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 legitimate son, Edward, who became our King in the year 1547.
Poor Jane Seymour, dying in childbirth, had no chance to enjoy her triumph, but the little Prince lived and was the hope of the nation. Then had followed the King's brief marriage with Anne of Cleves, and after its abrupt dissolution the ill-fated union with Catherine Howard. Only his last wife, Katharine Parr, survived him and it was said she would have gone the same way as Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard if she had not been such a good nurse and the King's ulcerous leg so painful and he too far gone in years to care much for women.
So we entered a new reign—that of Edward VI. Our young King was only ten years old at the time of his accession—not much older than I; and the paragon, Elizabeth, was four years his senior. I remember my father's coming down to Rotherfield Greys, rather pleased with the turn of events. Edward Seymour, the young King's uncle, had been made Protector of the Realm, the title of Duke of Somerset having been bestowed on him; and this now all-important gentleman was a Protestant who would instill the new faith into his young nephew.
My father was leaning more and more towards Protestantism, and as he remarked to my mother the greatest calamity which could befall the country—and incidentally the Knollys family-would be the accession to the throne of Catholic Mary, the King's elder daughter by Catherine of Aragon.
"Then," prophesied my father, "the scaffolds would be stained with the blood of good Englishmen and women, and the dreaded Inquisition which flourishes in Spain would be introduced into this country. So let us thank God for the young King and ask that through His clemency and loving care, Edward VI may long reign over us."
So we knelt and prayed—a custom which I already felt was followed too zealously in our family—while our father thanked God for His goodness to England and asked Him to go on looking after that country, keeping a particular eye on the Knollys family.