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

by Erickson, Carolly

  Every precaution was taken, every procedure in the long list of procedures drawn up by Thomas Cromwell observed. And yet there was an air of uneasiness, of nervousness about this pregnancy. The baby had to be a boy, a prince. And not only a boy, but a healthy, strong boy with powerful lungs and a robust, thriving body. He had to arrive hungry and noisy, Richards told me with a laugh. Not like the little princess, who though she lived, was a runt and did not clamor to be fed.

  Meanwhile the people, Chapuys told me, were reviving another old prophecy along with the one about the Mouldwarp. I remembered this prediction well—in fact I had once thought it must apply to me.

  A queen shall be crowned

  In the hall of the kings

  And the queen shall die.

  Anne had been crowned in the hall of the kings, just as I had. She might well be the one to die.

  But for the moment, she was surviving and felt the baby kicking within her. The midwives and the Pisan surgeon swore to this, and their assurance made Anne bolder than ever, Richards told me. She told all who would listen that God had led Henry to leave me and marry her. And that his clear purpose must have been for her to give the realm the prince I had not been able to bear. It made sense—but not to the crowds that gathered wherever Anne went and shouted insults and threats, and called her the queen who could not bear sons.

  “Do you know, Catherine, the guards that used to chase away all those who taunted Anne are nowhere to be found! The king has dismissed them.” So I was told by Francisco Phelipe my groom whose cousin Hernan was in the royal guard. “And Hernan says the king is going to spend the summer hunting, not going on progress with the queen.”

  As the spring advanced the thing I had been dreading most—next to some vengeful act Henry or Anne might carry out against me—came to the fore. Amid the doubt and turmoil about the future one thing had to be settled by law: the order of succession. And so it was. By statute Mary was disinherited; Anne’s children, born and as yet unborn, were declared heirs to the throne. And all of Henry’s subjects had to swear on oath to uphold this law.

  I refused. How could I not? I would not disinherit my own daughter, the rightful heir to her father’s throne. I would not abandon my own inheritance, the many long years I had spent in England as the bearer of the blood of Trastamara. This inheritance, my inheritance from my splendid heroic mother Isabella and my royal father Ferdinand, had been passed on to Mary, and would live on in her children in their turn.

  Henry sent a dozen royal commissioners to instruct me that I had no choice but to take the oath to uphold the heinous Act of Succession. When I refused, he sent an even larger and more solemn array of officials. These men informed me that there was no evading the oath, not for the highest born nobleman or woman or most exalted churchman or councilor. No one, absolutely no one, was exempt.

  Suddenly I was under siege. I was not allowed to see anyone or converse with anyone, not Mary, not my most trusted servants, not Ambassador Chapuys. Henry’s own occasional visits stopped abruptly. The comfort of the confessional was denied me, as was my old prie-dieu, brought from Spain long ago, where I knelt to say my prayers. I hardly need to add here that my prayers were redoubled in those fear-filled days. I had no idea what would happen, only that I knew I must do as my mother would have done in my place. She would never have taken the oath. She would have been steadfast.

  I was told that unless I took the oath my entire household would be dissolved, my servants denied me. Those of them who refused along with me would be severely punished. I would never see them again.

  Those closest to me, most faithful to me over the years, continued to refuse, out of loyalty to me. One by one I saw them respond to the officials’ cruel threats with stony silence. I can hardly write how proud I was of them, or how they strengthened and inspired me to remain stalwart in my own decision. I could not give in to the royal command if they did not.

  Then I heard that a great many others in the kingdom were refusing to obey, among them the revered John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester and the upright, uncompromising Thomas More. The moment had come, it seemed, for the best in the kingdom to rise up against Henry’s wrongs. To resist his wayward will, and follow their own consciences.

  Or rather, I should write, to follow our own consciences. For I felt that in that moment, each of us had to search our minds and hearts and do what those best guides in life told us to do.

  Inevitably, the day came when I was put to the ultimate test.

  I knew that those who refused the oath were being imprisoned. Some had died. Others were being tortured, or threatened with torture. Henry and his ministers were showing no mercy. Durham House was surrounded by soldiers and members of the royal guard. Again and again I was ordered to take the oath; again and again I refused.

  Then I was shut in a dim chamber, the only light a small window high up in one wall. I was given very little to eat or drink, but every hour I was instructed—indeed commanded—to take the oath. I had nothing to read, no comfort of any kind. I slept on the cold tile floor and ate at a wooden bench. Every day I commended my soul to God, thinking that it might be the day of my death.

  I cannot say for certain how many days I was confined in this way, and threatened with being shut away forever unless I obeyed the royal command.

  I prayed for a sign, for guidance. In my uncomfortable solitude, broken only by the coming and going of a single young serving girl, not one of those I knew well and trusted, I began to wonder whether I was being foolishly stubborn. Was I serving my own pride rather than following my conscience? Would I indeed be put to death, and would I die in vain, never to see Mary again or to live long enough to know my grandchildren? Had my life been a waste? I was glad that my mother did not live long enough to see me in my present state. I hoped I had not disgraced her name.

  Tormented in mind, my thoughts ever darker and my prayers less infused with hope in God’s mercy, I was visited by yet another cluster of royal officials. It was late in the day, their solemn faces were in shadow. I remember glancing upward toward the one small high window, praying for more light. Anything to make the walls seem less as if they were closing in around me.

  “Princess Dowager,” the leader of the delegation said when all the men had filed in and the heavy doors had been shut loudly behind them, “we have come to disperse your household. All your women have been locked in the cellar. Your physician, who is ill, has been sent to the friary and your confessor and apothecary will be put in the Tower dungeon, where they will be persuaded to tell us all they know of your wizardry against the queen.”

  I got to my feet, though unsteadily. I was dressed only in a loose woolen gown and shawl, my graying hair untidy—for I had no one to arrange it—and my hands without rings or bracelets. Around my neck I wore a gold cross bearing a relic of St. Lawrence. St. Lawrence the Martyr, who had been roasted alive.

  “I am no wizard, but the true queen of this land,” I said, my voice trembling despite my efforts to keep it strong. “I have done nothing to harm Mistress Anne.”

  One of the men slapped the leather bag he carried against a low table. “You will call the queen by her rightful name and title!”

  I was silent. I could feel my legs wobbling. I reached for the bedpost and held on.

  I realized that none of the men standing before me were royal councilors. Not a single face was recognizable to me. Henry had not sent his highest-ranking ministers to command me, only those most vehement and coarse.

  Another man spoke. “You will swear to uphold the statute!”

  “I will not.”

  More voices shouted their single demand. One added, “If you do not swear, you will be hanged. Hanged, do you understand?”

  “I will pray for the Lord’s mercy on my soul. But I will not swear.”

  I clung to the thick wooden bedpost. I was aware of its every crack and splinter.

  One of the men pulled out his short sword. “I assure you, madam, that you will not escape t
he king’s justice, should you continue in your obstinate refusal!” The voice was educated, cultivated. A student of the law, perhaps. Or an executioner in training. He had more to say.

  “You may have heard that prominent men of law and the church have refused to take the oath. They are being put to death as we speak.”

  I faltered. I nearly fell. No one put forth a hand to help me.

  “If you do not wish to have your servants suffer the same fate, you will obey in this and all other royal commands.”

  To this day I cannot say how it was that I found the strength to respond. But I did respond, and afterward, I felt, not weaker, but more empowered.

  “I will not.”

  The men began to murmur.

  “Then you will follow the chancellor and the Bishop of Rochester to the gibbet!” one of them shouted.

  I stood as straight as I could, and let go of the bedpost. “And which of you will be the hangman?”

  “That is not for you to know.”

  “Do you dare to hang me where all can see, and where the people will lament and mourn and curse the king? Or will you bring out your rope at midnight, in some foul alley, and do this thing in secret?”

  The men conferred among themselves. Then the boldest of them stepped forward, coming so close to me that his angry face was glaring down into mine, so close that I could see the throbbing veins at his temples.

  “Once more, Princess Dowager, on the king’s order, you will swear to uphold the statute!”

  I was silent. Guardsmen were called, and I was led down into the cellar, where I found my women in tears. They cried aloud at the sight of me, and we comforted one another as best we could for the rest of that long dark night.

  21

  I felt as though I had been spared a terrible fate and given another chance to live. There was only one reason Henry did not order me to be put to death, as he has so many others: my nephew Charles was at last gathering his forces to rescue me.

  Ambassador Chapuys brought me word that hundreds of skilled fighting men were being assembled in Spain, hundreds more mercenaries from Andalus and from as far away as Florence and Brescia hired to follow the imperial banner and invade England. England: that renegade land ruled by the tyrant King Henry (as he was increasingly seen) where the Holy Father and his holy church were cast aside and the king’s own will and desire made supreme.

  Ships were being assembled in the harbors of San Sebastian and Bilbao and Santander to carry the soldiers across the rough waters to the Dover coast, loaded with provisions to feed them and weaponry to arm them. I was assured by the ambassador that my nephew was bringing together the largest force of men and arms ever seen, and that he possessed more than enough gold and silver in his treasury to keep them equipped and paid for years. I was also assured that Henry had very few ships of his own to resist the vast invading fleet and turn it back, nor could he quickly mount any sort of defense on land. He relied on his coastal fortresses (I had often gone with him to visit them, and knew how proud he was of their strong walls) and the men who guarded them. Yet it had been so long since hostile ships in any number had arrived in English harbors that the invaders were sure to succeed in their conquest.

  “He sleeps badly at night, for fear of the Spanish soldiers,” the ambassador told me. “His spirit is not at rest. He fears the wrath of the divine—as well he should.”

  Chapuys had a small army of his own—an army of spies. He paid servants in the royal household to inform him of the king’s eating and sleeping habits, how often he sent for his physician and apothecary, when and how often he howled in pain at the ulcer on his leg and what abuse he hurled at his grooms and ushers. In short, all he said and did and how he spent his days. Nothing was overlooked, the ambassador insisted, by these vigilant informers who were well paid for their observations.

  And they were of one mind in this: that Henry was profoundly afraid. He could find no relief from his fears, no ease or peace.

  Certainly there was none to be had from his consort. Anne taunted him, shamed him, goaded him past endurance—and from what the ambassador was hearing, her ceaseless prods and goads were even worse than the prickings of Henry’s own conscience. He endured it all, and at times exploded in rage. But his very rage caused his blood to pound and the pain in his leg to worsen, and his head to ache, so that in the end he suffered more than ever.

  Anne’s taunts and criticisms were only one source of strain. The clamoring of his critics was growing louder. My own plight and that of our daughter Mary aroused much aggrieved talk.

  “Your very own former gentleman usher, Griffith Richards, confided to me that if he were only twenty years younger he would gladly join the emperor’s army,” Chapuys told me. “He says the king’s gone mad with all his ill fortune, and his fear of worse to come. He’s quite out of his mind.”

  Hearing this, I remembered how Henry’s father had acted very much like a madman, terrifying others in his wild raging and punishing his son, young Henry, far more cruelly than he deserved. My long-dead first husband Arthur had been his favorite, Henry was the son he despised. I saw it clearly, and resented him for it, even if he was my father-in-law and king of the realm. Now, it seemed, the prince that had been punished had grown into the image of his cruel father.

  “They say he is an angry bull, pawing the ground and snorting, lowering his head to charge,” according to the ambassador. “Whoever resists him is sure to be gored and trampled.”

  I knew well that Henry could be bullheaded, and that he left in his wake a path of ruin and even of blood, as he had shown only too clearly by the recent executions. But I could hardly imagine that he had no feeling whatever for our daughter. And Anne had not yet given him a son.

  In fact, Anne herself was said to be suffering. According to Chapuys’s informers among Anne’s waiting maids, she was being tormented just then by stories she was hearing about Henry’s pursuit of other women. She worried that he had tired of her, that he had deserted her and would never return to her bed. One tale after another gave her nightmares: it was whispered that Henry was weary of dark-haired, dark-eyed women such as Anne and sought a blond mistress; that he kidnapped and ravished young girls for his pleasure; that he boasted about being able to possess any girl or woman who caught his eye and aroused his lust.

  “She is too old and too dark,” he had said of Anne, and the words stung. On hearing them Anne dismissed the youngest of her maids of honor and those with the fairest hair and whitest skin. I had to remind myself that I too was more fair than dark—or at least I had been when I was a young girl and first came to Henry’s bed. Did she suppose, even for a moment, that Henry missed my company, my body beside him in bed?

  We women are prone to strange fancies, as men often say to our detriment. When we are frightened, or threatened, we imagine all sorts of things. I was sure Anne was no exception to this truth. Events were to prove that I was not so far wrong.

  * * *

  Henry went on progress that summer, despite the messages from Spain and the imperial lands that an invasion force was being readied. He traveled with his officers and servants from one country house to another as he usually did, as if in defiance of the danger from abroad.

  But as Francisco Phelipe’s brother Hernan had predicted, his intent was to hunt, not to spend days and nights in feasting and revelry, and Anne did not accompany him He moved on every few days, following reports of where the swiftest and strongest harts and bucks were to be found and taking Henry Fitzroy with him. Anne, her belly growing larger (according to reports), was left to go her own worrisome way, upset by stories of Henry’s conquests and feeling—so I was told—more and more isolated and alone, her fears increasing.

  It was clear to us all that Henry had decided to try to turn the ailing, weak boy Bessie Blount had presented to him fifteen or so years earlier into a fit heir to the throne—in case Anne was unable to provide one. By all accounts, young Fitzroy was well-meaning and as sweet as a girl, though hi
s arms and legs were as thin as dry sticks and his voice—oh, his voice!—was shrill and high. As everyone knows, boys’ voices turn to men’s when the boys reach the age of fifteen or earlier, and Fitzroy’s still had not grown lower. I had heard the grooms of Henry’s chamber snicker that it never would, that he belonged among the castrati, the Italian boys who sang so beautifully, their voices soaring higher and purer than the voices of women.

  Be that as it may, Henry seemed determined to toughen his bastard son and make a man of him. This alarmed Anne, who saw the child in her womb being deprived of his rights (always assuming her child was a prince, and not another princess) by the son of Bessie Blount.

  Then word reached us all at Durham House that Henry Fitzroy had suffered an accident. He had never been a skilled rider like his father, who seemed able to make any mount do his bidding and even appeared to be genuinely fond of each of his horses and to be able to communicate with them. Many a time I have heard Henry speaking softly to his horses while stroking their muzzles, saying again and again, “So ho, so ho, my minion,” and hearing them whicker and snuffle in response. Henry Fitzroy lacked this talent and was even said to be afraid of his more spirited mounts, unable to curb a horse when it shied. Horses sense fear, all riders know this; my own Griselda, the gentlest filly ever born, knew when a frightened rider was on her back and became uneasy.

  The news of Fitzroy’s accident set everyone talking—and speculating. It was said that a new horse he was riding threw him, and when he fell he broke one of his stick-thin legs and injured his back. He could have died, had one of his grooms not been there to break his fall and another to catch the maddened horse and calm him.

  What caused all the talk was that the new horse had been given him by Anne. Or rather, by someone Anne paid to buy, in secret, a costly, unruly Barbary stallion and make a gift of him to the king’s son. Anne wanted Fitzroy to die.