The Bastard Princess

by G Lawrence

  “Do not be sad, my lady,” he said. “Perhaps if we ever get the chance, I shall discover such lands for you. One day I will bring you the golden crown of the kings of the Indias, and rubies from the Emperor of the New World. I will bring you new lands to name after yourself and emeralds from the lair of the dragon at the end of the world.”

  I laughed and Kat laughed too. He was a merry companion, a gallant boy.

  “Such a bold adventurer!” said Kat admiringly to me as she laughed. I nodded and smiled at him again. Robin looked pleased to have the wrapt attention of us both. He always had that way about him even as a child, to fascinate women.

  “I should like that Master Dudley,” I said. “But perhaps you should stay closer to home. Your father may have many plans for you in mind, as my father has for me.”

  “And we should all do as our fathers wish,” he said dutifully but with mischief riding all over his handsome features. “I have the advantage however, my lady, of being subordinate also to your wishes as well as to my father’s. So if, one day, you should wish to travel the seas and see what treasures there are out there, I should be willing to be your captain. I would have no choice but to place your wishes above that of my father. You are after all, a princess of England.”

  “Should we be pirates together then?” I asked and laughed. “I had never heard a woman might be a pirate as well as a man.”

  He grinned and bowed again to me. “A gracious princess such as yourself, should be able to be and do anything she wishes,” he said. “That is the gift that God gave you when he bore you into the royal family.”

  I smiled tightly. “Sometimes, God moves us in ways that we do not expect,” I said. “But I do not think he placed me here to indulge in piracy.”

  Robin shook his head. “No, of course,” he said. “I jest, but I do believe there is more in store for the princess Elizabeth than simply marrying and leaving our fair country. Your father in his wisdom would not marry such a prize off and lose you.”

  It was flattery; it was the way things were at court where men advanced through pretty words and less noble deeds. But I felt like he meant it in truth. Yes, easily and from the first times we spoke, Robin Dudley was my good friend, and later in life it would seem to me often, that he was the one person on this earth that understood my nature and my soul, as every good friend knows instinctively of another.

  Chapter Twenty

  Winter

  1545

  Katherine the Queen was becoming known at court for not only her intense piety and devotion to religion, but for a little circle or salon of women she was gathering to her. Meetings in Katherine’s apartments included the Queen’s sister Lady Herbert, her stepdaughter Mistress Margaret Neville and also the wry Duchess of Suffolk and Lady Lisle. I too was honoured to be often brought in to discuss points on religious texts. We would pour over scriptures, new translations of the bible and discuss matters of doctrine.

  It was an intellectually exciting time for me, in the company of women who were as interested in learning, and were as well-read as I was. We found the blossoming of thought and word blooming in our minds and hearts and became devoted to the companionship that comes from a shared and loved interest in learning.

  Katherine was noted at court for having more serious leanings towards Calvinist and Lutheran beliefs than the rule of my father as Supreme Head of the Church would have allowed. Katherine perhaps thought that she was protected by her position as Queen, but as we would find in the New Year, the position of a Queen was a fragile thing.

  And it was perhaps my fault that we became so acutely aware of the dangers inherent in being the highest ranking woman in England.

  It was in the New Year that I presented another gift to my stepmother. This year, I had chosen to translate Prayers and Meditations, which Katherine had herself written and published. It was a volume of five original prayers. I thought it was a wonderful work and chose this time to translate the original English prayers into French, Italian and Latin for her. The work caused me many hours of grief and left me with an aching head, back and brain. But I was pleased with the result. I hoped that my stepmother would enjoy once again seeing how she had influenced me. I also sent a letter to accompany the volume to my father, to let him know how Katherine, his gracious wife, had influenced me, taught me and guided me. I wrote to him that the study of theology was a proper study for kings, as he himself had shown, and also that I thought my father must have been proud of this work by the hand of his lovely and pious queen.

  I could not have been more wrong.

  I did not realize that my father had not read the works of his wife, nor that he thought her salons and groups were mere diversions for womanly gossip rather than the application of study into the theological paths of scripture.

  I did not realize that he was tiring of her constant talk of religious matters, nor that he was annoyed by her drawing him into discussion on biblical theology and then disagreeing with him, debating him.

  I had not realized that Katherine had enemies at court, those who found her devotion to Lutheran leanings disturbing. Enemies who would seek to once again change queens and place a Catholic wife in Katherine’s place. They viewed our father’s growing displeasure with his wife with baited breath, just waiting for a chance to bring her down.

  I had never thought that a simple present, showing affection and love, could ever be dangerous. When it was delivered to her I felt no shiver of foreboding from the future, I felt no chill breeze ruffle the air of my chamber. I sat back happy in the knowledge that she would love the gift.

  The queen, my beloved stepmother, was in danger….and just how serious this was to be, we all would soon know.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  July

  1546

  My father was often ill.

  An old injury on his leg made his life hard and gave him much pain. He had injured it when he was a young man, taking more than one fall from his horse in the joust. When he was young, the injury had healed fast and given him little trouble, but as he grew older, and larger, the wound returned and gave him grievous pain. The injury seemed to keep to a cycle of its own. It would heal and our father would be in the highest of spirits, taking to riding and hunting with zest and vigour. Then the injury would come back, stronger than ever, causing him to go black in the face with pain, stopping him from riding and hunting as he still loved to do. The infection would bring forth great quantities of pus and blood, pouring from his damaged leg. The smell that came from the rotten flesh under the bandages was pungent and only a few of his most trusted servants were allowed to dress the wound.

  When it was at its worst, our father would shout and scream in pain, lashing out with his stick at his doctors as they tried to lance the wound and release its hold on the putrid pulp festering inside the swollen red wound. When the old injury was very bad, it would refuse to close at all, leaving the wound open to spoil further, like rotten meat in the sun.

  When he was ill, we children were not allowed to see him. I think our father enjoyed the idea that he was invincible as much as we honestly believed in the fiction ourselves. He did not want us to see him as weak or broken, as capable of being laid so low by injury and illness. He wanted to look in our eyes and see the devotion of those who truly believe their father to be a God of old. If we had the scent of sour blood and puss up our noses, or glimpsed the horror of the wound on his leg, it would be harder to preserve the fabric of fiction of this, over his illness.

  But even though he tried to hide it from us, we could see well enough the drawn paleness of his face when he emerged from a period where he had been too ‘busy’ to see us. We never spoke the words to each other, but we knew that he was a sick man.

  Katherine helped to make his time easier, but he did not like to have her near him either when he was really ill, perhaps for the same reasons as he separated us from him. He wanted all of his family, especially his wife, to believe him indestructible. Katherine was more t
han aware of the pain he suffered and could have coped easily with him in his misery, having had several previous husbands whom she had nursed through illness, but his will was law. His doctors bore the brunt of his rages and bad temper in his pain.

  It was like a magic spell in a fairy story; if he could stop us seeing the worst of his pain, then it was not real. But I suppose we all need the blanket of fiction to make the worst of times manageable.

  When she was allowed near to him, Katherine would try to divert him from the pain by discussing scripture, writings or other books with him. His mind was still one of the best she had ever known, she told me, and she thought it did her good to learn from our father.

  For me, the vision of my father was always preserved in majesty and might. He made sure that although the lines of his face might show some of the pain he had felt in his sufferings, when he appeared at court and with us, he was every inch a king and emperor. My father understood well that in order to be a king, one had to look like a king.

  As I always said that my father’s spirit was conjoined to England, it seemed I was right again. For there was a sickness which grew through our England even as the infected flesh of our father stretched and bloated under the weight of his infected load. As my father’s spirit was tied to the land, so as he grew sicker, so did the country. The constant war against heresy flared into a rage even as my father’s leg did, and this time it found new victims in a fashionable court preacher called Dr. Crome and a young woman of Protestant beliefs, Anne Askew.

  The conservative faction at court, those who longed for a return to the Catholic Church, were fastidious in rooting out all those who took a stronger leaning to the Protestant religion than my father liked. If they could not persuade him to return to Rome, they could at least persuade him to kill those who tried to manhandle his country closer into Protestant belief.

  My father was at heart a conservative Catholic. He may have agreed with my mother that the Church required reform, but I believe that if he had never been thwarted by the Pope on the matter of annulling his first marriage, he would have remained within the Catholic Church until the end of his life.

  None of us Tudors have ever liked people telling us what to do.

  The break with the See of Rome had seen him become the Head of the Church in England and even after he had disposed of my mother, who many saw as responsible for the break with Rome, he had retained the title. He could not do so without some change to the Church of England, and some of the ideas of Protestant belief had crept in to mingle awkwardly with those of the Catholic Church. This mixed rule had led him to tread a middle path between the faiths, where those of extreme views on either side of the religious gulf had to either tame their beliefs and follow him or disobey him and lose their heads. It was not safe to be either a Protestant heretic or a traitorous Catholic loyal to Rome. It was safe only to follow our father, and do exactly as he said.

  Although I had been brought up in the faith of my father, much of my learning and many of my tutors, including my noble stepmother, leaned much more into the Protestant than the Catholic faith. But to say any such thing would mean death under the rule of my father. So, secret factions on each side of the religious war formed, and fought their battles underground, through word and thought and subterfuge. It was one of these underground and underhand battles that nearly took my beloved stepmother from me.

  The Catholic, conservative faction at court disliked the Queen; they found her piety and her written works suspicious, sacrilegious. They liked not this heretic sitting at the side of the King and whispering in his ear in the bedchamber. They liked not her power; they liked not her influence over other rich and noble women. They liked her not, they wanted to see her removed.

  With the arrest of the young woman preacher Anne Askew came the first, and most horrific, interrogation of a woman for heresy. Askew had been outspoken about her belief in the Protestant faith, and had also used her divinely inspired beliefs to lecture and teach some notable women at our father’s court. She had preached in public places; something that was held as scandalous for a woman. She was also acquainted with many of the women who attended Katherine’s salon.

  Askew was arrested. They had her taken to the Tower of London where she was put on the rack and tortured. They broke her bones and ripped her flesh, hoping that she would give them something they could use against the Queen. A woman had never been used in such a manner before, but this act was approved by the King himself, who believed her to be a most unnatural type of heretic. Askew’s jailers used their powers well. They made her scream for them, they made her bleed. If they could get one snippet from Anne to incriminate the Queen, then they could remove Katherine and set up another queen in her place who could whisper conservative values to my aging father.

  It was a method others had used before when they liked not the Queen on the throne at the side of our father. Katherine’s enemies were sure they could make the pattern work for their interests too.

  But Anne gave them nothing, brave woman. They broke her body, they tore her flesh, but she gave them nothing they could use against the Queen.

  But that did not mean they would not try by other means to achieve what they failed to do through the torture of a remarkable woman.

  One evening Katherine was dining with our father and his aide Stephen Gardiner. As usual, Katherine sparked a conversation on a theological matter. Our father was tired and sore, and when Katherine pursued the matter further he became sullen and annoyed. She argued against a point he made and when she left our father said to Gardiner that it was; “nothing much to my comfort in mine old days to be taught by my wife.”

  Gardiner was of the conservative faction, a devoted Catholic. He was well able to take advantage of such a situation. He had done so when the same fate befell my own mother. Some snakes will always hunt in the same grass. Gardiner suggested that the King might find some of his wife’s beliefs to be not what he had thought they were, and suggested that she might be harbouring heretical tendencies. These things were not to be tolerated in any wife, he argued, not the least in the wife of the Head of the English Church. It may be that it was these ill influences on her which caused her to speak to her husband in such a manner, without respect for his intellect and his position above her. Perhaps it would be suitable to investigate the matter further, and see if there was anything within the chambers of the Queen that might confirm his suspicions?

  My father was irritated, in pain and frustrated with his wife. It is easy to act irrationally when one is annoyed with one’s husband or wife, but when one party is so much more powerful than the other, such displeasure can turn into real danger.

  Our father gave Gardiner permission to search the Queen’s chambers, question her ladies and also gave Wriothesley, another conservative, a warrant for the Queen’s arrest… so that she might be questioned on her beliefs also.

  Tremble all women in the absolute power of a husband!

  The first we knew of any of these matters was when Lady Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk came running to the Queen’s apartments like a hind chased by wolfhounds, breathless and panicked, her beautiful face almost purple, waving a bit of paper as she fell to the floor in front of Katherine, weeping and gasping for breath.

  We all stared at the lump on the floor that previously had been one of the most sophisticated noble women of the court. Lady Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk was a noted beauty and wit. Her sharp tongue was famous as was her quick mind; but now here she was, a gasping, hysterical, slumped form on the carpet.

  Katherine took the paper from her in astonishment, looked at it and then went deathly pale. Lady Willoughby grasped her shaking hands to the skirts of her mistress and looked up into Katherine’s almond-shaped grey eyes. She looked as though she feared her mistress might be taken from her at any moment.

  And this was in fact the case.

  The paper was the warrant for Katherine’s arrest; it stated that she was to be questioned on her re
ligious beliefs. She was to be taken to the Tower to await interrogation under order of the King. At the bottom of the page was the seal and signature of the King himself.

  Katherine sat down heavily on a chair, pale and shaking, staring at the warrant for her arrest which was authorised by her husband, the man she had gone to bed with only the night previous. She knew, as we all did, that if she went to the Tower then she would not come back. Our father did not bring his wives back. Once they were gone, they were gone. If she went to the Tower like my mother, like Catherine Howard, she would be released only by her own death.

  Her enemies wanted her head and her husband, my father, had given them the tool they needed to remove it from her neck.

  “It fell from Wriothesley’s pocket,” wept Lady Willoughby, still gasping for breath as she spoke. “As he walked, it fell out. I went to shout to him and give it back to him until I saw your name on it, read the… read it and then I turned and I ran to you, my lady.”