The Rose, The Falcon, and The Tower

A Mother's Secret

Mary Tudor stared at the book that lay on her desk, a "gift" sent from her father. The book had arrived shortly after midday while she was away for prayers in the chapel. Her steward had left it for her along with the note from her father. Mary glared at the book, angry at what she found written in its pages. Inside that book wrapped in red lather with an embossed pomegranate badge on its cover, lay the proof her father needed to divorce her sainted mother. The mother that Mary loved and idolized as a child, the woman she looked to for guidance and strength in her life had hidden a horrible secret away, a secret Katherine of Aragon hoped would stay hidden away with in the pages of her private journal.

Her mother had lied. To her father. To her people. To the Pope. And more importantly she had lied to Mary. Mary almost wanted to believe the book that set before her was a fake. A prop her father had commissioned to prove his point and win his Great Matter. But it was not, Mary instantly recognized her mother's handwriting, comforting and familiar in the graceful script. Her mother spoke of how she had indeed consummated her first marriage to the late Prince Arthur of Wales and even conceived soon after, only to lose the child to stress when Arthur caught the illness that killed him. The entire affair was, of course, covered up by Mary's grandfather Henry VII's and great grandmother Margret Beaufort.

Mary couldn't believe it, yet the proof stat before her that her mother was not the sainted honest woman everyone thought her to be. That her father was right to set her mother aside, to declare that Mary had no claim to the throne or the title princess and instead Elizabeth was the true Princess of England. Even worse was the fact that Anne Boleyn was the true Queen of England and the true legitimate wife of her father. Mary felt her world crash around her as the reality of her situation set in.