The Nymph from Heaven, page 50
part #1 of The Tudor Chronicles Series
Now that the duke had spoken, Wolsey, as a churchman and the king’s chancellor, even if he was a base commoner, could speak. “Your Majesty,” he said, his voice every bit as shaky as Stafford’s had been, “I beg, you, do not try to do this. The people would never…”
“Damn the people!” shouted Henry, his face now red with rage where before it had been as pale as death. “It is for the people that I must sink to such extremities! I seek but to ensure peace and an orderly succession upon my demise! I will make Bessie’s son the king of England, if it is the last thing I do! Without a son, I am childless!”
“You are not childless,” said Wolsey. “You have Mary, and a more beautiful, intelligent, lively princess there never was. She is a gift from God. You must make the best use of her that you can, Sire.”
“But do you not see? With naught but a daughter, I am childless! No woman could ever rule this kingdom! The last time one tried, the result was civil war and utter disaster! It will be for the foreign prince that she marries to reign! I do not forget what the French king said, Wolsey. I begin to believe it. Mary is illegitimate, and cannot succeed to the throne of England.”
Wolsey sighed audibly. “Do you forget Julius’ dispensation? The Princess Mary is quite legitimate, and will one day be Queen of France and England. What is there to be unhappy about?”
Henry glared at Wolsey through narrowed eyes, but said nothing.
Mary looked at Wolsey and could almost see his brain working as if it were an abacus. The beads flipped here and there rapidly, doing their sums. The cardinal concluded that further resistance at this point was both unnecessary and unwise. If the fault for Henry’s lack of a son and heir actually lay with him and not with Katharine, it might be that Bessie’s child would be stillborn, or a girl, or a boy who died before his navel was healed. Wolsey had learned long ago that arguing with Henry was fruitless, and only served to fix an unreasonable idea in his mind. It would be months before Bessie was brought to bed; things might have changed by that time. It was best to remain silent.
Finally, Brandon approached Henry, wordlessly entwined his arm in the king’s and began to walk. Henry, a little stunned himself by what had happened and by the voicing of his deepest fears and darkest thoughts, followed him from the Queen’s antechamber without protest. The others heaved a sigh of relief, but none of them spoke. There was nothing left to say.
There was little love lost between Wolsey and the duke; Stafford viewed Wolsey as an upstart and the basest of commoners, while Wolsey had always thought of Stafford as a weak, pampered noble who sponged off king and court, using his exalted blood as his excuse. But on this issue of legitimizing Bessie Blount’s bastard they were of one mind; it must not be. They bowed to Mary, took their leave of her and walked arm in arm from the Queen’s presence chamber, leaving Mary alone and desolate.
She looked at the great oak door of the Queen’s inner chamber. She was loath to reenter but knew that it was her duty to do so. Katharine would need her when she awakened. Mary quietly opened the door and went inside. There were candles on the tables, and a lamp burned at the queen’s bedside. Mary found a comfortable chair and made ready to sit vigil while Katharine slept.
But before she could sit down, she heard a small voice say, “Mary?”
“Katharine!” Mary had expected Katharine to still be sleeping. Had she heard the king’s words? “How do you feel? Is there aught that you desire?”
“Nay,” Katharine replied with a weary sigh. “What I want of this earth is far beyond my reach.”
“You heard, then?”
“Yes.”
Mary took Katharine’s hand in her own and said fiercely, “You must not worry, Katharine. The people will never accept Bessie Blount’s bastard for their king. It is unthinkable.”
“Poor Henry,” said Katharine, as the tears streamed down her face.
“You can say that?” cried Mary. “Poor Henry! After what he has done and said!”
“I do not blame him,” sobbed Katharine. “I have failed him.”
“Nonsense!” cried Mary. “In what way have you failed him? Six times you have carried his child, and you have Princess Mary! What failure is there in that?”
But it seemed that the effort of listening had overwhelmed the queen, and Mary could tell by her steady breathing that once again she slept the sleep of exhaustion and utter despair.
Jericho Priory, Blackmore, Essex, June 1519
Bessie lay back on the lacy, silken pillows propped up behind her on the elaborate tester bed and surveyed her opulent bedchamber once again, from side to side, and from floor to ceiling. She loved her new home, and never tired of admiring each room and its contents. She loved her life. And it was all due to her luck at being brought to court, and her wit and talent. At seventeen, she was a self-made woman. True, she had lost her good name, but of what importance was a blameless reputation to the mistress of a king?
She played with the creamy lace at her wrists and contemplated ringing for her breakfast. But no, she would tarry just a bit yet.
Her father, Sir John Blount, had been a courtier in the days of Henry the Seventh, and her mother, Katharine Pershall, had been a lady in waiting to Princess Katharine. Both had served Arthur and Katharine as Prince and Princess of Wales, when they were at Ludlow. But then Arthur died, and the couple had left royal service and moved to Knightly to take up a quiet life there. The children had started coming then, of which Bessie was the second.
Her father had been recalled to the court and appointed one of the King’s Spears, but when he went back, he had left his family at home. Bessie’s elder sister Anne had been found a husband from amongst the local Shropshire gentry, but it was decided that Bessie, with her golden beauty and sharp wit, might do better than to simply snag a provincial husband. She should go to court. Her father had arranged an appointment for her as lady-in-waiting to Queen Katharine, she whom her mother had served as a princess.
The king’s wandering eye had fallen upon Bessie almost immediately, but to her chagrin she had been deemed too young to become his mistress at age twelve. She had watched helplessly, smoldering with anger, as Henry had wooed and then seduced Jane Popincourt instead. But then the king’s sister, Queen Mary, returned from France, and Jane had left to join her lover there, and the way had opened up for Bessie. And this time she had no intention of being gainsaid.
She knew she was beautiful. She had the long, slightly wavy yellow hair that was considered the epitome of beauty at the Tudor court. She washed it every other day in a mixture of ale, eggs, and lemon juice to keep its natural fluffiness and golden color. When she dried it in the sunshine amongst the roses in the garden, it rippled to her knees. Her cornflower blue eyes, almost purple, really, were accented by dark lashes and eyebrows, which made a startling contrast to her fair hair and skin. Although many considered Mary Tudor to be the court beauty, with her flaxen hair and alabaster skin, Bessie felt that that title was Mary’s only because she was royal. Mary’s lashes and brows were as flaxen as her hair, and to Bessie, that gave Mary a washed-out look.
Bessie had planned her campaign carefully. As soon as Jane was on a palfrey headed for Dover, Bessie sang a song she had written for the king at a masque. She had a high, clear voice and played the lute better than anyone at court save the king himself. The words of the song were clever, but there could be no doubt of the open invitation in them. And this time she was no longer too young, by the standards of the day, to take a lover.
For one so young, Bessie was wise beyond her years. She guessed that Henry was romantic, and truly needed to believe himself in love. It was the only way he could justify his actions. To have taken a woman in sheer lust would not do for his prudish, church-like nature. So she had played the coquette, making him love her, or think he did, which was the same thing.
But Bessie did not love Henry and had no intention of doing so, ever. To love was to lose, in her estimation. Love blinded one to the truth. So she pretended to be enamored of the king while he showered her with expensive gifts and exquisite jewels. Not a day went by that she did not receive some trinket. But what she really wanted was power. And who had more power than the king? As the king’s mistress, she would be powerful indeed.
And so, after a suitable time and when Henry had reached the fever pitch of his desire, she surrendered. She was a virgin, but not ignorant; she had used every resource available to her to discover what being a mistress meant, and how to be one that Henry would never forget, nor wish to be rid of. The basic knowledge she shrugged off as the irrelevancy it was. She wanted to know more than just the mechanics of lovemaking. Thanks to a French serving maid who had accompanied Mary home from France, Bessie had soon learned all that she needed to know. And just as she had planned, Henry was not just pleased with her, he was delighted.
The courtiers had all speculated on how fast the king’s passion would burn itself out, but strangely, it never did. When Bessie had been Henry’s mistress for a little over a year, she tried her first experiment in truly using her power. The result was her father’s promotion to Esquire of the King’s Body. This was a significant endorsement; it meant that her father would wait on the king’s person in his privy chamber. Such a post was a signal honor, and all Bessie had had to do was to ask for it.
Her power was fixed after that, and she began to receive gifts from others at court. And so had begun her grasping career in influence peddling. Within six months, she had amassed a sizeable fortune, and all on her own. Henry was not blind to her games, but only laughed at her indulgently while admiring her gall. She was careful never to ask the impossible, and so it delighted him to grant her petitions on behalf of this one or that. She was his clever little Bessie, and he loved her. That she did not love him back had never once occurred to him.
But if she had thought herself ingrained and unstoppable before, when she had informed Henry that she was with child, her stock had risen to unimaginable heights. Nothing was too good for her after that. On the heels of her announcement to the king that she carried his child, the queen had failed once again in childbed, delivering a stillborn daughter.
The Christmas revels of that year, 1518, were necessarily curtailed due to the queen’s grief, but Henry found it difficult to grieve for a dead daughter, a child that he had never even laid eyes on. The queen was positively out of favor and spent most of her time in her private chapel praying; the king’s beautiful sister had repaired to her estates in Suffolk with her boor of a husband.
It was a time that Bessie would never forget. The court was hers that year. Pregnant but not yet showing, she had been the uncrowned queen of the court that year and had presided over all the festivities, sparsely attended and subdued as they were. She had sung and danced by day and made love to the king at night. The world seemed to have become a fantasy playground made expressly for her pleasure.
But, wise again, Bessie knew that she could not stay at court once her pregnancy became obvious. She asked Henry for a home of her own, and he had given her Jericho, an old abandoned priory. And he had insisted that she not spend one farthing of the wealth that she accumulated due to her position as royal mistress, but that she allow him to refurbish and furnish the place for her. As a gift, he said fondly, for the great gift which she was about to bestow upon him.
Jericho was not far from the court, and Henry visited often, fascinated to watch her belly growing, and to feel the babe kicking inside. And thanks to Mary’s French maid, whom Bessie had rewarded quite well for her tuition, she was able to satisfy Henry throughout the period of her pregnancy in ways that reminded him of his wild night with the archduchess of Austria three years before. The whole court marveled that the king seemed unable to stay away from Bessie even in her condition; he visited her so often that the joke at court when Henry could not be found was that he had “Gone to Jericho”. Let them wonder why, thought Bessie. She simply laid back and smiled smugly to herself at all that she had accomplished.
Never for an instant had she doubted that her child would be a boy. She was a rising star, and stars all had happy fates. She was not a melancholy failure, like Queen Katharine. And so when she had presented Henry with a lively, healthy boy just a few weeks before, she was not surprised. But even she had not expected Henry’s announcement that he planned to legitimize her son and make him king. That had been so far beyond even her dreams that she had never even considered it. But now, here he was, telling all and sundry that he had always known that he was capable of a healthy son and that this child would be the next king of England.
The king had started his campaign by naming the child Henry, after himself, and Fitzroy, meaning “son of the king”. And even at that moment Wolsey, at Henry’s command, was establishing an entire royal household for little Henry, complete with a steward, a chamberlain, a treasurer, and even a sewerer and a master of horse, even though the child would not eat at table or ride for years. In short, the king was treating little Henry Fitzroy as if he were already heir to the throne.
The queen was incensed, and had, for once, shown her anger in all its Latin fury. It was an insult to her, she said, and an insult to the Princess Mary. Bessie had many spies at court, and she had been informed that Henry’s reaction to this tirade, while calm and smug in public, had been to banish the queen from his bed. That could mean only one thing in Bessie’s estimation; he meant to be rid of her and marry Bessie.
There was precedent for a king marrying a subject. Why, the king’s own grandmother on the distaff side had been Elizabeth Woodville, a commoner whom the lusty King Edward the Fourth had married, much to the chagrin of all. But she had become a most powerful queen, hated and feared in her day.
Yes, Bessie had it all planned out. But as young as she was, she had one virtue that many women had not; patience. She did not need to cajole or beg, or even to suggest; all she had to do was to let Henry figure out what was best and wait for him to do it. For how could he make his illegitimate son the next king without making a queen of his mother?
Chapter 18
“I have never seen so beautiful a lady, or one so exquisite…”
-Gutierre Gomez de Fuensalida, Spanish Ambassador
Westhorpe, Suffolk, September 1519
The day was very fine, and Mary had asked to be carried outside on her settle to enjoy the sunshine while she awaited Brandon’s arrival. His letter said that he should be expected today. She shaded her eyes and scanned the horizon, but there was so far no sign of his party.
It was the first time since their wedding day that she and Brandon had been separated for more than a few hours, or by such a distance. But this time, there had been nothing for it. Mary had known in April when she and Brandon made their spring progress through their estates in Norfolk and Suffolk that she was once again with child. And this child, she had promised herself, would be born at home, at dear Westhorpe. But that decision meant that Brandon must return to court without her that summer, a situation which she deplored.
She might have changed her mind at the last minute and gone with him, but for the nagging pain in her side. She had never experienced its like before with either of her other pregnancies. This was something new. Her physician, however, believed that it might be a complication of her state, and that it would be assuaged with the birth of the child. But as the months passed, the pain persisted, and when the baby came, the pain had not gone away. Thankfully, the pain was intermittent; it came and went. But when it came she was doubled over in agony and could not stand or walk. It was all very mysterious.
Thinking about the pain had made the dull ache that it was come to the forefront of her mind, and she reached for the drops of laudanum that the doctor had bade her use so sparingly that they did almost no good at all. But he was right; when she took too much, the drops made her ill, and that exacerbated, rather than alleviated, the pain. It was a two-edged sword.
Mary smirked as she thought about the analogy between the pain medication and a sword. As she had been thinking she had been idly watching the clouds go by. The prevailing wind caused all of the clouds to elongate as they made their journey west; the one she had been watching had just taken on the shape of a sword. It was followed by a cloud that resembled a dragon with a very long tail. Mary laid her head back and gave herself up to watching the steady progress of the clouds across the blue sky. Was Brandon, perhaps, looking at the very same clouds as he made his way home across the vast wilderness that comprised much of Suffolk?
Mary had enjoyed their spring progress very much, and hoped to be able to go on the fall progress at harvest time. That was still a few weeks away; perhaps she would be better by then.
The Suffolks had entertained lavishly at each castle and manor house they had visited that spring, despite their precarious finances. But, one must admit, things were much better now than they had been in years past. François had kept his promise to send her dower rents on time, and with each installment he had returned a jewel or two of those given to her by Louis, and that he had so unfairly withheld from her upon her departure from France in 1515. And Henry had kept his promise as well, lowering their crippling fine, and occasionally remitting some of what they paid to reduce their debt to him. Henry, too, had intermittently returned some of the jewels Mary had been forced to give to him against hard times when there was no ready cash to hand. And well he might, she thought, if he expected her to preside over his political functions at court looking like the duchess, the princess, the queen that she was, dripping with expensive jewels to impress the foreigners with England’s wealth.
And so at Letherington Castle, Donington Castle, Castle Rising, and at many other of their properties, Mary and Brandon had wined and dined the local gentry, winning the hearts of all, Brandon with his unassuming ease with lesser men, and Mary with her charm, beauty and grace.
