Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (94 page)

I could not help but smile into his bright eager face. ‘Of course,' I said. ‘And I hear on all sides that Your Majesty has amused yourself.'

There was a little guffaw from the king's most intimate friends and he grinned a little sheepishly himself. ‘My heart ached for you night and day,' he said with the exquisite mock courtesy of courtly love. ‘I pined in outer darkness. And you are well? And our baby?'

‘Catherine is very beautiful and grows well and strong,' I said with a tiny stress on her name to prompt him. ‘She is most beautifully fashioned, a true Tudor rose.'

My brother George stepped forward and the king released me so that George could kiss my cheek.

‘Welcome back to court, my sister,' he said cheerily. ‘And how is the little princess?'

There was a moment of stunned silence. The smile was wiped from Henry's face. I gaped at George in blank horror at the terrible error he had made. He spun on his heel in a flash and turned to the king: ‘I call little Catherine a princess because she is fawned over as if she were a queen in the making. You should see the clothes that Mary has sewn for her, embroidered with her own hands. And the bed linen that the little empress reclines on! Even her swaddling clouts have her initials. You would laugh, Your Majesty. You would laugh to see her. She is a little tyrant at Hever, it must all be done to her direction. She is a veritable cardinal. She is a pope of the nursery.'

It was a wonderful recovery. Henry relaxed and laughed at the thought of the little baby's dictatorship, all the courtiers instantly echoed his laughter with their own smiles and titters at George's description of the baby.

‘Is it really so? Do you indulge her so much?' the king asked me.

‘She is my first,' I excused myself. ‘And all her clothes will be used again for the next one.'

It was a perfect note to hit. At once Henry thought of the next one and we had moved onwards. ‘Oh yes,' he said. ‘But what will the princess do with a rival in the nursery?'

‘I hope she will be too small to know much about it,' George suggested smoothly. ‘She might have a little brother before she is more than a year old. There are only months between Mary and Anne, remember. We are fertile stock.'

‘Oh George, for shame,' my mother said, smiling. ‘But a little boy at Hever would bring us all such joy.'

‘Me too,' said the king, looking at me with warm eyes. ‘A little boy would be a great joy to me.'

As soon as my father came home from France there was another family conference. This time I had a chair placed for me before the table. I was no longer a girl under instruction, I was a woman with the king's favour. I was no longer their pawn. I was at the very least a castle, a player in the game.

‘Say she conceives again and this time it is a boy,' my uncle said softly. ‘Say the queen is prompted by her own conscience to retire and set
him free to remarry. He would be very tempted by a pregnant mistress.'

For a moment I thought I had dreamed this plan, and then I knew I had been waiting for this moment. My husband William had warned me of this, and it had stayed in the back of my mind as a thought too awful to contemplate.

‘I am married already,' I observed.

My mother shrugged. ‘No more than a few months. It was hardly consummated at all.'

‘It was consummated,' I said steadily.

My uncle raised his eyebrow to prompt my mother.

‘She was young,' my mother said. ‘How would she know what was happening? She could swear it was never fully done.'

‘I can't do it.' I spoke to my mother and then I turned to my uncle. ‘I dare not do it. I can't take her throne, I can't take her place. She's a princess three times over, and I'm just a Boleyn girl. I swear to you: I can't do it.'

It was nothing to him. ‘You need do nothing out of the ordinary,' he said. ‘You will marry as you are bid, as you did once before. And I will order all the rest.'

‘But the queen will never retire,' I said desperately. ‘She has said so herself, she told me herself. She said she would die first.'

My uncle exclaimed, pushed his chair back and took a step to look out of the window. ‘She's in a strong position at the moment,' he conceded. ‘While her nephew is in alliance with England, nobody can upset that agreement, least of all Henry, for a baby not yet conceived. But the moment the war against France is won, and the spoils divided, then she is nothing but a woman too old for him who can never give him an heir. She knows, as we all do, that she has to go.'

‘When the war is won, perhaps,' my father worried. ‘But we dare not risk a breach with Spain just now. I have spent all this summer trying to broker such an alliance and make it stick.'

‘Which comes first?' my uncle asked drily. ‘Country or family? Because we cannot use Mary as we should, without risking the well-being of the country.'

My father hesitated.

‘Of course, you're not blood kin,' my uncle said, quietly venomous. ‘Only a Howard by marriage.'

‘Family comes first,' my father said slowly. ‘It must do.'

‘Then we may have to sacrifice the alliance with Spain against France,' my uncle said coldly. ‘It is more important to us to get rid of Queen Katherine than it is to make peace in Europe. It is more important to get
our girl into the king's bed than to save the lives of Englishmen. There are always more men who can be pressed for soldiers. But this chance for us Howards comes once in a century.'

We heard the news from Pavia in March. A messenger burst in upon the king in the early morning while he was still half-dressed, and he came running like a boy to the queen, a herald flying before him to hammer on the door of the queen's apartments and shout: ‘His Majesty is coming: the king!' so that we tumbled out of our rooms in different states of undress and only the queen was composed and elegant in a gown thrown over her nightshirt. Henry banged the door coming into the room and ran through us, while we twittered like an aviary of blind thrushes, straight to his queen. He did not even look at me, though I was deliciously rumpled with my hair in a cloud of gold around my face. But it was not to me that Henry raced with the best news he had ever heard. He brought the news to his queen, to the woman who had made for him an unbreakable alliance with her country of Spain. He had been unfaithful to her many times, he had been unfaithful to their policy many times. But when it triumphed, in this moment of intense joy, it was to her that he took the news, it was Katherine who was queen in his heart once more.

He threw himself at her feet and snatched up her hands and covered them with kisses and Katherine laughed like a girl again and cried out with impatience: ‘What is it? Tell me! Tell me! What is it?' while Henry could do nothing more than say:

‘Pavia! God be praised! Pavia!'

He leaped to his feet and danced her around the room, jumping like a boy. The gentlemen of his train came running in, he had outstripped them in the race to get to the queen. George came tumbling into the room with his friend Francis Weston, saw me and came to my side.

‘What on earth is going on?' I asked, smoothing my hair back and tying my skirt around my waist.

‘A great victory,' he said. ‘A decisive victory. The French army is said
to be all but destroyed. France lies open before us. Charles of Spain can have his pick of the south, we shall overrun the north. France is no more. It is destroyed. It will be the Spanish empire up to the borders of the English kingdom in France. We have hammered the French army into the ground and we are the unquestioned masters of France, and joint rulers of most of Europe.'

‘Francis defeated?' I asked disbelievingly, thinking of the ambitious dark prince who had been the rival of our golden king.

‘Smashed to pieces,' Francis Weston confirmed. ‘What a day for England! What a triumph!'

I looked across at the king and queen. He was no longer attempting to dance, he had lost the rhythm of the steps, instead he had wound her in his arms and was kissing her forehead, her eyes and her lips. ‘My dearest,' he said. ‘Your nephew is a great general, this is a great gift he has given us. We will have France at our feet. I shall be King of England and France in reality as well as title. And Richard de la Pole is dead – his threat to my throne is dead with him. King Francis himself is taken prisoner, France is destroyed. Your nephew and I are the greatest kings in Europe and our alliance will own everything. Everything that my father planned from you and your family has been given to us this day.'

The queen's face was radiant with joy, the years were stripped off her with his kisses. She was rosy, her blue eyes sparkling, her waist supple in his grasp.

‘God bless the Spanish and the Spanish princess!' Henry bellowed suddenly and all the men of his court shouted it back to him in a full-throated reply.

George glanced sideways at me. ‘God bless the Spanish princess,' he said quietly.

‘Amen,' I said, and I found it in my heart to smile at her glow as she rested her head against her husband's shoulder and smiled on her cheering court. ‘Amen, and God keep her as happy as she is at this moment.'

We were drunk with victory, that dawn and the four dawns that followed. It was like the twelfth night revels in the middle of March. From the leads of the castle we could see the beacon bonfires burning all the way to London and the city itself was red against the night sky with fires at every street corner and men spit-roasting carcasses of beef and lamb. We could hear church bells pealing, a constant chime as everyone in the country celebrated the total defeat of the oldest enemy of England. We ate special dishes which were given new names to mark the occasion: Pavia Peacock
and Pavia Pudding, Spanish Delight, and Charles Blancmange. Cardinal Wolsey ordered a special High Mass of celebration in St Paul's and every church in the land gave thanks for the victory at Pavia and the emperor who had won it for England – Charles of Spain, the beloved nephew of Queen Katherine.

There was no question now of who sat at the right hand of the king. It was the queen, who walked through the great hall wearing deepest crimson and gold with her head high and a little smile on her lips. She did not flaunt her return to favour. She took it as she had taken her eclipse: as the nature of royal marriage. Now that her star was risen again she walked as proudly as she had ever done when in shadow.

The king fell in love with her all over again as a thanksgiving for Pavia. He saw her as the source of his power in France, as the source of his joy at the victory. Henry was first and foremost a spoiled child; when he was given a wonderful present, he loved the giver.

He would love the giver of a gift right up to the moment that the present bored him, or it broke, or it failed to be what he wanted. And towards the end of March the first signs came to us that Charles of Spain might prove a disappointment.

Henry's plan had been that they should divide France between them, tossing only a share of the spoils to the Duke of Bourbon, and that Henry should become King of France in reality and take the old title which the Pope had conferred on him so many years ago. But Charles of Spain was in no hurry. Instead of making plans for Henry to go to Paris to be crowned King of France, Charles went to Rome for his own coronation as Holy Roman Emperor. And worse even than this was that Charles showed no interest in the English plan to capture the whole of France. He had King Francis as a prisoner; but now he was planning to ransom him back to France, to return him to the throne which had been so recently destroyed.

‘In God's name, why? Why would he?' Henry bellowed at Cardinal Wolsey in a great explosion of rage. Even the most favoured gentlemen of the king's inner circle flinched. The ladies of the court visibly cowered. Only the queen, on her chair by the side of the king at the top table of the great hall, was impassive, as if the most powerful man in the country was not shaking with uncontrollable fury only one foot from her.