitements by which she roused her lovers included “touchings,” it was stated at her trial. The bald obscenity of the official reports had nothing in common with Wyatt's courtly erotic yearnings, or the king's boisterous love letters. The world heard from Westminster that the queen had “procured and incited her own natural brother, George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, to violate and carnally know her, with her tongue in the said George's mouth, and the said George's tongue in hers, and also with open-mouthed kisses, gifts and jewels.” Five men altogether were condemned to death as her lovers. Anne was judged guilty of carnal adulterous lusts, of despising God's commands and human laws, and Chapuys informed his emperor that “she was also charged, and her brother likewise, with having laughed at the King and his dress.”

The mocked king made no secret of his joy at the condemnation of his wife that released him from her. “Already it sounds ill in the ears of the people,” Chapuys reported with interest, “that the King, having received such ignominy, has shown himself more glad than ever since the arrest of the whore, for he has been going about banqueting with ladies, sometimes remaining after midnight, and returning by the river.” Seven miles up the river Thames, prim, pretty Jane Seymour was lodged in state. Down the river, below London Bridge with its crammed houses and shops, lay the dark bulk of the Tower, where Anne Boleyn was waiting to die. The constable of the Tower, Sir William Kingston, reported with surprise that she was “very merry”; she kept laughing, he wrote, and once she joked, “I heard say the executor was very good, and I have a little neck,” and then she “put her hand about it, laughing heartily.” She was beheaded on Tower Green on May 19, not laughing, but looking “exhausted and amazed.”

Among the bills left unpaid at Anne Boleyn's death were listed expensive items for her little daughter—caps of satin and taffeta; satin and crimson fringe for the child's cradle. Elizabeth was nearly three when her mother was condemned to death by her father. She had been taken from the queen shortly after her birth, and a royal nursery had been established, first at the old wooded manor of Hatfield, then at stately Eltham Palace, and later at Hunsdon, in Hertfordshire, but despite the official separation she had seen her parents often during her babyhood. For the first two years of her life Elizabeth was the heir presumptive to the English throne, Henry's eighteen-year-old daughter, Mary, by his divorced wife, Catherine of Aragon, having been declared a bastard. There seemed little prospect that Elizabeth would actually inherit, for the king was in his lusty prime, and would surely beget sons to supersede her, but in the meantime she was the “High and Mighty Princess of England,” and both Henry and Anne were proud and fond of her. Two years before he was called upon to act as royal jailer, Sir William Kingston had written enthusiastically, “Today the King and Queen were at Eltham, and saw my Lady Princess—as goodly a child as has been seen. Her Grace is much in the King's favor, as goodly child should be, God save her.” In January 1536, only five months before Anne's disgrace, Elizabeth was summoned to Hampton Court to take part in the king's unbridled rejoicings at the death of his scorned and repudiated former wife, Catherine of Aragon. The little princess was paraded to Mass to the tingling blast of trumpets “and other great triumphs,” and late that evening the king, dressed from head to foot in yellow, except for the white feather in his cap, sent for his daughter and then swung her up in his huge arms and carried her about, boisterously showing her off to the company. By May, however, his elation had evaporated. It was claimed, years later, that just before Anne's arrest he had been seen at a window of Greenwich Palace, staring frozenly out into the courtyard below, while Anne stood weeping beside him apparently pleading with him, holding Elizabeth out to him beseechingly. Such vivid, disturbing scenes outside the familiar nursery world would surely remain in a child's uncomprehending memory, to sink into the layer of impressions with which the subconscious mind is lined.

Incidents remembered, servants' whispers, awkward answers to casual prattled questions—there were many ways in which Elizabeth would have absorbed information. No doubt efforts were made to protect her from the disturbing knowledge of her mother's shocking death, but in a large household consisting almost entirely of servants, with a fond governess—Lady Bryan—who was a cousin of the late queen, it is not likely that the child remained for long in total ignorance of the event. It might have seemed as unreal as a fairy story, as personally unrelated as tales of Robin Goodfellow or King Arthur's knights, had the drama not been constantly repeated with living protagonists throughout Elizabeth's childhood, becoming the reality of her own experience. In each of her father's subsequent marriages—Elizabeth was a veteran of five marriages by the time she was ten years old—the same picture was embellished, fresh layers of paint laid on the sketch of her own earliest impressions. The king, her mighty royal father, the image of towering masculinity, possessed utter power over each vulnerable, disposable wife who bound herself to him in wedlock.

The effects of the downfall and disposal of Anne Boleyn were soon felt at the nursery household of Hunsdon. “The very evening the Concubine was brought to the Tower,” Chapuys wrote, “when the Duke of Richmond went to say good night to his father, and ask his blessing after the English custom, the King began to weep, saying that he and his sister, meaning the Princess [Mary] were greatly bound to God for having escaped the hands of that accursed whore, who had determined to poison them.” Before the adulteress, whore, and poisoner Anne was beheaded, her marriage with the king was annulled, so by the time he married Jane Seymour, at the end of May, Henry had three illegitimate children—his beloved son, the Duke of Richmond, by his mistress Bessie Blount; Catherine of Aragon's daughter, the bastardized Mary; and little Elizabeth, whose governess, Lady Bryan, was soon distracted with worry at the poverty and confusion to which her household was reduced. “My Lady Elizabeth is put from that degree she was afore, and what degree she is of now, I know not but by hearsay,” she wrote, pleading with the king's minister Thomas Cromwell to intercede. When the royal visits ceased, so did the presents of clothes and nursery-stuff; Elizabeth had grown out of all her dresses, caps, and underclothes, and Lady Bryan had to beg Cromwell to arrange “that she may have some raiment,” ending her heartfelt plea with the touching revelation that Elizabeth was having pain with her milk teeth coming through, and therefore they were spoiling her a little, but she added, “I trust to God an' her teeth were well graft, to have Her Grace after another fashion than she is yet: so as I trust the King's Grace shall have great comfort in Her Grace. For she is as toward a child, and as gentle of conditions, as ever I knew any in my life.”

The royal neglect was remedied, and the former heir presumptive took her official place as the king's younger daughter. Yet she and her grown-up sister, Mary, remained legally bastards, and with the death of the king's only male offspring, the Duke of Richmond, in July 1536, the succession question became more dangerously uncertain than ever. There were still many Englishmen who could remember the Wars of the Roses, the struggle for supremacy between the Houses of Lancaster and York, which had ended when the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, laid firm hands on the crown at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, and nursed the limping country to new strength and wealth. His son Henry VIII had built a magnificently showy structure on firm foundations; under him England's court became one of the finest in Europe. In the words of his own famous song, Henry VIII loved “pastime and good company,” gambling and dancing, and, above all, hunting—he was reported to have worn out eight good horses in a single day's chase—and in a space of three years he managed to spend £3,300 on “cards, dice, tennis and wagers,” in addition to £11,000 that he paid out for jewelry during the same period. At times Henry's personality seemed to be the lookingglass of the Renaissance; he possessed both intelligence and charm, and Erasmus wrote of him warmly, “He is a man of great friendliness, and gentle in debate; he acts more like a companion than a king,” but the robes and regalia of absolute power could not fail to muffle and distort the informal humanity in man or woman. As a private individual, a “Squire Harry,” Henry would surely have lived his life in tolerable harmony with his pious foreign wife, Catherine, and his conscientious daughter Mary, regretful, perhaps, that he had no son, but obliged to be content with his studies, his music, his mistresses, and his sport. But as the king, God's anointed representative, with England, Ireland, Wales, and a slice of France for his estate, with some four million men, women, and children for his dependents, his responsibility was not to accept but to effect, and the future of the great nation that two generations of Tudors had cultivated and guarded was in jeopardy until the next Tudor prince should be born and the succession established beyond dispute.

After a quarter of a century of striving, Henry was at last presented with a healthy, legitimate, male heir. On October 12, 1537, eighteen months after the execution of Anne Boleyn, his third queen, Jane Seymour, gave birth to a boy at Hampton Court, and London went wild with joy. There were bonfires and banquets in the streets, hogsheads of free wine were set out in the city, more than two thousand guns pounded out a salute from the Tower, and there were “all the bells ringing in every parish church till it was ten at the clock at night.” The baby prince, “the whole realm's most precious jewel,” was christened Edward in the chapel of Hampton Court. Elizabeth, as the king's daughter, played an official part in the ceremony, carrying the richly ornamented chrisom cloth. Being only four years old, however, she herself had to be carried during the proceedings by the prince's senior uncle, Edward Seymour.

When the customary New Year's gifts were presented to Prince Edward on January 1, 1538, Henry VIII gave his infant heir sumptuous possessions, including “a basin all gilt, with a rose in the bottom with the King's Grace's arms in the rose,” “a ewer all gilt,” and a “standing cup with a cover, gilt, wrought with antique work,” while the Lady Mary chose for the child “a coat of crimson satin embroidered with gold, with tinsel sleeves and gold aiglettes.” The Lady Elizabeth, age five, gave the baby a little cambric shirt that she had laboriously sewed herself. If, as would seem likely, the arrival of a baby brother, and her own part in his christening, had prompted Elizabeth to ask a child's timeless questions about the origins of babies and functions of mothers, the death of Jane Seymour only six days after the birth, when the events were fresh in Elizabeth's mind, would have added another note to the discordant scale of impressions that included her own mother's death.

At six years old, when, according to Wriothesley, she already behaved in public with as much gravity as if she were forty, she was presented with another stepmother, the German Protestant Anne of Cleves, but to the court's bawdy amusement this Anne was so unappetizing that the king proved unable to consummate the marriage, and by the following summer she had been smoothly divorced, bought off with two manors, hangings, plate, fine dresses, a handsome allowance, and the title of “the King's beloved sister,” and in her place sat the ravishing young noblewoman Catherine Howard. Sweetly promiscuous, she had been seduced at thirteen and lived in blithe immorality ever since, but at first Henry was too blind with ardor for his nubile “rose without a thorn” to see the rot beneath the petals. In the autumn of his life he had found again the bliss of springtime sexuality. Catherine was Anne Boleyn's first cousin, and she accordingly made much of Elizabeth, giving her a prominent place at her wedding banquet. A little dizzy with the wines and rich foods, the raucous harmonies of shawms and sackbuts, and the smell of hot noisy people in sweaty satin, Elizabeth must have sat in the lofty, crowded banqueting hall of Hampton Court watching curiously as her vast and glorious father greedily fondled her girlish new stepmother. “The King caresses her more than he did the others,” Chapuys noted. By Christmas 1541, however, the king had awoken from his dream. With fury and misery he learned that his delicious young wife, by whom he could surely have given the nation an infant Duke of York, was no better than a trull, that she had been the paramour of a music master before her illustrious marriage, and had then committed adultery with a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber. “Yt maketh my harte to dye to thynck what Fortune I have that I cannot be always in your companye,” she had written to her lover, Thomas Culpeper, and added naively that she found writing a very difficult business.

The vague tale of Anne Boleyn's death now leapt into lurid life for the eight-year-old Elizabeth as the court and the country buzzed with interest at the scandal and shocking death of her pretty cousin. On February 12, 1542, Catherine was beheaded, as Elizabeth's mother had been, on Tower Green, and her headless body buried near that of Anne Boleyn, under the flagstones of the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, in the Tower.

By the time she was ten years old Elizabeth had had four stepmothers. The installation of a sensible, kind, and intelligent woman as the last of Henry's wives, in July 1543, came too late to eradicate the imprints of Elizabeth's childhood experiences, but the new stepmother skillfully brought a semblance of affectionate unity to the king's buffeted family. Lady Latimer, born Catherine Parr, had been twice widowed, but she was still an attractive little woman in her early thirties. A contemporary chronicler recorded that she was “quieter than any of the young wives the King had had, and as she knew more of the world she always got on pleasantly with the King, and had no caprices, and paid much honor to Madam Mary and the wives of the nobles.” Mary, now twenty-seven, devoutly Catholic, was still unmarried, and since the traumatic time when her own beloved mother's marriage with the king had been pronounced null and she herself declared a bastard, she had been passionately sensitive where her status was concerned. The wanton Catherine Howard, ten years Mary's junior, had slighted her, and the new queen's tactful respect for her rank and blood was accordingly welcome. For the pale precocious scholarling Edward, Catherine became a “dearest mother,” and to Elizabeth, who spent much of 1544 away from the court, she showed “care and solicitude.” In public duty as well as in personal relationships Catherine was thoroughly competent; soon after her marriage she efficiently acted as regent while Henry, in temporary amity with Charles V of Spain, was across the Channel commanding the English army in a combined endeavor against the French. The letters between them at this period have the flavor of comfortable domestic affection—“No more to you at this time, sweetheart,” the king concluded his communication of September 8, 1544, “saving we pray you to give in our name our hearty blessings to all our children.”