“Katherine,”the queen replied softly.
The king nodded. “We have a strong and healthy heir, praise God! Another daughter will bind us to another royal house, Bess, my dear. Henry will have Spain, Margaret, Scotland, Mary, well, I have yet to decide upon Mary. Perhaps France. Perhaps the Holy Roman Empire, and whoever she does not have, this fair new princess will have, eh?” The king bent and kissed his wife’s brow.
The Countess of Richmond said nothing. She did not like the look of her daughter-in-law. Bess was not young, and this had obviously been a hard birth for her. There would be no more children from this queen, Margaret Beaufort thought to herself.
Prince Henry and his two sisters were brought to see their new sibling.
“What does she look like?” Rosamund asked Meg.
“Like all of mama’s babies. Pale with reddish blond hair and light eyes,” the young Queen of the Scots replied. “She is very quiet, too. I think she will not survive long. What a pity that mama should go through all of that for a puny girl child.”
“I shall have only sons,” Prince Henry boasted.
“You shall have what God deigns, Hal,” Meg said.
Princess Mary was returned to Eltham to her nursery with her new sister. The prince remained with his father, but Meg and Rosamund stayed at the Tower with the queen and her women. The Venerable Margaret had gone to her London house of Cold Harbour. The queen was not recovering from her childbirth. The Tower was very quiet. Then, on the morning of February eleventh, the queen’s thirty-seventh birthday, Elizabeth of York died suddenly, with barely time for the priest to come and hear her final confession.
The king was devastated. He wept openly for the second time in the last year. The first time being when he had been told his heir, Prince Arthur, had died. The court was in shock. It had not been a difficult confinement, and the birth had been relatively swift. The queen had always been healthy and so confidently strong. But now she was dead of a childbed fever as if she had been any ordinary woman. It was difficult to believe. Elizabeth of York had been well loved. The court would miss her.
The king’s mother took over immediately, bringing Meg and Rosamund into her household. While a funeral needed to be planned, it was decided then and there that the princess’ formal wedding to the King of the Scots would take place in August as had been scheduled. As for Rosamund, while the king remained her guardian, the Venerable Margaret took charge of her, “for sweet Bess’ sake.” Then, having said it, she began to decide the funeral preparations, for the king was too broken with his grief and barely left his chambers.
A funeral effigy had to be carved. It would show the queen garbed in her finest robes and furs, smiling. The court and the country would mourn on the exact replica of Elizabeth of York at her best. It would always remain a good memory for them. The effigy would sit atop the queen’s coffin. She would be buried in Westminster Abbey in a tomb that would one day contain the mortal remains of her husband. The famed sculptor, Torrigiano, was summoned to take a death mask of the queen so that he might do a bronze monument to go atop her tomb. Henry Tudor had been his patron for several years, and the sculptor lived in London.
The day of the state funeral dawned gray and cold. The city was practically shrouded in a thick, wet fog. The state funeral procession departed the Tower of London where Elizabeth of York had breathed her last and wound through the streets of the dim city so that the populace might have a last glimpse of their good queen. Over fifty drummers, their instruments muffled to give the appropriate solemnity to the tragic occasion, led the mourners. They were followed by a vast number of Yeomen of the Guard, behind which came the black silk and velvet draped hearse, the carved effigy in its bright-colored robes atop it an almost startling sight. The hearse was drawn by eight coal-black horses bedecked with black silk robes and black plumes.
There were thirty-seven young virgins following the funeral cart, one for each year of the queen’s life, all garbed in the whitest of white velvet robes and carrying tall white beeswax tapers. The tall candles flickered eerily in the chill air. Rosamund was among them, having been given this honor by the king’s mother. The virgins, however, wore no cloaks, and Rosamund shivered with the cold, as did all of her companions. The white kid slippers upon their feet did little to keep out the damp and the wet chill. It would be a wonder, Rosamund thought to herself, if we don’t all join the queen, dead of a winter ague.
They entered the great abbey where a requiem mass was then celebrated by the archbishop, followed by a eulogy, which Rosamund learned later had been written and delivered by a young lawyer of the city, one Thomas More. His deep yet smooth voice rang out with his words of tribute, filling the great church:
Adieu! Mine own dear spouse, my worthy lord!
The faithful love, that did us both continue
In marriage and peaceable concord,
Into your hands here I do resign,
To be bestowed on your children and mine;
Erst were ye father, now must ye supply
The mother’s part also, for lo! here I lie.
As Thomas More’s voice died, the soft sounds of weeping could be heard throughout Westminster Abbey. Looking toward the king, Rosamund saw him wipe his eyes. His shoulders sagged. Henry Tudor had suddenly grown very old, but beside him his mother stood straight and his children were bravely comforting each other in their sorrow. Now the queen’s coffin was taken down from its place on the hearse at the end of the nave and set into its tomb. Elizabeth of York was blessed a final time by the clerics in attendance, and the funeral was over at long last.
Meg came and took Rosamund by the hand. Her eyes were red with her weeping as she and her mother had been very close, particularly in this last year. “Grandmother says you are to come home now with me. She says you played your part well, and my mother would have been pleased.”
They climbed into a covered cart that the Venerable Margaret had provided for her granddaughters and the other women of her household. The gray winter’s day was already growing dark as the vehicle made its way back through the misty London streets to the Countess of Richmond’s London residence.
The following morning the Princess Mary, who was not quite seven, was returned to her nursery at Eltham.
“Sometimes I think I have spent my entire life wearing black mourning,” Meg complained to Rosamund.
“You will be free to shed it again in a few months’ time,” Rosamund comforted the young Queen of the Scots. “You are fortunate, Meg, that you remember the mother you mourn. I do not recall mine at all.”
“Are there no portraits of her?” Meg asked.
“Country people usually don’t have portraits painted,” Rosamund replied with a smile. “Maybel knew her. She says I resemble her, but I resemble my father more. It’s not like really knowing though, is it? Your mother was so kind to me. I shall never forget her, and I shall name a daughter after her one day, Meg. I promise you that!”
