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

by Erickson, Carolly

  It was the Spanish ambassador who first brought me word that my husband had pledged himself to Anne, and she to him, in a hasty ceremony with only a few witnesses present. It had taken place toward the end of January.

  “One of my informants knew of it,” he told me, “but only an hour or so before the vows were exchanged. It was only by chance that he was able to find out what was going on.

  “Anne was ill,” he learned, “but not too ill to repeat her wedding vows. The king was trembling and shaking. When he repeated his vows his voice was low—almost a whisper.”

  “How ill was she?” I demanded.

  “It was the sickness of the mother-to-be.”

  Fateful words. So the Scandal of Christendom had conceived a child, and knew herself to be pregnant by the end of January. That meant that she would deliver her child in the fall, unless—

  I banished all such dire thoughts from my mind. I will not even record them here. Unless—

  Many things could go wrong, as I knew only too well. The midwives were never completely certain there was a healthy child in the womb until it quickened. Anne’s quickening would not be expected until the spring. And by then the outrage of my husband’s pretended marriage to his impure mistress would be avenged.

  The time had arrived for my nephew Charles to come to my defense. I sent him a message, urging him to act, to threaten invasion if Henry persisted in flaunting his feigned union with Anne. To invade England if his threats brought no result.

  When I received no immediate response I sent a second message, and then a third, all of them signed defiantly “Catherine the Queen.” I waited for an indication that the imperial armies were on their way, or that Charles himself would land on the English coast in his flagship. Day after day I expected an envoy from the imperial court. An informant, even. A messenger at least.

  But there was nothing. Gradually the truth became clear. It was no longer in Charles’s interest to defend me or protect me. I was not important: Henry was.

  There could be no other reason for my nephew’s inaction.

  My chamberlain Lord Mountjoy brought me the instructions Henry was too ashamed or too preoccupied to deliver himself. In delivering them the chamberlain called me, not “Mistress Catherine,” but “Princess Dowager.”

  “It is the king’s pleasure that you send no letter or message to the imperial court,” he announced. “Nor will you be allowed to receive any.”

  He was unctuous, as always. He meant to be ingratiating, despite his harshly negative message.

  Before I could demur he went on.

  “You will remain in your apartments until more suitable quarters are provided. In the meantime you will not be receiving any allotment of funds from the royal treasury, or from any other source—”

  “What? Am I to provide for my household from the few coins I brought from Spain as my dowry, when I married Prince Arthur? I could not feed a lapdog on that pittance!”

  As my own ire rose, Lord Mountjoy seemed to become increasingly pleased and self-satisfied. He was a handsome man, tall and slender, and he danced gracefully and well—an ability much prized at our court. He was preening, as he stood there before me. My words had no effect—or rather, they had the effect of making my chamberlain ever more aware of the security of his own position and the fragility of mine.

  As I was to learn later, Henry had promoted him to first gentleman of the chamber—at Anne’s insistence. My household officials and servants were being won over, through bribes and promises of promotion, to betray me. Had my nephew come to my aid with his arms and his fortune, Lord Mountjoy would have been put in a cold, cramped dungeon and I in my rightful place, on my queenly throne beside Henry. Not complaining angrily to an indifferent household official who was hiding a slight smirk—or was it a yawn?—behind one gloved hand.

  The question about Anne remained: Was she or was she not carrying a prince, a future king?

  Whatever the truth, Henry decided to take the bold step of presenting her to the courtiers as his wife and queen, the future mother of his son.

  Throughout our marriage it had always been his custom on Holy Saturday, on the eve of Easter Sunday, to attend mass with me. We made a ceremonial entry to the chapel together, and I sat to his side in a throne appropriate to my state. On this Easter Eve in the year 1533, however, it was Anne who accompanied him, not me, amid a loud and prolonged fanfare of trumpets, and with sixty waiting women in attendance.

  Yes, sixty! Among them were many of those who had pointedly declined to attend Anne when she accompanied Henry to Calais. They still resented Anne’s usurping my role and my status—Elizabeth Howard assured me of that—but they dared not refuse the king’s command. Some had been won over by gifts or promises of future benefits, others by threats or the fear of blows. All the women were stiff and tense, the duchess told me, ill at ease in being forced to take part in a ceremony that felt false. There was many a frown, many a murmur of resentment as they made their way along.

  What was especially galling to the women around her was the splendor of Anne’s adornments. She had not been crowned queen, yet at Henry’s order she was dressed in regal finery for this significant occasion. From head to toe she shone with gold, her trailing mantle made from cloth of gold, the jewels at her throat and on her fingers gleaming with a gilded luster. Nor were these mere garnets or amethysts or Orient pearls: these were crown jewels, priceless gems from the treasure house in the Tower.

  “All the gold and jewels the king heaped on her only made her look worse,” were Elizabeth Howard’s first words to me after the mass ended and she came to tell me how it had gone. “I overheard many criticisms from among her attendants. The shadows and the darkened chapel could not hide her flaws. Instead they revealed all her shortcomings. She is not beautiful. She is not young. Her nose is far too large and she has spots on her cheeks. She lacks the grace to walk like a baroness, much less a queen. And as for her swollen belly—” Elizabeth shook her head, her mouth turned down in disdain. “It is more a shame than an honor to the realm. If the king married her in January, as they say, then she was already with child when they said their vows.”

  Her words were scalding reminders of all that gave me pain, yet they were at the same time gratifying, I have to confess, especially when she described the deepgoing resentment Anne gave rise to among the women of the court. Even the men, the duchess told me, had to be nudged by Henry into acknowledging Anne with bows and murmurs of “Your Grace.”

  “No man, whether highborn or low, likes to be forced to show honor to a pregnant whore,” she concluded.

  The following morning, “Queen Anne” was prayed for at the Easter mass, and hearing the unwelcome form of words, some of the worshippers actually rose and left the church. If only I had been there! I would have led them out myself. But I was imprisoned in my rooms, far from the outrage being committed against me, doing my best to observe the resurrection feast in reverent solitude.

  “Queen Anne” indeed! She had no right whatever to that title, only my husband’s command that it be used. No formal judgment had ever been issued dispossessing me of my claim to the title of queen. Despite this, elaborate and costly preparations were already being made for Anne’s coronation.

  “It had better be done soon, before she gives birth to the prince!”

  “Or will the crowning and the christening be combined?”

  Londoners laughed and jeered in an effort to mask their dread, but it did seem, as the hastily arranged coronation festivities took form, as though the natural order had been turned upside down. Anne’s triumph was the triumph of disorder and wrong. It was seen as fearsome, as a sign of evil having come into the world. Not everyone gave in to their fears, but a great many did. For Anne, who bore the devil’s marks on her body, was just one more of the many strange signs and omens of disaster to be feared.

  And as Anne’s coronation came closer and closer, the strange events multiplied, and the number of bodies pulled from the
river and discovered under the stairs and in lonely fields on the outskirts of the capital grew higher.

  “From dread and despondency, and the fear of unknown evil, good Lord, deliver us,” prayed my confessor on the eve of Anne’s coronation. That night, toward sunset, a ball of fiery light appeared above the horizon and hung there, glowing, then spitting fire, until dusk. Londoners turned out into the streets in droves, certain that the end of the world had come, and it was nearly dawn before the forces of the Lord Mayor and the guilds, the soldiers and the booming of the Tower guns could force them back into their homes.

  17

  There was rebellion in the air that spring, what with the signs and wonders in the sky and the quaking of the earth and the high tax levied on every Londoner to pay for Queen Anne’s coronation, which could not be long delayed.

  The Londoners were incensed.

  “You should hear them shout, ‘Not a groat for the whore Nan Bullen and her crowning! We’ll have none but Queen Catherine!’” Ambassador Chapuys told me gleefully when he came to visit me at Buckden. “London is yours, Your Grace, and always has been.”

  Henry had ordered me moved to the Huntingdonshire countryside so as to be away from the capital when Anne’s coronation solemnities and festivities went on. I had no wish to hear the uproar, much less to join in all the clamoring myself, though I would have liked to hear the shouts of support and loyalty from the people. Shouts of support for me, not for Anne.

  Buckden was a spacious estate with an empty, lonely feel to the great old high-ceilinged hall and large apartments. It had been a bishop’s palace but the bishop and his priestly staff had been moved elsewhere. My footfalls echoed in the bare, chilly rooms. The ambassador’s boots were even louder as he walked through the apartments, looking around at the stark bare walls and sparse furnishings.

  I shivered, and moved closer to the hearth where my groom Francisco Phelipe had ordered a fire laid. In the past my chamberlain Griffith Richards would have seen to this task, but he had not been allowed to come with me to Buckden; like many others who had been members of my dwindling household, he had gone to serve Anne, by order of the king. I still had my serving women, my confessor George de Atequa, my cooks, kitchen turnspit boys and grounds keepers—Buckden had large grounds and gardens, and stands of fine old trees—and most important, my physician Miguel de Lasco and my apothecaries Juan de Soto and Philip Grenacre.

  In charge of all were my captors—as I thought of them—Sir Edward Chamberlain and Sir Edmund Bedingfield, assigned by my husband to keep me confined, oversee the estate and defend it should the need arise. They were scornful of this task, seeing it as far beneath their status. The look Edmund Bedingfield gave the ambassador when he was admitted was perfunctory, he and Sir Edward hardly paused in their afternoon dice games, played in the guards’ chamber, far from my own principal chamber with its welcoming hearth.

  “When is the coronation to be?” I asked when Ambassador Chapuys and I had seated ourselves before the fire.

  He was uncomfortable. “Not until one more matter has been settled—legally.”

  “And what is that?”

  He fumbled for words. “It is a mere formality,” he said at length. “A proceeding in the archbishop’s court, a point of detail.”

  I saw through his evasiveness, and demanded to know more.

  He sighed. “A correction must be made, an adjustment in status, for the sake of the succession.” He spoke hurriedly, dismissively. “I recommend that you pay no attention. Simply ignore whatever is said to you, or required of you.” He cleared his throat, then said, “Archbishop Cranmer is about to order you to appear before him at Dunstable, where he means to arrive at a judgment concerning your marriage to King Henry.”

  So it was to be done at last. The unfinished work of Cardinals Wolsey and Campeggio was to be completed by the dull, dour Archbishop Cranmer—who, I reminded myself, had once been Thomas Boleyn’s humble chaplain. Thomas Cranmer was about to decide whether or not I was Henry’s true wife and queen. He could only decide one way—against me and in favor of Henry’s freedom to marry Anne.

  No wonder the ambassador was looking down at his feet rather than at me.

  “It is only a form, a show. It means nothing,” he was saying. “The only true authority is in Rome—” He broke off, cleared his throat. He looked at me apologetically. I had been given ample evidence that Rome had fallen into such a state of corruption and sin that the authority of the Holy Father was all but nil. His earthly authority, that is.

  Whatever the unfortunate state of affairs in Rome, and however great my contempt for the archbishop, I was determined not to cooperate in any judgment he might arrive at that would weaken my claim to be queen.

  I wrote out a protest, refusing to heed the summons to attend the archbishop’s court, and saying that he had no authority to make a ruling. I might have added that the archbishop himself had been married twice—so it was said—and that in my opinion neither of his marriages was a valid one as he had taken holy orders. To add this would have been to act out of spite, however, and besides, not everything one heard was true.

  I trusted that my letter would be delivered.

  I waited—and in due course the ruling came down. I was declared to be in contempt of the archbishop’s court, which found that Henry and I had never been married at all. Words might have been spoken, vows taken between us, but in the archbishop’s judgment, we had never been man and wife.

  Which meant, however it hurt me to imagine it, even fleetingly, that Princess Mary was not the heir to her father’s throne, and that our son who had had so short a life so many years earlier had never been a true heir either. I was no more than a contumacious Castilian heiress who had overstayed her welcome in England by many years.

  I knew, to be sure, that this was nonsense. That any judgment pronounced by a cleric in the pay of the Boleyns was one-sided and without merit. Yet the words stung. They roused me to renewed anger against this imposter whose alluring ways had robbed me of my place at court, my rightful place at the king’s side. Even as I railed inwardly against her I knew, of course I knew, that it was as much Henry’s doing as Anne’s. His was the highest power, the power of the throne. All decisions were his. All betrayals were his as well. Henry had shaped and defined the judgment of the archbishop’s court. Now it was up to me to do what I could to rob it of its force.

  * * *

  There was little enough I could do while at Buckden. But I could at least send my dresser Maria de Caceres to London in my place, to buy cloth and thread to make new garments to enhance my meager wardrobe (all my queenly finery having been taken away) but in truth to be my eyes and ears.

  I asked Ambassador Chapuys to send an urgent message to the king saying that my few remaining gowns were in rags and my torn kirtles a disgrace, and making me sound more pitiful than demanding. Because I was no longer looked on as an impediment to Henry’s plans my dresser was permitted to go to the capital and spend a small sum at the cloth market.

  Maria de Caceres lost no time in setting out, escorted by three of the ambassador’s men. It was a modest enough group of travelers, unlikely to draw attention. On arrival, however, she was glad to have the protection of the mounted men, for she found London a bedlam, loud with shouts and slanders against the queen who was about to be crowned and filled with resentment. And the cloth market was at the center of it all.

  “You want to buy what?” my dresser was asked rudely when she tried to order five ells of woolen cloth dyed in my favorite shade of light blue. “Are you mad? We have no woolens at all, and barely half an ell of sour green sarcenet, and that a ruined scrap, dragged out from under the wheels of a cart!”

  “Don’t you know that there are no more ships from Flanders, there is no more cloth at all!” another indignant merchant told her.

  Others simply shook their heads, or threw up their hands in exasperation. Even the moneylenders were at their wits’ end, Maria told me in a message she s
ent to Buckden. There was no trade, no borrowing or lending. Everyone expected war—and soon. No trade could go on in the shadow of war.

  “You wait and see,” one burly drover told Maria as he passed her with his five thin cows. “A year from now we’ll all be ruined. All! Unless the king takes Good Queen Catherine back, and casts aside his whore!”

  Maria took a chance and told the man she was hoping to find some cloth for the queen—“the true queen, that is,” she added.

  Squinting, he looked her over, then her companions.

  “You’ll find all the cloth you want at the Steelyard,” he told her. “They are Germans there. Subjects of the Emperor Charles, though they do business here in England. They have no use for Nan Bullen, I’ll tell you that for certain! Their warehouses are full of woven goods, made in Flanders—but they won’t trade it. They know—we all know—there will be war.”

  He told her where to go to find the German merchants whose walled community was on the north bank of the river. “Go carefully,” he cautioned. “Their knives are sharp—and their tongues are even sharper.”

  Maria found her way to the Steelyard and, once she explained who she was and that she had come to London on an errand for me, she was welcomed into its embattled confines.

  She told them how I was all but imprisoned by King Henry and kept from coming before my faithful people, prevented from receiving their aid and encouragement. And she confided to them that I was ill, and in great need of cheer, to strengthen me and bring me back to health. If only they could make some sort of demonstration to show their support for me! Could they not show their loyalty to me on the day the unworthy queen Anne was to come to London?

  The merchants assured her that they would, then let her choose from among their stock of woolen cloth and would not let her pay them anything.

  And on the day Anne passed through the capital in procession, the merchants of the Steelyard made their contempt for her evident, by placing the arms of Aragon and Castile—my arms—and the imperial eagle of the Hapsburgs, my nephew’s arms, higher than Anne’s own emblem of the white falcon.