The Unfaithful Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII's Fifth Wife (26 page)

I was badly shaken by the incident on the river. I could not eat at all, and had to drink a good deal of calming poppy broth before I could go to bed and try—in vain—to sleep. I kept thinking about what Charyn had said weeks earlier, asking me if I was to have no coronation. I thought of the empty pearl cradle, of the harsh judgments of the strict Protestants who condemned me for lacking in sober conduct. I thought of the beautiful Madge Shelton, sailing away aboard the
Great Harry
with my husband, and of the somewhat improved Anna—improved in appearance but not in manner. Was she to dog my footsteps with her gloating and her unkind teasing banter?

Finally, toward morning, I managed to fall into an uneasy drowse, with the great bulk of my snoring husband by my side.

*   *   *

It was to be the last night we slept side by side for many days.

The day after my official welcome into the capital my husband gave orders to his privy chamber gentlemen that the door of his bedchamber was to be closed to me. And kept closed until he told them otherwise.

Tom brought me the news.

“He is irked,” Tom told me. “You know his quicksilver moods, full of happiness and generosity one moment and thundering with anger the next.”

“But why?”

Tom shook his head. “None of us knows why. He is uneasy in his mind. So many things trouble him. His leg hurts. The northerners are rebelling again. His favorite horse is spavined. He imagines that one of the yeomen of the bedchamber found a dagger hidden in his bed. He was wrong, to be sure. It was no dagger, but only a short stave, though what it was doing in his bed I cannot imagine.”

“He is angry with me for seeming to be barren. Though he is surely the one who deserves the blame.”

We were silent for a time. “Can nothing be done?” Tom asked.

“Joan has given me every remedy she knows of to administer to the king. Nothing seems to help him. Dr. Chambers blames me for the problem, as everyone knows. I cannot ask him for help.”

Tom was thoughtful for a moment. “It is said Queen Jane had a relic, a tear of the holy Virgin, that she wore around her waist. It brought her her child.”

“What became of the relic?”

“No one knows. Perhaps it was buried with her. Or perhaps she gave it to Archbishop Cranmer when he blessed her as she lay dying. She was a kind woman. She would have wanted others to have what had been precious to her. Though they say she was quite mad in her last days, with her fever.”

Tom took my hand and pulled me into a corner of the staircase, after listening for footsteps. No one was near. He kissed me and held me close, until we heard someone coming up the stairs.

“I will do my best to find out what became of the relic,” he whispered as he left me. “Think of me, dearest. And remember what I said about the privy chamber.”

*   *   *

The surgeons were at work, doing their best to heal my ailing husband. Once again his leg had flared up (how tedious these repeated inflammations had become to me!), and Dr. Chambers and Dr. Butts had called in half a dozen surgeons to minister to him. Knowing how he disliked having me see him when in agony and danger from his inflamed sore, I wanted to believe that the king had barred his bedchamber door to me because of his illness. Yet I knew that his order to me to stay away had come before he fell ill, several days before. So he was, as I suspected, angry with me. Punishing me, knowing full well that by barring me from his presence he was frightening me as well.

The surgeons were skillful, Tom told me. They lanced the pus-filled sores and probed them with hot irons to counteract the infections. They burned away the inflamed flesh and drained blood from a nearby vein and sewed up the wounds their painful ministrations left behind.

“They set no store at all by his ointment with the powdered pearls,” Tom told me. “They explained to him that it had made his leg much worse. You can imagine how he liked being told that! They brought leeches to suck out the poisons and he yelped with fright at the very sight of them, though I do think that, of all the remedies, the leeches help the most.”

Once again, in a grotesque way, our hopes were raised, for even the surgeons, Tom said, were shaking their heads and admitting to one another in low tones that the king could not live. Soon, I hoped, my brief uncomfortable time as queen consort would be over, and I could retire from court and, after perhaps a year of mourning, marry Tom.

But my husband, in fear of his life, sent to the French court for an apothecary he had heard of who was said to work wonders. We all awaited the arrival of this remarkable man, who was known only as S, with a great deal of interest. Intriguing newcomers were always welcome in any case, but in this instance, the mysterious S was said to be bringing with him a wonder-working remedy that would make the king well. Indeed he had the reputation of being able not only to restore health but to make the patient so strong and healthy that he or she would never be ill again.

By the time S made his appearance, the king was in a very serious state indeed, fighting for breath, crying out in pain—piteous cries, Tom said, like a wounded animal—and so swollen and bloated he was all but unrecognizable. Tom told me how the Frenchman wasted no time in bringing forth from a velvet chest a golden vessel filled with the powerful medicine. He called it the mithridate, and said that it was a secret mixture of some seventy ingredients, including dried mummy and powdered snails, poppy juice and a piece of the flesh of a hanged man. It was an ancient remedy that had been used for centuries. Apothecaries had kept it secret since the time of the Roman emperors.

It was as if the entire court held its breath, waiting to see whether the mithridate would restore the king to health. Hours passed—and then I heard the sound of running feet in the corridor outside my apartments. A buzz of voices, muffled cries, and then the word was passed to me: the king had not died, but was breathing a little more easily. By evening he was said to be regaining a little of his strength, and on through the night there were more bits of news coming from the royal privy chamber, all of it positive.

Positive, that is, for the king. Negative for Tom and me. I told my chamberers that the tears I shed were tears of relief, of joy. But in truth I was sadly disappointed, even though I knew a relapse was always possible, no matter how amazing the French apothecary was, or how remarkable his potion.

*   *   *

I was to be crowned, after all. My husband had announced it, the entire court had been informed and soon, very soon, the heralds would proclaim the forthcoming coronation in towns large and small throughout the land.

I, Catherine Howard, queen consort, would receive the venerable crown from the hands of Archbishop Cranmer, amid the solemnity of Westminster, with all the peers of the realm in attendance.

The king had commanded it, and so it would be carried out, at Whitsuntide, on the second day of June.

“But surely not,” Grandma Agnes cautioned me, rushing to my bedchamber as soon as she heard the news, and barely remembering to curtsey. “Not at Whitsun. It would be bad luck. Your cousin Anne was crowned at Whitsun, and nothing but ill fortune followed.”

“Perhaps my good fortune will cancel out her misfortunes.”

“It would take more good fortune than any one woman could have in a lifetime to cancel Anne’s bad luck,” she said vehemently. “Besides, whatever you do reflects on us all. The Howard name must be honored in all things, especially now that we have come into our own. Most of the royal offices are held by our family now.”

“Thanks to me,” I said bluntly.

“Thanks to your dead mother, you mean. You are only her shadow, her echo in the king’s mind.”

“And heart.”

Grandma Agnes shook her head. “Has he a heart? If so, it is a shrunken, withered thing.” I thought this an odd sentiment, coming from my grandmother, the woman who had carried a whip when chastising us at Horsham and Lambeth. The woman who had struck me and starved me.

I dismissed her, much to her displeasure, and called for the tailor Master Spiershon and his seamstresses. I required new gowns and robes for my coronation, and they were being sewn and fitted, which took a good deal of my time.

The king’s decision to order my coronation had come suddenly, as had so many other events that spring. While recovering from his illness, he once again allowed me into his privy chamber, and the first time he saw me, he seemed delighted. As it happened, I was wearing a bodice of thick double Milanese velvet, which made me look heavier than I was, and my stomacher was loose—purely for comfort’s sake. Also I wore at my waist the relic Tom had found for me, the small silver reliquary with the tear of the Virgin, hanging from a silver chain.

“Catherine! Sweetheart! How happy you have made me this day!”

I realized at once that he imagined, from my bulk and loose stomacher, that I was carrying a child—and I decided immediately not to correct him. It was not impossible, after all, merely unlikely. He had not entirely stopped trying to make love to me, right up until his decision to bar me from his privy chamber and the long frightening week of his illness.

He asked about the reliquary hanging at my waist, and I told him it had belonged to Queen Jane, and that it had brought her the good fortune of giving birth to Prince Edward.

“Yes! Of course,” he cried. “Now it has brought you—that is, it has brought us—good fortune as well. Ah, Catherine, I have been waiting for this day! And now we must have you crowned.”

The chosen day of my coronation, June the second, was only weeks away and there was a great deal to do in the meantime. I had to have a splendid gown for my procession through the streets of the capital, when I would be acclaimed by the people, a white gown for my entry into the Tower, robes of purple velvet for my entry into Westminster on coronation day, a magnificent gown for the coronation feast—not to mention new petticoats and underclothes. My coronation regalia and jewels had to be brought from the Jewel House in the Tower, not only the venerable crown but the jeweled circlet I would wear when entering the Tower and the heavy scepter I would carry, and the royal heirlooms the king wanted me to wear, including his mother’s necklaces and his grandmother’s long loop of pearls.

I was quite overwhelmed by all that I had to learn and all that there was to do. The coronation ritual was long and had many parts. I had to memorize where to go and what to do in each long section of the ceremony, as there would be no one to prompt me or guide me on the coronation day itself. I kept being interrupted by the women of my chamber, who, like me, had to have new gowns and who were to take part in the coronation itself. They fussed about their gowns, and worried over their assigned tasks and roles. Charyn demanded that I give her precedence over the others, and there was much squabbling and bickering.

But as it turned out, the commotion in my apartments was as nothing compared to the disputes that arose among the peers. My Howard relations demanded that they be given the premier roles in the coronation ceremony—which caused all the others to complain and make demands of their own, and to threaten not to participate at all. Some were bold enough to say that I was unworthy to be queen. Tom repeated some of the harsh words he overheard when the fractious nobles were quarreling among themselves.

“This king changes wives as often as other men change their hose and doublet,” Lord Morley said. “Why should we take part in a solemnity that will not endure above a year?”

“We did not crown the last one,” Lord Abergavenny remarked with a sniff. “Why should we crown this one?”

Even those who were eager to take part in the ceremony were disgruntled over the way it was to be carried out, and fought with one another over who had the privilege of supporting my right hand when I carried the scepter, and who would be given the honor of carrying my crown.

The northern lords were in revolt, and refused to take part in the coronation at all. On hearing this my husband, fed up with all the petty wrangling, shouted that he was surrounded by jackals and stomped off, limping, to inspect his new tiltyard.

In the end he lost patience with the entire undertaking, convinced as he became that the choice of Whitsun was indeed inviting bad luck, because Queen Anne had been crowned then. His master of the works brought news that repairs were needed at Westminster and in the White Tower, and that they could not possibly be completed by the second of June. But what weighed on him most, I suspect, was his growing fear that the Londoners would not rejoice when my open litter passed through the narrow streets on the day of my coronation procession. Like the insolent few who had harassed us when the royal barge passed along the river, there would be Londoners who would cry out insults, throw offal, and perhaps even attack me.

He confided his worries to me as we lay together in the ample pearl bed.

“I fear the crowds might agitate you too much, sweetheart, especially now, when you are in a delicate state. Who knows what frightening things they might do?”

“I am told that the Londoners mocked Queen Anne when she rode through the streets in her litter, and called out insults. And she was carrying her child at the time.” It was true. My cousin Anne had been crowned when she was pregnant with her one and only surviving child, the Princess Elizabeth.

“They did—and she bore it well enough. She was one who always gave as good as she got. But look what happened! She did not have a son, only a daughter!”

The coronation was cancelled, and the royal household was told to prepare for a great summer progress to the north country, where the king hoped to meet with King James of Scotland and reassert his power and authority over the rebels once and for all.

*   *   *

Uncle William was about to leave us. The king was sending him to the French court, to be his ambassador there. It was time, my husband thought, to strengthen old alliances that were tottering and build new ones. Sending the queen’s uncle was a sign of special favor.

Before Uncle William left he came to see me. He embraced me and kissed the top of my head. We sat together in a window embrasure.