The Spanish Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon

by Erickson, Carolly

  I opened my eyes and saw Doña Elvira, bending over me. I felt straw underneath me. Wet straw. I was lying on a straw pallet. I had never been so sick.

  “Is it—the plague?” Another woman’s voice.

  “It is the new plague. Sent to punish us for our sins.”

  I closed my eyes. Sometime later, the same woman’s voice came again, this time so low it was almost a whisper.

  “She will die, won’t she.”

  “Hush! Say your prayers!” said Doña Elvira.

  “But the others—they died—”

  “Say nothing! The infanta will recover! The Lord will preserve her!”

  Once again I closed my eyes. A woman’s scream wakened me.

  Men’s voices reached me then, priests’ voices, intoning Latin prayers. I tried to speak. I wanted to ask Doña Elvira whether the priests were praying for me, giving me the last rites. I tried to lift my arm, to feel my forehead. Was there holy oil on my forehead? Was I dying? But I was too weak even to raise my fingers. My arm was limp.

  “Into Thy hands, O Lord—”

  I could not even form the words.

  Mother. Dear mother …

  “If there is a babe within her,” I heard Doña Elvira whisper, “it cannot live.”

  * * *

  I thought that I would never recover.

  Two of my women died, and seven of the grooms, and some of the Welsh gentlemen too, I never knew how many. All in those terrible days when the new plague, the one they called the sweating sickness, struck us at Ludlow in the weeks following Arthur’s death.

  I was sure I would die too.

  Doña Elvira hovered near me, swabbing me with cool cloths, giving me sips of wine, talking to me reassuringly as she had when I was a small child.

  Gradually the burning fever passed, and the throbbing in my head, and I was able to eat a little. I felt as though I was coming back to life. As though I had passed through a darkness—an infinite darkness—and returned into the light again. The joy I felt was beyond anything.

  Doña Elvira smiled and nodded.

  “The Lord will preserve her,” was all she said, but I could tell that the strain on her face was gone, and when for the first time since I fainted on the muddy road, I heard her scold me, I knew that I would soon be well again.

  My kind mother-in-law Queen Elizabeth sent for me as soon as I was well, and I was glad to leave Ludlow Castle with its unhappy memories and return to Richmond.

  The queen embraced me lovingly and led me into her apartments. She wore a simple black mourning gown, and her ladies and maids of honor were all in mourning as well. I expected to find her in a state of inconsolable grief; instead she appeared subdued, but happy nonetheless and I soon found out why.

  “I am expecting another child,” she told me. “If the baby is a boy, we will name him Arthur.”

  “That is good news indeed. It must ease your sorrow—and the king’s, of course.”

  I thought I saw the merest shadow cross her features at my mention of her husband, but I wasn’t certain. At the time I thought little of it.

  I knew that the queen had given birth to many children, and that only three of them were still living: Princess Margaret, the eldest, Prince Henry, who was now Prince of Wales and heir to the throne, and Princess Mary, still a little girl, and a very pretty one.

  The queen told me that three skilled midwives were ready to attend her when the time came for the birth. She paused, then added, “They are the midwives I intended to send to you, Catherine, as soon as you conceived Arthur’s child.”

  “I wish he had left me with a son,” I said. “But it was not the Lord’s will. I prayed that I would be able to give him many children. It was my dearest wish, next to the wish that he would recover, and once again be well and strong.”

  “So many were praying for that,” she said softly, looking down at her hands, folded in her lap.

  “May I tell you something about Arthur that I have not told anyone else, not even Doña Elvira?” I was moved to ask.

  “Of course you may.”

  I swallowed. It was not easy to bring to mind what I was about to say.

  “I was with him all the time during his last days,” I began. “Sitting beside the bed, or on the bed. I listened to every sound he made. Every gurgle in his throat. Every cough. I watched him while he slept. He slept so poorly, his coughing woke him. Sometimes he woke very suddenly and cried out.”

  The queen nodded. She did not take her eyes from my face, and I saw much concern and compassion there. I saw in his mother the source of Arthur’s depth of feeling, and I felt a fresh pang of grief and loss.

  I took a breath and then went on.

  “The very last thing he whispered was, ‘I would not have made a very good king.’”

  The queen hung her head and wept.

  * * *

  Arthur had died in April. The following winter, in an icy January, the queen’s pains began. She prayed for another son, and the entire court prayed with her.

  After many hours the three midwives she relied on so greatly were exhausted, and it was left to King Henry’s physicians to bring her child into the world.

  It was a daughter.

  Within hours both the queen and her newborn baby were dead.

  “I must write to mother, to tell her what has happened,” I told Doña Elvira. “She will be very sorry. She knows how good Queen Elizabeth has been to me.”

  But Doña Elvira interrupted me by holding out a folded letter sealed with my mother’s familiar seal.

  “You need not write, Infanta Catalina. You will be able to tell her the news yourself when you see her.”

  I took the letter, broke the seal, and read it.

  “Dearest Catalina,” it began,

  I have dispatched the Reina del Cielo from La Coruña. May the Lord Our Savior and Protector grant her favorable winds, so that she will come into safe harbor before the Lenten season. Make haste to prepare, beloved daughter. We await your swift return to Castile.

  Given from our palace at Granada,

  This second day of November, in the

  Year of Our Lord fifteen hundred and two,

  Isabella, Reina Catolica

  4

  The rope stretched between a tall wooden pole and a corner of the stable roof, where it was held down by a heavy stone. My acrobat, Sebastian, was practicing his tricks.

  It was the first warm afternoon of spring, and I had insisted to Doña Elvira that no harm would come to me if I went for a walk in the gardens—alone.

  “Not alone. Not unless I accompany you,” was her gruff reply. Her mood was very sour just then, she said no to everything. Along with all the others in my household, she had not been paid her wages in over a year, and she was not at all inclined to indulge me.

  “Not even if I promise to stay near the stables, where no one will see me? All the grooms and stable boys are sleeping at this hour.”

  She glowered at me, then relented and agreed. “But do not be gone longer than an hour. And whatever you do, stay away from the river stairs!”

  We were living in the spacious but dilapidated palace known as Durham House, which being beside the river Thames, attracted into its gardens the worst sort of dirty thieves and rogues who lived under the bridges. We often saw them creeping near the river stairs, where the barges unloaded provisions and messengers from the royal court brought news.

  I assured Doña Elvira that I would stay far from the river, on the opposite side of the palace grounds where the stables were. Once there, I encountered Sebastian, walking along the rope, one careful step at a time, shifting a long pole he held to help him keep his balance. As I watched, he reached the roof and stepped lightly onto it.

  I heard the sound of clapping, and saw Prince Henry striding toward the rope, looking upward and applauding Sebastian as he walked. It was hard to believe that the prince was not yet twelve years old at that time, he was so tall and strong-looking. He had none of a boy’s c
lumsiness or shyness, he strode forward like a young guardsman, agile and quick. His round face was open and laughing, his blond hair lifted by the warm wind. He looked so much like Arthur that it pained me to see him, yet in vigor, size and strength he was as unlike his brother as it was possible to imagine. And his voice was twice as loud, and twice as rich and musical, as Arthur’s had ever been.

  “So ho, Spaniard!” he called out, smiling broadly. “I would see that trick again!”

  Sebastian, with a bow, stepped out onto the rope once more and made his way back toward the other end. Before he reached it he suddenly swung himself into a new position, straddling the rope, and then, with one clean, swift movement, he was hanging from the rope by his toes.

  The prince insisted that Sebastian show him how the tricks were done, and, throwing off his doublet, climbed up the pole until he reached the rope.

  I watched while the prince tried in vain to find his balance, Sebastian patiently guiding him. But all Prince Henry could do was hang precariously from the rope by his knees, and after a short time he gave up, and slid back down the pole, ripping his hose and his linen shirt but grinning with pleasure. When he reached the ground he took a coin from his pocket and tossed it to Sebastian, who tucked the coin into his shirt and proceeded to hang from the rope by his teeth.

  At this both Prince Henry and I clapped. I had seen Sebastian perform many times, at my parents’ court and since coming to England. Yet he always amazed me.

  I said as much to the prince, and added, “You are nearly as daring as he is.”

  He shrugged, but looked pleased.

  “I will do better next time,” he said. “I hope you will be there to watch me, and applaud me, as you did your acrobat.”

  Charmingly said, I thought to myself. The boy has a good wit as well as an agile body—and much daring.

  “I would enjoy that,” I told him, “but I am leaving very soon, to return to my home in Granada. My mother has sent a ship to fetch me.”

  The prince, who had been hopping on one foot, put both feet on the ground and appeared very surprised.

  “But you can’t. My father is going to marry you. I heard him say so.”

  I opened my mouth but no sound came out. I shook my head.

  “No,” I finally said, still shaking my head. “Whatever you thought you heard, it cannot be.”

  “My ears are keen,” he insisted, reminding me once more of Arthur, who had made me laugh.

  “Such a marriage would be a sin. The sin of incest.”

  “But I heard him. I know what I heard.” He looked at me thoughtfully. Then, a moment later, he glanced up at Sebastian, and, spitting on his hands, began to climb the pole again.

  As I walked back through the gardens and into the courtyard of the palace I wondered, could the prince have been right in what he told me? Could my royal father-in-law intend to make me his wife? It was unthinkable. My mother would never allow it. Was that why she was sending the Reina del Cielo to rescue me?

  That night I could not get to sleep, not even when Doña Elvira brought me a soothing posset to drink and sang me a song that had comforted me when I was a child. I could not stop the worrisome imaginings that crowded into my mind. Why hadn’t the ship come? Had it sunk? Had it been delayed by storms?

  Or had King Henry, in secret, sent his own ships to capture the Reina del Cielo before it reached England, and was I, too, his captive, and soon to be his bride?

  * * *

  I worried over this, but not for very long. Toward the end of June of that year, the Year of Our Lord 1503, a new marriage treaty was signed. I was to marry, not King Henry, but Prince Henry.

  We would not marry right away. Not for several years at least, until he reached the age of fourteen or fifteen, which seemed like a very long time in the future. And the Holy Father in Rome would need to grant us the favor of a document called a dispensation, which meant that he would dispense with the laws of the church that prevented a man from marrying his brother’s widow.

  Yet I trusted that all would go well, and that in two or three years I would be the wife of the prince. Until then I would continue to live in the riverside palace of Durham House, with my household of Spanish servants and under the vigilant eye of Doña Elvira.

  And there was another great benefit of my betrothal: I was to receive the generous sum of one hundred pounds every month, to pay my servants and keep us all in royal state.

  So this was the reason the Reina del Cielo had never arrived in England. It was because my mother and father, in their wisdom, had arranged a new marriage for me, one that would prevent the sin of a marriage to King Henry, who was an old man and who, I was certain, disliked me.

  Now there would be no more long nights without sleep, no more threadbare gowns and worn-out chemises. No lack and no fear. Only full larders and storerooms, new gowns and new tapestries and furnishings for the old palace by the river. And in the fullness of time, when the old king died, I, Infanta Catalina, would become Queen of England.

  * * *

  With my betrothal to Prince Henry I was brought into the royal family more fully than before. The Lady Margaret, the king’s aged mother, showed such benevolence toward me and was so considerate of me that Doña Elvira grew jealous, and made a sour face whenever she heard the venerated lady’s name. She balked at accompanying me when I was invited to Richmond, saying that she knew no English (which was true) and could not converse with any of Lady Margaret’s women, and adding testily that no one at the English court showed proper deference to her own rank and dignity.

  Since I had grown tired of Doña Elvira’s tartness and petulance, I did not insist that she accompany me. Instead I took along Maria de Rojas or one of my other ladies—which only deepened Doña Elvira’s ill humor.

  Lady Margaret could not have been kinder to me or more solicitous. She looked at me, not with an appraising or critical eye, but as if eager to find all that was best and most promising in me. I basked in her benevolent gaze, and heard her tell me how beautiful my long thick auburn hair was, falling in waves below my waist, how dainty my hands and feet were, how my gray eyes held intelligence and mirth, and how she thought I must sing well and with true pitch, my speaking voice was so resonant and low.

  She flattered me—or was it possible that she saw something of her own younger self in me, a girl small in stature but pleasing enough to look at, and with a quickness of mind men thought rare in a girl or woman? Whichever it was, flattering or not, I could not help but feel that for the first time since Arthur’s death, I looked forward to my future in England.

  I saw little of King Henry, and when I was in his presence, always with many others nearby, he ignored me. He was said to be intent on finding a suitable wife. A wife young enough to give him more sons. Also Doña Elvira told me that she had heard he was not well, and in fact he appeared pale, and often frowned. Whether he was frowning in pain, or in bad temper, I could not tell. Whenever I saw him I could not put out of my mind the alarming thought that he had wanted to make me his wife.

  My happiest days were spent hunting with Prince Henry, who was already a good horseman and a daring rider. One afternoon Doña Elvira announced to me that there was a man waiting for me in the stable yard.

  “What man?”

  “He says Prince Henry sent him.”

  “Then please tell him I will be glad to receive him.”

  “He says you must go where he is.”

  Taken aback, I thought for a moment, while Doña Elvira, her lips pursed in disapproval, stood before me, stolid and silent.

  “Then I will do as he asks, since my lord and future husband sends him.”

  I went out to the stable yard, where a slim, smiling young man with sandy hair under a Flemish cap was waiting with a fine jennet and a small docile pony. Both horses had harnesses decorated with intricate designs worked in gold.

  The young man bowed.

  “You are sent by Prince Henry?”

  He nodded. “I a
m Paul Van Vrelant, huntsman to the prince—and apprentice harness gilder,” he added. “I am learning the craft from my father.”

  I moved toward the jennet, who shuffled her feet and twitched her long combed tail as I neared her. I have always loved horses. I was enchanted.

  “Griselda. I will call you Griselda,” I said to her, and reached out to pat her soft nose. She whickered and snuffled. She put me in mind of a beautiful mount my mother had ridden often when I was a child. A long-legged, spirited mare she called Esmeralda. Emerald. I asked mother many times to let me ride Esmeralda, but she said no.

  “Esmeralda is a one-woman horse,” she told me. “I ride her, and no one else.”

  I wanted Griselda to be my one-woman horse. I would ride her, and no one else.

  “The pony is for Princess Mary,” Paul told me. “The prince hopes that you and the princess will ride together.”

  I nodded, while continuing to pet and stroke my lovely new mount.

  “I will send one of my grooms to care for them,” Paul went on, but I barely heard him. I was preoccupied with Griselda.

  Princess Mary soon made her new pony her favorite. At seven years old she was a daring and spirited rider, like her brother Henry, and her new pony was capable of trotting very briskly beside my much larger Griselda, if I kept Griselda to a walking pace.

  Prince Henry’s older sister Princess Margaret had just left their father’s court for Scotland, where she was to marry the Scottish King James. Mary missed her, and as I too missed my older sisters, we were happy to spend time together in a newfound sisterly bond. Mary was a very pretty child, as I have said, and good-tempered and lighthearted. She chattered endlessly, asking me one question after another as we rode.

  I told her about my sisters.

  “Juana is lovely to look at and full of passion, Maria is quieter, and steadier. My oldest sister, Isabella, died when I was very near your brother Henry’s age. And I had a brother, Juan, who only lived to be nineteen years old.”

  She grew quiet. “I will have to go away one day just as Margaret has, won’t I.” She looked up at me, as if wanting me to agree.