My Enemy, the Queen

311 Pages·1982·1.13 MB·English

by  Victoria Holt

MY ENEMY THE QUEEN
Victoria Holt
The Old Lady of Drayton Basset
Blame not my Lute! for he must sound Of this or that as liketh me; For lack
of wit the Lute is bound To give such tunes as pleaseth me; Though my songs be
somewhat strange, And speak such words as touch thy change, Blame not my
Lute.
S T W
IR HOMAS YATT
1503-1542

I C . I stay in my house at Drayton Basset. I am getting
NEVER GO TO OURT NOW
old, and it is permissible for old women to sit and dream. They say: “My lady
goes on. How old is she? Few have reached her age. It seems my lady will live
forever.”
I sometimes think that too. How many people now alive can remember that
November day in the year 1558 when Queen Mary —whom people had begun to
call Bloody Mary—died, causing no great sorrow to her people except to those
supporters who had feared what her passing would mean to them? How many
can remember when my kinswoman, Elizabeth, was proclaimed Queen
throughout the land? Yet I remember it well. We were in Germany then. My
father had thought fit to flee the country when Mary came to the throne, for life
could be dangerous to those who by nature of their birth and religion looked to
the young Elizabeth.
We were all summoned together and made to kneel and thank God, for my
father was a very religious man. Moreover my mother was Elizabeth’s cousin—
so the new reign should bring good to our family.
I was just past seventeen at the time. I had heard a great deal about Elizabeth
and her mother, Queen Anne Boleyn. After all, my mother’s mother was Mary
Boleyn, Anne’s sister, and stories of our brilliant, fascinating kinswoman Anne
were part of our family legends. When I saw Elizabeth I knew what that
brilliance meant because she possessed it too—in a different way from her
mother, but it was there all the same. Elizabeth had other qualities also. She
would never have suffered from the executioner’s sword. She was too clever for
that; she had shown even during her early life a genius for self-preservation. But,
for all her coquetry and dazzling adjuncts to beauty, she lacked the essential
appeal which her mother must have had, and which my grandmother, Mary
Boleyn—who had had the good sense to be the King’s mistress and not bargain
for a crown—had possessed in great measure; and if I am to write truthfully, I
must not impede myself with false modesty and must say that I had inherited this
appeal from my grandmother. Elizabeth was to discover this—there was little
she did not discover—and she hated me for it.
When she came to the throne, she was full of good intentions, which I have
to admit she tried to keep. Elizabeth had one important love affair in her life, and
that was with the crown. She allowed herself a little dalliance, though; she liked
to play with fire, but in the first year of her reign she was so badly scorched that
I believed she was forever after determined it should never happen again. Never
would she be unfaithful to the greatest love of her life—the glorious, glittering
symbol of her power—the crown.
I could never resist taunting Robert with this even during our most
passionate encounters—and there were many of those. He would become
violently angry with me then; but I had the satisfaction of knowing that I was
more important to him than she was. Apart from her crown.
There were the three of us—a challenge to fate. Those two who strutted
across the stage were the two most brilliant, awe-inspiring figures of their time.
I, the third member of the trio, was often kept in the background of their lives,
yet I never failed to make my presence felt. Try as she might, Elizabeth never
succeeded in shutting me out completely. In due course there was no one at
Court whom the Queen hated as she hated me; no other woman so aroused that
overwhelming jealousy. She had wanted Robert, and he became mine … of his
own free will; and the three of us knew that although she might have given him
the crown—and he was as passionately in love with it as Elizabeth herself—yet I
was the woman he wanted.
I often dream I am back in those days. I feel the exhilaration, the excitement
creeping over me, and I forget that I am an old woman, and I long to make love
with Robert again and do battle with Elizabeth.
But they are in their graves long since and only I live on.
So my consolation is to ponder on the past, and I live it all again, and
sometimes I wonder how much of it I dreamed and how much was real.
I am reformed now—the Lady of the Manor. Some go to convents when they
have lived lives such as I have; they repent their sins and pray twenty times a
day for forgiveness in the hope that their last-minute piety will assure them a
place in heaven. I have devoted myself to good works. I am the bountiful lady.
My children die, but I live on; and now it has struck me that I will write it down
as it happened, and that will be the best way to live it all again.
I shall try to be honest. It is the only way I can relive the past. I shall try to
see us as we really were—a brilliant triangle, for any must be brilliant with those
two scintillating at two points, so brightly often as to obscure the vision. And
myself there too, as important to them—for all their power—as they were to me.
What emotions shook that triangle: Robert’s love for me, which made me the
Queen’s rival; her hatred of me born of jealousy and the knowledge that I could
please him as she never could; those rages of hers which somehow never
allowed her to lose sight of her own advantage. How she loathed me, calling me
“That She-Wolf,” which others imitated rather to please her than out of contempt
for me. Yet I—only I—of all the women in her life was to cost her so much in
jealousy and anguish—and only she would cost me so much. We were in
conflict, and she had the advantage. It was her power against my beauty—and
Robert, being the man he was, was drawn this way and that between the two of
us.
Perhaps she was the winner. Who shall say? Sometimes I am not sure. I took
him from her, but then she took him from me— and death cheated us both.
She had her revenge on me and it was a bitter one—but I still have the fire
and the passion left to me, old as I am, to tell our story. I want to convince
myself of the way it happened. I want to tell the truth about myself … about the
Queen and the two men we loved.
The Exiles
While the city is covered with gibbets and the public buildings so crowded
with the heads of the bravest men in the kingdom, the Princess Elizabeth, for
whom no better fate is foreseen, is lying ill about seven or eight miles from
hence, so swollen and disfigured, that her death is expected.
A N , the French Ambassador, commenting on one of
NTOINE DE OAILLES
Elizabeth’s “favourable” illnesses at the time of the Wyatt Rebellion.

I 1541, five years after Elizabeth’s mother had been
WAS BORN IN THE YEAR
executed. Elizabeth herself was eight years old. It was the year after the King
had married another kinswoman of mine, Catherine Howard. Poor child, the
following year a fate similar to that of Anne Boleyn overtook her, and Catherine
too was beheaded at the King’s command.
I had been christened Letitia after my paternal grandmother, but I was always
known as Lettice. We were a large family, for I had seven brothers and three
sisters. My parents were affectionate and often stern, though only for our own
good, as we were often reminded.
My early years were spent in the country at Rotherfield Greys, which the
King’s recognition of my father’s good services had secured for him some three
years before I was born. The estate had come to my father through his, but the
King had a habit of taking for his own any country mansion he fancied—
Hampton Court was the outstanding example of this royal avarice—so that it
was comforting to know that he accepted my father’s claim to his own property.
My father was away from home a good deal on the King’s business, but my
mother rarely went to Court. It might well have been that her close connection to
the King’s second wife could have aroused memories in Henry’s mind which he
would have preferred to be without. It could hardly be expected that a member
of the Boleyn family would be welcome. So we lived quietly, and in the days of
my childhood I was content enough; it was only as I grew older that I became
restive and impatient to escape.
There were what seemed to me interminable lessons in the schoolroom with
its leaded windows and deep window seats, its long table at which we bent over
our laborious tasks. My mother often came to the schoolroom to see us with our
tutors and she would go through our books and listen to reports on our progress.
If they were bad or even indifferent, we would be summoned to the solarium,
where we would take up our needlework and listen to a lecture on the
importance of education to people of our rank. Our brothers did not join us in the
schoolroom. After the custom of the day they were to go to the houses of
illustrious families and were brought up there until the time came for them to go
to Oxford or Cambridge. Henry had already left home; the others, William,
Edward, Robert, Richard and Francis, were as yet too young. As for Thomas, he
was but a baby.
It was during those lectures that I and my sisters, Cecilia, Catharine and
Anne, were made aware of Elizabeth. “My first cousin,” my mother explained
proudly. Elizabeth, we were told, was a model for us all to follow. At the age of
five, it seemed, she was almost a Latin scholar, and as familiar with Greek as she
was with the English tongue, besides being fluent in French and Italian. How
different from her Knollys cousins, whose minds strayed from these important
matters and who gazed out of the windows when their eyes should have been on
their books so that their good tutors had no alternative but to complain to their
mother of their inaptitude and inattention.
I was noted for saying the first thing which came into my mind, so I
declared: “Elizabeth sounds dull. I dareswear that if she knows Latin and all
those other languages she knows little else.”
“I forbid you to speak of the Lady Elizabeth in that way again,” cried my
mother. “Do you know who she is?”
“She is the daughter of the King and Queen Anne Boleyn. You have told us
often enough.”
“Don’t you understand what that means? She is of royal blood, and it is not
impossible that she could be Queen one day.”
We listened because our mother could easily be led to forget the purpose of
our presence in the solarium and to talk of the days of her childhood; and of
course that was more entertaining to us girls than a lecture on the need to apply
ourselves to our lessons; and when she was thus enthralled she would not notice
that our hands lay idle in our laps.
How young we were! How innocent of the world! I must have been six years
old when I first began to take notice, and by then we were in the last stages of
the old King’s reign.
My mother talked not of the present time, which could have been dangerous,
but of the past glories at Hever when as a child she had been taken to the castle
to visit her grandparents. Those were the days of glory when the Boleyns’
fortunes were rising fast, which was natural because they had a queen in the
family.
“I saw her once or twice,” said my mother. “I shall never forget her. There
was a certain wildness in her then. It was after the birth of Elizabeth and Anne
had been desperately hoping for a son. Only a male heir could have saved her
then. My uncle George was there at Hever—one of the handsomest men I ever
saw… .” There was sadness in her voice; we did not press her to tell us of Uncle
George. We knew from experience that such a request might put an end to the
narrative and remind her that she was talking to young children of matters
beyond their understanding. In due course we discovered that handsome Uncle
George was executed at the same time as his sister—accused of committing
incest with her. Falsely accused, of course, because the King wished to be rid of
Anne in order to marry Jane Seymour.
I often remarked to Cecilia that it was exciting belonging to a family like
ours. Death was something we accepted in the nursery. Children—and
particularly children of our station—thought lightly of it. When one looked at
the family portraits it was said: “This one lost his head. He disagreed with the
King.” That heads were very precariously held on the place intended for them
was a fact of life.
But in the solarium our mother made us see Hever again with its moat and
portcullis and the courtyard and the hall where the King had often dined and the
long gallery where he had courted our famous relative, the enchanting Anne. Our
mother used to sing the songs which had been sung by the minstrels there—
some composed by the King himself—and when she strummed on her lute, her
eyes would grow glazed with the memories of the brief and dazzling glory of the
Boleyns.
Now great-grandfather Thomas Boleyn lay buried in the church at Hever, but
our grandmother Mary came to see us now and then. We were all fond of our
grandmother. It was sometimes hard to imagine that she had once been the old
King’s mistress. She was not exactly beautiful, but she had that certain quality
which I have mentioned before and which she had passed on to me. I very
quickly learned that I possessed it and it delighted me, for I knew it would bring
me much of what I wanted. It was indefinable—a certain appeal to the opposite
sex which they found irresistible. In my grandmother Mary it had been a
softness, a promise of easy yielding; not so with me. I would be calculating,
watchful for advantage. Yet it was there in both of us.
In time we learned of that sad May day at the Greenwich joust when Anne
had been taken to the Tower with her brother and her friends, and from which
she had only emerged to be led to the scaffold. We knew of the King’s
immediate marriage thereafter to Jane Seymour and the birth of the King’s only