by Karen Harper
“R-regrets?” he stammered. “You m-mean regrets of dead children with the Spanish princess? But you gave me Prince Edward. You said you loved me.”
“For one thing, I am speaking of regrets for the deaths of your first two wives and the callous setting aside of two others after me, not to mention beheading that poor girl Cat Howard. I speak the truth now without fear, since you can no longer hurt me. Oh, yes, I feared you, knew I had to wed you, or you’d bring me and my family down, ruin us as you had others. Love? Love for our son, but only fear for you.”
“Jane . . . Jane . . . you cannot mean th—”
“Even now you have turned your affections from Queen Katherine after she has nursed and tended you, even in your vilest moods.”
“But . . . b-but you understood about my first two queens. I explained it to you, you above all people. The Boleyn was a whore, and my marriage to Spanish Catherine a sham and sin, and not my fault.”
“Princess Mary’s mother was loyal and loving to you until the day she died. Anne Boleyn was innocent of the charges against her, my lord; in God’s truth, you knew that. Incest? Witchcraft? You pursued her for years, devastated the English Church for her. As you face eternal judgment, surely you know that, and you will admit all at the judgment seat. But you wanted to get her out of your way so you could have me, have the chance of a legitimate son.”
He recoiled from me, but I still could not free the dagger from under his arm. The man’s weight was amazing.
“You . . . Jane, how can you be so cruel to defend her? The entire Boleyn family betrayed me—incest with her brother. At least his wife, Rochford, died with Cat Howard! And now the Howard men will go down too!”
“How could Cat Howard love you, any more than I, for even then you were a fat old man. And now you’ll kill the Howard men? For what, my lord king? Yes, Surrey and Norfolk should have been chastised for their arrogance, but that was nothing compared to your pomposity. They fought England’s wars for you and with you over the years. It grieves me greatly—and all the saints of heaven too—that you are so brutal and cruel. You have dragged down and have slaughtered by royal decree families that have helped you, and that shows your weakness, your fear, not your strength and power. ’Tis a great, great sin, huge sins encrusted on your doomed soul.”
“No—nooo . . .” Even though I feared I was overdoing my part, he began to gasp for breath, his once-commanding voice a mere whine. “You cannot mean these things!” He shoved feebly at me, but my wrist was still trapped; I could feel my entire arm going numb. He hissed, “Sent from hell, you a demon—”
“Sent from heaven, Henry Tudor! A harbinger from heaven. It is to hell you are going for the way you have destroyed so many innocent and loyal, from your first wife to the brave Fitzgeralds of Ireland who ruled there for you over the years. You could have been the greatest king in Christendom, but now you must pay the price for all eternity.”
He began to choke, crying, sniveling with one hand lifted to cover his face. I gave a great tug to free my arm from under him and loosed it—without the dagger.
“It cannot be, cannot be, for I am blessed, beloved of the Lord High God. It cannot be. . . .” His whining trailed off, and he lay back on his pillows, gasping for air. I wished I had the dagger, but I would have had to strike him with my left hand, and that mountain of flesh could well protect his heart or throat. I could only hope his shock and horror might make him senseless or even bring death before his cronies could call for Bishop Cranmer to administer the last rites, offering atonement for his sins. Whatever happened, I had made my point with the dagger of truth.
So I fled the king’s bed, of necessity leaving Dudley’s dagger behind and finally leaving behind some of my fierce hatred for England’s dreadful Tudor.
After my confrontation with the king, I lay shaking all over as if I had the ague, feeling chilled even beneath two coverlets. I was huddled in the truckle bed in the next room, where Magheen slept those days she stayed with me when Anthony was away. He still slept, where I had hastily undressed and scattered my garments in the dark. As I had heard the king’s snoring, I could hear my husband’s now through the closed door.
I was so undone I could not sleep and was terrified that, if I did, I’d have my nightmare again. Waking reality on the morrow seemed dreadful too. What would happen when Anthony or others found the defaced royal will? I had hidden his signature from it. Perhaps they would discover the dagger in the king’s bed and question Dudley. The king might recall what had happened and would surmise who had invaded his inner sanctum and imitated his dead wife. Or would he now send for Bishop Cranmer for the final Church rites to cleanse his black soul? I had thrown the lawn shawl with the pocket for the dagger down the chute of a common jakes, but if I were taken and tortured, what would I admit to? Oh, Saint Brigid, I should not have mentioned the Fitzgeralds with the other families he had ruined. Had Queen Jane known of or cared one whit for the Irish Geraldines?
And the most awesome agony of all: Would I—could I—have really killed the king if it had come to that, committed a murder, what I condemned him for? Thou shalt not kill. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. All the years of hatred that had driven me, eaten at me . . .
In fevered prayer, I thanked the Lord God that he had given me another way—a better way—to punish the king for his cruelties. For, whether he was in his right mind or not, I had tormented him as he had so many others. I had not killed the king, for that was the Lord’s doing, and He had given me my just revenge.
Besides, were the king’s advisers partly to blame for the massacre of my family, of others? His Privy Council, his secretaries of state, his supporters over the years, even my husband? No, as I look back on it even now, years later, I record here in my life’s story that I yet blame the king. His son, Edward VI, the boy king, became a pawn in the hands of the Seymours and Dudley; Mary Tudor, when queen, harkened to her bishops and her Spanish husband; even bold Elizabeth had her Cecils and Walsingham. But the horrid Henry Tudor was a law unto himself, and I believe he was judged in death accordingly.
I would say exactly that in the written reckoning of my Fitzgerald family, those who should have been Ireland’s kings but someday, perhaps, at least could rule there again. Yes, I would record my memories soon and, when I could, hide them with the precious Red Book of Kildare and pray I could help return my brother Gerald to Ireland someday.
’Round and ’round my frenzied thoughts went. I would never be a poet, but I would author my own words. Pieces of Surrey’s poems pranced through my mind: I weep and sing in joy and woe . . . for my sweet thoughts sometime do pleasure bring . . . gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting, when that I think what grief it is again . . .
Yes, joy and woe, I would write it all, the memories and motives of the woman who could have been the Irish princess.
That morn, sometime after the late January daylight, a pounding on the door jolted me from sodden sleep. I got up, wrapped a coverlet around myself, and had stumbled nearly to the hall door when Anthony burst from our bedchamber, half-dressed.
“Why are you sleeping in here? You should have wakened me!” he cried, pushing me aside to reach the door himself. Then, more quietly, “What if His Majesty has taken a turn for the worse?”
It was Sir Anthony Denny, concern stamped hard upon his face.
“His Grace became hysterical last night, shrieking he was damned to hell. We broke through a door he had somehow locked, and he soon after went into a sort of trance—a coma,” he reported. “Bishop Cranmer has been sent for. Come at once!”
“Gera, bring my leather jerkin and shoes!” Anthony ordered as both men raced down the hall.
I closed the door and wilted against it, my legs shaking. Justice. Victory for me and mine. But what if the king rallied as he had before and remembered too much?
Knocking sounded on the door again; it reverberated through me.
“Gera, ’tis Alice. The palace is astir! The king is truly on his dea
thbed now, they say!”
“I heard,” I said as I opened the door for her. “I must dress quickly and take Anthony some things.”
Alice bustled in as Magheen, ever spritely, came in behind her with her usual morning hug. “You know,” Alice said, “perhaps facing death, the king will now have a care for how my poor Lord Leonard felt when he was sent to his death, or your menfolk too.”
“Yes,” I told her as I threw the coverlet off and went barefoot and naked into our bedchamber to dress, “perhaps the king has thought on that a bit.”
Quiet chaos reigned in Whitehall Palace the next two days as the king sank further into death’s cold waters. I liked to think of it that way, that my nightmare of all those heads floating past me would haunt him too. Strangely—blessedly—I had not dreamed of such since my nightmare clash with the king.
Anthony said the queen was not allowed to see her husband in his deplorable condition, for he had left orders to that effect. The royal children were at separate rural retreats and were not to be told of the king’s approaching death yet. Sadly, the Earl of Surrey had been beheaded on Tower Hill, and his father was to be dispatched on this day, Thursday, January 27.
Everyone knew the king had received communion from his confessor, and finally Bishop Cranmer had been summoned to administer the last rites, as if he were the angel of death himself. Anthony kept muttering that before the king had sunk into a coma, he had suffered “sobbing deliriums as if he were doomed to hell for all his evil deeds.” Finally Bishop Cranmer arrived, but the king was in no state to give permission for anything—finally, praise the Lord! I later learned that when Cranmer reached the king, Henry Tudor gave no sign that he “put his trust in the mercy of Christ to forgive his sins.” No nod, no gesture—nothing, though Cranmer insisted the king “had wrung his hand as hard as he could” in response, and Anthony agonized that the king’s soul had gone to purgatory quite unforgiven.
At least the king’s power and life had ended. I thought the very walls of the palace, perhaps all of London and the realm—certainly, I thought, the folk, even the fens and fields of my Ireland—breathed a sigh of relief that his thirty-sixyear reign was over. The king, my enemy, at last was dead.
“We have a mess on our hands,” Anthony told me the morn after the king died. He looked grief-stricken, yet excited, for he was to play a large part in the royal mourning rituals. He had just sat down for a quick supper in our chamber, more or less perched on the edge of his seat so he could jump up again. “In the midst of all these elaborate funeral arrangements,” he explained, “we’ve discovered the king sliced his own signature off the will we’d struggled so hard over.” I strained to hear him, for his mouth was full of powdered beef. “It must have been in one of his confused states, though how he got from his bed to the will on the table in the next room—and locked the door to that room—we cannot fathom. We found the dagger that did the deed, though.”
I felt my face heat. I took a slow sip of wine, hiding behind my goblet. I had decided to save, rather than destroy, the signature of the king. I fancied that when I could, I would paste it at the end of The Red Book of Kildare as if he had signed it in approval.
“So an unsigned will means what?” I asked.
“Tell no one! We are forging onward, and nothing the king wanted will be changed. By the way, John Dudley has been privily censured too, so that should make you happy. Though he denies it, he dared to secrete that dagger I just mentioned on his person when he went in to see the king the other day. Evidently he meant it as a gift to His Majesty, since the king had it with him in bed when he died.”
“How do you know it was Dudley’s?”
“My dear, I wish you would properly call him by his title. He’ll be a power behind the next throne, and your bitterness toward him must end. His office of Lord High Admiral, you see, was scripted on the dagger plain as day. Well, the king always loved the navy and fancied himself the ultimate Lord High Admiral, I warrant.”
I shuddered at that thought but tried not to show it. No matter, for Anthony plunged on. “The Seymour brothers will no doubt get titles, as they will be advisers of their royal nephew; at least, Edward Seymour will be, as Lord Protector. Tom Seymour’s a bit more problematic, a wencher, hotheaded, but then perhaps most sea captains are—and that is their allure, eh?”
He meant to goad me, but I said naught. He jumped up, leaving his meal half-eaten. “I do know something for certain, though,” he went on, interrupting my wondering as to, if Dudley resigned from his admiralty position, who would be elevated in his stead.
I reined my wayward thoughts back in. “And what is that, my lord?”
“The Seymours’ dead sister, Queen Jane, would be thrilled for her son, proud of her brothers and the glorious, long reign her husband has had, don’t you think?”
Going over to open the door for him, I said, I am sure a bit too tartly, “I can hardly speak for a dead woman, my lord, and that is that.”
After being embalmed and lying for two days in the room where he had died, Henry Tudor’s body was moved from his secret apartments to a heavy, elaborate hearse hastily erected in the Chapel Royal, the very place where the king was praying the day Cat Howard tried to reach him to beg for mercy. The hearse was not a wheeled one but a structure to elevate the coffin, surrounded by nearly a hundred foot-long, square wax tapers. The funeral journey to Windsor, his final resting place next to Queen Jane—though I warrant he would have liked to change his wishes on that now—would take two days. So identical hearses were being constructed, one for Syon House, the midway resting point of the funeral cortege, then a third inside St. George’s Chapel at Windsor.
In the Chapel Royal at Whitehall, with the queen leading the way, we all filed past the bulky coffin. Candlelight blazed on the banners depicting the saints, the flags and escutcheons of arms, and the huge canopy of rich cloth of gold draped overhead. The chief mourners were led by Henry Grey, 3rd Marquess of Dorset, the father of Jane Grey, who had been a companion to my sisters when they lived with the Greys at Bradgate Hall after Beaumanoir was lost to us. Continual requiem masses were said and sung for the release of the king’s soul from purgatory into heaven. But all the trappings of kingdom and Church aside, I believed that my Queen Jane had told the truth: The soul of Henry Tudor, entrusted with his subjects’ well-being, had sorely perverted his power, so was not destined for celestial realms.
The next day, I accompanied Queen Katherine in a separate, heavily guarded entourage of her ladies to Windsor for the funeral, while the much slower cortege made its way behind us out of London. Bells tolled, Anthony told me later, for, as master of the horse, he led the dead king’s riderless steed close behind the chariot bearing the coffin. Atop that lay the life-size waxen effigy of the king in all his robed and crowned grandeur. I heard later that onlookers whispered that it vibrated when the chariot clattered over cobblestones, so that it seemed the king would cast off death and rise.
Crowds choked the highway, even as we women and our guards passed ahead of the funeral procession. I was tempted to spread some coin along the way as bribes, and not ones for goodwill cries to be shouted for the king. But most of all, I longed to shout myself, “The tyrant king is finally dead, but the Geraldines live on!”
Within St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, the king’s effigy and coffin rested atop a painted and gilded hearse thirty-five feet high. It was fringed with black silk, the candles flaming around it made from four thousand pounds of the finest wax.
With the queen and her other ladies, I looked down upon it from the elevated queen’s closet, a privy second-story viewing area. Like me, Katherine Parr was dry-eyed. How beautiful she looked in her blue velvet robes lined with sarcenet and a purple bodice and kirtle all made especially for the funeral. I wondered if she had thoughts for her true love, Tom Seymour, who had courted her before she caught the king’s eye. Like me, did she silently long for her lost mariner? And now that she was widowed yet again, would Tom Seymour come
back into her life? I knew she must remain unwed for a time, lest she be with child by the king—fat chance that, I thought.
Below us, the requiem Mass droned on, with Henry Tudor’s coat of arms, helmet, shield, and sword laid upon the altar. Ironically, Bishop Gardiner, after being snubbed by the king, gave the funeral sermon, since he was the bishop for the Garter Knights and this was their chapel. He preached from the text, “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord.” Whether or not, like the thief upon the cross, the king had his sins forgiven at the last, I knew I had spoken my piece and he had heard me.
Finally it was over, the pomp, the elaborate trappings and rituals. The floor of the choir was opened. The king had wanted to have his remains rest temporarily in the huge vault below until his ornate tomb was completed nearby. Much of the marble had been pilfered from the expensive stone monument the king’s old adviser, Cardinal Wolsey, had planned for his own tomb before the king brought him down. A betrayer, thief, and murderer, that was what the inscription on it should say, I thought as I watched sixteen yeomen guards slowly lower the massive coffin into the vault.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, cinerem cineri et pulverem pulveri ,” echoed in the high-vaulted chapel.
Then a clarion voice rang out: “Almighty God in his infinite goodness, give good life and long to the most high and mighty prince, our sovereign lord King Edward VI, by the grace of God. The king is dead. Long live the king!”
Others took up the echoing cries from below, even the grieving queen and her ladies, though I barely mouthed the words. Then people shouted, “Long live the noble King Edward, ruler of England, France, and Ireland!”
And so, I thought, as those words pierced my ears and tears at last burned my eyes, my quest begins anew with the next generation of Tudors and their advisers, even that damned Dudley.
