Yorkshire, 1579. Anne Vavasour was bred for this, and now she was ready. Tomorrow she would leave home to take up her place at the court of Queen Elizabeth, where all successes flowed from Her Majesty’s good graces.
At sixteen, she was pretty enough, and a decade of dancing, riding, and country living made her shapely and graceful. But that was not what men noticed when they met her. It was her smile that stopped them. It lit up her face, from the point of her chin to the top of her brow, with her eyes sparkling. Then she’d speak with the wit and wisdom of a princess—in Latin, Greek, French, Italian, or even English. And when their eyebeams crossed, she held them in thrall.
She had practiced all this with the friends and neighbors who visited the house in Wiltshire where she had been tutored from the age of six. Sir Henry and Thomas Knyvet, her uncles, invested in the finest teachers and dancing masters for the family children. Since Thomas was a Groom of the Privy Chamber for Queen Elizabeth, he was well fixed to place his relations at court as they came of age.
The Knyvets’ prize pupil was Anne, their sister’s daughter, and they groomed her to be a kindred spirit for the Queen. Her curriculum was guided by the precepts of Roger Ascham, who had been a tutor to Princess Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey. Master Ascham wrote these down in The Schoolmaster, published in 1570, just in time for Anne’s schooling. As a result, she was taught with kindness, not fear, and was encouraged to shape her own ideas. True to plan, Anne became self-confident and assured. She mastered English first, and then the most important old and new foreign languages. She loved poetry as well as philosophy, history, and literature. She also learned embroidery, music, dancing, archery, and hunting.
In the late autumn of 1579, Anne was packed to travel down to London from her parents’ house in Yorkshire. Everything was arranged for her to become a Gentlewoman of the Bedchamber in the Queen’s
innermost circle.
On this, her last evening at home, Anne sewed together a new, blank commonplace book to record her thoughts at court, and looked through the passages she’d written in her old commonplace book during school.
They were still good words to live by, she thought. But what was to become of her now?