Book The First: Katherine of Aragon - The Pomegranate Queen
A little something I have been working on with the wonderful help of @FalconHonour - she also wrote the first opening section of this for me. Lady Eleanor also belongs to her and I am using her with permission from her.
Swinging himself from the saddle, he strides up to his sister’s solar, nodding abruptly to Maria de Salinas as he passes her.
There is a blackness in his face that makes the guards jump to attention and they throw the doors open without a word.
Katherine is sitting by the window, little Beth at her feet. The almost-ten-year-old’s coppery hair is loose and Katherine is playing with it idly as she listens to twelve-year-old Mary play a Welsh ballad on the lute.
It is a pretty scene, and for a moment, Edmund is loath to disturb it, but then he hardens his heart. Katherine is not his Queen. Mary and Beth are not his Princesses. They are no more than his brother’s natural daughters, daughters born to a bare-faced liar.
"My Lady," he bows crisply, shallowly.
A shadow crosses Katherine’s face as she notes his lack of respect for her rank, but she has no time to say anything before Beth looks up, her narrow face lighting up with joy.
"Uncle Edmund!"
She springs to her feet. As she flies towards him, Edmund can’t help but embrace her. She’s always been the more vivacious of the Tudor sisters, and bastard or not, she reminds him of her aunt Mary when they were children.
"Could you and Mary give me some time with your mother, please, Beth?" he asks a moment later, putting the young girl away from him gently. "I’ve got some very important news from Court to tell her."
Beth nods at once – he’s always been her favourite uncle – but Mary, graver and more aware of her supposed position as Henry’s heiress, hesitates. She looks to her mother, and it is only when Katherine gives an encouraging nod that she lets her younger sister pull her from the room.
The moment the door closes behind the girls, Katherine whirls on Edmund.
"Is that any way to greet your Queen, Lord Somerset?!"
The colour is high in her cheeks, her accent thick. His deliberate omission of the respect due to her as Queen has clearly struck a nerve. Edmund laughs scornfully.
"How proud you still are, My Lady Dowager!"
Katherine’s jaw drops. How dare Edmund – a man young enough to be her son, a boy she has never liked, but has loved for Henry’s sake - denigrate her so?
Edmund sees her temper rising and cuts her off, unrolling a long scroll.
"Henry bade me bring you this. It is the Pope’s ruling on Your Majesties’ marriage. Written on the 30th day of April of this year, anno domini 1528, it declares that your marriage to His Grace, Henry, King of England and France and Lord of Ireland is null and void."
"Pope Clement would never -" Katherine begins, flabbergasted, but Edmund, frustrated beyond all measure at his older sister’s continued obstinance, simply talks over her.
"Oh, but he has, Katherine. What’s more, His Holiness has refused to grant your daughters’ legitimacy. He said that, when you married my brother Arthur at sixteen, Your Highness should have been old enough to know what constituted legal consummation and that for you to claim ignorance of the fact that you and Arthur had known each other carnally was a barefaced lie. His Holiness has also voided the dispensation granted by Pope Julius in 1503 that allowed you to marry Henry even if you had consummated your marriage to Arthur, on the grounds that it was drawn up under undue political pressure from your parents and mine and is therefore invalid."
Edmund pauses for breath, satisfied to see the colour draining from Katherine’s face. His sister has always been far too proud for her own good. Christ, are those tears shining in her eyes? He takes a savage pleasure in the thought.
Rolling up the larger scroll, he lays it on the table beside Katherine with the seal facing upwards so that she cannot dispute the validity of the ruling, and draws another from the leather pouch he wears at his waist.
"My brother is not a vindictive man, Princess. He has no wish to see you destitute. To this end, therefore, His Majesty has decreed that Your Royal Highness shall have £600 per annum from the estates of the late Prince Arthur to keep yourself and your daughters, the Ladies Mary and Elizabeth, in the style to which you are entitled as Dowager Princess of Wales. He is also granting you Hunsdon House for your own use, so that your daughters may receive a stable upbringing until it is time for them to wed. He bade me convey you a promise, made on his immortal soul – that his natural daughters will wed good honest Englishmen in keeping with their rank."
"Knights! Barons! My daughters should have Princes!" Katherine snarls. Edmund scoffs.
"And so they would have done if you had only gone back to Spain when Arthur died. You could have been Queen of France or Duchess of Savoy, with not a doubt in anyone’s minds as to the validity of your match. But no. You had to have Henry. You had to have Henry and grudge who grudge."
Suddenly exhausted, Edmund turns on his heel and strides for the door. At the threshold, he pauses, though he doesn’t turn back to look at Katherine.
"You brought this upon yourself, Katherine. You must have known your lie couldn’t last forever, and yet you perpetuated it all through the last quarter-century. Well, now you must live with the consequences of your actions. I wish you joy of telling your daughters."
With that, he steps across the threshold and lets the guards swing the doors shut behind him.
In the instant before the heavy doors close entirely, Katherine’s self-control deserts her. A guttural howl escapes her, her anguished rage echoing through Durham House for all to hear.
In the silence that follow the departure of the Duke of Somerset, Eleanor wonders how long it will be before the now Dowager Princess of Wales tells her daughters of their change in status.
She gets her answer exactly one hour and twenty two minutes later - she actually counts the clock as the minutes tick by.
The former Princess Mary emerges from her chambers, a whirl of green and red, hair and dress mingling as she moves.
"My Lady?"
She shouldn't speak - oh, she really shouldn't, given that it is her sister the King chose to divorce the former Queen for - but she cannot help it.
The crack that shakes her head violently rings out around Durham House as the former Princess's hand smashes around her face with a sickening crunch and her gable hood, protocol in the former Queen's household, falls to the floor. "Dear God," thinks Eleanor, seeing Lady Mary's face as the fury dances behind her blue eyes. "She's not crying: she's a Tudor true".
"Get out!"
Mary doesn't say it so much as spit it, fury dancing through her words.
"My Lady?"
"OUT!"
Mary roars the word into Eleanor's face as fury runs wild and she hurls a paperweight that makes the walls clunk as it barely misses Eleanor's head. "I have no desire to see you or your ilk again. Write to your father, to the commoner that sired you, and tell him you have been dismissed - now and forevermore - from my presence. And then get out."
Eleanor flees.
The week that follows, the agonising days that she has to wait for her mother and father to come and retrieve her, is Hell on Earth. Lady Mary upturns a chamber pot over her head, trips her when she's carrying trays, forbids her from using the privy causing her to wet herself several times and then refuses to let her change her dresses, makes her cry six times and draws blood when she slaps her around the face again, as if she takes some perverse glee out of making her life as terrible as she can.
Finally, finally, she's had enough - "What did I do to you, My Lady?" she asks after five days of punishment at the Lady Mary's hands.
"If your concubine of a sister had not come along, then my father would still be married to my mother and Elizabeth and I would still be Princesses. Ironic, isn't it? Two of you three Boleyn girls turned out to be whores - one in France, the other here in England! One wonders if you'll be the same?"
"My Lady, I-"
"-I think you will. Now get out of my presence before I upturn that tray over your head and beat you with it."
The threat - nay, Eleanor realises, the promise - lingers. None of Katherine's ladies help - they're either Spanish or loyal to the Dowager Princess or scared of defying the King's daughter, bastard though she may be - and so she suffers on until, at last, at long last, her mother and father arrive to bring her home.
"Your Royal Highness," Eleanor drops a curtsey to The Dowager Princess as, finally, she can leave the worst days of her life.
"Enough of your bile!" spits the Lady Mary before her mother can answer, or before little Beth can open her mouth to speak. "Away with you. Be gone from my presence, you traitorous moll. Oh, and Sir Thomas?" The gall she has, to not even acknowledge the new Earl's title, makes Eleanor gasp in surprise. "Let this be a warning to you and your family here and now: If you ever darken my life again, even if you are with my father, I will order the guards to fire the canons at you. Get out. And don't ever come back. Remember, Mistress Eleanor, a Tudor does not forget slights against them. Ever."
And that, Eleanor knows, as Lady Mary orders the servants inside and drags her mother and sister away without even a curtsey to Eleanor's parents, now an Earl and Countess, is the end of that.
The servants, far from gently, load up their luggage into the carriage her parents have arrived with and Eleanor climbs in, the last to do so. She turns and looks up to the windows of Durham House.
There, face full of fury, hatred radiating from every bone, is the Lady Mary, glaring at her.
"Oh, Anne, what have you done?" wonders Eleanor. "At least you are dead and do not have to suffer this."
Katherine, having now lost everything, watches the carriage trail away. "How has it come to this?" she thinks sadly, watching Mary stalk away from the window as the carriage vanishes from sight. "How has everything gone so wrong? It was not always this way."
Book The First: Katherine of Aragon - The Pomegranate Queen
Chapter I: June 1528
Durham House,
London,
June 1528
"Durham House," Edmund thinks, as he reins his sorrel hunter back in the courtyard, having covered the short distance between it and Richmond at an easy canter. "In some ways it’s fitting that Katherine should have retreated here, to the home of her widowhood. After all, a widow is what she is now."London,
June 1528
Swinging himself from the saddle, he strides up to his sister’s solar, nodding abruptly to Maria de Salinas as he passes her.
There is a blackness in his face that makes the guards jump to attention and they throw the doors open without a word.
Katherine is sitting by the window, little Beth at her feet. The almost-ten-year-old’s coppery hair is loose and Katherine is playing with it idly as she listens to twelve-year-old Mary play a Welsh ballad on the lute.
It is a pretty scene, and for a moment, Edmund is loath to disturb it, but then he hardens his heart. Katherine is not his Queen. Mary and Beth are not his Princesses. They are no more than his brother’s natural daughters, daughters born to a bare-faced liar.
"My Lady," he bows crisply, shallowly.
A shadow crosses Katherine’s face as she notes his lack of respect for her rank, but she has no time to say anything before Beth looks up, her narrow face lighting up with joy.
"Uncle Edmund!"
She springs to her feet. As she flies towards him, Edmund can’t help but embrace her. She’s always been the more vivacious of the Tudor sisters, and bastard or not, she reminds him of her aunt Mary when they were children.
"Could you and Mary give me some time with your mother, please, Beth?" he asks a moment later, putting the young girl away from him gently. "I’ve got some very important news from Court to tell her."
Beth nods at once – he’s always been her favourite uncle – but Mary, graver and more aware of her supposed position as Henry’s heiress, hesitates. She looks to her mother, and it is only when Katherine gives an encouraging nod that she lets her younger sister pull her from the room.
The moment the door closes behind the girls, Katherine whirls on Edmund.
"Is that any way to greet your Queen, Lord Somerset?!"
The colour is high in her cheeks, her accent thick. His deliberate omission of the respect due to her as Queen has clearly struck a nerve. Edmund laughs scornfully.
"How proud you still are, My Lady Dowager!"
Katherine’s jaw drops. How dare Edmund – a man young enough to be her son, a boy she has never liked, but has loved for Henry’s sake - denigrate her so?
Edmund sees her temper rising and cuts her off, unrolling a long scroll.
"Henry bade me bring you this. It is the Pope’s ruling on Your Majesties’ marriage. Written on the 30th day of April of this year, anno domini 1528, it declares that your marriage to His Grace, Henry, King of England and France and Lord of Ireland is null and void."
"Pope Clement would never -" Katherine begins, flabbergasted, but Edmund, frustrated beyond all measure at his older sister’s continued obstinance, simply talks over her.
"Oh, but he has, Katherine. What’s more, His Holiness has refused to grant your daughters’ legitimacy. He said that, when you married my brother Arthur at sixteen, Your Highness should have been old enough to know what constituted legal consummation and that for you to claim ignorance of the fact that you and Arthur had known each other carnally was a barefaced lie. His Holiness has also voided the dispensation granted by Pope Julius in 1503 that allowed you to marry Henry even if you had consummated your marriage to Arthur, on the grounds that it was drawn up under undue political pressure from your parents and mine and is therefore invalid."
Edmund pauses for breath, satisfied to see the colour draining from Katherine’s face. His sister has always been far too proud for her own good. Christ, are those tears shining in her eyes? He takes a savage pleasure in the thought.
Rolling up the larger scroll, he lays it on the table beside Katherine with the seal facing upwards so that she cannot dispute the validity of the ruling, and draws another from the leather pouch he wears at his waist.
"My brother is not a vindictive man, Princess. He has no wish to see you destitute. To this end, therefore, His Majesty has decreed that Your Royal Highness shall have £600 per annum from the estates of the late Prince Arthur to keep yourself and your daughters, the Ladies Mary and Elizabeth, in the style to which you are entitled as Dowager Princess of Wales. He is also granting you Hunsdon House for your own use, so that your daughters may receive a stable upbringing until it is time for them to wed. He bade me convey you a promise, made on his immortal soul – that his natural daughters will wed good honest Englishmen in keeping with their rank."
"Knights! Barons! My daughters should have Princes!" Katherine snarls. Edmund scoffs.
"And so they would have done if you had only gone back to Spain when Arthur died. You could have been Queen of France or Duchess of Savoy, with not a doubt in anyone’s minds as to the validity of your match. But no. You had to have Henry. You had to have Henry and grudge who grudge."
Suddenly exhausted, Edmund turns on his heel and strides for the door. At the threshold, he pauses, though he doesn’t turn back to look at Katherine.
"You brought this upon yourself, Katherine. You must have known your lie couldn’t last forever, and yet you perpetuated it all through the last quarter-century. Well, now you must live with the consequences of your actions. I wish you joy of telling your daughters."
With that, he steps across the threshold and lets the guards swing the doors shut behind him.
In the instant before the heavy doors close entirely, Katherine’s self-control deserts her. A guttural howl escapes her, her anguished rage echoing through Durham House for all to hear.
*~*~*~*~*
In the silence that follow the departure of the Duke of Somerset, Eleanor wonders how long it will be before the now Dowager Princess of Wales tells her daughters of their change in status.
She gets her answer exactly one hour and twenty two minutes later - she actually counts the clock as the minutes tick by.
The former Princess Mary emerges from her chambers, a whirl of green and red, hair and dress mingling as she moves.
"My Lady?"
She shouldn't speak - oh, she really shouldn't, given that it is her sister the King chose to divorce the former Queen for - but she cannot help it.
The crack that shakes her head violently rings out around Durham House as the former Princess's hand smashes around her face with a sickening crunch and her gable hood, protocol in the former Queen's household, falls to the floor. "Dear God," thinks Eleanor, seeing Lady Mary's face as the fury dances behind her blue eyes. "She's not crying: she's a Tudor true".
"Get out!"
Mary doesn't say it so much as spit it, fury dancing through her words.
"My Lady?"
"OUT!"
Mary roars the word into Eleanor's face as fury runs wild and she hurls a paperweight that makes the walls clunk as it barely misses Eleanor's head. "I have no desire to see you or your ilk again. Write to your father, to the commoner that sired you, and tell him you have been dismissed - now and forevermore - from my presence. And then get out."
Eleanor flees.
The week that follows, the agonising days that she has to wait for her mother and father to come and retrieve her, is Hell on Earth. Lady Mary upturns a chamber pot over her head, trips her when she's carrying trays, forbids her from using the privy causing her to wet herself several times and then refuses to let her change her dresses, makes her cry six times and draws blood when she slaps her around the face again, as if she takes some perverse glee out of making her life as terrible as she can.
Finally, finally, she's had enough - "What did I do to you, My Lady?" she asks after five days of punishment at the Lady Mary's hands.
"If your concubine of a sister had not come along, then my father would still be married to my mother and Elizabeth and I would still be Princesses. Ironic, isn't it? Two of you three Boleyn girls turned out to be whores - one in France, the other here in England! One wonders if you'll be the same?"
"My Lady, I-"
"-I think you will. Now get out of my presence before I upturn that tray over your head and beat you with it."
The threat - nay, Eleanor realises, the promise - lingers. None of Katherine's ladies help - they're either Spanish or loyal to the Dowager Princess or scared of defying the King's daughter, bastard though she may be - and so she suffers on until, at last, at long last, her mother and father arrive to bring her home.
"Your Royal Highness," Eleanor drops a curtsey to The Dowager Princess as, finally, she can leave the worst days of her life.
"Enough of your bile!" spits the Lady Mary before her mother can answer, or before little Beth can open her mouth to speak. "Away with you. Be gone from my presence, you traitorous moll. Oh, and Sir Thomas?" The gall she has, to not even acknowledge the new Earl's title, makes Eleanor gasp in surprise. "Let this be a warning to you and your family here and now: If you ever darken my life again, even if you are with my father, I will order the guards to fire the canons at you. Get out. And don't ever come back. Remember, Mistress Eleanor, a Tudor does not forget slights against them. Ever."
And that, Eleanor knows, as Lady Mary orders the servants inside and drags her mother and sister away without even a curtsey to Eleanor's parents, now an Earl and Countess, is the end of that.
The servants, far from gently, load up their luggage into the carriage her parents have arrived with and Eleanor climbs in, the last to do so. She turns and looks up to the windows of Durham House.
There, face full of fury, hatred radiating from every bone, is the Lady Mary, glaring at her.
"Oh, Anne, what have you done?" wonders Eleanor. "At least you are dead and do not have to suffer this."
Katherine, having now lost everything, watches the carriage trail away. "How has it come to this?" she thinks sadly, watching Mary stalk away from the window as the carriage vanishes from sight. "How has everything gone so wrong? It was not always this way."
Last edited:
