The Constant Princess

by Philippa Gregory

  “It is possible,” he conceded.

  “And Harry’s wife would be Princess of Wales, and Harry’s wife would be the new queen. She would go before me, she would rule in my place, and all my sacrifice would be for nothing. And her sons would be kings of England.”

  “That is true.”

  Catalina threw herself into her chair. “Then I have to be Prince Harry’s wife,” she said. “I have to be.”

  De Puebla was quite horrified. “I understood you had agreed with the king to marry him! He gave me to believe that you were agreed.”

  “I had agreed to be queen,” she said, white-faced with determination. “Not some cat’s-paw. D’you know what he called me? He said I would be his child bride, and I would live in his mother’s rooms, as if I were one of her ladies-in-waiting!”

  “The former queen…”

  “The former queen was a saint to put up with a mother-in-law like that one. She stepped back all her life. I can’t do it. It is not what I want, it is not what my mother wants, and it is not what God wants.”

  “But if you have agreed…”

  “When has any agreement been honored in this country?” Catalina demanded fiercely. “We will break this agreement and make another. We will break this promise and make another. I shall not marry the king, I shall marry another.”

  “Who?” he asked numbly.

  “Prince Harry, the Prince of Wales,” she said. “So that when King Henry dies, I shall be queen in deed as well as name.”

  There was a short silence.

  “So you say,” said de Puebla slowly. “Perhaps. But who is going to tell the king?”

  God, if You are there, tell me that I am doing the right thing. If You are there, then help me. If it is Thy will that I am Queen of England, then I will need help to achieve it. It has all gone wrong now, and if this has been sent to try me, then see! I am on my knees and shaking with anxiety. If I am indeed blessed by You, destined by You, chosen by You, and favored by You, then why do I feel so hopelessly alone?

  Ambassador Dr. de Puebla found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to bring bad news to one of the most powerful and irascible kings in Christendom. He had firm letters of refusal from Their Majesties of Spain in his hand, he had Catalina’s determination to be Princess of Wales, and he had his own shrinking courage, screwed up to the tightest point for this embarrassing meeting.

  The king had chosen to see him in the stable yard of Whitehall Palace. He was there looking at a consignment of new Barbary horses, brought in to improve English stock. De Puebla thought of making a graceful reference to foreign blood refreshing native strains, breeding best done between young animals, but he saw Henry’s dark face and realized that there would be no easy way out of this dilemma.

  “Your Grace,” he said, bowing low.

  “De Puebla,” the king said shortly.

  “I have a reply from Their Majesties of Spain to your most flattering proposal, but perhaps I should see you at a more opportune time?”

  “Here is well enough. I can imagine from your tiptoeing in what they say.”

  “The truth is…” De Puebla prepared to lie. “They want their daughter home, and they cannot contemplate her marriage to you. The queen is particularly vehement in her refusal.”

  “Because?” the king inquired.

  “Because she wants to see her daughter, her youngest, sweetest daughter, matched to a prince of her own age. It is a woman’s whim—” The diplomat made a little diffident gesture. “Only a woman’s whim. But we have to recognize a mother’s wishes, don’t we? Your Grace?”

  “Not necessarily,” the king said unhelpfully. “But what does the Dowager Princess say? I thought that she and I had an understanding. She can tell her mother of her preference.” The king’s eyes were on the Arab stallion, walking proud-headed around the yard, his ears flickering backwards and forwards, his tail held high, his neck arched like a bow. “I imagine she can speak for herself.”

  “She says that she will obey you, as ever, Your Grace,” de Puebla said tactfully.

  “And?”

  “But she has to obey her mother.” He fell back at the sudden hard glance that the king threw at him. “She is a good daughter, Your Grace. She is an obedient daughter to her mother.”

  “I have proposed marriage to her and she has indicated that she would accept.”

  “She would never refuse a king such as you. How could she? But if her parents do not consent, they will not apply for dispensation. Without dispensation from the Pope, there can be no marriage.”

  “I understand that her marriage was not consummated. We barely need a dispensation. It is a courtesy, a formality.”

  “We all know that it was not consummated,” de Puebla hastily confirmed. “The princess is a maid still, fit for marriage. But all the same, the Pope would have to grant a dispensation. If Their Majesties of Spain do not apply for such a dispensation, then what can anyone do?”

  The king turned a dark, hard gaze on the Spanish ambassador. “I don’t know now. I thought I knew what we would do. But now I am misled. You tell me. What can anyone do?”

  The ambassador drew on the enduring courage of his race, his secret Jewishness which he held to his heart in the worst moments of his life. He knew that he and his people would always, somehow, survive.

  “Nothing can be done,” he said. He attempted a sympathetic smile and felt that he was smirking. He rearranged his face into the gravest expression. “If the Queen of Spain will not apply for dispensation there is nothing that can be done. And she is inveterate.”

  “I am not one of Spain’s neighbors to be overrun in a spring campaign,” the king said shortly. “I am no Granada. I am no Navarre. I do not fear her displeasure.”

  “Which is why they long for your alliance,” de Puebla said smoothly.

  “An alliance how?” the king asked coldly. “I thought they were refusing me?”

  “Perhaps we could avoid all this difficulty by celebrating another marriage,” the diplomat said carefully, watching Henry’s dark face. “A new marriage. To create the alliance we all want.”

  “To whom?”

  At the banked-down anger in the king’s face, the ambassador lost his words.

  “Sire…I…”

  “Who do they want for her now? Now that my son, the rose, is dead and buried? Now she is a poor widow with only half her dowry paid, living on my charity?”

  “The prince,” de Puebla plunged in. “She was brought to the kingdom to be Princess of Wales. She was brought here to be wife to the prince, and later—much later, please God—to be queen. Perhaps that is her destiny, Your Grace. She thinks so, certainly.”

  “She thinks!” the king exclaimed. “She thinks like that filly thinks! Nothing beyond the next minute.”

  “She is young,” the ambassador said. “But she will learn. And the prince is young—they will learn together.”

  “And we old men have to stand back, do we? She has told you of no preference, no particular liking for me? Though she gave me clearly to understand that she would marry me? She shows no regret at this turnaround? She is not tempted to defy her parents and keep her freely given word to me?”

  The ambassador heard the bitterness in the old man’s voice. “She is allowed no choice,” he reminded the king. “She has to do as she is bidden by her parents. I think, for herself, there was an attraction, perhaps even a powerful attraction. But she knows she has to go where she is bid.”

  “I thought to marry her! I would have made her queen! She would have been Queen of England.” He almost choked on the title. All his life he had thought it the greatest honor that a woman could think of, just as his title was the greatest in his own imagination.

  The ambassador paused for a moment to let the king recover.

  “You know, there are other, equally beautiful young ladies in her family,” he suggested carefully. “The young Queen of Naples is a widow now. As King Ferdinand’s niece, she would bring
a good dowry, and she has the family likeness.” He hesitated. “She is said to be very lovely, and—” he paused “—amorous.”

  “She gave me to understand that she loved me. Am I now to think her a pretender?”

  The ambassador felt a cold sweat which seeped from every pore of his body at that dreadful word. “No pretender,” he said, his smile quite ghastly. “A loving daughter-in-law, an affectionate girl…”

  There was an icy silence.

  “You know how pretenders fare in this country,” the king said stiffly.

  “Yes! But…”

  “She will regret it, if she plays with me.”

  “No play! No pretense! Nothing!”

  The king let the ambassador stand, slightly shaking with anxiety.

  “I thought to finish this whole difficulty with the dowry and the jointure,” Henry remarked, at length.

  “And so it can be. Once the princess is betrothed to the prince, then Spain will pay the second half of the dowry and the widow’s jointure is no more,” de Puebla assured him. He noticed he was talking too rapidly, took a breath, and went slower. “All difficulties are finished. Their Majesties of Spain would be glad to apply for dispensation for their daughter to marry Prince Harry. It would be a good match for her and she will do as she is ordered. It leaves you free to look around for your wife, Your Grace, and it frees the revenues of Cornwall and Wales and Chester to your own disposal once more.”

  King Henry shrugged his shoulders and turned from the schooling ring and the horse. “So it is over?” he asked coldly. “She does not desire me, as I thought she did. I mistook her attention to me. She meant to be nothing but filial?” He laughed harshly at the thought of her kiss by the river. “I must forget my desire for her?”

  “She has to obey her parents as a princess of Spain,” de Puebla reminded him. “On her own account, I know there was a preference. She told me so herself.” He thought that Catalina’s double-dealing could be covered by this. “She is disappointed, to tell you the truth. But her mother is adamant. I cannot deny the Queen of Castile. She is utterly determined to have her daughter returned to Spain or married to Prince Harry. She will brook no other suggestion.”

  “So be it,” said the king, his voice like ice. “I had a foolish dream, a desire. It can finish here.”

  He turned and walked away from the stable yard, his pleasure in his horses soured.

  “I hope that there is no ill feeling?” the ambassador asked, hobbling briskly behind him.

  “None at all,” the king threw over his shoulder. “None in the world.”

  “And the betrothal with Prince Harry? May I assure Their Catholic Majesties that it will go ahead?”

  “Oh, at once. I shall make it my first and foremost office.”

  “I do hope there is no offense?” de Puebla called to the king’s retreating back.

  The king turned on his heel and faced the Spanish ambassador, his clenched fists on his hips, his shoulders square. “She has tried to play me like a fool,” he said through thin lips. “I don’t thank her for it. Her parents have tried to lead me by the nose. I think they will find that they have a dragon, not one of their baited bulls. I won’t forget this. You Spaniards, you will not forget it either. And she will regret the day she tried to lead me on as if I were a lovesick boy, as I regret it now.”

  “It is agreed,” de Puebla said flatly to Catalina. He was standing before her—“Like an errand boy!” he thought indignantly—as she was ripping the velvet panels out of a gown to remodel the dress.

  “I am to marry Prince Harry,” she said in a tone as dull as his own. “Has he signed anything?”

  “He has agreed. He has to wait for a dispensation. But he has agreed.”

  She looked up at him. “Was he very angry?”

  “I think he was even angrier than he showed me. And what he showed me was bad.”

  “What will he do?” she asked.

  He scrutinized her pale face. She was white but she was not fearful. Her blue eyes were veiled as her father’s were veiled when he was planning something. She did not look like a damsel in distress; she looked like a woman trying to outwit a most dangerous protagonist. She was not endearing, as a woman in tears would have been endearing, he thought. She was formidable but not pleasing.

  “I don’t know what he will do,” he said. “His nature is vengeful. But we must give him no advantage. We have to pay your dowry at once. We have to complete our side of the contract to force him to complete his.”

  “The plate has lost its value,” she said flatly. “It is damaged by use. And I have sold some.”

  He gasped. “You have sold it? It is the king’s own!”

  She shrugged. “I have to eat, Dr. de Puebla. We cannot all go uninvited to court and thrust our way in to the common table. I am not living well, but I do have to live. And I have nothing to live on but my goods.”

  “You should have preserved them intact!”

  She shrugged. “I should never have been reduced to this. I have had to pawn my own plate to live. Whoever is to blame, it is not me.”

  “Your father will have to pay the dowry and pay you an allowance,” he said grimly. “We must give them no excuse to withdraw. If your dowry is not paid he will not marry you to the prince. Infanta, I must warn you, he will revel in your discomfort. He will prolong it.”

  Catalina nodded. “He is my enemy too, then.”

  “I fear it.”

  “It will happen, you know,” she said inconsequentially.

  “What?”

  “I will marry Harry. I will be queen.”

  “Infanta, it is my dearest wish.”

  “Princess,” she replied.

  Whitehall, June 1503

  “YOU ARE TO BE BETROTHED TO CATALINA OF ARAGON,” the king told his son, thinking of the son who had gone before.

  The blond boy flushed as pink as a girl. “Yes, sire.”

  He had been coached perfectly by his grandmother. He was prepared for everything but real life.

  “Don’t think the marriage will happen,” the king warned him.

  The boy’s eyes flashed up in surprise and were then cast down again. “No?”

  “No. They have robbed us and cheated us at every turn. They have rolled us over like a bawd in a tavern. They have cozened us and promised one thing after another like a cock teaser in drink. They say—” He broke off, his son’s wide-eyed gaze reminding him that he had spoken as a man to a man, and this was a boy. Also, his resentment should not show however fiercely it burned.

  “They have taken advantage of our friendship,” he summed up. “And now we will take advantage of their weakness.”

  “Surely we are all friends?”

  Henry grimaced, thinking of that scoundrel Ferdinand and of his daughter, the cool beauty who had turned him down. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Loyal friends.”

  “So I am to be betrothed, and later, when I am fifteen, we will be married?”

  The boy had understood nothing. So be it. “Say sixteen.”

  “Arthur was fifteen.”

  Henry bit down the reply that much good it had done Arthur. Besides, it did not matter since it would never happen. “Oh, yes,” he said again. “Fifteen, then.”

  The boy knew that something was wrong. His smooth forehead was furrowed. “We do mean this, don’t we, Father? I would not mislead such a princess. It is a most solemn oath I will make?”

  “Oh, yes,” the king said again.

  The night before my betrothal to Prince Harry, I have a dream so lovely that I do not want to wake. I am in the garden of the Alhambra, walking with my hand in Arthur’s, laughing up at him and showing him the beauty around us: the great sandstone wall which encircles the fort, the city of Granada below us, and the mountains capped with silvery snow on the horizon.

  “I have won,” I say to him. “I have done everything you wanted, everything that we planned. I will be princess as you made me. I will be queen as you wanted me to be. My mo
ther’s wishes are fulfilled, my own destiny will be complete, your desire and God’s will. Are you happy now, my love?”

  He smiles down at me, his eyes warm, his face tender, a smile he has only for me. “I shall watch over you,” he whispers. “All the time. Here in al-Yanna.”

  I hesitate at the odd sound of the word on his lips, and then I realize that he has used the Moorish word “al-Yanna,” which means both heaven, a cemetery, and a garden. For the Moors heaven is a garden, an eternal garden.

  “I shall come to you one day,” I whisper, even as his grasp on my hand becomes lighter and then fades, though I try to hold him. “I shall be with you again, my love. I shall meet you here in the garden.”

  “I know,” he says, and now his face is melting away like mist in the morning, like a mirage in the hot air of the sierra. “I know we will be together again, Catalina, my Katherine, my love.”

  25TH JUNE 1503

  It was a bright, hot June day. Catalina was dressed in a new gown of blue with a blue hood. The eleven-year-old boy opposite her was radiant with excitement, dressed in cloth of gold.

  They were before the Bishop of Salisbury with a small court present: the king, his mother, the Princess Mary, and a few other witnesses. Catalina put her cold hand in the prince’s warm palm and felt the plumpness of childhood beneath her fingers.

  Catalina looked beyond the flushed boy to his father’s grave face. The king had aged in the months since the death of his wife, and the lines in his face were more deeply grooved, his eyes shadowed. Men at the court said he was sick, some illness which was thinning his blood and wearing him out. Others said that he was sour with disappointment: at the loss of his heir, at the loss of his wife, at the frustration of his plans. Some said he had been crossed in love, outwitted by a woman. Only that could have unmanned him so bitterly.

  Catalina smiled shyly at him, but there was no echoing warmth from the man who would be her father-in-law for the second time; but had wanted her for his own. For a moment, her confidence dimmed. She had allowed herself to hope that the king had surrendered to her determination, to her mother’s ruling, to God’s will. Now, seeing his cold look, she had a moment of fear that perhaps this ceremony—even something as serious and sacred as a betrothal—might perhaps be nothing more than revenge by this most cunning of kings.