Henry's Golden Queen: (Catherine of Aragon) (Tudor Tales Book 1) by Lozania Prole

Author:Lozania Prole [Prole, Lozania]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: King Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Catherine of Aragon, British Royal Family, Royal History, royal marriages, hampton court
Publisher: Wyndham Books (Tudor Historical)
Published: 2022-12-05T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

The Bright Star Wanes

Henry did not visit his wife for many moons. He frolicked more with the maids, and he paid them compliments and attentions. The city chatted of the new love, one of the Boleyn girls, and as fast a little hussy as ever fastened a kerchief over her hair. A brazen girl, and proud of the fact that she could steal a King from a Queen. The poor Queen! they said, full of sympathy for her. The poor gallant Queen, who did not reproach him however hard she felt about all this.

Not a word did she say.

She confessed to her friar, and she behaved with cold cool calm. Her happiest moments were when she played with her young daughter, or talked to Margaretta. Somehow she had contrived to obliterate the fact that Margaretta had once been Henry’s love. She had chosen to erase the thought of it from her memory, deliberately shutting it out. There were things in life one must forget, and God had sent her handmaid back to her. Somehow the bond between them had become even stronger; now she knew it would last for their entire lives.

‘You will never leave me?’ she said one day when the horror that she might be deserted came to her.

‘Never, I vow.’

Between them they cared for the young Princess.

Even her mother had to admit that the Princess Mary was a difficult girl. She had never outstripped the plainness and with the pock marks it had become almost a disfiguration. She was small made, with hard eyes, and pale lashes and brows, but her hair had stayed dark. There was no relationship between that hair and her father’s red gold, nor her mother’s paler gold. She had an ugly mouth, one courtier had said that she was ‘the princess born with a scowl’ and indeed she always gave the impression that she was angry.

She was a delicate maid.

When she recovered from the pox, she suffered severe headaches. Today they would have been diagnosed as migraine, recurring almost every week, with sickness, with acute pain and hours spent on her back trying to face the attack. Twice she had contracted a severe form of jaundice, so that all colour had left her face for ever, and she was yellow as a guinea piece, and pock-marked like some sour old pin cushion from which the pins have long been plucked and flung aside.

She was a girl who suffered badly, but who was destined to walk with pain throughout her life and suffered for this. She had always been intolerant of the hard father whom she knew upset the mother on whom she doted, and whom she said ‒ with truth ‒ that she could never trust. She had turned away from court life, and the torn lives of her parents, to her religious faith in the hope that this would restore her and make her happy. She spent hours on her knees in prayer, and greater time with her father confessor.

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