Joanna Hickson - The Tudor Bride

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014

Copyright © Joanna Hickson 2014

Cover photographs © Richard Jenkins (main image); Shutterstock.com(patterns). Cover lettering © Stephen Raw

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2013

Joanna Hickson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007446995

Ebook Edition © January 2014 ISBN: 9780007564637

Version: 2017-07-12

For Katie and young Hugo

who are my Catherine and young King Henry.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Family Trees

Map

Narrator’s Note

Part One: Queen of England (1421–1422)

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Part Two: The Secret Years (1427–1435)

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Part Three: Journey into Jeopardy (1435–1437)

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Author’s Note: Fact and Fiction

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

Respected Reader,

My name is Guillaumette, known to my friends as Mette. Some of you may already know that and yes, I am French but I write this at my house in London, where I live very quietly now. You will understand that the French are not much liked in England today, so I think it best to speak and write in English.

It is not my own story I write; this is the story of my mistress, Catherine de Valois, youngest daughter of the French king Charles the Sixth, whom I suckled as a baby, nursed as a child and tried to console through the troubled years of her girlhood, during which she was offered by various of her male relatives to the invading enemy, King Henry the Fifth of England, as his bride. This she eventually became, not entirely without her consent, in June 1420. By the end of that year, as a result of his extraordinary military success, an alliance with the Duke of Burgundy and a very favourable (to him) peace treaty, King Henry and his new bride were able to enter Paris in triumph, he as the new Regent and Heir of France and she as his queen. Afterwards they sailed for England as a golden royal couple, ready to be féted and celebrated, not least at Catherine’s coronation in London. And I sailed with them.

Since France lay devastated by years of constant warfare, you may think it was a relief for me to follow in the new queen’s train, but I left France with a heavy heart. I had always been close to my daughter Alys, who with her husband and baby girl lived in Paris, which was now under English rule. My son Luc, meanwhile, had sworn his allegiance to Catherine’s seventeen-year-old brother Charles, the former Dauphin, who had been disinherited and declared illegitimate by his sister’s marriage treaty and forced to retreat to his loyal territories south of the Loire. Charles would have to fight the combined armies of England and Burgundy if he was to win back his name and his claim to the French throne. Catherine and the Dauphin’s father, King Charles, was subject to devilish fits and often confined to a padded room, believing he was made of glass and terrified of being shattered; a living metaphor for the shattered state of his kingdom and, I fear, the splintered state of my family. Regrettably we were typical of French people at the time, the divided victims of violence and political upheaval. I did not depart with a light heart.

Nevertheless, when we embarked at Calais, part of me was glad to be leaving the chaos behind but, I realise now, twenty years later, how little notion I had of what we were sailing into. Catherine had no choice, she was by law the Queen of England, whether the English liked her or not; but for me it was different. I followed her out of loyalty and love, but there were times later, I assure you, when I wondered whether I had done the right thing in boarding that ship …

The grey-green sea looked hungry as it lapped and chewed on the English shore, voracious, like the monsters mapmakers paint at the edge of the world. With her sails flapping, the Trinity Royal idled nose to the wind under the walls of Dover Castle, a vast stronghold sprawled atop high chalk cliffs which gleamed in the flat winter sunlight. Visible against this great white wall were the flags and banners of an official welcoming party and a large crowd of onlookers gathered along the beach. Unfamiliar music from an unseen band drifted past us on a dying breeze.

Having almost completed my first sea voyage, I could not say that I was an enthusiastic sailor. I felt salt-stained and wind-blown, my only consolation being that the sea-swell which had plagued my stomach all the way from France had now eased and the ship’s movement had dwindled to a gentle rocking motion. Queen Catherine, by contrast, looked radiant and unruffled after the crossing, even when faced with the prospect of being carried ashore in a chair by a bunch of braggart barons, bizarrely known as the Wardens of the Cinq Ports; bizarrely because there were seven towns involved, not five as the title suggested, and some of them were not even ports. Apparently this chair-lift was an English tradition, but personally I considered it barbaric that a king and queen should be expected to risk their lives being carried shoulder high over treacherous waters to a stony beach when they could have made a dignified arrival walking down a gangway onto the Dover dockside. Besides, as Keeper of the Queen’s Robes, I, Guillaumette Lanière, was the one who would have to restore the costly fur and fabric of the queen’s garments from the ravages of sand and salt-water.

King Henry discussed this singular English honour with his brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, when the duke boarded the Trinity Royal from his galley, half a league off the white cliffs. That his grace of Gloucester thought himself a fine fellow was amply evident in the swashbuckling way he climbed the rope-ladder, vaulted the ship’s rail one-handed and sprang up the stair to the aftcastle deck, where the king and Queen Catherine stood waiting. Gloucester sported thigh-high polished leather boots and his short green doublet clung tightly to his muscular physique, admirably displaying the heavy gold collar and trencher-sized medallion of office which hung around his broad shoulders. His bend of the knee was practised and perfect, accompanied by a flourish of his right hand as he grasped his brother’s with the left.