The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots (32 page)

We left England shortly after Jocelyn died. We had no choice, father said, and mother agreed. England was no longer a safe place for the Knollys family.

It was not just that my father, Francis Knollys, could not bring himself to preside over any more cruel executions of fellow Protestants—or of Catholics either, for that matter—for he was, deep down, a tenderhearted man. Or that Queen Mary was growing more and more vengeful, ordering more and more men and women to their deaths because they would not conform to her Catholic beliefs. Or that some said she was mad, crazed by anger and sorrow over her inability to give birth to a living child to succeed her on the throne.

It was more than all these things, a deep-rooted taint of blood that made us vulnerable to the queen’s wrath. For we were related to Queen Mary’s half-sister Princess Elizabeth, and Elizabeth, just then, was imprisoned in the Tower of London, accused of treason.

My beautiful mother Catherine was Princess Elizabeth’s aunt, and I and my brother and sister were the princess’s cousins. Queen Mary believed that everyone related to her half-sister was suspect, and probably dangerous to her throne and to the peace of the realm, and certainly immoral.

My mother had explained our family history to my sister Cecelia and Frank and me when we were quite young. It all began, she said, early in the reign of our famous King Henry VIII, many years before we were born.

“You see, our late King Henry, when he was married to Queen Catherine, his Spanish wife, needed a son to inherit his throne. But all Queen Catherine’s baby boys died, and nearly all the baby girls too, all except for Mary, who is now queen.

“If only Queen Catherine had died!” she went on, a little wistfully. “Everything would have been so much easier. But she did not die, she just went on having more and more babies, and they kept on dying. The poor king thought that God was cursing him, and maybe He was. So in time King Henry honored other women and let them become the mothers of his children. One of those women was my mother, your grandmother Mary Boleyn.”

Our grandmother Mary Boleyn had died when I was a very small child, far too young to remember her, but I had seen portraits of her, painted when she was young. A lovely girl, with light brown hair and blue eyes. An innocent girl, or so one would have thought from the look of the portraits. Yet I knew from what my mother said that she had the reputation of being far from innocent.

“She had a husband, William Carey,” mother was saying. “Yet she also had the king’s love. And his was the stronger.” The last words were almost whispered, as though mother were confiding to us a precious secret.

“So you are the king’s daughter!” I cried. “And we are all his royal grandchildren!”

My mother smiled, an enigmatic smile.

“Some people say that, but only my mother knew for certain. And she would never say. I think the king made her swear to keep everything about our birth a secret. Certainly King Henry always favored me, and your uncle Henry too.”

Our mother’s brother Henry was a frequent visitor to our family home at Rotherfield Greys. He was a tall, muscular man, an exceptional horseman and fine athlete. Yes, I thought. Uncle Henry could very well be the son of the late King Henry, who had the reputation of being able to match or exceed any man at his court for height and strength and was a champion riding at the tilt.

“So you are a princess, and Uncle Henry is a prince,” I said. “You should be granted royal honors.”

My brother and sister nodded enthusiastically. “You should, mother,” they urged.

But mother only laughed. “I am no princess—at least I was never acknowledged as such. I am plain Catherine Carey, daughter of Mary Boleyn Carey and Will Carey of the privy chamber. And brother Henry is of the same lineage—officially. In truth I do not know who my father was, the king or my legal father Will Carey, who died when I was very small. Or possibly some other man, for my mother was said to have other lovers. I have no desire to make exalted claims to the throne, or to be a rival to Queen Mary.”

“Yet you look like him,” I insisted. “You have reddish hair and blue eyes and are very fair, just as he was.” I knew only too well what King Henry had looked like, all the royal palaces were full of his portraits, and there was a sculpture of his head and shoulders in a place of honor in our family home.

At this my mother nodded, but then she went on, in quite another tone.

“Whoever my true father was, there is a far darker aspect to our family story. It concerns your grandmother Mary’s sister Anne.”

We all knew of Anne. The witch. The harlot. The evil woman who had cast a spell on King Henry and used her magic to force him to divorce good Queen Catherine and marry her instead. The wicked queen who had been beheaded.

I had heard the servants gossip about Queen Anne for as long as I could remember. They often crossed themselves—in the Catholic fashion—when they spoke of her, as if to ward off her potent evil that lingered on, even though she had been dead for many years. My parents never spoke of her at all—at least not in my hearing—so mother’s mention of her made me pay particular attention to her words.

“My aunt Queen Anne Boleyn never liked my mother. They were very different. Mother was a soft and comforting sort of woman, who liked to laugh and dance and had a sunny nature. She loved to eat and drank more wine than was good for her.”

Hearing this I glanced at my sister, and caught her eye. We quickly looked away again, but each of us knew what the other was thinking: our mother also drank more wine than was good for her.

“My aunt Anne was a shrewd woman,” mother was saying. “I liked to think that she saw the world through narrowed eyes. She thought Mary was a fool—though in truth I think it was Anne who was, in the end, the more foolish. My mother was happy most of the time, while Anne, for all her shrewdness, never was. At least I never saw her when her face was lit with happiness.”

Smiling, she reached down and cupped my face in her two hands, then Cecelia’s. “That is what I wish for you girls,” she
said. “That your pretty faces will be lit with happiness, all your lives long.”

“Did you watch Queen Anne die?” Frank asked mother, “like we had to watch Jocelyn die?”

“No. Brother Henry and I were away, living in the country. We were in disgrace, as were all the Boleyns. As we still are. But it was Anne who mattered. Anne and her brother George and all those in their households. Oh, that was a horrible time. Everyone I knew was frightened, and my mother most of all.”

“Was Queen Anne really a witch?” Frank asked.

Mother looked thoughtful. “It was said that she practiced alchemy. Mother told me about a room she had, where she kept potions and powders. The servants thought she was turning lead into gold, though if she did, she never gave any to us. She may have made poisons. But as to witchcraft—” She broke off, shaking her head and looking dubious. “It was said the king loved her with an uncommon hunger. But I think it was the hunger of great lust, and not of witchery. In any case,” she concluded, “Queen Mary never forgave her stepmother Queen Anne for being so alluring to the king that he divorced her mother. Mary hates all Boleyns, and no doubt she always will.”

Mother’s words were much in my thoughts as our family boarded the
Anne Gallant
at Dover, leaving Queen Mary’s Catholic England and bound for the safety of Protestant Frankfurt, where my father had acquaintances who he said would take us in. I held my head high, convinced, as I was, that I had the royal blood of the Tudors in my veins. And I remembered what my mother had said, that it was far better to be happy than shrewd, and above all to be wary of the wrath of kings and queens.

Whether it was because of my newfound certainty that I was of royal ancestry or simply because, at sixteen, I was coming into my years of promised beauty, I was much admired when we arrived at our new home in Frankfurt.

I had been a beautiful child, everyone had always agreed on that, though my father had frowned on all talk of my loveliness and said “You’ll make her too full of herself” or “Too much praise makes the devil’s playground” when my mother and others spoke admiringly of how pleasing my looks were. My younger sister Cecelia, my father’s favorite, tended to burst into tears and leave the room when I was the center of attention; this made him vexed at me, though it was hardly my fault that my hair was the rare red-gold of autumn leaves and my skin as flawless and as translucent as the finest ivory. (Cecelia’s hair was a mousy brown and her skin, while smooth, tended to be the color of sand. But she had very good teeth, as I often reminded her.)

We were lodged in the grand house of Jacob Morff, a member of the Consistory and an elder of the Lutheran church, the dominant influence and authority in Frankfurt. The four-storey gabled house was near the Old Bridge, where a few Catholic sisters continued to operate a foundling home and to take in unwanted infants. We heard the babies crying at all hours, in fact it seemed to mother and me that their numbers were growing with each passing day. But beyond this nuisance all was comfortable in the Morff household, and we were shown a courteous if impersonal hospitality.

It was the custom for Protestants to shelter one another, for as our numbers grew we were persecuted mercilessly, and there were many English Protestants coming to the continent, fleeing Queen Mary and her burnings, when I was a girl. Herr Morff had several English families living in his large house, though he was not a genial host, rather he kept a grave distance, as though unsure what to make of us foreigners. In time I was to understand why.

At first I quite enjoyed myself in our new town, a large and bustling place, its narrow streets crowded with horses and carts and peddlers on foot. The sprawling marketplace was bursting with commerce, except on Sundays, when all business transactions were forbidden by the Consistory as were all amusements. The ancient cathedral with its tall spire towered over all other city structures, and the massive stone bridges that spanned the Main river, the thick brick walls that surrounded the town and the weighty, many-storied houses centuries old gave the entire place an air of solidity, if not of grandeur. London was older than Frankfurt, father said, but Frankfurt was richer—and much more moral, now that the Consistory governed all.

That it was a moral place we knew from the abundance of hymn-singing that went on, not only in church, where the
services were long and tedious (though no one was allowed to complain about this out loud), but in the streets and squares. When we went out in the afternoons, we often walked or rode past group after group of townspeople who had gathered to sing hymns or other pious songs.

“We must join in,” father said. “We must not appear strangers in their midst.” So we learned to sing “How lovely shines the morning star” and “My trust in Thee can nothing shake” and “From depths of woe I cry to Thee” in our English-accented German and we tried our best to imitate father’s expression as he sang, his heavy-lidded eyes sad, his lined, narrow face full of a dark longing.

We did our best to look and act pious, but true religious feeling cannot be feigned, and in truth we were young and full of pent-up energy and had few outlets for our restless physical vigor. Hymn-singing was not the activity we needed.

But the elders made and enforced strict rules about what we could and could not do. We were not allowed to swim, lest it lead to “promiscuous bathing” with men and women, boys and girls all joining in together. Long walks were forbidden, because they made the blood flow more rapidly and heightened the passions. Athletic feats promoted pride in the body, and the body was the prime portal of sin. Dancing, which led to frivolity and flirtation, was condemned with especial rigor.

One Sunday there was a scuffle in the square near the Old Bridge, in front of a tavern called the White Lion. I had often seen men quarreling and fighting in our village of Rotherfield Greys and on our visits to London but until that afternoon I had never seen men attacking one another in hymn-singing Frankfurt. Then I noticed that at the center of the brawl was Jacob Morff’s sturdy, blond son Nicklaus, a boy I liked for his jokes and a way he had of imitating the cleaning women in the
Morff household. These maids walked with their knees together, taking short steps and always looking down at the floorboards, never at each other or objects in the room or other people. They were not shy, nor furtive, merely inconspicuous to an extreme degree. Nicklaus Morff, despite his girth and strong young muscles, could squeeze himself down and assume the appearance and carriage of one of these maids, pressing his knees together and walking in a way that made me laugh out loud, and Cecelia too if she was nearby.

Now, however, Nicklaus was pounding the head of another boy onto the rounded stones of the square, and shouting “No, you won’t! You can’t!” as the cluster of squabbling men and boys grew larger, drawing a crowd.

“Stop this at once!”

It was the voice of a big man I had seen once or twice at Jacob Morff’s house, a senior member of the Consistory who, as he began to speak, seemed to cleave a path through the crowd until he stood amid the fighters, pulling them apart and shouting at them. Several other older men joined the leader in putting a halt to the violence. The brawlers, disheveled and dirty, several of them bloody, stood stiff-limbed and scowling. I heard Nicklaus swear angrily under his breath at the boy he had been scuffling with.

“Each of you, take note! This is your warning. If you are seen lifting your hands against each other again, you will be publicly denounced by name. Come out, saith the Lord, lest the body be cankered by its weakest members. Now, speak! What is the cause of this rioting and drunkenness?”

At first no one spoke. Then a man was thrust forward by some of the others.

“It is the White Lion, Elder Roeder. It is to be closed!”

“That is correct. There are to be no more taverns in this city
from now on. Only Christian eating houses. With a Bible on every table. The Consistory has ordained it.”

A loud moan of outrage arose from the crowd.

“Silence!”

But the moan of protest went on, and there were shouts of “Beer! Beer!” and a few people began singing a drinking song.

Elder Roeder drew from his long black gown a tablet and a charcoal-tipped stick, and began writing down names. Meanwhile I saw, somewhat to my amazement, that Bibles were being flung out of the door of the White Lion, landing on the cobblestones and raising small puffs of dust. I thought to myself, are these the same citizens of Frankfurt who meet to sing hymns in the streets? Or are there two Frankfurts, the city of the pious and the city of the others, who do not sing hymns and who drink in taverns and, most likely, engage in promiscuous bathing and athletics and card-playing and dancing.

“Sacrilege!” shouted the elder, and he wrote more furiously on his tablet. “You are all denounced! You will all appear before the Consistory!”

“Well, if we must,” shouted Nicklaus Morff, “then we must. But we can all get drunk first!”

And before anyone could stop him he darted into the White Lion, and a good many of those in the crowd followed him in, leaving Elder Roeder to his writing and shouted threats.

Father led us all away before we too could find our names recorded on his tablet. But the elder’s angry shouts followed us as we made our way along the river, past the bridge and the foundling home, and began to hear, as well, the strains of a raucous drinking song.