A/N: My friend Izzy, aka gradiscas on tumblr, was kind enough to offer to draw me my Chapuys family from my upcoming NaNo, so I asked what one-shot she wanted as a show of my deepest gratitude, and she asked for me to write a Chary story set in the alternate universe that this graphic (ofhouseadama dot tumblr dot com / post / 29804865606 / au-henry-viii-dies-before-his-break-from-the) is based upon.
Mary I of England ascended to the throne in 1532 at the age of sixteen, following the sudden death of her father, Henry VIII. Contemporary reports from eyewitnesses in London account that when Mary and her mother Katherine of Aragon returned to Hampton Court for Mary's coronation the streets were crowded with revelers and supporters for England's first queen regnant. The old queen—and now the new—had never lost favor among the people, despite Henry's futile attempts to install Anne Boleyn as his second wife.
While her mother was the head of her regency council, all historical accounts indicate that Mary was essentially a monarch with full powers, even before reaching the age of majority. As her mother's health waned in the years following her coronation, Mary grew closer to her mother's ally, the then Imperial Ambassador Eustace Chapuys. Records indicate that it was he, who, in 1535, contracted Mary's betrothal and marriage to Francis I's son, Henry of Orleans, behind his master's back.
The marriage wasn't consummated until after Katherine's death in January 1536, during which time it is indicated that Chapuys became Mary's only confidant, besides her father's friend and her uncle, Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk. Shortly following Katherine's burial, Brandon sent for Henry to be brought to London and created a Prince of England.
Mary quickly became with child, and delivered her first baby, a son named Henry, presumably after her father, not her husband, in December 1536. She would have trouble conceiving and delivering healthy children, and her efforts at producing heirs would only be hampered by her husband's distaste for her and for England, often returning to his own estates in France. Her second surviving child, Elizabeth, would not be born until spring 1542, shortly after Henry's death.
Barely a year after her first husband's death, Mary, disregarding the advice of her counsel but with the support of ally Charles Brandon, became betrothed to her childhood friend and confidant, Eustace Chapuys, newly-made Count of Turin and twenty-two years her senior…
"Mama?"
There was the question of what a Queen of England would wear to her second wedding. Mary had easily donned a silver taffeta gown, as was the tradition of all royal Tudor brides, but would forgo the orange blossoms for what had been one of her father's favorite gold crowns, her red hair coiled against her head and hidden underneath a plain white veil with Savoyard lace trim.
She takes a deep breath, and turns to her eight-year-old Harry.
A year-long betrothal, at my age, she wonders idly. A wonder. But better than war as an alternative.
"Yes, my little prince?"
Little prince he was—and only of England, as negotiated by Eustace in the dowry. Harry and Elizabeth did not stand in line to inherit any of the Valois territories. All eventualities had to be accounted for, after all, and England could not afford for…
"So will Uncle Eustace become mine and Bessie's Papa now?" her little boy asks, peering up at her in his fine silver doublet and breeches, constructed of the same shimmering fabric of her bodice and overskirt, and the white slashes in his sleeves matching her kirtle. "Because Bessie already calls him Papa, even though Uncle Brandon tries to tell her not to."
She squints down at the boy.
She had gotten lucky, she knows. Henry—her late husband Henry, she curses his mean and spiteful soul—had been of dark hair and dark eyes, and her children easily looked to be of either their parents features. Harry, of fair complexion and fair hair, with his bright blue eyes was easily a Tudor. Bessie, with her dark curls and pale grey eyes, less so. But she has Valois looks, as the French Ambassador often claims, and Mary sees no possible reason to correct him.
"I see of no reason that you cannot call him Papa in private," she answers tenderly, scooping her child up in her arms. How long until he would be too big and ungainly to lift against her? She fervently prays that the Lord send her more children soon, for as her departed mother once told her that like all women, she had been born to be a mother. "But I would not advise it outside of our solar."
"Because of the French," the boy answers solemnly, with a half-quirked smile.
Mary smiles wryly. "And you have learned too much from your new papa for a boy of only eight. I will have to speak to him of that."
Harry's face falls. "But no! Mama, I like my lessons with Uncle—with Papa."
It warms her heart too much to hear the boy call him that.
No smiling, my lady.
His half-sardonic, half-chiding voice enters her mind too quickly. With too much ease, like it often does as she drifts off to sleep or when first waking up in the morning, warm and content in the safe circle of his arms. He needn't be always with her, because he always will be.
Bessie's eyes are proof of that.
And Harry's smile.
It is a dangerous game they have played these past nine years. (It is a good thing, she reflects, that she played her games with a master of gamesmanship helping her cheat.) And now, that she has even been allowed to marry him, what with whispers of Anne Boleyn come again in the form of a newly-ennobled Savoyard. Perhaps it is something in Tudor blood, a taste for commoners.
God has smiled upon them.
There is a knock at the door, and then the sound of a man's boots walking evenly across the floor. Mary looks up, and waves her lady's maids from rising.
"Charles?" she calls, lowering her son to the floor. He had accompanied her down the aisle on her first trip, and now that duty would belong to her children. Nervously, she twists the coronation ring where it rests on her left hand. "Is it time?"
Her body belongs to England. Her soul to Eustace Chapuys. Her heart to her darling babes. Her mind to her people.
The speech she has written—it is a tenuous political dance, marrying a commoner. Especially a foreign one. But she is eight and twenty and has already sacrificed half of her life's happiness and fortitude to her father and to other men.
Anne Boleyn, the woman who has been much on her mind the past year. Anne Boleyn, who is no longer Boleyn, but Percy, with children of her own who attend court, who play with Harry and Bess. Life… is very strange, but Mary feels a strange kinship to the woman who tore apart her childhood at the seams. She thinks she may understand her, now. Maybe it is easier, with her mother long-buried. The hurts faded, no longer rubbed raw.
Her uncle enters the room, her red velvet cloak folded reverently over his arm.
"It is, your majesty."
No princehood for Eustace. He will become a Duke.
As negotiated with France, for not declaring war for her intentions in a second marriage.
A bloody war over marriage, Mary thinks, trying to push her nerves down with a decidedly nonchalant internal voice. All is fair, even all the measures I have taken in the name of love. All the measures I have taken to marry marriage to love.
Mary I of England, a widow, becomes yet again, a wife.
"He's going to figure it out, if you keep treating him like…"
"Like my son?" her husband (nine years, Mary thinks, feeling vindicated) replies, his smirk visible in even just his voice.
Mary huffs. "He's a smart boy, Eustace. It won't take him too long, once he reaches of—of that age."
Her husband (!) chuckles, stroking his fingers through her long curls. "He will be the least of our worries, by then, my lady."
"I would say," she answers, the corners of her mouth curling up into a more relaxed smile. "Although Elizabeth, I'm afraid, is going to wind up looking more like you than either I or Harry."
Eustace crosses himself. "I would hope not, god-willing."
Mary frowns. "Why not? You have a very handsome face. She has your beautiful eyes, and your long, straight nose and prominent cheekbones, and perhaps it is not all very English, she may set a new standard of beauty one day and—"
He chuckles, wrapping his arms around her waist and rolling himself on top of her, fitting between her legs as her knees come up to press against his hips. "And I will be dead and no one will have a man to compare her too, and the French Ambassador will claim she looks like some distant Valois woman and Harry, and you too, God be good, will smile and play along."
"When Bess is three and ten you will be still be alive." Her nose wrinkles when he begins to trace her jaw with his mouth. "Not all men are like my father, may he rest in peace."
"We can hope," he tells her, pulling her earlobe between his teeth. "That I am not like your father. Not that he rests peaceably."
Mary snorts in a very unladylike fashion that Eustace finds to be more than endearing; he cants his hips against hers.
"And also that I will live to torture myself with the image of our daughter being chased around by suitors," he adds, his voice taking on a deeper tone, more serious and leaden. A promise, from a man who promises nothing to no one but her. And their children. "But you are right, they may never know."
"They'll know," Mary whispers, fingers tracing the fine muscles of his back. One hand goes to his chin, bringing his face level with hers. "They already know. You are already their father even if you were… not their father. Henry was never… he was not a good man. Not like you are."
"Not many people would call me a good man, Maria," he says in reply, but his words are softened by the tenderness in his eyes.
"Eustace Chapuys," she admonishes lightly. "We have very high standards for the Queen of England. Are you saying that you are not fit to keep up with them?"
"Well," he snorts fondly, pushing her hair back onto the pillow and kissing her face. "It is a little bit too late for an annulment, my sweet, for we have already consummated the marriage and created progeny."
She laughs, fingers wending into his curls as his lips move from her face to her neck, to that spot at the juncture of her shoulder and her back, and bites—
"Well then," she gasps, before continuing facetiously, "I will just have to break with Rome—"
Many modern historians have begun to argue that Eustace Chapuys, 2nd Duke of Richmond, was in fact the biological father of all of Mary I's children, and that they had begun an affair as early as 1535 as Katherine of Aragon lay on her death bed. There is evidence in the newly-released private letters between the Queen and her second husband, written between the years of 1542 and up until shortly before the Duke's death in 1562, as well as the timings of a few of Mary's miscarriages, happening too long after Henry would have left to return to France. Regardless, the children born during Mary I's marriage to Henry of France came to regard Chapuys as their father in their private conversation and correspondence.
Ten months after their marriage in 1544, Mary gave birth to twins, Edward and Katherine, after which her health was in serious decline, and many wondered if she would ever recover enough to continue her rule. A regency council was even set up for then ten-year-old Henry IX, but Mary recovered five months later. Reports from the time detail what today would be considered the rupturing of uterine cysts and subsequent infection, possibly from endometriosis.
Mary became pregnant several times over the interceding years, but could not carry another child to term, and would not again until the birth of her last child, Anne, in 1552. Against all odds, Mary had become close friends with her once-enemy Anne Boleyn, even allowing her to become one of her ladies in waiting and political advisor. In 1556, shortly before Anne's death, twenty-year-old Henry IX wed his grandfather's ex-mistress's daughter, seventeen-year-old Georgiana Percy.
Mary ruled England until her death in 1569, although there is indication that she began to hand over some of her power as queen to her heir as early as the year after the Duke of Richmond's death.
While remembered for her second marriage, Mary I is also notable for her currency reform and military policies, and while some debate that they were directly crafted by Richmond, recent evidence suggests that…
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