The Unfaithful Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII's Fifth Wife (22 page)

The king had yet to reveal what he had discovered about the impediment to his marriage to Anna, to reveal, that is, that in actuality he was not married at all. He told me he would disclose this fact to his advisers at the right time. But I began to wonder when the right time would come, since in the queen’s household all the talk was of her coronation—a coronation that everyone said would soon take place, and Queen Anna herself was said to be full of excitement over the spectacle of her crowning.

I confess that I was tired of all the waiting and confusion—and besides, at Bishop Gardiner’s palace I had less opportunity to see Tom, and seeing Tom was very important to me—more important than anything. So I concocted a ruse. I gave a false impression. I did not exactly lie, but I did create an illusion meant to hasten my marriage to the king.

I began complaining of feeling ill, I said that my stomach hurt and that my clothes were suddenly too tight. I stuffed handkerchiefs in my underwear to make my breasts look heavier than usual. I remarked to the chamberers in Queen Anna’s household that I had not received my monthly flux for some time, knowing that they would immediately spread the word that I was with child.

Now all eyes were on my belly, especially Grandma Agnes’s critical stare. She came to the bishop’s palace and regarded me from all angles.

“Well then, is it true?”

I pretended not to understand her question. I was a good dissembler.

“Has the king given you a child?”

“I know not.”

She bristled. But her anger no longer frightened me. I was the betrothed of the king.

“Come, girl, you are no innocent! Are you with child or are you not?”

“I suppose we shall know well enough by harvest time.”

She stepped toward me, as if to slap me, but I stood my ground, stiffened my spine and glared up at her.

She hesitated, then with a smirk and a shrug she turned and left me. I was not certain whether she heard my parting words.

“Before long you will have to ask my permission to leave my presence!”

*   *   *

Summer arrived and I kept up my ruse. As I hoped, King Henry wanted to believe that I was carrying his child, and began clearing the “entanglements” that stood in the way of our wedding.

The first obstacle was Lord Cromwell. Suddenly and without warning, without even a trial, he was arrested and taken to the Tower, accused of treason and heresy. The fell hand of the king had been raised against him, and he was shown no mercy. While he languished in his prison, Queen Anna was removed from court, sent to the palace of Richmond. Once there she was told that her marriage to King Henry would soon be declared invalid, which must have come as a great shock to her, and an even greater shock to her mother, who, I had no doubt, was outraged.

Meanwhile I was preparing for my own wedding to come. The queen’s apartments, so recently renovated and made ready for Anna, were now made ready for me. And the members of my large household were chosen, one by one, from my lord chamberlain to my master of the horse to my chaplains and maids of honor, my yeomen and footmen and grooms, to the sumptermen who would carry my litter and the cooks, scullery boys and clerks who would govern the preparation and serving of my food.

I pretended to have difficulty in choosing all these servants and officials, plagued as I was by pains in my stomach and dizziness and the increasing tightness of my clothes. I kept up the pretense as long as I could, aided by the heat (which really was quite oppressive) and all the confusion surrounding the king’s sudden, decisive decrees. In a few fateful weeks he had swept his most powerful official from court to prison and removed his queen as well: everyone wondered who would be next, and how soon the next blow would fall.

I am happy to say that King Henry was lenient with Anna, who was made to understand that although she would no longer be queen, she would be welcome to stay on in England with the respectful title of “Sister to the King,” and her own fine houses and a generous income. Her mother, however, was required to return to Cleves, and to stay there indefinitely.

To King Henry’s great satisfaction, a convocation of more than two hundred clergymen met in July to ponder the serious matter of whether or not the royal marriage was indeed a valid one. And to hardly anyone’s surprise, they decided, after much debate and haranguing, that it was not valid. That the king and Anna had been living in sin for many months, and that the king was free to marry any suitable partner he chose.

The king could hardly wait to marry me, he seemed as eager as a boy, not a mature man, stout and potbellied, with white hairs in his beard and a balding pate. Five seamstresses worked day and night to complete my wedding gown, which was by far the most costly and elegant garment I had ever put on. It was made in the French style, with yards of flowing silver bawdkin falling in luxuriant folds over a kirtle of cloth of gold. My headdress framed my face in sparkling diamonds, at my throat was a beautiful necklace of diamonds, rubies and pearls, with a great pendant diamond as large as a walnut.

When I tried on all my finery on the day before the wedding, standing before the large pier glass in the queen’s suite at Hampton Court, the seamstresses fussing around me, it all felt foreign to me. I was not this splendidly attired young woman, about to become Queen of England. I was Catherine Howard, short and smiling, who liked to make people laugh and whose nose was too big. As Charyn used to tell me, I was the runt of the Howard litter, who could not be allowed to breed and who would never marry.

Now I was marrying in splendor, to the most highborn man in the realm.

And I would have given anything not to be going ahead with it. What if I ran away, this very night? Where would I go? How far could I run before the king’s agents came after me and found me?

But of course I could not go. I could not leave Tom.

Wild thoughts flitted through my unsettled head as I stood staring at my reflection. What would the future bring? Would I become a widow soon, as I fervently hoped? Would I be able to do all that was required of me as queen? Would my husband’s subjects accept me, and pay homage to me, or would they mutter against me and shout insults at me as they had my cousin Anne Boleyn?

I could not sleep at all, the night before the wedding. In the morning I was bleary-eyed and pale, my hands shook and my stomach rebelled. I could not eat or drink. I allowed my chamberers to adorn me, brushing out my long auburn hair so that it fell in waves down my back, dressing me in my beautiful gown, fastening the sparkling necklace around my neck, the huge pendant walnut so heavy it seemed to drag my head down.

When I was ready I took Uncle William’s arm and let him lead me into the chapel. His kind, reassuring presence steadied me. But when King Henry entered the chapel, magnificent despite his girth in silver and white, jeweled rings on every finger, a massive necklace of emeralds spilling down his chest and a jeweled cap covering his balding head, I began to tremble. For just behind the king came his privy chamber gentlemen, with Tom prominent among them.

When I saw Tom I began to cry, quietly, and Uncle William bent down to kiss my cheek, at the same time wiping my tears with his glove.

“Be brave, Catherine,” he whispered. “The family is watching.”

And they were. Glancing around the small chapel I saw Uncle Thomas, looking very proud and smug, and Grandma Agnes, white-haired and wraith thin, and many of my cousins, aunts and uncles, even my stepmother Margaret. How I wished, in that moment, that my father had been beside me, instead of Uncle William. My dear father! Oh, how I missed him in that moment!

The ceremony was brief, the words went past my ears in a blur of sound. Standing next to the immense king, so very much taller and wider than I, a foolish happy smile on his broad face, I repeated my vows as carefully and accurately as I could, aware that my small voice shook with every word.

*   *   *

A few days after our wedding, King Henry took me to the site of his future palace of Nonsuch once again. We toured the grounds, noting where work had progressed. There were no buildings in place as yet, only the wooden scaffolding where some of them would one day stand. He had given orders that the high tower be completed first, and it was under way, though far from being finished. Masons were laying the stonework when we rode by, sweat pouring from their naked backs as they suffered under the hot sun.

“It won’t be long now, Catherine. Soon my tower will rise, and I will be able to come here to take refuge from my enemies. The northmen are preparing to rebel against me, my councilors say, just as they did four summers ago. If they come this far south, we’ll wait for them here, you and I.”

“I think we may need a few guardsmen. And perhaps a culverin or two.”

“Nonsuch will be well defended, I assure you. It will be the largest and strongest fortress in England one day.

“This is my dream, Catherine,” he went on after a time, in a lower tone. “This place, with you beside me. In you my dear love has come back to me, you know. My blessed one. My Jocasta. In you her sad loss will be redeemed, when you bear me a son. A boy to replace the one she lost, all those years ago.”

“I—I’m no longer certain that there is a child within me,” I confessed. “It may have passed from me.”

The king frowned. “When?”

“I am not certain, I just—no longer feel ill, and my belly has not swollen—”

“Perhaps it was simply a woman’s fancy.”

“Or perhaps a misbegotten babe.”

Suddenly the king blanched, a look of utter terror crossed his features.

“Don’t say such things! Only the devil sends misbegotten babies, deformed things with two heads or no arms or legs—” He shuddered. “When I was married to the first Queen Catherine, she presented me with one deformed dead babe after another. And all because our marriage was flawed. Your cousin Anne was cursed in the same way, and could not give me a healthy son. Only Queen Jane was able to do that, because there was no shadow over our marriage, no sin. You, my dear little wife, will give me sons because we are truly wed, with no sin to overshadow us, no impediments to cloud our union. It will be as God wills. In you my dream will at last come true.”

His faith in the future, his confidence in the purity and sinlessness of our marriage struck me to the heart—and filled me with guilt. I had only pretended to be pregnant. I had deceived everyone. And the greater deception was that my marriage to King Henry was just as flawed as his marriage to Anna had been. She had had a precontract with the Duke of Lorraine’s son, I had been handfasted to Francis Dereham. If the king was right, and only valid marriages were blessed with sons, then ours was doomed.

I pondered this on the way back to Whitehall, concerned about all that had happened and the unknown future, fearful lest I give birth to a deformed child and the king become suspicious about my past.

*   *   *

In the worst heat of that sweltering August word came from the rural manor of Shaddesburgh that Prince Edward was gravely ill. King Henry abandoned his planned hunting trip and rode to Shaddesburgh at once, taking Dr. Chambers and Dr. Butts with him and insisting that I go along as well, which I was only too glad to do. I had not seen the young prince, who was only rarely brought to court, and was concerned about him.

We rode through scenes of destruction; dead and dying cattle littered the sere pastures, withered crops blighted the fields, and the plague was said to be widespread nearly everywhere. I prayed that Prince Edward had not been struck with the plague, for it did not spare children and if stricken, the weakest of them died within days.

We found the little prince in his gilded cradle, surrounded by nurses and rockers. He was not yet three years old, but he looked much younger, lying curled into a ball, his eyes shut, his delicate face white. The servants knelt to honor the king, who hurried to peer down at his son, feeling his small head with his own large hand.

“He burns with fever!” King Henry exclaimed, “yet his face is white, not red. How can this be!” He turned to Dr. Butts and ordered that a specific potion be given to the prince to counteract his fever, then demanded of the servants whether an apothecary had been summoned.

“A wise woman from the village was brought to attend the prince as soon as he fell ill,” the steward told King Henry. “She made him drink what she prepared.”

“By all the saints! She’s killed him!”

The two royal physicians lost no time in treating the prince, ordering the servants to bring cool wet cloths to wrap around his body, moving him to the coolest part of the manor—the cellars—and making certain he was given cold rich cow’s milk and cider to drink.

We stayed at the manor for three days, and by the close of the third day little Edward’s cheeks were not so pale and his wide blue eyes were regarding us gravely. Those three days were an agony for my husband. (I must now accustom myself to writing of him that way, as my husband, though it has never ceased to feel odd to me.) He spent hours sitting uncomfortably by his son’s cradle, stroking him and talking to him, praying, conferring with the two physicians and with an apothecary brought from the nearest town. Through it all he needed to have me nearby, and I too sat beside the prince’s cradle, praying and watching for the least sign of improvement in his condition.

“He resembles his mother,” Henry remarked during our long vigil. “He has her brow and nose. I hope he will inherit her calm, gentle spirit. And her loyalty—I admired her loyalty above all.

“You are like her in that way, Catherine,” he resumed after a pause. “As I have told you so often, I can trust your loyalty.” He shook his head. “Not like the dastardly Crum—and the others. So many others.” The Lord Privy Seal had been executed on our wedding day. Others had followed him to the scaffold.

He stood—and grimaced. I could tell that his leg was giving him pain. I smiled sympathetically.

“Dear Catherine, I do so hope that we will have a son before long. Another Harry, like me, what do you say? A healthy, strong boy. A champion at the tilt, as I used to be–”