The Constant Princess

22ND FEBRUARY 1511

Ten days later, when she was at the height of her happiness, they brought to Queen Katherine the worst news of her life.

It is worse even than the death of my husband, Arthur. I had not thought there could be anything worse than that; but so it proves. It is worse than my years of widowhood and waiting. It is worse than hearing from Spain that my mother was dead, that she died on the day I wrote to her, begging her to send me a word. Worse than the worst days I have ever had.

My baby is dead. More than this, I cannot say, I cannot even hear. I think Henry is here, some of the time, and María de Salinas. I think Margaret Pole is here, and I see the stricken face of Thomas Howard at Henry’s shoulder; William Compton desperately gripping Henry’s shoulder, but the faces all swim before my eyes and I can be sure of nothing.

I go into my room and I order them to close the shutters and bolt the doors. But it is too late. They have already brought me the worst news of my life; closing the door will not keep it out. I cannot bear the light. I cannot bear the sound of ordinary life going on. I hear a page boy laugh in the garden near my window and I cannot understand how there can be any joy or gladness left in the world, now that my baby has gone.

And now the courage I have held on to, for all my life, turns out to be a thread, a spiderweb, a nothing. My bright confidence that I am walking in the way of God and that He will protect me is nothing more than an illusion, a child’s fairy story. In the shadows of my room I plunge deep into the darkness that my mother knew when she lost her son, that Juana could not escape when she lost her husband, that was the curse of my grandmother, that runs through the women of my family like a dark vein. I am no different after all. I am not a woman who can survive love and loss, as I had thought. It has only been that, so far, I had never lost someone who was worth more than life itself to me. When Arthur died my heart was broken. But now that my baby is dead, I want nothing but that my heart should cease to beat.

I cannot think of any reason I should live and that innocent sinless babe be taken from me. I can see no reason for it. I cannot understand a God who can take him from me. I cannot understand a world that can be so cruel. In the moment that they told me, “Your Grace, be brave, we have bad news of the prince,” I lost my faith in God. I lost my desire to live. I lost even my ambition to rule England and keep my country safe.

He had blue eyes and the smallest, most perfect hands. He had fingernails like little shells. His little feet…his little feet…

Lady Margaret Pole, who had been in charge of the dead child’s nursery, came into the room without knocking, without invitation, and kneeled before Queen Katherine, who sat on her chair by the fire, among her ladies, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

“I have come to beg your pardon, though I did nothing wrong,” she said steadily.

Katherine raised her head from her hand. “What?”

“Your baby died in my care. I have come to beg your pardon. I was not remiss, I swear it. But he is dead. Princess, I am sorry.”

“You are always here,” Katherine said with quiet dislike. “In my darkest moments, you are always at my side, like bad luck.”

The older woman flinched. “Indeed, but it is not my wish.”

“And don’t call me ‘Princess.’ ”

“I forgot.”

For the first time in weeks Katherine sat up and looked into the face of another person, saw her eyes, saw the new lines around her mouth, realized that the loss of her baby was not her grief alone. “Oh God, Margaret,” she said, and pitched forwards.

Margaret Pole caught her and held her. “Oh God, Katherine,” she said into the queen’s hair.

“How could we lose him?”

“God’s will. God’s will. We have to believe it. We have to bow beneath it.”

“But why?”

“Princess, no one knows why one is taken and another spared. D’you remember?”

She felt from the shudder that the woman remembered the loss of her husband in this, the loss of her son.

“I never forget. Every day. But why?”

“It is God’s will,” Lady Margaret repeated.

“I don’t think I can bear it.” Katherine breathed so softly that none of her ladies could hear. She raised her tearstained face from her friend’s shoulder. “To lose Arthur felt like torture, but to lose my baby is like death itself. I don’t think I can bear it, Margaret.”

The older woman’s smile was infinitely patient. “Oh, Katherine. You will learn to bear it. There is nothing that anyone can do but bear it. You can rage or you can weep, but in the end, you will learn to bear it.”

Slowly Katherine sat back on her chair; Margaret remained, with easy grace, kneeling on the floor at her feet, handclasped with her friend.

“You will have to teach me courage all over again,” Katherine whispered.

The older woman shook her head. “You only have to learn it once,” she said. “You know, you learned at Ludlow: you are not a woman to be destroyed by sorrow. You will grieve but you will live, you will come out into the world again. You will love. You will conceive another child, this child will live, you will learn again to be happy.”

“I cannot see it,” Katherine said desolately.

“It will come.”

The battle that Katherine had waited for, for so long, came while she was still overshadowed with grief for her baby. But nothing could penetrate her sadness.

“Great news, the best news in the world!” wrote her father. Wearily, Katherine translated from the code and then from Spanish to English. “I am to lead a crusade against the Moors in Africa. Their existence is a danger to Christendom, their raids terrify the whole of the Mediterranean and endanger shipping from Greece to the Atlantic. Send me the best of your knights—you who claim to be the new Camelot. Send me your most courageous leaders at the head of your most powerful men and I shall take them to Africa and we will destroy the infidel kingdoms as holy Christian kings.”

Wearily, Katherine took the translated letter to Henry. He was coming off the tennis court, a napkin twisted around his neck, his face flushed. He beamed when he saw her, then at once his look of joy was wiped from his face by a grimace of guilt, like a boy caught out in a forbidden pleasure. At that fleeting expression, at that brief, betraying moment, she knew he had forgotten that their son was dead. He was playing tennis with his friends, he had won, he saw the wife he still loved, he was happy. Joy came as easily to the men of his family as sorrow to the women of hers. She felt a wave of hatred wash over her, so powerful that she could almost taste it in her mouth. He could forget, even for a moment, that their little boy had died. She thought that she would never forget, never.

“I have a letter from my father,” she said, trying to put some interest into her harsh voice.

“Oh?” He was all concern. He came towards her and took her arm. She gritted her teeth so that she did not scream, “Don’t touch me!”

“Did he tell you to have courage? Did he write comforting words?”

The clumsiness of the young man was unbearable. She summoned her most tolerant smile. “No. It is not a personal letter. You know he rarely writes to me in that way. It is a letter about a crusade. He invites our noblemen and lords to raise regiments and go with him against the Moors.”

“Does he? Oh, does he? What a chance!”

“Not for you,” she said, quelling any idea Henry might have that he could go to war when they had no son. “It is just a little expedition. But my father would welcome Englishmen, and I think they should go.”

“I should think he would.” Henry turned and shouted for his friends, who were hanging back like guilty schoolboys caught having fun. They could not bear to see Katherine since she had become so pale and quiet. They liked her when she was the queen of the joust and Henry was Sir Loyal Heart. She made them uncomfortable when she came to dinner like a ghost, ate nothing, and left early.

“Hey! Anyone want to go to war against the Moors?”

A chorus of excited yells answered his holloa. Katherine thought that they were like nothing so much as a litter of excited puppies, Lord Thomas Darcy and Edward Howard at their head.

“I will go!”

“And I will go!”

“Show them how Englishmen fight!” Henry urged them. “I, myself, will pay the costs of the expedition.”

“I will write to my father that you have eager volunteers,” Katherine said quietly. “I will go and write to him now.” She turned away and walked quickly towards the doorway to the little stair that led to her rooms. She did not think she could bear to be with them for another moment. These were the men who would have taught her son to ride. These were the men who would have been his statesmen, his Privy Council. They would have sponsored him at his first Communion, they would have stood proxy for him at his betrothal, they would have been godfathers to his sons. And here they were, laughing, clamoring for war, competing with each other for Henry’s shouted approval, as if her son had not been born, had not died. As if the world were the same as it had ever been; when Katherine knew that it was utterly changed.

He had blue eyes. And the tiniest most perfect feet.

In the event, the glorious crusade never happened. The English knights arrived at Cádiz but the crusade never set sail for the Holy Land, never faced a sharp scimitar wielded by a blackhearted infidel. Katherine translated letters between Henry and her father in which her father explained that he had not yet raised his troops, that he was not yet ready to leave, and then, one day she came to Henry with a letter in her hand and her face shocked out of its usual weariness.

“Father writes me the most terrible news.”

“What is happening?” Henry demanded, bewildered. “See, here, I have just received a letter from an English merchant in Italy, I cannot make any sense of it. He writes that the French and the Pope are at war.” Henry held out his letter to her. “How can this be? I don’t understand it at all.”

“It is true. This is from my father. He says the Pope has declared that the French armies must get out of Italy,” Katherine explained. “And the Holy Father has put his own papal troops into the field against the French. King Louis has declared that the Pope shall no longer be Pope.”

“How dare he?” Henry demanded, shocked to his core.

“Father says we must forget the crusade and go at once to the aid of the Pope. He will try to broker an alliance between us and the Holy Roman Emperor. We must form an alliance against France. King Louis cannot be allowed to take Rome. He must not advance into Italy.”

“He must be mad to think that I would allow it!” Henry exclaimed. “Would I let the French take Rome? Would I allow a French puppet Pope? Has he forgotten what an English army can do? Does he want another Agincourt?”

“Shall I tell my father we will unite with him against France?” Katherine asked. “I could write at once.”

He caught her hand and kissed it. For once she did not pull away and he drew her a little closer and put his arm around her waist. “I’ll come with you while you write and we can sign the letter from us both—your father should know that his Spanish daughter and his English son are absolutely as one in his support. Thank God that our troops are in Cádiz already,” Henry exclaimed as his good fortune struck him.

Katherine hesitated, a thought forming slowly in her mind. “It is…fortuitous.”

“Lucky,” Henry said buoyantly. “We are blessed by God.”

“My father will want some benefit for Spain from this.” Katherine introduced the suspicion carefully as they went to her rooms, Henry shortening his stride to match hers. “He never makes a move without planning far ahead.”

“Of course, but you will guard our interests as you always do,” he said confidently. “I trust you, my love, as I trust him. Is he not my only father now?”

SUMMER 1511

Slowly, as the days grow warmer, and the sun is more like a Spanish sun, I grow warm too and become more like the Spanish girl I once was. I cannot reconcile myself to the death of my son—I think I will never reconcile myself to his loss—but I can see that there is no one to blame for his death. There was no neglect or negligence, he died like a little bird in a warm nest and I have to see that I will never know why.

I know now that I was foolish to blame myself. I have committed no crime, no sin so bad that God, the merciful God of my childhood prayers, would punish me with such an awful grief as this. There could be no good God who would take away such a sweet baby, such a perfect baby with such blue eyes, as an exercise of His divine will. I know in my heart that such a thing cannot be, such a God cannot be. Even though, in the first, worst outpourings of my grief, I blamed myself and I blamed God, I know now that it was not a punishment for sin. I know that I kept my promise, Arthur’s promise, for the best reasons, and God has me in His keeping.

The awful, icy, dark fact of my baby’s loss seems to recede with the awful cold darkness of that English winter. One morning the fool came and told me some little jest and I laughed aloud. It was as if a door had opened that had long been locked tight. I realize that I can laugh, that it is possible to be happy, that laughter and hope can come back to me and perhaps I might even make another child and feel that overwhelming tenderness again.

I start to feel that I am alive again, that I am a woman with hope and prospects again, that I am the woman that the girl from Spain became. I can sense myself alive: poised halfway between my future and my past.

It is as if I am checking myself over as a rider does after a bad fall from a horse, patting my arms and legs, my vulnerable body, as if looking for permanent damage. My faith in God returns utterly unshaken, as firm as it has ever been. There seems to be only one great change: my belief in my mother and my father is damaged. For the first time in my life I truly think it possible that they can have been wrong.

I remember the Moorish physician’s kindness to me and I have to amend my view of his people. No one who could see his enemy brought as low as he saw me, and yet could look at her with such deep compassion, can be called a barbarian, a savage. He might be a heretic—steeped in error—but surely he must be allowed his own conclusions with his own reasons. And from what I know of the man, I am certain that he will have fine reasons.

I would like to send a good priest to wrestle for his soul, but I cannot say, as my mother would have said, that he is spiritually dead, fit for nothing but death. He held my hands to tell me hard news and I saw the tenderness of Our Lady in his eyes. I cannot dismiss the Moors as heretics and enemies anymore. I have to see that they are men and women, fallible as us, hopeful as us, faithful to their creed as we are to ours.

And this in turn leads me to doubt my mother’s wisdom. Once I would have sworn that she knew everything, that her writ must run everywhere. But now I have grown old enough to view her more thoughtfully. I was left in poverty in my widowhood because her contract was carelessly written. I was abandoned, all alone in a foreign country because—though she summoned me with apparent urgency—in truth it was just for show; she would not take me back to Spain at any price. She hardened her heart against me and cleaved to her plan for me and let me, her own daughter, go.

And finally, I was forced to find a doctor in secret and consult with him in hiding because she had done her part in driving from Christendom the best physicians, the best scientists, and the cleverest minds in the world. She had named their wisdom as sin, and the rest of Europe had followed her lead. She rid Spain of the Jews and their skills and courage, she rid Spain of the Moors and their scholarship and gifts. She, a woman who admired learning, banished those that they call the People of the Book. She who fought for justice had been unjust.

I cannot yet think what this estrangement might mean for me. My mother is dead; I cannot reproach her or argue with her now, except in my imagination. But I know these months have wrought a deep and lasting change in me. I have come to an understanding of my world that is not her understanding of hers. I do not support a crusade against the Moors, nor against anyone. I do not support persecution, nor cruelty to them for the color of their skin or the belief in their hearts. I know that my mother is not infallible, I no longer believe she and God think as one. Though I still love my mother, I don’t worship her anymore. I suppose, at last, I am growing up.

Slowly, the queen emerged from her grief and started to take an interest in the running of the court and country once more. London was buzzing with the news that Scottish privateers had attacked an English merchant ship. Everyone knew the name of the privateer: he was Andrew Barton, who sailed with letters of authority from King James of Scotland. Barton was merciless to English ships, and the general belief in the London docks was that James had deliberately licensed the pirate to prey on English shipping as if the two countries were already at war.

“He has to be stopped,” Katherine said to Henry.

“He does not dare to challenge me!” Henry exclaimed. “James sends border raiders and pirates against me because he does not dare to face me himself. James is a coward and an oath breaker.”

“Yes,” Katherine agreed. “But the main thing about this pirate Barton is that he is not only a danger to our trade, he is a forerunner of worse to come. If we let the Scots rule the seas then we let them command us. This is an island: the seas must belong to us as much as the land or we have no safety.”

“My ships are ready and we sail at midday. I shall capture him alive,” Edward Howard, the admiral of the fleet, promised Katherine as he came to bid her farewell. She thought he looked very young, as boyish as Henry, but his flair and courage were unquestioned. He had inherited all his father’s tactical skill but brought it to the newly formed navy. The Howards traditionally held the post of lord admiral, but Edward was proving exceptional. “If I cannot capture him alive, I shall sink his ship and bring him back dead.”

“For shame on you! A Christian enemy!” she said teasingly, holding out her hand for his kiss.

He looked up, serious for once. “I promise you, Your Grace, that the Scots are a greater danger to the peace and wealth of this country than the Moors could ever be.”

He saw her wistful smile. “You are not the first Englishman to tell me that,” she said. “And I have seen it myself in these last years.”

“It has to be right,” he said. “In Spain your father and mother never rested until they could dislodge the Moors from the mountains. For us in England, our closest enemy is the Scots. It is they who are in our mountains, it is they who have to be suppressed and quelled if we are ever to be at peace. My father has spent his life defending the northern borders, and now I am fighting the same enemy but at sea.”

“Come home safely,” she urged.

“I have to take risks,” he said carelessly. “I am no stay-at-home.”

“No one doubts your bravery, and my fleet needs an admiral,” she told him. “I want the same admiral for many years. I need my champion at the next joust. I need my partner to dance with me. You come home safely, Edward Howard!”

The king was uneasy at his friend Edward Howard setting sail against the Scots, even against a Scots privateer. He had hoped that his father’s alliance with Scotland, enforced by the marriage of the English princess, would have guaranteed peace.

“James is such a hypocrite to promise peace and marry Margaret on one hand and license these raids on the other! I shall write to Margaret and tell her to warn her husband that we cannot accept raids on our shipping. They should keep to their borders too.”

“Perhaps he will not listen to her,” Katherine pointed out.

“She can’t be blamed for that,” he said quickly. “She should never have been married to him. She was too young, and he was too set in his ways, and he is a man for war. But she will bring peace if she can. She knows it was my father’s wish, she knows that we have to live in peace. We are kin now, we are neighbors.”

But the border lords, the Percys and the Nevilles, reported that the Scots had recently become more daring in their raids on the northern lands. Unquestionably, James was spoiling for war; undoubtedly he meant to take land in Northumberland as his own. Any day now he could march south, take Berwick, and continue on to Newcastle.

“How dare he?” Henry demanded. “How dare he just march in and take our goods and disturb our people? Does he not know that I could raise an army and take them against him tomorrow?”

“It would be a hard campaign,” Katherine remarked, thinking of the wild land of the border and the long march to get to it. The Scotsmen would have everything to fight for, with the rich southern lands spread before them, and English soldiers never wanted to fight when they were far from their villages.

“It would be easy,” Henry contradicted her. “Everyone knows that the Scots can’t keep an army in the field. They are nothing more than a raiding party. If I took out a great English army, properly armed and supplied and ordered, I would make an end of them in a day!”

“Of course you would.” Katherine smiled. “But don’t forget, we have to muster our army to fight against the French. You would far rather win your spurs against the French on a field of chivalry which will go down in history than in some dirty border quarrel.”

Katherine spoke to Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, Edward Howard’s father, at the end of the Privy Council meeting as the men came out of the king’s rooms.

“My Lord? Have you heard from Edward? I miss my young chevalier.”

The old man beamed at her. “We had a report this day. The king will tell you himself. He knew you would be pleased that your favorite has had a victory.”

“He has?”

“He has captured the pirate Andrew Barton with two of his ships.” His pride shone through his pretense of modesty. “He has only done his duty,” he said. “He has only done as any Howard boy should do.”

“He is a hero!” Katherine said enthusiastically. “England needs great sailors as much as we need soldiers. The future for Christendom is in dominating the seas. We need to rule the seas as the Saracens rule the deserts. We have to drive pirates from the seas and make English ships a constant presence. And what else? Is he on his way home?”

“He will bring his ships into London and the pirate in chains with him. We’ll try him and hang him on the quayside. But King James won’t like it.”

“Do you think the Scots king means war?” Katherine asked him bluntly. “Would he go to war over such a cause as this? Is the country in danger?”

“This is the worst danger to the peace of the kingdom of any in my lifetime,” the older man said honestly. “We have subdued the Welsh and brought peace to our borders in the west; now we will have to put down the Scots. After them we will have to settle the Irish.”

“They are a separate country, with their own kings and laws,” Katherine demurred.

“So were the Welsh till we defeated them,” he pointed out. “This is too small a land for three kingdoms. The Scots will have to be yoked into our service.”

“Perhaps we could offer them a prince,” Katherine thought aloud. “As you did to the Welsh. The second son could be the Prince of Scotland as the firstborn is the Prince of Wales, for a kingdom united under the English king.”

He was struck with her idea. “That’s right,” he said. “That would be the way to do it. Hit them hard and then offer them a peace with honor. Otherwise we will have them snapping at our heels forever.”

“The king thinks that their army would be small and easily defeated,” Katherine remarked.

Howard choked back a laugh. “His Grace has never been to Scotland,” he said. “He has never even been to war yet. The Scots are a formidable enemy, whether in pitched battle or a passing raid. They are a worse enemy than any of his fancy French cavalry. They have no laws of chivalry, they fight to win and they fight to the death. We will need to send a powerful force under a skilled commander.”

“Could you do it?” Katherine asked.

“I could try,” he replied honestly. “I am the best weapon to your hand at the moment, Your Grace.”

“Could the king do it?” she asked quietly.

He smiled at her. “He’s a young man,” he said. “He lacks nothing for courage—no one who has seen him in a joust could doubt his courage. And he is skilled on his horse. But a war is not a joust, and he does not know that yet. He needs to ride out at the head of a bold army and be seasoned in a few battles before he fights the greatest war of his life—the war for his very kingdom. You don’t put a colt into a cavalry charge on his first outing. He has to learn. The king, even though a king, will have to learn.”

“He was taught nothing of warfare,” she said. “He has not had to study other battles. He knows nothing about observing the lie of the land and positioning a force. He knows nothing about supplies and keeping an army on the move. His father taught him nothing.”

“His father knew next to nothing,” the earl said quietly, for her ears only. “His first battle was Bosworth and he won that partly by luck and partly by the allies his mother put in the field for him. He was courageous enough, but no general.”

“But why did he not ensure that Henry was taught the art of warfare?” asked Ferdinand’s daughter, who had been raised in a camp and seen a campaign plan before she had learned how to sew.

“Who would have thought he would need to know?” the old earl asked her. “We all thought it would be Arthur.”

She made sure that her face did not betray the sudden pang of grief at the unexpected mention of his name. “Of course,” she said. “Of course you did. I forgot. Of course you did.”

“Now, he would have been a great commander. He was interested in the waging of war. He read. He studied. He talked to his father, he pestered me. He was well aware of the danger of the Scots, he had a great sense of how to command men. He used to ask me about the land on the border, where the castles were placed, how the land fell. He could have led an army against the Scots with some hopes of success. Young Henry will be a great king when he has learned tactics, but Arthur knew it all. It was in his blood.”

Katherine did not even allow herself the pleasure of speaking of him. “Perhaps,” was all she said. “But in the meantime, what can we do to limit the raids of the Scots? Should the border lords be reinforced?”

“Yes, but it is a long border, and hard to keep. King James does not fear an English army led by the king. He does not fear the border lords.”

“Why does he not fear us?”

He shrugged, too much of a courtier to say any betraying word. “Well, James is an old warrior; he has been spoiling for a fight for two generations now.”

“Who could make James fear us and keep him in Scotland while we reinforce the border and get ready for war? What would make James delay and buy us time?”

“Nothing,” he declared, shaking his head. “There is no one who could hold back James if he is set on war. Except perhaps only the Pope, if he would rule? But who could persuade His Holiness to intervene between two Christian monarchs quarreling over a pirate’s raid and a patch of land? And the Pope has his own worries with the French advancing. And besides, a complaint from us would only bring a rebuttal from Scotland. Why would His Holiness intervene for us?”

“I don’t know,” said Katherine. “I don’t know what would make the Pope take our side. If only he knew of our need! If only he would use his power to defend us!”

Richard Bainbridge, Cardinal Archbishop of York, happens to be at Rome and is a good friend of mine. I write to him that very night, a friendly letter as between one acquaintance to another far from home, telling him of the news from London, the weather, the prospects for the harvest and the price of wool. Then I tell him of the enmity of the Scottish king, of his sinful pride, of his wicked licensing of attacks on our shipping and—worst of all—his constant invasions of our northern lands. I tell him that I am so afraid that the king will be forced to defend his lands in the north that he will not be able to come to the aid of the Holy Father in his quarrel with the French king. It would be such a tragedy, I write, if the Pope was left exposed to attack and we could not come to his aid because of the wickedness of the Scots. We plan to join my father’s alliance and defend the Pope; but we can hardly muster for the Pope if there is no safety at home. If I have my way, nothing should distract my husband from his alliance with my father, with the emperor and with the Pope, but what can I, a poor woman, do? A poor woman whose own defenseless border is under constant threat?

What could be more natural than that Richard, my brother in Christ, should go with my letter in his hand to His Holiness the Pope and say how disturbed I am by the threat to my peace from King James of Scotland, and how the whole alliance to save the Eternal City is threatened by this bad neighborliness?

The Pope, reading my letter to Richard, reads it aright and writes at once to King James and threatens to excommunicate him if he does not respect the peace and the justly agreed borders of another Christian king. He is shocked that James should trouble the peace of Christendom. He takes his behavior very seriously and grave penalties could result. King James, forced to accede to the Pope’s wishes, forced to apologize for his incursions, writes a bitter letter to Henry saying that Henry had no right to approach the Pope alone, that it had been a quarrel between the two of them and there is no need to go running behind his back to the Holy Father.

“I don’t know what he is talking about,” Henry complained to Katherine, finding her in the garden playing at catch with her ladies-in-waiting. He was too disturbed to run into the game as he usually did and snatch the ball from the air, bowl it hard at the nearest girl, and shout with joy. He was too worried even to play with them. “What is he saying? I have never appealed to the Pope. I did not report him. I am no talebearer!”

“No, you are not, and so you can tell him,” Katherine said serenely, slipping her hand in his arm and walking away from the women.

“I shall tell him. I said nothing to the Pope, and I can prove it.”

“I may have mentioned my concerns to the archbishop and he may have passed them on,” Katherine said casually. “But you can hardly be blamed if your wife tells her spiritual advisor that she is anxious.”

“Exactly,” Henry said. “I shall tell him so. And you should not be worried for a moment.”

“Yes. And the main thing is that James knows he cannot attack us with impunity, His Holiness has made a ruling.”

Henry hesitated. “You did not mean Bainbridge to tell the Pope, did you?”

She peeped a little smile at him. “Of course,” she said. “But it still is not you who has complained of James to the Pope.”

His grip tightened around her waist. “You are a redoubtable enemy. I hope we are never on opposing sides. I should be sure to lose.”

“We never will be,” she said sweetly. “For I will never be anything but your loyal and faithful wife and queen.”

“I can raise an army in a moment, you know,” Henry reminded her. “There is no need for you to fear James. There is no need for you even to pretend to fear. I could be the hammer of the Scots. I could do it as well as anyone, you know.”

“Yes, of course you can. And, thank God, now you don’t need to do so.”

AUTUMN 1511

Edward Howard brought the Scots privateers back to London in chains and was greeted as an English hero. His popularity made Henry—always alert to the acclaim of the people—quite envious. He spoke more and more often of a war against the Scots, and the Privy Council, though fearful of the cost of war and privately doubtful of Henry’s military abilities, could not deny that Scotland was an ever-present threat to the peace and security of England.

It was the queen who diverted Henry from his envy of Edward Howard and the queen who continually reminded him that his first taste of warfare should surely be in the grand fields of Europe and not in some half-hidden hills in the borders. When Henry of England rode out it should be against the French king, in alliance with the two other greatest kings of Christendom. Henry, inspired from childhood with tales of Crécy and Agincourt, was easy to seduce with thoughts of glory against France.

SPRING 1512

It was hard for Henry not to embark in person when the fleet sailed to join King Ferdinand’s campaign against the French. It was a glorious start: the ships went out flying the banners of most of the great houses of England, they were the best-equipped, finest-arrayed force that had left England in years. Katherine had been busy, supervising the endless work of provisioning the ships, stocking the armories, equipping the soldiers. She remembered her mother’s constant work when her father was at war, and she had learned the great lesson of her childhood—that a battle could only be won if it were thoroughly and reliably supplied.

She sent out an expeditionary fleet that was better organized than any that had gone from England before, and she was confident that under her father’s command they would defend the Pope, beat the French, win lands in France, and establish the English as major landowners in France once more. The peace party on the Privy Council worried, as they always did, that England would be dragged into another endless war, but Henry and Katherine were convinced by Ferdinand’s confident predictions that a victory would come quickly and there would be rich gains for England.

I have seen my father command one campaign after another for all of my childhood. I have never seen him lose. Going to war is to relive my childhood again, the colors and the sounds and the excitement of a country at war are a deep joy for me. This time, to be in alliance with my father, as an equal partner, to be able to deliver to him the power of the English army, feels like my coming-of-age. This is what he has wanted from me, this is the fulfillment of my life as his daughter. It is for this that I endured the long years of waiting for the English throne. This is my destiny, at last. I am a commander as my father is, as my mother was. I am a Queen Militant, and there is no doubt in my mind on this sunny morning as I watch the fleet set sail that I will be a Queen Triumphant.

The plan was that the English army would meet the Spanish army and invade southwestern France: Guienne and the Duchy of Aquitaine. There was no doubt in Katherine’s mind that her father would take his share of the spoils of war, but she expected that he would honor his promise to march with the English into Aquitaine and win it back for England. She thought that his secret plan would be the carving up of France, which would return that overmighty country to the collection of small kingdoms and duchies it once had been, their ambitions crushed for a generation. Indeed, Katherine knew her father believed that it was safer for Christendom if France were reduced. It was not a country that could be trusted with the power and wealth that unity brings.

MAY 1512

It was as good as any brilliant court entertainment to see the ships cross the bar and sail out, a strong wind behind them, on a sunny day; and Henry and Katherine rode back to Windsor filled with confidence that their armies would be the strongest in Christendom, that they could not fail.

Katherine took advantage of the moment and Henry’s enthusiasm for the ships to ask him if he did not think that they should build galleys, fighting ships powered with oars. Arthur had known at once what she had meant by galleys; he had seen drawings and had read how they could be deployed. Henry had never seen a battle at sea, nor had he seen a galley turn without wind in a moment and come against a becalmed fighting ship. Katherine tried to explain to him, but Henry, inspired by the sight of the fleet in full sail, swore that he wanted only sailing ships, great ships manned with free crews, named for glory.

The whole court agreed with him, and Katherine knew she could make no headway against a court that was always blown about by the latest fashion. Since the fleet had looked so very fine when it set sail, all the young men wanted to be admirals like Edward Howard, just as the summer before they had all wanted to be crusaders. There was no discussing the weakness of big sailing ships in close combat—they all wanted to set out with full sail. They all wanted their own ship. Henry spent days with shipwrights and shipbuilders, and Edward Howard argued for a greater and greater navy.

Katherine agreed that the fleet was very fine, and the sailors of England were the finest in the world, but remarked that she thought she might write to the arsenal at Venice to ask them the cost of a galley and if they would build it as a commission or if they would agree to send the parts and plans to England, for English shipwrights to assemble in English dockyards.

“We don’t need galleys,” Henry said dismissively. “Galleys are for raids on shore. We are not pirates. We want great ships that can carry our soldiers. We want great ships that can tackle the French ships at sea. The ship is a platform from which you launch your attack. The greater the platform, the more soldiers can muster. It has to be a big ship for a battle at sea.”

“I am sure you are right,” she said. “But we must not forget our other enemies. The seas are one border, and we must dominate them with ships both great and small. But our other border must be made safe too.”

“D’you mean the Scots? They have taken their warning from the Pope. I don’t expect to be troubled with them.”

She smiled. She would never openly disagree with him. “Certainly,” she said. “The archbishop has secured us a breathing space. But next year, or the year after, we will have to go against the Scots.”

SUMMER 1512

Then there was nothing for Katherine to do but to wait. It seemed as if everyone was waiting. The English army were in Fuenterrabia, waiting for the Spanish to join with them for their invasion of southern France. The heat of the summer came on as they kicked their heels, ate badly, and drank like thirsty madmen. Katherine alone of Henry’s council knew that the heat of midsummer Spain could kill an army as they did nothing but wait for orders. She concealed her fears from Henry and from the council, but privately she wrote to her father asking what his plans were, she tackled his ambassador asking him what her father intended the English army to do, and when should they march?

Her father, riding with his own army, on the move, did not reply; and the ambassador did not know.

The summer wore on. Katherine did not write again. In a bitter moment, which she did not even acknowledge to herself, she saw that she was not her father’s ally on the chessboard of Europe—she realized that she was nothing more than a pawn in his plan. She did not need to ask her father’s strategy; once he had the English army in place and did not use them, she guessed it.

It grew colder in England, but it was still hot in Spain. At last Ferdinand had a use for his allies, but when he sent for them, and ordered that they should spend the winter season on campaign, they refused to answer his call. They mutinied against their own commanders and demanded to go home.

WINTER 1512

It came as no surprise to Katherine, nor to the cynics on the council when the English army came home in dishonored tatters in December. Lord Dorset, despairing of ever receiving orders and reinforcements from King Ferdinand, confronted by mutinying troops—hungry, weary, and with two thousand men lost to illness—straggled home in disgrace, as he had taken them out in glory.

“What can have gone wrong?” Henry rushed into Katherine’s rooms and waved away her ladies-in-waiting. He was almost in tears of rage at the shame of the defeat. He could not believe that his force that had gone out so bravely should come home in such disarray. He had letters from his father-in-law complaining of the behavior of the English allies. He had lost face in Spain, he had lost face with his enemy France. He fled to Katherine as the only person in the world who would share his shock and dismay. He was almost stammering with distress, it was the first time in his reign that anything had gone wrong and he had thought—like a boy—that nothing would ever go wrong for him.

I take his hands. I have been waiting for this since the first moment in the summer when there was no battle plan for the English troops. As soon as they arrived and were not deployed I knew that we had been misled. Worse, I knew that we had been misled by my father.

I am no fool. I know my father as a commander, and I know him as a man. When he did not fling the English into battle on the day that they arrived, I knew that he had another plan for them, and that plan was hidden from us. My father would never leave good men in camp to gossip and drink and get sick. I was on campaign with my father for most of my childhood. I never saw him let the men sit idle. He always keeps his men moving, he always keeps them in work and out of mischief. There is not a horse in my father’s stables with a pound of extra fat on it; he treats his soldiers just the same.

If the English were left to rot in camp, it was because he had need of them just where they were—in camp. He did not care that they were getting sick and lazy. That made me look again at the map and I saw what he was doing. He was using them as a counterweight, as an inactive diversion. I read the reports from our commanders as they arrived—their complaints at their pointless inaction, their exercises on the border, sighting the French army and being seen by them, but not being ordered to engage—and I knew I was right. My father kept the English troops dancing on the spot in Fuenterrabia so that the French, alarmed by such a force on their flank, would place their army in defense. Guarding against the English they could not attack my father who, joyously alone and unencumbered, at the head of his troops, marched into the unprotected kingdom of Navarre and so picked up that which he had desired for so long at no expense or danger to himself.

“My dear, your soldiers were not tried and found wanting,” I say to my distressed young husband. “There is no question as to the courage of the English. There can be no doubting you.”

“He says…” He waves the letter at me.

“It doesn’t matter what he says,” I say patiently. “You have to look at what he does.”

The face he turns to me is so hurt that I cannot bring myself to tell him that my father has used him, played him for a fool, used his army, used even me, to win himself Navarre.

“My father has taken his fee before his work, that is all,” I say robustly. “Now we have to make him do the work.”

“What do you mean?” Henry is still puzzled.

“God forgive me for saying it, but my father is a masterly double-dealer. If we are going to make treaties with him, we will have to learn to be as clever as him. He made a treaty with us and said he would be our partner in war against France, but all we have done is win him Navarre, by sending our army out and home again.”

“They have been shamed. I have been shamed.”

He cannot understand what I am trying to tell him. “Your army has done exactly what my father wanted them to do. In that sense, it has been a most successful campaign.”

“They did nothing! He complains to me that they are good for nothing!”

“They pinned down the French with that nothing. Think of that! The French have lost Navarre.”

“I want to court-martial Dorset!”

“Yes, we can do so, if you wish. But the main thing is that we still have our army, we have lost only two thousand men, and my father is our ally. He owes us for this year. Next year you can go back to France and this time Father will fight for us, not us for him.”

“He says he will conquer Guienne for me; he says it as if I cannot do it myself! He speaks to me as a weakling with a useless force!”

“Good,” I say, surprising him. “Let him conquer Guienne for us.”

“He wants us to pay him.”

“Let us pay for it. What does it matter as long as my father is on our side when we go to war with the French? If he wins Guienne for us, then that is to our good; if he does not, but just distracts the French when we invade in the north from Calais, then that is all to the good as well.”

For a moment he gapes at me, his head spinning. Then he sees what I mean. “He pins down the French for us as we advance, just as we did for him?”

“Exactly.”

“We use him, as he used us?”

“Yes.”

He is amazed. “Did your father teach you how to do this—to plan ahead as if a campaign were a chessboard, and you have to move the pieces around?”

I shake my head. “Not on purpose. But you cannot live with a man like my father without learning the arts of diplomacy. You know Machiavelli himself called him the perfect prince? You could not be at my father’s court, as I was, or on campaign with him, as I was, without seeing that he spends his life seeking advantage. He taught me every day. I could not help but learn, just from watching him. I know how his mind works. I know how a general thinks.”

“But what made you think of invading from Calais?”

“Oh, my dear, where else would England invade France? My father can fight in the south for us, and we will see if he can win us Guienne. You can be sure that he will do so if it is in his interest. And, at any rate, while he is doing that, the French will not be able to defend Normandy.”

Henry’s confidence comes rushing back to him. “I shall go myself,” he declares. “I shall take to the field of battle myself. Your father will not be able to criticize the command of the English army if I do it myself.”

For a moment I hesitate. Even playing at war is a dangerous game, and while we do not have an heir, Henry is precious beyond belief. Without him, the safety of England will be torn between a hundred pretenders. But I will never keep my hold on him if I coop him up as his grandmother did. Henry will have to learn the nature of war, and I know that he will be safest in a campaign commanded by my father, who wants to keep me on my throne as much as I want it; and safer by far facing the chivalrous French than the murderous Scots. Besides, I have a plan that is a secret. And it requires him to be out of the country.

“Yes, you shall,” I say. “And you shall have the best armor and strongest horse and handsomest guard of any other king who takes the field.”

“Thomas Howard says that we should abandon our battle against France until we have suppressed the Scots.”

I shake my head. “You shall fight in France in the alliance of the three kings,” I assure him. “It will be a mighty war, one that everyone will remember. The Scots are a minor danger, they can wait. At the worst they are a petty border raid. And if they invade the north when you go to war, they are so unimportant that even I could command an expedition against them while you go to the real war in France.”

“You?” he asks.

“Why not? Are we not a king and queen come young to our thrones in our power? Who should deny us?”

“No one! I shall not be diverted,” Henry declares. “I shall conquer in France and you shall guard us against the Scots.”

“I will,” I promise him. This is just what I want.

SPRING 1513

Henry talked of nothing but war all winter, and in the spring Katherine started a great muster of men and materials for the invasion of northern France. The treaty with Ferdinand agreed that he would invade Guienne for England at the same time as the English troops took Normandy. The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian would join with the English army in the battle in the north. It was an infallible plan if the three parties attacked simultaneously, if they kept meticulous faith with each other.

It comes as no surprise to me to find that my father has been talking peace with France in the very same days that I have had Thomas Wolsey, my right-hand man, the royal almoner, writing to every town in England and asking them how many men they can muster for the king’s service when we go to war in France. I knew my father would think only of the survival of Spain: Spain before everything. I do not blame him for it. Now that I am a queen I understand a little better what it means to love a country with such a passion that one will betray anything—even one’s own child, as he does—to keep it safe. My father, with the prospect on one hand of a troublesome war and little gain and, on the other hand peace, with everything to play for, chooses peace and chooses France as his friend. He has betrayed us in absolute secrecy and he fooled even me.

When the news of his grand perfidy comes out he blames it all on his ambassador, and on letters going astray. It is a slight excuse, but I do not complain. My father will join us as soon as it looks as if we will win. The main thing for me now is that Henry should have his campaign in France and leave me alone to settle with the Scots.

“He has to learn how to lead men into battle,” Thomas Howard says to me. “Not boys into a bawdy house—excuse me, Your Grace.”

“I know,” I reply. “He has to win his spurs. But there is such a risk.”

The old soldier puts his hand over mine. “Very few kings die in battle,” he says. “Don’t think of King Richard, for he all but ran on the swords. He knew he was betrayed. Mostly, kings get ransomed. It’s not one half of the risk that you will be facing if you equip an army and send it across the narrow seas to France, and then try and fight the Scots with what is left.”

I am silent for a moment. I did not know that he had seen what I plan. “Who thinks that this is what I am doing?”

“Only me.”

“Have you told anyone?”

“No,” he says stoically. “My first duty is to England, and I think you are right. We have to finish with the Scots once and for all, and it had better be done when the king is safely overseas.”

“I see you don’t fear overmuch for my safety?” I observe.

He shrugs and smiles. “You are a queen,” he says. “Dearly beloved, perhaps. But we can always get another queen. We have no other Tudor king.”

“I know,” I say. It is a truth as clear as water. I can be replaced but Henry cannot. Not until I have a Tudor son.

Thomas Howard has guessed my plan. I have no doubt in my mind where my truest duty lies. It is as Arthur taught me—the greatest danger to the safety of England comes from the north, from the Scots, and so it is to the north that I should march. Henry should be encouraged to put on his most handsome armor to go with his most agreeable friends in a sort of grand joust against the French. But there will be bloody work on the northern border; a victory there will keep us safe for generations. If I want to make England safe for me and for my unborn son, and for the kings who come after me, I must defeat the Scots.

Even if I never have a son, even if I never have cause to go to Walsingham to thank Our Lady for the son she has given me, I shall still have done my first and greatest duty by this, my beloved country of England, if I beat the Scots. Even if I die in doing it.

I maintain Henry’s resolve; I do not allow him to lose his temper or his will. I fight the Privy Council who choose to see my father’s unreliability as another sign that we should not go to war. Partly, I agree with them. I think we have no real cause against France and no great gains to make. But I know that Henry is wild to go to war and he thinks that France is his enemy and King Louis his rival. I want Henry out of the way this summer, when it is my intention to destroy the Scots. I know that the only thing that can divert him will be a glorious war. I want war, not because I am angry with the French or want to show our strength to my father; I want war because we have the French to the south and the Scots to the north and we will have to engage with one and play with the other to keep England safe.

I spend hours on my knees in the royal chapel; but it is Arthur that I am talking to, in long, silent reveries. “I am sure I am right, my love,” I whisper into my clasped hands. “I am sure that you were right when you warned me of the danger of the Scots. We have to subdue the Scots, or we will never have a kingdom that can sleep in peace. If I can have my way, this will be the year when the fate of England is decided. If I have my way, I will send Henry against the French and I will go against the Scots and our fate can be decided. I know the Scots are the greater danger. Everyone thinks of the French—your brother thinks of nothing but the French—but these are men who know nothing of the reality of war. The enemy who is across the sea, however much you hate him, is a lesser enemy than the one who can march over your borders in a night.”

I can almost see him in the shadowy darkness behind my closed eyes. “Oh, yes,” I say with a smile to him. “You can think that a woman cannot lead an army. You can think that a woman cannot wear armor. But I know more about warfare than most men at this peaceable court. This is a court devoted to jousting; all the young men think war is a game. But I know what war is. I have seen it. This is the year when you will see me ride out as my mother did, when you see me face our enemy—the only enemy that really matters. This is my country now; you yourself made it my country. And I will defend it for you, for me, and for our heirs.”

The English preparations for the war against France went on briskly, with Katherine and Thomas Wolsey, her faithful assistant, working daily on the muster rolls for the towns, the gathering of provisions for the army, the forging of armor, and the training of volunteers to march, prepare to attack, and retreat, on command. Wolsey observed that the queen had two muster rolls, almost as if she were preparing for two armies. “Are you thinking we will have to fight the Scots as well as the French?” he asked her.

“I am sure of it.”

“The Scots will snap at us as soon as our troops leave for France,” he said. “We shall have to reinforce the borders.”

“I hope to do more than that,” was all she said.

“His Grace the King will not be distracted from his war with France,” he pointed out.

She did not confide in him, as he wanted her to do. “I know. We must make sure he has a great force to take to Calais. He must not be distracted by anything.”

“We will have to keep some men back to defend against the Scots. They are certain to attack,” he warned her.

“Border guards,” she said dismissively.

Handsome young Edward Howard, in a new cloak of dark sea-blue, came to take leave of Katherine as the fleet prepared to set sail with orders to blockade the French in port, or engage them if possible on the high seas.

“God bless you,” said the queen, and heard her voice a little shaken with emotion. “God bless you, Edward Howard, and may your luck go with you as it always does.”

He bowed low. “I have the luck of a man favored by a great queen who serves a great country,” he said. “It is an honor to serve my country, the king…and”—he lowered his voice to an intimate whisper—“and you, my queen.”

Katherine smiled. All of Henry’s friends shared a tendency to think themselves into the pages of a romance. Camelot was never very far away from their minds. Katherine had served as the lady of the courtly myth ever since she had been queen. She liked Edward Howard more than any of the other young men. His genuine gaiety and his open affection endeared him to everyone, and he had a passion for the navy and the ships under his command that commended him to Katherine, who saw the safety of England could only be assured by holding the seas.

“You are my knight, and I trust you to bring glory to your name and to mine,” she said to him, and saw the gleam of pleasure in his eyes as he dropped his dark head to kiss her hand.

“I shall bring you home some French ships,” he promised her. “I have brought you Scots pirates, now you shall have French galleons.”

“I have need of them,” she said earnestly.

“You shall have them if I die in the attempt.”

She held up a finger. “No dying,” she warned him. “I have need of you, too.” She gave him her other hand. “I shall think of you every day and in my prayers,” she promised him.

He rose up and with a swirl of his new cloak he went out.

It is the feast of St. George and we are still waiting for news from the English fleet, when a messenger comes in, his face grave. Henry is at my side as the young man tells us, at last, of the sea battle that Edward was so certain he should win, that we were so certain would prove the power of our ships over the French. With his father at my side, I learn the fate of Edward, my knight Edward, who had been so sure that he would bring home a French galleon to the Pool of London.

He pinned down the French fleet in Brest and they did not dare to come out. He was too impatient to wait for them to make the next move, too young to play a long game. He was a fool, a sweet fool, like half the court, certain that they are invincible. He went into battle like a boy who has no fear of death, who has no knowledge of death, who has not even the sense to fear his own death. Like the Spanish grandees of my childhood, he thought that fear was an illness he could never catch. He thought that God favored him above all others and nothing could touch him.

With the English fleet unable to go forwards and the French sitting snug in harbor, he took a handful of rowing boats and threw them in, under the French guns. It was a waste, a wicked waste of his men and of himself—and only because he was too impatient to wait and too young to think. I am sorry that we sent him, dearest Edward, dearest young fool, to his own death. But then I remember that my husband is no older and certainly no wiser and has even less knowledge of the world of war, and that even I, a woman of twenty-seven years old, married to a boy who has just reached his majority, can make the mistake of thinking that I cannot fail.

Edward himself led the boarding party onto the flagship of the French admiral—an act of extraordinary daring—and almost at once his men failed him, God forgive them, and called him away when the battle was too hot for them. They jumped down from the deck of the French ship into their own rowing boats, some of them leaping into the sea in their terror to be away, shot ringing around them like hailstones. They cast off, leaving him fighting like a madman, his back to the mast, hacking around him with his sword, hopelessly outnumbered. He made a dash to the side and if a boat had been there, he might have dropped down to it. But they had gone. He tore the gold whistle of his office from his neck and flung it far out into the sea, so that the French would not have it, and then he turned and fought them again. He went down, still fighting; a dozen swords stabbed him. He was still fighting as he slipped and fell, supporting himself with one arm, his sword still parrying. Then, a hungry blade slashed at his sword arm, and he was fighting no more. They could have stepped back and honored his courage, but they did not. They pressed him further and fell on him like hungry dogs on a skin in Smithfield market. He died with a hundred stab wounds.

They threw his body into the sea, they cared so little for him, these French soldiers, these so-called Christians. They could have been savages, they could have been Moors for all the Christian charity they showed. They did not think of the supreme unction, of a prayer for the dead; they did not think of his Christian burial, though a priest watched him die. They flung him into the sea as if he were nothing more than some spoilt food to be nibbled by fishes.

Then they realized that it was Edward Howard, my Edward Howard, the admiral of the English navy, and the son of one of the greatest men in England, and they were sorry that they had thrown him overboard like a dead dog. Not for honor—oh, not them—but because they could have ransomed him to his family, and God knows we would have paid well to have sweet Edward restored to us. They sent the sailors out in boats with hooks to drag his body up again. They sent them to fish for his poor dead body as if he were salvage from a wreck. They gutted his corpse like a carp, They cut out his heart, salted it down like cod; they stole his clothes for souvenirs and sent them to the French court. The butchered scraps that were left of him they sent home to his father and to me.

This savage story reminds me of Hernando Pérez del Pulgar who led such a desperately daring raid into the Alhambra. If they had caught him they would have killed him, but I don’t think even the Moors would have cut out his heart for their amusement. They would have acknowledged him as a great enemy, a man to be honored. They would have returned his body to us with one of their grand chivalric gestures. God knows, they would have composed a song about him within a week, we would have been singing it the length and breadth of Spain within a fortnight, and they would have made a fountain to commemorate his beauty within a month. They were Moors, but they had a grace that these Christians utterly lack. When I think of these Frenchmen it makes me ashamed to call the Moors barbarians.

Henry is shaken by this story and by our defeat, and Edward’s father ages ten years in the ten minutes that it takes the messenger to tell him that his son’s body is downstairs, in a cart, but his clothes have been sent as spoil to Madame Claude, the daughter of the King of France, his heart is a keepsake for the French admiral. I can comfort neither of them; my own shock is too great. I go to my chapel and I take my sorrow to Our Lady, who knows herself what it is to love a young man and to see Him go out to His death. And when I am on my knees I swear that the French will regret the day that they cut my champion down. There will be a reckoning for this filthy act. They will never be forgiven by me.

SUMMER 1513

The death of Edward Howard made Katherine work even harder for the preparations of the English army to leave for Calais. Henry might be going to playact a war, but he would use real shot and cannon, swords and arrows, and she wanted them to be well made and their aim to be true. She had known the realities of war all her life, but with the death of Edward Howard, Henry now saw, for the first time, that it was not like in a storybook, it was not like a joust. A well-favored, brilliant young man like Edward could go out in the sunshine and come home, butchered into pieces, in a cart. To his credit, Henry did not waver in his courage as this truth came home to him, as he saw young Thomas Howard step up to his brother’s place, as he saw Edward’s father summoning his tenants and calling in his debts to provide troops to avenge his son.

They sent the first part of the army to Calais in May, and Henry prepared to follow them with the second batch of troops in June. He was more somber than he had ever been before.

Katherine and Henry rode slowly through England from Greenwich to Dover for Henry’s embarkation. The towns turned out to feast them and muster their men as they went through. Henry and Katherine had matching great white horses and Katherine rode astride, her long blue gown spread out all around. Henry, riding at her side, looked magnificent, taller than any other man in the ranks, stronger than most, golden-haired and smiling all around.

In the mornings when they rode out of a town they would both wear armor: matching suits of silver and gilt. Katherine wore only a breastplate and a helmet, made from finely beaten metal and chased with gold patterns. Henry wore full armor from toes to fingertips every day, whatever the heat. He rode with his visor up and his blue eyes dancing and a gold circlet around his helmet. The standard-bearers carrying Katherine’s badge on one side, and Henry’s on the other, rode either side of them and when people saw the queen’s pomegranate and Henry’s rose they shouted, “God Bless the King!” and “God Bless the Queen!” When they left a town, with the troops marching behind them, and the bowmen before them, the townspeople would crowd the sides of the road for a good mile to see them ride by, and they threw rose petals and rosebuds on the road in front of the horses. All the men marched with a rose in their lapels or in their hats, and they sang as they marched: bawdy songs of old England, but also sometimes ballads of Henry’s composing.

They took nearly two weeks to get to Dover and the time was not wasted, for they gathered supplies and recruited troops in every village. Every man in the land wanted to be in the army to defend England against France. Every girl wanted to say that her lad had gone to be a soldier. The whole country was united in wanting revenge against the French. And the whole country was confident that with the young king at the head of a young army, it could be done.

I am happier, knowingly happier, than I have been since the death of our son. I am happier than I had thought possible. Henry comes to my bed every night during the feasting, dancing, marching tour to the coast; he is mine in thought and word and deed. He is going on a campaign of my organizing, he is safely diverted from the real war that I will have to fight, and he never has a thought, or says a word, but he shares it with me. I pray that in one of these nights on the road, riding south to the coast together, in the heightened tension that comes with war, we will make another child, another boy, another rose for England, as Arthur was.

Thanks to Katherine and Thomas Wolsey the arrangements for the embarkation were timed to perfection. Not for this English army the usual delay while last-minute orders were given, and forgotten essentials desperately ordered. Henry’s ships—four hundred of them—brightly painted, with pennants flying, sails ready-rigged—were waiting to take the troops to France. Henry’s own ship, blazing in gold leaf with the red dragon flying at its stern, bobbed at the dock. His royal guard, superbly trained, their new livery of Tudor green and white, spangled with sequins, were paraded on the quay, his two suits of gold-inlaid armor were packed on board, his specially trained white horses were in their stalls. The preparations were as meticulous as those of the most elaborate of court masques and Katherine knew that for many of the young men, they were looking forward to war as they did to a court entertainment.

Everything was ready for Henry to embark and sail for France when in a simple ceremony, on the strand at Dover, he took the great seal of state and before them all invested Katherine as regent in his place, governor of the realm and captain general of the English forces for home defense.

I make sure that my face is grave and solemn when he names me Regent of England, and I kiss his hand and then I kiss him full on the mouth to wish him Godspeed. But as his ship is taken in tow by the barges, crosses the bar of the harbor, and then unfurls her sails to catch the wind and sets out for France, I could sing aloud for joy. I have no tears for the husband who is going away because he has left me with everything that I have ever wanted. I am more than Princess of Wales, I am more than Queen of England, I am governor of the realm, I am captain general of the army, this is my country indeed, and I am sole ruler.

And the first thing I will do—indeed, perhaps the only thing I will do with the power vested in me, the only thing that I must do with this God-given chance—is defeat the Scots.

As soon as Katherine arrived at Richmond Palace she gave Thomas Howard, Edward’s younger brother, his orders to take the cannon from the armories in the Tower and set sail with the whole English fleet, north to Newcastle to defend the borders against the Scots. He was not the admiral that his brother had been but he was a steady young man and she thought she could rely on him to do his part to deliver the vital weapons to the north.

Every day brought Katherine news from France by messengers that she had already posted along the way. Wolsey had strict instructions to report back to the queen the progress of the war. From him she wanted an accurate analysis. She knew that Henry would give her an optimistic account. It was not all good news. The English army had arrived in France; there was much excitement in Calais and feasting and celebrations. There were parades and musters and Henry had been much congratulated on his handsome armor and his smart troops. But the Emperor Maximilian failed to muster his own army to support the English. Instead, pleading poverty but swearing his enthusiasm to the cause, he came to the young prince to offer his sword and his service.

It was clearly a heady moment for Henry, who had not yet even heard a shot fired in anger, to have the Holy Roman Emperor offering his services, overwhelmed by the glamorous young prince.

Katherine frowned when she read that part of Wolsey’s account, calculating that Henry would hire the emperor at an inflated amount and would thus have to pay an ally who had promised to come at his own expense for a mercenary army. She recognized at once the double-dealing that had characterized this campaign from the start. But at least it would mean that the emperor was with Henry in his first battle, and Katherine knew that she could rely on the experienced older man to keep the impulsive young king safe.

On the advice of Maximilian, the English army laid siege to Thérouanne—a town which the Holy Roman Emperor had long desired, but of no tactical value to England—and Henry, safely distanced from the short-range guns on the walls of the little town, walked alone through his camp at midnight, spoke comforting words to the soldiers on watch, and was allowed to fire his first cannon.

The Scots, who had been waiting only until England was defenseless, with king and army in France, declared war against the English and started their own march south. Wolsey wrote with alarm to Katherine, asking her if she needed the return of some of Henry’s troops to face this new threat. Katherine replied that she thought she could defend against a border skirmish, and started a fresh muster of troops from every town in the country, using the lists she had already prepared.

She commanded the assembly of the London militia and went out in her armor, on her white horse, to inspect them before they started their march north.

I look at myself in the mirror as my ladies-in-waiting tie on my breastplate, and my maid-in-waiting holds my helmet. I see the unhappiness in their faces, the way the silly maid holds the helmet as if it is too heavy for her, as if none of this should be happening, as if I were not born for this moment: now. The moment of my destiny.

I draw a silent breath. I look so like my mother in my armor that it could be her reflection in the mirror, standing so still and proud, with her hair caught back from her face and her eyes shining as bright as the burnished gilt on her breastplate; alive at the prospect of battle, gleaming with joy at her confidence in victory.

“Are you not afraid?” María de Salinas asks me quietly.

“No.” I speak the truth. “I have spent all my life waiting for this moment. I am a queen, and the daughter of a queen who had to fight for her country. I have come to this, my own country, at the very moment that it needs me. This is not a time for a queen who wants to sit on her throne and award prizes for jousting. This is a time for a queen who has the heart and stomach of a man. I am that queen. I shall ride out with my army.”

There is a little flurry of dismay. “Ride out?” “But not north?” “Parade them, but surely not ride with them?” “But isn’t it dangerous?”

I reach for my helmet. “I shall ride with them north to meet the Scots. And if the Scots break through, I shall fight them. And when I take the field against them I shall be there until I defeat them.”

“But what about us?”

I smile at the women. “Three of you will come with me to bear me company and the rest of you will stay here,” I say firmly. “Those behind will continue to make banners and prepare bandages and send them on to me. You will keep good order,” I say firmly. “Those who come with me will behave as soldiers in the field. I will have no complaints.”

There is an outburst of dismay, which I avoid by heading for the door. “María and Margaret, you shall come with me now,” I say.

The troops are drawn up before the palace. I ride slowly down the lines, letting my eyes rest on one face and then another. I have seen my father do this, and my mother. My father told me that every soldier should know that he is valued, should know that he has been seen as an individual man on parade, should feel himself to be an essential part of the body of the army. I want them to be sure that I have seen them, seen every man, that I know them. I want them to know me. When I have ridden past every single one of the five hundred, I go to the front of the army and I take off my helmet so that they can see my face. I am not like a Spanish princess now, with my hair hidden and my face veiled. I am a bareheaded, barefaced English queen. I raise my voice so that every one of them can hear me.

“Men of England,” I say. “You and I will go together to fight the Scots, and neither of us will falter nor fail. We will not turn back until they have turned back. We will not rest until they are dead. Together we will defeat them, for we do the work of heaven. This is not a quarrel of our making; this is a wicked invasion by James of Scotland, breaking his own treaty, insulting his own English wife. An ungodly invasion condemned by the Pope himself, an invasion against the order of God. He has planned this for years. He has waited, like a coward, thinking to find us weak. But he is mistaken, for we are powerful now. We will defeat him, this heretic king. We will win. I can assure you of this because I know God’s will in this matter. He is with us. And you can be sure that God’s hand is always over men who fight for their homes.”

There is a great roar of approval and I turn and smile to one side, and then the other, so that they can all see my pleasure in their courage. So that they can all see that I am not afraid.

“Good. Forward march,” I say simply to the commander at my side and the army turns and marches out of the parade ground.

As Katherine’s first army of defense marched north under the Earl of Surrey, gathering men as they went, the messengers rode desperately south to London to bring her the news she had been expecting. James’s army had crossed the Scottish border and was advancing through the rolling hills of the border country, recruiting soldiers and stealing food as they went.

“A border raid?” Katherine asked, knowing it would not be.

The man shook his head. “My lord told me to tell you that the French king has promised the Scots king that he will recognize him if he wins this battle against us.”

“Recognize him? As what?”

“As King of England.”

He expected her to cry out in indignation or in fear, but she merely nodded, as if it were something else to consider.

“How many men?” Katherine demanded of the messenger.

He shook his head. “I can’t say for certain.”

“How many do you think?”

He looked at the queen, saw the sharp anxiety in her eyes, and hesitated.

“Tell me the truth!”

“I am afraid sixty thousand, Your Grace, perhaps more.”

“How many more? Perhaps?”

Again he paused. She rose from her chair and went to the window. “Please, tell me what you think,” she said. “You do me no service if, thanks to you, trying to spare me distress, I go out with an army and find before me an enemy in greater force than I expected.”

“One hundred thousand, I would think,” he said quietly.

He expected her to gasp in horror but when he looked at her she was smiling. “Oh, I’m not afraid of that.”

“Not afraid of one hundred thousand Scots?” he demanded.

“I’ve seen worse,” she said.

I know now that I am ready. The Scots are pouring over the border, in their full power. They have captured the northern castles with derisive ease; the flower of the English command and the best men are overseas in France. The French king thinks to defeat us with the Scots, in our own lands, while our masking army rides around northern France and makes pretty gestures. My moment is now. It is up to me, and the men who are left. I order the royal standards and banners from the great wardrobe. Flown at the head of the army the royal standards show that the King of England is on the battlefield. That will be me.

“You will never ride under the royal standard?” one of my ladies queries.

“Who else?”

“It should be the king.”

“The king is fighting the French. I shall fight the Scots.”

“Your Grace, a queen cannot take the king’s standard and ride out.”

I smile at her. I am not pretending to confidence: I truly know that this is the moment for which I have waited all my life. I promised Arthur I could be a queen in armor, and now I am. “A queen can ride under a king’s standard, if she thinks she can win.”

I summon the remaining troops: these will be my force. I plan to parade them in battle order, but there are more comments.

“You will never ride at their head?”

“Where would you want me to ride?”

“Your Grace, perhaps you should not be there at all?”

“I am their commander in chief,” I say simply. “You must not think of me as a queen who stays at home, influences policy by stealth, and bullies her children. I am a queen who rules as my mother did. When my country is in danger, I am in danger. When my country is triumphant, as we will be, it is my triumph.”

“But what if…?” The lady-in-waiting is silenced by one hard look from me.

“I am not a fool. I have planned for defeat,” I tell her. “A good commander always speaks of victory and yet has a plan for defeat. I know exactly where I shall fall back, and I know exactly where I shall regroup, and I know exactly where I shall join battle again, and if I fail there, I know where I shall regroup again. I did not wait long years for this throne to see the King of Scotland and that fool Margaret take it from me.”

Katherine’s men, all forty thousand of them, straggled along the road behind the royal guard, weighed down by their weapons and sacks of food in the late-summer sunshine. Katherine, at the head of the train, rode her white horse where everyone could see her, with the royal standard over her head, so that the men should know her now, on the march, and recognize her later, in battle. Twice a day she rode down the length of the line with a word of encouragement for everyone who was scuffing along in the rear, choking with the dust from the forward wagons. She kept monastic hours, rising at dawn to hear Mass, taking Communion at noon, and going to bed at dusk, waking at midnight to say her prayers for the safety of the realm, for the safety of the king, and for herself.

Messengers passed constantly between Katherine’s army and the force commanded by Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey. Their plan was that Surrey should engage with the Scots at the first chance, anything to stop their rapid and destructive advance southwards. If Surrey were defeated, then the Scots would come on and Katherine would meet them with her force, and fling them into defense of the southern counties of England. If the Scots cut through them then Katherine and Surrey had a final plan for the defense of London. They would regroup, summon a citizens’ army, throw up earthworks around the City and if all else failed, retreat to the Tower, which could be held for long enough for Henry to reinforce them from France.

Surrey is anxious that I have ordered him to lead the first attack against the Scots, he would rather wait for my force to join him; but I insist the attack shall go as I have planned. It would be safer to join our two armies, but I am fighting a defensive campaign. I have to keep an army in reserve to stop the Scots sweeping south, if they win the first battle. This is not a single battle I am fighting here. This is a war that will destroy the threat of the Scots for a generation, perhaps forever.

I too am tempted to order him to wait for me, I so want to join the battle; I feel no fear at all, just a sort of wild gladness as if I am a hawk mewed up for too long and now suddenly set free. But I will not throw my precious men into a battle that would leave the road to London open if we lost. Surrey thinks that if we unite the forces we will be certain to win but I know that there is no certainty in warfare, anything can go wrong. A good commander is ready for the worst, and I am not going to risk the Scots beating us in one battle and then marching down the Great North Road and into my capital city, and a coronation with French acclaim. I did not win this throne so hard, to lose it in one reckless fight. I have a battle plan for Surrey, and one for me, and then a position to retreat to, and a series of positions after that. They may win one battle, they may win more than one, but they will never take my throne from me.

We are sixty miles out of London, at Buckingham. This is good speed for an army on the march. They tell me it is tremendous speed for an English army; they are notorious for dawdling on the road. I am tired, but not exhausted. The excitement and—to be honest—the fear in each day is keeping me like a hound on a leash, always eager, straining to get ahead and start the hunt.

And now I have a secret. Each afternoon, when I dismount from my horse, I get down from the saddle and first thing, before anything else, I go into the necessary house, or tent, or wherever I can be alone, and I pull up my skirts and look at my linen. I am waiting for my monthly course, and it is the second month that it has failed to come. My hope, a strong, sweet hope, is that when Henry sailed to France, he left me with child.

I will tell no one, not even my women. I can imagine the outcry if they knew I was riding every day, and preparing for battle when I am with child, or even in hopes of a child. I dare not tell them, for in all truth, I do not dare do anything which might tilt the balance in this campaign against us. Of course, nothing could be more important than a son for England—except this one thing: holding England for that son to inherit. I have to grit my teeth on the risk I am taking and take it anyway.

The men know that I am riding at their head and I have promised them victory. They march well; they will fight well because they have put their faith in me. Surrey’s men, closer to the enemy than us, know that behind them, in reliable support, is my army. They know that I am leading their reinforcements in person. It has caused much talk in the country, they are proud to have a queen who will muster herself for them. If I were to turn my face to London and tell them to go on without me, for I have a woman’s work to do, they would head for home too—it is as simple as that. They would think that I had lost confidence, that I had lost faith in them, that I anticipate defeat. There are enough whispers about an unstoppable army of Scotsmen—one hundred thousand angry Highlanders—without me adding to their fears.

Besides, if I cannot save my kingdom for my child, then there is little point in having a child. I have to defeat the Scots, I have to be a great general. When that duty is done, I can be a woman again.

At night, I have news from Surrey that the Scots are encamped on a strong ridge, drawn up in battle order at a place called Flodden. He sends me a plan of the site, showing the Scots camped on high ground, commanding the view to the south. One glance at the map tells me that the English should not attack uphill against the heavily armed Scots. The Scots archers will be shooting downhill and then the Highlanders will charge down on our men. No army could face an attack like that.

“Tell your master he is to send out spies and find a way around the back of the Scots to come upon them from the north,” I say to the messenger, staring at the map. “Tell him my advice is that he makes a feint, leaves enough men before the Scots to pin them down, but marches the rest away, as if he is heading north. If he is lucky, they will give chase and you will have them on open ground. If he is unlucky he will have to reach them from the north. Is it good ground? He has drawn a stream on this sketch.”

“It is boggy ground,” the man confirms. “We may not be able to cross it.”

I bite my lip. “It’s the only way that I can see,” I say. “Tell him this is my advice but not my command. He is commander in the field, he must make his own judgment. But tell him I am certain that he has to get the Scots off that hill. Tell him I know for sure that he cannot attack uphill. He has to either go round and surprise them from the rear or lure them down off that hill.”

The man bows and leaves. Please God he can get my message through to Surrey. If he thinks he can fight an army of Scots uphill he is finished. One of my ladies comes to me the minute the messenger has left my tent. She is trembling with fatigue and fear. “What do we do now?”

“We advance north,” I say.

“But they may be fighting any day now!”

“Yes, and if they win we can go home. But if they lose we shall stand between the Scots and London.”

“And do what?” she whispers.

“Beat them,” I say simply.

10TH SEPTEMBER 1513

“Your Grace!” A page boy came dashing into Katherine’s tent, bobbed a most inadequate hurried bow. “A messenger, with news of the battle! A messenger from Lord Surrey.”

Katherine whirled around, her shoulder strap from her halberk still undone. “Send him in!”

The man was already in the room, the dirt of the battle still on him, but with the beam of a man bringing good news, great news.

“Yes?” Katherine demanded, breathless with hope.

“Your Grace has conquered,” he said. “The King of Scotland lies dead—twenty Scottish lords lie with him, bishops, earls, and abbots too. It is a defeat they will never rise up from. Half of their great men have died in a single day.”

He saw the color drain from her face and then she suddenly grew rosy. “We have won?”

“You have won,” he confirmed. “The earl said to tell you that your men, raised and trained and armed by you, have done what you ordered they should do. It is your victory, and you have made England safe.”

Her hand went at once to her belly, under the metal curve of the breastplate. “We are safe,” she said.

He nodded. “He sent you this…”

He held out for her a surcoat, terribly torn and slashed and stained with blood.

“This is?”

“The coat of the King of Scotland. We took it from his dead body as proof. We have his body, it is being embalmed. He is dead, the Scots are defeated. You have done what no English king since Edward the First could do. You have made England safe from Scottish invasion.”

“Write out a report for me,” she said decisively. “Dictate it to the clerk. Everything you know and everything that my lord Surrey said. I must write to the king.”

“Lord Surrey asked…”

“Yes?”

“Should he advance into Scotland and lay it waste? He says there will be little or no resistance. This is our chance. We could destroy them—they are utterly at our mercy.”

“Of course,” she said at once, then she paused. It was the answer that any monarch in Europe would have given. A troublesome neighbor, an inveterate enemy lay weakened. Every king in Christendom would have advanced and taken revenge.

“No. No, wait a moment.”

She turned away from him and went to the doorway of her tent. Outside, the men were preparing for another night on the road, far from their homes. There were little cook fires all around the camp, torches burning, the smell of cooking and dung and sweat in the air. It was the very scent of Katherine’s childhood, a childhood spent for the first seven years in a state of constant warfare against an enemy who was driven backwards and backwards and finally into slavery, exile and death.

Think, I say to myself fiercely. Don’t feel with a tender heart, think with a hard brain, a soldier’s brain. Don’t consider this as a woman with child who knows there are many widows in Scotland tonight, think as a queen. My enemy is defeated, the country lies open before me, their king is dead, their queen is a young fool of a girl and my sister-in-law. I can cut this country into pieces, I can quilt it. Any commander of any experience would destroy them now and leave them destroyed for a whole generation. My father would not hesitate; my mother would have given the order already.

I check myself. They were wrong, my mother and father. Finally, I say the unsayable, unthinkable thing. They were wrong, my mother and father. Soldiers of genius they may have been, convinced they certainly were, Christian kings they were called—but they were wrong. It has taken me all my life to learn this.

A state of constant warfare is a two-edged sword: it cuts both the victor and the defeated. If we pursue the Scots now, we will triumph, we can lay the country waste, we can destroy them for generations to come. But all that grows on waste are rats and pestilence. They would recover in time, they would come against us. Their children would come against my children and the savage battle would have to be fought all over again. Hatred breeds hatred. My mother and father drove the Moors overseas, but everyone knows that by doing so they won only one battle in a war that will never cease until Christians and Muslims are prepared to live side by side in peace and harmony. Isabella and Ferdinand hammered the Moors, but their children and their children’s children will face the jihad in reply to the crusade. War does not answer war, war does not finish war. The only ending is peace.

“Get me a fresh messenger,” Katherine said over her shoulder, and waited till the man came. “You are to go to my lord Surrey and tell him I give him thanks for this great news of a wonderful victory. You are to tell him that he is to let the Scots soldiers surrender their arms and they are to go in peace. I myself will write to the Scots queen and promise her peace if she will be our good sister and good neighbor. We are victorious, we shall be gracious. We shall make this victory a lasting peace, not a passing battle and an excuse for savagery.”

The man bowed and left. Katherine turned to the soldier. “Go and get yourself some food,” she said. “You can tell everyone that we have won a great battle and that we shall go back to our homes knowing that we can live at peace.”

She went to her little table and drew her writing box towards her. The ink was corked in a tiny glass bottle, the quill especially cut down to fit the small case. The paper and sealing wax were to hand. Katherine drew a sheet of paper towards her, and paused. She wrote a greeting to her husband; she told him she was sending him the coat of the dead Scots king.

In this, Your Grace shall see how I can keep my promise, sending you for your banners a king’s coat. I thought to send himself to you, but our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it.

I pause. With this great victory I can go back to London, rest and prepare for the birth of the child that I am sure I am carrying. I want to tell Henry that I am once again with child; but I want to write to him alone. This letter—like every letter between us—will be half public. He never opens his own letters, he always gets a clerk to open them and read them for him, he rarely writes his own replies. Then I remember that I told him that if Our Lady ever blessed me with a child again I would go at once to her shrine at Walsingham to give thanks. If he remembers this, it can serve as our code. Anyone can read it to him but he will know what I mean—I shall have told him the secret, that we will have a child, that we may have a son. I smile and start to write, knowing that he will understand what I mean, knowing what joy this letter will bring him.

I make an end, praying God to send you home shortly, for without no joy can here be accomplished, and for the same I pray, and now go to Our Lady at Walsingham, that I promised so long ago to see.

Your humble wife and true servant,

Katherine.

Walsingham,

Autumn 1513

Katherine was on her knees at the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, her eyes fixed on the smiling statue of the Mother of Christ, but seeing nothing.

Beloved, beloved, I have done it. I sent the coat of the Scots king to Henry and I made sure to emphasize that it is his victory, not mine. But it is yours. It is yours because when I came to you and to your country, my mind filled with fears about the Moors, it was you who taught me that the danger here was the Scots. Then life taught me a harder lesson, beloved: it is better to forgive an enemy than destroy him. If we had Moorish physicians, astronomers, mathematicians in this country we would be the better for it. The time may come when we also need the courage and the skills of the Scots. Perhaps my offer of peace will mean that they will forgive us for the Battle of Flodden.

I have everything I ever wanted—except you. I have won a victory for this kingdom that will keep it safe for a generation. I have conceived a child and I feel certain that this baby will live. If he is a boy I shall call him Arthur for you. If she is a girl, I shall call her Mary. I am Queen of England, I have the love of the people and Henry will make a good husband and a good man.

I sit back on my heels and close my eyes so the tears should not run down my cheeks. “The only thing I lack is you, beloved. Always you. Always you.”

“Your Grace, are you unwell?” The quiet voice of the nun recalls me and I open my eyes. My legs are stiff from kneeling so long. “We did not want to disturb you, but it has been some hours.”

“Oh, yes,” I say. I try to smile at her. “I shall come in a moment. Leave me now.”

I turn back to my dream of Arthur but he is gone. “Wait for me in the garden,” I whisper. “I will come to you. I will come one day soon. In the garden, when my work here is done.”

Blackfriars Hall

THE PAPAL LEGATE SITTING AS A COURT TO HEAR THE KING’S GREAT MATTER, JUNE 1529

Words have weight. Something once said cannot be unsaid, meaning is like a stone dropped into a pool; the ripples will spread and you cannot know what bank they wash against.

I once said, “I love you, I will love you forever,” to a young man in the night. I once said, “I promise.” That promise, made twenty-seven years ago to satisfy a dying boy, to fulfill the will of God, to satisfy my mother and—to tell truth—my own ambition, that word comes back to me like ripples washing to the rim of a marble basin and then eddying back again to the center.

I knew I would have to answer for my lies before God. I never thought that I would have to answer to the world. I never thought that the world could interrogate me for something that I had promised for love, something whispered in secret. And so, in my pride, I never have answered for it. Instead, I held to it.

And so, I believe, would any woman in my position.

Henry’s new lover, Elizabeth Boleyn’s girl, my maid-in-waiting, turns out to be the one that I knew I had to fear: the one who has an ambition that is even greater than mine. Indeed, she is even more greedy than the king. She has an ambition greater than any I have ever seen before in a man or a woman. She does not desire Henry as a man—I have seen his lovers come and go and I have learned to read them like an easy storybook. This one desires not my husband, but my throne. She has had much work to find her way to it, but she is persistent and determined. I think I knew, from the moment that she had his ear, his secrets, and his confidence, that in time, she would find her way—like a weasel smelling blood through a coney warren—to my lie. And when she found it, she would feast on it.

The usher calls out, “Katherine of Aragon, Queen of England, come into court”; and there is a token silence, for they expect no answer. There are no lawyers waiting to help me there, I have prepared no defense. I have made it clear that I do not recognize the court. They expect to go on without me. Indeed, the usher is just about to call the next witness…

But I answer.

My men throw open the double doors of the hall that I know so well and I walk in, my head up, as fearless as I have been all my life. The regal canopy is in gold, over at the far end of the hall with my husband, my false, lying, betraying, unfaithful husband in his ill-fitting crown on his throne sitting beneath it.

On a stage below him are the two cardinals, also canopied with cloth of gold, seated in golden chairs with golden cushions. That betraying slave Wolsey, red-faced in his red cardinal’s robe, failing to meet my eye, as well he might; and that false friend Campeggio. Their three faces, the king and his two procurers, are mirrors of utter dismay.

They thought they had so distressed and confused me, separated me from my friends and destroyed me, that I would not come. They thought I would sink into despair like my mother, or into madness like my sister. They are gambling on the fact that they have frightened me and threatened me and taken my child from me and done everything they can do to break my heart. They never dreamed that I have the courage to stalk in before them, and stand before them, shaking with righteousness, to face them all.

Fools, they forget who I am. They are advised by that Boleyn girl who has never seen me in armor, driven on by her who never knew my mother, did not know my father. She knows me as Katherine, the old Queen of England, devout, plump, dull. She has no idea that inside, I am still Catalina, the young Infanta of Spain. I am a princess born and trained to fight. I am a woman who has fought for every single thing I hold, and I will fight, and I will hold, and I will win.

They did not foresee what I would do to protect myself and my daughter’s inheritance. She is Mary, my Mary, named by Arthur: my beloved daughter, Mary. Would I let her be put aside for some bastard got on a Boleyn?

That is their first mistake.

I ignore the cardinals completely. I ignore the clerks on the benches before them, the scribes with their long rolls of parchment making the official record of this travesty. I ignore the court, the city, even the people who whisper my name with loving voices. Instead, I look at no one but Henry.

I know Henry, I know him better than anyone else in the world does. I know him better than his current favorite ever will, for I have seen him, man and boy. I studied him when he was a boy, when he was a child of ten who came to meet me and tried to persuade me to give him a Barbary stallion. I knew him then as a boy who could be won with fair words and gifts. I knew him through the eyes of his brother, who said—and rightly—that he was a child who had been spoilt by too much indulgence and would be a spoilt man and a danger to us all. I knew him as a youth, and I won my throne by pandering to his vanity. I was the greatest prize he could desire and I let him win me. I knew him as a man as vain and greedy as a peacock when I gave to him the credit for my war: the greatest victory ever won by England.

At Arthur’s request I told the greatest lie a woman has ever told, and I will tell it to the very grave. I am an Infanta of Spain, I do not give a promise and fail to keep it. Arthur, my beloved, asked me for an oath on his deathbed and I gave it to him. He asked me to say that we had never been lovers and he commanded me to marry his brother and be queen. I did everything I promised him, I was constant to my promise. Nothing in these years has shaken my faith that it is God’s will that I should be Queen of England, and that I shall be Queen of England until I die. No one could have saved England from the Scots but me—Henry was too young and too inexperienced to take an army into the field. He would have offered a duel, he would have chanced some forlorn hope, he would have lost the battle and died at Flodden and his sister Margaret would have been Queen of England in my place.

It did not happen because I did not allow it to happen. It was my mother’s wish and God’s will that I should be Queen of England, and I will be Queen of England until I die.

I do not regret the lie. I held to it, and I made everyone else hold to it, whatever doubts they may have had. As Henry learned more of women, as Henry learned more of me, he knew, as surely he had known on our wedding night, that it was a lie, I was no virgin for him. But in all our twenty years of marriage together, he found the courage to challenge me only once, at the very beginning; and I walk into the court on the great gamble that he will never have the courage to challenge me again, not even now.

I walk into court with my entire case staked on his weakness. I believe that when I stand before him, and he is forced to meet my eyes, that he will not dare to say that I was no virgin when I came to him, that I was Arthur’s wife and Arthur’s lover before I was ever his. His vanity will not allow him to say that I loved Arthur with a true passion and he loved me. That in truth, I will live and die as Arthur’s wife and Arthur’s lover, and thus Henry’s marriage to me can be rightfully dissolved.

I don’t think he has the courage that I have. I think if I stand straight and tell the great lie again, that he will not dare to stand straight and tell the truth.

“Katherine of Aragon, Queen of England, come into court,” the usher repeats stupidly, as the echo of the doors banging behind me reverberates in the shocked courtroom, and everyone can see that I am already in court, standing like a stocky fighter before the throne.

It is me they call for, by this title. It was my dying husband’s hope, my mother’s wish and God’s will that I should be Queen of England; and for them and for the country, I will be Queen of England until I die.

“Katherine of Aragon, Queen of England, come into court!”

This is me. This is my moment. This is my battle cry.

I step forward.

Author’s Note

THIS HAS BEEN one of the most fascinating and most moving novels to write, from the discovery of the life of the young Katherine to the great question of the lie that she told and maintained all her life.

That it was a lie is, I think, the most likely explanation. I believe that her marriage to Arthur was consummated; certainly, everyone thought so at the time It was only Doña Elvira’s insistence after Katherine had been widowed, and Katherine’s own insistence at the time of her separation from Henry, that put the consummation into doubt. Later historians, admiring Katherine and accepting her word against Henry’s, put the lie into the historical record where it stays today.

The lie was the starting place of the novel, but the surprise in the research was the background of Catalina of Spain. I enjoyed a wonderful research trip to Granada to discover more about the Spain of Isabella and Ferdinand, and came home with an abiding respect both for their courage and for the culture they swore to overthrow: the rich tolerant and beautiful land of the Moslems of Spain, el Andalus. I have tried to give these almost forgotten Europeans a voice in this book and to give us today, as we struggle with some of the same questions, an idea of the conviviencia—a land where Jews, Moslems, and Christians managed to live side by side in respect and peace as People of the Book.

A NOTE ON THE SONGS

“Alas, Alhama!,” “Riders gallop through the Elvira gate…,” and “There was crying in Granada…” are traditional songs, quoted by Francesca Claremount in Catherine of Aragon (see book list below). “A palm tree stands in the middle of Rusafa,” is by Abd al Rahman, translated by D. F. Ruggles and quoted by Maria Rosa Menocal in The Ornament of the World (see book list below).

The following books have been most helpful in my research into the history of this story:

Bindoff, S. T. Pelican History of England: Tudor England. London: Penguin, 1993.

Bruce, Marie Louise. Anne Boleyn. London: Collins, 1972.

Chejna, Anwar, G. Islam and the West: The Moriscos, A Cultural and Social History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983.

Claremont, Francesca. Catherine of Aragon. London: Robert Hale, 1939.

Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Darby, H. C., ed. A New Historical Geography of England Before 1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Dixon, William Hepworth. History of Two Queens. Vol. 2, Anne Boleyn. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1874.

Elton, G.R. England Under the Tudors. London: Methuen, 1955.

Fernández-Arnesto, Felipe. Ferdinand and Isabella. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975.

Fletcher, Anthony. Tudor Rebellions. London: Longmans, 1968.

Goodwin, Jason. Lords of the Horizon: A History of the Ottoman Empire. London: Vintage, 1989.

Guy, John. Tudor England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Haynes, Alan. Sex in Elizabethan England. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1997.

Loades, David. Henry VIII and His Queens. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2000. ———. The Tudor Court. London: Batsford, 1986.

Lloyd, David. Arthur Prince of Wales. Ludlow, Wales: Fabric Trust for St.

Laurence, 2002.

Mackie, J. D. Oxford History of England: The Earlier Tudors: 1485–1558. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952.

Mattingly, Garrett. Catherine of Aragon. London: Jonathan Cape, 1942.

Menocal, Maria Rosa. The Ornament of the World. London: Little, Brown, 2002.

Mumby, Frank Arthur. The Youth of Henry VIII: A Narrative in Contemporary Letters. London: Constable, 1913.

Núñez, J. Agustín, ed. Muslim and Christian Granada. Granada: Ediciones Edilux, 2004.

Paul, John E. Catherine of Aragon and Her Friends. London: Burns and Oates, 1966.

Plowden, Alison. The House of Tudor. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976.

———. Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1998.

Randell, Keith. Henry VIII and the Reformation in England. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993.

Robinson, John Martin. The Dukes of Norfolk. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Scarisbrick, J. J. Yale English Monarchs: Henry VIII. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997.

Scott, S. P. The History of the Moorish Empire in Europe. Vol.1. New York: AMS Press, 1974.

Smith, Lacey Baldwin. A Tudor Tragedy: The Life and Times of Catherine Howard. London: Cape, 1961.

Starkey, David. Henry VIII:

A European Court

in England. London: Collins and Brown, 1991.

———. The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics. London: G. Philip, 1985.

———. Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII. London: Vintage, 2003.

Tillyard, E.M.W. The Elizabethan World Picture. London: Pimlico, 1943.

Turner, Robert. Elizabethan Magic: The Art and the Magus. Boston: Element Books, 1989.

Walsh, William Thomas. Isabella of Spain. London: Sheed and Ward, 1931.

Warnicke, Retha M. The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn. Cambridge and New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1989.

Weir, Alison. Henry VIII: King and Court. London: Pimlico, 2002.

———. The Six Wives of Henry VIII. London: Pimlico, 1997.

Youings, Joyce. Penguin Social History of Britain: Sixteenth Century England. London: Penguin, 1991.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2005 by Philippa Gregory Limited

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gregory, Philippa.

The constant princess / Philippa Gregory.

p. cm.

“A Touchstone book.”

1. Catherine of Aragon, Queen, consort of Henry VIII, King

of England, 1485–1536—Fiction. 2. Great Britain—History—

Henry VIII, 1509–1547—Fiction. 3. Henry VIII, King of England,

1491–1547—Fiction. 4. Queens—Great Britain—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6057.R386C66 2005

823'.914—dc22 2005052303

ISBN: 0-7432-8248-5

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