THE LETTER
By Carol Powers
I found the pages buried in a Tudor letter casket I bought at an outdoor flea market in
Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. The market wasn’t far from the church where Catherine of
Aragon is buried. Was it Catherine’s spirit who led me there that day?
I’d like to believe it was Catherine’s spirit whispering in my ear to buy the chest. Or
perhaps it was all of Henry’s wives, and Elizabeth, too, who distracted the seller after she told
me she’d need to have a look inside the chest before she could sell it. She didn’t know where it
had come from, she told me, she’d never seen it before, but she’d let me have it for fifty
pounds. It had been sitting on her table, off to one side, apart from a conglomeration of old
fountain pens and cutlery. As she reached out her hand to open the lid, a gust of wind blew
the forks and spoons and knives off the table. She snatched my fifty pound note and dashed off
to rescue her table settings, calling, “Never mind!” over her shoulder as she went.
Of course I was so curious about the box’s contents I opened it as soon as I was sitting in
my car. At first, though, all I could see was a scramble of Christmas ribbons. I decided to empty
the box later. It was a long drive with lots of traffic back to my house in Ely, and that gust of
wind was followed with splatters of rain that quickly turned into a deluge. I decided not to stop
for my favorite Chinese food take away. I’d fix myself a cup of tea and an omelet, then open the
box, I told myself.
I sat alone at my kitchen table, sipping my tea, an omelet plump with cheese and
browned in butter on my dinner plate. I lifted the box’s lid, pulled out the ribbons, and felt the
scratch of paper against my fingertips. It was many pages of folded paper. I pushed my omelet
to one side, unfolded the papers, and began to read the Italic script:
The hour is late this night of Christmas, and the candle flickers low. I must hurry, to record
what I remember when I am the most alone, late at night. Although truly, as Queen, I am never
alone, even now a servant lies nearby. Did it all really happen as I remember, or was my mind
twisted with fever, playing tricks? I am Elizabeth of England, daughter of the Great Harry, none
who have ever seen me, with my Tudor red hair, could deny this. And yet my father’s mind
wandered as he lay with Death filling his chamber … he saw monks surrounding him in his bed
while he lay gasping, struggling for air, the life ebbing from him.
Am I the same?
But I am living. I have survived the terrible pox. My body burned with fever, my face
remains scarred. And when my will to live faltered, during the worst of my wretched sickness …
dare I write it? Yet I must not forget the spirits who came to me.
Catherine of Aragon
I knew her not.
Of course I had never met her whilst she lived and breathed, although my half sister,
Mary, harped to me countless times and hours of her Godly and womanly virtues, but naught of
her appearance. It mattered not. Even in my delirium I could see the resemblance. That same
martyred air.
My fever’d mind panicked. I clutched at the bedclothes and struggled to rise, but I was too
weak. Come she to gloat, to tell me to prepare to die? She’d been cast aside so cruelly and
brutally by my father, surely she hated me. But her countenance was kind, she smiled, her voice
gentle, her ghostly hand on my hot, pox ravaged cheek.
“Fear not, Elizabeth, you will survive. You may think I hate you. Nothing could be more
false. You were born to do what Mary could not.”
As I struggled to reply, she faded away. I sank back into the pillows. My dear Mary Sidney
rushed to dab my forehead, swollen with pox, with a cool cloth. Limbs aching, I fell
into a fitful sleep. I didn’t doubt that Cecil and even my dear Robin would think me quite mad,
were I to tell them of this.
Had it, in fact, been real? Surely it could not, was not. And why Catherine? Why not my
own mother, Anne Boleyn?
‘Twas only the beginning.
The days of my illness dragged on. The first time I awoke after Catherine of Aragon’s
visage appeared, her words echoed in my mind. I told myself it had been the pox, making my
mind go false.
Where does one go when one dies? I shivered as I lay, my body wracked with pain and
fever, the ugly, oozing, painful lesions covering my body … my face, ravaged. I might be
discovering for myself soon enough, but I took her words to heart. Until the fierce illness
struck hard at me again. My will to live began to crumble.
The servant girl who brings my chamber pot slept on the pallet at the
foot of my bed. I could barely discern her light, even breathing, yet I knew she was with me. Her
rest was deep and untroubled. She hasn’t the worries or the cares I shoulder.
Another mist began to gather by my bedside. I knew her at once. My most beloved
stepmother, Katherine Parr. The woman I’d wronged so terribly when I allowed my attraction
for her husband, Lord Thomas Seymour, to overwhelm my judgment. True, I was but a child of
fourteen. That mattered not, women and girls are always considered to be the ones who lead
men astray. And hadn’t she herself held me to keep me from running away, when he cut my
gown to ribbons with his knife? Even now, years later, it is a memory at which I wince and
shudder to think of. But these things led me to learn life’s harsh lessons for one born royal as I
was at an early age. Trust no man. Or woman.
I struggled to find the words to greet her. Poor Katherine. Dead of childbed fever. I still
pray for your forgiveness and mourn your loss. A dank, gray twilight, the day nearly over late
afternoon, a cold November twilight, rain pelting against the windows of my
chamber. My women were as relentless as the downpour, watching over me and forever
scurrying about. I could not the words discern, so quiet and hushed were their tone, but I
sensed their worry and fear.
Perhaps I might yet die, Catherine of Aragon’s reassuring message of a few nights ago be
damned. Mayhap she had only come to taunt me after all, to gloat over what I would fail to
achieve. My sister, Mary, was no doubt sniggering with her over my fate as I lay weakening by
the hour. They say she heard a children’s choir singing as she hovered between this world and
the next. If she could be forgiven for her treatment of those who refused to
return to Rome and the Pope in their worship of God, surely I must fare as well?
Katherine’s misty form took full shape. Radiant, joyous, smiling she was, surrounded by
a glowing aura of white light. “Grieve me not, mourn me no longer, sweet child, my beloved
stepdaughter, “she said, speaking clearly as my women walked to and fro, but they noticed her
not, neither her distinct words, nor her sparkling presence.
She continued.
“I loved you as if you were my own flesh and blood child. It was all part of a piece of a
larger puzzle, the weaving of your destiny. All your trials, the difficult, hard, dangerous, lonely,
despairing times were your preparation for your destiny – to be the greatest ruler and Queen
that England and the world has ever seen.”
At that moment I cared not if my ladies heard me and thought me mad. I struggled to
speak, to answer, to question her. But, just as Catherine of Aragon had done, she faded away.
The first of my father’s wives, and now the last. But not his second, not my own mother!
If all of this was real, surely she would be here?
My bed had become my prison. I lay thrashing, sheets soaked with my sweat, my hair
tangled and plastered to my cheeks and pillows. My throat was parched and sore. Nothing my
women brought me to drink helped.
I obsessed over what the shades had told me. That I would survive the pox. My lonely
childhood and terrifying years during my brother Edward’s rule and Mary’s had been to prepare
me for my destiny.
My poor brother, dead at only seventeen. One could scarce compare our childhoods,
how different they had been, although we shared many hours in the schoolroom. We had both
lost our mothers, true, but there the similarity ended.
Surely my sister, Mary, had as miserable a start in many ways. Yet she failed to learn
from her circumstances. I witnessed her countless mistakes. Marrying a foreign, Catholic Prince
was bad enough. Far worse was plunging the country into misery with her persecutions of
those who loved the New Learning. Torturing, burning, killing and, in the end, martyring the
people whom she’d professed to love.
What was it, the words I’d heard whispered, from my cousins and playmates as I grew,
of what my mother had said? When she learned my father desired her as yet another mistress,
to be used and then tossed aside like an empty flagon of wine?
“I shall not be as my sister.”
Nor shall I.
My body was still much weakened, yet I resolved to fight Death. The ghosts’ whispers had
made me realize all I had survived to become Queen.
At long last, my fever broke for good.
Now it is late December’s weather piercing my bones like a well sharpened blade, but the
chill it brings is naught compared to the pox’s fever. My women drape me in furs and shawls
and pages visit hourly to heap more wood onto the fire roaring near my bedside. The flames’
crackle, hiss and spit are a comfort to my ears again, no longer a shrieking to my distorted
hearing as when my fever raged.
I am gaining in strength day by day. And last night, the eve of our Savior’s birth, all I had
ever hoped for, a miracle … My Lady Mother, Anne Boleyn, did visit me whilst I lay abed.
To be sure, throughout the long days and nights of my sickness, I wondered what my mother
would resemble if she did appear before me.
A headless corpse … I do not deny I thought of it.
It was the first night after my fever broke for good. I was as weak as a newborn babe. I fell
asleep weeping that night. Gratitude flavored with grief. Grateful to be alive, oh to be sure, but
distraught to know I would be henceforth scarred and ugly, my face pitted and pockmarked.
Any who doubt gratitude and grief cannot exist together side by side has never been
desperately ill, nor maimed and disfigured and then lived. ‘Twas a bittersweet return to a
life that will never again be as I’d remembered.
My tears began to cease, I wiped my cheeks as I lay, rigid and staring up at the ceiling,
determined that my servant girl sleeping on the floor should not hear my sobs, the sounds of
despair.
Then there she was.
She glowed, her Boleyn necklace, the strands of pearls encircling the “B” around her neck.
“Mother,” I croaked. I could feel the tears welling up inside me. If she had motioned to
me to come with her, I would not have resisted.
“Yes, I waited,” she answered. “I didn’t want you to doubt me, ‘tis why the others
appeared before me.”
Now I was even more incredulous.
“Oh, yes,” she assured me, “we are all together now, the six of us …. “ her voice trailed
off. I could see shadows, figures of shimmering light, behind her, all of them in a cluster. A
sense of peace, calm and love settled around me.
“I gave you life, Elizabeth, but yet all of us have assisted you on your path. You have
learned much from each of our fates. We all celebrate you, and delight in your ability to rule
England better than any man has yet done. Never forget what our lives have taught you. The
lessons will make you, and England, a great nation and a world power. Let yourself not be
influenced to marry, Elizabeth, no matter what pressure is put upon you. Yield to no man. We
had not the power that you do. Never give it away.”
“Your time to join us is many years hence. Never doubt we are with you always.”
That was all.
These pages I shall keep secret, lest others – the men around me – think me mad. I am
the Queen, no one would dare to search my private quarters. I will reread my memories when I
need a reminder, on days when I am sad and weary of my burdens. I wear my ring with my
mother’s likeness hidden inside. It too brings me comfort.
The pages are dated 25 December 1562. There is no signature, but the handwriting
looks like Elizabeth’s. I have an appointment with the curator of the British Museum tomorrow.
I have told no one else.
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