The Spanish Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon

by Erickson, Carolly

  She made no pretense of politeness. Gone was all trace of the simpering coyness she had shown when with the emperor. Instead she spoke plainly, and seemingly without evasion, of what concerned us most.

  “Charles has been taking counsel with experts in the law of the church,” she began. “Since I am always at his side, I hear what is said between them. Unlike you, Catalina, I was not tutored in Latin and Greek. I am not learned. But I have an attentive ear, and I understand much of what is said in these talks. I understand more, I’m sure, than Charles imagines.”

  I could well believe what she said. Maria Juana was shrewd and intelligent—and when it came to her own interests, quite ruthless. Or so I was discovering.

  She shook out her skirts and took a few steps, heedless of the strict etiquette that she had learned to follow when she was a member of my household. Then, she would never have dared turn her back on me, or spoken to me without my permission; now, she moved where she liked, said what she liked, and flaunted her freedom. I saw Griffith Richards wince at the sight. Yet he remained silent, sensing that I did not want him to object or interfere.

  “Before long you will be replaced as queen,” Maria Juana was saying as she paced. “King Henry and his lawyers will use every argument they know to bring this about. One of their arguments will be that in marrying you, King Henry offended against the divine law. In the Book of Leviticus it is written that it is wrong for a man to marry his brother’s widow. If he does, he faces divine punishment. The marriage is condemned. There will be no children.

  “You were married to King Henry’s brother Arthur, and then, after Arthur died, to Henry. Your marriage to Henry is cursed. Therefore King Henry must find another wife. One not tainted by a former marriage to his brother.”

  Maria Juana looked keenly at me, to gauge my reaction. I remained quiet. I had heard this same line of argument often before, from my husband and from my own confessor, each time one of my babies died, or I miscarried.

  “Yet if Arthur was too weak or too young to take your virginity, then you were never truly married to him, and once he died, you were free to marry Henry just as if you were an untouched young girl.” She paused, then added, “Only a few of the women of your household know the truth about your marriage to Arthur. I am one of them.”

  Her words left me shaking with anger. How dare Maria Juana presume to judge the soundness of my brief, sad marriage to Arthur? To be sure, he was a thin, weak young man and I a virgin when we were wed. Beyond that, only Arthur and I knew what had passed between us once we were husband and wife. And Arthur had long since left me a widow.

  “I assure you, Maria Juana, that I know the truth—and unlike you, I speak the truth. You say whatever suits you, whatever benefits you. I say what I know to be true, whether it benefits me or not.”

  At this she laughed in derision.

  “Surely, Catalina, you are not so naïve. Everyone serves their own advantage in what they say, whether they realize it or not.”

  But she had more to say. And in saying it she remained cool and detached. It was clear to me that my half-sister had made bargains before, and profitable bargains, to judge from her rise in wealth and possessions. In return for much gold and other riches, she had traded her body, her birthright as King Ferdinand’s daughter, and her ability to keep and reveal secrets of the court. And now she was on the threshold of making the greatest bargain of her life: trading a precious secret she knew concerning my marriage to Arthur for the high honor and position of wife to Emperor Charles and mother to his children.

  “Here is what I propose,” Maria Juana was saying. “You, Catalina, are in hopes of preventing King Henry from setting you aside. I wish to marry Emperor Charles. We can accommodate one another, if you are willing. We can reach a bargain.”

  Skeptical, I asked what the terms of this bargain would be.

  Before answering me Maria Juana looked over at my gentleman usher, who continued to stand all but motionless at the doorway of my apartments, as if to block Maria Juana from leaving. His expression was impassive but I noticed that his face was growing more and more red—a sure sign of vexation.

  “If you should try to prevent the emperor from making me his consort,” Maria Juana said in a low voice, barely above a whisper, “then I will reveal what I know of your wedding night with Prince Arthur. If you offer no objection, I will keep what I know to myself.”

  It was as though a blow had struck me, I felt such a shock. So she meant to lie, to distort the truth of what had happened on that long-ago wedding night, and indeed on all the nights of my brief marriage to poor unfortunate Arthur. She meant to betray me, and the memory of dear Arthur, who knew so well what his own weaknesses were, in order to become Charles’s wife.

  I looked at Maria Juana with newfound loathing. She was acting entirely out of spite. She had no need of wealth—she was already wealthy. She knew, better than anyone, that I had not caused her mother’s death or harmed her in any way. She had lived in my household, watched me in my daily actions, observed my heartaches and triumphs. She had no reason to want to harm me—other than envy. I was the daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, a royal princess and now a queen. She was my father’s bastard, with no claim to his royal name or title. It was this vital difference between us that made her want to cause me harm. And she would surely do so—if she could.

  “I welcome any truthful words you may say about my ill-omened marriage to beloved Prince Arthur. I pray daily for his soul. As to any lies you may tell, may God preserve you from eternal punishment!” I felt my cheeks grow warm, my voice rose and it was all I could do to prevent myself from slapping Maria Juana.

  It was all too much for Griffith Richards. He could not remain silent any longer.

  “Brazen strumpet!” he burst out. “Wanton worthless daughter of a pig!”

  But Maria Juana had already slithered past him and escaped into the corridor beyond.

  * * *

  Nothing was as it had been.

  It was as if Maria Juana was a bird of ill omen, whose appearing was a warning of dire things to come. Sailors see such birds from their ships, and quake with fear, knowing for certain that fierce storms and high waves will soon be upon them. In the same way I began to tremble with fear, and sleep badly or not at all, waiting for the first of the storms to arrive.

  It did not take long.

  “Traitor!” Henry bellowed on the day he learned that my nephew Charles had broken his word, and was not going to marry our daughter Mary. He howled in his rage and shook his fist. “Faithless cur! How dare he betray me!” He closeted himself with Cardinal Wolsey and I could hear more shouts of rage from the chamber where they were.

  At the time I thought little of the fact that my husband did not include me in his talk with the cardinal that day, though later on my exclusion did seem significant to me. I see now that Henry was turning away, not only from me, but from his longtime reliance on Spain and her allies. Instead he had begun to fear them, as he had once feared King Francis.

  Henry felt deeply aggrieved and betrayed—and in truth I did too. I had trusted my nephew to protect me and defend my interests as he had promised to do, come what may. And that meant making my beloved daughter Mary his wife, so that she too would be protected and defended. I never imagined that he would actually marry Maria Juana, no matter how potent her wiles. Her influence over him would be that of a persuasive mistress and nothing more.

  Nothing more, that is, if the storms did not worsen.

  But worse was yet to come.

  For Charles was bent on making war, and for that he needed money—a great deal of money—and a formidable army. The army was already his to command. Our Spanish soldiers are well known to be the most feared pikemen and mounted warriors in all Christendom, only the Swiss can be compared with them when it comes to defeating the enemy—any enemy. When my nephew became King of Spain he had a force of thousands of armed men, superbly trained by the Great Captain himself, Gonzalo Fe
rnandez de Cordoba, whose men at arms my mother had relied on in her long fight against the Moors.

  As to the money Charles needed, it was his to command as well—if only he married his cousin, Isabella of Portugal. Her dowry of a million crowns was a temptation he found impossible to resist, and so he married her, and in less than a year, she gave him a son and heir.

  He married her, and broke his word to Henry and to me. But the wars he waged made him ever stronger, ever more feared, and left those who had relied on him all but powerless to oppose him. In the end he became master of much of Italy, where he fought with the French and won.

  Having crushed his rebellious imperial subjects in Flanders, he ordered his captains to march southward, into Milan and Lombardy, where he made King Francis his prisoner, and took the king’s children hostage—which I thought was unspeakably cruel—and ordered them sent to Spain.

  Nor was this the full extent of his audacity; he dared to threaten, and then to assault, the citadel of Christendom, the holy city of Rome.

  * * *

  Letters and messages began reaching my dresser Maria de Caceres from her two young cousins Rosa and Angela who were novices in the Convent of the Poor Clares in Borgo San Sepolcro. They wrote of trying to escape from the city when the first imperial soldiers began running through the streets, shouting threats and assaulting friars and nuns, seizing priests and bellowing “Pay or die!”

  “I’ll never forget that first terrible day,” Angela wrote. “They were setting fires everywhere, shooting off their guns, making us all terrified. We had no way to escape them. We went down into the cellars where the sacramental wine was kept, but they had been there before us, and drunk all the wine. We tried to hide from them, we prayed that their commanders would stop them. But there were no commanders, no orders. Only confusion and hatred. We heard them cursing the Holy Father and all the priests and nuns—only they called us devils and whores.

  “They smashed the doors of the church where Father Michael was saying mass. They rushed in and attacked him. He fell. Then when he lay helpless, pleading for his life, there before the altar, they cut off his head.”

  “We heard that the Holy Father, Pope Clement, had taken refuge in the fortress of the Castel Sant’Angelo,” Rosa wrote, “but that did not prevent the terrible mayhem from continuing. The cruel soldiers dragged the sisters from their convents, not sparing the oldest of them, and raped them and beat them to death with sticks. They stole everything of value, even silver chalices and relics of the saints and martyrs.”

  Cardinal Wolsey had informants in the holy city and they sent messages to him filled with stories of damage and ruin. According to these informants, precious papal records were destroyed, documents burned, entire libraries thrown onto bonfires. Works of art were ripped with swords, graves of the holy martyrs desecrated, reliquaries made into chamber pots. Even altar cloths and vestments were stolen.

  “The soldiers maimed or killed everyone and everything without mercy,” Angela wrote to my dresser Maria. “Even the mothers in labor, and young children. I saw babies stuck on the sharp point of a lance, and children barely old enough to walk thrown against the stone walls and killed. There is blood everywhere, all of Rome is in mourning. If only you could have seen the faces of those men, the soldiers, filled with hate and eager to destroy all that lay in their path. They were pure hatred, pure evil.”

  “May God forgive them for what they have done,” Rosa wrote. “I know I never shall.”

  I read and reread all the letters, shaking my head in wonderment and praying for the souls of those who were lost. All the time I kept thinking, surely it was not my nephew Charles who loosed those savages, those haters of the church, on Rome. I wanted to believe that the men had simply gone berserk and been maddened by all the blood, all the confusion and terror. I had heard of soldiers overcome with fury when their comrades were killed. Then, thinking only of avenging the deaths of their friends and brothers in arms, they struck out blindly.

  “It is the way of war,” my mother told me sadly. “Fighting, even for the highest and best of causes, creates tragedies. Losses. Men die needlessly.”

  Yet the thought that it was Charles, my sister’s son, who was encouraging his men to kill and destroy, not only other men, but families and their shelters, their servants and even their animals ate away at me, day after day, until I could not bear to think of the holy city of Rome any longer.

  “Babylon the great has fallen!” I heard one of my husband’s councilors say to another. “And a good thing too. The Roman cesspit has been draining us of money for far too long. Perhaps now we can see where the real demons are, not in hell but in Rome!”

  Another added, “I only wish they had killed all the apothecaries. The makers of poisons. They were the true masters of the College of Cardinals. If you can’t overcome your rivals with swords and pikes, use poison! That was always the way of Italy, of the church of Rome. Poison!”

  Hearing these words made me shudder. I had heard rumors of bishops and archbishops who died unnatural deaths, unexplained deaths. Was my nephew, my poor mad sister Juana’s son, responsible for those as well?

  In those sorrowful days I felt as if the world had been turned upside down. There was much talk at court about a battle far to the east, in a place I had never heard of called Mohacs, where an army of Turks had killed the King of Hungary. The cardinal shook his head in worry over this battle. “The Turk will overwhelm us all, in the end,” he muttered to himself. “The Infidel will triumph.”

  So much had gone awry, the order of the world was in tatters. Maria Juana had indeed been a bird of ill omen. Then the worst storm of all arrived and my own small world was shattered. My husband had been struck by Cupid’s arrow, the dart of love.

  A poison dart, as it proved. For his beloved was the sullen, thin-lipped daughter of Elizabeth Boleyn, the prideful, willful girl who had been sent away from the Archduchess Margaret’s court for the sin of lust. Anne Boleyn, whose father Thomas Boleyn had just been appointed Lord Rochford and whose lovely dark eyes and unchaste ways had captured my husband’s obdurate heart.

  * * *

  At first I found it hard to believe. Elizabeth Boleyn’s defiant, rebellious daughter who had shown me her scars, the marks of her beatings, and said, “Here is my marriage portion.”

  She had come back to our court several years earlier, and had been appointed one of my many maids of honor—far from the most alluring or beautiful of them, to be sure, but much improved from the unhappy, unappealing girl she had been when I advised her mother to send her to the court of Queen Claude.

  Henry had named one of his ships the Anne Boleyn, as he had another vessel the Mary Boleyn, for Anne’s bothersome sister, and another, as I have said, the Catherine Pleasaunce, for me. I should have realized that Anne was important to him, as he was sparing in his ship names and only christened a ship with the name of a woman he desired. I ought to have realized that his appetite was wide and deep, and his dissatisfaction just then very great.

  Instead I paid Anne little attention, other than to notice that she danced well, and was tall, and could rarely keep still, she had so much energy. She complained about the peacocks that wandered through the palace grounds, she said they woke her with their cries in the early morning. She had a vicious greyhound named Grisaud that bit anyone it disliked and growled and bared its teeth at Griffith Richards. And there was another thing I noticed: at times Anne stared at me rudely, though when that happened and I looked back at her she quickly lowered her eyes.

  I confess that I was paying a great deal more attention, in those disjointed days, to the betrayal of my nephew Charles and the ugly assaults of his soldiers in Rome. I lamented the destruction of the papal city when an equally devastating assault was being made on my marriage, my family.

  Whisperings had begun, all of them having to do with Anne and my husband. It was being said that Anne had already borne Henry a child, or even two children, and that throughout the huntin
g season—when Anne’s presence was not required at court—he kept her in a small hunting lodge in the forest near Esher, where he could visit her at his pleasure, and where she could bear his children in secrecy and hide them away, out of sight.

  It was all absurd, to be sure. Had Anne been great with child she could not have hidden her swollen belly, beanstalk-thin and lean as she was. I and others in my household would have been aware of her condition, and its furtive cause.

  Yet the whisperings persisted, and became mutterings, then shouted insults.

  “Whore! Harlot! Jezebel!”

  Anne could hardly leave the palace, or walk on the lawns, without hearing the abuse.

  She had a small flat writing desk covered in gold that she kept in her storage chest at the foot of her bed. One day by chance I saw her lifting the desk out and placing it on a table by the window in the room she shared with two of the other maids of honor. The greyhound was lying at her feet. She was preparing to write a letter, and was sharpening a goose-quill pen with a knife. So intense was her concentration that at first she did not hear me come into the room, but went on with what she was doing.

  When the quill was sharpened she took a letter from the pocket of her gown and began reading it.

  I recognized my husband’s handwriting—and the imprint of the royal seal. At the bottom of the letter were two hearts intertwined.

  I gasped, the greyhound growled, and Anne, startled, turned and saw me.

  In an instant she was out of her chair and standing, with her back to the desk, glaring angrily at me.

  “I want a household of my own!” she cried, her voice quavering slightly. “I want eighty serving men and twenty women to attend me!”

  Instead of reacting angrily I moved toward the table and, keeping my voice low and even, complimented her on her gold writing desk.