Dear Heart, How Like You This (31 page)
The King suddenly pulled up his form, shouting, “Sister, ’tis not grandsons I want, but sons! Can you not understand that I want no other man to sire England’s Prince but I?”
Mary’s face lost all its animation, to become expressionless.
“Aye, Harry, you are a man like other men. It always, always comes back to this: your need to prove your manhood by siring sons!”
With a swift stride, the King moved towards her, slapping her hard across the face. Recovering from his blow, Mary raised her hand to her bruising cheek. She looked bright-eyed with unshed tears at her brother, and smiled ever so faintly.
“Yea, my dear brother, yet another way that men have to demonstrate their manhood.”
The man before her blushed deeply, now appearing shame-faced. He sputtered out: “I did not mean to strike you, Mary!”
The Princess Royal of England and Dowager Queen of France moved over to her brother, embracing him lovingly. For a few minutes she leant her throbbing cheek upon his silken doublet.
“Yea. I know, Harry. I know,” Mary comforted, reaching up to gently caress his face, and wipe away the tears falling from his eyes.
“Our Tudor tempers are hard to keep under tight rein. Perhaps we both have said enough on this matter, brother. I am so tired… so very tired,” Mary now said as she moved away from him to look sadly down at the dying embers in the fireplace.
“But you
must
understand this, Harry.” Mary turned her attentions away from her thoughts, and back to the humbled man before her. For a brief instant in time, the King had vanished, leaving a very worried, utterly human man before her.
“I love Catherine. From the time I was a little girl of five, she has been like an elder sister to me. More so, Harry, with our own mother gone, I often as a child looked to Catherine to take her place. I cannot and will not accept another woman in Catherine’s place. I simply cannot. Not while my true sister still suffers and lives. I am sick, Harry. I feel death stalking my every move. I will do nothing, I swear to you, Harry, nothing
,
which I feel could endanger my very soul…”
“Be it as you say, sister.” The man stirred, and straightened up his tall frame, taking back, as it were, the cloak of Kingship upon his broad shoulders once more. “I will let you keep to your conscience, Mary. All I ask of you is to keep your sentiments to yourself.”
Mary shrugged her shoulders.
“I have spoken my mind to you, Harry. That, for the moment, is enough. I can rest easier now. But, I am very weary. My brother, if you will please excuse me, I will send Suffolk back to attend you. All I want now is to go up to my chambers to rest.”
With that she deeply curtsied in her brother’s direction. The King then went quickly over to her so to help raise her visibly trembling body. He kissed twice the cheek he had bruised.
“Yea, go sweetheart; go and rest.”
Suffolk was said, by George and other reliable informers, to have shuddered with horror as this battle of royal wills was enacted before his frightened eyes, and within his very home. Later, after the King had departed from their house, the Duke begged his ailing wife to keep her feelings under strong control, otherwise all would be lost for their house. The Suffolks owed great debts to the Crown.
I sympathised immensely with the Duchess, and could understand why she did what she did. Indeed, she only did what she felt right. Like so many, Mary loved Catherine greatly; indeed, was namesake to her only living child. She grieved that things had come to such a pass as this, and also grieved for Catherine when all her sons had died. Mary too had borne sons into the world, only to see them quickly snatched, by death, out from her arms—many of them before they were weaned. The Tudor Princess and former Queen of France, though sickening with the illness that would kill her all too soon, was, nevertheless, still determined not to bend too much to the will of her brother. A brother who appeared to be so hell bent on his own destruction.
In sooth, it seemed to me, even though I heard all this second hand from George and my other sources, that the ailing Duchess had appointed herself Catherine’s avenging angel, so angry was she that Catherine had been tossed aside like a worn out shoe.
And discarded, Catherine was. On July the eleventh, 1531, Anne and the King packed all their personal belongings and left Windsor and Catherine for Anne’s favourite royal residence: Greenwich—the palace where Anne could take much pleasure in the nearby sea. Catherine of Aragon was not informed of this move, but discovered it to her immense sorrow the following day, when it became clear to all that the King planned not to return.
Catherine wasted no time in sending a courier with a letter for the King. In it she expressed her great grief that the King had not even come to say goodbye to her.
Poor Catherine! Ever since she was a frightened, lonely widow of sixteen, Henry, the new heir to the throne of England, had been like a shining beacon where all else was darkness. Even if the beacon was but the promise that one day they would be man and wife, and, thus, the eventual King and Queen of England.
Sometimes the pattern of life takes us in a complete circle. After her first husband—Prince Arthur—died, the Spanish Princess was severely pushed aside by the first Tudor monarch, and had to wait many a long year before her knight and King came to take her from the darkness and back into the light of day.
Now the fairy tale was ended. This was no tale from the pages of
Le Morte D’Arthur
, but the true story of people of flesh and blood, with all the despair and agony poor mortals like ourselves have inherited since the time that Eden became lost to us. For it was that same knight who now forced her back into the darkness. But this time, any hope of earthly happiness for her was utterly shattered and destroyed.
The King made this even more obvious by the stinging letter he sent her in reply to her message of regret that he had left her in such a manner. The King wrote to her in his dispatch that it was a pack of lies to claim that she came to him a virgin from her marriage to his brother Arthur, thus, Rome had no authority to disallow him his divorce. She must, from hence forth, regard herself as the Dowager Princess of Wales, and no longer as his wife. And, as she only had the relationship of that of a sister-in-law to him, Catherine was, in future, to keep her nose out of his concerns, and stop complaining to the whole world how she had been wronged. The King ended this message to his former wife by daring her to prove that she had been indeed a virgin when he had married her more than twenty long years ago. Catherine was then separated from the Princess Mary, her beloved daughter—the only child of her supposed marriage to the King to survive both birth and infancy. A daughter Catherine never saw again.
In the end, the King commanded to take her household to the royal estate of More. Thus concluded Catherine of Aragon’s union with the King.
1532–1533
Some tyme I fled the fyre that me brent,
By sea, by land, by water and by wynd,
And now I follow the coles that be quent
From Dover to Calais against my mynde,
Lo! how desire is both strong and spent!
And he may see that whilom was so blinde;
And all his labour now he laugh to scorn
Mashed in the breers that erst was all to torne.
“And she also to use newfangleness.”
Late in the year 1532 we received messages in Calais from England, telling us to make preparations to ready ourselves for the arrival of the King and the Lady Marquess of Pembroke—a lady I once had simply known as my cousin: Anne Boleyn. Yea, my dark Lady…
I was commanded to return to England, so to prepare the way from that end. I did all the duties expected of me, but in the back of my mind (or did it originate from my beating heart?) there was a kind of painful pulse, constantly crying out:
Anne! Anna! Anna my love!
I thought my years of absence from her company would cure and heal me of this love, this passion that had done its best to torment me throughout life. I tried to tell myself that I no longer cared; the fire was dead, the passion had blazed bright but was now spent. I tried to convince myself through my poetry, that this was truth. But my heart knew otherwise.
For to love her for looks lovely
My heart was set in thought right firmly,
Trusting by truth to have had redressed.
But she hath made another promise
And hath given me leave full honestly.
Yet do I not rejoice it greatly
For on my faith I loved so surely.
But reason will that I do cease
For to love her.
Since that in love the pains been deadly,
Methinks it best that readily
I do return to my first address,
For at this time too great is the press
And perils appear too abundantly
For to love her.
Once my duties were complete I sailed back to Calais to assist with the final preparations needed for this very important royal visit. At length, the day arrived, and, with my heart in my throat, I strived desperately to ready myself for the arrival of the woman whose complete love was all I had ever truly wanted in this life.
Anne and the King arrived as the bells rang out the tenth hour on the morning of the eleventh of October. I was one of the party who went down to the Port of Calais to welcome the King and the woman he wished to marry. The day was one of those magical days when sun and wind unite to make one tingle with the elation of being alive. Even so, there was little I could take true joy in.
It had been obviously an excellent crossing for the King and his party, because they all disembarked in extremely high spirits.
I made my greetings to the King and his bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, before I was suddenly face to face with the new Marquess of Pembroke—Anne, my dark Lady. The woman to whom I had, so long ago, given all that I had to give of love.
I took her hand and bowed over it, saying as I did the customary greeting, and then looked her in the face. The last time I had seen Anne this close was the day after we, for that first and only time, had been lovers. During the time since, as we had done whenever separated by life, we had sent messages to each other through George, but we had kept to our bargain of seeing one another only from the safety of distance. Thus, during my brief visits to England and court, I had made no effort to seek her out. I wanted only to give myself the opportunity to heal, and come to terms with what would never be.