Great Britain -- History -- Tudors, 1485-1603 -- Fiction; Historical fiction
So those Kings and Queens did what they could least to mark the
outrageous demeanour of this Princess. They did no more than as if she
had been a court jester, and affected to wonder that she had once been a
beautiful and young Princess, for love of whom her husband, then a
simple esquire, had languished longer than need be in prison in Almain.
Yet so it was.
This Princess spent the winter of most years, latterly, in London for
the benefit of the climate. The summers until lately she had been
accustomed to spend in Bothal Castle or Cockley Park Tower, which she
hired of Sir Robert Ogle, who had lately been made Lord Ogle of Ogle.
Upon the death of her husband she had inherited much land near Morpeth
and she considered that she would have had much more had not the Lord
Lovell, lately dead, seized so much of it by reason of his marriage with
the Lady Rohtraut, the Princess’s daughter. The lawsuits about these
lands were not yet concluded, and it was these that the knights of
Cullerford and Haltwhistle were seeking to force from the Lady Rohtraut
by keeping her imprisoned. The Princess had, however, by no means
abandoned her claim to these lands and it was to prosecute her lawsuits
that, each summer, she came to the North. She was otherwise a very rich
woman, having many coronets, chains with great pearls, rubies, ferezets,
silks, hangings, furniture and much gold. Moreover, she was for ever
trafficking in parcels of land with the Ogles, the Bartrams, the
Mitfords and other families round the town of Morpeth. In that way she
had both occupation and profit, and she harried the leisure of the
several receivers of her son, the Lord Dacre whom the King kept in
London.
Now, upon a day, being the second day in July of the year 1486, this
lady sat upon a chair resembling a high throne upon three stone steps
covered with a carpet. She had behind her yet another carpet that
mounted the wall and came forward over her head in the manner of a dais.
This old lady inclined always to the oldest fashions.
Thus, upon her round, old head she had an immense structure that bent
her face forward as if it had been that of our Father at Rome beneath
the triple tiara. It was made of two pillows of scarlet velvet, covered
with a net of fine gold chains uniting large pearls. Such a thing had
not been seen in England for two or three score years, but the ladies at
her father’s court had worn them when she had been a girl. For the rest
of her, she was dressed in black wool with a girdle, from which there
hung ten or a dozen keys of silver, steel, or gold inlaid with steel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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