The King's Daughter (66 page)

Isabel looked westward toward England. “I’ll never go back,” she said quietly. “There’s nothing for me there.”

Carlos nodded eastward toward Europe. “And that way there is nothing for me. I want no more soldiering.” Headded with his crooked smile, “I do not even have a sword, thanks to you.”

She blushed, recalling her mad moment on the quay when she had tossed his sword into the river.

The ship jostled over a swell, shooting pain up her thigh. She winced. Carlos took her arm and led her back to the steps leading up to the quarterdeck, and eased her down to sit on a stair. He stood before her and looked across the main deck, southward. “I have been thinking of … the New World. They need horse breeders there in New Spain. A man could make a good life there with a
rancho
… raising horses.” He looked at her hopefully, uncertainly.

She looked southward. Out there, invisible beyond the world of gray water, was a new continent, hot and green and lush. A new world, indeed. A new life. She said, “I’d like to see those mountain plateaus you spoke of, where the wind bends the grasses but you hear no sound.”

She looked up at him and saw the wide-eyed look again on his face. “What is it?” she asked.

“You are smiling,” he said.

“So are you.”

He grinned. He sat down beside her and took her hand and looked at her. A frown of doubt flitted across his face. “Rootless, your father said. He is right. I have never had … a family.”

“Is that what you want?”

“I want you. Forever.”

Her heart leapt. “You have me. That’s a family.”

He grinned again, but now with a look of wonder. He took her face between his hands and kissed her, hesitantly at first, then hungrily. She pulled back her head to catch her breath. She touched his cheek, then shyly smoothed her hand up over his bristled hair. It felt surprisingly soft.

She glanced toward the forecastle deck where her father was leaning out over the bowsprit, explaining the rigging to van Borselen. It was good to see him taking an interest.
In time,
she told herself,
he’ll be drawn back to life.

Time,
she thought, looking back at Carlos. It was what they all needed. Time to see and hear and feel life at the proper pace again. “When we get to Antwerp,” she said, “come and meet my mother and my brother.”

“Your mother. Is she—”

“We don’t know. We hope and pray.”

He nodded. “I will too.”

He said it so sincerely, it made her want to kiss him again and hold him forever. “Stay with us in Antwerp. It will give my father time to get used to you. Besides,” she added with a slight blush, “before we embark to new worlds, I need to get to know you myself.”

He shrugged. “I have a bad knee. Everything else you already know.”

She laughed.

“But,” he said, smiling, caressing her cheek, “I think I will need a long time to know you.”

She went into the haven of his arms. Smiling, she nestled her cheek against the warmth of his neck.
Take all the time you want, my love. Take forever.

AUTHOR’S NOTES

The dates and chronology of events of the Wyatt rebellion are accurate in the novel, with the exception of one liberty, fashioned for the dramatic purposes of my story: the mass trials and hangings of the rebels actually began three days after Wyatt’s surrender at Ludgate, not the following day as I have depicted. (The Queen pardoned the last four hundred rebels in a publicly orchestrated display of her clemency in which the prisoners were led to her palace at Westminster to beg for mercy beneath her window.)

The histories of the prisons of London make riveting stories of their own. Two specific facts may be of interest to the reader. First, the jailer of Newgate Prison in 1554 was, indeed, the Andrew Alexander who appears in the novel, a man who later became notorious for his cruelty to Protestants imprisoned in Newgate by Queen Mary. Second, although I have created the character of Dorothy Leveland, the Fleet jailer, the keepership of the Fleet Prison was, indeed, in the hands of the Leveland family for several centuries (they held a manorial title in Kent to which the post belonged), and two of the earliest keepers were women—widows of keepers who inherited and ran the family business.

“Jail fever” is now believed to have been a form of typhus.

The author of a historical novel strives to create a seamless blend of fact and fiction. Of the characters who appear in
The King’s Daughter,
the ones who actually lived are Queen Mary; her councilors and military commanders; Sir Thomas Wyatt and his circle of supporters, including the Duke of Suffolk; the rival ambassadors Antoine de Noailles and Simon Renard; and Henry Peckham, the organizer of Wyatt’s London support. The rest—the Thornleighs, the Grenvilles, Carlos Valverde, Edward Sydenham, and the St. Legers—are fictional.

In the case of Carlos, his record of employment by the previous English regime, and his award of land, fit the historical facts of the English Crown’s use of foreign mercenaries. Henry VIII hired German, Italian, and Spanish mercenaries to fight the French at Boulogne and to defend the English frontier against Scotland. Henry’s son, the teenaged King Edward VI, used thousands of foreign mercenaries to defeat the Scots at Pinkie Cleugh in 1547, and then kept a large number of these veterans on to quell unrest within England. For this information, and for other sixteenth-century military details, I am indebted to Gilbert John Millar’s
Tudor Mercenaries and Auxiliaries 1485–1547.

Some notes about the fate of the various historical figures who appear in the novel follow.

Sir Thomas Wyatt was held prisoner in the Tower for a month, then executed on Tower Green.

The Duke of Suffolk was also beheaded within the month (to be soon followed by his unfortunate daughter, the nine-day monarch, Queen Jane, who had been in the Tower since Mary’s accession six months before). Princess Elizabeth was arrested in the flurry of panic after the uprising, and was kept a prisoner in the Tower until Mary released her two months later.

Following the rebellion, Mary began a widespread and brutal persecution of Protestants. By the end of 1555, seventy people had been burned at the stake for heresy, and by the end of her reign three years later, the total number of burnings was nearly three hundred. As James A. Williamson states in
The Tudor Age,
“The total was small compared with the record of the Netherlands, but it was stupendous for England, which had never seen anything approaching it before.” These killings earned the Queen the title “Bloody Mary.”

The Queen went ahead and married the Spanish Prince Philip in July 1554, five months after the rebellion. In 1555, Mary persuaded herself she was with child, and unwisely announced her hopes to the world. The “pregnancy” turned out to be a tumor. Mary was devastated. The remainder of her short reign was no less full of sorrow. Her husband had stayed in England only long enough to fulfill his conjugal duties, then left to oversee his father’s empire of Spain, the Netherlands, and the colonies of the New World. In 1557, for Philip’s sake, Mary threw her country into his war with France. Philip returned to his wife to oversee the raising of an English army for this enterprise, then promptly left again, never to return. England suffered a humiliating defeat in the war, resulting in the loss of the port of Calais, the last English toehold in France. The war also bankrupted Mary’s treasury.

Defeat in France, desertion by her husband, endless plots against her fomented by English Protestants in league with the French—all these griefs broke Mary’s spirit. After months of illness, she died in November 1558 at the age of forty-two. The country’s church bells rang joyously at the accession of her half sister Elizabeth, who took the throne at the age of twenty-five. Intelligent, wily and fiercely dedicated to England, Elizabeth ruled her kingdom with a sure hand and a politic doctrine of religious toleration for the next forty-five years.

My Prologue, in which Mary digs out the entombed remains of her royal father and burns him as a heretic, sprang from a comment in J. J. Scarisbrick’s monumental biography,
Henry VIII.
He reports that, for decades after Mary’s reign, there was “whispering” that she had secretly ordered this deed done. So, when you go to St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle and stand on the spot in the aisle where Henry VIII is said to be buried, it may be true that you are walking on the King’s bones … but then again, maybe not.

A READING GROUP GUIDE

THE KING’S
DAUGHTER

Barbara Kyle

ABOUT THIS GUIDE

The suggested questions are included to
enhance your group’s reading of Barbara Kyle’s
The King’s Daughter.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. With her mother grievously wounded and her father thrown into prison, Isabel faces a terrible choice. She is pledged to help Wyatt’s rebels, her fiancé, Martin, among them, but her father has ordered her to take her injured mother to safety in Europe. Isabel decides to send her mother away but stay herself to help the rebels and try to free her father, though the latter seems impossible. What are your views about Isabel’s decision? Was she wrong to abandon her mother, or was she right to stay?

2. Queen Mary’s decision to marry Philip of Spain is the flashpoint for the country’s unrest. The people are against her subordinating herself to a powerful foreign prince, and the Queen’s own councilors beg her to call off the marriage, but Mary, desperate for a husband and an heir, will not betray her betrothal vows, and the result is the Wyatt Rebellion. What is your opinion of Mary’s stand? Was she dedicated or deluded?

3. Isabel is determined to get her father out of prison where he will surely face execution. When the jailer, Mosse, offers her a trade—her father’s release in exchange for carnal enjoyment of her body—Isabel allows Mosse to rape her. How did you feel about her bargain? Was she horribly naïve, or was the chance of saving her father worth enduring Mosse?

4. Martin is boyishly eager to join Wyatt’s rebels and win a glorious victory against the Queen until, after the first battle, he watches his wounded brother die in his arms. Stunned by the brutal reality of war andfearing he’ll hang if the rebels lose, Martin decides to flee England, and when Isabel says she will not join him, he leaves without her. What is your view of Martin’s decision to desert both Wyatt and Isabel?

5. Loyalty and betrayal are key themes in
The King’s Daughter
and the steadfastness of many is tested: Isabel’s pledge to Wyatt, Mary’s loyalty to her Catholic faith, Carlos’s promise to kill Thornleigh, Isabel’s fidelity to Martin. How do you feel about the choices these characters make to either preserve or destroy the bonds they hold dear?

6. Isabel’s parents, Honor and Richard, treat her like a child, insisting she doesn’t know what she’s talking about in wanting to help the rebels, and Isabel is, in fact, naïve about the “glorious uprising.” But what she experiences between her initial eagerness to help Wyatt and her final decision to betray him changes her almost overnight from a child into a woman. What do you think were the turning points that made Isabel grow up?

7. E. M. Forster said, “If I had to betray my country or my friend, I hope I would have the courage to betray my country.” As Wyatt’s army reaches Ludgate in London Wall, Isabel faces this heart-wrenching choice. If she keeps the gate open, the rebels will win, but Sydenham’s archer will surely kill her father; if she closes the gate, she’ll save her father, but the rebels will be captured and hanged. She must betray one or the other. What are your views about her choice?

8. Land means everything to Carlos. Having lost his land in the law courts, which drove him to kill a man, he jumps at the chance to get out of prison by accepting Sydenham’s commission to assassinate Thornleigh. But he falls in love with Isabel, so he abandons that mission, joins the Queen’s army, and captures Wyatt, assuring himself of the Queen’s reward of land. Yet Carlos gives it all up to save Isabel and her father, dooming himself to poverty. How do you view his action? Is a man who makes such a sacrifice foolish or strong?

9. Frances Grenville’s love for Edward Sydenham verges on adoration until she sees him with Isabel, and then her actions prove the adage “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” After Carlos captures Edward with the rebels, Queen Mary tells Frances that she will pardon Edward if Frances wishes, but Frances declines the offer. How did you feel about Frances’s decision to let Edward hang?

10. At the climax Isabel and Carlos risk everything to save her father from hanging, yet once they’ve carried him to safety, Isabel’s father warns her not to marry Carlos, calling him a “rootless mercenary.” But she stands firm, choosing Carlos. What is your view of the future Isabel and Carlos might have together? Are their worlds too radically different, or can love overcome such differences?