Elizabeth & the Prince of Spain E-Book

Margaret Irwin

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Elizabeth I Trilogy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 445

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The final evocative instalment of Margaret Irwin's timeless trilogy, following the triumphs and tragedies, the battles of wit and will between Henry VIII's spirited daughters, Bloody Mary and Elizabeth. Philip, Prince of Spain, the unwilling bridegroom of Queen Mary, has been warned about the Queen's half-sister, the young Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn. According to others, she is a heretic, a rebel, and has 'a spirit full of enchantment'. An alluring description and one that immediately intrigues, rather than deters, the foreign prince. Accused of treachery by Mary and under threat of death, Elizabeth's life hangs in the balance. But, idolised by his aging wife and able to sway her decisions, Philip holds the power to save the courageous young princess. And so Elizabeth must advance warily towards her destiny, running the gauntlet between Bloody Mary's jealousy and morbid outbursts of hate, and Philip's uneasy ardour.

Leseprobe

Praise for Margaret Irwin

‘One of Britain’s most accomplished historical novelists. Her love and respect for the past shines through every page’

Sarah Dunant, author of Sacred Hearts

‘Accomplished, fluent, graceful, picturesque and very readable’

Times Literary Supplement

‘Kind, courageous and fertile; it mingles history and romance with such spirit’

The Observer

‘Beautifully and evocatively written, this is historical writing at its best’

Historical Novels Review

‘Margaret Irwin’s books have an unsurpassed colour and gusto’

The Times

‘Splendidly retold … the strange drama in this writer’s skilful hands has a strong romantic appeal’

Daily Telegraph

Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain

MARGARET IRWIN

Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain

Contents

Title Page

PRELUDE: THE BOY

BOOK I: THE PRINCE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

INTERLUDE: THE PRIEST

CHAPTER TWELVE

BOOK II: THE PRINCESS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

POSTLUDE: THE KING AND QUEEN

About the Author

By Margaret Irwin

Copyright

PRELUDE: THE BOY

1541

‘My father has fought bulls singlehanded in the arena,’ said the boy. ‘He is brave as a lion. He has never been defeated. He is the Conqueror of the World. How could he be conquered – by a pirate fleet of heathen Moors?’

‘The East is Europe’s worst danger,’ said a dry voice in dusty answer.

‘It was. But my grandfather drove all the Moors out of Spain after they’d ruled and ravaged here for seven hundred years. And he was not half as great a man as my father.’

‘No, but his wife was,’ the tutor muttered, all but sniggered, and covered it with a hasty cough, his precise tone at once correct again. ‘My Prince, it is not the heathen who have conquered the Holy Roman Emperor, the “lnvincible Emperor”. It is the winds and the waves of the sea. Listen to the storm raging even now against this tower.’

He stooped eagerly forward, his sharp nose peaked against the light, his black-sleeved arm swooped to draw back the heavy curtain and in a dramatic gesture pushed aside a wooden shutter.

Outside the small panes of glass a jagged landscape leaped into shape against a frantic sky. Those were not the Guadarrama range that Prince Philip knew, but the mountains of hell.

‘Look at the lightning,’ insisted the tutor, a stiff man but now curiously gloating, as many a peaceable man will do in a scene of violence in which he need take no part. ‘Hear the rain flailing down on the stones of the courtyard far below. These are the enemy who conquered the Emperor Charles V at Algiers, smashed his great ships to splinters against the rocks, blew his tents away like dandelion clocks on the seashore.’

Something chilled his enjoyment in his descriptive powers. He turned from the window and saw his Prince looking at him. Philip said coldly, ‘The storms show the wrath of heaven. It is God who directs the winds and waves. “He spoke and His enemies were scattered.” Do you tell me that God fought for the Moors against the Emperor my father?’

Another flash, a long rending crash tore the sky across as he spoke.

‘This is blasphemy,’ said the boy. ‘God himself denies it.’

Dr. Siliceo hastily snapped the shutter to again and pulled the curtain over it, shutting out the enormous scene from the stuffy glittering little room. Candle flames in the draught, which even glass, wood and tapestry could not suppress, winked against the silver figure writhing on the crucifix, flickered over the livid blood-pink and blue in a Flemish picture.

‘Certainly,’ said Dr. Siliceo severely, ‘it is blasphemy for Your Highness to deny victory to your illustrious father. That is exactly what I was explaining. You must write and tell him that you understand his defeat was caused by no human agency; it was by the command not of God but of the Devil.’

As so often, Philip felt himself rebuked without quite knowing why. ‘I will write,’ he said heavily.

Yes, he must write. Yet again.

Pen, paper and ink. More and more paper, more and more ink, yet another pen. He was always doing it. ‘He fights and I write,’ Philip muttered. It was all he could do, while his father fought battles, risked his life in them. ‘Emperors don’t get killed in battle,’ Charles V had often scoffed to those who tried to restrain him, but he had very nearly disproved it this time. His wretched troops had been mowed down in a surprise attack in the drenching night, some had broken and fled; the whole army might well have been totally destroyed if the Emperor had not seized his sword and rushed into the front ranks, rallying them by his courage alone to drive their attackers back into Algiers.

If only Philip had been there at his side! But he would have been no use; only an added responsibility and anxiety to his father. His common sense saw it clearly though bitterly.

One day he would be a full-grown man, he would be a great soldier like his father; he would have more and bigger ships than any in the world, and his armadas would avenge this defeat suffered by the armadas of Spain.

Yet the hope of doing what his father had failed to do lay heavy as lead upon his spirit. Lethargy fell on him like sleep; he longed to sleep, to die, and never to be called upon to prove himself as great a man – no, greater even, than his father. ‘Let me alone for I am not better than my fathers.’

‘Let me alone,’ he said aloud. That of course could not be taken literally. Dr. Siliceo retired to a corner of the room and bent his head over a book, low, lower, as his breathing grew louder. He could sleep.

To sleep, to die, to lie for ever carved in marble like the beautiful young Prince Juan on his tomb at Avila, who had never had to live to be King of Spain but had died instead at sixteen. Philip would not be afraid to die. But to live; to take over the mastery of more than half the world; to make swift decisions in the heat of action; to break the power of his arrogant nobles and then seem to make friends with them, while always distrusting them; to trust no one, depend on no one, to listen to advice and take none of it – yes, Philip was afraid to live. How could he ever do it all?

He was small, he was not very clever, and two great Kings would hem him in on either side, his father’s lifelong rivals, older than his father and much bigger, two crafty wicked giants, but his father had outwitted and defeated them, outrun them in the race for the Empire. They were Henry VIII of England, huge as a bull, with a bull’s brutal inimical stare, in the full flush of his career of murderous matrimony; and the sly ‘Foxnose,’ François I of France, also well over six feet, whom his father had conquered and captured in battle and held as his prisoner for two years in Madrid. The French would never forgive it, watched always for the chance to attack Spain with every ally they could muster, even the heathen Moors.

Yes, the Very Christian King of France had actually joined forces with the fanatic enemies of Christ, with the Sultan, Soliman the Magnificent, and his slave-born sea-captain Barbarossa the Red-beard, and helped them to build up this pirate fleet at Algiers with the Moors who had been driven out of Spain. From that ancient port on the North African shore they raided the seaports of Spain, destroyed Spanish shipping and trade, and drove the wretched coast-dwellers further and further inland to the safety of the mountains.

‘Three things from which no man is safe,’ said the old Moorish proverb. ‘Time, the sea and the Sultan.’ And now the sea and the Sultan had defeated his father, and no man was safe. No man was safe until he was dead.

The boy laid down his pen on the blank sheet of paper and stared at the tortured figure on the crucifix. Yes, even He was safe in spite of His sufferings, since there had been nothing more to do but suffer unto death.

He rose and walked to the window, making no sound even when he drew back the curtain and the shutter. No lightning now pierced the dreadful night; nothing could be seen. Yet he saw something, the pale glimmer of a face framed in a nun’s coif, and it was looking at him.

It could not be; the tower rose sheer from the rock, no one could be there, floating in space fifty feet above the ground. He was seeing a vision, a nun’s face. Relief surged over him in an engulfing wave; God had sent him the answer to all his fears and doubts of himself in the world; He meant him to renounce the world and become a monk.

The nun’s lips were moving; speaking to him; he could hear no word through the thick glass, nor could he do so, if the window were open, against the roar of the tempest. Yet he knew what she was saying to him, dead contrary to his thought. ‘Go back,’ she said, ‘back to all you have to do.’

‘I have not the strength.’

‘You will have all the strength you can bear.’

‘How can I do it all?’ But he knew her answer even as her face drifted into darkness. ‘As it comes. One thing at a time.’

At this time he could write a letter of condolence to his father.

He shut out the now empty darkness and stood remembering where he had seen that face before. A few months ago at Avila he had stared with the curiosity of a boy at a young woman who some years before had run away from home to become a Carmelite nun, and now proposed to reform the Order and bring it back to its ancient austerity. She was mad, some people said, others that she was a witch; she had visions, or else she was tempted by the Devil; she was a hopeless invalid, paralysed at times, unable to move hand or foot; yet when she prayed, her body sometimes floated up into the air. Her family had complained of her and now her convent was doing so, her confessor had ordered her to make rude gestures of repudiation when visited by beatific visions; she had been warned by the Church, even threatened by the Holy Office of the Inquisition.

Philip stood so still that Dr. Siliceo blinked, sat up, stood up.

‘Your Highness requires—’

‘Nothing. Yes. What is the name of that nun – the “ecstatic” who is causing trouble at Avila?’

‘Teresa of Avila,’ replied Siliceo; ‘a tiresome woman. Why does your Highness ask?’

Philip did not answer. A little shakily he went back to his desk.

The tutor repeated drowsily, ‘A very tiresome woman. Her Superior has told me that she prays for suffering. That is doubtless a way of ensuring that one’s prayer shall be granted.’ His chuckle rustled like a dead leaf across the room, but there was no sign that his pupil had heard him. Philip was writing. Siliceo took up his book, but his eyelids dipped lower, lower, then flicked open on the desk inlaid with gold and mother-of-pearl, at the jewelled quill scratching at the paper, and the smooth flaxen head ducked over it like a fledgling chicken’s bending to peck. A good-looking boy, drowsed the tutor comfortably, perhaps not so good a scholar as one would expect from a pupil of his, but every inch a Prince, especially on horseback where you didn’t see how few the inches were; silver fair, his veins showed the blue blood, pure of any taint of the Moor, a rarity prized among the proudest Spanish families, and prized above all by Siliceo, who believed passionately in racial purity and preached that not only all infidel Moors and Jews should be expelled from Spain, as had been done, but all those also who had been converted to Christianity, and even all who had ever had a Moor or Jew, however far back, in their ancestry. Conversion could be feigned; the only sure test was pure Spanish blood.

But Prince Philip, alas, had more of Flemish blood. Siliceo had been engaged to correct that error; the boy had grown into a typical well-bred Castilian, respectable (outwardly at least), grave, reserved, and austere in manner, even more a Spaniard than many who were pure bred, since so much conscious effort went into being it – ‘a converted Spaniard,’ Siliceo chuckled to himself in malicious somnolence. So contrary is even the best regulated mind, particularly when half asleep, that he felt almost peevish at his success. Well, he had trained the Prince to be a gentleman, which was more than his father, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, that gross Fleming, could ever be. ‘These Hapsburgs!’ he muttered on a faint snore that startled him awake. At that instant an eyelid flicked open for a second in his mind; could training be carried a shade too far? That small figure before him, grimly plodding away at his squeaky quill, was a strange silent boy; it was most unlike him to speak even as much as he had spoken just now.

Something there was in him that seemed to check his imagination, his motive power; just as the uproarious rejoicings at his birth had been checked, broken off by his father’s command and the whole Court ordered into mourning, sackcloth and penance, when the appalling news reached Spain that the Holy City of Rome was being sacked, and by the Christian troops of the Holy Roman Emperor himself. Outrage, murder and ruin, more horrible even than that wrought long ago by the heathen Goths, ravaged and all but destroyed Rome. It was the most shocking conquest in history, also the unluckiest, for every man who had taken active part in it was said to have met since then a violent or disgusting death.

The Emperor Charles himself was not there; it was not his doing, as he had frequently explained, but that of the other fellows, the subordinates who had let the men get out of hand; slack discipline, starvation rations, they had caused the rot.

True, he had ordered the march on Rome, but he was never one jot the worse for it; his appetites were as huge as ever, whether for food and drink, for bouts of boisterous jollity or an equally unrestrained melancholy; for more power over at least half of the Old and all the New World which, as fast as it went on being discovered, had long ago been decreed by the Borgia Pope to belong to Spain ‘to all eternity.’

Unabated, unsated, the old ruffian appeared to savour every moment of his invincible career, for all that he talked at times of his need to ‘make his soul’ and repent of his sins – but never with any mention among them of the Sack of Rome. In spite even of that, his luck had held, till now.

But it had been no good omen for his son, born in that hour of hideous victory over the Pope and his Church, to be the Very Catholic King of Spain; to have the high festival at his birth turned into bitter penance, as if he were doomed to an inheritance of guilt. Was the boy indeed haunted by a sense of guilt and need of atonement?

He was. But what haunted Philip was the fear of not behaving himself correctly in public, and every moment of his life was public, every natural function had to be conducted as a solemn ritual. Even at four years old, when he was breeched, it was a religious rite as well as a gorgeous ceremony; he had been perched high up on a mule and led across a vast plain where rocks as big as houses lay tumbled on top of each other in the burning sunlight; he came to red walls that reached up to the sky, and was told this was Avila, and shown the tombs of Torquemada the Grand Inquisitor, and the handsome marble youth who like himself had been Prince of Spain. He had been taken out of the quivering heat into a cold dim chapel where psalms were chanted round him, and long black-robed nuns took off his baby petticoats, touching him with unaccustomed hands, some podgy and clammy, some knuckly and sharp, but all strange; they put on his new manly breeches and black Court dress. Then he had to stand and face a long procession of lords and ladies and clergy, and then a vast cheering crowd below the stone balcony where trumpets blared in his ears and heralds shouted, proclaiming him the Prince of Spain. Very tired, bewildered, half deafened, frightened, he did not flinch, he bowed when told to, he behaved perfectly.

So he did even when he had been naughty and his mother, that serene beauty who seemed to him the Queen of Heaven, whipped him in front of her Court ladies and they shed tears at such cruelty to the tiny fair princeling. But Philip had not cried before the ladies when he was four. He had not cried when two years ago his mother died, and he had to lead her funeral procession out from the gaunt rock city of Toledo down through Spain, riding day after day across the vast tablelands of Castile and La Mancha and Andalusia, down towards Granada, down into the tomb of her grandparents Ferdinand and Isabella. There they lay at Granada, where they had forced the last surrender of the Moors; and there she, young and lovely, now must lie. The great vault was opened, her coffin lowered into it before the weeping multitudes; but Philip did not cry.

And he did not cry now when he was alone, and fourteen, though his whole world lay shattered before him, and his father, the Invincible Emperor, had been conquered by his enemies. No, not by them, never that. What was it old Siliceo had said, now blinking like a sleepy black cat in his corner, so little did he care? ‘By no human agency,’ echoed young Philip in a whisper, staring at the devils that his father found so amusing in that picture by Hieronymus Bosch. Birds swallowed men, toads danced with women, a lean thoughtful face looked out dispassionately on them all, wearing a pink hat, and on its brim yet more devils. The colours were like torn flesh, but unreal. Nowhere on earth could one see pink so violent, so vile, so virulent.

‘No human agency,’ repeated Philip; and was answered by the wind that flapped the edges of the heavy curtains, rattled the shutters of the turret room in the alcazar that towered defiantly on its rock above the Castilian plain.

The room became filled with the patient persistence of the boy in proving to himself that the heathen hordes had not conquered yet again, that it was not the infidels’ fleet who had defeated his father’s ships at Algiers, but ‘all the elements that had conspired against Your Majesty’s prudence and greatness.’

BOOK I: THE PRINCE

CHAPTER ONE

1554

‘I am going, not to a marriage feast, but to a fight,’ said the young man.

‘And what else is marriage?’ grunted his father.

The young man stamped his feet down into his new silver-laced boots while the tailor reverently pulled them up higher and the trunk hose of white kid lower, till they fitted skin-tight round the slim and shapely legs, except for a wrinkle near the knee. The shaggy old man huddled by the window at a table that was covered with the inner mechanisms of a quantity of clocks, flicked up a red eyelid to scrutinize his son’s legs. ‘The hose are too long,’ he said, ‘or rather,’ with a wheezy chuckle, ‘the legs are too short.’

‘An inch off just here,’ the tailor whispered to his second-in-command. The legs tautened as if to stretch themselves, they balanced momentarily on the tips of the toes, striving for an unavailing instant to deny the sombre truth uttered by his father.

If only he were a few inches taller! It was important that he was a small man, because it was so important that he should be a great one. His father was old and ill and seemed at times half childish in his frantic preoccupation with his clocks, trying to make them all keep exactly the same time; although he knew well he should now concentrate on eternity and have done with time, and was threatening to retire to a monastery and do so. Yet his father, the Emperor Charles V, was still by far the greatest man in the world, and he would bequeath to him the greatest task that any man could undertake; nothing less than that he, his son Prince Philip, should be master of it.

‘For it must come to that,’ his father had always told him; ‘it is One World now. One faith, one rule, and one man to support it,’ so the Emperor had told the solemn boy whose pouting under-lip had mimicked his own in the effort to look portentously important; and he said it again now to the sadly conscientious young man who at his command was trying on before him the wedding garments that were an inch too long.

But this time he varied his formula. ‘It is your world now,’ said the thick guttural voice. ‘It is you who have got to make and keep it one, under Spanish domination everywhere, for that is coming, mark you – it must come, in spite of those damned Lutheran princes stabbing me in the back from my own land of Germany. Luther – Luther – why did I ever let him live? I had him in the palm of my hand’ – his fist shot out (and a startled tailor toppled over backwards on his heels), the gnarled fingers struggled to spread out, but had to twist up again – ‘and I let him go!’

‘Why did you, sir?’ Prince Philip’s question was almost an accusation.

‘God knows! His safe-conduct I suppose. I’d promised him that. Machiavelli was a sound statesman; a prince who breaks his word is stronger than he who keeps it, no doubt that’s true. But even an Emperor must think of his soul – sometimes.’ The Emperor paused to consider this paradox, then rejected it.

‘But no, I know why I did it. I said, “We’ll keep this little monk, he may be useful to us some day.” A handy weapon against the Papacy, I thought. There have always been heresies in plenty, and one could always stamp them out in time. But I wasn’t in time. Luther’s been dead for years, but he’s still infecting the world. This plague of heresy is spreading like the Black Death, and what will be the end of it all? The death of society, of the civilized world, that’s what heresy will bring. It is an international conspiracy to destroy government in every country, to bring one revolution after another, to divide nations, even families against themselves. It exalts treason into a virtue. Men will betray their country to be true to their “ideas” – ideas of what? That Judas Iscariot is a saint, for he betrayed his Master.’

And this was what Philip had to fight, as fiercely as ever his father had done, in hand-to-hand combat, or even the Cid himself, the hero of Spain, against the infidel. The infidel was again the enemy. The heathen Moor, or heretic English, there was nothing to choose between them, except that the latter were the more dangerous since they still pretended to the name of Christians.

His father’s rivals, the two crafty wicked giants that he had dreaded as a boy, had been dead seven years, but their work went on. France was again at war with Spain, as bitterly her enemy as when François I had allied himself with the heathen Sultan and his pirate fleet.

And England, for whom Henry VIII had opened the door into heresy – opened it only ajar, since he had intended to keep the doctrine, and the profits, of the Catholic Church, while ejecting the Pope and monasteries – England had kicked the door wide open, and all through the reign of Henry’s son Edward had had heresy imposed by the law of the land. But now for the last year Edward was dead and his elder sister Mary was Queen, and Philip must go to England to marry her and help her bring back the country to the Church of Rome. It would be difficult, dangerous. The law would be now on the side of the Church, but a great part of the people were still against it; still more were against Mary’s Spanish marriage. Protests had been openly made in Parliament and even by Mary’s devotedly Catholic Chancellor, Bishop Gardiner; last winter the Spanish Ambassadors for the marriage negotiations had been snowballed by Londoners, who concealed stones in their snowballs; and early this last spring there had been a large-scale revolt headed by young Thomas Wyatt, of a most respectable family of diplomats and public servants, a revolt which had surged in civil warfare through the London streets right up to the Queen’s palace and all but succeeded in overthrowing her government. Yet Wyatt had been executed, declaring to the end that he was no traitor since he had fought only for ‘true religion’. A very pretty example of the high-minded treason his father was inveighing against, considered Philip, and tried to say so, but the Emperor only mumbled, ‘Hey, what’s that? Wyatt? You needn’t worry. That business was well squashed, I saw to that. Executions in plenty. England’s been made safe enough for you to go there for weeks past.’

And he lolled out a bright green tongue that slipped and fell sideways in his mouth. It never failed to startle his son’s nervous susceptibilities, though Philip knew that it was only fresh leaf that his father sucked to promote saliva in his fever-cracked mouth. But every time it licked out at him like a lopsided lizard he wished that his father, in spite of or perhaps even instead of being the conqueror and master of the world, were just an ordinary father. Why should he take more than a dozen clocks to pieces all at once? One or two might be reasonable, even three or four might be excused – but fourteen, perhaps fifteen! It was, like everything to do with his father, extravagant, disproportionate, positively gluttonous.

‘How many clocks, sir, have you disintegrated there?’

‘Why – all there are in the palace,’ replied the Emperor in a voice surprisingly mild at the irrational demand. ‘Time is important, you know, and you will find it so. Be sure that you keep time on your side.’

‘Tick tock, tick tock’ they all agreed, for at last he had put them together. They began to strike, some deep and sonorous as a church bell, some tinkling and thin as a child’s rattle, some playing fragments of tune, some striking hammers, some slow, some fast, but all measuring out the time, one, two, three, four, on and on to the full number of eleven. ‘There!’ shouted the Emperor through their discordant din, snatching off his horn-rimmed spectacles and flinging himself back in his chair, an exhausted bear in all his furs, hot though the day was. But presently a smile like Jove’s smoothed and expanded his rutted, forward-thrusting face. ‘There, at last! They are all striking together at the same time.’

But not all. One, the smallest, came cheeping in at the very end, like a belated chicken out of its egg. The Emperor thrust his enormous jaw at it.

‘But in any case,’ said Philip’s precise, slightly disdainful tones, as he pulled his new round globular watch out of the pocket of his discarded coat, ‘it is not the right time.’

He could have bitten his tongue out as he heard his own words, but it was too late.

‘What’s that? Not the right time? These lazy rogues, these muddlers, bunglers—’ and the Emperor Charles roared to his servants to bring again the exact time by the Cathedral clock; would not speak again till he had heard it; would not finish the portentous warnings of this farewell interview; but put on his owlish spectacles anew, and set to work in grim silence to regulate them all over again.

An ordinary father would not have done that. But none of Philip’s family were ordinary.

He squared the slight shoulders on which the burden of Hercules was doomed to roll; he looked over the bowed backs and busy fingers of the tailors crawling round his legs, fitting on the wedding garments that were to be his armour for the Crusade that he must lead for Spain, the Empire of the world, and the one true Church to bind it together. And then he looked at the grey silhouette of his father’s sunken head against the window, and beyond it the jagged outline of rocky hills, bare and tawny as a lion’s skin in the harsh sunlight, that was his home. Yes, one – or other – of them must marry Mary of England. And why not the other?

A tinkling chime went up from one of the clocks. The rest followed in ragged chorus. The spell was broken; they were free to speak. Philip resumed the clothes he had been wearing, dismissed the tailors, collected his words.

‘As Your Majesty was betrothed to Mary over thirty years ago –’ he began, then gulped and started again rather more hurriedly. ‘If the marriage were arranged for Your Majesty, that would be the best course.’

‘I am over fifty-four and too old,’ grunted the father.

‘I am under twenty-seven and too young,’ said the son.

‘As the prospective bride is thirty-eight, she seems tolerably balanced between the two of us. But not in reality. For no one would call you young for your age – you are quite ten years ahead of them. But I, alas, am at least twenty years older than my age, a crippled wreck whose only wish is to leave the world and become a monk.’

But he was still the reigning Emperor, and knew there could be no gainsaying his commands. He thrust out his underhung jaw, fringed with sparse grey beard like the stubble of dead gorse on a wintry cliff, as he passed sentence on his son. Philip stood condemned.

His indigestible veneration for his father rose in his throat. Not for the first time he was tempted to disgorge it. It had suffered a rude shock in his boyhood when he had learned that the Emperor had been defeated by the Moorish fleet at Algiers. The discovery that no man, not even his father, was almighty, remained a guilty secret within Philip’s breast, to be shunned even in this moment when he longed to remind himself, yes, and his father of it; to tell him that his hero-worship had once been shaken; that his father’s very presence acted as a dead weight, crushing, paralysing him; that though no man could want the adventure of going into a hostile, heretic and semi-barbarian land to marry a prim old maid nearly a dozen years older than himself, yet he could almost welcome it, since it would at least remove him from his father’s influence.

Only once before had he left Spain, and that was to go into his father’s country of Flanders, where that influence had been ten times stronger and more all-pervading than in Spain. For the Emperor had never ceased to be a foreigner in Spain, while in Flanders he was adored as a native hero, and what was more a good fellow of the first water, or rather vintage. Philip’s visit to Flanders had been a lamentable failure.

At least in England he would be free of that influence, though it did not make him the less indignant at being sent there. He bowed ceremoniously and said, ‘As an entirely obedient son, I have no other will but yours, and therefore leave it to Your Majesty to act as you think best.’ He added under his breath, ‘Not my will but my father’s.’

‘Are you seeing yourself as Jesus Christ?’ demanded Charles on a spurt of laughter that blew the leaf out of his mouth, and he had to replenish it with another from a bowl of water on the table. But he felt a trifle worried. His eyes, enlarged by the globular horn-rimmed spectacles, scrutinized the pale, stiff young man before him as though he were part of the mechanism of his clocks. There could be nothing wrong with the mechanism. The Spaniards, a race as stubborn and untameable as their cruelly barren land, were taking him to their hearts (‘if they have any,’ he snorted) as they had never taken himself. Yet, unlike so many heirs to the throne, Philip never attempted to set himself up in rivalry to his father, he was indeed entirely devoted to him and did everything his father told him. Not too good a boy either; even at fourteen he had needed watching with the women, aha! and the sly young dog had shown his sensuality by coupling his demands for Titian’s religious pictures with discreetly worded requests for ‘poesies,’ as he called the Master’s voluptuous paintings of naked females with respectably mythological names. And now as a young man, for all his public decorum, he took his private pleasures, but perhaps too private; he could never really lose himself in a debauch, and that was partly why he had been so unpopular in Flanders; the old Fleming his father found in this a trace of satisfaction. He had to bear the weight of the world, but he had not let it cramp him unduly; he had taken his pleasures with Flemish grossness and fairly openly, though not flagrantly; but Philip with all his appetites had no gusto, perhaps not much guts. He had won a prize in the tourneys in Flanders, but it was his affectionate aunts who had been the judges. He certainly did not care for war and fighting, though he had his own sort of courage; put him to the tortures of the damned and it would be his pride to pretend he felt nothing. He could stand anything; but would he move? A rock could stand; but the ruler of the world had to be a deal more than a still, carved face in a marble block. There was after all something wrong with this boy; he had never been one.

And into his mind, as though it had passed there from Philip’s, there flashed the unwilling memory of his crushing defeat at Algiers, and the stilted dispassionate letter of condolence that his son of fourteen had written to him. He had hoped that damned dull tutor had dictated it, but no, the construction was too bad; it was clearly Philip’s work, and clear proof he never was a boy. He shook off the memory, which often before he had shared with his son; though neither of them had ever spoken of it. It gave an edge to his annoyance with Philip for so obviously being about to do what he was told, and think himself a martyr for it. It was unfortunate that others thought the same; the Bishop of Pampeluna had actually compared him to Isaac, sacrificed by his father Abraham. That must have pleased Philip. It was time he learned how lucky he was.

The shrewd screwed-up eyes peered over their spectacles. The green tongue shot out to strike again. ‘Fortune is a strumpet,’ he chuckled; ‘she keeps her favours for the young.’

‘Mary Tudor is the last gift one would expect from a strumpet,’ came in slow answer as the young man turned from his father; in no impatient movement, for it was his pride to be patient, but with the deliberate determination of acceptance.

Something deeply, sluggishly inert in his nature welcomed the chance to be heroic through acceptance rather than action, suffering rather than adventure.

Heroically he turned again and strode back towards the table, kicking shreds and snippets of stuff shed by the tailors out of his way, as if to spurn the pleasures he was leaving of his life in Spain. Bare and bright the sunlit scene rose outside the window; a lizard flashed emerald across the white wall of the courtyard below, and some young men riding past on their way to the tiltyards were singing an old song of how they had returned from hunting to find their vineyard stripped by the Moors, and there would be no wine for them. Seven centuries of Spain lay in that song, but to Philip it was too familiar for him to have noticed before; only now, as he heard it jigging away into the distance, he thought that he would not hear it in England.

The Emperor divined the self-pity in his gaze and remarked in affectionate exasperation, ‘Take another text to yourself for comfort; it is your father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.’

‘A kingdom whose people rose in arms to prevent my coming! A kingdom whose angry Parliament refuses me even the title of King, and has shorn away every vestige of power from my position as the Queen’s Consort.’

‘You’ll get it back in the night-time,’ Charles told him with cheerful ribaldry. ‘What more powerful position could you hold than that? A young man in bed with an old maid must be a boor or impotent if he fails to get all he wants from her. You are neither. Win her to you, and she’ll do her best to get her councillors to give you all we want. Kings don’t count for much now in England. Henry VIII did, but he was a giant, and even he was careful to keep on the right side of the people. But now it’s the councillors who rule the country – and rule the Queen too. You’ll have to win them over – not so easy.’ He pushed his horn-rimmed spectacles up high on his wrinkled forehead and leaned back in his chair, talking with greedy enjoyment, lisping sometimes and mumbling often, almost inaudibly, yet greedily savouring his own sound advice, blinking in amused memory of the little scenes it called up of that strange, that incredible country that he had once visited for a fortnight when he was a youth.

‘Drink English beer, and praise it. It’s bitter, but better than their wine, since Henry sold the monasteries and lost their vineyards. Talk to people as human beings, not as abstractions. Look them in the face, don’t squint sideways at their boots, it makes them think you’ve something to conceal, and so you have, your shyness, but they’ll never guess that. So look straight at their eyes. Smile, and when any Englishman tells a story, laugh. It’s always meant to be funny. But be serious when you talk of sport. Don’t forget Henry was the best shot of his day, and I’m told they still speak wistfully of their bluff King Hal; he might chop off your head, but was equally likely to clap you on the back and call you a useful fellow with the longbow or the tennis racket. Make love to the women with discretion. The English do not make kind cuckolds.

‘And don’t let our women go with their husbands. They’ll make more mischief than any soldiers. Send them home, send them to Flanders, send them to hell. But don’t, as you value your peace, your hoped-for crown, your very life, don’t let them meet the Englishwomen!

‘If you do all this cleverly, you’ll be crowned King in Westminster Abbey in three months and, what’s far more important, you’ll be shipping English troops to Flanders to fight with us against the French.’

At last Philip had a chance to speak.

‘England should do so for her own sake. France will invade her from Scotland as soon as the Dauphin is old enough to marry the little Queen of Scots.’

‘That confounded brat!’ exploded Charles, spitting yet another leaf across the table. ‘King Henry swore when she was a baby in arms that she was the most dangerous person in Europe. And here she is just ten years old and the King of France vowing to support her claim to the English throne and so unite it to the French!’

‘Queen of Scotland, England, France,’ murmured Philip. ‘A combination strong enough to overbalance Spain.’

‘If it happened – but it won’t. We’ll break it, for we’ll be in first with England. That wretched little northerly island muffled in her sea-fogs right away from Europe, she’s always been able to tip over the balance here. All my life and my father’s, we have had to woo England. They say we Hapsburgs do not need to fight – we marry instead. And we married England long before you were born, when my poor aunt, Katherine of Aragon, wedded King Henry VIII and then could only succeed in rearing Mary Tudor. It was her one faux pas and she paid for it, but look how we’ve all paid for it! That florid, exorbitant, terrible fellow, Henry, upset everything, divorcing Katherine and bringing the Reformation into England unawares – brought it in like an imp in a bottle to work his divorce and re-marriage. But it wouldn’t go back into the bottle, it rose and swelled into a gigantic genie, beyond his control.

‘But now, in you, Spain has her best chance to win a real grip on England.’

‘No better chance,’ said Philip deliberately, and looking his father in the eyes as he had been told to do, ‘than when Your Majesty was betrothed to Mary Tudor.’

The Emperor looked back at his son in irritation. It was more than tactless to remind him that he also had had the opportunity to knit the two countries together, when as a youth he had been betrothed to Mary Tudor, a little girl with long fair hair of which her father had been inordinately proud.

It had been a brief settlement, almost momentary; and the moment had passed, the betrothal had been cancelled, and the two countries had floated apart like ships that passed in the night.

‘Leave it,’ said the old man tersely. ‘You’ll never make me twenty again.’

‘Nor Mary five. But,’ said Philip chivalrously, ‘I will undertake my poor, deserted aunt.’

His father floundered. Humour from Philip was apt to be unexpected, it threw you off your balance. Charles talked on in his rapid guttural, trying to recover it. ‘What’s that, you jackanapes? Your aunt? Drop it, you puppy. She’s not your aunt, though her mother was mine. But Henry could never bear me to call him “Uncle”, – I had to change it to “Brother”. So be careful. You’ve offended her enough already, never writing to her until at last the poor woman had to do it first. What woman can bear that? Having to write the first letter, send the first portrait. And now you’re putting off going to England again and again though I told you weeks ago that you’d damage your prestige if you dilly-dallied.’

He stared, startled. For the first time in their lives he had caught sight of a cold gleam of anger in the eyes that he had ordered to look into his; they were so looking, and the Emperor rather wished they were not doing so. For the first time it struck him that perhaps he did not know altogether what this self-contained young man was like, or might become.

‘I am going,’ said Philip, ‘to fulfil your obligation, your father’s, and your grandfather’s. I am the fourth generation to woo an English alliance. To do so, I am abandoning not only my pleasure in my faithful mistress of many years’ standing, but my duty towards my all but affianced bride. We have already settled a large dowry on the Princess of Portugal which will also have to be abandoned, as a bribe to buy her off, and is therefore a dead loss. My own loss will be a wife near me in blood and talking my language, sharing my way of thought, in order to go to a strange country that is seething with hate of Spain, religion and civilization, and marry an old maid with whom I cannot exchange a word, except in languages foreign to us both. I grant you that my future wife has shown consideration for me in begging me to bring my own cooks and physicians. But it is an uncomfortable hint at the likely danger of poison. I see no occasion for reproach.’

The Emperor decided to change the subject rapidly, and introduce the stimulus of a mild flick of jealousy. Philip had frequently shown an inclination to covet something only when someone else wanted it or was likely to acquire it.

Eyeing his son astutely, he told him, ‘Well, if you wait much longer, the English Cardinal, that fellow Reginald Pole, will get there first. I have had the devil of a time holding him back as it is. Take care he doesn’t cut you out. Ha ha! He’s as much of an old maid as she is, and two of a feather might get together. They’ve done so already in letters, and he doesn’t wait for her to write first. Their mothers planned their marriage at one time – Lord, what mothers won’t do!’

‘Sir, he’s a Cardinal—’

‘He’s a Plantagenet. He’s a better right to the English throne than she has. That’s why all his family were executed by Henry nearly twenty years ago. What’s that – a Cardinal? That’s nothing. He could get dispensation, he’s never taken priest’s orders. But in any case he’ll be even more dangerous as her Father-in-God than as her husband, stirring up the Devil’s own mischief through pure religion.’

‘Pure religion? Does that mean he’s tainted with reform?’

‘Oh no, he’s right as rain,’ his father assured him testily. ‘You’ll never find him charged with heresy. My fears are all the other way, that he’ll be too rigid. I don’t trust him, he’s too sincere.’

Philip understood this surprising statement very well. ‘You think he’ll want the English nobles to give back their Church property?’

‘Exactly. As if the greedy robbers would give up their spoils after near a score of years! The Queen hopes for it, of course, she’s a woman. But he’s a Churchman and ought to understand. No, he mustn’t set foot in England till he brings firm assurance from Rome that it’s the right of every Englishman to keep what he has stolen. The Pope understands that. But the Pope’s not Pole.’

‘Nor a Plantagenet.’

‘The plant of the Devil! Spiritual pride, beware it. But allied with family pride, beware it doubly. Especially in England.’

‘Even with the Tudors?’ There was more than a shade of contempt in Philip’s tone.

‘Especially with the Tudors. They’ve no shadow of right to the throne – except that their grandfather killed the Plantagenet Richard III and picked his crown out of a thornbush. That makes ’em prickly.’

‘Is this Plantagenet, Pole, ambitious?’

‘No, oh no, I wish he were. He’d be safer if one could buy him off. No, he’s a nice fellow, a good fellow, but he will talk Christianity. He’s even done it to the Pope. He’ll do it –’ the Emperor’s wheezy laughter choked him for a moment – ‘to the English Bishops! Imagine what trouble that will lead him into!’’

‘I can imagine it very clearly,’ said Philip grimly.

‘Yes, the English clergy are in a ticklish position, both religious and matrimonial. They’ve changed themselves three times over in the last half-dozen years. First, Catholic though not Roman in the last years of my Uncle Henry, and all the clergy celibate, not a wife for any one of ’em, not even for his precious Archbishop Cranmer, who helped him to divorce my Aunt Katherine and marry Ann Bullen and then helped him to un-marry and behead her – but, oh no, never a wife for his useful dog Cranmer, though he’d smuggled one over from Germany in a box, they say. Well, there they are, all of ’em as good as gold and celibate as bullocks, and then under little Edward they all turn black Protestant and rush into matrimony like the rats of Norway that fling themselves in droves into the sea and get drowned. That’s England all over – no restraint. One day, no parson’s wives, only an occasional modest mistress tucked away decently in the pantry, all very right and proper, and on the morrow the whole country swarms with parsons’ wives, pert and prim, fat and slim, messing up their husband’s work, meddling with the parish, setting it all by the ears, and then in a few months it’s crawling with parsons’ brats and the next year double the number. King Henry always said the reason against the clergy marrying was that they’d breed like rabbits, and so they did, right on until last summer, when the poor boy Edward dies, Mary becomes Queen, and hey presto all the wives have gone to earth with their litters, and once again the clergy is celibate, Catholic, and Roman too this time. All this talk has made my throat as dry as the Sierra,’ he suddenly accused his son. ‘Where’s the sherry?’

He reached for the flagon. ‘Ah that’s better. Sherry – “Caesaris – the wine of Caesar!” Well what’s good enough for Julius Caesar is good enough for me. And now for God’s sake let me go to dinner. The pleasures of love, especially in holy wedlock, are apt to be grossly over-rated, but it is impossible to exaggerate the pleasures of the table.’

The grandees of Spain entered and hauled him out of his chair, supported his crippled feet, all but carried his painful tottering frame to dinner. He sat and crammed his mouth and belly with food, poured rivers of the wine of Cadiz and the Rhine down his wry neck, and rolled his parched tongue against his palate to let the heady coolness linger on it as long as possible. The sound of his steady chumping was interspersed with the occasional gulp of a belch, but there was none of his ambling mumbling lisping talk, for his mouth was far too fully occupied. To Charles one thing at a time.

His appetites were huge, and even now in his sick old age his digestion almost matched them. He had always found gluttony the safest vice. Vast meals appeased the craving of his senses, made him satisfied, satiated, stupefied, able to relinquish slightly the clutch of his conscious mind on the problems that beset the master of the world – a world shattered and disordered, with the old order crumbling into decay.

But here on the table was order still, unquestioned, established, sacred, each course following the other in harmony unalterable as the stars in their courses; the beef after the broth, the coney and capon after the carp, the swan after the stork, the peacock after the partridge, the venison after the veal, the perfect progress of one savoury flavour after another leading up to the voluptuous chorus of crowded sweets, grapes and apricots and peaches in tarts and fritters and garnished custards, hypocras and cream of almonds, translucent jellies quivering in the towering shapes of the gods on Mount Olympus, treading on rosy clouds with sugared violets in their saffron-shredded hair.

There he sat cloying his palate, cramming his appetite, mercifully dulling his senses, releasing him from his long, taut task of living.

Was life then but a craving to find death? But he had no need to ask it, knowing the answer lay in his longing to lay down his crown, to leave this vast glittering hall and its crowds of nobles, superb yet subservient, who handed him each fresh dish on bended knee; and to put on the single coarse robe of a monk in the monastery of Yuste, sleep in a bare cell, and never come out into the world again.

Even an Emperor must think of his soul sometimes, he had said; but it was not true, it was not possible, it was not even right, while on the business of being an Emperor. One thing at a time. Statecraft must come before soulcraft, Machiavelli had put it down in black and white, but all sound statesmen had known and acted on it long before. He had kept his word and spared Luther’s life – and look what had come of it!

What if, in sparing Luther, he had launched the world in revolution for centuries to come?

He had done it for reasons of State; but he would have felt far more guilty if he had done it just because it was the right thing for him to do. The State must come before the individual soul.

Yet Christ had shown that the individual soul mattered above all else. So how could one be a Christian and a statesman – let alone an Emperor?