Blaze Wyndham (58 page)

“Oh, Hal, how I pray for it,” Blaze told him. “Jane Seymour is a good and sweet lady. You will be happy with her, I know it! God will indeed bless you with a son for England.” Blaze curtsied low to him, and smiling, she backed from the king’s privy chamber out into the other room where her husband eagerly awaited her.

Together Blaze and Anthony hurried from the palace down across the green lawns of Greenwich to where their barge was awaiting to take them upriver. They went hand in hand, laughing and talking happily to one another, totally unaware that the king was watching them from his windows as they went.

I have loved three women in my life
, Henry Tudor thought.
Two are now dead. Blaze calls her gentle Jane, and indeed she is. I think I shall come to love her too
. He watched as Anthony helped Blaze down into their barge. He watched as the earl entered the barge himself, and it pulled away from the royal quay.
Aye
, the king thought again,
I have loved three women in my life. Two are dead. Farewell, my little country girl. Farewell!

H
enry Tudor was married to Jane Seymour on May 30, 1536, in a private ceremony which was held in the Queen’s Closet at his palace of Whitehall. Anne Boleyn had been dead but eleven days. Queen Jane chose for her motto:
Bound to obey and serve
. This she did well, producing for Henry his only legitimate son, Edward, born on the twelfth of October 1537. Sadly, Jane Seymour died of a childbed fever some twelve days later, on October 24, 1537. Henry mourned her deeply.

Henry took three more wives in his efforts to secure the Tudor succession. Anne, a princess of the duchy of Cleves, whom he divorced immediately, to her great relief. Catherine Howard, a younger cousin of Anne Boleyn’s, who, like her relative, was executed on the Tower green the thirteenth of February 1542. It was expected that the king, who was now over fifty, would remain a bachelor for the rest of his life, but he did not, marrying Catherine Parr, a widow, in 1543. The new queen, who was childless but had nursed two elderly husbands and raised their children, was the ideal mate for the king in his declining years.

Henry Tudor died on the twenty-eighth of January 1547. He was succeeded by his son, Edward VI, a boy of but nine. Ruled over by a series of “protectors,” he died without issue on July 6, 1553, not quite sixteen years of age. Although the young king had attempted to alter the succession in favor of his cousin, Lady Jane Grey, English law prevailed and Catherine of Aragon’s daughter, Mary, succeeded to the throne. Mary reigned five and a half troubled years, during which time she married her cousin, King Philip of Spain, and brought the Inquisition to England for a brief period, thereby gaining the enmity of her people. She, too, died without issue.

Cardinal Wolsey had said that Henry Tudor would never marry Anne Boleyn, and yet he had. He said that no child of Henry’s and Anne’s would rule England. Elizabeth Tudor, the only child of that unhappy misalliance, came into her inheritance on the seventeenth of November 1558. Since the death of her father she had faced many terrors, including the stigma of bastardy, the suspicions of her half-brother’s protectors and her half-sister’s advisers. She had survived the rigors of the Tower, coming perilously close to death on several occasions. She had lived in dishonored exile at Woodstock in her sister’s reign. She survived it all.

Upon learning that she was Queen of England, she is reported to have said, “This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.” Anne Boleyn’s daughter reigned over her people for forty-four years, giving her name to a golden age still hailed in history:
Elizabethan
. She died on March 24, 1603. She was England’s greatest queen.

Bertrice Small
has written thirty novels of historical romance and three erotic novellas. She is a
New York Times
bestselling author and the recipient of numerous awards. In keeping with her profession, Bertrice Small lives in the oldest English-speaking town in the state of New York, founded in 1640. Her light-filled studio includes the paintings of her favorite cover artist, Elaine Duillo, and a large library—but no computer as she works on an IBM Quietwriter 7. Her longtime assistant, Judy Walker, types the final draft. Because she believes in happy endings, Bertrice Small has been married to the same man, her hero, George, for thirty-nine years. They have a son, Thomas, a daughter-in-law, Megan, and two adorable grandchildren, Chandler David and Cora Alexandra. Longtime readers will be happy to know that Nicki the Cockatiel flourishes along with his fellow housemates, Pookie, the long-haired greige and white, Honeybun, the petite orange lady cat with the cream-colored paws, and Finnegan, the black long-haired baby of the family, who is now three.