Catherine suppressed a smile at the thought that there was another royal mother as domineering as her own. ‘And how is my dear sister Marie?’ she asked.
‘She is so highly thought of at that convent in Poissy,’ Isabeau said contemptuously, ‘that she will no doubt end her days there as Mother Superior.’
Catherine remembered how pleased Marie had been to be accepted as a postulant. ‘I’m sure that will make her very happy,’ she said.
‘Michelle, on the other hand, is hardly likely to be a mother at all, superior or otherwise. She has still not presented her husband with the son and heir he expects of her.’
‘There’s still plenty of time for that,’ said Catherine from the lofty standpoint of a woman who had recently produced a healthy male child with little difficulty.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Isabeau. ‘Frankly, I don’t think it will ever happen. She’s getting old now and losing her looks. She’s twenty-seven. Philip goes to her bed, of course, in the hope of getting a son, a legitimate one, that is. From what I hear, he’s busy fathering brats from Dijon to Flanders but he still hasn’t managed one with Michelle.’
‘But she is not without hope of a child, is she?’
‘Who knows? But she’s such a sour-puss nowadays that I’m not surprised he goes elsewhere for his bed sports. And she’s been like that for the last three years, ever since John the Fearless was murdered. For some reason, she seems to want to take the blame for it, as though it really was her own brother that killed him. She wears a face as long as a fiddle so it’s no wonder Philip is behaving like a tom-cat. Who can blame him? She’s brought it on herself.’
Barely a month later, Catherine remembered what her mother had said when news reached the Château de Vincennes that Michelle had died. At first, Catherine refused to believe what she’d heard. Michelle? Dead? Surely not. But, if so, why? And how? Henry, feeling better but not yet inclined to travel, urged her to return to St Pol with a small escort party, so that she could learn more about what had happened to her sister and comfort her parents in their distress.
The messenger who had first brought the news from Ghent was summoned to appear before both Isabeau and Catherine to give an exact account of what had happened but he seemed unable to tell them anything of any significance except that Michelle had appeared to be well and healthy until a day or two before her death. No, she had not had an accident and, as far as he knew, neither had she died from any complications arising from a possible pregnancy. There was no report of any sickness in Ghent and no one else seemed to be involved. She had just – and here the messenger shrugged – well, she had just died. He couldn’t tell them any more except that the funeral had been well-attended. She had, after all, been a popular duchess.
Isabeau was stroking her lap dog’s head so hard that the whites of its bulbous eyes were showing. She dismissed the messenger with an imperious wave of her hand. ‘Poison, do you think, Catherine?’ she asked when they were alone. She wore a grim expression on her face.
‘Surely not, Maman!’ Catherine was tearful and shocked by the suggestion. ‘Who would benefit from poisoning her?’
‘You never know,’ said Isabeau darkly. ‘These days, you never know. And it’s always notoriously difficult to prove.’
‘Then we must heed the words of Saint Augustine, my Lady. “Nothing is more certain than death and nothing less so than the hour of its coming”.’
The Queen cast her eyes to the ceiling, surprised that her daughter could still find solace in some of the more trite platitudes of the saints. Then she shook her head, her mouth a bitter downturned line as she pushed the small dog off her lap. It scurried for cover under her chair, away from the painful pressure of her stroking.
Philip of Burgundy seemed not to mourn his wife at all. Within an indecently short time after her death, he sent a messenger to Henry with a request for help in relieving the town of Cosne-sur-Loire.
Catherine was sitting with Henry in their solar at the Château de Vincennes when the message arrived.
‘My Lord, you mustn’t even think of it!’ she objected. ‘You’re just beginning to get back on your feet and now you’re proposing to go rushing off again, helping Philip with some stupid little siege that doesn’t concern you.’
‘Everything that happens in France concerns me, Catherine,’ said Henry, ‘and as it happens, the Dauphin himself is the cause of this particular problem. He has established his centre at Cosne, so it is hardly what you call a stupid little siege.’
‘That doesn’t make me personally responsible for it! Charles may be my brother but he makes his own decisions. I don’t want you to fight him, Henry! I don’t want you to fight Charles!’ Catherine was on her feet now, her voice rising, her fists clenched and her eyes brimming with tears, trying to make him listen to her, fearing that he would become very ill indeed if he went back into the field of battle too soon. She had so recently lost her sister that she couldn’t bear the thought that she might lose her husband as well. And if she didn’t lose her husband, then she would very probably lose her brother. Hysteria threatened to overwhelm her.
‘That’s enough, Catherine,’ Henry silenced her sternly. ‘This is not a matter of what you want or don’t want. I’m going to Philip’s aid and there’s an end to it.’ Catherine subsided, sobbing, into a chair.
But she was right. It was far too early for Henry to venture back into the fray. He had always been a man who drove himself too far too often but, this time, his sheer determination to confront the Dauphin was not enough to see him through. He set out from the Château de Vincennes on horseback but soon became too weak to ride. He never reached Cosne.
The physicians in attendance on the King were seriously worried about him. They set up a temporary field hospital and tried all the herbal remedies they knew, to no avail. No amount of bleeding seemed to make any difference whatsoever and they dared not try to purge him. The best idea seemed to be to take the King back to the Château de Vincennes and a messenger was sent on ahead to make sure that the Château would be ready to receive him. Another messenger was dispatched in haste to summon John of Bedford to attend his brother at the Château.
Catherine spent many anxious hours watching from a casement window high up in the donjon until she eventually saw a group of soldiers approaching the Château flanked by men of the royal guard and with the royal standard fluttering above a horse-drawn litter. She ran down the long spiral staircase and met the group at the door, trying not to get in the way as the King’s stretcher was being man-handled into a room on the ground floor. As his body servants began to remove his stinking clothes, she tried to get Henry to speak to her.
He turned his face away from her and his voice was barely audible. ‘Catherine, grant me my dignity, please. This bloody flux is no sight for the eyes of a gentlewoman. Go. Leave me. I will send for you when I am clean.’
Catherine hovered nervously outside the makeshift sickroom as priests, doctors, scribes, and servants came and went. The urgent sound of footsteps running in corridors awakened a sudden dim memory for her and she felt real fear.
When he arrived, John of Bedford greeted her briefly before being ushered straight into the King’s room. Sinking heavily onto the chair at the bedside, he was deeply troubled to see how emaciated and hollow-eyed his brother had become in such a short time. ‘Well, Henry,’ he said as jovially as he could, forcing a broad smile, ‘what would you like to discuss? Are you sure you’re feeling up to it or would you rather leave things until you’re feeling a little better?’
‘I’m dying, John,’ said Henry through parched lips, ‘let’s not pretend otherwise.’ He raised his hand feebly to quell his brother’s loving denial. ‘Comfort my poor wife when I am gone. I cannot leave her much, the jewellery must be sold to pay off debts but she is provided for. Come, have you brought a scribe with you? Good. There are things I need to arrange and I must tell you what they are.’
With what little energy he could muster, the K
ing dictated a codicil to the will which had been drawn up before he sailed for France and before the birth of his son. The fact that there was now a male heir to the throne made the corrections imperative.
‘He must be known as the Prince of Wales,’ Henry insisted between laboured breaths, ‘he is the eldest son of the sovereign. It is my particular wish.’ The scribe made a note of the fact. Slowly and painfully but with deliberation, Henry went on to dictate his wishes for his son’s education and upbringing. His brother Humphrey of Gloucester was to be made responsible for the baby, guarding and protecting him in all things. The Prince’s household was to be run by Henry’s trusted friend Sir Walter Hungerford. John of Bedford was to oversee English interests in France.
During the ensuing days, Catherine spent hours lingering near sickroom, fanning her face in the oppressive heat, waiting to be summoned to her husband’s bedside. He had not yet asked for her but she wanted to be near at hand when he did.
Then, on the last day of August, she rose abruptly from her seat as a priest, clutching a rosary, emerged from the King’s room followed by John of Bedford, his eyes red-rimmed and swollen. He didn’t need to tell her what she already knew in her heart.
‘He’s dead?’
John nodded mutely.
‘And he never sent for me,’ she said in a dull voice.
The early days of September passed in a dim, grey muddle. Not that Catherine cared very much. She had been shocked by the sudden death of her sister then, with her husband’s death so soon afterwards, she had simply let other people take over her life. She did what she was told to do, she ate when food was put in front of her, and she tried to sleep when she went to bed but that was the hardest thing. The bed felt vast and lonely and that was when she missed Henry most of all, missed curling up against his broad back. She remembered how, in winter, she would warm her icy feet on the backs of his legs until he squealed in laughing protest before turning towards her, taking her in his arms, and warming her thoroughly. She smiled at those memories but her throat ached with longing for him and tears were never far away.
She tried to take an interest in arrangements for the funeral. John of Bedford had explained to her that, really, Henry must be taken home to England for his burial. His people would want to pay homage to him in his own country. It was unthinkable that he should be buried in France.
‘But, surely, that won’t be possible, it … it will take too long to convey him back to England!’ She couldn’t bring herself to say that the journey would take many weeks and that, in this heat, her husband’s corpse would surely soon begin to rot. John understood her hesitation and explained to her as kindly as he could that Henry’s organs had already been removed and given a Christian burial in a French graveyard. By now his body had been embalmed in aromatic herbs and balsam, wrapped in lengths of silk, and placed in a wooden coffin which had then been sealed inside another made of lead. It would safely make the journey to England, no matter how long it took.
In the second week of September, Catherine stood outside the door of the donjon, watching as the funeral cortège assembled for its slow, solemn journey across France. Several princes, lords, and knights of the royal household and four hundred men-at-arms would accompany Henry’s coffin on its long journey home to England. Suddenly she gasped, gripping John’s arm.
‘Henry!’ she cried. ‘It’s Henry. Look, John, look!’ She pointed to a figure lying on top of the coffin, dressed in Henry’s robes, wearing a crown and holding an orb and sceptre.
John caught her as her knees gave way and her body slumped, cursing himself for not having warned her of what she would see. It was an effigy, a manikin made of boiled leather, but from a distance it might have been her husband, back from the dead. Shaking uncontrollably, she covered her face with her hands, blotting out the image, as John put his arm around her shoulders to comfort her.
Catherine joined the funeral cortège later in the month, escorted by John of Bedford. By the second week of October, having made frequent stops for masses to be said for the dead king in churches and cathedrals all along the route, the long, bleak procession of mourners reached Calais and waited for suitable ships to convey them across the English channel.
It was in Calais that she received the news which, if she’d been honest with herself, she had been half-expecting for years. Nevertheless, it was news which nearly pushed her over the edge of reason. In a message sent with great haste from Paris she learned that, on October the twenty-first, her father, King Charles VI, had finally succumbed to his torment. Now her world really had come to an end, she had nothing to live for. There was too much death. Her sister, Michelle, had been taken from her too suddenly and, though they had seen little of each other as children and had never been very close, Catherine still felt a great sadness at her death. And now the only two men who had ever loved her were both dead. She had no husband, no father. Nothing.
She no longer even had the comforting presence of John of Bedford since, on hearing of the death of the French king, he had decided that he must stay on in France to represent England at the funeral and make certain that, in any public declaration of succession to the French throne, the French people would be left in no doubt that Catherine’s son, King Henry VI was now their sovereign. They must not expect to see the Dauphin Charles on the throne of France.
Death and decay seemed to be everywhere that October. The beauty of autumn leaves, turning red and yellow, falling to the ground in great colourful drifts to reveal the skeletal shapes of trees, was just another aspect of death for Catherine. In desolation, her world seemed to close in on her and her troubled mind painted pictures of anguish and grief as she slept. The horses returned to haunt her and the screaming children came again in the night.
She almost forgot the reason why she had, until now, always looked forward so much to this time of the year; but Guillemote had not forgotten. So when she came into the royal bedchamber to wake her mistress on the morning of October the twenty-seventh, she brought with her a small posy of autumn flowers, Michaelmas daisies, hawkbit, and a few late roses, to place on Catherine’s bedside table.
‘Happy birthday, Your Highness,’ she greeted her.
Catherine opened her eyes. ‘Happy birthday, Guillemote? I hardly think so.’ She blinked back sudden tears. ‘I’m twenty-one years old today and already my life is over.’
Guillemote was thoughtful. ‘My Lady,’ she said, ‘I believe I have been in your service long enough to presume to correct you occasionally, without fear of punishment.’
‘That is most impertinent of you, Guillemote,’ Catherine said, with a wry smile of affection for her friend.
‘Forgive me, Your Highness,’ Guillemote continued, ‘but I have been thinking. Bad things often come in threes and you have suffered three most distressing bereavements in just over three months. You can no longer be the three things you have been in the past. You can no longer be a sister to Michelle and you cannot be a wife to your husband nor yet a daughter to your father. So, on this birthday you must look forward to being a mother to your son. He is still a little baby and he is already a king but he will not be ready for kingship for many, many years. Until he is, he will need all your help and all your devotion. Today, on this birthday, the direction of your life must change.’
Catherine felt herself losing control, her lower lip trembling. ‘Guillemote,’ she said, ‘dear Guillemote. Your thorough lack of respect is very refreshing.’
It was then that the tears came, floods and torrents of tears, seeming to wash through her shuddering frame, sluicing away all the sorrow, all the bitterness and all the frustration of the months gone by. At first, Guillemote tried to comfort her but, wisely, she decided to let her mistress weep for all that she had lost in such a very short time.
Catherine remembered Guillemot’s words as she stood alone on the deck of the Trinity Royal, her eyes firmly fixed on the horizon. She was within sight of England and, as she watched the white cliffs rising steeply ou
t of the water, she knew that the reception she was about to face would be very different from the last time. Her gaze came to rest on the closely guarded catafalque which supported Henry’s coffin with its hideous boiled leather effigy of the King. Then she remembered that other homecoming, less than two short years ago when the people of Dover, in a frenzy of enthusiasm, had waded waist-deep into the freezing water to welcome them both, the living Monarch and his Lady, waving and shouting their greetings, jostling each other to get near the boat.
‘Long live the King!’ That tumultuous welcoming shout still seemed to echo in her memory as she looked at the people who now waited in dark, silent groups on the foreshore, watching as the heavy lead coffin was lowered on ropes and pulleys from the Trinity Royal and manoeuvred carefully onto the wooden jetty in the harbour mouth. Henry was back on English soil and the only sound that welcomed him was carried on the wind from the tower of the little church of St Mary-in-Castro, where a single bell tolled the death knell for the departed king.
Catherine was still the Queen of England and there was still a King Henry. But Catherine was now the Dowager Queen and her son was king of both England and France. He was barely ten months old.
Part Two
Owen
Maent yn dweud fy mod yn caru,
Lle nad wyf, mi allaf dyngu.
Yn lle ‘rwyf yn caru mwyaf
Y mae lleiaf sôn amdanaf.
People say I have a lover,
Who she is they can’t discover.
Though she holds my heart in tether
No one links our names together.
‘Maent yn dwedyd’ (‘They Say’) – an old Welsh folk song.
Chapter Nine
Windsor Castle, November 1422
‘Diawl!’ Owain cursed loudly as he knocked over the ink horn.
‘Clumsy devil!’ Maredydd jumped up from his seat. ‘Thank God there wasn’t much ink in it, it’s hardly spilled at all. Here, let me help you to clear it up. You’re going to have to do better than this if you want to impress old Hungerford.’
Root of the Tudor Rose Page 12