My Just Desire The Life of Bess Ralegh, Wife to Sir Walter

ONE "My One and Only Daughter": Growing Up Under Elizabeth She had been born in April 1565, a precious daughter to relatively elderly parents who had already produced six sons. Bess's father, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, fifty at the time of her birth, would live only another six years. It was thus her mother, Anne, and one of her older brothers, Arthur, who were to exert the greatest influence upon Bess as a young girl. Anne Throckmorton harbored great hopes for her daughter, hopes rooted in her own traumatic childhood experiences and her intimate and perilous involvement with the power struggles and shifting regimes that characterized the mid-sixteenth century. Historian Alison Plowden, reviewing the early years of the future Queen Elizabeth (whose mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed before her daughter was three, and stepmother Jane Seymour died soon after giving birth to Prince Edward, and a second stepmother was executed for adultery), argues that "it would be hardly surprising if by the time she was eight years old, a conviction that for the women in her family there existed an inescapable correlation between sexual intercourse and violent death had taken root in her subconscious." But this conviction may well have been shared by an entire generation of women, including the young Anne, who suffered, directly or indirectly, from the actions of their king as he slid into unhappy despotism in his search for a male heir and a loyal wife. Anne's father, Nicholas Carew, had been a loyal follower of Henry VIII, and, more problematically, of Henry's first wife, Katharine of Aragon. Carew survived the dangerous years in which Henry abandoned Katharine because of his desire for Anne Boleyn, and then, when convinced of Anne's adultery, swiftly married Jane Seymour, a mere eleven days after his second wife's execution. Throughout this time, Nicholas Carew continued to be one of Henry's closest friends, a "jolly gentleman" by all accounts. But the king was a dangerous friend, and with a suddenness that by this stage of Henry's despotism probably surprised no one, Nicholas Carew fell from favor. Execution swiftly followed. One of Anne's first, and by definition last, memories of her father would have been a visit to him the night before his death on March 3, 1539, to make her farewells. Her mother, Lady Carew, had done all she could to prevent her husband's fall, exhorting him "to obey the king in everything," but to no avail. Anne's mother lived on for another seven years. She would be buried with her "traitor" husband, leaving a few pounds to one daughter, her clothes to another, and nothing to adolescent Anne. Despite this traumatic start to life and her lack of a dowry, Anne made a respectable marriage, allying herself with another survivor of the troubled closing years of Henry VIII's reign: Nicholas Throckmorton. Her new husband's problem was not that he was one of nineteen children (although this would have minimized his inheritance prospects), but that his family remained loyal to the papacy despite England's move toward reformed religion and eventual Protestantism. Nicholas's father, George Throckmorton, a leading courtier in the early years of Henry's reign and the pleased recipient of generous gifts of land from his royal master, opposed the king's eventually successful plan to an- nul his marriage to Katharine of Aragon. This was politically unwise, and George was advised by Henry's chief minister, Thomas Crom- well, to "stay at home and meddle little." Over the following decades, Throckmortons were to fail, extremely conspicuously, to do just that. Home for the defiantly Catholic Throckmortons was (anBeer, Anna is the author of 'My Just Desire The Life of Bess Ralegh, Wife to Sir Walter', published 2004 under ISBN 9780345452894 and ISBN 0345452895.