The Irish Princess (28 page)

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Authors: Karen Harper

Tags: #Ireland, #Clinton, #Historical, #Henry, #Edward Fiennes De, #General, #Literary, #Great Britain - History - Henry VIII, #Great Britain, #Elizabeth Fiennes De, #Historical Fiction, #Princesses, #Fiction, #1509-1547, #Princesses - Ireland, #Elizabeth

BOOK: The Irish Princess
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He pulled back, both lips and hands. “God bless you, Irish, and have a care for your safety—always.”
Damn the man if he thought this memory would be a comfort and not a torment, but he turned and was gone.
 
PART III
 
My Womanhood
 
In ship, freight with remembrance
Of thoughts and pleasures past,
He sails that has in governance
My life, while it will last . . .
When other lovers in arms across
Rejoice their chief delight.
Drowned in tears, to mourn my loss,
I stand the bitter night,
In my window, where I may see,
Before the winds how the clouds flee.
Lo! what a mariner love hath made of me . . .
Thus is my wealth mingled with woe,
And of each thought a doubt doth grow;
“Now he comes! Will he come? Alas, no, no!”
 
—HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY
 
CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH
 
WHITEHALL PALACE
 
December 12, 1543
 
M
y betrothed held my hand as our wedding service was recited in the presence chamber at Whitehall Palace with the king and court looking on. Bishop Ridley’s voice droned on, and my thoughts jumped hither and yon.
“Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony, which is an honorable estate, instituted of God in the time of man’s innocence . . .”
Although I thought Elizabeth Tudor quite innocent of evil intent, she was not at my wedding and had written me how “mournful” she was to miss it. The poor girl had been banished to the countryside by her father for wearing a ring with her mother’s portrait hidden within and for standing up to him over it. I admired her for her loyalty and pluck, to champion her mother who—like too many others—had been cruelly dispatched by the Tudor tyrant. I would rather have had Elizabeth here even than Mary, and certainly rather than the king, though I had nothing but praise for Queen Katherine for putting up with her irascible, demanding husband.
“. . . therefore marriage is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding. . . .”
Henry Tudor was a beast. Because his wife read the Bible in English and had dared to discuss points of religion with him, he had nearly let Dudley arrest her for questioning. But I knew another reason the king had almost turned on her too, however much she nursed him and put up with his bitter, quicksilver moods. From Fleet Prison, where the king had allowed Surrey to keep his hand but had supposedly forbidden him pen and paper, someone had smuggled a Surrey poem to the queen, which the king had found under a bed pillow. I knew that poem well, for Anthony showed it to me the night before our wedding, for obvious reasons. Although, like the queen’s true love, Tom Seymour, my dear Edward Clinton was kept at sea, someone had told Anthony of our kiss on the king’s wedding day.
“It was a kiss for the bride—that’s what Lord Clinton said, and he left immediately for the sea and Scotland,” I answered back. More than once I had stood up to Anthony, though he liked it not.
“I hear it was quite a kiss,” he had raved. “Elizabeth Fitzgerald, I will brook no complications with you! God knows, there are enough of those without Clinton sailing through your head—or heart, like . . . like this mariner mentioned in the poem Surrey dared to have smuggled to the queen! ’S blood, with all I’ve done for you, plan to share with you, I’ll not have doubts about where my wife’s loyalty—and her beautiful body—lies! The poetic wretch once wrote another poem about you, I recall, so how do I know this one isn’t for you as much as for the queen?” he’d demanded, ripping the paper in half and tossing it on the floor, from which I retrieved it later.
“Anthony,” I’d replied, trying to rein in my panic—not that he would cast me off but at how the poem struck home with me—“Surrey did not write it for me or send it to me. Nor should he have so presumed with our loyal, loving queen. The king should not have lost his temper at Her Majesty, nor should you berate me. She has not seen Seymour for months and is likely not to again,” I’d insisted, hands on hips, my voice rising. “Don’t wed me then if you cannot trust me.”
Though I was a mere twenty years to his sixty-four, I could tell he was abashed at my defiance. My Irish temper, he’d called it more than once.
“I-I didn’t mean that,” he stammered, then cleared his throat. “You’ve charmed the king—me too, of course. I’m sure the queen’s quite safe from arrest now, and I simply wanted to make myself clear. I’m so very possessive of you, my sweet; that is all. Besides, however important Seymour and Clinton are to the king’s growing navy, I know if they overstepped in any way with our wives, there would be hell to pay. . . .”
Hell to pay . . . I knew the only way to keep Queen Katherine and myself—let alone the realm of Ireland—safe from this vile monarch was to get rid of him. And now that I lived at court and was about to move into quarters even closer to the king, I must strike soon.
“First, marriage was ordained for the procreation of children . . .”
If I bore Anthony children, I must act circumspectly to protect them. Could he have children in his old age? Must I take John Dudley’s advice to rear children loyal only to the English crown? And if I got with child, would my husband send me away from court during my pregnancy to his new country house at Byfleet in the shire of Surrey, or to his favorite, Battle Abbey in the sweet countryside of Kent? All seemed sunny and soft at those sites, when I still longed for the wild, windy reaches of Kildare, or—yes—Lincolnshire.
“. . . therefore, if any man can show any just cause why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter forever hold his peace.”
I wanted to scream,
I cannot wed this man! For he is a friend of my enemy and wants me to be loyal. My heart belongs to another I can never have but will ever love. . . .
“I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you knows any impediment why ye may not be lawfully joined together in matrimony, ye do now confess it.”
I do confess as I took my vows, I also promised myself to be as good a wife to my lord as I could be. That is, considering that I still wanted to kill his best friend, the king of England.
But one other thing haunted me too. On our wedding night, when my husband, who had amorous skills I had not imagined, took my virginity, and rocked over and inside me, I thought of the waves of the sea. And even when my body responded to his arts, I did not feel that he touched me at all.
 
The next years, I must confess, spun out of my control and sometimes blurred to blackness. Mostly, it was time spent away from court, for I was with child almost immediately. I became quickly ill, sicker each morn than poor Magheen, who helped tend me now, had been at sea when we left Ireland. To visit me and yet keep his court duties, Anthony rode back and forth to London from our country house at Byfleet.
When I could keep food down, I liked nothing more than to sit in my bedroom window, with my beloved old Wynne at my side, looking out over the Fleet River to watch rowboats or small sailboats pass by. My memories “freight with remembrance of thoughts and pleasures past,” as Surrey’s poem had said, made me yearn to see my long-lost brother Gerald and Edward Clinton, whose names I never spoke. I was like to go mad from my confinement. Sometimes, even when the windows were tight shut against a storm, I was certain I could smell the sea.
The birth was a horror, and my son was born dead. That is all I can bear to write even to this day: My beloved little son, Gerald Fitzgerald Browne, was born dead and was buried at our larger country seat, Battle Abbey, and I was racked with fever and regrets. Was the Lord punishing me for my lust to kill the king? The Bible said kings were put on their thrones by God, but surely He could not approve of evil ones like Henry Tudor.
I put the pieces of myself back together and returned to court, attending the queen or Elizabeth, living in Anthony’s comfortable suite of rooms there, ironically just down the hall from the hidden door to the king’s back chambers. Both men were away, for despite his age and increasing physical ills, the king led his troops to war in France in the spring of 1544, while Queen Katherine, who became increasingly dear to me, served as regent in his stead. My lord went with the king, as did Surrey, who had been pardoned and released. The Howards were always good soldiers, even though they were dreadful diplomats.
One evening late, when I knew no one was about, I took a candle and tried the hidden door in the narrow servants’ hall through which I had seen Anthony disappear months ago. After two false starts, the panel pushed inward, and I traversed a dark, dim corridor, much narrower than the one I had escaped through at Maynooth. With the king’s gargantuan girth, I doubted he could fit through it at all. Pushing aside the door at the other end—I was amazed it was not locked—I peeked into a windowless bedchamber dwarfed by a massive oaken bedstead, then tiptoed to a door to view a small adjoining library with a table and two chairs beyond.
An unseen current made my candle flicker, and I panicked that it would leave me in utter darkness. Solid shadows leaned and loomed from corners, under the table, even from the heavy folds of the velvet bed hangings. My heart thudded so hard it seemed drums echoed in the suite. So this was where the king of England slept and worked when fears assailed him, like an animal seeking its hidden den. Now I knew where to leave poison or take my chance with a knife for his assassination.
But when Henry Tudor returned from France, claiming a triumph at Boulogne, bringing my lord with him, I was soon with child, ill again. Must my babies poison me when they were in the womb? Was it another warning to me from on high?
I spent hours on my knees in prayer, trying to make bargains with the Almighty God about this babe I carried: that if the child lived, I would not try to kill the king but would reason with future monarchs to restore the Geraldines to Ireland. My little coterie of Mabel, Magheen, Margaret, and Alice kept me sane until I bore my second son, named, much to my chagrin, but at my husband’s insistence, Henry.
It was another dreadful delivery—how had my mother done this five times? The attending physician, brought by Anthony from London, told me he believed I was so torn from the birth that I would never conceive another child. I mourned that and yet felt some relief too.
Though I kept the child in the country, where the air was better, he lived but one year and was lost to quatrain fever, and I was inconsolable again. The Fitzgeralds must be cursed. One way or the other, we could not keep our males alive. Even my beloved wolfhound, Wynne, had died. If only Gerald would come back and fight for Ireland with me.
No matter that Anthony vowed he had not wed me to sire a family, for he had that. Nothing got me through those deeply dark days. Nothing, that is, but a nosegay delivered to me by messenger from the princess Elizabeth, for she and Mary had been reinstated in the line of succession then. The note with the fragrant nosegay simply read,
 
 
Dear friend, Lady Gera. We all suffer tragedies and must learn to bear up under them by helping each other. I have learned this the hard way and can only pray the path ahead will be smoother for both of us. I should like for you to return to my household at court you so briefly graced.
 
Elizabeth Tudor, Princess

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