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Read an excerpt from Elizabeth & Leicester (Continued...)

When Katherine died, in the early days of 1536, Mary was not allowed to go to her mother's deathbed. The two-year-old Elizabeth was at court with her parents for the Christmas festivities—more festive than ever, after the news of Katherine's demise, which (said Chapuys) sent Henry into a celebratory suit of yellow velvet, and Anne's ladies into a frenzy of joy. Elizabeth was paraded around the courtiers in her father's arms. Everything—not just Henry's suit—seemed sunny. But again, underneath the dance music there was a darker melody. Chapuys heard that the King had already whispered to one confidant that he had been seduced by witchcraft into marriage with Anne, and therefore considered it null: as witness the fact he still had no male heir. Anne herself seems already to have had an early sense of foreboding, even sending a half-conciliatory message to Mary—hoping to recruit future sympathy for her own daughter, maybe? She was pregnant again, but lost the male foetus; perhaps because news was brought to her that Henry had fallen, and could easily have been fatally injured, in the jousting tournament. ('She has miscarried of her saviour', her uncle said) In the same breath as he reported it, Chapuys mentioned that the King was making much of one Mistress Seymour. Anne must have been aware that if she fell, Elizabeth would be left very vulnerable.

One of the great imponderables about Elizabeth's early life is her relationship with her mother. Were those first three months together at Greenwich enough to forge a bond? Or did Elizabeth effectively find mother figures, adequate or otherwise, in the parade of women who raised her—to some of whom she would remain close until their dying days? Later she would write that 'we are more indebted to them that bringeth us up well than to our parents.” Even had Anne lived, she would not necessarily have shared an establishment with her daughter. She visited the nursery, alone and with Henry; wrote to and heard from Lady Bryan. She sent many gifts up the north road, from a fringed crimson canopy for the cradle to a gadget for straightening the finger of which Elizabeth would later be so proud. We may if we choose deduce a doting mother from the lavish items of clothing she bestowed on the infant, but evidence as to direct involvement is limited. Having given birth to a royal child, her emotion or lack of it was not an issue. In either case, she was required now merely to step back and leave matters to King and council. From now on even the decision to have Elizabeth weaned at twenty-five months would be ratified 'by his grace, with the assent of the queen's grace'. It is true that Elizabeth's half-sister Mary had been unusually close to her mother Katherine (who, when the child Mary was ill, had her in her bed to nurse her). But even Katherine had bent the rules of royal matrimony only with difficulty. And Katherine did not have Anne's other fish to fry: was not, at that time, surrounded by enemies; did not have a religious reform to promote and a political party to rally.

Elizabeth may have stayed with or near her parents that spring. If so, it is not clear why. Perhaps now Anne felt the need to spend time with her daughter; perhaps the King was too distracted to order her return to Hertfordshire. Perhaps Katherine's death (which, as Anne well knew, paved the way for her own replacement by a third wife, less controversial and more fecund) made them feel the child was indeed better away from Mary. Two decades later, the Scottish reformer Alexander Alane (also known as 'Alesius'), then living in England, told Elizabeth that he remembered a scene: 'your most religious mother carrying you, still a little baby, in her arms and entreated the most serene King, your father, from the open window…the faces and gestures of the speakers plainly showed that the King was angry'. But that may have been fantasy rather than memory; and Elizabeth may have been in Hertfordshire, well away from the court.

A surviving clothing bill to Queen Anne, presented by the mercer William Lok in that spring of 1536, shows that in the three months from January to April alone, the two-year-old Elizabeth was supplied with a gown of orange velvet, kirtles of russet velvet, yellow satin, white damask and green satin; embroidered purple satin sleeves, ribbons, a damask bedspread, and carefully fitted caps, one made of purple satin, another in a net of god. But the lavish spending stopped abruptly. At the beginning of May, Anne was arrested.

She was charged with committing adultery with a handful of men, including her musician Mark Smeaton (the only one to have confessed, almost certainly under the fear or fact of torture) and her own brother George. From the state she seems to have had few illusions about her fate. A few days before her arrest, Anne had had a conversation with her chaplain Matthew Parker (later Elizabeth's first Archbishop of Canterbury) about Elizabeth's future upbringing. As he recounted it later, with the dubious benefits of hindsight, he was convinced that Anne was in some way entrusting Elizabeth to his care.

Just as it has always been one of the great 'what ifs' of history whether, if Henry had never met Anne, England would still be a Catholic country, so it has always been a puzzle just why Anne had to die. We realized a while ago that Anne was not the villainess of earlier legend, just as we know how unsubstantiated were the charges of adultery that prefaced her death. But it has proved curiously hard to replace that biblically colourful image of a scheming Jezebel with another that convinces entirely. Was this a woman who combined a genuine religious fervour with personal ambition? Is it possible Anne had become a political liability—that diplomatic pressures in Europe, and her own very sincere espousal of a kind of moderate religious form, came to threaten her former ally Cromwell over the great land grab that was the dissolution of the monasteries. Anne's vulnerability (just like Robert Dudley's, later) was that she had set herself up as a natural scapegoat—too aggressive, too rapid a riser, ever to command much sympathy.

We do not know how or when Elizabeth heard of her mother's death. She was probably told by her own household, and kindly—but did the news come all at once, or in gradual stages? Did she hear first that her mother was dead, and only later the manner of it? Did anyone, in her childhood, throw in her face her mother's supposed failings? It is hard to doubt that the gossip of servants, and the bitterness of her sister Mary, told her enough to mark her indelibly. The more so if the two half-sisters were together when Lady Kingston (wife to the Lieutenant of the Tower) came hotfoot from London, where she had accompanied Anne to the scaffold, with news that was the best of all to one girl, the worst of all for the other.

Did Elizabeth herself, as she grew, believe Anne innocent? Presumably. As queen, she would favour her mother's kindred; would adopt her mother's motto 'Semper eadem', 'Always the same', and her badge of a falcon. She cherished a jewel that showed her portrait and her mother's side by side. Unlike her sister Mary, she made no attempt to revive and clear her mother's memory when she came to the throne (any more than did Robert Dudley to clear his family). But one might argue that she paid her debt to her own past in many tiny ways. They permeate the relationship she and Robert shared.

If Elizabeth's mother was innocent, then her father was the more guilty…Did Elizabeth learn here the downside of marriage based on mere personal attraction? It is anachronistic to suggest that Elizabeth felt precisely the same guilt and trauma we today impute to the child of quarrelling parents. But she must have had her own horrors to contend with; must have been aware that he mother was widely credited with the heinous crimes of treason and adultery—aware too, that her mother's fate might have bee very different, had she herself been a boy. Later in life her refusal to look facts squarely in the face amounted almost to a flair, a distinct element in her governing stile. It is tempting to speculate that she was forced to learn the skill early.

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