Oddments
Disclaimer: I am not a Theologian, a Historian, or a TV Producer; I therefore do not own any thing.
Pairing: None – Elizabeth I
Prompt #36: Death
Elizabeth the unmarried. Elizabeth the Virgin Queen. She was dying, and with her passing so to the Tudor Dynasty, all of her grandfather's work, would die out as well. She could have stopped this – married, had children, kept her line alive. And yet that would require love, and love was too close to loss for her to enter that emotional state willingly.
Elizabeth did not have a positive role model where matters of the heart were concerned – she had her father.
His majesty, King Henry VIII, had six wives by the time of his death, and with each bride Elizabeth saw love transform from the sweeping epics of bedtime to a fickle, wayward master – never true, always fleeting.
Henry first married Katherine, a Spanish Princess who crossed an ocean for her husband. She endured widowhood and poverty before devoting her best years to her adopted land. She had been stubborn and she had been wrong, blindingly Catholic and blindingly devoted to Henry, despite the shaky grounds of their marriage. And yet as she lay dying Elizabeth could not blame her. Katherine was told almost from birth she was to be Queen, she was the daughter of Queens. And the break from Rome was new, the light of true religion faint as sunrise, she had not known it. And the woman had a right to be stubborn, in her grey hair and barren age she was sent away. Elizabeth knew that her mother was in the right and yet she knew how that must have stung.
Her mother. Anne Boleyn had loved the King truly, her only desire to do what he wanted. She brought about a great enlightenment, saving the English people from the abominations and abuses of the Bishop of Rome. She loved passionately. All she wanted was a boy. God deprived her that and in the end true love did not save her.
From Katherine and her mother Elizabeth learned that one can fall out of love as quickly as one can fall in it. And what the king wants – from religious supremacy to a Queen dead – the king gets.
And then there was Sweet Jane, the name her father had for Jane Seymour from the moment he met her on earth to the moment he met her in heaven. Elizabeth had been too young to form much of an opinion of the Queen who'd given her father the ultimate gift, a son, the good King Edward; she also paid the ultimate price. Jane's passing affirmed to Elizabeth that Love cannot save you.
Her father then married and divorced Anne of Cleves – all over her looks. She was a kind sweet lady, who like Katherine, years before her crossed countries and left home to make herself his bride. His dismissal of her taught Elizabeth that love is most certainly not blind.
When her father put kind, sweet, young Kathryn Howard to death, Elizabeth knew – she swore she would never marry. Kathryn should never had been queen – at least not at her age, had she had time to be a child and not a pawn Elizabeth knew she could've been something special. She had been a kind and caring girl. But a girl. And her death told her that love and marriage went together like death and betrayal.
Aside from her own beloved mother Elizabeth loved Catharine Parr the best, she took an interest in her education and encouraged her studies and praised her always. And yet Catharine's last two marriages, to Elizabeth's father and to Thomas Seymour showed her that love was conditional. Henry only loved Catharine when she submitted to him in all things. Thomas only loved Catharine when she was the best that he could get.
As Elizabeth took her final breath she reflected on the one lesson she'd learned, not through tears, it was the bright spot before the eternal sleep, one lesson in love that resembled the pure courtly affection so favored.
There was one love that never faded. The love between a woman and her country.
Note: I'm not really pleased with this piece, there were so many deaths to choose form I didn't know where to go and each one seemed triter than the next. Than and what can I say about these women that hasn't been said already. And what can I say about these Queens that won't get someone mad at me?