Secrets of the Tudor Court Boxed Set Read Online Free PDF

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 proxyat 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—thesort who has a wit sharp enough to cut and the cleverness not to use it to slice into the wrong person.”
     
    Q UEEN E LIZABETH 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,