The Constant Princess ttc-1

by Philippa Gregory

  I shall not give myself to heartbreak, I shall give myself to England. I shall keep my promise. I shall be constant to my husband and to my destiny. And I shall plan and plot and consider how I shall conquer this misfortune and be what I was born to be. How I shall be the pretender who becomes the queen.

  London,

  June 1502

  THE LITTLE COURT MOVED TO DURHAM HOUSE in late June and the remainder of Catalina’s court straggled in from Ludlow Castle, speaking of a town in silence and a castle in mourning. Catalina did not seem particularly pleased at the change of scene, though Durham House was a pretty palace with lovely gardens running down to the river, with its own stairs and a pier for boats. The ambassador came to visit her and found her in the gallery at the front of the house, which overlooked the front courtyard below and Ivy Lane beyond.

  She let him stand before her.

  “Her Grace, the queen your mother, is sending an emissary to escort you home as soon as your widow’s jointure is paid. Since you have not told us that you are with child she is preparing for your journey.”

  De Puebla saw her press her lips together as if to curb a hasty reply. “How much does the king have to pay me, as his son’s widow?”

  “He has to pay you a third of the revenues of Wales, Cornwall and Chester,” he said. “And your parents are now asking, in addition, that King Henry return all of your dowry.”

  Catalina looked aghast. “He never will,” she said flatly. “No emissary will be able to convince him. King Henry will never pay such sums to me. He didn’t even pay my allowance when his son was alive. Why should he repay the dowry and pay a jointure when he has nothing to gain from it?”

  The ambassador shrugged his shoulders. “It is in the contract.”

  “So too was my allowance, and you failed to make him pay that,” she said sharply.

  “You should have handed over your plate as soon as you arrived.”

  “And eat off what?” she blazed out.

  Insolently, he stood before her. He knew, as she did not yet understand, that she had no power. Every day that she failed to announce that she was with child her importance diminished. He was certain that she was barren. He thought her a fool now: she had bought herself a little time by her discretion—but for what? Her disapproval of him mattered very little; she would soon be gone. She might rage but nothing would change.

  “Why did you ever agree to such a contract? You must have known he would not honor it.”

  He shrugged. The conversation was meaningless. “How should we think there would ever be such a tragic occurrence? Who could have imagined that the prince would die, just as he entered into adult life? It is so very sad.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Catalina. She had promised herself she would never cry for Arthur in front of anyone. The tears must stay back. “But now, thanks to this contract, the king is deep in debt to me. He has to return the dowry that he has been paid, he cannot have my plate, and he owes me this jointure. Ambassador, you must know that he will never pay this much. And clearly he will never give me the rents of—where?—Wales and, and Cornwall?—forever.”

  “Only until you remarry,” he observed. “He has to pay your jointure until you remarry. And we must assume that you will remarry soon. Their Majesties will want you to return home in order to arrange a new marriage for you. I imagine that the emissary is coming to fetch you home just for that. They probably have a marriage contract drawn up for you already. Perhaps you are already betrothed.”

  For one moment de Puebla saw the shock in her face, then she turned abruptly from him to stare out of the window on the courtyard before the palace and the open gates to the busy streets outside.

  He watched the tightly stretched shoulders and the tense turn of her neck, surprised that his shot at her second marriage had hit her so hard. Why should she be so shocked at the mention of marriage? Surely she must know that she would go home only to be married again?

  Catalina let the silence grow as she watched the street beyond the Durham House gate. It was so unlike her home. There were no dark men in beautiful gowns, there were no veiled women. There were no street sellers with rich piles of spices, no flower sellers staggering under small mountains of blooms. There were no herbalists, physicians, or astronomers, plying their trade as if knowledge could be freely available to anyone. There was no silent movement to the mosque for prayer five times a day, there was no constant splash of fountains. Instead there was the bustle of one of the greatest cities in the world, the relentless, unstoppable buzz of prosperity and commerce and the ringing of the bells of hundreds of churches. This was a city bursting with confidence, rich on its own trade, exuberantly wealthy.

  “This is my home now,” she said. Resolutely she put aside the pictures in her mind of a warmer city, of a smaller community, of an easier, more exotic world. “The king should not think that I will go home and remarry as if none of this has happened. My parents should not think that they can change my destiny. I was brought up to be Princess of Wales and Queen of England. I shall not be cast off like a bad debt.”

  The ambassador, from a race who had known disappointment, so much older and wiser than the girl who stood at the window, smiled at her unseeing back. “Of course it shall be as you wish,” he lied easily. “I shall write to your father and mother and say that you prefer to wait here, in England, while your future is decided.”

  Catalina rounded on him. “No, I shall decide my future.”

  He had to bite the inside of his cheeks to hide his smile. “Of course you will, Infanta.”

  “Dowager Princess.”

  “Dowager Princess.”

  She took a breath; but when it came, her voice was quite steady. “You may tell my father and mother, and you shall tell the king, that I am not with child.”

  “Indeed,” he breathed. “Thank you for informing us. That makes everything much clearer.”

  “How so?”

  “The king will release you. You can go home. He would have no claim on you, no interest in you. There can be no reason for you to stay. I shall have to make arrangements but your jointure can follow you. You can leave at once.”

  “No,” she said flatly.

  De Puebla was surprised. “Dowager Princess, you can be released from this failure. You can go home. You are free to go.”

  “You mean the English think they have no use for me?”

  He gave the smallest of shrugs, as if to ask: what was she good for, since she was neither maid nor mother?

  “What else can you do here? Your time here is over.”

  She was not yet ready to show him her full plan. “I shall write to my mother,” was all she would reply. “But you are not to make arrangements for me to leave. It may be that I shall stay in England for a little while longer. If I am to be remarried, I could be remarried in England.”

  “To whom?” he demanded.

  She looked away from him. “How should I know? My parents and the king should decide.”

  I have to find a way to put my marriage to Harry into the mind of the king. Now that he knows I am not with child surely it will occur to him that the resolution for all our difficulties is to marry me to Harry?

  If I trusted Dr. de Puebla more, I should ask him to hint to the king that I could be betrothed to Harry. But I do not trust him. He muddled my first marriage contract, I don’t want him muddling this one.

  If I could get a letter to my mother without de Puebla seeing it, then I could tell her of my plan, of Arthur’s plan.

  But I cannot. I am alone in this. I do feel so fearfully alone.

  “They are going to name Prince Harry as the new Prince of Wales,” Doña Elvira said quietly to the princess as she was brushing her hair in the last week of June. “He is to be Prince Harry, Prince of Wales.”

  She expected the girl to break down at this last severing of her links with the past, but Catalina did nothing but look around the room. “Leave us,” she said shortly to the maids who were laying out h
er nightgown and turning down the bed.

  They went out quietly and closed the door behind them. Catalina tossed back her hair and met Doña Elvira’s eyes in the mirror. She handed her the hairbrush again and nodded for her to continue.

  “I want you to write to my parents and tell them that my marriage with Prince Arthur was not consummated,” she said smoothly. “I am a virgin as I was when I left Spain.”

  Doña Elvira was stunned, the hairbrush suspended in midair, her mouth open. “You were bedded in the sight of the whole court,” she said.

  “He was impotent,” Catalina said, her face as hard as a diamond.

  “You were together once a week.”

  “With no effect,” she said, unwavering. “It was a great sadness to him, and to me.”

  “Infanta, you never said anything. Why did you not tell me?”

  Catalina’s eyes were veiled. “What should I say? We were newly wed. He was very young. I thought it would come right in time.”

  Doña Elvira did not even pretend to believe her. “Princess, there is no need for you to say this. Just because you have been a wife need not damage your future. Being a widow is no obstacle to a good marriage. They will find someone for you. They will find a good match for you, you do not have to pretend…”

  “I don’t want ‘someone,’ ” Catalina said fiercely. “You should know that as well as I. I was born to be Princess of Wales and Queen of England. It was Arthur’s greatest wish that I should be Queen of England.” She pulled herself back from thinking of him, or saying more. She bit her lip; she should not have tried to say his name. She forced down the tears and took a breath. “I am a virgin untouched, now as I was in Spain. You shall tell them that.”

  “But we need say nothing, we can go back to Spain, anyway,” the older woman pointed out.

  “They will marry me to some lord, perhaps an archduke,” Catalina said. “I don’t want to be sent away again. Do you want to run my household in some little Spanish castle? Or Austria? Or worse? You will have to come with me, remember. Do you want to end up in the Netherlands or Germany?”

  Doña Elvira’s eyes darted away; she was thinking furiously. “No one would believe us if we say you are a virgin.”

  “They would. You have to tell them. No one would dare to ask me. You can tell them. It has to be you to tell them. They will believe you because you are close to me, as close as a mother.”

  “I have said nothing so far.”

  “And that was right. But you will speak now. Doña Elvira, if you don’t seem to know, or if you say one thing and I say another, then everyone will know that you are not in my confidence, that you have not cared for me as you should. They will think you are negligent of my interests, that you have lost my favor. I should think that my mother would recall you in disgrace if she thought that I was a virgin and you did not even know. You would never serve in a royal court again if they thought you had neglected me.”

  “Everyone saw that he was in love with you.”

  “No they didn’t. Everyone saw that we were together, as a prince and princess. Everyone saw that he came to my bedroom only as he had been ordered. No more. No one can say what went on behind the bedroom door. No one but me. And I say that he was impotent. Who are you to deny that? Do you dare to call me a liar?”

  The older woman bowed her head to gain time. “If you say so,” she said carefully. “Whatever you say, Infanta.”

  “Princess.”

  “Princess,” the woman repeated.

  “And I do say it. It is my way ahead. Actually, it is your way ahead too. We can say this one, simple thing and stay in England, or we can return to Spain in mourning and become next to nobody.”

  “Of course, I can tell them what you wish. If you wish to say your husband was impotent and you are still a maid, then I can say that. But how will this make you queen?”

  “Since the marriage was not consummated, there can be no objection to me marrying Prince Arthur’s brother Harry,” Catalina said in a hard, determined voice.

  Doña Elvira gasped with shock at this next stage.

  Catalina pressed on. “When this new emissary comes from Spain, you may inform him that it is God’s will and my desire that I be Princess of Wales again, as I always have been. He shall speak to the king. He shall negotiate, not my widow’s jointure but my next wedding.”

  Doña Elvira gaped. “You cannot make your own marriage!”

  “I can,” Catalina said fiercely. “I will, and you will help me.”

  “You cannot think that they will let you marry Prince Harry?”

  “Why should they not? The marriage with his brother was not consummated. I am a virgin. The dowry to the king is half paid. He can keep the half he already has, and we can give him the rest of it. He need not pay my jointure. The contract has been signed and sealed; they need only change the names, and here I am in England already. It is the best solution for everyone. Without it I become nothing; you certainly are nobody. Your ambition, your husband’s ambition, will all come to nothing. But if we can win this then you will be the mistress of a royal household, and I will be as I should be: Princess of Wales and Queen of England.”

  “They will not let us!” Doña Elvira gasped, appalled at her charge’s ambition.

  “They will let us,” Catalina said fiercely. “We have to fight for it. We have to be what we should be, nothing less.”

  Princess-in-Waiting

  Winter 1503

  KING HENRY AND HIS QUEEN, driven by the loss of their son, were expecting another child, and Catalina, hoping for their favor, was sewing an exquisite layette of baby clothes before a small fire in the smallest room of Durham Palace in the early days of February 1503. Her ladies, hemming seams according to their abilities, were seated at a distance, Doña Elvira could speak privately.

  “This should be your baby’s layette,” the duenna said resentfully under her breath. “A widow for a year, and no progress made. What is going to become of you?”

  Catalina looked up from her delicate black-thread work. “Peace, Doña Elvira,” she said quietly. “It will be as God and my parents and the king decide.”

  “Seventeen, now,” Doña Elvira said, stubbornly pursuing her theme, her head down. “How long are we to stay in this godforsaken country, neither a bride nor a wife? Neither at court nor elsewhere? With bills mounting up and the jointure still not paid?”

  “Doña Elvira, if you knew how much your words grieve me, I don’t think you would say them,” Catalina said clearly. “Just because you mutter them into your sewing like a cursing Egyptian doesn’t mean I don’t hear them. If I knew what was to happen, I would tell you myself at once. You will not learn any more by whispering your fears.”

  The woman looked up and met Catalina’s clear gaze.

  “I think of you,” she said bluntly. “Even if no one else does. Even if that fool ambassador and that idiot the emissary does not. If the king does not order your marriage to the prince, then what is to become of you? If he will not let you go, if your parents do not insist on your return then what is going to happen? Is he just going to keep you forever? Are you a princess or a prisoner? It is nearly a year. Are you a hostage for the alliance with Spain? How long can you wait? You are seventeen—how long can you wait?”

  “I am waiting,” Catalina said calmly. “Patiently. Until it is resolved.”

  The duenna said nothing more, Catalina did not have the energy to argue. She knew that during this year of mourning for Arthur, she had been steadily pushed more and more to the margins of court life. Her claim to be a virgin had not produced a new betrothal as she had thought it would; it had made her yet more irrelevant. She was only summoned to court on the great occasions, and then she was dependent on the kindness of Queen Elizabeth.

  The king’s mother, Lady Margaret, had no interest in the impoverished Spanish princess. She had not proved readily fertile, she now said she had never even been bedded, she was widowed and brought no more money into the
royal treasury. She was of no use to the house of Tudor except as a bargaining counter in the continuing struggle with Spain. She might as well stay at her house in the Strand, as be summoned to court. Besides, My Lady the King’s Mother did not like the way that the new Prince of Wales looked at his widowed sister-in-law.

  Whenever Prince Harry met her, he fixed his eyes on her with puppylike devotion. My Lady the King’s Mother had privately decided that she would keep them apart. She thought that the girl smiled on the young prince too warmly, she thought she encouraged his boyish adoration to serve her own foreign vanity. My Lady the King’s Mother was resentful of anyone’s influence on the only surviving son and heir. Also, she mistrusted Catalina. Why would the young widow encourage a brother-in-law who was nearly six years her junior? What did she hope to gain from his friendship? Surely she knew that he was kept as close as a child: bedded in his father’s rooms, chaperoned night and day, constantly supervised? What did the Spanish widow hope to achieve by sending him books, teaching him Spanish, laughing at his accent and watching him ride at the quintain, as if he were in training as her knight errant?

  Nothing would come of it. Nothing could come of it. But My Lady the King’s Mother would allow no one to be intimate with Harry but herself, and she ruled that Catalina’s visits to court were to be rare and brief.

  The king himself was kind enough to Catalina when he saw her, but she felt him eye her as if she were some sort of treasure that he had purloined. She always felt with him as if she were some sort of trophy—not a young woman of seventeen years old, wholly dependent on his honor, his daughter by marriage.