The first Elizabeth Read online

  In the first week of September final touches were put to the preparations. Finery and furnishings for the royal infant were assembled—sheets and swaddling bands, a christening mantle of crimson cloth of gold, furred with ermines, a ''great cradle of estate" trimmed in velvet and gold and silver gilt. All had to be made afresh for this baby, as Katherine had refused to lend Anne's child the christening robes Mary had worn seventeen years earlier, and the issue had not been pressed. King Henry's attention was elsewhere, on the jousts he was organizing to celebrate the birth, on deciding on a name for the prince (either Edward or Henry, it was said), and on the august pronouncements of the physicians and astrologers he had assembled to reassure him about the child's health and sex. There was no doubt whatever, they concurred gravely, that the baby would be a strong, long-lived male.

  Then the pains began. The physicians took their places around the vast bed, their sharp instruments ready, the midwives put in position copper basins for catching the blood and rolls of linen for staunching it. Hours passed. The courtiers, only too aware of the activity in the queen's chambers, were distracted by a mildly scandalous wedding. Charles Brandon, very recently made a widower in his late forties, was marrying a very pretty, very virginal young girl of fourteen whom he had originally chosen to become his daughter-in-law. The wedding took place on the morning of September 7. That afternoon Anne's labor reached its climax.

  All went as it should. Anne sweated and struggled to rid herself of her burden, and her attendants tensed themselves to see her through the last dangerous moments. The baby appeared, its flesh a living, pulsing red, its tiny body whole and unblemished. In the candlelight they bent close to check its sex, then gasped in dismay. Anne Boleyn's child was a girl.

  It is in truth a pretty toy For babes to play withal; But O the honies of our youth Are oft our age's gall!

  A

  t nightfall huge bonfires were lit in the London streets, and the bells of the city's churches rang so loudly they could almost be heard downriver at Greenwich. The queen's enemies tried to belittle the celebrating, but it was real enough. Everywhere men and women were helping themselves eagerly to the tuns of wine set out for the citizenry, and drinking healths to the baby princess; when they had drunk their fill they danced crazily and threw their caps in the air for joy, just as they had the last time England's queen had given birth to a living child.

  In the palace a darker mood prevailed. Mercifully, Anne slept, so worn out by her labor she had no strength left to dread her husband's irate displeasure. Henry, at first shocked to disbelief by the news of his daughter's birth, soon became angry. He lashed out at everyone within range, first driving out the astrologers—doubtless with such threatening words that they thought themselves lucky to escape with their lives—and then swearing at the physicians and midwives until he reduced them to submissive self-reproach. Even the horse master and grooms of the stables felt the bite of his rancor when he summoned them to cancel the carefully planned jousts.

  When Anne began to recover there must have been some heated scenes between husband and wife. Henry, who had abandoned his first queen

  because she presented him with only weak and stillborn sons and unwelcome daughters, was chagrined beyond measure to find that his second could do no better. Behind his rage was the fear that, having risked his throne, his soul and the safety of his kingdom on this child, he had been betrayed. On some level he had believed himself divinely guided to act as he had in divorcing Katherine and marrying Anne; now he must believe either that God was taunting him or that his conscience had misled him. Either view was unnerving. It was easier to blame the disaster on Anne, and to use it as an excuse for the estrangement that had already begun to divide them.

  By the hearth in the nursery the tiny princess lay in her great cradle of estate, swaddled so tightly she could not move her arms or legs. With the obliviousness of the newly born she slept through her father's rages and her mother's tears, aware of nothing save the periodic hunger in her stomach and the discomfort of her overheated body.

  In the first few days of her life she was easily the most talked-of child in England; as the news of her birth made its way through Europe she became the most talked-of child in Christendom. But she was not spoken of in the reverent tones due a princess of the blood royal; she was laughed at. This girl child, it was said, was the butt of an almighty joke, God's just chastisement of the king who had defied God's vicar on earth.

  With the world laughing behind his back, King Henry took in hand the immediate practical concerns presented by the birth of an heir. First, the child had to have a name. Mary. She would be called Mary, taking both the place and name of Katherine of Aragon's daughter in order the more thoroughly to supplant her. Word went out that the infant princess would be known by the same name as her half-sister, and as late as the day of the christening courtiers expected to pay their respects to her as Princess Mary.

  But when they took their appointed places in the friary church at Greenwich for the christening ceremony they found that the king had changed his mind, and the herald that proclaimed the princess's title saluted her as "the right high, right noble, and right excellent Princess Elizabeth, princess of England."

  The christening could hardly have been more elaborate if the child had been the hoped-for prince. The chief nobles, the leading churchmen and the lord mayor and aldermen stood by as the dowager duchess of Norfolk carried the baby to the church, with Thomas Boleyn behind her bearing the long train of the purple velvet christening mantle. Hangings of cloth of gold and bright tapestries draped the interior of the chapel, and soft thick carpets covered the floor. A heavy scent of incense and perfume filled the air, disguising the strong odor of coals burning in a brazier near the font;

  the brazier provided warmth for the baby while she was undressed behind a curtain, then handed to the bishop of London who immersed the back of her head and her heels in the holy water. Before her purple mantle was put on again she was anointed on back and breast with the holy oil sacred to royalty, and given her name.

  Elizabeth's three godparents, the dowager duchess, the old marchioness of Dorset and Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, sponsored her at the font, which was raised to permit the crowds of onlookers to witness the baptism "without pressing too nigh." Then the hundreds of guardsmen standing in attendance lit their torches, and even the tiny taper enclosed in the infant's hand was lit and placed on the altar. The christening gifts were produced, and noblewomen carried them into the palace, to the queen's chamber, where Anne and Henry waited to give their formal blessing to their child.

  "It is to be feared," wrote an Italian who followed events at the English court, "that the child will be weak, owing to [its] father's complexion and habits of life." 1 The speculation was justifiable, given the feebleness of Henry's earlier children and the enormously high odds against infant survival. If Elizabeth did not succumb from inherent frailty, or fall prey to disease, there were sinister forces waiting to entrap her. Ten months after her birth, when the king's breach with the pope had become complete, two friars were overheard preaching the princess's destruction. "She was christened in hot water," they told the assembled faithful, "but not hot enough." 2

  Such threats to her mortality were ignored, however, in the regulations governing the royal nursery, which envisioned an orderly and healthful environment undisturbed by any sort of menace. Under the supervision of the lady governess, a staff of yeomen and grooms were appointed to attend the infant's needs while sewers and officers of the pantry stood ready to supply her food. There were three chamber women called "rockers," a dry nurse, and a wet nurse—the latter the focus of severe scrutiny.

  It was a premise of Tudor childrearing that infants were marked for life with the character of the women who nursed them. If the wet nurse was vulgar or vicious, however she might hide these faults from the parents who employed her, she would pass them on to the child entrusted to her. Did she speak a strong dialect, or slur her speech
? If so, the infant would be sure to mimic her as soon as it formed words. In the case of a royal child these considerations took on added gravity, and made the choice of a nurse as important as the choice of a chaplain or tutor.

  Once engaged, the woman's every move was watched, in particular her meals. "It must be seen that the nurse's meat and drink be assayed during

  the time that she giveth suck to the child," the regulations insisted, "and that a physician do oversee her at every meal, which shall see that she giveth the child seasonable meat and drink."

  It was not enough to have a well-run nursery; the entire court must be purged of hazards to the baby's health. In 1533 the court of Henry VIII was not the lawless bedlam it had been eight years earlier, when the chaos had cried out for sweeping reform. But there were dangers to be eliminated. The most obvious was plague. A new proclamation prohibited royal servants from going to London—always the prime breeding ground of infection —and returning again to their posts. At the same time, Londoners coming to the palace had to stay outside the gates, delivering their goods and transacting their business through the iron grillwork. Vagabonds and other "followers of the court"—ragged urchins, idlers, pickpockets and prostitutes—were driven off with stern warnings not to return, and efforts were made to cleanse the large and unruly palace staff of undesirables. 3

  Despite the best intentions all did not run smoothly in Tudor nurseries. Babies either sweltered or froze in the unevenly heated rooms, and fretted in their restrictive swaddling bands. The discomforts of overheating and the close confinement combined to produce a pimply rash; drafts led to eternal coughs and dripping noses. And there were fleas, abundant and everhungry, which infested even the most exalted nurseries and left highborn babies with red and swollen fingers, ears and toes.

  A month passed, two months, and the infant princess belied the prognosis of weakness. She ate, she filled out, she opened her wide blue eyes— soon to turn to brown—and began to grow a fuzz of reddish-blond hair. Her father's frowning disappointment over her sex turned to cautious faith in her survival, and to a natural resolve to exploit her usefulness. Of course, she would be of significance only until a brother was born, but in the meantime she was the sole representative of the true Tudor line, and on her behalf the cumbersome process of altering the succession was set in motion.

  Unquestionable establishment of her rights was essential, for as the year 1533 drew to a close England stood in peril. Sentence of excommunication against Henry VIII had yet to be pronounced, but though it had been delayed for two months—in order that Henry "might come to a knowledge of his error"—it could not be forestalled indefinitely. With excommunication came a triple danger: an excommunicated king was automatically held to be deposed, leaving his kingdom vulnerable to invasion and civil war. The Hapsburg emperor Charles V would no doubt contrive to fill the power vacuum, and in fact the intimidating net of imperial might was growing tighter.

  English travelers crossing the Channel were warned to avoid the emperor's territories. "I give you knowledge that if your king take not his queen again within thirty days," a Flemish captain threatened three English merchants who boarded his ship at Gravelines, "I would advise you nor none of your nation to pass this ways, but to keep you at home; for if you do, I will take you as good prizes." Incidents of this kind, coupled with persistent rumors that the emperor was massing fighting men in his Netherlands provinces to send to England, led many to fear that the vital cloth trade with Flanders might be cut off. And that, the imperial ambassador Chapuys noted, would be disastrous, for the king would then have to reckon with the ire of the clothworkers—'who are considerably more than half the people in England," he estimated with exaggeration. 4

  Early in December the merchants came to Henry in a body and asked pointedly whether or not their next shipments through the Channel ports would be safe. Instead of replying directly he blustered and strode angrily about, pouring out a tirade of abuse against Pope Clement and dismissing the impending censures with an imperious toss of his head. No one would dare to interfere with them, he told the merchants haughtily. As for the threatened excommunication, he "would do wonders" against the pope, whose threat was only an empty gesture. Henry's dazzling if unwarranted confidence satisfied the merchants, and in fact his luck did carry him through the crisis unscathed—for the present. 5

  To underscore his defiant stand the king went ahead with his exaltation of his newborn daughter at the expense of her half-sister Mary. A well-staffed household was prepared for Elizabeth at Hatfield, and she was escorted there "in full state," with a large retinue of lords and gentlemen. Henry used the occasion as an excuse to show his daughter to the Londoners who had responded with loyal celebrations at her birth. Though it was out of the way, the traveling party wound through the capital before turning northward, "the better to impress upon the people the idea of her being the true princess of Wales."

  Meanwhile Mary, who until recently had been accustomed to a corps of a hundred and sixty servants, was reduced almost to the status of a servant herself. She was unwillingly installed in the worst suite of rooms in the turreted, red brick manor house, and ordered to serve as maid of honor to her infant sister. More humiliating still, she was denied the deference due a princess, and was forced to call the baby "Princess Elizabeth" while she herself was referred to merely as "the lady Mary." In an era when formalities were often a matter of life and death these distinctions were freighted with menace. Legally, Mary was a bastard and excluded from the succession; she lived at her father's sufferance. If he were to die, Anne Boleyn

  would become regent, and though Anne might hold back from ordering the execution of a princess she would not hesitate to eliminate a troublesome nobody.

  Thus for the first months of her life Elizabeth was the innocent object of a grave rivalry—and of her half-sister's enduring animus. Mary Tudor was by nature a warm and loving girl with a special fondness for little children. But she would have needed the greatheartedness of a saint to overlook the deep injury Elizabeth symbolized. Tiny as she was, the baby stood between Mary and the throne. She incarnated Anne Boleyn's usurpation of Katherine of Aragon's rights and lineage; what was worse, she drew to herself what little attention the king spared for his children, leaving Mary all but fatherless.

  The first encounter between the half-sisters set the tone. Mary arrived at Hatfield, where Elizabeth's household was already in operation, and Norfolk, her gruff companion on the unhappy journey, remarked pointedly that she might want to pay her respects to the princess. Mary bristled to hear the title applied to Elizabeth, and told the duke curtly that she knew of no princess in England save herself, and that the daughter of "Madame de Pembroke"—as she called Anne Boleyn—had no such distinction. Reluctantly, she would agree to call the baby "sister," just as she called the king's bastard son Henry Fitzroy "brother," but conscience forbade her any further compromise.

  The duke was abusive—and he was a bruising antagonist. But Mary would not yield, and as he stopped short of striking her he left her unbowed. She sent her father the stinging message that "his daughter, the princess, begged his blessing," then when Norfolk refused to carry it she retired to her room. It was only then, with the duke out of sight and a thick oaken door between them, that she gave way to tears. 6

  Relations between the sisters became a pavane of precedence. Elizabeth was given the place of honor in the dining hall; Mary took her meals in her room rather than sit in the chair of an inferior. Anne heard of this, and ordered Mary back to the table; she obeyed, but repeated a precisely worded formula of protest before every meal. The same protest accompanied her every act that might be misinterpreted as voluntary acknowledgment of Elizabeth's higher status, until the words became almost a reflex. The struggle over primacy reached its peak when, at regular intervals, the entire household moved to a new residence so that the old one could be swept out and scoured. The princess was carried in a sumptuous velvet litter, while Mary either walked beside her or tr
aveled in the conspicuously plain conveyance of an ordinary gentlewoman. The contrast was unbearably humiliating to Mary, who was put to shame before the country people

  who still held her in esteem and disregarded Anne Boleyn's daughter as an insignificant bastard. Mary begged to be allowed to ride either ahead of her half-sister's party or behind it, to avoid the comparison.

  As a rule her entreaties went unheard, and more than once she was shoved forcibly into her assigned place. But at least one time she was indulged. The household was en route from a country house, possibly Eltham, to one of the palaces upriver. Told that she could ride on ahead, Mary "suddenly pushed forward," spurring her horse and leaving the rest of the party in her dust. She reached Greenwich, where the king's barge was waiting to carry the royal children the rest of the way, an hour before Elizabeth's velvet litter came into view. By the time the princess could be transferred to the barge Mary had already taken possession of the seat of honor, and she savored her preeminent position during the remainder of the trip. 7

  Dynastic politics ruled Elizabeth's earliest childhood, and distant relatives governed her nurture. A widowed cousin of her mother's, Lady Bryan, had charge of the wet nurse and other nursery staff, while another Boleyn connection, John Shelton, was steward of the household. His wife Margaret Shelton had the unpleasant task of browbeating Mary into submission. When Lady Shelton showed any tendency to leniency Anne was quick to reprimand her; in Anne's view Mary deserved to be slapped and addressed as a "cursed bastard" for her obstinacy.

  The king and queen visited their child infrequently, riding separately or together to wherever the princess was staying and remaining there only a short time. They supervised Elizabeth's upbringing from a distance, through intermediaries. Someone—was it King Henry himself?—questioned the high expenses of her household in 1535 and ordered a lengthy explanation for each expenditure. Due response was made: the accounts covered the Christmas celebrations, when more table linens were used and more food consumed; more candles and coals were burned in wintertime than at other seasons; some of Elizabeth's attendants exceeded the number of personal servants allowed in the household rules laid down by the king. And so on in a lengthy list—rendered with the detached formality of a treaty negotiation. 8