by Nell Gavin
Others stated that God did not approve of marriage to a brother’s spouse, but Henry was adamant and his father certainly had no objection. Spain and England had both had gone to some trouble to marry Katherine to the British crown. At the same time, Spain’s queen, Isabella, was dying and anxious for her daughter Katherine to be settled. Rome proved the hardest to convince, but Henry pressured his father who manipulated the stakes so that all involved would approve.
Katherine, who was never asked how she felt about any of it, suffered through the haggling like a head of beef at auction, then went to Henry, finally, as his wife. When his father died and Henry took the throne, Katherine became a queen.
Henry dearly loved Katherine, and was clearly born to be king despite his position as second son and his early expectation of entering the Church. My family talked of nothing but Henry for months, even years, it seems. He was such a fine, strong king and we were so proud to be his subjects. His well-known feelings for Katherine fueled Mary’s and my adolescent fantasies and yearnings for romantic love. To a young girl, he was the perfect king and she, the perfect queen.
Katherine, the fairy tale princess from Spain, intrigued me. For a time, I developed a preference for anyone or anything of Spanish origin, fixing a mantilla upon my head and posing before the looking glass, insinuating myself into friendships with Spanish visitors, practicing Spanish dances on my harp or lute. I referred to Katherine by her Spanish name, “Catalina”, and reverently rolled the word over my tongue, sometimes in a whisper to myself, like a love poem or a song.
I developed so strong a reversal of those feelings, as years passed, that my distaste will transcend that lifetime. I have grown to so thoroughly dislike the country and the people and the language and the music and the history that the word “Spanish” equates itself in my mind with “hellish”.
Had Katherine been Danish, I would have detested the Danes.
Then, however, I was proud that my dark hair and complexion were like that of my queen. Our great king had chosen a dark bride rather than a golden one, and he adored her. For the first time in my life, I was not ashamed to be dark and for that, I fervently loved her.
Mary was frivolous with her intellect, as was I, and liked to daydream, sketching landscapes from the window. Developed early and eagerly interested in young men, she often sat in a reverie of love toward one gentleman or another, and sometimes spoke of being attracted to the King. Most young ladies were, when Henry first entered his manhood. Mary talked of tossing him roses and of having him bow to her from the jousting field like a romantic figure from the days of the Crusades. Then she flitted on to the next young man who caught her fancy and dreamed of him instead. She planned for a handsome knight to fetch her away someday, and worship and adore her. In the meantime, anyone of good name would do, and in the absence of a young man of good name, a masque or a festival would suffice.
Through the years, I would be her confidant and her friend, applauding her for attentions paid by an eligible suitor (or later, amorous kings) and wiping her tears when he would disappoint her. I hid as much as I could all the details from Mother, and Mary did the same for me. It was always best that Mother know less rather than more, and she knew only as much as we were jointly incapable of withholding from her.
At this I see Mother’s face, and even here I stiffen from resentment and anxiety. The mother I reflect upon was not soft. I always picture her in the dim light of the sitting room in the evening, always in a restrained and muted glow, not in sunlight or surrounded by garden flowers as some fondly recall their mothers. I see her, handsome and slender, appearing taller than she was, standing very straight and proper and inflexible, issuing quiet orders that were to be obeyed promptly and without question. I think of her and still feel I have to strive to be better and am close to failure, for her requirements were high and unforgiving.
Mother was a “presence” at Hever, which had seemingly been built, not to be occupied, so much as to provide a backdrop for her. Within it we were all merely satellites circling her. This included my father whom one would have thought was the more powerful figure of the two because of his gender and his success at court. This was not the case. Mother had the better bloodline and the sharper tongue. It was always Mother who had the final say.
Father’s family was more recently come to wealth and power so he was more conscious of them than Mother. She assumed they were her due and never questioned it but ever felt she was due more by right of superior birth and superior personal attributes. Father, by contrast, knew they were things one fought for with wit and energy. He enjoyed using them for the purpose of being seen and acknowledged as someone of importance. Mother simply knew she was someone of importance. All who met her knew this also.
Mother frightened me more than did Father. My mood turned dark in the face of her disapproval, sometimes spiraling into despair, whereas Father’s whip merely gave me pain that passed within hours. I could always be certain why Father was issuing a beating: my own behavior was the cause of it.
With Mother, my failures were less defined. She had little patience with persons who fell short. One delivered what she expected and no tolerant understanding would be forthcoming if the end product was not as she had demanded. With Mother, I had to guess, sometimes, what “falling short” entailed. I too often discovered what it meant with unpleasant surprise.
She often seemed disapproving without saying how or why I had failed her, so I tried to make her expectations solid and substantial in order that I might understand and meet them. I strove for perfect manners, and perfect curtseys, and perfect gestures, and perfect accents, and perfect posture, and perfect dance steps and perfect ways that things could be done. I wanted to please her so much that any small failing caused me embarrassment as intense as death. There was a hopelessness in that. She was looking for a perfect way for me to be and I was imperfect. Yet I remained possessed by the need to make her proud of me. I turned my resentment in upon myself and increased her disappointment in me by adding my own. My mother’s expectations tainted the image I had of myself and I always fell short. I always fell short.
Ironically, there was a tenderness to her character that she did not ever show, and which I did not suspect. She kept Rose and her idiot child, who contributed nothing in the way of tangible servitude and often needed care themselves.
“They have nowhere else to go,” she would coldly snap when asked. “I would not risk Hell by turning them out to beg or starve.”
Her servants ate clean and wholesome food, received the same medical treatment as the family, lived in comfortable quarters and had no unreasonable tasks demanded of them. They were given generous Christmas baskets, then were secretly slipped pouches of coins when they came to Mother and privately wept about ailing parents or a sickly brother. When questioned about missing coins, Mother would face my father with narrowed eyes and insist that he miscounted. It happened frequently but he would not risk challenging her. It was only the servants (and my father) who knew this side of her, for she hid her compassion and publicly denied her charitable actions (if they were uncovered) were anything more than irksome duty. It was Mother who drew from the servants the passionate loyalty they felt toward all of us. It is only now that I know this.
She also had a tenderness with regard to marriage. It was she who allowed me to remain unwed for as long as I did, searching for a man I could love. She had loved my father, and had married beneath her to be with him. To my knowledge she did not regret the decision even though it meant sacrificing some of her own position and lowering the prospects for her children. They would not force me into a loveless marriage as so many parents did, she vowed, though not to me. Time passed and Mother made earnest efforts to marry me off, but she heard my objections to her choices, and left me unwed and unpressured. In the meantime she simply spoke untruthfully about my age and waited, for she believed in true love. I took my time in the search because I believed in true love as well.
Their
intention being to secure me a husband of some small worthiness, although their expectations were grim given my defects of appearance and my hand, my parents spared no effort or expense toward my education and my acquisition of “charm”. I had considerable charm to begin with, if one could call a babbling tongue and a shameless desire for attention “charm”, so they intended to enhance what they considered to be my only hope. That “hope” included my being taught—and actually learning—what not to say, and when, and to whom. That most important lesson went unlearned.
At age 11, I was sent to the Netherlands where I became a ward of Margaret, Archduchess of Austria, and where I was tutored beside the children of European royals. My father had served the Archduchess in an official capacity as diplomat, and through this had become friendly with her. In appreciation, she extended him an invitation to send his daughter to her. This unique opportunity was to have gone to the elder child, Mary, but Father viewed me as the one in greater need of any advantage. He also judged me to be the brighter of the two of us, and therefore the one most apt to bring credit to the family name. So he sent me, the second daughter, in her stead.
It was here that my musical training began, in a place where the greatest musicians of the day were gathered. Ah! The blessed chance that led me to that place! For two years I resided among the angels, listening to music that these beings had smuggled from heaven to earth and which transported me to a state of shivering ecstasy. My fingers ached to reproduce it, and my determination to be one of them was fixed for a lifetime.
Then, my father called me home because the political situation had become uncertain, and because another opportunity had presented itself.
It was the general wisdom of the time that charm and manners should be acquired in France, at court. Our opportunity came when Henry’s younger sister, Mary Tudor, was sent to France to marry its king, Louis XII. My father was rising at court, and had made himself useful to King Henry on several occasions. His efforts and position entitled him to make arrangements for my sister and me to go as part of Mary Tudor’s entourage, and so we and a number of other young ladies of rank sailed across the Channel with her.
The crossing proved dangerous. It was ill-timed and the weather was fierce. The fear that we might sink was very real, and that fate was only nearly missed. England’s finest young ladies heaved and vomited and writhed in the most exhausting distress. Prayers for death were spoken aloud, and although mine were among them, I thought I must already have died and gone to Hell and was suffering punishment for a grievous sin.
The Princess was carried off the ship, for she had no strength to walk. The rest of us straggled behind with matted hair and soiled gowns, drifting like pale waifs onto dry land, supporting each other and mutely following as we were instructed, our stomach muscles still reflexing as if the firm dry ground was pitching waves. We were days away from a state of physical comfort. Some of us were years away from fear of travel by sea. Most of us viewed France, the unwelcoming gray land beneath the overcast winter sky, with distaste.
I, myself, cast one long, lonesome look back across the Channel toward a home I had only barely touched again after two years, and missed.
Mary Tudor’s wedded “bliss” (or rather lack, thereof) was to last only a few months. The royal husband to whom she had unwillingly gone was an old man who died conveniently soon after the ceremony. Before going to him, she had bargained with Henry, agreeing to marry only upon the condition that she be allowed to choose her own husband after she was widowed which, she hoped, would not take so very long. She already had a lover in mind, a commoner, and she was determined to marry him. It was only through this bargain that such a marriage was even remotely feasible, scandalous as it was.
Henry intended to keep his end of the bargain (with hopeful plans to persuade her against it if he could possibly manage it). He was a meticulously honorable man in his way. I give him that. Not many a king would have given weight to a manipulative promise he made to a mere woman when so much was at stake. The royal princess in a marriageable state was of the highest value to him in political negotiations. Most would have simply ordered her to marry, sold her off and been done with it. Yet he gave her permission to marry the man she loved because he was a man of honor and had given his word, and because her tears had torn at his heart.
King Louis of France had not planned to support a score of English ladies, nor did it please him to do so, so he ordered most of our gaunt, unhappy party back on a ship to England immediately upon our arrival. Mary and I, however, remained. Then, after his death, the princess was married once again (in secret in the event Henry changed his mind and withdrew his approval; Henry howled with outrage upon learning of the elopement, and of and his sister’s distrust and betrayal), this time with joy both during the ceremony and in the years to come. She returned to England with the rest of the young ladies who had made the journey with her.
However, Mary and I were still to remain in France. It was an “honor” we were told, bestowed upon us because of the invaluable service of our father to Henry. We became full-fledged members of the French court.
On the one hand, I was spared the Channel crossing. On the other, I disliked France, and had done so from the day I stepped stinking and wretched off the ship and set my shaky foot upon her soil. I would eventually grow to love it there, but my initial reaction was dismay and despair.
From that first day when we were installed at the palace, our guardians “protected” us from the reality of life in the French court with strict rules, endless religious tomes and moral lectures. These teachings were markedly different from the behavior I observed among the French courtiers.
The people at court were shrill, catty and innately boorish beneath their sophisticated social polish, treating young English ladies as bumpkins, or as sexual toys. We were sometimes the butt of humor we did not understand, which made the men laugh and the women glare at us, and were sometimes groped or followed by courtiers who found the stalking of us great sport.
This worsened with the death of Louis and the coronation of Francis I, for this new king took part in the sport himself and led much of the misbehavior.
For me, it was a frightening place among people strange to me, seemingly all wild people following the example of a wild and decadent king. It became a living hell when I was caught in the hunt. I wanted nothing more than to go home. I ached with it. I often thought of England at night and wept, for years, but I adapted over time as I was young and had no choice in the matter. My hints in frequent letters went ignored.
Under the strict religious teachings I absorbed with great drama, heartfelt emotion and romantic intent, I may well have become a nun, except for the rapes. I did not speak of them, but carried a scar on my neck where the miserable jackal cut me with his knife as I fought. When I whispered to someone the name of the man who had caused the wound, she made the need for secrecy clear to me and all who tended me. Hence, news of it went no further. The very few who knew the truth explained that I was abed with a fever, not a wound, then sharply warned me to cover my neck. I received a “gift” of an unfashionable wide choker necklace, and orders to wear it. I wanted no one to know, and willingly complied.
I henceforth took to wearing high collars or wide bands of cloth or metal around my neck to hide the scar and to deflect questions about its source. When asked, I said I had a mole I wished to cover. History has kept my secret for me, although the mole has since grown to “large” and “disfiguring” (It is ever irksome to hear about yourself as relayed by persons who do not know, or whose intentions are to discredit you). In time the scar faded, but I still wore the neckbands because I still saw the scar there, large and red, even after others could not see it there at all.
He came back several times and had me. In a matter of weeks I lost the solidity of my religious faith, for where was God? I still held tight to the vestiges of belief, particularly as they pertained to Hell, and read the Bible with a driving desperation, pulling apart t
he words in an effort to find evidence that my soul was not entirely lost. However, I had no further desire to become a nun, even had the damage been reversible and I been made physically whole again. Now despoiled and no longer worthy of God, I concentrated on the art of making engaging conversation in two languages, and of becoming attractive to men. If one is not a nun, one must become a wife, and my focus turned from the one ambition to the other.
Still, for years I saw the scenes during sleepless nights, replaying the attacks and imagining myself fighting harder and killing him. I twisted the bedclothes and gritted my teeth. My blood surged with fury and murderous thoughts and my soul writhed with hatred and vengeance. With all my other failings, I now had to suffer guilt for having allowed a man to be with me in that way, and for fantasizing his manhood painfully severed and removed. I did not confess these thoughts to a priest as I might have once. I knew without asking for forgiveness that neither the priest nor God would forgive me, for the man in question was one over whom I would surely burn in Hell.
I hated my own impotence most of all. I had had no choice for a number of reasons, his knife among them. However, the sin—in my mind—was my own. He called me horrible names and told me the fault was entirely mine, and I believed him because I did not know otherwise, and because a man such as he can only speak the truth. He beat me about the face, and always had the tip of his knife at my throat. Still, I should have stopped him. I should have been able to run. I should not have been tempting to him, somehow.
I fully expected harsh punishment for these events and my thoughts about them and, throughout my life, I dreaded facing Judgment. I find instead that I am not to be punished at all. Here I find that the murderous thoughts were not sinful; they were born of trauma and pain, and were a natural progression of healing. I did not nurture them, nor did I act upon them. I did the best I could, and that is all that is ever asked. The act itself was indeed a severely punishable sin but the sin, I am reassured, had never been mine just as Mary had always known. Not mine . . . I wish I had believed it in life.
