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

by Erickson, Carolly

  Enraged, Henry was quick to find out the truth. According to Ambassador Chapuys, the horse dealer was caught, beaten and forced to confess what he knew. Bleeding and weeping, terrified of Henry’s vengeance, he admitted that Anne had sent him money and jewels in return for his gift of the stallion to Fitzroy. Wringing his hands and begging for the king’s mercy, he was not executed but instead was sent, in chains, to be an oarsman on a ship Henry was outfitting to sail westward, to search for gold in the New World. All this I learned from Griffith Richards and the grooms in the stables at Durham House.

  In my view it was Anne who should have been punished, but she still carried the king’s child in her belly. That child was her protection, and she knew it. She would do anything, it seemed, to promote her unborn son’s right to the throne—if the child was indeed a son.

  Meanwhile I was afraid for Mary’s safety. Anne feared Mary, that was certain. She had been heard to say, more than once, “She is my death and I am hers,” and now that we all knew she had made an attempt to kill Fitzroy we had no doubt that she wanted to remove Mary as well.

  But for the moment, in midsummer, Anne was distracted by Henry’s dalliances with other women and the remarks he made about her being too old and too dark to attract him. At first I paid little attention to any of this, knowing Henry as I did and aware that he was accustomed to saying disparaging things (as he often had to me during our long marriage) and to seeking out new women to charm and seduce. But given Anne’s condition, and her heightened fears, I wondered whether the present circumstances might give me just the opportunity I had been praying for, my chance to regain my place at Henry’s side.

  I sent a message to my trusted friend Lady Wingfield to say that I had come across a remarkable aid to making my face look youthful again. I told her how I treated my complexion with lemon juice three times a day and then applied the costly cream called dead fire, a precious substance that erased all the lines around my mouth and eyes and the pouches and scars and age spots that made me look like an old woman. If only I had known about this remarkable ointment when I was younger, I told her, I could have preserved my youth intact all these years. As it was, I seemed to be growing more youthful and more lovely each time I smoothed on the dead fire; the years were falling away and I felt beautiful, even though I would soon be an old woman of fifty summers.

  I felt certain that Lady Wingfield would tell Anne of my discovery, and that Anne, feeling the sharp sting of Henry’s rejection, would want to try it for herself. And indeed everything I said about the potent cream was true; it did indeed wipe away every blemish and wrinkle from a woman’s skin—but it did much more, as I learned from the surgeon Henry brought to court to aid, if needed, in the delivery of Anne’s child.

  Luis de la Borda had indeed studied at Pisa, and was renowned for his ability to assist at difficult births. But he was Aragonese, not Pisan, as I discovered when Ambassador Chapuys brought him to Durham House to pay his respects to me. And he instructed me in the use of dead fire.

  He meant well, to be sure. He was sympathetic to me, not only as a fellow Aragonese and the daughter of the great Queen Isabella, but because of my plight as the discarded wife of the king. He believed that he was offering me a chance to restore my lost beauty—which had never been outstanding—and fend off the deepest wrinkles that arrive with age. He cautioned me not to use too much of the remarkable cream he gave me to try or it might burn my skin. I was cautious; I spread some on the tail of a marmoset I kept in a cage, a sad-faced, fearful creature that spent its mournful days watching the comings and goings of my servants and now and then pelting them with bits of orange peel.

  At first the cream seemed to have no effect. But then the marmoset began baring its teeth and screeching, running in frantic circles around the cage. I called for Francisco Phelipe and told him to wipe the animal clean, which he did.

  “The tail is beautiful,” he told me. “Smooth and without blemish. But the smell is terrible. And the poor creature’s heart pounds more loudly than the royal drummers at an execution.”

  I have no excuse whatever for what I did in passing on news of the wonder-working dead fire to Lady Wingfield, knowing she would tell Anne about it. I have asked for forgiveness, I have prayed to be free of a spirit of revenge. But I must admit (how could I not?) that I wished Anne harm. I truly felt that she deserved punishment for what she did to Henry Fitzroy and what she no doubt wished to do to Mary.

  I am at fault. But even now I confess that I burned with a desire for vengeance. I burned just as fiercely as my marmoset did when the dead fire ate away at his tail.

  Besides, Anne had only herself to blame for what happened. I knew that she would be strongly tempted to try the dead fire, especially after learning from Lady Wingfield that I was looking more youthful because of it and that I was more than content with its effects. Anne was never moderate or cautious in anything she did. When she insisted that Lady Wingfield demand my entire supply of the precious cream, and when having gotten it she spread it immoderately over her swollen cheeks and chin and lined forehead, she ignored any thought of caution and soon, like my marmoset, she became frantic and began screaming in pain.

  Lady Wingfield did her best to rub away the cream, but Anne, maddened as my poor monkey had been, was beside herself with burning irritation.

  “It did lighten her skin a little,” Lady Wingfield told me the following day, when the whole ordeal was over and Anne’s entire household had been restored to a semblance of peace. “But her teeth are black and her breath smells as though she had swallowed the outscourings of an entire butcher shop. I never did smell anything so rancid! If the king were with us, instead of stag hunting in heaven knows where, he would make sure to stay as far from Anne as he possibly could.”

  * * *

  I prayed for forgiveness, as I have said. I prayed for deliverance from Henry’s anger. I prayed for a sign.

  And then the sign came.

  We expected Anne to take her chamber to await the birth of her child soon after St. Swithin’s Day but the holy day came and went and still she did not withdraw.

  Days passed, then weeks. There were questions, murmurs. Had the Great Whore given birth in secret to another Little Whore instead of a prince and was she hiding the truth in order to avoid Henry’s anger? Ambassador Chapuys, Griffith Richards, Lady Wingfield and all those concerned about me and about Mary waited eagerly for news. What could have happened?

  Then the midwives and the surgeon left the country house where Anne was staying, saying only that there was no announcement to make about Anne’s condition.

  “If you ask me,” Lady Wingfield said when she came to Durham House, “there never was a child. Or if there was, she lost it very early on, and was too frightened to admit it.”

  I never knew for certain what was true and what was gossip, or whether (as I feared during my sleepless nights) her health declined because of the dead fire. One thing alone was clear: she had not given Henry a prince. With summer’s end the court returned to the capital, Henry brought home his trophies from the hunt, Fitzroy limped on his injured leg that never seemed to heal and tended to hold his hand to his painful back with every step he took. The summer’s follies and mischances were over. And my nephew Charles, once he heard the welcome news that there was no prince to succeed to Henry’s throne, decided not to invade England until the following year, when the weather warmed and the French might be persuaded to join him.

  * * *

  Anne was said to be getting fat. She was stuffing herself with comfits, fruit and nut candies and licorice-root sweets. She slept badly at night and had nothing to do during the day, not even look after her small daughter who had nursemaids and laundresses, footmen and grooms and even her own almoner to fill her every need.

  It was said Anne rarely held her child, and when she did, she wept as if she could not stop. Anne hated the sight of Mary and avoided Henry Fitzroy even though he was married to her cousin, and thus was part of the pow
erful Howard family—in addition to being the king’s son.

  Rumors continued to swirl through the court and to reach me at Durham House; rumors about Henry who was said to be enamored of a young blond girl who he kept in a hunting lodge, hoping that she would agree to wed him and bear him a son. When Anne learned that he had told this girl that he had been “struck with the dart of love” (the same words he had used years earlier to woo Anne herself) and that he would not eat or sleep until the girl agreed to become his mistress, Anne raved and shrieked (so Lady Wingfield told me) and swore that she would have the girl sent away. Meanwhile she continued to devour her favorite comfits, and to plot her revenge.

  So all stood as the new year opened. Henry was ignoring Anne, and little Elizabeth, and attempting to arrange a marriage for Mary with the son of King Francis. My nephew Charles was pitting his powerful armies against the Turks in far-off Africa—though Ambassador Chapuys assured me that if at any time Henry threatened me or made me suffer and fear for my life, the emperor would send his troops immediately to defend me.

  As it turned out, I had little to fear from Henry; it was Anne who had become my deadliest enemy—and Mary’s.

  There was a visionary in Kent, known as Friar Gawen but in truth no friar at all but a common thief who in his youth had languished long in the pillory for stealing his master’s oxen. The people of Kent revered him, though as I was to discover, Anne gave him money to invent his visions. She paid him to say that he had had a revelation that Anne could not bear the king a son while I lived, nor could Anne’s daughter Elizabeth thrive while Mary lived.

  We were at great risk of being killed.

  Friar Gawen drew crowds with his ranting and his tales of being awakened by an angel who told him to get down on his knees and prepare to hear divine messages. For a time the Kentish folk were in awe of his visions and his heavenly voices, and even Henry was so afraid of him that he shut him away in Penshurst Castle, where he predicted that soon many monks and even a cardinal of the church would die at Henry’s order. (How he knew this I cannot imagine, but as it happened he was right.)

  The friar was more mad than holy—and more greedy than mad—but his visions and voices spread fear, especially after Henry began ordering harsh punishments of monks and priests who opposed the immense changes he was making in the English church, depriving the Holy Father in Rome of all authority and putting himself, King Henry, at the head of all.

  It was a spectacle of horror that spring, the spring of my fiftieth year, as one by one those who refused to swear loyalty to the king instead of to the Holy Father in Rome as head of the church were brought to their deaths. I was ordered brought to Tyburn and compelled to watch, though from a distance, as the first group of monks, all of them wearing their robes, all of them thin and weak from fasting, were led out to be hanged.

  The crowd that gathered to watch the executions was large and greatly dismayed. How dare King Henry add this sacrilege to his long list of sins, that he should order holy men to their deaths? Few in the crowd were bold enough to voice their criticisms aloud; they knew well enough what punishment would follow if they did. But they were in anguish all the same.

  Though ordered by the hangmen to stop their praying, the condemned monks continued to repeat the familiar words of the Lord when he prayed for his persecutors and asked for them to be forgiven. The starkness of those holy words, the thin chests and gaunt faces of the monks when their robes were stripped away, their unflinching offering up of their bodies made many in the crowd weep and add their own prayers.

  That the cruel hangmen plunged their knives into the men’s thin bellies and drew out their bowels while they still lived, causing a great stench and forcing many of the onlookers to retch and choke added to the horror. People sopped up the red gore in their handkerchiefs, and kissed the bloody ground, and afterward, when the men’s severed hands and feet were borne away to be nailed to the city gates, they kissed these relics as well, showing their reverence for those the king had treated with such barbarity.

  Not long afterward an even larger crowd gathered on Tower Hill to do reverence to the frail, elderly Bishop Fisher, who during his imprisonment had been named a cardinal of the church by the Holy Father Paul III. As soon as he emerged from the chapel it was clear to all those who were there to watch him die—really to honor him—that he was far too ill and feeble to walk unaided. He had to be helped to climb the steps to the scaffold, his unkempt white hair all but covering his wrinkled cheeks. Yet throughout the agony of his punishment he looked resolute, stern, and as strong as a much younger man, or so I was assured by those who recounted his suffering to me afterward. And when his severed head was mounted on Tower Bridge, it was said that his face resembled the face of a much younger man—as if he had found his youth renewed amid his suffering.

  No cardinal of the Roman Church had ever been executed in England. Pope Paul declared the realm to be accursed of God, and called for a holy war against it.

  Then, as if in response, rain began to pour down, heavy rain, day after day, flooding the Tower courtyards and the gallows at Tyburn, ruining the crops in the fields, filling the Thames until it overflowed its banks and washed away boats and docks, shiploads of Flemish cloth and English wool, wrecking the king’s sport and rotting the heads of the condemned traitors that grinned down, black and stinking, from their heights on Tower Bridge.

  22

  I coughed all summer long and had a rheum in my chest from the constant rain and cold. It rained, as I have said, not only for forty days and forty nights but until the first frosts and even after that. Many people feared the rain would never stop, but would sweep all before it, until the Lord’s vengeance had been accomplished and all life came to an end. So I told Ambassador Chapuys when he was finally allowed to see me in my new residence, Kimbolton Castle, where I was taken when I fell ill.

  We laughed about this—Chapuys brought a jester with him who made fun of those who feared the world’s end, and I could not help but be amused—yet I continued to cough and sneeze and the medicines given to me were not much help in making me well again.

  I drank wine to ease the rheum in my chest, and my surgeon bled me and gave me a purgative. Yet the pains I felt in my stomach by summer’s end were much worse than my cough. I was not able to eat much and slept hardly at all; when I did fall asleep I was awakened almost at once by a feeling as if a clawed hand had gripped my belly and would not let it go.

  My spirits sank whenever I looked in the pier glass and saw my pale, gaunt cheeks and called for Maria de Caceres to bring me powdered ochre to redden them. I hardly recognized my wrinkled, blue-veined hands with their long thin fingers; my shoulders were bony and my stomach so flat it almost disappeared beneath my ribs. I knew it was the constant cold that caused this, the cold and the rain. When the frosts began my bedchamber was icy cold, and my blankets thin.

  I had not been allowed to bring my apothecary Juan de Soto to Kimbolton. His assistant, young Philip Grenacre, was well meaning but far from fully trained in the lore of medicines and philtres and still had much to learn, as I had often been told. I would rather Ambassador Chapuys had brought a seasoned apothecary with him than a jester! But then, as the ambassador told me in subdued tones, Henry had refused to give him permission to see me at all for many months, and he felt he could not make further demands.

  Still, I told him I wanted to move to a warmer and healthier place. The decayed old bedchamber I slept in at Kimbolton was dark and small, the floors sagged and creaked and the old stone walls were chinked by gaps that let in the cold, rainy air. The furnishings looked and smelled as though they had not been cleaned or changed in a very long time. How I would have liked to change them all—no, to move to another house entirely, as I told the ambassador. To a healthier place with a sunlit garden. In such a place, I felt sure, I would get well again.

  During the long cold afternoons I daydreamed of returning to Spain, to the Alhambra, with its green arbors and splashing fountai
ns. In my memory it was always hot and sunny there, the sunlight so bright we had to seek shade and fanned ourselves while we drank cooling fruit drinks mixed with brandy. I imagined feeling the refreshing air on my cheeks, and hearing one of the young servant girls singing a tender, plangent melody for our pleasure.

  For some reason I remembered the spiders, how as winter was approaching (the warm winter of Andalusia) the spiders scuttled in under the ceiling tiles and mother told me they were searching for their mates. She made it sound like such a welcome thing, so good and natural that the spiders should seek one another out to love and mate. But I learned soon enough that the bright green spiders stung, and the long-legged black ones could jump up and bite a child and kill him (as they did one of our baker’s sons) and that there were poison caterpillars climbing the trees in the fall and if I touched one of them or tried to rub its fur my hand and arm itched for days.

  All this I told Chapuys as my foolish thoughts wandered back to my childhood and he suggested that I must be thinking of spiders because of the pouch of live spiders that Henry always wore around his neck to keep him from getting the sweating plague. He spoke to me often of trifles, light things of no consequence that made me laugh. He described how Henry was gambling heavily at cards, playing Pope July and Primero and growling and frowning when he lost, which he often did. I insisted that he call me “Your Majesty” and told him that I shivered whenever I heard the words “Princess Dowager.” He merely nodded.

  I asked about Anne, knowing that she was in disgrace, having failed to give birth to a prince, but he dismissed my questions without really answering them. There was a rumor that Anne was pregnant yet again, and suffering from the stomach pains all mothers endure. Her pains could not have been as sharp or as piercing as mine, I thought—and chided myself for wishing even worse suffering on her for all that she had said and done against Fitzroy and Mary.