My Care Is Like My Shadow in the Sun
—Elizabeth I, c.1582
If your legitimacy in this world descends through your father, and your father declares it illegal to speak of your mother (he had her beheaded), it’s possible you won’t shake the habit after he’s long gone. Instead, you never marry. You delay, prevaricate. You take to keeping a small sword under your pillow. Because you were two years and eight months when your mother died, you have never spoken her name. But you listened carefully to her old chaplain, who broke the news when you were six, telling you what really happened. After that for a long time, you thought you might die. Later, you relented, letting poets write of summer and roses, but refused to talk about God. Now, you find great joy elsewhere: the salt-soaked shorelines, where your fleet breaks the Armada again and again. After all, you’re only a woman, mistress of half an island. You put on the ring with your mother’s portrait in its secret locket. You never take it off.
In Which Katherine Parr Is Nearly Arrested for Heresy & Crimes
from The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Alison Weir
carefully:
other doctors warned
[her] that little was obviously
forbidden
in fact:
the greatest destruction [twice]
came with
[mostly
real] proof
what lucky escape
[for a queen] when the subject of religion
was mistaken
for preposterous [men &]
sex
Near Miss
If survive means “to outlive,”
Katherine Parr met the criteria—she lived
another year after Henry.
But, having come to fame
in this manner, her death naturally
became unimportant. For instance,
tourists poking around the eighteenth-century
ruins of Sudley Castle discovered
her tomb, and thereafter she was accorded
no rest. The sixth time they exhumed her,
the tenant who occupied the land
held a party. They took out her body
and danced with it. They tugged off her head.
Her arms. I daresay in time she must have
gotten used to it—watching golden
bars of light gliding obliquely
across broken masonry, listening to voices
never her own. Or the farmer’s rabbits
scratching in corners, as if foretelling
a time when ancient rivers change course,
and all memory slips into sweet undertow.
