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The Tudor Bride
Joanna Hickson
The thrilling story of the French princess who became an English queen, from the best-selling author of The Agincourt Bride. Perfect for fans of The White Queen.Even the greatest of queens have rules – to break them would cost her dearly…King Henry V’s new French Queen, Catherine, dazzles the crowds in England but life at court is full of intrigue and her loyal companion, Mette, suspects that the beautiful Eleanor Cobham, protégée of the Duke of Gloucester, is spying for him.Catherine believes herself invincible as she gives birth to an heir, then tragically King Henry is struck down by fever. Unable to outwit those who seek to remove the new king from her care, Catherine retires from court, comforted by the King’s Harper, Owen Tudor.At the secluded manor of Hadham a smouldering ember bursts into flame and Catherine and Owen Tudor become lovers. But their love cannot remain a secret forever, and when a grab for power is made by Gloucester, Catherine – and those dearest to her – face mortal danger…
JOANNA HICKSON
The Tudor Bride
Copyright (#ulink_70ab0478-7a69-53e5-b2d1-43b6c4ba5592)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
Copyright © Joanna Hickson 2014
Cover photographs © Richard Jenkins (main image); Shutterstock.com (http://www.Shutterstock.com) (patterns). Cover lettering © Stephen Raw
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 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 (#u3c52bc03-8bd9-5545-baf3-7a8f691834a6)
Title Page (#uac69337b-fa03-5fbb-961b-8b1eb3cd3665)
Copyright (#u06939ef9-7b0b-5245-8c58-d310d0717518)
Dedication (#ued4b8759-917b-5cb1-8741-2e8f44d18608)
Family Trees (#ue5d5ffb7-3656-5627-9303-fa4d852e17c1)
Map (#u2e8d521a-0087-51a9-a3db-a44cd4a35a11)
Narrator’s Note (#ufbc6d721-ef92-5291-a1ee-c8cbd5a78876)
Part One: Queen of England (1421–1422) (#ub0173ebb-1fdb-5314-8c2c-f33476116494)
Chapter 1 (#u354d5407-185a-5119-9d7d-fe6fdd39d08a)
Chapter 2 (#u6c278bd5-39c4-5af2-8fd4-de3b9c15a9d8)
Chapter 3 (#u5014b15b-6b4d-5908-abed-69b2d7a33da8)
Chapter 4 (#u52b855da-e6b0-56c4-abce-9e949ac8f721)
Chapter 5 (#ua4c71396-0a1a-590e-be67-07573afbd7e6)
Chapter 6 (#u7434bbea-449d-580d-b3d8-0195ce64a8c5)
Chapter 7 (#u6920b810-c30b-5db7-9d6d-00d05dbc2a35)
Chapter 8 (#u61a76c00-1ad7-546a-b07e-6d841a86b1ab)
Chapter 9 (#ud27c0bfc-39b4-5503-bee4-afebc666d4ff)
Chapter 10 (#u04ba9909-1b8f-5d6f-9a68-3dc8d722d52b)
Chapter 11 (#u901f2e66-af30-540a-95f2-c6c229a2d2be)
Chapter 12 (#ud4ed06b0-a01d-5e5c-9e9a-33c76def830d)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two: The Secret Years (1427–1435) (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three: Journey into Jeopardy (1435–1437) (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note: Fact and Fiction (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
NARRATOR’S NOTE (#ulink_29cc7c1f-1cc3-57ad-991c-9820062e93a9)
The House of the Vine, London, Summer 1440
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 …
PART ONE (#ulink_dab15a23-2bb6-550a-a21d-4768d35bb356)
1 (#ulink_5befc063-8178-52d9-bd4d-3a131f290234)
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.
‘A hearty welcome to both your graces!’ He pressed his lips to the king’s ring, but raised his eyes not to his brother’s face but to Catherine’s. ‘England waits with bated breath to greet its beautiful French queen.’
