The Spanish Queen by Carolly Erickson

Author:Carolly Erickson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

11

“The eighth wonder of the world! That’s what it is.”

“There’s never been another tourney to match it. And never will be again!”

“They say it is costing eight thousand ducats a day, and more, to pay all those men.”

“The king swears he won’t cut his beard until the day the tourney begins.”

In windswept Picardy, on a plain called the Golden Valley, a wonderment was indeed in the making. Day after day, hundreds of carpenters and joiners, plasterers and bricklayers worked in wearisome shifts to build the king’s imposing palace and rig the tents, paint the walls and hang the tapestries to adorn them. Our court was always full of mutterings and predictions, but that spring the talk was louder than ever and the expectations high indeed.

While we watched, from our hastily erected tents, a splendid gatehouse took form, turrets and battlements arose, choristers were heard singing in the palace chapel and the smells of spices and roasting flesh and freshly baked loaves began to reach us from the kitchens and bakehouse. Stables were built, horses exercised and groomed, and raised stands, sheltered from the sun and wind, constructed for the crowds expected to watch the jousters as they couched their lances and lowered their visors and thundered down the lists.

As my nephew Charles had predicted, Cardinal Wolsey ordered all, with the sergeant painter and the chief designer of pageants—an impatient Italian—as his deputies. The cardinal let it be known that the workmen must build the entire tourneying site in twenty-two days, whatever delays might arise from storms or plagues or quarreling between the English and French craftsmen. Unless this deadline was met, no one would be paid.

For twenty days and more the hammering, sawing and pounding continued, amid shouts of encouragement and threats from those in charge. Then, on the twenty-third day, we awoke to find that the noise had stopped. All the structures appeared to be complete, each one decorated with carved ornaments and painted blazons and pennons waving in the Tudor colors of green and white.

A large winged statue of Cupid symbolized the enduring love between the English and French. Not far away a statue of fat, smiling Bacchus symbolized enduring drunkenness—and offered conduits of free-flowing red and white wine below the inscription “Let all who will, make good cheer.”

Cheer indeed there was—and not a few jibes. For the hastily erected palace was quickly given the name “Palace of Illusion” by those who mocked its flimsy construction, the walls painted to look as though they were made of bricks, the timbers too weak and insubstantial to withstand even the mildest of winter winds. Some of the Flemish artisans were overheard to mutter that the amity between England and France was also illusory, for had King Henry not ordered his builders to construct a secret passageway through which he could escape should the French attack while the tournament was under way?

Escape seemed the farthest thing from my husband’s mind as he rose each morning before dawn to hunt, returning in

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