The Bastard Princess

by G Lawrence

  Katherine sat, still staring at the letter and then suddenly she rose and began to take off her clothes. Her trembling hands pulled at the lacings of her sleeves and pulled the beautiful silks from her hair.

  We all stared at her in some shock. I thought that perhaps the paper had unhinged her mind until she spoke.

  “Come,” she said. “Help me. I must undress. I am ill and must remain in bed. I cannot be moved. I cannot be moved on pain of death.”

  We saw her purpose then. If she was ill and sent to bed, they could not take her willingly to the Tower. If she kept to her bed, perhaps we would have some time to find a way to save her. We all but ripped the fine crimson gown from her body and helped her trembling and shaking into her bed.

  We were crying, many of us, as we did so. My cousin, the little Lady Jane Grey with her serious face and pale eyes collapsed in a faint and I had to take her to her own bed.

  Jane was the granddaughter of my royal aunt Mary Tudor, sister to my father. She was my cousin. Jane was a little grave girl who loved to read and learn as I did. Her home life gave her not much in the way of affection or understanding, for her parents believed in beating an education into their children. They believed in beating their children for most things, it seemed. Jane did not talk about her home life, but I saw enough of her bruises and scars to understand that she withstood a lot of physical pain at the hands of her parents. This was not unusual; many parents beat their children, many tutors did so too. But I had been raised with limited beatings and so I tended to view them with an eye of suspicion. It seemed to me that beating one’s opinion into a child was only likely to teach the child that was the only way to get anything done. We teach our children better when we explain the world to them, rather than teach them to cope with the world by hitting out at it.

  Jane had come to love the gentle Queen as a mother, much as I had. Katherine was a woman who really understood how to draw people to her, and to love her with much devotion.

  As my maids and I put little Jane into her bed, she clasped my hand and wept. “The King would not truly seek to hurt the Queen?” she whispered to me, begging. I tried to shake my head, but my obvious fear made my action meaningless; she could see the terror written plain on my face. I reached out and drew her to me, kissing her head and crying with her.

  Every horrible emotion and fear that I had ever known came to me. I felt as though I knew that Katherine would be taken from us, in just the same way that I had lost my mother, and another stepmother before her. But this mother I had dared to love, perhaps more even than the dim memory of my own mother. I had dared to open my heart, dared to love and now our father was planning to remove another wife, to make way for another woman to take her place. He was ready and able to kill my beloved Katherine.

  I dropped to the floor at the side of my cousin’s bed and I wept tears of terror and loss. Fearing that I was to lose another woman from my life that I loved.

  I had never felt so alone in all my life.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  July

  1546

  Katherine was stunned into calmness at first when she took herself into her bed but later on that day, perhaps when the full force of her dreadful situation hit her, she started to become hysterical.

  Weeping and moaning, shrieking and wailing like a banshee; we could not calm her, nor tame her restless cries. The good, sensible woman that I had respected and known was completely overcome with terror and became insensible; she cried out names, the various wives of my father and also the names of her previous husbands in between her fulsome tears. There was nothing we could do or say to make her rest. We feared for her mind.

  Eventually, her hysterical cries came to the attention of the King. From his apartments, which adjoined hers, he could hear her crying. He knew not that she had found the arrest warrant. I imagine that by this time Lord Chancellor Wriothesley had found that he had mislaid the valuable bit of paper and was spending some time desperately searching for it.

  We had thrown it into the fire. There would be no paper for him to find.

  Eventually my father sent a servant to discover what all the noise was emanating from the Queen’s apartments. He did not come himself at first, as he was still angry at her. We did not allow the messenger to enter and see Katherine in the terrible state she was in, but we informed the messenger of the dire illness of the Queen.

  The King was in much astonishment to hear that the Queen was so unwell, having seen her for their evening bedding only the night before and finding her quite well and buxom. So he sent his own Doctor Wendy to see her and find out what was wrong with her.

  When Wendy arrived, Katherine was sent into a mortal panic thinking that the guards had come to arrest her. The knock at the door was enough to send her retching with fear over the side of her bed. But when we let him in, good man, he brought peace to Katherine where we had been unable to.

  Wendy was another who sympathised with the Protestant faith. He may have been a secret Protestant, and so having a lady on the throne who was of the same beliefs was important to him. Once Katherine had sobbed her fears to him of arrest and execution, Wendy advised her that he would send the King to her, and tell him that she was rendered ill because she thought she had lost the love of the King. He told her to mention nothing of the warrant for her arrest, and to say nothing of her knowledge of it. She merely needed to convince the King of her utmost devotion to him, and she would be safe.

  “Be humble and womanly,” he said clasping her hands in his. “Wash your face and look beautiful, use the charm that is yours, madam, and let the King know that you are his modest, mild and dutiful wife… Assure him that you seek to enliven his mind only to distract him from pain… that your thoughts are his thoughts, and you will save yourself from this fate. The King loves you, but his temper is a fragile thing in his great pain. Tempt him and soothe him. Survive to fight another day, learn to be more careful in your words, and you will be safe.”

  Wendy could counsel her where we could not. She started to breathe normally once more as the plan settled in her mind. We helped to wash her face free of the ugly stain of tears, to smooth her hair and freshen her breath, made bitter with fear. We changed her rumpled nightgown and dabbed perfume on her skin. She was still pale and shaking, afraid for her life, but she was calmed and prepared to plead for her life. My father was brought to her. He leant on his cane heavily as he entered the room, and there was an expression of such concern and love on his face that I could hardly believe this man was the same that had signed the warrant for Katherine’s arrest.

  Which man was my father? The lover or the tyrant? I would never really know. For all my life it seemed as though there were in fact many men who bore the title of my father. They all wore the same body and flesh, and yet they were as changeable as the weather on the shore.

  We ladies bowed and left, only to gather at the door, our ears pressed to the wood, desperate to hear what was going on.

  For my own part, I felt ready to defend Katherine to the death. I was no man, but I could fight if I had to. I felt then as though I had the strength to fight, the fear pulsing through my veins.

  “How now, sweetheart?” we heard the King say. “What ails you? My doctors tell me you are sickened… but not unwell, what means this?”

  Then we heard Katherine’s faint voice through the door saying that she was much sickened in herself, thinking that she had done something to drive the love of her dread sovereign and most beloved husband from her, and that this thought had caused her to become lain low with sorrow and with devastation.

  “For you are my only love and care in this world and if I have not your love then I have nothing. I would rather die than lose the love of so great a man and King,” she said.

  Our father’s voice was soft as he asked why she thought he would have stopped loving her and she replied that she had marked when they had discussed some points at dinner that he had become angry with her, and in doing this she feared t
hat she had lost his love. But she had only sought to argue with him, she said, to distract his mind from the pain he felt in his physical body.

  “Not so, Kate,” I heard the stern voice of my father say and felt my heart tremble with it. “You have become a doctor, seeking to instruct us.”

  Katherine denied it strongly: “My lord, I have never thought it the position of a woman to instruct her husband. Such a place would be beyond the realm of all that is natural. But in your mind there is such a wealth of knowledge that I have always benefited from the privilege of learning from you. If I have ever adopted a point of view opposite to your majesty’s own, it was only so that I might better understand all the facets of the rightful argument, seeking through debate to better educate my own dull mind with the full weight of all your majesty’s higher education and understanding. I have at times also sought to distract you with talk on scripture, so that you might be diverted from the pain that presently assails you in your body. I have profited from your gracious generosity in sharing your wisdom with me, but I would never want you to believe that I ever sought to instruct you. The thought would be inconceivable to me, for you are my better in every way.”

  It was very clever. In one fell swoop she had our father convinced that she saw him as her superior and only sought to argue with him for the betterment of her mind and to see to his greater comfort. She was fighting for her life, and she was doing it well.

  She was a clever woman, Katherine Parr.

  My father paused, obviously thinking about her words. Every one of us was holding our breath at the door, but then we heard him say, with gruff affection in his voice; “Is it so Kate? Then we are the best of friends as ever we were.”

  And she was safe.

  I think I learnt a lot that day about how a person may be saved by words. They are our most powerful weapon, and can be used to incriminate or save a person’s life at will. And she lied, of course she lied! She was fighting for her life… would you not have done the same?

  A few days later, my father and Katherine were in the gardens together. Katherine was reading to her husband gently from a book of prayers. She had carefully chosen a volume that had been dedicated to the King. It was as they sat together reading in the warm sunlight, that Lord Chancellor Wriothesley arrived with a detachment of guards to arrest Katherine. He had a copy of the warrant with him. No doubt something he had made up and copied to make it look like the one we had burnt in the fire.

  As he made his proclamation, declaring he was there to arrest the Queen and take her to the Tower, my poor Katherine paled and sunk backwards into her chair. Perhaps for a moment she thought that my father really intended to go through with the arrest after all. She had thought herself safe, and now she was to die.

  But it was not so; my father had simply forgotten to revoke the warrant for his wife’s arrest. It had slipped his mind.

  My father jumped at Lord Chancellor Wroithseley in a rage and beat him around the head with his stick shouting that he was a knave, a beast and a fool.

  Wroithseley was somewhat surprised and made a rather undignified exit, scrambling out of the gardens and out of reach of my father’s stick. Wroithseley realised that the pale, shaking woman who had almost fainted when he arrived to arrest her had been saved by the changing tides of my father’s thoughts and affections.

  Anne Askew died in the fires of Smithfield, burned at the stake as a heretic on the 16th July that year. If she had any dealings with my stepmother she never mentioned them; the brave woman concealed anything that might have incriminated the Queen.

  And if Katherine had known Anne, spoken with her, or respected her beliefs, she said nothing. But on that day, as Anne’s flesh was melted from her bones by the licking tongue of the flames, Katherine’s eyes brimmed with tears as she bent her head to her embroidery.

  Katherine had learnt a valuable lesson, and unlike my mother and many other wives of my father, she had survived it. The position of a queen is more dangerous than that of a common man. For there is farther to fall, and there are more people who would wish your destruction than any commoner could imagine.

  Katherine had faced death, and escaped. She would be more careful from now on to ensure the love and support of the only man who could choose to either protect or destroy her… my father, the King.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Winter

  1547

  When a woman gives her hand to a man, she hands him the power to do as he will with her life. This was a truth made most clear to me as I watched Katherine’s close scrape with death at the hand of my father.

  Her marriage to him had brought her wealth and prestige, yes, but it had also placed her in the greatest of dangers. If my father decided one day he did not like her anymore, she could still easily find herself without a head.

  Our world, the world in which I lived was fraught with danger and one was all the more near to danger the closer one was to the throne.

  The favour our father showed to Katherine after her near-arrest spoke volumes as to how deeply her absolute submission had touched him. This was what he wanted of a wife and queen; someone that was intelligent, beautiful and wise, but who would conform all her desires and will to his. Perhaps that was why he had loved the pallid, insipid Jane Seymour so much… her motto of Bound to Obey and Serve spoke to his own need for dominance over not only the country that he ruled, but over the wife who was his partner in life.

  Little, flighty Catherine Howard too, had understood his will for domination…her motto of No other Will but His had unfortunately turned out to be a lie, but as long as he had believed it, he had loved her absolutely.

  My mother was not made of that kind of mettle. That was, I think, why she died.

  I think in those dangerous days of 1546 I learnt the values of pragmatism; that even if Katherine did not believe that her husband was in all ways her superior, her survival and the continuation of her life was in his hands and therefore it paid to be humble before him. Through Katherine I learned that it was more important to be pragmatic and survive, than it was to die to defend one’s own belief.

  The world is not perfect, but it is the only one we have to live in. Sometimes it was better to keep the fullness of one’s thoughts within, and share them only at a time when it was safe to do so.

  Thousands disagreed with me. Many went to the executioner’s block or to the fires my father used to rid the country of Catholic and Protestant extremists. Unlike the pragmatic Katherine, they would not hide their true feelings for the chance to save their lives.

  Was it wrong of me to think they did the wrong thing, these martyrs? Would I have ever harboured the certainty of the martyrs who went to the flames in order to preserve their immortal soul? The way I was starting to see the world was different to this steel-hard surety that some people seemed to have

  To me it seemed God wanted certain people to be able to survive for a greater purpose than even they knew.

  To me it seemed that God would not want all people rent apart by the technicalities of their Christian beliefs.

  To me, it seemed, being able to survive, to live, to go on to greater things and help others, was more important than flying like a celestial comet, burning out and being forgotten as soon as the tail of your flight had left the skies.

  The people knew and respected the reign of my father, and it had been long enough now that we understood the changes he had made to

  England for the betterment of its people. I was a keen student of history. It seemed to me that those who were able to reign well and for the most part peaceably, gave more to their people than those tiny, fragmented reigns such as in the civil war between York and Lancaster. War only causes the common people to lose all they have both the money in their hands and the blood in their veins. The rich lose little, the common man loses all. Although it is their place to remain loyal to their liege lord, it is the place of the lord to protect the common man’s interests as well as his own.

  My
tutors often said that I had an uncommon understanding of the history of our country and the world. I found the lives of those who had ruled our country absorbing and often found myself musing on certain situations kings and queens had been placed in before… would I have chosen differently to them?

  Edward and I often liked to discuss these ideas together when we had the chance. We were often together at our combined household at Ashridge if I was not with Katherine at Whitehall or Greenwich. Katherine had asked that Mary and I be often at court with her; our names often headed the lists of the gentlewomen of the Queen’s chamber at court. It was a great comfort to be near to her; when I thought of how close we had come to losing this woman from our lives, due to a difference in religion or thought, it made me shudder and feel quite sick.

  When I was not with Katherine however, I loved to be in the company of my younger, most serious brother. He was clever and although he took his position with the utmost of seriousness that gave him a great gravity for one so young, he had a sense of fun also. I was perhaps one of the few people he would ever show that side of his character to. Even in the journal he was starting to keep, he tried to remain as regal and as collected as he wanted to appear to the rest of the court.