The King's Pleasure, page 9
“And your hair must hang loose; though I shall be jealous of every man who eyes it. Beautiful hair, wonderful hair.” He took a handful of it and wound it about his throat.
She was so dazzled with it all—it was like being let out of a dark prison into the sunshine—that his object in presenting her on her first public appearance as Queen, decked in the symbols of virginity, escaped her. Had he suggested that she wear sack-cloth and wooden shoes, she would not have questioned his whim. She was completely subjugated by him and so much in love that she felt wicked. Was it right sometimes to forget even God? To be so carnally inclined?
When the old Countess of Richmond and the Princess Mary, both of whom had avoided her for months, came with offers of friendship she found herself looking at the old woman and thinking: Did you ever know such joy? and at the young one: Will you ever know it? The answer was no. There never had been, was not, and never would be, a lover like Henry.
By the ordinary people the marriage had been welcomed. With them Katharine enjoyed a mysterious popularity. The English did not take kindly to foreigners, and there were times—especially when the trade treaty with Spain was dishonored—when it was not safe for a Spaniard to walk the streets of London; but Katharine was pretty, in un-Spanish fashion; she had been widowed tragically early; and of late years she had been ill-done-by. English sympathy for the underdog was awakened. And there were all the elements of the romantic tale in the handsome prince honoring his betrothal as soon as his old father—obviously the obstacle—was dead. It was right, and it was also symbolic, part of all the new reign promised, youth in the ascendant, less taxes and restrictions, more splendor.
So the crowds roared themselves hoarse as the pretty Princess dressed like a bride rode to her coronation through streets hung with bright cloth and tapestries and cloth of gold. She was even more beautiful than she had been eight years earlier, and looked, they said, not a day over eighteen.
Katharine was aware that in half a year she would be twenty-four. She also knew that in return for all this adulation, she owed the crowd something—an heir to the throne. Please God, this would be a fruitful marriage and that she would be pregnant soon.
The celebrations were hardly over before she was with child and able to say to Henry—as soon as she was certain:
“Dearest; you must not play any more tricks on me…” He loved dressing up and bursting into her apartments, followed by a group of young men, all disguised, as Moors, as Saracens, as Robin Hood and his merry men. She was never surprised or deceived, but she delighted in the pretence of being and receiving them as the occasion seemed to demand. Frivolity had played so small a part in her life.
“Sweetheart, when?”
“I think in our month, April.”
Joanna’s married happiness had ended when Philip turned from her when she was pregnant: Katharine, seeing her figure grow bulky and her face puffy, knew some anxiety. But Henry never veered. He could have been a middle-aged father watching over a pregnant daughter. When she could no longer dance he would sit beside her and watch until she urged him to join in; then he would dance, never more than once with any lady, and at the end of each measure, come back to her side with a question, was she comfortable, tiring, too hot, too cold? The musicians were instructed not to play too loudly; and never any sad songs; the ballad mongers were to bring no story that would hurt a lady’s tender heart. No woman, Katharine was sure, ever had a more cherished, peaceful pregnancy.
They kept Christmas at Richmond, and on the seventh day of the festivities, she was at table when the pain struck. Nothing; I have been overeating. Again; and it is not in my stomach. Akin to, but worse than, the pains I used to have each month, the pains love cured. July; and this is the first of January. Do I imagine? No!
“I must retire,” she said.
No real cause for panic; I was premature; Joanna once told me that I was almost born on muleback; and I lived. He will live.
She said, “Heap up the fire, warm blankets.” Born untimely into a winter world he would need comfort and great care.
But what the last violent wrench of pain brought into the world needed no warmth, no cosseting. A female, stillborn.
Katharine bowed to the will of God. He ruled all and had chosen, for some reason that it would be heresy even to question, to bring this pregnancy to nothing. But she was disappointed and feared that Henry would be.
Henry proved that he was unique among men.
“I am sorry. But we are young. There will be others. It is a pity that you have nothing to show for your pains. Poor Kate, all to do again.” He held her hand, he kissed her and when she was up and about again, planned things to divert and amuse her. In after years when she heard him called “cruel,” her mind might accept the word; her heart never did; she had seen him kind and cheerful in circumstances in which many a man—not a King awaiting the birth of his heir—would have been gloomy, reproachful or merely indifferent.
The ordinary people stood by her too. The few, very few, women who could write, sent letters, all on the one theme. “I lost three before I bore one living, a great boy I have now.” Most of the messages were verbal, “Tell Her Grace not to worry. I lost my first…my second…my third.” “I was hard on forty when I bore my John, after three slips.”
The seemingly boundless goodwill—actually proof of the fact that once the English, from titled lady to fishwife, had taken up an attitude, were loath to let it go—cheered and heartened her. February; March; and the Court very gay, full of visitors, attracted as though by a magnet; a Renaissance Court, but at the same time safe and orderly. In April—our month—she was pregnant again. This time…God, God, please…
A year to the very day; on the first of January in the year of our Lord, 1511, this time properly prepared, in a room with new hangings, all embroidered with the initials H and K, she was brought to bed, properly attended, and delivered of a living child, a boy.
“A boy, thanks be to God,” the midwife said, as much satisfaction in her voice as if she had begotten and borne him.
The child’s first wailing cry was that of dynasty, sounding through Richmond, beyond and beyond. Bell-ringers leaned on their ropes and rocked ancient steeples; bonfires were lighted; people danced in the streets. A prince, a prince; one day to be Henry the Ninth. All England—not yet emerged from the celebration of Christmas into the workaday world—went mad.
And once again Henry showed himself to be unique. From the congratulations, the feastings, the planning for the most splendid christening any child had ever had, he removed himself to go, in midwinter, to a most inclement region of his realm; to stay in what he called “my little palace of Barsham,” which was indeed a small and inconvenient if beautiful house; to cast off his shoes in the Slipper Chapel and walk, barefoot, to the Shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham, in order to give thanks to God for this great blessing.
“I wish I could go with you,” Katharine said. “Lay my eternal gratitude, and my gift, with your own, at her feet.”
“I will.”
“I shall go myself, as soon as I am well enough.”
“To be well, you must eat well,” he said solicitously. “Dish after dish you pick at and send away. Is there nothing of which you could eat heartily?”
“Salad,” she said. “With a dish of salad I could out eat you.”
Some Spanish dish, he supposed. Bearing the word carefully in the forefront of his mind he went and found Wolsey who knew a little about everything.
“Thomas, what is salad?”
“A dish, Your Grace.”
“I know. What made of? How cooked? The Queen has expressed a desire for it.”
“A desire which cannot, alas, be gratified. Not in England nowadays.”
“Why not nowadays?”
“Once,” Wolsey said, “there were salad gardens all along the banks of the Thames. They ran to ruin, or so I understand, during the late wars. And sheep are more profitable.”
“It grows then?” Henry asked with interest. “Order me a salad garden at each palace and manor.”
“Even so—in mid-winter. Though I believe that in Flanders they grow lettuces and carrots and such things all the year round, under glass to save them from the frost.”
“Then we, too, will have glass. Meantime order what is needed from Flanders.”
“But Your Grace it would be withered and dead…”
“Why? A great tree can be transplanted if the roots are dug out wide enough. I want a salad garden dug up, entire, and shipped here with all possible speed. I want some Flemings who understand such things. We will have a whole house of glass if necessary. You see to it. I am on my way to Walsingham. I hope to find a dish of this stuff on my table when I come back.”
Katharine must have whatever she wanted: but there was more to it than that. Wolsey’s words about the late wars underlined a fact—the later Plantagenet kings had enjoyed a standard of luxury never since attained. During those wars England had dropped behind a little, and not yet caught up because his father cared nothing for such things. He would alter all that. Imagine a King of England obliged to send to Flanders for a dish of salad!
Thomas Wolsey, humbly born, the son of a butcher and grazier at Ipswich had reached his present position, King’s Almoner, by industry and attention to duty. The post in itself was not important; but even in the elder Henry’s time he had begun to twist it to his own ends. No former Almoner had been so often consulted, taken into such confidence. The younger Henry had inherited him, relied upon him, had already made him a member of his Council; said to others, “Wolsey will see to it,” to Wolsey, “I leave it to you.” Wolsey, in the service of his King, and in the interests of his own inordinate ambition, was prepared to work twenty hours a day and to achieve the impossible without breathing hard or allowing the sweat to show. Promotion would come.
By the twentieth of February the Court was at Westminster. All the royal residences were a little too small for the number of people who must be accommodated and each in turn must be used, then vacated and cleaned and aired; regular movement was the habit. But because it was winter it had been decided to leave the baby Prince of Wales with his household, his wet nurses and his paraphernalia at Richmond.
To leave him was a wrench and for the first time Katharine understood why her mother had dragged tired, hungry children from battlefront to winter quarters and back again. Poor Mother, she had tried to compound her duty as parent with her duty as Queen. Her own was by comparison a small problem; the baby was in good hands and it was necessary that she should take her place as Queen of England at the great—the most resplendent tournament—planned to take place at Westminster in honor of her son’s birth.
The tournament had been splendid. Henry—disguise again—had ridden in the lists as Sir Loyal Heart, wearing her sleeve. Sleeves had now become of such importance that they were garments in themselves, detachable and interchangeable. Ladies, prewarned, had three made so that one could be given to the favored knight without leaving one of their own arms bared.
She sat in the ladies’ gallery overlooking the tourney ground and saw Sir Loyal Heart, wearing her sleeve, white slashed with rose, challenge and defeat all comers.
Later she sat at the table, on the dais of the great hall, and watched what anyone who was not conversant with the English would have thought to be a dangerous riot. Dozens of young men, most of them apprentices, broke into the hall, snatched food from the lower tables, drained wine cups, twitched away gold lace and even jewels from women, and buttons from men.
“It is their way of showing their pleasure,” Henry said, and jumped down to join in the mêlée. They stripped him too. The fun might have lasted another hour had he not remembered the dish of salad; when he did, he called the guard, his Beefeaters, and had the hall cleared.
He came back to the table, in his shirt, all aglow.
“My doublet has gone for honor and largess,” he said, laughing. Then Francisco Filipez, her own server, one of those who had lived through the lean days with her, set a great dish of crisp young lettuce, carrots the size of a little finger, sliced cucumber, tiny radishes like rubies, all gleaming with oil, between her and Henry.
At the same time the Duke of Buckingham, whose turn to take the honor it was, moved into position behind Henry with a bowl and a towel. It was a dish that called for the washing of hands.
“So,” Henry said. “Now let me see you out eat me.”
There was a little commotion behind the screen at the door. Henry said, “If it is the mob returned, tell the yeomen to lay about with intent.”
Buckingham jumped down, made his way to the door, vanished behind the screen.
Somebody said, “Holy Mother of God!” and from the lower end of the hall a stunned silence spread like an incoming tide.
Buckingham, making his way through those who had heard, through those who were passing the word, had a face bleached white as bone. When he reached the dais, standing at a lower level, looking up, his face contorted; tears sprang from his eyes.
“The prince is dead,” he said.
There were many princes in the world; but only one over whose demise Lord Buckingham would weep.
VIII
This time she was stunned by grief, bewilderment and remorse. She knew that everything that happened in the world happened because it was God’s will, and being the will of God the child would have died had she leaned over his cradle. Yet the thought was unavoidable: There was I, making merry at Westminster while my child drew his last breath at Richmond.
Henry was grieved but still stout-hearted; the child had lived for fifty-two days, that gave hope for the future. There was still no hint of reproach in his manner towards her; nothing but kindness and the desire to comfort.
“Grieving,” he said sensibly, “will not bring the boy back; and too much misery could undermine your health, upon which the next child depends.”
He thought she spent too long on her knees in cold chapels, fasted too often and too severely. He was himself conscientious about his religious duties and attended Mass every day; but he did not kneel for hours as Katharine did, praying for and hoping for enlightenment as to where she had been at fault to deserve such punishment.
His response to his loss was to think about it as little as possible; to look towards the future, surround himself with good company and allow himself no time for brooding. He was a man, he needed an heir; but his whole life was not centered, as Katharine’s was, on a lunar cycle: Am I? Am I not? Perhaps next time.
Also the future into which he looked was different; this year he would have his twentieth birthday; she her twenty-sixth.
The year passed, and the next, without any sign of what she hoped for; otherwise they were full and happy; and in 1513 Henry paid her the highest compliment which a King could pay his Queen.
War against France had long been talked of. Louis XII had encroached in Italy and Henry and Ferdinand could persuade themselves that in attacking him they were defending the Pope. Both had other motives; Ferdinand his own interests and ambitions in Italy, Henry the ancient claim of the Kings of England to the throne of France. Also war, he felt, would be as exhilarating as any tournament.
“When I go to France,” he told Katharine, “I shall leave you as Regent.”
“I hope that war may be avoided,” she said. He was disappointed.
“No Queen has been Regent since Edward the Third appointed Philippa to be his Regent when he went to France.”
She had by this time acquired some knowledge of English history.
“The Scots attacked then. The Battle of Neville’s Cross?”
“They are unlikely to do so this time. James of Scotland is my brother-in-law; we have a treaty. Is it fear of the Scots that makes you look so grave?”
“No. If I look grave it is at the thought of your absence; and of the dangers that you will face.” He laughed.
“Danger? From whom? Old Louis of France? One of his knights? When no man in England has yet unhorsed me.”
“There are other dangers. I have seen war. For every man who falls on the field three die of disease—sickness flourishes where men live close, and another dies of privation.”
The mention of disease woke his horror of it.
“I shall not live close. As for the rest, there will be no privation in this war. Wolsey is ordering the provender; biscuits, cheese, dried fish; twenty-five thousand oxen, all prime beasts, will be slaughtered and salted down. And no man of my thirty thousand will spend a night under a hedge or a haystack. There will be tents for all. And what is more, we take the Twelve Apostles with us.”
“In what form?”
“Twelve great guns, now being cast; each bears the name and the image of an Apostle.” The knight’s sword, the yeoman’s bow still had their part to play, but a modern King, planning a modern war, must have modern weapons. Henry spoke with childish pride about his cannon, and indeed he and his friends wore, all that spring, the air of boys planning an outing; they were a generation too young to have known war and when they thought of it they thought in terms of glory; there’d be some blood shed, mostly French, and exciting opportunities to show off skill and courage.
“This, you will see, will be my glorious year,” Henry said. “And before I leave, I hope to get you with child again.” He could still make her blush.
