The Constant Princess

by Philippa Gregory

  But equally, his vanity could work against me. If they emphasize the wealth of Princess Eleanor, the influence of her Hapsburg family, the glory of the connection to the Holy Roman Emperor—he may be seduced. His grandmother will speak against me and her word has been his law. She will advise him to marry Princess Eleanor and he will be attracted—like any young fool—to the idea of an unknown beauty.

  But even if he wants to marry her, it still leaves him with the difficulty of what to do with me. He would look bad if he sent me home. Surely he cannot have the gall to marry another woman with me still in attendance at court? I know that Harry would do anything rather than look foolish. If I can find a way to stay here until they have to consider his marriage, then I will be in a strong position indeed.

  I walk more slowly, looking around me at the cold river, the passing boatmen huddled in their winter coats against the cold. “God bless you, Princess!” calls out one man, recognizing me. I raise my hand in reply. The people of this odd, fractious country have loved me from the moment they scrambled to see me in the little port of Plymouth. That will count in my favor too with a prince new-come to his throne and desperate for affection.

  Harry is not mean with money. He is not old enough yet to know the value of it, and he has always been given anything he might want. He will not bicker over the dowry and the jointure. I am sure of that. He will be disposed to make a lordly gesture. I shall have to make sure that Fuensalida and my father do not offer to ship me home to make way for the new bride. Fuensalida despaired long ago of our cause. But now I do not. I shall have to resist his panic and my own fears. I must stay here to be in the field. I cannot draw back now.

  Harry was attracted to me once, I know that. Arthur told me of it first, said that the little boy liked leading me into my wedding, had been dreaming that he was the bridegroom and I was his bride. I have nurtured his liking, every time I see him I pay him particular attention. When his sister laughs at him and disregards him, I glance his way, ask him to sing for me, watch him dance with admiration. On the rare occasions that I have caught a moment with him in private, I ask him to read to me and we discuss our thoughts on great writers. I make sure that he knows that I find him illuminating. He is a clever boy; it is no hardship to talk with him.

  My difficulty always has been that everyone else admires him so greatly that my modest warmth can hardly weigh with him. Since his grandmother My Lady the King’s Mother declares that he is the handsomest prince in Christendom, the most learned, the most promising, what can I say to compare? How can one compliment a boy who is already flattered into extreme vanity, who already believes that he is the greatest prince the world has known?

  These are my advantages. Against them I could list the fact that he has been destined for me for six years and he perhaps sees me as his father’s choice and a dull choice at that. That he has sworn before a bishop that I was not his choice in marriage and that he does not want to marry me. He might think to hold to that oath, he might think to proclaim he never wanted me and deny the oath of our betrothal. At the thought of Harry announcing to the world that I was forced on him and now he is glad to be free of me, I pause again. This too I can endure.

  These years have not been kind to me. He has never seen me laughing with joy, he has never seen me smiling and easy. He has never seen me dressed other than poorly and anxious about my appearance. They have never called me forwards to dance before him or to sing for him. I always have a poor horse when the court is hunting and sometimes I cannot keep up. I always look weary and I am always anxious. He is young and frivolous and he loves luxury and fineness of dress. He might have a picture of me in his mind as a poor woman, a drag upon his family, a pale widow, a ghost at the feast. He is a self-indulgent boy; he might decide to excuse himself from his duty. He is vain and lighthearted and might think nothing of sending me away.

  But I have to stay. If I leave, he will forget me in a moment. I am certain of that, at least. I have to stay.

  Fuensalida, summoned to the king’s council, went in with his head held high, trying to seem unbowed, certain that they had sent for him to tell him to leave and take the unwanted Infanta with him. His high Spanish pride, which had so much offended them so very often in the past, took him through the door and to the Privy Council table. The new king’s ministers were seated around the table; there was a place left empty for him in the plumb center. He felt like a boy, summoned before his tutors for a scolding.

  “Perhaps I should start by explaining the condition of the Princess of Wales,” he said diffidently. “The dowry payment is safely stored, out of the country, and can be paid in—”

  “The dowry does not matter,” one of the councilors said.

  “The dowry?” Fuensalida was stunned into silence. “But the princess’s plate?”

  “The king is minded to be generous to his betrothed.”

  There was a stunned silence from the ambassador. “His betrothed?”

  “Of the greatest importance now is the power of the King of France and the danger of his ambitions in Europe. It has been thus since Agincourt. The king is most anxious to restore the glory of England. And now we have a king as great as that Henry, ready to make England great again. English safety depends on a three-way alliance between Spain and England and the emperor. The young king believes that his wedding with the Infanta will secure the support of the King of Aragon to this great cause. This is, presumably, the case?”

  “Certainly,” said Fuensalida, his head reeling. “But the plate—”

  “The plate does not matter,” one of the councilors repeated.

  “I thought that her goods—”

  “They do not matter.”

  “I shall have to tell her of this…change…in her fortunes.”

  The Privy Council rose to their feet. “Pray do.”

  “I shall return when I have…er…seen her. ”Pointless, Fuensalida thought, to tell them that she had been so angry with him for what she saw as his betrayal that he could not be sure that she would see him. Pointless to reveal that the last time he had seen her he had told her that she was lost and her cause was lost and everyone had known it for years.

  He staggered as much as walked from the room, and almost collided with the young prince. The youth, still not yet eighteen, was radiant. “Ambassador!”

  Fuensalida threw himself back and dropped to his knee. “Your Grace! I must…condole with you on the death of…”

  “Yes, yes.” He waved aside the sympathy. He could not make himself look grave. He was wreathed in smiles, taller than ever. “You will wish to tell the princess that I propose that our marriage takes place as soon as possible.”

  Fuensalida found he was stammering with a dry mouth. “Of course sire.”

  “I shall send a message to her for you,” the young man said generously. He giggled. “I know that you are out of favor. I know that she has refused to see you, but I am sure that she will see you for my sake.”

  “I thank you,” the ambassador said. The prince waved him away. Fuensalida rose from his bow and went towards the princess’s chambers. He realized that it would be hard for the Spanish to recover from the largesse of this new English king. His generosity, his ostentatious generosity, was crushing.

  Catalina kept her ambassador waiting, but she admitted him within the hour. He had to admire the self-control that set her to watch the clock when the man who knew her destiny was waiting outside to tell her.

  “Emissary,” she said levelly.

  He bowed. The hem of her gown was ragged. He saw the neat, small threads where it had been stitched up and then worn ragged again. He had a sense of great relief that whatever happened to her after this unexpected marriage, she would never again have to wear an old gown.

  “Dowager Princess, I have been to the Privy Council. Our troubles are over. He wants to marry you.”

  Fuensalida had thought she might cry with joy, or pitch into his arms, or fall to her knees and thank God. She did none
of these things. Slowly, she inclined her head. The tarnished gold leaf on the hood caught the light. “I am glad to hear it,” was all she said.

  “They say that there is no issue about the plate.” He could not keep the jubilation from his voice.

  She nodded again.

  “The dowry will have to be paid. I shall get them to send the money back from Bruges. It has been in safekeeping, Your Grace. I have kept it safe for you.” His voice quavered, he could not help it.

  Again she nodded.

  He dropped to one knee. “Princess, rejoice! You will be Queen of England.”

  Her blue eyes when she turned them to him were hard, like the sapphires she had sold long ago. “Emissary, I was always going to be Queen of England.”

  I have done it. Good God, I have done it. After seven endless years of waiting, after hardship and humiliation, I have done it. I go into my bedchamber and kneel before my prie-dieu and close my eyes. But I speak to Arthur, not to the risen Lord.

  “I have done it,” I tell him. “Harry will marry me, I have done as you wished me to do.”

  For a moment I can see his smile. I can see him as I did so often when I glanced sideways at him during dinner and caught him smiling down the hall to someone. Before me again is the brightness of his face, the darkness of his eyes, the clear line of his profile. And more than anything else, the scent of him, the very perfume of my desire.

  Even on my knees before a crucifix I give a little sigh of longing. “Arthur, beloved. My only love. I shall marry your brother but I am always yours.” For a moment, I remember, as bright as the first taste of early cherries, the scent of his skin in the morning. I raise my face and it is as if I can feel his chest against my cheek as he bears down on me, thrusts towards me. “Arthur,” I whisper. I am now, I will always be, forever his.

  Catalina had to face one ordeal. As she went in to dinner in a hastily tailored new gown, with a collar of gold at her neck and pearls in her ears, and was conducted to a new table at the very front of the hall she curtseyed to her husband-to-be and saw his bright smile at her, and then she turned to her grandmother-in-law and met the basilisk gaze of Lady Margaret Beaufort.

  “You are fortunate,” the old lady said afterwards, as the musicians started to play and the tables were taken away.

  “I am?” Catalina replied, deliberately dense.

  “You married one great prince of England and lost him; now it seems you will marry another.”

  “This can come as no surprise,” Catalina observed in flawless French, “since I have been betrothed to him for six years. Surely, my lady, you never doubted that this day would come? You never thought that such an honorable prince would break his holy word?”

  The old woman hid her discomfiture well. “I never doubted our intentions,” she returned. “We keep our word. But when you withheld your dowry and your father reneged on his payments, I wondered as to your intentions. I wondered about the honor of Spain.”

  “Then you were kind to say nothing to disturb the king,” Catalina said smoothly. “For he trusted me, I know. And I never doubted your desire to have me as your granddaughter. And see! Now I will be your granddaughter, I will be Queen of England, the dowry is paid, and everything is as it should be.”

  She left the old lady with nothing to say—and there were few that could do that. “Well, at any rate, we will have to hope that you are fertile,” was all she sourly mustered.

  “Why not? My mother had half a dozen children,” Catalina said sweetly. “Let us hope my husband and I are blessed with the fertility of Spain. My emblem is the pomegranate—a Spanish fruit, filled with life.”

  My Lady the King’s Grandmother swept away, leaving Catalina alone. Catalina curtseyed to her departing back and rose up, her head high. It did not matter what Lady Margaret might think or say, all that mattered was what she could do. Catalina did not think she could prevent the wedding, and that was all that mattered.

  Greenwich Palace,

  11th June 1509

  I WAS DREADING THE WEDDING, the moment when I would have to say the words of the marriage vows that I had said to Arthur. But in the end the service was so unlike that glorious day in St. Paul’s Cathedral that I could go through it with Harry before me and Arthur locked away in the very back of my mind. I was doing this for Arthur, the very thing he had commanded, the very thing that he had insisted on—and I could not risk thinking of him.

  There was no great congregation in a cathedral, there were no watching ambassadors or fountains flowing with wine. We were married within the walls of Greenwich Palace in the church of the Friars Observant, with only three witnesses and half a dozen people present.

  There was no rich feasting or music or dancing; there was no drunkenness at court or rowdiness. There was no public bedding. I had been afraid of that—the ritual of putting to bed and then the public showing of the sheets in the morning; but the prince—the king, I now have to say—is as shy as I am, and we dine quietly before the court and withdraw together. They drink our healths and let us go. His grandmother is there, her face like a mask, her eyes cold. I show her every courtesy, it doesn’t matter to me what she thinks now. She can do nothing. There is no suggestion that I shall be living in her chambers under her supervision. On the contrary she has moved out of her rooms for me. I am married to Harry. I am Queen of England and she is nothing more than the grandmother of a king.

  My ladies undress me in silence. This is their triumph too, this is their escape from poverty as well as mine. Nobody wants to remember the night at Oxford, the night at Burford, the nights at Ludlow. Their fortunes as much as mine depend on the success of this great deception. If I asked them, they would deny Arthur’s very existence.

  Besides, it was all so long ago. Seven long years. Who but I can remember that far back? Who but I ever knew the delight of waiting for Arthur, the firelight on the rich-colored curtains of the bed, the glow of candlelight on our entwined limbs? The sleepy whispers in the early hours of the morning: “Tell me a story!”

  They leave me in one of my dozen exquisite new nightgowns and withdraw in silence. I wait for Harry, as long ago I used to wait for Arthur. The only difference is the utter absence of joy.

  The men-at-arms and the gentlemen of the bedchamber brought the young king to the queen’s door, tapped on it and admitted him to her rooms. She was in her gown, seated by the fireside, a richly embroidered shawl thrown over her shoulders. The room was warm, welcoming. She rose as he came in and swept him a curtsey.

  Harry lifted her up with a touch on her elbow. She saw at once that he was flushed with embarrassment, she felt his hand tremble.

  “Will you take a cup of wedding ale?” she invited him. She made sure that she did not think of Arthur bringing her a cup and saying it was for courage.

  “I will,” he said. His voice, still so young, was unsteady in its register. She turned away to pour the ale so he should not see her smile.

  They lifted their cups to each other. “I hope you did not find today too quiet for your taste,” he said uncertainly. “I thought with my father newly dead we should not have too merry a wedding. I did not want to distress My Lady his mother.”

  She nodded but said nothing.

  “I hope you are not disappointed,” he pressed on. “Your first wedding was so very grand.”

  Catalina smiled. “I hardly remember it, it was so long ago.”

  He looked pleased at her reply, she noted. “It was, wasn’t it? We were all little more than children.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Far too young to marry.”

  He shifted in his seat. She knew that the courtiers who had taken Hapsburg gold would have spoken against her. The enemies of Spain would have spoken against her. His own grandmother had advised against this wedding. This transparent young man was still anxious about his decision, however bold he might try to appear.

  “Not that young; you were fifteen,” he reminded her. “A young woman.”

  “And Arthur w
as the same age,” she said, daring to name him. “But he was never strong, I think. He could not be a husband to me.”

  Harry was silent and she was afraid she had gone too far. But then she saw the glimpse of hope in his face.

  “It is indeed true then, that the marriage was never consummated?” he asked, coloring up in embarrassment. “I am sorry…I wondered…I know they said…but I did wonder…”

  “Never,” she said calmly. “He tried once or twice but you will remember that he was not strong. He may have even bragged that he had done it, but, poor Arthur, it meant nothing.”

  “I shall do this for you,” I say fiercely, in my mind, to my beloved. “You wanted this lie. I shall do it thoroughly. If it is going to be done, it must be done thoroughly. It has to be done with courage, conviction; and it must never be undone.”

  Aloud, Catalina said, “We married in the November, you remember. December we spent most of the time traveling to Ludlow and were apart on the journey. He was not well after Christmas, and then he died in April. I was very sad for him.”

  “He was never your lover?” Harry asked, desperate to be certain.

  “How could he be?” She gave a pretty, deprecatory shrug that made the gown slip off one creamy shoulder a little. She saw his eyes drawn to the exposed skin, she saw him swallow. “He was not strong. Your own mother thought that he should have gone back to Ludlow alone for the first year. I wish we had done that. It would have made no difference to me, and he might have been spared. He was like a stranger to me for all our marriage. We lived like children in a royal nursery. We were hardly even companions.”

  He sighed as if he were free of a burden; the face he turned to her was bright. “You know, I could not help but be afraid,” he said. “My grandmother said…”