The Irish Princess (17 page)

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Authors: Karen Harper

Tags: #Ireland, #Clinton, #Historical, #Henry, #Edward Fiennes De, #General, #Literary, #Great Britain - History - Henry VIII, #Great Britain, #Elizabeth Fiennes De, #Historical Fiction, #Princesses, #Fiction, #1509-1547, #Princesses - Ireland, #Elizabeth

BOOK: The Irish Princess
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“Dear Gera,” she said, for Mother had written to her about my pet name and Mary liked to use it, “poet or rhymer—or rakehell, for he has a bad reputation and vile temper—I warrant Surrey’s been to Greenwich to try to cheer my father, so we’ll hear if his spirits have lifted some in his loss of the queen. At least, praise God,” she said, probably without realizing she was frowning deeply, “the king has his precious prince now, and Elizabeth and I have a brother—a half brother.”
The ravaged, gaunt face of my half brother, Thomas, flashed through my mind as I had seen him last on his shameful way to the scaffold. It was a miracle Mother had never found out what I had done, but I had told Magheen and was miffed at her for days when she insisted that I would bring bad luck upon myself by my defiance and deceit. But now I noted how Mary’s voice quavered when she spoke of the new prince who had surely supplanted her in her father’s affections and obstructed her path to the throne. Ah, the fate of women, who could never govern alone, never choose whom they would wed, never simply challenge an enemy to a joust or battle.
 
It turned out that our visitor was no one eligible as a suitor, for he was wed, but he was the powerful Duke of Norfolk’s son and closely related to the royal Tudors in blood and service. New-fledged hope bloomed in me that I might use him to get nearer to the king. Besides, the Earl of Surrey seemed in collusion with my mother too, for that evening he spoke of how young he and his wife were when they were wed. I had perched in a window seat alone in the gallery to listen to Lady Mary play her virginals; the earl came to sit beside me, rustling my skirts so that I had to move over a bit into the curtained shadows.
“I heard our hostess call you Gera, so if I may presume . . .”
“You may presume, at least to call me Lady Gera.”
“Ah, a sharp wit for one so young. Lady Gera, we hardly had a chance to chat after our introduction earlier,” he whispered, leaning so close I could smell a rich pomade from his person mingled with wine on his breath. Attired in finest peacock blue brocade, and for a country visit too, he had been drinking a great deal and still had a goblet of wine with him now. Stretching out his legs as if to display his gartered hose wrapped around well-turned legs, he gave a satisfied—or a yearning—sigh.
When he just studied my face overlong, I decided to put him off a bit. “I believe,” I told him, “Her Grace asked at table how your wife, Frances, was doing, but I did not hear your reply.” He had been watching me all evening over supper, enough to make my face heat once or twice. I might be painfully young yet, but I did not want him to think I was a green girl—a wild Irish colleen—who could be taken advantage of.
“Ah, yes. Frances and I wed at the lofty age of thirteen but have only lived together these last two years, when we turned twenty. And lately I’ve been away from her quite a bit, in service of God and king—perhaps not in that order, or perhaps they are one and the same,” he said with a muted snicker.
I must admit I did favor the bitter undercurrent to his words whenever he mentioned His Majesty, as everyone liked to call the man, a term of worshipful adoration I tried to avoid using.
“Such a difficult way to begin a marriage, I warrant,” I whispered back. “And I hear your sister Mary is the widow of the king’s dead oldest son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond.”
“So you’re a student of the spiderweb of titles and relationships,” he said, “or at least a student of court gossip. Yes, keep your ear ever to the ground on that,” he said with a smirk, and shook his head at something else he evidently dared not say.
He leaned back toward the window, set ajar, looking now not jaunty but most melancholy. Such quicksilver moods, I thought, but then Her Grace had warned me that he had a sudden temper. He frowned and sighed again, took another swig of wine, then stared down at his knees while I covertly studied him. His expression was somewhere between a grin and a grimace. His eyes, sleekly arched brows, close-combed hair, and a small, pointed beard were all of the same auburn hue. Lanky and loose limbed, he nevertheless carried himself with great pride, oft flinging flamboyant gestures when he spoke, however still he sat now. Magheen would have said he had his nose in the air.
I did not let on that I had inquired of his pedigree. The Howards had strong claims to royal blood. Though cousins to the Boleyns, they had smoothly escaped the downfall of that family. He sighed again and lifted his hand over his heart in the most affected way.
“You see, I was a boyhood companion of Fitzroy,” he told me, still looking down. “The mere thought of his loss still makes me sad. In short, he was my best friend, and I yet mourn my equal friend, no grudge, no strife. His Majesty saw fit to have me share his son’s schoolroom and travel with him to France in our youth. I knew his beautiful mother well, and his stepfather, Edward Clinton. Now poor Clinton’s lost Bessie too, but he’s a charmer and a climber, and he’ll wed even higher, I’ve no doubt.”
I sat frozen, trying to get my thoughts back to the conversation, back to pumping this man for any information I could use about the king. But I kept seeing Edward Clinton,
a charmer and a climber
, at the helm of the ship with me on stormy waters and in the dark room at Beaumanoir when he held me with his hard hands and told me that strange things could happen between maids and men, even married ones. And now he might wed again.
“Lady Gera, what did I say? Are you all right?”
“Indeed I am. Your loss reminded me of mine; that is all.”
I was aching to ask him if he’d seen Edward Clinton lately or if he had gone to sea. But Clinton was my enemy too, along with his malicious mentor, Dudley. So I said instead, “It must be both a blessing and a burden to belong to such a premier family so close to the king.”
He sat up straighter; his chin lifted. “Why, who would credit how beautifully you have put that, my sweet, a burden and a blessing? As I wrote in a sonnet recently, ‘I weep and sing, in joy and woe, as in a doubtful ease.’ Yes, the Howards sat at the pinnacle of power when Anne Boleyn was in favor, and are a bit out of fashion right now, though the king still values our military prowess when it suits him.” He took another drink of wine. I was amazed his speech was not slurred, for his eyelids seemed heavy as he assessed me, but then, this was a master wordsmith whether in his cups or not.
“Thank God,” he went on, “Anne Boleyn did not take us down with her, for my father—her uncle—oversaw her trial and helped pronounce her guilty.”
It frightened me that such a pronouncement of family betrayal no longer made me so much as blink an eye. It was the way of the world when it came to power, and I merely nodded as he plunged on: “And if that damned Cromwell doesn’t drag His Grace into a foreign Protestant marriage for political reasons—passions and politics, a volatile mix—perhaps we can find His Grace a more pliable Catholic bride who is pure English, eh?”
I assumed he meant someone else in his staunch Catholic family, for Anne Boleyn’s Protestant leanings had been an aberration for the Howards, Mary Tudor had said. With a snide smile and a quick elbow to my ribs, Surrey added, “My dear, fair Geraldine, if you weren’t from a hotbed of Irish rebels, we’d dangle you before the king, eh, youth or not? He needs a fillip in his autumn years. You are one of the comeliest young women I have ever seen, and I shall write a sonnet saying so, I swear it. With my name upon it and circulated in high places, it shall fetch you a fine marriage.”
He was slurring his words a bit now, so the wine must finally be affecting him. He nearly leaned on me, so I was glad Mary’s ladies were intent on her playing, for I did not intend to pass up this chance for information I could use.
“But the king,” I said, hoping to get him back on track. “Are you so sure he will wed again at his age after all his ill fortune with three wives?”
“Remember what I said about politics and passion, my sweet. For one reason or the other, Henry Rex will wed again, and under ordinary circumstances, he’d find you a tasty temptation.”
At that, I could brook no more from him. “I believe our royal hostess is finished, and we will soon be at the gaming tables, my lord. So if you will kindly excuse me—”
I stood up fast enough that he almost rolled sideways in the window seat and spilled the last of his ruby red wine on his bright blue hose—it looked rather like blood, I thought, and felt a bit queasy at all I had heard and all I had dared.
 
My days serving the princess Mary in rural Hunsdon came and went. The Protestant German princess Anne of Cleves, King Henry’s fourth wife, came and went into English exile from court, because the king liked her not and refused to consummate the marriage and wanted it annulled. Baseborn and -bred Cromwell, now Earl of Essex, had arranged that sad match. He had also climbed too high too fast and had a host of nobly born enemies, so he too came and went. He was arrested for treason (and for his supposed plans to wed the princess Mary, which everyone knew was just another trumped-up charge at his treason trial), and was beheaded in July of 1540, one year after I had met the Earl of Surrey, who still came to visit us from time to time with gifts for Mary—and for me.
Surrey’s hotspur temper continued to get him in trouble; once the king ordered him locked up at Windsor for striking another courtier. While there, as he had promised, he wrote a poem in my honor, one he had dared to entitle “Description and Praise of His Love Geraldine.” Yet I was honored, and my mother was thrilled to hear it had been circulated at court, much, I feared, as one might pass around a handbill of sale for a rare mare. I write here the sonnet, for it went like this:
From Tuscane came my Lady’s worthy race;
Fair Florence was sometime her ancient seat.
The western isle whose pleasant shore doth face
Wild Camber’s cliffs, did give her lively heat.
Foster’d she was with milk of Irish breast:
Her sire an Earl; her dame of Prince’s blood.
From tender years, in Britain doth she rest,
With Kinges child; where she tasteth costly food.
Hunsdon did first present her to mine eyen:
Bright is her hue, and Geraldine she hight.
Hampton me taught to wish her first for mine;
And Windsor, alas! doth chase me from her sight.
Her beauty of kind; her virtues from above;
Happy is he that can attain her love!
 
The line about Hampton Court was pure poetic license, and why not? For I fear the rakehell, as Mary Tudor had called him once, took license with everything else—though our strange friendship was pure, despite his reputation and his flirting. He hardly needed me, for the Howard family had a great new triumph. Despite the disaster of the Boleyn marriage, they had managed to dangle (as Surrey had put it to me) another young, ripe Howard girl, named Catherine, called Cat, in front of the aging king’s nose. Desperate to regain his own youth, the king had snatched her up. The lady Mary was much offended that her father would take a fifth wife and one four years younger than herself.
But she, like me, wanted to be in the king’s good graces, so, after a rough patch where Queen Catherine openly favored the seven-year-old Elizabeth and ignored Mary, my royal mistress made peace with Cat Howard. Shortly thereafter, Mary and her ladies, including me, were summoned to Hampton Court to serve the new queen. Finally, I was going to meet—and somehow beat—the king.
 
CHAPTER THE TWELFTH
 
HAMPTON COURT PALACE
 
August 1540
 
Y
ou might know
he
was at court. I do not mean the king—I shall relate that next, for of course Henry Tudor was in residence, though he was out hunting when we arrived that warm summer day. Rather I mean that I heard “Captain” Edward Clinton was there and would not sit with the next Parliament the king called, for he was soon to go to sea. Clinton, a member of Parliament, king’s captain, and king’s lackey! And I overheard that, much like his monarch, the widowed wretch had wed yet again, this time to Ursula Stourton, niece to John Dudley, no less! I felt both Clinton and Dudley were the king’s beasts, lined up to aid and abet him just as the carved and painted griffins, unicorns, and dragons lined the entrance to this vast redbrick palace along the River Thames.

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