The Constant Princess Read online

  “I am sure you are right,” she said. “But we must not forget our other enemies. The seas are one border, and we must dominate them with ships both great and small. But our other border must be made safe too.”

  “D’you mean the Scots? They have taken their warning from the Pope. I don’t expect to be troubled with them.”

  She smiled. She would never openly disagree with him. “Certainly,” she said. “The archbishop has secured us a breathing space. But next year, or the year after, we will have to go against the Scots.”

  SUMMER 1512

  Then there was nothing for Katherine to do but to wait. It seemed as if everyone was waiting. The English army were in Fuenterrabia, waiting for the Spanish to join with them for their invasion of southern France. The heat of the summer came on as they kicked their heels, ate badly, and drank like thirsty madmen. Katherine alone of Henry’s council knew that the heat of midsummer Spain could kill an army as they did nothing but wait for orders. She concealed her fears from Henry and from the council, but privately she wrote to her father asking what his plans were, she tackled his ambassador asking him what her father intended the English army to do, and when should they march?

  Her father, riding with his own army, on the move, did not reply; and the ambassador did not know.

  The summer wore on. Katherine did not write again. In a bitter moment, which she did not even acknowledge to herself, she saw that she was not her father’s ally on the chessboard of Europe—she realized that she was nothing more than a pawn in his plan. She did not need to ask her father’s strategy; once he had the English army in place and did not use them, she guessed it.

  It grew colder in England, but it was still hot in Spain. At last Ferdinand had a use for his allies, but when he sent for them, and ordered that they should spend the winter season on campaign, they refused to answer his call. They mutinied against their own commanders and demanded to go home.

  WINTER 1512

  It came as no surprise to Katherine, nor to the cynics on the council when the English army came home in dishonored tatters in December. Lord Dorset, despairing of ever receiving orders and reinforcements from King Ferdinand, confronted by mutinying troops—hungry, weary, and with two thousand men lost to illness—straggled home in disgrace, as he had taken them out in glory.

  “What can have gone wrong?” Henry rushed into Katherine’s rooms and waved away her ladies-in-waiting. He was almost in tears of rage at the shame of the defeat. He could not believe that his force that had gone out so bravely should come home in such disarray. He had letters from his father-in-law complaining of the behavior of the English allies. He had lost face in Spain, he had lost face with his enemy France. He fled to Katherine as the only person in the world who would share his shock and dismay. He was almost stammering with distress, it was the first time in his reign that anything had gone wrong and he had thought—like a boy—that nothing would ever go wrong for him.

  I take his hands. I have been waiting for this since the first moment in the summer when there was no battle plan for the English troops. As soon as they arrived and were not deployed I knew that we had been misled. Worse, I knew that we had been misled by my father.

  I am no fool. I know my father as a commander, and I know him as a man. When he did not fling the English into battle on the day that they arrived, I knew that he had another plan for them, and that plan was hidden from us. My father would never leave good men in camp to gossip and drink and get sick. I was on campaign with my father for most of my childhood. I never saw him let the men sit idle. He always keeps his men moving, he always keeps them in work and out of mischief. There is not a horse in my father’s stables with a pound of extra fat on it; he treats his soldiers just the same.

  If the English were left to rot in camp, it was because he had need of them just where they were—in camp. He did not care that they were getting sick and lazy. That made me look again at the map and I saw what he was doing. He was using them as a counterweight, as an inactive diversion. I read the reports from our commanders as they arrived—their complaints at their pointless inaction, their exercises on the border, sighting the French army and being seen by them, but not being ordered to engage—and I knew I was right. My father kept the English troops dancing on the spot in Fuenterrabia so that the French, alarmed by such a force on their flank, would place their army in defense. Guarding against the English they could not attack my father who, joyously alone and unencumbered, at the head of his troops, marched into the unprotected kingdom of Navarre and so picked up that which he had desired for so long at no expense or danger to himself.

  “My dear, your soldiers were not tried and found wanting,” I say to my distressed young husband. “There is no question as to the courage of the English. There can be no doubting you.”

  “He says…” He waves the letter at me.

  “It doesn’t matter what he says,” I say patiently. “You have to look at what he does.”

  The face he turns to me is so hurt that I cannot bring myself to tell him that my father has used him, played him for a fool, used his army, used even me, to win himself Navarre.

  “My father has taken his fee before his work, that is all,” I say robustly. “Now we have to make him do the work.”

  “What do you mean?” Henry is still puzzled.

  “God forgive me for saying it, but my father is a masterly double-dealer. If we are going to make treaties with him, we will have to learn to be as clever as him. He made a treaty with us and said he would be our partner in war against France, but all we have done is win him Navarre, by sending our army out and home again.”

  “They have been shamed. I have been shamed.”

  He cannot understand what I am trying to tell him. “Your army has done exactly what my father wanted them to do. In that sense, it has been a most successful campaign.”

  “They did nothing! He complains to me that they are good for nothing!”

  “They pinned down the French with that nothing. Think of that! The French have lost Navarre.”

  “I want to court-martial Dorset!”

  “Yes, we can do so, if you wish. But the main thing is that we still have our army, we have lost only two thousand men, and my father is our ally. He owes us for this year. Next year you can go back to France and this time Father will fight for us, not us for him.”

  “He says he will conquer Guienne for me; he says it as if I cannot do it myself! He speaks to me as a weakling with a useless force!”

  “Good,” I say, surprising him. “Let him conquer Guienne for us.”

  “He wants us to pay him.”

  “Let us pay for it. What does it matter as long as my father is on our side when we go to war with the French? If he wins Guienne for us, then that is to our good; if he does not, but just distracts the French when we invade in the north from Calais, then that is all to the good as well.”

  For a moment he gapes at me, his head spinning. Then he sees what I mean. “He pins down the French for us as we advance, just as we did for him?”

  “Exactly.”

  “We use him, as he used us?”

  “Yes.”

  He is amazed. “Did your father teach you how to do this—to plan ahead as if a campaign were a chessboard, and you have to move the pieces around?”

  I shake my head. “Not on purpose. But you cannot live with a man like my father without learning the arts of diplomacy. You know Machiavelli himself called him the perfect prince? You could not be at my father’s court, as I was, or on campaign with him, as I was, without seeing that he spends his life seeking advantage. He taught me every day. I could not help but learn, just from watching him. I know how his mind works. I know how a general thinks.”

  “But what made you think of invading from Calais?”

  “Oh, my dear, where else would England invade France? My father can fight in the south for us, and we will see if he can win us Guienne. You can be sure that he will do so if it is in his inte