The King's Daughter

by Barbara Kyle

  He shook his head in wonder. “So like your mother,” he murmured.

  Mother, Isabel thought. In her recurring nightmares during these past two weeks, over and over her mother fell, just beyond her reach. And what had driven her on since her father’s arrest was her will to save him from falling too. Now he was here with her, safe, and they were on their way to Antwerp and her mother. Would they find her alive or dead? Her father’s anxious face told her that the same fear gnawed at him.

  Isabel reached inside her bodice and took out the crumpled page she had torn from her mother’s book in Sydenham’s parlor, and saved. She unfolded it and tried to smooth it out as best she could. In the sunlight that streamed through the window the beautiful blue painted speedwell shimmered on the page. She held it out to her father, offering it.

  He recognized it instantly and reached for it like a man reaching for treasure. Tears gleamed in his eyes.

  Isabel said, “She survived so much. She will again. I doubt it not.”

  She stepped out on deck into bright noonday sun. The white sails aloft gleamed against a cloudless, bold blue sky. A crewman jogged past her, heading for the fo’c'sle, andblinked at her bare feet. True, the air was cold in the chill breeze, but the deck underfoot had been warmed by the steady sun. Besides, her mind was not on such things. She was looking for Carlos.

  She stopped below the quarterdeck. Further forward, past the mainmast, Captain van Borselen stood with a crewman up on the forecastle deck. They were pointing at shrouds, discussing some matter of rigging, and did not notice Isabel. She saw Carlos at the port railing, looking out to sea. She started toward him, limping. The dull throbbing in her thigh had swelled to a drumming, but it was not too terribly painful if she kept her weight off it and favored her good leg. Over the sound of the waves and sails, Carlos did not hear her approach.

  “Bel, wait,” Thornleigh called, coming after her, a blanket in his hands. Isabel stopped several paces behind Carlos. At Thornleigh’s voice he glanced at them both over his shoulder. But he did not turn.

  “It’s too cold,” Thornleigh said, wrapping the blanket around Isabel’s shoulders. “You shouldn’t be out here.”

  She said nothing. She was looking at Carlos. Thornleigh’s gaze followed hers. He whispered to her, “I think he’s in love with you, poor fellow.”

  “Poor fellow?”

  “Well, I mean Martin.” His tone became earnest. “Bel, there’s no reason why your happiness should be denied you. We’ll bring Martin to us in Antwerp. He won’t want to stay in England now, in any case. He can work for me. Adam and I could use the help. We’ll send for him immediately. All right?”

  Isabel realized he didn’t know that Martin had ever joined Wyatt, and she had no wish to go into that now. Her eyes had not wavered from Carlos’s back. Her father had spoken clearly and she felt sure that Carlos had heard him. “Martin is in France, Father,” she said with equal clarity. “He left days ago. And I won’t be sending for him. I wish him well. But I never expect to see him again.”

  Carlos turned around at the railing.

  Thornleigh blinked at Isabel. “What? Martin and you are not …?”

  He looked quickly at Carlos, then back at Isabel, his face registering a growing suspicion. But on Carlos’s face Isabel saw hope.

  Thornleigh took Isabel’s elbow and lowered his voice. “This is no man for you. You’re grateful to him, of course, I know that. He knows that. And I’ll reward him for what he’s done. But don’t let gratitude blind you to reality. He’s a rootless mercenary. He has nothing.”

  Isabel and Carlos continued to look at one another. “Bel, listen, I … I don’t feel entitled anymore to dictate to you … or withhold my consent, but this—”

  “I’m glad to hear it, Father,” she said, glancing at him with a smile. “The only consent I need is his.”

  She turned back, catching Carlos’s look of wide-eyed surprise.

  “Master Thornleigh!” van Borselen shouted from the forecastle deck. He stepped forward and called out in his heavily accented English, “I am told you own ships, yes? Would you come look at this halyard?”

  Annoyed at the distraction, Thornleigh called back, “What’s the problem?”

  “Refitting done in London. I want to hoist the spritsail but the rigging is"—van Borselen shrugged in bafflement—"English-fashioned.” His crewman had turned too, and they both stood watching Thornleigh, waiting.

  Thornleigh cast a final bewildered look at Isabel, a final frown at Carlos, then heaved a sigh and went to join the captain at the bowsprit.

  Carlos moved toward Isabel. They stood together awkwardly, gazing at one another, silent.

  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, s
he’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?