The Bastard Princess Read online

  My maids shifted on their pallet beds on the floor, sighing for happiness at the end of their long day. The noise was one of familiarity and comfort. I was never really alone.

  As I fell into the arms of sleep I heard Lady Bryan speak to Mary as they left the room.

  “The Lady Elizabeth did well for one so small and young,” she said, and Mary replied in a little warm whisper, “she did very well Lady Bryan, a credit to you, to herself and to the King.”

  I smiled as I drifted into sleep.

  A credit to the King was what I genuinely desired to be.

  Chapter Five

  Eltham Palace

  Autumn 1537

  Queen Jane was dead.

  After enjoying ten days of glory and adoration after the birth of my brother, the Queen of our realm lay white and cold, her body emptied of its soul, awaiting burial.

  I had been taken to Eltham Palace after the ceremony, and Mary had stayed at court to help the Queen with her recovery. But soon the Queen had started to fever and sweat. She would not eat nor drink and the heat of her body became a raging fire. Delirium took hold of her mind until she knew not who was around her or where she was. She knew nothing of her son. She knew nothing of the world.

  Our father, Mary had written to me, was frantic with worry over the Queen’s illness and then, was crushed by her death. Finally he had found a woman who had given him his longed-for heir, he had thought he had found the perfection he had sought for so long… and then his perfection had sickened and died.

  It seemed that love and marriage for our father was never going to have a happy ending.

  Queen Jane was buried in state as a Queen; the first of my father’s wives to be given that honour. Katherine of Aragon was buried as the Princess Dowager of Wales somewhere in Portsmouth, or so I was told, and my mother lay in the Chapel of Saint Peter Ad Vincula, in the Tower of London, her decapitated body bundled into an arrow chest, her last resting place on this earth unmarked.

  Perhaps Jane, dying as she gave the King his greatest wish, deserved a place in the halls of kings… perhaps not. Despite my father’s love for her, I could little forget that this woman had directly replaced my own glittering mother.

  Our father was plunged into dark grief. He appeared for state occasions but I was told that apart from that, he preferred to keep to the company of only his greatest and closest friends. He did not seek to visit me.

  Our little brother, Edward, joined the same household as Mary and I. It was special to me as suddenly all three of us, children of the King, all without a mother, were brought together to grow up together.

  Mary was of course much older than Edward or I, and I felt much, much older than Edward who was just a baby. But still, in those early years at Hatfield and Eltham there was a sense of family, of kinship and closeness.

  There was however a down-side to all of this, as there often is in life. My beloved Lady Bryan was in charge of the Royal Nursery and now that Edward was brought to Eltham he had to become her priority. Although she took time and care to explain this well to me, I could not help but seethe a little with jealousy that my brother should have taken the ministrations of my governess from me. I was not her sole care in the world anymore, and I admit that it rankled with me, no matter how fond I was of my fat little baby brother.

  But with Lady Bryan leaving my intimate care, a new person entered my life, one who would become my greatest friend and confidant but also one who would perhaps place me in the greatest of dangers. But when one opens one’s heart to love another, it is always placed in some danger. I would never trade all the perils I faced, perhaps partly because of her, for a quieter life without her.

  I loved Katherine Champernon from the first moment she leaned close to my ear, whispering to me with a little sideways grin, and told me to call her Kat.

  Kat was the daughter of Sir Phillip Champernon of Devon; Sir Phillip was a learned man, who saw the benefits, as some enlightened families had, of educating his daughters well along with his sons. My own mother had belonged to such a family herself, and my father the King believed that his daughters should be of much more use to him if they understood not only to read, write and sew, but also learned languages, philosophy and history so that our minds may be quick and useful.

  Kat was an excellent tutor; she was learned in classical history and languages and had an enthusiasm for reading that was infectious and pleasing. Although I had never been indifferent to the pleasures of learning, under her tutelage I started to find it a joy. There were so many books to read in the world and I wanted to read all of them. She started me on a diet of French, Spanish and Latin (which I had already started) and then history, dancing and philosophy for my sweet. It was a rich dinner certainly, but I feasted on books every day. Any time I looked tired or bored with a lesson, she would find a new way to make it agreeable; we would take walks where we conversed and discussed both historical events and new ideas. She taught my mind from a very early age to hone the skills of conversation and argument, to find my own view and to be able to support it. She was a fine tutor… and a good friend to a lonely little girl.

  She was also the most incorrigible gossip you would ever chance to meet and had not learnt to guard her tongue, as she would have to do one day.

  As I grew older, she talked to me more and more as a friend, letting slip little nuggets of scandal or court politics, so that, as she said; “I should have an education in current affairs as well as historical matters.” But of course this was really just an excuse to gossip.

  Kat’s fine tutoring of my mind was tested when Sir Thomas Wriothesley paid a call to our house, now moved once more to Hatfield, in 1539. He had business with Mary, but as a courtesy, stopped to pay a call on Edward and myself.

  He came into the room after seeing my brother. I stood from my writing table and smoothed my dress. He bowed to me as the King’s daughter and I curtseyed to him, and indicated that he may sit, if he wanted, on one of the floor cushions.

  We started by discussing my health and that of the King and the Prince, and then he asked me if I was reading much that I found interesting as he had come to see me during a time when I was deep in study.

  “Is it perhaps the fables of Aesop?” he said in a gentle, if slightly patronizing tone, I thought.

  “It is De Re Publica,” I said, stroking the volume with my long-fingered hand. “I find Cicero fascinating and his language is beautiful. Excellent writing can be as valuable to a nation as any wealth. Even Julius Cesar said; “It is more important to have greatly extended the frontiers of the Roman Spirit, than the frontiers of the Roman Empire.”

  Wriothesley stared at me for a moment in astonishment. He blinked.

  “My lady,” he said a little weakly. “I must have forgotten in my advancing years, but how old are you now?”

  “I am six years old.” I said smiling at him. I loved to surprise people with my age… they always thought I was older because of my gravity; I had a certain vanity about that I suppose.

  “You are so like your father,” he said with affection and a little wonder. “When he was a young man, and when he was in the nursery, he loved books more than anything in the world they say, and he still has a fine library now.”

  I beamed at him. There was nothing I liked more than being compared to my great father and hearing that I was like him.

  “You are pleased to be likened to your father?” he said, noting my face and smiling at me.

  “Indeed,” I said. “For there is no greater king on this earth.”

  His smile broke out all along his face. “I agree most heartily my lady,” he said. “And you, as his daughter, are a great credit to him. I shall be sure to tell him not only of your most advanced and educated mind, but of your graciousness and most excellent conduct.”

  I smiled wider at him; he was fast becoming one of my favourite people.

  “Thank you my lord.” I said. “And please do come again to converse and visit with us. Your compa
ny has been most agreeable.”

  He bowed to me and left, shaking his head and smiling still; perhaps marvelling at my old head, on little shoulders.

  Chapter Six

  Hatfield House

  1538 - 1540

  As my brother grew up, he and I were more and more in companionship with each other. Our households were joined for much of Edward’s infancy. My poor Lady Bryan spent the majority of his childhood in fear for her life, for Edward’s well-being and health were of paramount importance to the King our father. He was both paranoid and obsessive about keeping his precious son safe from harm and infection.

  Edward’s walls and floors were washed daily, no one who had been near a site of plague, sickness or infection was allowed near the house. Only those with the express permission of the King were allowed to visit, and even I was quarantined away from my brother for the slightest sniffle, headache or cold.

  Edward was the heir to the throne, the only legitimate boy that our father had, and since the death of our bastard brother Richmond in 1536, Edward was the only boy surviving of any of our father’s marriages or affairs. I did not remember Richmond, that son born of my father’s affair with Bessie Blount. He had died in the same year as my mother, and if I met him, I must have been too young to recall the face or voice of my half-brother. They said that our father had adored him; Richmond was the first proof that he could get living sons. But after his death, our father did not mention him. Our father was unwilling to speak of painful things in his past. Once he had left something or someone behind, they were to be forgotten.

  Edward was a serious child, even as an infant. Much like myself; he loved books, stories and learning, but that did not mean that he did not love to joke and have fun. There was a natural type of rivalry between us to learn and out-do each other. I believe we learnt more together than even our excellent tutors would have been able to teach us, as we vied with each other to excel. I was secretly rather jealous that my little brother was the centre of everyone’s world. It was a position I would have liked to have. That jealousy encouraged me to try to stand out more and more. Without Edward, and my envy of him, I would not be the person I grew to become.

  When I started to outstrip the teaching methods of Kat, she arranged that Edward’s tutors recommend a male tutor for me. William Grindal was taken on for my education and I grew most fond of him. Grindal had been the star pupil of Roger Ascham who in turn had been the star pupil of Edward’s tutor John Cheke. They all were in contact with each other whenever possible, these men with lively minds and active tongues ready to leap into discussion at any time. Roger Ascham was a constant visitor to our houses, and he taught both Edward and me how to write in a beautiful italic hand. Grindal tutored me through ever more difficult stages of Latin and Greek, allowing me to work on translations from Greek to Latin, then into English or French, which broadened my mind and gave me both fluency and understanding of many languages.

  We were also allowed to share tutors to a certain extent, and Jean Belmain, Edward’s French tutor helped me to master the language of spoken French and the accent that would serve me well in the future.

  Our house was a little hive of learning and activity, but our education was also taken outside where we learned to hunt, to hawk and often, to play against each other shooting at the archery butts.

  I was better at it than my brother. My arm was strong and my aim was true. Kat told me that my mother had been an excellent archer, as she said I was.

  Perhaps one of the reasons I loved Kat so, was that she was the only person who talked of my mother to me. Never in public, for my mother’s name was not to be mentioned before others, but in private, she would tell me of my mother, of her passions for learning and for religion, of her private ways with her ladies and of the great love that once existed between her and my father.

  I learned early on that my mother’s fall from grace was not something that I should mention. Some things were too dangerous to ask of in our world. But I longed to know more about the mysterious woman I had barely known, and Kat was my only source for knowledge about her. She was the only one who would dare, out of love for me, to talk of my mother the Queen Anne.

  “There was no one like your mother.” she whispered to me when we were alone together in my room as I was going to bed. “No one was so enticing, or interesting. She was tall and willowy, like you, but her hair was dark and long. Her skin was clear and soft and when she sang, she sounded like an angel.”

  “They say that your mother kept a good house as the Queen,” she continued nodding with approval. “And there was never such good order amongst the ladies of the royal house as when she ruled. She had a merry spirit and a pretty laugh. She loved to read and to talk, she loved to discuss ideas and ideals; she loved to ride and to hunt with the falcon. She was fascinating to all men and women who met her.”

  “Perhaps too fascinating,” I said. I was not unaware of the accusations that had been levied at her before her execution.

  “You should not believe everything that you hear,” Kat warned softly. “There are many who think she was unjustly accused and that you are still the legitimate princess of the realm.”

  “You should be more careful in what you say Kat,” I said fearfully. “What if someone overheard?”

  “I am whispering to you my lady,” she said. “And I trust you would not betray me?”

  I shook my head. “Never,” I said. “But why would my father have had my mother executed… if she did not do terrible things?”

  Kat looked around her and dropped her voice further. “Your mother had enemies,” she said. “She was of the reformed mind, she leaned to the Protestant faith, and there were others who did not like her passion for the new thinking. They did not like her influence over your father. They feared that she might sway him to leave the Catholic Church for good. For her, he had already broken with Rome, dissolved the monasteries, become the Head of the English Church in the place of the Pope. Her enemies feared that she would influence him further. They thought if they could remove her, then they could bring back the old religion and join the country once more with Rome.”

  “And they…made things up about her?”

  Kat nodded. “And the King was so in love with her that hearing their stories of betrayal, of her giving her love to other men, made him wild with jealousy. It was not his fault; men who are in love with women as he loved her can do terrible things, things born from fear and pain. He believed her enemies, their tales wounded his pride and his love for her, and she was executed because of their lies.”

  I looked around again, as though a spy might be hiding behind a tapestry and overhear our whispers. “My father is very clever,” I said softly. “He would not just believe anything without knowing it for sure.”

  Kat shook her head. “You are very young,” she said. “And although you know many things, you are still a child when it comes to the matters of the heart. When a man loves a woman so completely as your father loved your mother, it is a fragile thing that can be destroyed so easily, it can be abused, turned into blinding hate and rage. Such it was with your mother and father. The lies of her enemies made him think that she had betrayed him. He was afraid that she loved him no longer, and so he sought to destroy her before she could destroy his heart. He has never faced the truth, for he cannot. It would be too painful for him to admit that she died innocent of the things she was accused of…too painful for him to admit that he killed the woman he loved… unjustly.” She looked at me with serious eyes; “there are some things that every man and woman in this world can never face about their actions or their own selves. We seek to hide the parts of us we do not understand or like. This is so for your father, in the case of your mother.”

  I shuddered and felt on the verge of tears. I could hardly believe that my father would be so easily deceived, and yet neither did I want to believe my mother was capable of such wrongs as I had heard of her. Neither version of the past was easy, or enjoyable.
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  “The position of kings and queens may seem all-powerful,” said Kat snuggling her body to mine in the warm bed and wrapping her arms about me. “But you know well from your study of history that this is not always the case. Emperors and kings, queens and generals have been destroyed by betrayal as often as others have triumphed and won. These things you should remember, for one day you will be grown, and perhaps you will help to rule a country should your father marry you to a king. Keep the memory of your mother in your heart, know that she loved you and was a good woman. What others say can never affect your love for her, but know too that it can be dangerous to speak the truth; the enemies that brought forth her death, may still be enemies to you…just for the kinship with her which flows in your blood.”