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

As a parent, Henry had one thing going for him (besides being there, alive)—his royalty. It was his name (not her mother's unless you count her pride in her 'most English' descent) that the adult Elizabeth would invoke so frequently. Did Elizabeth perceive a class element in her parents' relationship, which would be replicated in her own with Robert Dudley? Years before her birth—before her mother yielded—Henry had written to Anne a letter in which (though he spoke of himself as her 'very loyal servant', in the language of courtly fantasy) the King urged the commoner to 'do the duty of a true, loyal, mistress and friend, and give yourself body and heart to me'. There was something consuming in his passion. It sounds as if he wanted to gobble Anne up whole, which is effectively what Elizabeth would do with her favourites. Elizabeth surely found the relationship a thankless one, in that she was to give her head and heart to a man who—when he had a living daughter, but no legitimate son—would describe himself as 'childless'. And for the first half of the period, hardly more than a decade in all—that passed between Anne's death and that of Henry himself, Elizabeth's father was effectively an absentee from her life.

As the 1530s gave way to the 1540s—while Jane Seymour gave birth to a son and died; while Henry made his brief fourth marital experiment with Anne of Cleves; and even while he took as his fifth wife the pretty, teenaged Katherine Howard—the royal sisters were chiefly living in Hertfordshire; and all the better for being away from the court, no doubt. Even Mary, at this stage of Elizabeth's early life, managed to separate her hatred of the mother from her feelings towards the child. Now that Anne, like Katherine, was dead, she managed to see both herself and her half-sister as victims.

Mary had quickly learned that Anne's death had not ended her problems, and had fought long and hard before, in that summer of 1536, she signed the 'confession' of her own bastardy. Two days before Anne's execution, the Archbishop of Canterbury had annulled her marriage, so that Elizabeth too was ipso facto a bastard. The Act of Succession passed that summer decreed that the throne should go only to Henry's children by Jane or by some subsequent wife, Elizabeth, like Mary, being 'illegitimate…and utterly foreclosed, excluded and banned to claim, challenge or demand any inheritance as lawful heir.'

None the less, if they were bastards they were still royal bastards, and would (while they pleased their father) be treated royally. While Mary stood as godmother at the new Prince Edward's christening, Elizabeth (herself still so small she had to be carried) held up the chrisom.

Soon after Anne Boleyn was executed, Lady Bryan was complaining to Cromwell that

my Lady Elizabeth is put from that degree she was afore, and what degree she is of now I know not but by hearsay. Therefore I know not how to order her, nor myself, nor none of hers that I have the rule of—that is, her women and grooms, beseeching you…that she may have some raiment. For she hath neither gown, nor kirtle, nor petticoat, nor no matter of linen, nor smocks, nor kerchiefs, nor rails, nor body-stitchets [nightgowns or corsets], nor hand-kerchiefs, nor sleeves, nor biggens [nightcaps].

The white damask and the russet velvet had clearly been outgrown and would not necessarily be fast replaced. They were, in a sense, representative of the devoted care which Elizabeth would never again be able to take for granted, as her friend, from these in authority.

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