• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 918 0

of his most confidential councillors that he would no longer remain in the trouble, fear and suspense he had so long endured on account of the Queen and Princess” and that they “should see, at the coming Parliament, to get him released therefrom, swearing most obstinately that he would wait no longer.”20 All talk was of imminent martyrdom. Weeks later the imperial agent Dr. Pedro Ortiz wrote of the likelihood that Katherine and the princess would be “sentenced to martyrdom which she [Katherine] was ready to receive in testimony of the Holy Faith, as the Cardinal of Rochester and other holy martyrs have done.”21 Mary would, Chapuys feared, be made an example of, “to show that no one ought to disobey the laws” and that Henry meant to fulfill what “had been foretold of him; that is, that at the beginning of his reign he would be as gentle as a lamb, and at the end, worse than a lion.”22

CHAPTER 16

SUSPICION OF POISON

My most dear lord, King and husband,

The hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I owe you forceth me, my case being such, to commend myself to you, and to put you in remembrance with a few words of the health and safeguard of your soul, which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and pampering of your own body, for the which you have cast me into many calamities and yourself into many troubles. For my part, I pardon you everything, and I wish to devoutly pray God that He will also pardon you.

For the rest, I commend unto you our daughter Mary, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired…. I forgive you myself, and I pray God to forgive you…. I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.1

AT TWO IN THE AFTERNOON OF FRIDAY, JANUARY 7, 1536, KATHERINE of Aragon died in her chamber at Kimbolton Castle. She was fifty years old. She had suffered with “pain in her stomach” for several months and had begged Henry to allow Mary to visit her.2 Yet mother and daughter, separated for four years, were not to be granted the solace of a final meeting.

But Eustace Chapuys was given permission to visit. He arrived at Kimbolton on Sunday, the second, seeking to console Katherine as she prepared to die and to assure her, albeit falsely, that “the King was sorry for her illness.”3 For several hours each day he sat with Katherine, and they talked of the events of the previous years. Katherine thanked the ambassador for his good services and expressed regret as to “her misfortune and that of the princess,” and for the “delay of remedy by which all good men had suffered.” Chapuys reassured her that the mounting tide of heresy had not arisen because of her defiance, as she feared, but that God sent such trials “for the exaltation of the good and the confusion of the wicked.” In response to the ambassador’s words, “she showed herself very glad, for she had previously had some scruple of conscience because the heresies had arisen from her affair.” Her nephew “could not have done better,” given the “great affairs which had hindered him,” and she declared it was “not without its advantages as the Pope now upon the death of the Cardinal of Rochester and other disorders, intended to seek a remedy in the name of the Holy See.”4

The visit of the ambassador comforted Katherine, and for a while after she rallied a little. She managed to sleep; “her stomach retained her food” and, “without any help, [she] combed and tied her hair, and dressed her head”; but then her health deteriorated once more.5 At dawn on Friday the seventh, she heard Mass, dictated her final letters to Charles and Henry, and prayed “that God would pardon the King her husband for the wrong that he had done her.”6 Having received Extreme Unction, she spent her last hours in calm reflection. By the early afternoon she was dead.

Later that day Sir Edmund Bedingfield, Katherine’s steward, wrote to Cromwell, informing him of her death and detailing the arrangements that were to be made for the preparation of her body: “the groom of the chandlery here can cere [disembowel and embalm]