The Irish Princess

by Karen Harper

  One evening late, when I knew no one was about, I took a candle and tried the hidden door in the narrow servants’ hall through which I had seen Anthony disappear months ago. After two false starts, the panel pushed inward, and I traversed a dark, dim corridor, much narrower than the one I had escaped through at Maynooth. With the king’s gargantuan girth, I doubted he could fit through it at all. Pushing aside the door at the other end—I was amazed it was not locked—I peeked into a windowless bedchamber dwarfed by a massive oaken bedstead, then tiptoed to a door to view a small adjoining library with a table and two chairs beyond.

  An unseen current made my candle flicker, and I panicked that it would leave me in utter darkness. Solid shadows leaned and loomed from corners, under the table, even from the heavy folds of the velvet bed hangings. My heart thudded so hard it seemed drums echoed in the suite. So this was where the king of England slept and worked when fears assailed him, like an animal seeking its hidden den. Now I knew where to leave poison or take my chance with a knife for his assassination.

  But when Henry Tudor returned from France, claiming a triumph at Boulogne, bringing my lord with him, I was soon with child, ill again. Must my babies poison me when they were in the womb? Was it another warning to me from on high?

  I spent hours on my knees in prayer, trying to make bargains with the Almighty God about this babe I carried: that if the child lived, I would not try to kill the king but would reason with future monarchs to restore the Geraldines to Ireland. My little coterie of Mabel, Magheen, Margaret, and Alice kept me sane until I bore my second son, named, much to my chagrin, but at my husband’s insistence, Henry.

  It was another dreadful delivery—how had my mother done this five times? The attending physician, brought by Anthony from London, told me he believed I was so torn from the birth that I would never conceive another child. I mourned that and yet felt some relief too.

  Though I kept the child in the country, where the air was better, he lived but one year and was lost to quatrain fever, and I was inconsolable again. The Fitzgeralds must be cursed. One way or the other, we could not keep our males alive. Even my beloved wolfhound, Wynne, had died. If only Gerald would come back and fight for Ireland with me.

  No matter that Anthony vowed he had not wed me to sire a family, for he had that. Nothing got me through those deeply dark days. Nothing, that is, but a nosegay delivered to me by messenger from the princess Elizabeth, for she and Mary had been reinstated in the line of succession then. The note with the fragrant nosegay simply read,

  Dear friend, Lady Gera. We all suffer tragedies and must learn to bear up under them by helping each other. I have learned this the hard way and can only pray the path ahead will be smoother for both of us. I should like for you to return to my household at court you so briefly graced.

  Elizabeth Tudor, Princess

  Whether Katherine Parr had put the girl up to that, I know not. I yet have the beautifully scripted note and several of the roses pressed from the nosegay. To my husband’s relief and the delight of my coterie of female friends—including the Tudor queen and two Tudor princesses—I returned to court, much chastened and changed, yet still, in the very marrow of my bones, above all else, an Irish Geraldine.

  I was astounded at the change in the king when I returned. Though it had been boasted he was hale and hearty while he had waged war in France, he had become a cripple. He had to use a special chair some called a tram, with shafts back and front, and to be carried from room to room by six men. Sometimes he was rolled about on a chaired cart covered with quilted, tawny velvet. If the court progressed to a new palace, he had to be winched up in a leather harness and swung onto his horse, a massive destrier so it could bear his weight. Most were not allowed to see him being so handled, but I watched it from a window more than once.

  I served the queen, who tried so hard to tend her husband. When Mary or Elizabeth came to court, I spent much time with them, carefully planting seeds about how I loved Ireland and how my family had ruled there for the Tudors over the years. I talked of my love for my exiled brother whenever the opportunity presented itself, for I knew that especially Elizabeth loved and missed her half brother, Edward, Prince of Wales. He was usually away from court to keep him in the salubrious country air, though I knew that was no sure protection from young children being struck down.

  Then, as well as his own declining health, two more of the king’s cruel acts to two very different people with far varying ranks and means made me see that I could wait no longer for my revenge, whatever the price. For one thing, he ordered a young country woman, Anne Askew, the daughter of a knight from lovely Lincolnshire, to be tortured for her Protestant beliefs. Though I was Catholic, were we not all protestants over some personal belief? John Dudley, Lord Lisle, urged the poor girl while she was on the rack to confess to error, but she would not, so His Gracious Majesty ordered her burned alive at Smithfield in London.

  Then in December the year of our Lord 1546, when the Earl of Surrey dared to quarter the royal arms with his own Howard arms, the king had Surrey and his sire, the Duke of Norfolk, arrested and tried for treason. I had no great love for the Howards, and Surrey tended to be an arrogant blackguard, but I could not bear the thought of another family who had well served this tyrant king being brought low—perhaps unjustly executed, as my people had been. It was, for me, the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, and I did something quite heedless. I was still seething over the loss of my sons and full of festering vengeance against the king.

  So when I heard that Henry Tudor had ordered Surrey shamed by making him walk from Fleet Prison to the Tower, however well he had acquitted himself in his trial for treason, I took a plain, hooded cloak from Magheen’s clothing chest along with a handful of coins I was saving for Christmas gifts and sneaked out of the palace.

  With my bundled goods under one arm, wearing my own fur-lined cloak against the bitter wind, I walked to the Holbein Gate outside Whitehall on King Street. Since the royal mews were near Charing Cross, when I wanted to ride or fuss over my horse, Kildare, a beautiful blond palfrey Anthony had given me as a wedding gift, I always sent word she was to be brought to the courtyard by one of my lord’s men. But not today. No good, with what I had planned, to be seen mounting—quite alone—by courtiers gazing out their chamber windows or by my lord’s men, so I had sent a lad I trusted to fetch Kildare. The public street outside the palace would have to do for a mounting site.

  “Milady, where’s the rest of the party then?” the lad, Ross, asked when he’d given me a boost up with his clasped hands under my foot.

  “Just down the street,” I told him. “Come back here for Kildare by midafternoon.”

  “Brrr, ’tis cold,” he said, no doubt worried about me more than himself. “You should not ride out.”

  At those words from a mere lad, I nearly turned back, for if my lord heard I’d ridden out alone, would he think I’d gone to meet someone secretly? Well, he was busy with the king today, and this could not be helped. Besides, Edward Clinton—now Sir Edward Clinton, knighted for seagoing prowess and bravery in battle—was chasing pirates hither and yon, so Anthony could hardly accuse me of meeting him. I warrant pirates harried English ships as sorely as they raided Irish ones.

  I dropped the lad one of the many groats I’d brought along to grease palms and turned Kildare away through the crowded street. How I hoped Edward’s old mentor John Dudley was not overseeing Surrey’s march to the Tower today.

  You might know that damned Dudley was rising fast too, and had climbed to the position of Lord High Admiral and Earl of Warwick from his service in France with the king. Earl, no less, though he still did much of the king’s dirty work, including haranguing poor Anne Askew as her limbs were stretched and broken upon the rack. And I—though I might be wed to one of the king’s two best friends—was still a Fitzgerald under an Act of Attainder against my family, as the earl had reminded me just the other day.

  The thought of tha
t made me bold. If they dubbed me yet a rebel and traitor, so be it—and I would act that way.

  I reined in so that I could change cloaks. No good to look like a wealthy lady out in London’s streets, though I knew the leather-and-brass trappings on Kildare might give me away too. How I wished I had a Geraldine battle banner, and how dared the king arrest the Howards for theirs!

  I rode eastward toward Fleet Prison, a noisome place where debtors and non-noble crown prisoners were usually sent—another insult to Surrey. He would have quite a walk through London’s streets on this cold day to reach the Tower, where his father was already imprisoned. And he, like I, knew so few emerged from there alive. Like my father, brother, and uncles, he would meet his fate there, another man who had helped the king but had now gainsaid him or threatened his great pride. Surrey’s wife and children would be left to mourn. Their goods would be forfeit and parceled out to bootlickers. I would not stand for that, never again.

  Tying my plain cloak at the neck to keep the hood from slipping off, I rode down the Strand, then through Temple Bar to the prison. Even in the winter, the Fleet River, so clean near our country home, stank like a very sewer, worse than the summer Thames. Guards in Tudor livery stood outside, forming up in ranks, so I assumed Surrey was yet to emerge. At least another man was in charge; I did not see Dudley. I circled around them to get ahead. From the people lining the route, I could tell which way he would go.

  I dismounted near an ordinary, a tavern that served meals, and waited a few moments until a woman laden with loaves of bread in a basket started inside. “I need your help and will pay,” I told her. “A friend of the Earl of Surrey wants people along his way to shout out, ‘A Howard! A Howard! Bless the Howards!’ but then to melt away.”

  Red-faced from the wind, with her nose running, she nodded, but said, “No one gonna melt much in this cold today, mistress.” But she eyed the groats I showed her.

  “I need you or someone you can trust to spread these coins along the way to men who will start the cries, then move away—ahead along the earl’s route to do the same again.”

  “And you’d trust me with your coins?”

  “Goodwife, cannot a woman trust another woman? Keep several for yourself, send your friends—and then forget you ever saw me.”

  “Hard to forget a face like yourn. The earl dear to you then?”

  “It is only that those who seek his life are not dear to me.”

  “Aye, I’ll do it then, swear I will. Got two braw lads at home. Soon’s I deliver this bread, then, I’ll have them on their way.”

  “Two braw lads at home,” I repeated, my voice catching. How I envied this poor, plain woman. I could say no more but gave her the coins, praying I could trust her. After the woman came back outside and scurried off, I waited, holding Kildare’s reins, tears in my eyes, cloaked and hooded as Surrey was marched past. No cries for the Howards yet, but he walked with his head up, his shoulders back, and his eyes straight ahead. What was it about these Tudor times that made families—the Boleyns, the Howards, even the Fitzgeralds—proud and powerful, only to be pulled down by this terrible monarch?

  Tears froze on my cheeks as I heard the first shouts up ahead, “A Howard! A Howard! G’ bless ye, milord!” The cries for Surrey seemed to swell. But, in truth, I saw and heard again that dreadful day my half brother and my uncles were taken to their deaths from the Tower to Tyburn.

  As I mounted and rode Kildare back toward the palace, the streets were less crowded, so I assumed some London folk had followed Surrey all the way across town. “Good girl, my Kildare,” I said, patting her neck as her hoofs beat a poem of their own in my ears and brain. Clomp, clomp. Kildare. Kildare , Kill dare—yes, I would dare to kill the king.

  CHAPTER THE TWENTIETH

  WHITEHALL

  January 1547

  At last, I was going to kill the king. He was already dying, but I was going to kill him anyway.

  At the bottom of a coffer full of stomachers and shawls, I had hidden a dagger that could not be traced. I had found it in a box in the stables at Battle Abbey, though I wished I had one that had belonged to my family to do the deed. Anthony kept several about with his various dress swords, but I dared not use one that could be linked to him or to me. Men of means oft had their names or initials or family mottoes engraved upon their weapons.

  The ailing king kept much to his rooms, at night to his secret chambers, Anthony had once let slip, as the status of the royal health careened up and down. At times, my lord said, His Grace was quite lucid; other times, he lived in the past, raving about how Queen Jane Seymour was the only woman he really loved—Jane, the beloved mother of his son who would rule after him. He even hallucinated she was with him, had imagined conversations with her, then went to wailing that she had died.

  Only the royal physicians and the king’s closest friends—especially Lord Denny and my husband—had easy access to him as he rewrote his will and planned his son’s investiture as Prince of Wales.

  Although the queen had returned to Whitehall a fortnight ago, the king had sent her away to Greenwich for yuletide. She had been regent for him while he was in France, but now he wanted to send a clear message that she would not be regent for his son until he reached his majority. As dearly as Her Majesty had tended him, it seemed the only woman on his mind now was dead Queen Jane.

  Surrey was scheduled to die in a few days, on January 21; his father, the Duke of Norfolk, who before the birth of Prince Edward had been discussed as a possible heir to the throne, had not yet been given a death date. So, if my opportunity came soon to confront the king alone in his secret rooms, I might not only avenge the lost lives of the Fitzgeralds, but save Surrey’s and his sire’s to boot.

  Truth be told, I eavesdropped on my husband and Lord Denny, gleaning everything I could about when the king insisted on being alone—he needed to “cleanse his soul,” Anthony said—and when he summoned others. Guards stood in the main corridor outside his chambers, where many nobles waited, hoping for a final audience, a last bequest of monastery lands or money. But when the time was right, I knew the back way in.

  The day before Surrey was to die, I saw John Dudley hovering about in the corridor outside the royal suite like a spider watching his web. He accosted me as I tried to pass by. “Ah, Lady Browne. You know,” he said, blocking my way as he had five years ago when I’d first met him, “I heard reports of the strangest occurrence in the streets when the Earl of Surrey was moved from Fleet Prison to the Tower.”

  My stomach cartwheeled, and I tried to face him down without blinking or flinching. “Really? Such as?”

  “I wasn’t there, but I have it on good authority that people along the route dared to shout out in the streets for him, ‘A Howard! A Howard!’ or some such. It reminds me of like tumult for a treasonous family I once was in charge of—much to my regret.”

  “I find it hard to believe you regretted that. Anything for king and country—and your family. Even destroying another family.”

  “I will ignore your sharp tongue for now. We are on the same side—the same side, I daresay, that Edward Clinton is on.”

  My eyes widened. Had Dudley seen us together at the king’s wedding banquet? Could Dudley have been the one who told Anthony of that? Surely Edward himself would not have spoken of me, so perhaps Dudley’s niece Ursula had. Were our unrequited desires so obvious then? Alice’s fears that I cared for Edward were one thing, but it dirtied my desires if this man knew of my feelings for his man Clinton.

  When I gave Dudley no rejoinder, he plunged on. “I have not told anyone of your continued rebellious female nature, for you seem to be handling loyalty to your husband well. But sometimes what ‘seems’ is not what ‘is,’ especially with a beautiful woman to distract one from her true purpose.”

  Despite the chill in the hall, I began to perspire. There was no way under heaven this man could know of my plans, for I had not even told Magheen. I decided not to protest or argue but continued to
stare him down. That obviously disconcerted him, for he shifted from foot to foot and hit his leather gloves repeatedly in the palm of one hand as he went on. “Lest it—by some far stretch of circumstance—could have been you—again—behind such defiance to urge the common people to cry out for enemies of the king, I am warning you to stay in line.”

  “Stay in line? Stay in line to be the next person to be dealt with cruelly and unfairly?”

  “You speak treason to criticize the king, however enfeebled he is now.”

  I cared not that this man was supposedly my better. I shook my finger in his face. “Best, my lord, you too heed what happens to families on the rise, lest your precious Dudley family should overstep in Tudor times and pay the price.”

  He grabbed me by the upper arm and gave me a little shake, speaking now through gritted teeth. “You’ll not threaten me, girl. My father died on the block for treason charges under this king’s father, and I have been fighting my way, my family’s way, back for years. I—Ah, Sir Anthony,” he said, loosing me and changing his expression and tone in a trice as my husband emerged from the king’s suite and the yeomen guards quickly closed the door behind him.

  “Gera, dear, were you waiting for me?” Anthony asked as he came over to us. Now that someone had emerged from the inner sanctum, people shifted closer, trying to overhear what my lord would say.

  “Just passing by when the lord admiral wished me well,” I said, praying that Dudley would not want him to know of our conversation any more than I did.

  “I must go back in to His Grace,” Anthony told me rather loudly, perhaps so others heard him. He turned to Dudley. “His Majesty will see you briefly. Since the middle of the month, he has swerved in and out of reason, but he is in good form right now, his old self.”