The Bastard Princess

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by G Lawrence


  They were hard words for a little girl, but I was shrewd enough to understand her well enough.

  Chapter Seven

  1540 - 1542

  My father married again in 1540. I did not meet the new Queen whilst she was Queen as it seemed there was a problem with the match. Our father quickly turned this wife, the Princess Anne of Cleves, into his Most Beloved Sister, and she settled into a life in England as a rich woman with a royal allowance and many goodly houses to her name. She became my aunt; a strange arrangement where a stepmother may become an aunt in the blink of an eye or with the scratch of a pen. But such was the will and power of my father; what he wanted, became the truth.

  Kat told me that Anne of Cleves was betrothed to another prince before she had married my father, and this was a lawful impediment to the marriage between them, forcing its end. But servants whisper well, and I heard another rumour… that my father had not thought her pretty enough to be his wife. There were other stories travelling in murmurs across the breeze of the courtyard and the stable block too… that our father had already found the woman he wished to marry instead of the Princess of Cleves, and he rid himself of his ugly wife, for a new appealing one.

  Her name was Catherine Howard, of the house of the Duke of Norfolk, and she was a young cousin of my mother’s, making her something of a second cousin to me. She had been a lady in waiting during the short-lived reign of the Cleves princess. I could not help but remember that this was how our father had met Jane Seymour before he replaced my mother with her. It was also how he had met my own mother before he replaced Katherine of Aragon.

  My father it seemed, never needed to look far to find a new bride.

  I was taken to meet the new Queen, my stepmother, one afternoon. We met formally in her new apartments at Hampton Court and I was surprised that she seemed younger even than Kat, which Catherine was, being but seventeen. She was little, plump and pretty; she laughed a lot and had lovely eyes that sparkled when she saw me.

  “We must be good friends,” she said to me after I had curtseyed to her. “They tell me you are very clever and very well learned. I am not so. My tutors always despaired of me when I was your age.” Her little face pouted a little with the memory and I was surprised to see how easily she showed her emotions; living on the outside of her features. This little woman could hide nothing it seemed.

  My father was enraptured with her. Everywhere he went he took her and he was very fond of touching her, pulling her to him when they walked together, stroking her as they sat at the head of banquets and entertainments. He rode with her body crushed against his, never allowing her to ride her own horse. He could not bear to be apart from her. It seemed she was doing him good. He had taken to riding and hunting with vigour once more and the increasing girth of his waist seemed to stall and retreat at his new enthusiasm for exercise.

  Kat said to me that he had never shown such affection to a wife, apart from my mother.

  There was something in Catherine Howard that was so easy to like. She loved to laugh and to dance. She was flighty to be sure, and had no great intellect, but she was friendly and warm. There seemed to be no malice in her and she was very keen that she and I should see much of each other, which made me like her more. Possibly, this was due to our connection by blood, but I think it was also because she had not succeeded in getting my sister Mary to warm to her.

  Mary was unlikely to approve of any lady as unbidden in her emotions as Catherine in any courtly position. But I think that the idea of the merry, flighty, slightly silly, Catherine taking the lofty place once held by her regal mother, Mary’s paragon of all womanly goodness, was vastly repugnant to her. Mary was polite to Catherine, but she did not attempt to do more than was strictly necessary to honour her as queen.

  Edward was young and serious, but Catherine managed to get even him to giggle and stare at her with adoration. The King loved her, all seemed happy and well at the palace after the great mourning of Queen Jane and the strangeness of our father’s brief marriage to Anne of Cleves…. and I thought therefore that this would be my father’s happy ending.

  I was wrong.

  They had hardly been married for any time at all before Catherine was arrested, sent to the Tower, accused of adultery and executed.

  She did not have a trial as my mother had done. She was not allowed to defend herself. They said when my father heard what she was accused of, that he had screamed for his sword, wanting to strike her head from her neck himself.

  The night before she died she asked that the headsman’s block be placed in her rooms at the Tower of London, so that she could practise dying with dignity as her cousin, my mother, had done. They say she walked to it over and over, practising her steps, rehearsing how to place her head carefully upon it. When she had done so a dozen times, she rested her head there and wept quietly, her tears rolling down the sides of the block, where later her blood too would flow.

  I shivered when I thought of her pretty, sparkling eyes weeping through the night against the block on which she was to lay her head and die. On the morrow of 13th February 1542 they came for her, and Catherine Howard passed from this life with the stroke of an axe. She was not quite nineteen years old.

  Catherine was the second Queen in all of English history to be executed by the King. My mother had been the first.

  Kat was sorrowful. She had liked the Queen’s spirit and her merry ways.

  “They say that she took a lover, the same Master Culpepper who was in service in the king’s own house and was executed with her,” she whispered to me when we were in bed at night. “And even before that,” Kat leaned towards me, her voice catching with both excitement and horror at her own tale. “When she was a young girl in her grandmother’s house… there were other men she took to her bed.”

  I shivered again. “That is what they said of my mother too,” I said.

  Kat nodded. “But in this case, unlike your mother’s, it seemed that all the men admitted it,” she said. “Apart from Culpepper.”

  I sighed, feeling sorrowful. “Does it seem to you, Kat, that marriage and love are… dangerous things for women?”

  Kat tusked and shook her head. “Not for all women,” she said.

  “But for royal women, or those who become royal?” I shivered still, even though the covers were warm about me. “I think that I should not want to marry when I am older.”

  Kat laughed. “You will change your mind on that, my lady,” she said. “Marriage is the most natural and most glorious state for a woman, and besides,” she grinned at me, “would you not wish to have a child? You will find that hard without a husband.”

  I smiled at her. But my thoughts were uneasy. Pretty little Catherine Howard and my beautiful mother both ended their days at the executioner’s block. Jane Seymour had died after giving birth and Mary’s mother, Katherine of Aragon had died abandoned; shut up and forsaken in a castle… Which of them had had a glorious state? Would any of them have chosen differently, perhaps not married, if they had thought their ends might be as awful as they had been?

  I had started to think that marriage seemed like it only led to one thing for a woman: death.

  Chapter Eight

  Hever Castle

  Summer 1542

  Since she and my father had ceased to be married, my new aunt, Anne once of Cleves, now of England, had become an attentive member of my family. Interested in becoming closer with her adopted nieces and nephew, she wrote to each of us, sending books and little presents such as pretty ribbons, fine cloths and gems to us. It is easy to win the affections of children in such a manner.

  Our time at Eltham and Hatfield in our youth was spent largely in seclusion from the court; fears about the corruption of the court on the young, both from diseases that spawned in the city and from the activities that adults seemed to censure, and yet engage enthusiastically in, were impressed on us as reasons for our absence from the court proper. We came to visit at times, on state occasions in particular
, and our father visited us when he could, mostly to see Edward of course, but also to spend time with Mary and me. He would take us walking in the gardens; ask about our lessons and what we had learnt since last we saw him. Since the end of his marriage to Catherine Howard he had remained unmarried and seemed to have lost some of the resolute and awesome spirit which I had always previously felt resonating from him. He was sad I suppose, sorrowed by the failure of another marriage, lowered by the betrayal of someone he had loved. When I slipped my little hand into his as we walked, I felt him squeeze my fingers slightly, as though in thanks for my little offering of love to him.

  When I was not with my father, I would think of Catherine Howard with sadness, but when I saw him, brought lower than I had seen before after her execution, I felt more sorry for him. It changed from day to day I think. I could never entirely reconcile the feelings of both love and fear I had for my father. Perhaps it was because, as my Lady Bryan once said, subjects must both love and fear their King… that is the source of his control.

  As much as I was his daughter, I was also his subject. It was the same for his wives I suppose, they had two roles and both ordered them to obey his will. But my father had a habit, it seemed, of picking women who did not wish to obey him as a husband or as a king. I wonder sometimes if his overwhelming disappointment in marriage was because he saw his wives as having betrayed him as a man, or as a king?

  It was rare enough, but sometimes our father would allow other visitors to come to us when he could not. Courtiers vying for his favour would seek to impress us with their gifts, or fools they brought to the house, in the hopes that we would offer a kind word to our father about them. It was easy enough to tell which were in truth interested in us and which were only interested in advancement.

  One of those he allowed to visit was our aunt, Anne, his new sister.

  My aunt of Cleves was a good woman. Although the impediment to her marriage with my father had deprived me of her as a stepmother, my father’s careful arrangement to make her his beloved sister had given me a loving and considerate aunt.

  Anne was a plain looking woman with a rather over-large nose that she sought to hide by adopting a shy, down-cast expression that made her seem most humble. She had pretty eyes though, and a sense of acceptance about her which was easy to like. She had been pleased to marry my father, she told me, but no less pleased to become his sister and to remain in England which was “a great country”. It seemed that she held the country she came from in little regard.

  I could get very little from her as to the type of land that she hailed from, but when she did speak about her country and especially her brother the ruler, she had a wild, frightened look about her eyes that made me think she would have been scared to return to it. She loved England, that was sure enough, and she had been made a rich woman by submitting to the will of our father. She gambled and played at cards a great deal with her servants, and her English, although accented and heavy, was getting better daily. She was not discontented with her life at all.

  No other queen had fallen so gratefully or so gracefully from her place at the side of our father. Every other queen he had sought to depose or replace, to annul, divorce or kill… And every one of them had fought to stay where they were. All but Anne; and now every one of the others lay in a grave, every one of them. The only memory honoured was that of Jane. The names of my father’s other wives were never mentioned at court. My father’s anger at them had removed their existence from life, and from history.

  Anne was not a queen anymore, but she was alive, she was prosperous, she was independent in her means.

  Is it better that one should strike through life like a flash of lightening that once it strikes the earth vanishes without a trace….or is it better that one should be like the changing brightness of the sun? Able and ready to bend and to fade when required, but always present somewhere, and always alive?

  If my mother could have guessed at her fate, would she have changed her actions? Would she have taken a lesser place, if it meant that she would not die… that she might still be with me? I knew not. Something within me told me that my mother was not made of the same mettle as my living aunt of Cleves.

  Anne of Cleves was indeed a rich woman. She had a royal pension on which to live which was vastly generous in its terms, servants, a fine stable of good horse and my father had bestowed upon her several palaces when he made her his sister. One of these had been the family home of my own mother, Hever castle in Kent. On occasion when I was young, I was taken there to see Anne.

  Having found out, from Kat of course, that Hever was the castle my mother had grown up in, I was eager to see it. The first time I rode over the little hill and spied the white-washed walls shining in the failing light, surrounded by the dappled waters of the gentle moat, I felt as though I had found a part of my mother. As though I had stumbled into a memory of her which I could not place; it was like waking from a dream where the pictures and events of the dream have gone, and yet the emotions raised by it still echo in the fibre of your heart.

  I stopped my horse and those around me did the same as I gazed on the little castle. Hardly bigger than a manor house really. A small village stood not far from it in the distance, where blue smoke rose to mingle with the dusk from many chimneys. My mother had been related to the Howards, to the Dukes of Norfolk, but my grandparents had been Boleyns; a family who had impressed my father with their skills in courtiership and diplomacy. I wished I had had a chance to know something of them, although I think my father might not have approved. I think at this time my aunt Mary Boleyn was still living, but her reputation was as wild as could be, so I would never have been allowed to meet with her.

  I leaned forward on my horse, patting his sweating sides and looking at the childhood home of my mother. This was where she had played as a child; this was where she had learned her lessons and danced. This was where she would have laughed and sung. This was where she and my father had met and courted in secret when they first found love together. My heart swelled and tears came to my eyes as I tried to place that distant faded memory I had of her within the gracious gardens of Hever, as I tried to reconcile the half-thoughts and strange emotions that came from finding another part of my mother, in my own life.

  My aunt Anne came out to meet us in the little courtyard followed by her many attendants and saw me looking around with interest at the castle. Her gown was glorious in black velvet with ermine at her cuffs and collar. She was allowed to wear all the trapping of royalty with the permission of our father, and she was keen to take advantage of this generous allowance.

  “Yes,” she said in her heavy English, nodding at me and following the long gaze from my eyes around me. “I knew you would want to see Hever. For your own blood, it speaks to you… calls to you, does it not?”

  I smiled but did not answer her question. I did not speak of my mother often, and certainly not in public. I curtseyed to her and embraced her, telling her of my pleasure in receiving the gifts she had sent to me. Anne smiled; that habit of pointing her large nose downwards gave her, in the shadow of the castle, a strangely sly appearance.

  We ate together in the great hall; a weighty, grand room with a roaring fire at its heart. All around us, encrusted on the ceiling and around the fire were emblems and badges of the Boleyns. My grandfather had obviously wanted to ensure his family were remembered. What a shame, I thought, that he could not do that by ensuring the survival of his children, rather than the survival of his insignia.

  When we had finished the sweet at the end of our meal, and my belly was filled with slice after slice of thick marmalade and wafer, I was taken to my bed.

  The next morning, Anne took me on a little tour of the castle and of the grounds.

  “This room was your mother’s… when she was a child,” she said, swinging open the heavy oaken door to a dark little room, and then she shrugged, “or so they tell me.”

  We stood in the little room. Once my mother had been
here as a child, perhaps at the same age as I was now. Feelings fought to well up inside me and I pushed them away. I could not be seen to show emotion, to show anything at the mention of my mother. Servants could see and report many things.

  “It is a good room,” I said pressing my hand on hers. “But it is you whom I have come to see.”

  She smiled at me; her plain face was gentle with affection. “I was so pleased when I became your aunt,” she said, still stumbling over some of the words. “For it meant that I could see you and your brother and sister. I did not have a lot of family in Cleves, and none that are… as clever, or as friendly, as the one that your father gave me here in England.” She grinned at me. “He gave me many things,” she said, “but I think his great gift was my new family.”

  I reached out my hands to her, “I too was glad to take you as my own blood,” I said. “My father was wise to keep you in our family as a sister.”

  She looked almost crafty as she turned a little away. “They say that your father looks for a new queen,” she said. “Perhaps one day, he and I might once again become husband and wife, rather than brother and sister. Then you would be my daughter. Would you like that?”

 

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