“Cheat!” With a snarl, the prince stalked off. Harry trailed after him, shoulders slumped.
WHEN I WAS eleven, a fifteen-year-old Spanish princess named Catherine of Aragon arrived in England and married Prince Arthur. She was greeted with elaborate processions and festivities. I had to laugh at my first sight of the Spanish ladies. They rode on mule chairs instead of saddles, two to each mule, back-to-back. The arrangement made them look as if they had quarreled and were refusing to speak to each other.
A little more than two months after that, the Lady Margaret was betrothed to King James of Scotland and married to him by proxy at Richmond Palace. She was twelve. There was a tournament to celebrate, the first I was allowed to attend. My uncle was one of the competitors. Although he lived at court and was master of the king’s falcons, I rarely saw him after my mother’s death. If he noticed me in the crowd of spectators, he did not give any sign of it.
In April of that year, tragedy struck. Prince Arthur died. Prince Henry, who had been intended for the church, became the new Prince of Wales and heir to the throne. He went to live at court, taking all his household with him—Harry Guildford and Will Compton and Ned Neville and the younger boys, like little Nick Carew, who had come to Eltham well after I’d arrived there.
We were reunited at Westminster toward the end of that summer, and to entertain us King Henry paraded his collection of curiosities. He kept a giant woman from Flanders and a wee Scotsman, a dwarf. There was a man who ate sea coal—a very strange sight! But the oddest curiosities of all were the newest additions. Certain men of Bristol who had sailed to the New World that lies across the Western Sea had brought back three natives of that distant land and given them to King Henry as a gift.
The sight of these savages both frightened and fascinated me. They wore the skins of beasts as clothing and ate raw flesh. No one was able to understand their speech.
“You must keep them locked up, Father,” Princess Mary told the king. “Otherwise they might eat us.”
“They are not cannibals, Mary, and we mean to civilize them. I have assigned them a keeper. He will look after them, just as keepers watch over the more simpleminded of our royal fools.”
Distracted by this idea, she frowned. “Goose does not have a keeper.”
“Goose is not simple, so he does not need one,” King Henry said with an indulgent chuckle. “He is the other kind of fool—the sort who has a wit sharp enough to cut and the cleverness not to use it to slice into the wrong person.”
QUEEN ELIZABETH DIED shortly after I turned thirteen. She’d just given birth to another child, a daughter, but the baby also died. The loss of his wife affected King Henry VII even more than the death of his eldest son. I think he truly loved her.
A few weeks after the queen’s funeral, the king came to Eltham. He dismissed the Lady Margaret’s other attendants but bade me remain. Then he seemed to collapse onto a window seat. He indicated some cushions on the floor in front of it with a listless gesture, inviting his daughter to sit. I remained standing.
The king was a pitiful sight. Hair that had once been reddish brown had gone gray and was uncombed. His pale coloring had gone sallow, and the skin around his jowls sagged, as if he’d lost all interest in food or had forgotten to eat. He was almost fifty years old, but he had never looked it before. Now he seemed to have aged a decade in a single month.
As if he felt my gaze upon him, he looked up, peering at me for a moment without recognition before he gathered himself and motioned for me to come closer. “Sit, Jane. This concerns you, too.”
“Your Grace?” Hesitantly, I settled myself on the cushion to the right of the Lady Margaret.
“My dear,” he said, turning to Princess Margaret. “You must set out for Scotland as we planned. You will leave from Richmond Palace in late June.”
Margaret frowned but did not argue. She had been married to King James IV more than a year earlier and plans for her departure had been well advanced before her mother’s death.
“Jane, Margaret asked that you go with her. I had intended to permit it, but no longer. I wish you to remain in England.”
We both stared at him. I had not known about the Lady Margaret’s request. Now I did not know what to say. Indeed, I hesitated to say anything at all.
“Jane must accompany me,” Margaret objected. “I cannot do without her.”
“You will have to,” her father said. “Your sister needs her more. Mary is eight years old, the same age Jane was when her mother died. If I could keep you here, Margaret, I would, but you needs must go to Scotland. In your place, Jane must stay.”
“In my place?” Margaret looked offended. “Jane is no princess!”
The king sighed and glanced again at me. A crafty look came into his pale eyes. “What say you, Jane? Do you wish to go to Scotland with Margaret or stay here with Mary?”
He could command that I stay, no matter what I said. I thought of Mary. I’d heard her crying for her mother in the night and my heart had gone out to her. I looked at Margaret—solid, sturdy Margaret who knew her own mind even at the tender age of thirteen. She did not need me…and Mary did.
“I will stay here,” I said.
“You will not regret your decision.” The king looked pleased.
After he left, the Lady Margaret stared at me with cold, unforgiving eyes. With a wrenching sense of loss, I knew our friendship was at an end.
“I always knew our father loved Mary best,” she said when I started to speak, “but I thought you would be loyal.”
“The king of Scots may not permit you to keep any of your household,” I reminded her. Although James IV had agreed to let her bring a goodly number of English men and women with her, she had been warned of the possibility that he would dismiss most of them after she arrived in Scotland.
“I am a princess of England,” Margaret declared. “I shall do as I like.”
After Margaret Tudor left England for Scotland, I tried not to think about her. My “sister,” as Will Compton would have it, had stopped speaking to me—in either English or French—well before her departure.
I devoted myself to the Lady Mary and was pleased when, over the course of the next two years, she began to turn to me for advice. I became her “dearest Jane,” but I never let myself forget how quickly that might change. When she asked for honesty, I gave her only as much as I thought she wanted to hear.
I CELEBRATED MY sixteenth birthday at Pleasure Palace in January of the twentieth year of the reign of King Henry the VII. By then I had lived in England for some seven and a half years and, while the Lady Mary feared thunderstorms, I had developed a liking for the wild weather that sometimes battered the English Isles at that time of year.
For three long days and nights in the middle of the month, a gale that had swept across the Narrow Seas and into the south of England raged unchecked. It uprooted trees and sheered tiles off rooftops. From the Lady Mary’s apartments, which looked out upon a garden with a fountain, an apple orchard, and part of the two-hundred-acre park her father had enclosed for hunting, I was able to watch branches waving madly but could see little else.
Curiosity finally drew me to the opposite side of the palace, to the passageway beneath the king’s apartments where we had once rolled hoops. There the windows overlooked the rapidly rising waters of the Thames. From that vantage point I had a clear view of a surface that had been frozen solid only a few days earlier. Now the river had overflowed its banks, flooding the lowest-lying areas. In awe, I watched stairs designed to give access to Greenwich Palace at any stage of the tide vanish beneath the roiling water.