her. He loved Elizabeth, Elizabeth of the fiery hair and the spirited nature and the quick temper. She would never be the dark-browed beauty that her mother had been; she was tawny-red like her father. He felt sudden anger sweep over him. Why, oh, why had she not been born a boy!
She did not speak to him, but stood quite still beside him, her attention caught and held, for a great ship—his greatest ship—was sailing towards the mouth of the river, and she was watching it, her eyes round with appreciation. He glowed with pride and warmed further towards her because she so admired the ships he had caused to be built.
To contemplate that ship lifted his spirits. He needed to lift his spirits, for he had been troubled, and to think one sees a ghost is unnerving to a man of deep-rooted superstitions. He found himself wondering about this man who was Henry of England, who to him had always seemed such a mighty figure, so right in all that he did.
He was a great king; he had done much for England, for he
He thought of this land which he loved, of April sunshine and soft, scented rain; of green fields and banks of wild flowers; and the river winding past his palaces to the sea. It was no longer just an island off the coast of Europe; it was a country becoming mighty, promising to be mightier yet; and through him had this begun to happen, for he would let nothing stand in the way of his aggrandizement, and he was England.
He thought backwards over bloodstained years. Wales subdued; but a few weeks ago he had assumed the title of King of Ireland; he planned to marry his son Edward to a Scottish princess. As he reached out for treasure so should England. He would unite these islands under England and then...
He wanted greatness for England. He wanted people, in years to come, when they looked back on his reign, not to think of the blood of martyrs but of England’s glory.
There were dreams in his eyes. He saw his fine ships. He had made that great navy into the finest ever known. He had thought of conquering France, but he had never done so. France was powerful, and too much of England’s best blood had been shed in France already. But there were new lands as yet undiscovered on the globe. Men sailed the seas from Spain and Portugal and found new lands. The Pope had drawn a line down the globe from pole to pole and declared that all lands discoverable on the east side of that line belonged to Portugal and west of it to Spain. But England had the finest ships in the world. Why not to England? War? He cared not for the shedding of England’s blood, for that would weaken her and weaken Henry, for never since Wolsey had left him to govern England did he forget that England was Henry.
No bloodshed for England, for that was not the way to greatness. What if in generations to come England took the place of Spain! He had ever hated Spain as heartily as he loved England. What if English ships carried trade to the new lands, instead of war and pillage, instead of fanaticism and the Inquisition! He had the ships...If Spain were weak....What a future for England!
He thought of his pale, puny son, Jane’s son. No! It should have been Anne’s son who carried England through these hazy dreams of his to their reality. He looked at Anne’s girl—eager, vital, with so much of himself and so much of Anne in her.
Oh, Anne, why did you not give me a son! he thought. Oh, had this girl but been a boy!
What should scholarly Edward do for England? Would he be able to do what this girl might have done, had she been a boy? He looked at her flushed face, at her eyes sparkling as she watched the last of the ship, at her strong profile. A useless girl!
He was trembling with the magnitude of his thoughts, but his moment of clarity was gone. He was an old and peevish man; his leg pained him sorely, and he was very lonely, for he had just killed his wife whose youth and beauty were to have been the warm and glowing fire at which he would have warmed his old body.
He reminded his conscience—better preserved than his body—that Anne had been an adulteress, a traitress, that her death was not murder, only justice.
He scowled at Elizabeth; she was too haughty, too like her mother. He wished he could shut from his mind the sound of screaming, mingling with the chanting voices in the chapel. Catherine was a wanton, a traitress, and adulteress, no less than Anne.
The ship was passing out of sight, and he was no longer thinking of ships, but of women. He pictured one, beautiful and desirable as Anne, demure and obedient as Jane, young and vivacious as Catherine. His hot tongue licked his lips, and he was smiling.
He thought, I must look for a new wife...for the sake of England.
About the Author
JEAN PLAIDY is the pen name of the late English author E. A. Hibbert, who also wrote under the names Philippa Carr and Victoria Holt.
Born in London in 1906, Hibbert began writing in 1947 and eventually published more than two hundred novels under her three pseudonyms. The Jean Plaidy books—about ninety in all—are works of historical fiction about the famous and infamous women of English and European history, from medieval times to the Victorian era. Many were bestsellers in the United States and abroad, although they are currently out of print. At the time of Hibbert’s death in 1993, the Jean Plaidy novels had sold more than fourteen million copies worldwide.
Murder Most Royal
Jean Plaidy
A READER’S GROUP GUIDE
The wives of Henry VIII are a famously unlucky bunch. From the long-suffering Katharine of Aragon, to the haughty and stunning Anne Boleyn, to the passionate coquette Catherine Howard, each enjoys favor in her turn according to Henry’s needs—and is as quickly discarded when the royal eye roves elsewhere. Henry’s deadly whims require a cadre of supporters whose considerable gifts as politicians are at times almost farcically absorbed by the king’s romantic needs, as the increasingly cruel monarch sacrifices one wife to the next in bloody succession. One of
