Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain by Margaret Irwin

Author:Margaret Irwin [Margaret Irwin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780749012670
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2013-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

Now at last his path lay clear ahead of him. It led back home, to his own country. His roots lay in that soil, like those of the great oaks that he had climbed as a schoolboy in the playground of the Carthusians’ monastery, now dispersed, destroyed.

Many beloved things had been uprooted in that soil. His duty now was to plant them again.

The new Queen wrote urging him to it; she shared his sense of divine purpose in bringing both of them to power in their own country. They might indeed share even more. Their friends had long wished for their marriage; he had shunned the thought of it in his dislike of ambition; but now even his ‘immodest modesty’ had to admit that he was respected throughout Europe and that none would make that charge against him. He resolved ‘not to retire from the busy scenes of life,’ nor ‘make more account of myself than of the public.’ He might well serve the public best by marrying his cousin and Queen, and so keep England balanced between France, Spain and the Papacy. Still more might he serve God best by it. He had not even yet taken the priests’ vows of chastity; was it because God had reserved him for the more onerous duty of the vow matrimonial?

Elderly and timid, he shrank from it, but Mary too was middle aged, modest and virginal. They would understand each other, and could work together. He remembered her as a delicate, pretty little creature, simple hearted and kind, a loyal and admiring friend to himself, and deeply attached to his mother, whose dearest wish had been that they should marry. In carrying this out he hoped to make himself believe that he would expiate the doom he had brought upon his mother.

But when at last he met Mary again she was the wife of Philip of Spain.

Pole had done his best to prevent it. He knew Englishmen well enough, even after twenty years abroad, to tell the Pope that a Spaniard as King-Consort would be ‘universally odious’ to them.

The Pope had replied that ‘one could not swim against the stream’ – not when the stream was directed by the Emperor.

For sixteen months Pole had struggled to swim against it, before at last the Royal Barge rowed him up the Thames – to take up a position of truncated power, a work deprived of half its value. He had to restore England to the Church without England making any restitution to the Church. His own enforced compromise embittered him as no enemy had done. Bitterness brings weakness. He was the less a man.

The first English winter he had suffered for so many years, at a time when he was far older and colder in blood and the less able to resist it, put him at his lowest ebb physically as well as spiritually. Coughing and sneezing his aching way through the riverside mist and rain at Lambeth, he came face to face with the task most alien to him.

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