The Baker's Daughter Volume 2

by Bonny G Smith

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  The little frock was indeed quite fetching; seeing it he could not help but think that soon Jane…

  “Indeed, it is, Your Grace,” he replied diplomatically. But the other part of his brain was assessing the situation politically. So upon the news that the queen was with child, the Princess Elizabeth had hied to court from her home in the country to make the same assessment that he himself was here to make. Shrewd!

  “Your Grace,” he said, apropos of the layette that Mary was still fondling in an absent, somewhat detached manner. “I am here, as you know, on behalf of His Grace.”

  Mary looked up. “Yes,” she replied. “I must own that I had expected my husband to come himself to be with me at this joyous and momentous time.” The question hung on the air.

  The Count shifted uneasily in his chair. Jane had busied herself with some needlework, and was sitting in the window seat where the light was better. “The king sends his most profound regrets,” said de Feria. “But he is much engaged with matters on the Continent.”

  A shadow crossed Mary’s face. “I see. I understand. But…” She stopped. If Philip could not come, there was no more to be said.

  “The king did, however, send a message for you.”

  Mary brightened and regarded the Count expectantly.

  De Feria took a long pull from his goblet, then set it aside. “His Grace desires me to say that he thinks it would be most prudent if Your Grace would make a will.”

  For a moment Mary was stunned; then a wave of disappointment washed over her. “Was there no other message?”

  Jane looked up and gave de Feria a warning glance.

  “Yes, of course,” he lied. “So remiss of me. Of course His Grace sends his best regards and felicitations. And I also have a letter for Your Most Gracious Majesty. But His Grace was most insistent that I stress with the utmost urgency the need for Your Grace to make a will. There is always much danger in the travail of childbirth, Your Grace.”

  Incredibly, Mary smiled. The travail of childbirth! Yes, soon she would be so travailing. Certainly there was some danger involved. But at the end of the struggle, a Catholic heir for England!

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “I will do so. I will think on it tonight and begin tomorrow to draw up the document. As always, His Grace is most sensible.”

  De Feria took another long draught from his wine cup and when he set it down it had a hollow ring. Jane was instantly on her feet to refill it. She knew that this was going to be a trying interview; her heart went out to her beloved. And to her mistress!

  “His Grace also desires me to say,” the Count said carefully, “that provision must be made for…all contingencies.”

  Mary fondled one of the tiny shoes that was part of the layette. “What contingencies are those?”

  “It is possible, of course, that Your Grace…what I mean to say is…” This was proving more difficult than even he had anticipated.

  “Yes, yes,” said Mary, waving an irritated hand. “I might die. I am not unaware of it. We have agreed that I shall make a will. If I should not survive the birth of my s-son…” A son! For the very first time she knew what her father had felt whenever he dreamt of holding his son in his arms. She would never, could never, forgive him, but at last, at least, she understood. “…then my child shall inherit my kingdom. The king, my husband, shall be named regent. I understand. I shall do as he asks and have it all set down. Have I not said as much?”

  “Ye-es,” replied de Feria. “But the contingency that most concerns His Grace is the one in which neither yourself nor the child survives.”

  Mary stared at him as if pole-axed. She could not have been more dumbfounded had she just been cleaved from chin to chine. “But…”

  “In that case, Your Grace, some other person would have to be named heir to the throne.”

  Mary stared back at him speechless; he took the advantage and the opportunity to get it all out. It was nothing that the queen had not heard before, from Philip’s own lips. Why must she be so difficult?

  He leaned forward in his chair, his hands clasped between his knees. “Your Grace, the king understands your reluctance to name the Princess Elizabeth as your heir. But the possibility of such an eventuality cannot be ignored. The princess, also, must be made to see reason. She must marry Emmanuel Philibert. If she does not, and she takes the throne, who knows whom she might elect to marry? England should then be lost to Hapsburg interests. Surely Your Grace does not want that? Think! It is the age-old dilemma; England must ally with either France or Spain. Alliance with France is out of the question; England is at war with that country! And Mary of Scotland, who is legitimate and a Catholic, has a solid claim to the throne of England through her grandmother, your own aunt. And she is poised to marry the French dauphin! Never was the Princess Elizabeth’s marriage more urgent or of more vital importance than at this moment.”

  Mary’s eyes narrowed. Philip had purposely left behind his confessor, Francisco Bernardo de Fresneda, to cajole her into forcing Elizabeth to marry the duke of Savoy. This she had resisted at all turns; if she named Elizabeth as her heir even as a contingency, then it meant that Anne Boleyn had won. And to that she would never agree.

  And it had been easy to cast the blame for her inability to convince her sister to marry upon others, not the least of whom was Elizabeth herself. It was indeed an interesting paradox; Elizabeth believed, and had firmly stated, that if she married it would compromise her power…assuming she ever attained any! To her sister, marrying a foreigner was out of the question, and marrying an Englishman not much better. Either way, her sister felt sure that her power would be wrested from her hands. Mary, on the other hand, believed that marriage to the Duke of Savoy and the prompt production of a child would strengthen Elizabeth’s position immeasurably. The irony of it all lay in the fact that for completely opposite reasons, the two royal sisters were for once in accord. Neither wished Elizabeth to marry.

  Having no reply, de Feria continued on. “You are queen, Your Grace. You have it in your power to force the princess to comply.”

  Mary looked up. “I am sorry, but that I cannot do. I cannot make such a unilateral decision, let alone hope to enforce it. The Parliament would have to be consulted.”

  De Feria bristled. All the arguments Philip had warned him he would get! “There is no law of which I am aware that says Parliament must approve the marriage of an English monarch.”

  Mary bristled in her turn. “Forgive me, but this is England, not Spain.” De Feria was the least disliked of the Spanish Grandees that Philip had imperiously imposed upon the English, but he was still extremely arrogant and possessed in full measure that indefinable air of Spanish superiority to the English. She had up to this time been immune to the dislike of the Spaniards that her countrymen evinced; therefore she was somewhat surprised to find herself growing impatient with the Count.

  Above all, and really this was the crux of the problem, she decided, de Feria had never really grasped the nuances of English politics.

  “No,” she said. “There is no such law. But in England, sir, the monarch must make an effort to work with the Lords and the Commons. Failure to do so may have unpleasant consequences where other issues are concerned.” She was fully expecting the request for more resources for the war; whom did Philip think would be approving such expenditure…? She could not afford an open rift with Parliament, even had she wanted Elizabeth to marry Savoy. Which she did not!

  “I cannot, I will not, force my sister to marry against her will. I shall make my will, as His Grace has requested, but beyond that I am not willing to go.”

  Incredibly, de Feria continued on as if she had never spoken. “His Grace wishes you to name the Princess Elizabeth as your heir; but contingent, of course, only upon the eventuality of the death of both yourself and the child.”

  Mary chose to ignore this breach of etiquette; de Feria was, after all, speaking directly for the king, her husband, a man whom she had pro
mised to obey in all things. “I cannot in good conscience name my sister as heir. It is a belief that I have held for four-and-twenty years, since her birth; there is a reasonable doubt, based on the conviction of her mother, that she is in fact the daughter of my father. All know this.”

  For one brief moment a red mist clouded his vision and he wished with all his heart that he could grasp this exasperating woman by the shoulders and shake her until her head lolled on her neck. He shook the urge off. As if anyone could behold the Princess Elizabeth and doubt who her father was!

  De Feria made a conscious effort to relax back into his chair. Otherwise that compulsion, that most dangerous desire to shake her, might yet get the better of him. He took a sip of wine from his goblet. “Your Grace,” he said steadily, “the Princess Elizabeth is already your heir, barring of course the production of the fruit of your own body, by both Act of Parliament and the terms of King Henry’s will. What harm is there in explicitly stating in your will what all know to be true?”

  Mary’s eyes smoldered. “Tell His Grace that I am most heartily sorry, but I shall not.”

  De Feria shifted in his seat. “Then it is my most unpleasant duty to inform Your Grace that the king, your husband, will be very angry with you.”

  Jane had been watching the storm clouds brew on the queen’s brow for several minutes. Unless she missed her guess, the staid Count was about to be subjected to a frightening display of Tudor temper.

  But suddenly Mary’s chin began to quiver and in a quavering voice she said, “I have already begun to taste His Grace’s anger all too frequently.” And to Jane’s utter amazement, and de Feria’s dismay, Mary burst into tears.

  Jane leapt from the window seat and tossing her sewing aside she turned to de Feria and cried, “There now, that is quite enough!”

  De Feria was nonplussed; he could not have been more surprised if his hound had chided him for whipping his horse.

  Really, he thought, such independence of spirit as these English women displayed! It was most unbecoming. In Mary, only just acceptable because she was queen, but in Jane, his little Jane! Completely unacceptable. He would have to curb this tendency if she was to be a proper Spanish wife.

  Jane had climbed onto the bed and was holding Mary in her arms, administering comforting little pats and saying something unintelligible, but soothing in tone.

  Mary sobbed uncontrollably. But in the midst of it all, de Feria noticed that she sat with her knees drawn practically up to her chest, her arms resting on them, and her head on her arms as her shoulders shook with her tears. No pregnant woman facing the imminent birth of her child could have assumed such a posture.

  He had his answer.

  Chapter 48

  “Her Perfect lyfe in all extreme, her pacient hart dyde shoe; For in this worlde she never founde but doleful daes and woe.”

  – from Mary’s epitaph

  Greenwich Palace, May 1558

  A slight gap in the drawn bed curtains was letting through a sunbeam that stabbed Mary’s eyes. She frowned. The heavy velvet drapes on all the windows of the Queen’s Chamber were supposed to be drawn tight. But it was May and London was experiencing a spell of warm weather. If she were not to stifle in her own bed, some air must reach her. It was just bad luck – a phenomenon with which she was now painfully familiar – that the ray of light from the window had managed to find a chink in the bed curtains.

  When one spent so much time in darkness, unmoving, one’s other senses became more honed, it seemed. She heard the voices, muted by distance, of the gardeners calling out to one another; doves cooing; birdsong; the distant clang of a ship’s bell. All were familiar sounds, some in which she used to take great delight. But nothing to do with her now. Those sounds were part of the living world. But here, secluded in her great bed in the darkness, it was as if she were dead.

  Daylight. Morning? Afternoon? She knew not if it were morning, noon or night and did not care to know. She had done with such distinctions. As she had done with the day of the week, the month, even the year. What difference did it make? What difference did anything make now? Even up to the last day of April she had cherished a hope. But then, without any ceremony whatsoever, April had faded into May and still she felt no labor pains. Gradually, without explanation, her belly deflated of its own accord.

  There would be no child.

  Why? She asked for the hundredth time. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? She laughed out loud and then checked herself, her hands clasped over her mouth. Only mad people spoke to themselves, or laughed aloud at their own thoughts. She was not mad, only dreadfully, dreadfully disappointed. Disappointed? Devastated. But she must not blaspheme. The very worst thing! She had been taught all her life that it was God’s will that would be done, not her own; and that mere human beings must accept without question His decisions. Still…

  No, that way madness did lie. Think about something else!

  She had, at the very last moment, decided that she would have her lying-in at Greenwich. She had become restless and uncomfortable at Whitehall, and because her labor was taking so long to commence, the palace was badly in need of sweetening. It was Hampton Court in 1555 all over again! And then the true meaning of that thought had struck her like a bolt of lightning. No! It would not, it could not be. She was with child and awaiting her ordeal. She would be more comfortable at Greenwich, and so to Greenwich she would go.

  Greenwich Palace had been her mother’s favorite of all the royal dwellings. It was here that the widowed Katharine of Aragon had been living, alone and neglected, when the old king died and Henry, young, beautiful, that golden prince (now king!) had come marching purposefully down the lime-walk to claim her his at last. He had knelt down, taken her hand tenderly into his own, sworn a knight’s fealty to her as his lady-love, proposed marriage, called her “His Kate”. That had been the beginning of the happy time; and for almost twenty years the halcyon days continued. Her mother loved recalling that cherished memory and sharing it with her daughter.

  And then, after the deaths of child after child, finally Mary had come as a symbol of hope that Queen Katharine should indeed deliver one day to her faithful king and devoted husband the son and heir to England which he craved more than anything else in the world.

  Well, almost faithful; there had been Mary Boleyn, and then Bessie Blount and her bastard son, the Duke of Richmond. But her father had been more discreet than most kings would have been, and his lapses had been surprisingly few.

  Then more disappointments; and finally along had come Anne Boleyn to shatter their lives completely, irretrievably, and forever.

  Oh, why would her mind stray so?

  She had been born at Greenwich, and christened there. It was on the water, which she liked. And the Observant Friars, her mother’s favorite order, was there, reestablished; she could go to the little chapel where her parents had been quietly married and listen to the monks chant. She could pray, light candles, hear Mass. Yes, she would go to Greenwich and then everything would be all right.

  And then, nothing.

  It was so grossly unfair! Once again she was the laughingstock of Christendom. Two false pregnancies! The shame was so cruel that she thought she might die of it. And the consequences were even worse than the shame. She still had no child of her body to carry on her work of restoring England to the true faith. The ominous ceasing of her monthly courses, one of the symptoms which she had mistaken for pregnancy, meant that there might not be another opportunity. Besides which, her husband had all but deserted her, so there would likely be no more opportunity there, either!

  She had bravely faced up to all of this; she was, after all, born of a long line of valiant kings and courageous queens. But nothing had prepared her for the grip of the black depression that followed these stark realizations. Never before had she felt so utterly hopeless. The abject misery that these dark realities evinced made the melancholy of her annual autumn illness seem trivial by comparison.

 
So this was despair. The deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins. Make no mistake; this mental malaise from which she suffered was despair. To one so utterly bereft of everything that mattered it was the final state of being before death itself. It was, in fact, a living death. What had become of all her bright hopes and dreams? Her people no longer loved her as they had once done. Philip was gone. Even God had abandoned her. What was there left to live for?

  Mary turned on her side and covered her head with a pillow. She never wanted to see the light of day again. Surely no one could live like this, and therefore she must die.

  All was lost. Her hopes of a child, a Catholic heir for England, absolutely, completely, finally dashed; the fault for the loss of Calais, and the end of England’s foothold on the Continent, laid at her door; the blame for this new ague that was decimating the English population being thrown at her, for only God knew what reason; the comprehension that Philip had forsaken her, that he had never loved her and never would; the certainty that never now would her dream of restoring England to the true faith become a reality, for even the pope had deserted her; knowing that she was destined to die someday as her mother had, deprived of the love of her husband, bereft of a son and heir, and bested by her worst enemy.

  And not just her own worst enemy, but her mother’s as well! It was doubly damning that she must own up to the fact that Anne Boleyn’s daughter would ascend the throne of England upon her death, and that her own husband would probably marry her. Nemesis! It was becoming all too evident that Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth were destined to triumph over Katharine of Aragon and Mary of England. The game, which she had played so well for so long, would in the end be lost to her archrivals. Her mother had lost, well and truly; but she had never conceded defeat. She, Mary, would be forced to do so in the end.

  It was all too cruel. It was simply too much to be borne. How could all of this possibly be God’s will? And if not His, then whose? In the beginning her reign, starting with her defeat against all odds of the Duke of Northumberland to gain her throne, had been not just lucky but absolutely charmed; but now her fortunes were at their lowest ebb. Such a turning away from her of Divine Providence must needs be a judgment of some sort. But of what? Or was she simply being tested, as Job had been? Could all this be the work of Satan, even this debilitating, black despair?