I have everything I ever wanted—except you. I have won a victory for this kingdom that will keep it safe for a generation. I have conceived a child and I feel certain that this baby will live. If he is a boy I shall call him Arthur for you. If she is a girl, I shall call her Mary. I am Queen of England, I have the love of the people and Henry will make a good husband and a good man.
I sit back on my heels and close my eyes so the tears should not run down my cheeks. “The only thing I lack is you, beloved. Always you. Always you.”
“Your Grace, are you unwell?” The quiet voice of the nun recalls me and I open my eyes. My legs are stiff from kneeling so long. “We did not want to disturb you, but it has been some hours.”
“Oh, yes,” I say. I try to smile at her. “I shall come in a moment. Leave me now.”
I turn back to my dream of Arthur but he is gone. “Wait for me in the garden,” I whisper. “I will come to you. I will come one day soon. In the garden, when my work here is done.”
Blackfriars Hall
THE PAPAL LEGATE SITTING AS A COURT TO HEAR THE KING’S GREAT MATTER, JUNE 1529
Words have weight. Something once said cannot be unsaid, meaning is like a stone dropped into a pool; the ripples will spread and you cannot know what bank they wash against.
I once said, “I love you, I will love you forever,” to a young man in the night. I once said, “I promise.” That promise, made twenty-seven years ago to satisfy a dying boy, to fulfill the will of God, to satisfy my mother and—to tell truth—my own ambition, that word comes back to me like ripples washing to the rim of a marble basin and then eddying back again to the center.
I knew I would have to answer for my lies before God. I never thought that I would have to answer to the world. I never thought that the world could interrogate me for something that I had promised for love, something whispered in secret. And so, in my pride, I never have answered for it. Instead, I held to it.
And so, I believe, would any woman in my position.
Henry’s new lover, Elizabeth Boleyn’s girl, my maid-in-waiting, turns out to be the one that I knew I had to fear: the one who has an ambition that is even greater than mine. Indeed, she is even more greedy than the king. She has an ambition greater than any I have ever seen before in a man or a woman. She does not desire Henry as a man—I have seen his lovers come and go and I have learned to read them like an easy storybook. This one desires not my husband, but my throne. She has had much work to find her way to it, but she is persistent and determined. I think I knew, from the moment that she had his ear, his secrets, and his confidence, that in time, she would find her way—like a weasel smelling blood through a coney warren—to my lie. And when she found it, she would feast on it.
The usher calls out, “Katherine of Aragon, Queen of England, come into court”; and there is a token silence, for they expect no answer. There are no lawyers waiting to help me there, I have prepared no defense. I have made it clear that I do not recognize the court. They expect to go on without me. Indeed, the usher is just about to call the next witness…
But I answer.
My men throw open the double doors of the hall that I know so well and I walk in, my head up, as fearless as I have been all my life. The regal canopy is in gold, over at the far end of the hall with my husband, my false, lying, betraying, unfaithful husband in his ill-fitting crown on his throne sitting beneath it.
On a stage below him are the two cardinals, also canopied with cloth of gold, seated in golden chairs with golden cushions. That betraying slave Wolsey, red-faced in his red cardinal’s robe, failing to meet my eye, as well he might; and that false friend Campeggio. Their three faces, the king and his two procurers, are mirrors of utter dismay.
They thought they had so distressed and confused me, separated me from my friends and destroyed me, that I would not come. They thought I would sink into despair like my mother, or into madness like my sister. They are gambling on the fact that they have frightened me and threatened me and taken my child from me and done everything they can do to break my heart. They never dreamed that I have the courage to stalk in before them, and stand before them, shaking with righteousness, to face them all.
Fools, they forget who I am. They are advised by that Boleyn girl who has never seen me in armor, driven on by her who never knew my mother, did not know my father. She knows me as Katherine, the old Queen of England, devout, plump, dull. She has no idea that inside, I am still Catalina, the young Infanta of Spain. I am a princess born and trained to fight. I am a woman who has fought for every single thing I hold, and I will fight, and I will hold, and I will win.
They did not foresee what I would do to protect myself and my daughter’s inheritance. She is Mary, my Mary, named by Arthur: my beloved daughter, Mary. Would I let her be put aside for some bastard got on a Boleyn?
That is their first mistake.
I ignore the cardinals completely. I ignore the clerks on the benches before them, the scribes with their long rolls of parchment making the official record of this travesty. I ignore the court, the city, even the people who whisper my name with loving voices. Instead, I look at no one but Henry.
I know Henry, I know him better than anyone else in the world does. I know him better than his current favorite ever will, for I have seen him, man and boy. I studied him when he was a boy, when he was a child of ten who came to meet me and tried to persuade me to give him a Barbary stallion. I knew him then as a boy who could be won with fair words and gifts. I knew him through the eyes of his brother, who said—and rightly—that he was a child who had been spoilt by too much indulgence and would be a spoilt man and a danger to us all. I knew him as a youth, and I won my throne by pandering to his vanity. I was the greatest prize he could desire and I let him win me. I knew him as a man as vain and greedy as a peacock when I gave to him the credit for my war: the greatest victory ever won by England.
At Arthur’s request I told the greatest lie a woman has ever told, and I will tell it to the very grave. I am an Infanta of Spain, I do not give a promise and fail to keep it. Arthur, my beloved, asked me for an oath on his deathbed and I gave it to him. He asked me to say that we had never been lovers and he commanded me to marry his brother and be queen. I did everything I promised him, I was constant to my promise. Nothing in these years has shaken my faith that it is God’s will that I should be Queen of England, and that I shall be Queen of England until I die. No one could have saved England from the Scots but me—Henry was too young and too inexperienced to take an army into the field. He would have offered a duel, he would have chanced some forlorn hope, he would have lost the battle and died at Flodden and his sister Margaret would have been Queen of England in my place.
It did not happen because I did not allow it to happen. It was my mother’s wish and God’s will that I should be Queen of England, and I will be Queen of England until I die.
I do not regret the lie. I held to it, and I made everyone else hold to it, whatever doubts they may have had. As Henry learned more of women, as Henry learned more of me, he knew, as surely he had known on our wedding night, that it was a lie, I was no virgin for him. But in all our twenty years of marriage together, he found the courage to challenge me only once, at the very beginning; and I walk into the court on the great gamble that he will never have the courage to challenge me again, not even now.
I walk into court with my entire case staked on his weakness. I believe that when I stand before him, and he is forced to meet my eyes, that he will not dare to say that I was no virgin when I came to him, that I was Arthur’s wife and Arthur’s lover before I was ever his. His vanity will not allow him to say that I loved Arthur with a true passion and he loved me. That in truth, I will live and die as Arthur’s wife and Arthur’s lover, and thus Henry’s marriage to me can be rightfully dissolved.
I don’t think he has the courage that I have. I think if I stand straight and tell the great lie again, that he will not dare to stand straight and tell the truth.<
br />
“Katherine of Aragon, Queen of England, come into court,” the usher repeats stupidly, as the echo of the doors banging behind me reverberates in the shocked courtroom, and everyone can see that I am already in court, standing like a stocky fighter before the throne.
It is me they call for, by this title. It was my dying husband’s hope, my mother’s wish and God’s will that I should be Queen of England; and for them and for the country, I will be Queen of England until I die.
“Katherine of Aragon, Queen of England, come into court!”
This is me. This is my moment. This is my battle cry.
I step forward.
Author’s Note
THIS HAS BEEN one of the most fascinating and most moving novels to write, from the discovery of the life of the young Katherine to the great question of the lie that she told and maintained all her life.
That it was a lie is, I think, the most likely explanation. I believe that her marriage to Arthur was consummated; certainly, everyone thought so at the time It was only Doña Elvira’s insistence after Katherine had been widowed, and Katherine’s own insistence at the time of her separation from Henry, that put the consummation into doubt. Later historians, admiring Katherine and accepting her word against Henry’s, put the lie into the historical record where it stays today.
The lie was the starting place of the novel, but the surprise in the research was the background of Catalina of Spain. I enjoyed a wonderful research trip to Granada to discover more about the Spain of Isabella and Ferdinand, and came home with an abiding respect both for their courage and for the culture they swore to overthrow: the rich tolerant and beautiful land of the Moslems of Spain, el Andalus. I have tried to give these almost forgotten Europeans a voice in this book and to give us today, as we struggle with some of the same questions, an idea of the conviviencia—a land where Jews, Moslems, and Christians managed to live side by side in respect and peace as People of the Book.
A NOTE ON THE SONGS
“Alas, Alhama!,” “Riders gallop through the Elvira gate…,” and “There was crying in Granada…” are traditional songs, quoted by Francesca Claremount in Catherine of Aragon (see book list below). “A palm tree stands in the middle of Rusafa,” is by Abd al Rahman, translated by D. F. Ruggles and quoted by Maria Rosa Menocal in The Ornament of the World (see book list below).
The following books have been most helpful in my research into the history of this story:
Bindoff, S. T. Pelican History of England: Tudor England. London: Penguin, 1993.
Bruce, Marie Louise. Anne Boleyn. London: Collins, 1972.
Chejna, Anwar, G. Islam and the West: The Moriscos, A Cultural and Social History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983.
Claremont, Francesca. Catherine of Aragon. London: Robert Hale, 1939.
Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Darby, H. C., ed. A New Historical Geography of England Before 1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Dixon, William Hepworth. History of Two Queens. Vol. 2, Anne Boleyn. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1874.
Elton, G.R. England Under the Tudors. London: Methuen, 1955.
Fernández-Arnesto, Felipe. Ferdinand and Isabella. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975.
Fletcher, Anthony. Tudor Rebellions. London: Longmans, 1968.
Goodwin, Jason. Lords of the Horizon: A History of the Ottoman Empire. London: Vintage, 1989.
Guy, John. Tudor England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Haynes, Alan. Sex in Elizabethan England. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1997.
Loades, David. Henry VIII and His Queens. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2000. ———. The Tudor Court. London: Batsford, 1986.
Lloyd, David. Arthur Prince of Wales. Ludlow, Wales: Fabric Trust for St.
Laurence, 2002.
Mackie, J. D. Oxford History of England: The Earlier Tudors: 1485–1558. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952.
Mattingly, Garrett. Catherine of Aragon. London: Jonathan Cape, 1942.
Menocal, Maria Rosa. The Ornament of the World. London: Little, Brown, 2002.
Mumby, Frank Arthur. The Youth of Henry VIII: A Narrative in Contemporary Letters. London: Constable, 1913.
Núñez, J. Agustín, ed. Muslim and Christian Granada. Granada: Ediciones Edilux, 2004.
Paul, John E. Catherine of Aragon and Her Friends. London: Burns and Oates, 1966.
Plowden, Alison. The House of Tudor. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976.
———. Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1998.
Randell, Keith. Henry VIII and the Reformation in England. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993.
Robinson, John Martin. The Dukes of Norfolk. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Scarisbrick, J. J. Yale English Monarchs: Henry VIII. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997.
Scott, S. P. The History of the Moorish Empire in Europe. Vol.1. New York: AMS Press, 1974.
Smith, Lacey Baldwin. A Tudor Tragedy: The Life and Times of Catherine Howard. London: Cape, 1961.
Starkey, David. Henry VIII:
A European Court
in England. London: Collins and Brown, 1991.
———. The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics. London: G. Philip, 1985.
———. Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII. London: Vintage, 2003.
Tillyard, E.M.W. The Elizabethan World Picture. London: Pimlico, 1943.
Turner, Robert. Elizabethan Magic: The Art and the Magus. Boston: Element Books, 1989.
Walsh, William Thomas. Isabella of Spain. London: Sheed and Ward, 1931.
Warnicke, Retha M. The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn. Cambridge and New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1989.
Weir, Alison. Henry VIII: King and Court. London: Pimlico, 2002.
———. The Six Wives of Henry VIII. London: Pimlico, 1997.
Youings, Joyce. Penguin Social History of Britain: Sixteenth Century England. London: Penguin, 1991.
By the same author
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Gregory, Philippa.
The constant princess / Philippa Gregory.
p. cm.
“A Touchstone book.”
1. Catherine of Aragon, Queen, consort of Henry VIII, King
of England, 1485–1536—Fiction. 2. Great Britain—History—
Henry VIII, 1509–1547—Fiction. 3. Henry VIII, King of England,
1491–1547—Fiction. 4. Queens—Great Britain—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6057.R386C66 2005
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