Boleyn Traitor, page 21
We are dismounting in the inn yard, and the gates are closing on the staring crowd outside, when there is a shout from the high road and a band of exhausted riders wearing the livery of Henry Fitzroy rattles in.
Thomas Cromwell, who rides ahead of the court to ensure the king’s reception, is out of the inn to meet them before the lead rider has even dismounted, and he rushes Fitzroy’s herald into the great hall to speak to the king in private.
Jane, climbing slowly from her litter, asks me: ‘Who was that? They were in such a hurry?’ and when I tell her, she says: ‘Oh, what should I do?’
I gesture that she should go forward to stand beside the king, to receive whatever news Fitzroy has sent with such urgency, and I take her gloves and follow behind, feeling that I am pushing an unwilling broodmare into a pen. But she is so slow that Cromwell has already closed the door on the king’s private room.
Jane looks from the panels of the closed door to me, and I whisper: ‘Better wait.’
We stand awkwardly before the door, everyone watching us, and then I hear a great bellow from inside, as if the king has been gored by a bull or stabbed to the heart. I nearly run in I am so sure he has been attacked, and I hear him shout: ‘No! No! No!’
Thomas Seymour barrels his way through the shocked courtiers to get to his sister. ‘You’ve got to go in,’ he says urgently. ‘I think Henry Fitzroy is dead. I think they’ve just told him.’
‘Oh no!’ she says. ‘Oh why? Poor boy! But – oh no, Thomas, I can’t go in there …’
Even in my shock, I could laugh at this new brother pushing this queen towards the door, and this one – so unlike her predecessor – refusing to seize her chance.
The door is suddenly thrown open before us, and the messenger and Thomas Cromwell stride out. For a moment, before the door is slammed shut and the guard takes up arms before it, I can see inside: the king on his hands and knees on the rush-strewn floor, bellowing like a stag brought down by a spear. He looks wounded beyond recovery, his big mouth gaping wide with screams of pain. It is like a death, a moment of shocking intimacy.
Jane clings to me. ‘I’m not going in there,’ she tells her brother.
Only one person, Lady Margaret Pole, born royal, the king’s cousin, has the courage to intervene. She says a quick word to her sons, Henry and Geoffrey, and takes Jane by the hand. ‘We’ll both go in to him,’ she says firmly.
The guard lifts his halberd for her as for a royal princess, and she leads Jane inwards. The door closes behind them, and Thomas Cromwell is at my side. ‘Send the ladies to their rooms, dinner will be served late,’ he tells me. ‘Henry Fitzroy is dead – a short illness. The king will dine alone in his privy chamber.’
From behind the door, we hear agonised sobbing. ‘Fitzroy! My heir! How could God do this to me? How can God turn against me? Why would God punish me? This must be women’s sin? Women’s sin! Cursed be the woman that did this!’
WE STAY AT the Lyon for three days; the king keeps to his private rooms. We don’t see him. We don’t even hear him after that first night of screaming. Jane, legless with fear, comes out of the room clinging to Margaret Pole and the king locks the door behind them. He only admits servants with trays heaped with food: unbelievable amounts of food, enough for half a dozen men, as if he is choking down sobs with manchet bread and butter.
Everything is ended: his secret triumph that he had a strong son, ready and waiting to be named as heir. His pushing the new law through an obedient parliament. Even the Howard plan to put Mary Howard into the royal line is valueless: her husband, Henry Fitzroy, is dead; and all the plans are for nothing. The king has no heir but girls: Lady Mary a named bastard, Lady Elizabeth another one, and Lady Margaret Douglas, a legitimate half-Tudor niece, has disappeared and nobody even knows where she is.
‘In the Tower,’ Thomas Cromwell tells me by the way, as if it is of little interest. ‘Arrested for marrying young Lord Thom Howard without permission.’
I have to school myself to keep my face perfectly still. ‘I thought my kinsman, Lord Thom, was going home to Kenninghall?’
‘I’d drop the connection if I were you,’ Lord Cromwell advises me. ‘He’s in the Tower, for seducing an heir to the throne. His baby face won’t save him. Courtly love has become treason.’
I find my hands are trembling, and I put them behind my back. ‘A secret marriage is not treason …’
‘It’s against the law.’
‘No, it isn’t …’ I know it is not.
‘A new law, not yet passed. A new law that will say that the royal family can only marry with the king’s permission. If Lord Thom and Lady Margaret married in secret then they have broken that law.’
‘But it was not written when they married …’
Blandly, he nods.
‘This is not justice,’ I say, thinking of the last time that I said that something was unjust. Then it was the king’s warhorse, beheaded for treason. Since then, he has beheaded his wife and my husband. Will he behead his niece as well? Will I say nothing for a niece – just as I said nothing for his wife or his warhorse? Just as I said nothing for my husband?
‘The king is the law,’ Cromwell reminds me. ‘He cannot be unjust.’
‘Rex non potest peccare?’ I quote. ‘The king cannot be wrong?’
Cromwell smiles. ‘Quite so.’
Sir William Paulet, the comptroller of the new queen’s household, comes up to his patron, Lord Cromwell, to ask him for orders.
‘Are we staying here another day, my lord?’
Cromwell nods. ‘Another day, I think.’
‘I’ll have to order mourning clothes for the queen and her ladies from the royal wardrobe in London,’ I say to Sir William.
Lord Cromwell shakes his head. ‘No mourning.’
‘When we get back to Greenwich? For the funeral?’
‘No funeral.’
‘No funeral for the king’s own son?’ I ask disbelievingly.
‘Dead,’ Cromwell mutters in my ear. ‘So nothing to do with the king after all.’
‘The king has ordered the Duke of Norfolk to organise the burial of the body in his family chapel at Thetford Priory,’ Sir William says, as if this is completely normal.
‘Thomas Howard is to bury the king’s son?’ I ask incredulously.
‘He is his father-in-law,’ Sir William reminds me pompously. ‘Henry Fitzroy will be buried by his father-in-law, in his family vault.’
Thomas Cromwell and I silently enjoy the irony that my uncle, who so longed for Henry Fitzroy in his short life, now has him in death. The dead youth is all Howard and no Tudor. The king has sworn he will have no more dead sons, so his beloved boy has not died but vanished, like a seraph in a miracle play. It is as if he never was, and the court has another ghost that we will never mention.
THE KING EMERGES from his rooms without a word about his vigil of gorging, and we resume our journey to Dover, as if nothing has happened at all. Jane hardly dares to look at him; she was so frightened by the roaring and then the solitary feasting. When she has to stand at the king’s side, for the presentations at Dover, I have to prop her up from behind; she floats away from him unless she is anchored.
Lord Lisle and his wife Honor have sailed across the Narrow Seas from their fortress at Calais to greet the king and his new queen and hide their delight that his heir is dead. Not even the king’s sullen greeting overshadows the splendour of their rising sun. They are of the Plantagenet family, old royal blood and the traditional religion, they loved the old queen and pray for her daughter Lady Mary. After the banquet – where the king crams food into his mouth as if gorging on despair – they slip away to the Pole rooms to celebrate the triumph of their family over the Boleyns. Everything is going their way: Anne Boleyn the reform queen disgraced and dead, Henry Fitzroy the Protestant heir, dead, too, Elizabeth is declared bastard, so their darling, Lady Mary, is the only possible royal heir and who could be a better husband for her, and king consort for England, than the favoured son of the old royal family: Reginald Pole himself? The red rose of Tudor Lancaster and the white rose of Plantagenet York will unite to bring lasting peace, and the young royal couple will return England to the Church of Rome. Sir Geoffrey Pole – hopelessly indiscreet – is radiantly happy and all the way home from Dover to London, the Poles and the Courtenays ride with shining faces, as if they have been called to greatness.
Lord Cromwell drops back from the king’s side to bring his big cob beside my pretty roan.
‘Looks as if they didn’t overreach after all – they have greatness in their grasp,’ I remark to him.
‘They’ve been lucky,’ he says grudgingly. ‘They killed Anne the Protestant queen, but God Himself took Fitzroy, the Protestant heir. Now, they think they’ve won – they’ve got the only heir left standing.’
‘It is an annuntiatio,’ I say sourly. ‘And Sir Geoffrey Pole as the Virgin Mary.’
I smile at his snort of laughter.
Westminster Palace, Summer
1536
BUT THE KING surprises us. As soon as we arrive at Westminster he forces Lady Mary to take the oath, and the young woman, very far from triumph, has to deny her mother’s marriage and declare herself illegitimate. The king’s wound has opened up on his leg again, he can barely walk, and there is no heir to the throne. Lady Mary declares herself illegitimate; Lady Elizabeth is illegitimate and too young; Lady Margaret Douglas his niece is still in disgrace in the Tower.
‘Whatever has she done?’ Jane whispers, beckoning me closer.
‘She married young Thom Howard, half-brother to the Duke of Norfolk. Thom is arrested and is being questioned, too.’
She goes even paler. ‘We know nothing,’ she whispers her lesson.
‘Quite right. And anyway, this all happened …’ I trail off. Anne and her reign, and even Queen Katherine and her reign, are never mentioned in Jane’s court, which has no knowledge of anything, especially history.
‘But they’ll blame me,’ Jane predicts dolefully. ‘My brother Edward and his wife Anne will blame me. They’ll all blame me, though I know nothing.’
SHE IS RIGHT. The Seymours blame her for Margaret Douglas’ deception, but it is worse for the Howards: the king accuses them of creeping into the line of succession for the third time. First, there was Anne Boleyn with sortilèges then there was Mary Howard with a marriage contract, now there is Lord Thom Howard with a secret marriage. What is this, if not a conspiracy of Howards?
To cheer the king, Thomas Cromwell suggests a legal device, to speed up executions – a ‘writ of attainder’. Now the king can demand an execution without trial, and no one can appeal against sentence of death. Thom Howard is not accused nor tried nor defended; the king declares him guilty, and parliament slavishly agrees that he must die.
I pass Lord Cromwell on the winding stair. ‘Are we madder than ever?’ I ask.
‘Lady Margaret Douglas had better be mad, for nothing else will save her,’ is all he says, and he goes on down the winding steps to the dark river below.
Westminster Palace, Autumn
1536
THE SOUR MOOD of the pilgrims on the road to Canterbury rumbles through the country like a late summer storm. All the lords report that the workers on their lands and the tenants on their farms are surly, saying that the church, their own parish church, their mother church is under attack. They have given their halfpennies and farthings to the church for feast days and candles for centuries and won’t allow their treasures to be stolen and their windows smashed out. Each village demands that its own abbey or monastery or convent is spared, whatever happens a country mile away.
Even the poorest people hear of the king’s excommunication and there are terrifying rumours that the pope is going to move against the king in a crusade, and Reginald Pole will lead a holy army to invade and restore England to the true faith. At court the Poles, especially Lady Margaret’s youngest son Sir Geoffrey, are ostentatiously loyal. They are never seen together, never even speaking to each other, so I am certain they are organising and the tenants on their vast lands – almost the whole of the west of England – are ready to rise in rebellion the moment that their favoured son, Reginald, lands at the head of a crusade. Lord Cromwell brings the two princesses, Mary and Elizabeth, to join us behind the walls of Westminster Palace and musters men and goods and weapons ready for a siege of London.
Lady Mary stalks into the queen’s rooms, wearing royal purple, and curtseys to Jane Seymour. The angle of her head under the jewelled hood is exactly right for a blood-royal princess to a queen by marriage. Jane, who wisely persists in knowing nothing, jumps up from her throne and kisses her stepdaughter, and Lady Margaret Pole, who escorted her protégé back to her place at court, steps back and smiles at me. The victory of getting Lady Mary to an honoured place at court has been accomplished almost unnoticed – the luck is running with the Spanish party again.
I go to the royal nursery to greet my niece Lady Elizabeth and find an imperious little girl who hides her fear at the strange surroundings by demanding one thing after another from her harassed governess. She is instantly recognisable as Anne’s daughter, though she has the king’s colouring. The look she throws me under sandy eyelashes is as swift and calculating as Anne. Already, aged only three, she knows to hide her emotion; the chubby cheeks of babyhood are her mask.
I take her hand. ‘I think you’re going to be the greatest courtier of all.’
‘I’m not,’ she disagrees instantly. ‘I was Princess Elizabeth, but now it is Lady Elizabeth.’ She has the slightest infant lisp, but there is nothing childish in her dignity.
‘I am Lady Rochford,’ I tell her. ‘I am your aunt.’
‘Tudor?’ she asks keenly.
‘Boleyn,’ I say.
She turns away – the tilt of her little copper head is in an exact copy of Anne’s disdain.
‘Good day, Lady Elizabeth,’ I say.
THE KING’S DAUGHTERS take refuge behind the great walls of Westminster Palace, safe inside the walled City of London, because the men and women of Lincoln and then Yorkshire and then, one after another, all the great counties of the north, declare they will not have their faith destroyed and their beautiful churches emptied of treasure. Every day, news comes in – from one lord or another – of rebels who call themselves pilgrims, marching under banners that show the five wounds of Christ. It is the old crusader banner: a call to all faithful; no Christian will raise a sword against them.
Of course, my uncle the Duke of Norfolk is immediately forgiven any offence. Nothing matters when the king needs a reliable killer. He is ordered to raise his army and go to Yorkshire. He rides out, ready to kill a couple of hundred peasants armed with staves; but finds himself surrounded by fifty thousand men, led by mounted armed gentry, determined that the houses of religion founded by their forefathers and serving their people, shall not be slandered by Cromwell’s inspectors and swallowed by the king’s treasury.
My uncle, outnumbered five to one, takes in his desperate situation and pledges his empty honour to be their friend. He swears to the rebels that the king only needs to know their grievances to set everything right. All these changes – heretical changes – are the fault of the king’s wicked advisor, Lord Cromwell.
Thomas Howard kills two birds with one stone: buying time against the rebels and turning them against his greatest rival – Cromwell. He guarantees that the king will reopen closed monasteries, repay all the stolen treasure, and reunite with the pope. He offers a free and complete pardon to every man, praises them for doing God’s work in protecting the Church against the infidel Cromwell. My uncle is St Paul – he has seen the light. I imagine him gritting his teeth as he smiles at them and sends panic-stricken messages demanding help to the frightened court at Westminster.
‘Pardon them!’ Jane drops to her knees in a flurry of pale silk and lifts her earnest face, framed in the ugly square hood. ‘Mercy!’
There is a stunned silence in the privy chamber. It could not be more awkward. Lord Cromwell pauses in the middle of reading aloud a grovelling letter from the Duke of Norfolk listing the endless reforms he has had to promise in order to save the king’s army from being butchered.
Nobody is talking about a real pardon. Nobody would ever talk about a real pardon, only Jane would think that it could be a real pardon.
I glance around for help in getting Jane out of the way of the royal temper. Nobody responds. Lady Mary, the pilgrims’ princess, is too wise to make any move forward or back. She folds her hands in her sleeves like a nun and looks down at Jane, kneeling at the king’s feet.
‘Pardon them? Pardon them?’ The king repeats Jane’s words in a mocking falsetto voice. ‘Madam, you would do better to get an heir to the throne than advise me to throw it down.’
It is a shocking insult to a new wife in honeymoon days. I glance over at Cromwell and see that he will make no move to rescue Jane, who is now frozen on her knees, condemned as a fool before the entire court, and a barren fool at that. Jane’s brothers coached her to do this queenly ritual; but they could not have been more mistaken. This is not Katherine of Aragon asking pardon for a dozen rowdy apprentices, condemned to death and snivelling. These are powerful rebels with the Spanish party, the Church, the old royal family and most of the lords of the north on their side. They speak with one coherent voice – the king does not want to hear them. They are calling for the death of Cromwell – he’s not going to offer a pardon.
The two men let Jane kneel; it is the fool who saves her.
‘Pardon them!’ Will squeaks, throwing himself to his knees and putting his hands together in mimicry of the queen. ‘Pardon them! And get their leaders to London and execute them when you’ve got them here! That’s what I meant to say. Not pardon them and forgive them and put the abbeys up again. And certainly don’t give the lands back. And don’t repay the money! Quite the opposite! Take more!’
