The Favored Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII's Third Wife - Softcover

Erickson, Carolly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250007194 ISBN 13: 9781250007193

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2012

Synopsis

From The New York Times bestselling author of The Last Wife of Henry VIII comes a powerful and moving novel about Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII, who married him only days after the execution of Anne Boleyn and ultimately lost her own life in giving him the son he badly needed to guarantee the Tudor succession

Born into an ambitious noble family, young Jane Seymour is sent to Court as a Maid of Honor to Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII's aging queen. She is devoted to her mistress and watches with empathy as the calculating Anne Boleyn contrives to supplant her as queen. Anne's single-minded intriguing threatens all who stand in her way; she does not hesitate to arrange the murder of a woman who knows a secret so dark that, if revealed, would make it impossible for the king to marry Anne.

Once Anne becomes queen, no one at court is safe, and Jane herself becomes the object of Anne's venomous rage when she suspects Jane has become the object of the king's lust. Henry, fearing that Anne's inability to give him a son is a sign of divine wrath, asks Jane to become his next queen. Deeply reluctant to embark on such a dangerous course, Jane must choose between her heart and her loyalty to the king.

Acclaimed biographer and bestselling novelist Carolly Erickson weaves another of her irresistible historical entertainments about the queen who finally gave Henry VIII his longed for heir, set against the excitement and danger of the Tudor Court.

About this title

About the Author:

Distinguished historian Carolly Erickson is the author of more than two dozen works of fiction (Rival to the Queen, The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette) and nonfiction (The First Elizabeth, Royal Panoply: Brief Lives of the English Monarchs). Her novel The Tsarina’s Daughter won the Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Award for Best Historical Fiction. She lives in Hawaii.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

THE FAVORED QUEEN (Chapter One)

“Has she lost her baby?”

My question hung in the air, unanswered.

The three Spanish midwives, brought from Legrogno especially to attend Queen Catherine at this, her tenth delivery, did not meet my steady gaze but looked down at the thick carpet at their feet. The queen’s closest friend and principal lady in waiting, Maria de Salinas, her expression somber and her shoulders rounded in defeat, stood loyally beside her mistress’s bed but said nothing. The surgeons who had been summoned by King Henry to attend the queen were nowhere to be seen.

Queen Catherine lay asleep in her high carved wooden bed, mouth agape, her sparse greying auburn hair spread out over her lace-trimmed pillow, the pillow sweat-stained and rumpled as were the bedclothes. Her face was haggard, weary. As those of us who served her knew well, she had been struggling to give birth ever since the previous evening, and it was clear to me now, as I looked down at her, that the effort had taken all her strength. She looked like a woman nearer in age to sixty than forty, though her fortieth birthday had been celebrated by her entire household not long before.

As I watched, she began to murmur in her sleep, as if troubled by disturbing dreams. Her small white wrinkled hands, the fingers bent and swollen, clutched convulsively at the satin counterpane.

I glanced around the darkened bedchamber, taking in the closely drawn thick curtains of purple damask, the heavy, old-fashioned furnishings the queen had brought from Spain many years earlier when she came to the English court as a bride, the religious pictures and crucifixes on the paneled walls, the elaborately embroidered prie-dieu, embroidered by the queen herself, where I had so often seen her kneeling in prayer, the implements of torture (as I thought of them) used by the midwives and laid out on a table beside the bed. Knives, probes, metal clamps and pincers. Bowls and towels, powders and flasks full of medicines. Cruel tongs used, I knew, to reach in and grasp a resistant infant trapped inside a diseased womb. I shuddered at the sight of them, and looked away.

Another sight also made me shudder. A plain wooden chest stood against one wall of the room, its lid not quite closed. Protruding from one corner was a bloody cloth. A sheet, I thought. Hearing me approach, the midwives must have tucked the bloodstained sheets hastily into the chest, and left one corner out.

The pungent odor of lavender filled the room. Lavender, given to women after childbirth to induce a restful calm and sleep. And there was another odor as well. The sharp, unpleasant odor of opium. I had smelled it often, for my father’s physician prescribed it for him to ease the pains of his gout.

So the queen had been given opium to assuage her labor and to induce the sweat trance believed to lessen the fever that carried off so many women after giving birth. Opium, that helped the mother but often (so I had heard it said) cost the child’s life.

I was still waiting for an answer to my question. There had been a delivery, of that I was certain. But what of the child? We had not heard the cry of the newborn, the joyous shouts of welcome and triumph from the midwives and physicians when the newborn was a boy.

All was quiet in the room, except for the sound of the queen’s ragged breathing. Then I heard a stifled sob. One of the midwives had tears rolling down her olive-tinted cheeks.

“Will no one tell me plainly?” I demanded. “Has she lost her baby?”

After a pause, Maria de Salinas looked at me and gave the slightest nod.

“He lived for an hour,” she said. “Only an hour. He was baptized.” At these words Maria and the other women crossed themselves. “We prayed,” Maria went on. “But it was the Lord’s will to take him.”

My heart sank. Once more, I thought. Once more, to hope month after long month for a living child, and then to be so cruelly disappointed. I could only imagine the queen’s deep sorrow and dismay.

“Has the king been informed?”

“No, Mistress Seymour,” Maria answered in her heavily accented English. “It was the queen’s wish that he not be informed for a little while yet.”

But I had my orders. King Henry had insisted before leaving for the hunt that should the queen’s child be born while he was away, a messenger would be sent to him at once. It was my responsibility to follow the royal order.

I left the bedchamber and sought out Queen Catherine’s gentleman usher Griffith Richards, giving him the sad news and instructing him to send word to the king.

“I will go myself, Mistress Seymour,” he said. “I know where the huntsmen are today.”

“Ride slowly then,” I said softly. “The queen is in no hurry to let her husband know what has happened.”

He sighed and nodded. “Yet again,” he said. “Yet again.” He turned and left the room, and I noticed that he did not make haste.

*   *   *

Several hours later Maria de Salinas came to me.

“Mistress Seymour, Her Highness is asking for you.”

I followed her at once into the royal bedchamber where Queen Catherine, out of bed and dressed in a becoming, loose-fitting gown of fine magenta wool trimmed in miniver, was seated before her pier glass.

“Ah, Jane,” she said as I entered, “gentle, kind Jane. Soothe me. Brush out my hair.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

I took the soft brush from the dressing table and began to gently run it through the thin strands. I saw the queen’s eyes close in pleasure as I did so.

“I must not let the king see me in my tired state. I must try to be pleasant to look at when he comes, when I greet him. After all, he will be tired from his hunt, and in need of refreshment and rest. He will not be in a mood to hear bad news about our child.”

“May the Lord bless the little one and take him to His bosom,” I said.

“Amen,” was the queen’s soft reply. Her thin lips were curved into a wan smile.

“Another small shrine to be added,” she remarked, indicating a cabinet above the prie-dieu where were kept eight miniature portraits, one for each of the children she had lost. Above each portrait was a silver crucifix, below each a tablet with the name of the baby. “We had planned to name this one Edward—or Isabel, had she been a girl. After my sainted mother.”

Her voice, normally low and pleasant, trembled slightly and she was speaking so softly that it was hard for me to hear her. I felt as though I were listening to someone in a trance. I thought of the opium, the sweat trance ... was the queen still under the influence of the strong medicine? She did not seem like herself. Though she often honored me with her confidences, the way she was talking to me now was more open and free than in the past. Almost as if I were her confessor, Fray Diego, and not her maid of honor, Jane Seymour.

She went on talking, as I brushed the long thin strands of hair and gathered them into my hand. I could not help but notice that the brush was filling with hair; there were thin patches where the queen’s scalp all but shone through. What did it mean, that her hair was falling out?

I looked into the pier glass and saw a slight frown pass across her features. “I was so certain that this time ... this time ... the Lord would give me a strong boy. I made a pilgrimage to Our Lady at her shrine at Walsingham. Afterwards I felt so certain that she would grant my wish.”

I knew well that the queen had made a pilgrimage to the shrine, for I had gone with her. Had she forgotten? Had the opium made her forgetful?

“Perhaps she will, Your Majesty. Next time,” I said.

She shook her head. “No. I cannot go through such a terrible labor again. No, this was the last time.” She made a small sound. I realized that she was laughing quietly to herself.

“My old duenna, Dona Elvira, used to tell me when I was a little girl that I never knew when to give up. I kept on doing the same thing over and over, she said, even though I never got the result I wanted. I guess she was right.”

“Your Majesty has been granted a beautiful, intelligent daughter, Princess Mary. Your jewel and delight, as you always say.”

“Yes. But she is not a prince. And England needs a prince.”

I had nothing to say to that, so was silent. Everyone knew the situation, the problem—many called it a crisis—over the succession. King Henry needed a son to inherit his throne. But he had only a daughter, only Princess Mary, who had been given the title Princess of Wales, the title traditionally given to the officially designated heir, but who could not be expected to reign. No woman could govern the unruly English, that was evident to all. The chronicles told of a queen in the distant past, Queen Maud, who attempted to rule but was overthrown. No woman had tried since. Better the throne should pass to the king’s natural son, the boy known as Henry Fitzroy. But should he be the one to inherit, there would be challenges to his rulership. There would be chaos, possibly civil war, as in the time of King Henry’s grandfather.

So the king’s loyal subjects prayed that the queen, despite her many failures in the past, would at last give birth to a healthy boy. But those prayers—including my own—had gone unanswered.

Presently I said, “Shall I bind Your Majesty’s hair?”

“Yes, Jane. And put on my hood, the cheerful rose-colored one with the pearls.”

“That one is very becoming.”

“It brings a little color to these pale cheeks. ...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1250007194
• ISBN 13: 9781250007193
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320