Boleyn Traitor, page 42
We assume that King James will come with a riding court of some hundreds, but we have to be ready to house a thousand courtiers – the English cannot look unprepared or too poor to pay for rebuilding. The old tents from the Field of the Cloth of Gold are pulled out of storage, reburnished, and sent on their way up the North Road too. They will be set up on the meadows outside the walls, to house the Scots court overflowing from the rebuilt abbey and castle.
While the king redraws plans and spurs on the builders to throw up halls and rooms and kitchens and stables, he dreams of dominating the younger man. He will resolve the constant border warfare; he will separate the king from his alliance with France. He will win Scotland to peace. More than anything else, he will make Mary of Guise regret her choice of James of Scotland over Henry of England. This visit to York – originally just one of the many stops on the progress around the north – has become the centre of his plans, the legacy of his reign.
Every day, we rehearse the new masque. Dressmakers work on togas, and all the artists in the north of England are summoned to York to make masks, headdresses, scenery, and to build the Aurelian walls of plaster. They have to design and build pretend siege engines; this Roman army is to have cannon and thunder-flashes. Aurelian, the king himself, swathed in a toga of cloth of gold with a crown of gold laurel, is to enter on a throne of gold pulled by the white mules of the queen’s litter. Stands are built for an audience of thousands.
The grander the plans, the greater the work, the more certain I am that he will announce Kitty’s coronation at the end of the masque, when he is in his golden pomp as Caesar Aurelian. I commission a masquing crown of painted gold for her, ready for his command. I keep her to the rigid schedule of rehearsals, entertaining the king, praying beside him, dining beside him, and even smiling with pretend pleasure as he comes barging into her rooms at night and is heaved up into her bed. In just a month’s time, she will be crowned Queen of England, I promise her – just endure another day. In a year’s time, she will be dowager queen, with a massive fortune, and a place on the council of regency for seventeen years until little Prince Edward comes of age – just endure another night.
‘It’s worth it!’ I tell her in the morning.
She turns her face from the stinking sheets. ‘Is it?’
WE ARE STILL preparing for King James’ arrival when a letter comes from Falkland Palace to say that he has not even started his journey. This is an insult that Thomas Cromwell would never have allowed. We would never have gone near the border until we knew that the Scots king had started on his journey. The king blusters that it gives us more time to prepare, that he is glad. He is not waiting on his nephew but taking his own time on his works. He hides his anger and is more terrifying, seething in silence, than when he is ranting. Nothing can divert him from his silent fury: his daughter Lady Mary fades from sight – she is always at her prayers. The queen is like the kitten of her nickname – she slinks off to a corner whenever she can. The courtiers cannot escape. We have to walk with him, kneel beside him in prayer, try to divert his brooding inattention, we are all afraid of him.
One morning, very subdued, we process into the chapel and see Thomas Culpeper in his place behind the king. I am proud of Kitty; she does not betray herself for a moment. She curtseys to the king to the right depth of reverence and calmly walks to her place in the church. She kneels and closes her eyes in prayer. Only then do I see her sway on her knees, and her lips move to bless his name, but she does not glance towards Thomas until breakfast, when he bows to her as we all walk into the hall.
‘Master Culpeper, I am pleased to see you are well again,’ she says lightly, and no one can hear the longing in her voice.
‘I thank you for your kind wishes.’ He bows and goes to his place.
She watches him go.
‘Kitty,’ I say very quietly, and she turns to me with her face closed and calm.
‘I know,’ she says, and I think: we are teaching her to be a courtier. We are teaching her to be a liar.
THE KING SENDS Thomas Culpeper as his deputy to bring us ladies into dinner. As he takes my hand, I feel him slip a little ring into my palm. It is a cramp ring, blessed by the king at Easter.
I look up at him and see his dark eyes are bright with laughter. ‘This is a kind gift,’ I say.
‘It’s a crime,’ he says. ‘I’ve incriminated you, Jane. I stole it from the king’s collection last Easter, and I swear it brought my fever down. I thought you might like it, in case you are ever ill.’
‘You shouldn’t have taken it,’ I scold him. ‘The queen would have given you one if she had known that you wanted it.’
‘I do want one from her,’ he says earnestly. ‘Think of it as an exchange. I want hers in return for this one.’
‘You shouldn’t ask,’ I say, then I see his mock-penitent face. ‘Oh, very well.’
‘And she must give it me herself,’ he insists. ‘This evening.’
‘If it’s safe,’ I say.
I THINK NOTHING WOULD have prevented him coming; nothing could have made her refuse him. He walks through the abbess’ little conversation room, up the stairs to her bedroom, and the moment he is in the door, they are in each other’s arms, enwrapped in the huge vaulted room, young lovers on a bench before the fire. She sits on his knees; she winds her arms around his neck. She buries her face in his shoulder; he grips her as if he would never let her go. They are entwined. She whispers to him that life is unbearable without him; he says that he had passionate dreams of her, that he was delirious and thought that she came for him in a beautiful barge that sailed through his bedroom window.
But still, they do not plan beyond the next night, when they can only be together if Thomas is not called to sleep in the king’s chamber. They don’t speak of her coronation, about the presentation to King James. They don’t think about the journey back to London; they don’t even think of this coming autumn or winter, nor how they will bear to be parted in the court’s daily routine when we are living in the London palaces again. They take all their joy in the present moment; they want nothing more than this now: this fierce grip of passion, the whisper of desire.
To my absolute horror, I suddenly hear the noise of several men crossing the hall outside the bedroom door and then a loud knock on the door. The couple at the fireplace freeze for a moment, and this time, they don’t leap apart; he does not run to hide, leaving her alone to face whoever is at the door. They rise to their feet; they turn towards the door. He puts his hand around her waist. They look like two beautiful lovers facing a wicked enchanter: they are poised together, confronting danger, as if ready to be turned into stone together.
‘Are you mad? Fssst!’ I wave him to the doorway, and unwillingly, he goes towards it. ‘Don’t go down the stair!’ I hiss. ‘There may be someone at the bottom, guarding the parlour door!’ I close the door on him, and turn to Kitty. ‘Ready?’
She is blanched with shock. Wordlessly, she nods. I go to the main door that leads to the hall.
‘Who is it?’
‘Anthony Denny. Is that you, Lady Rochford? Is the queen still awake? Will she receive His Majesty?’
I don’t need to glance back at Katheryn to see that she cannot be forced into bed with the king tonight. She is shaking from head to foot as if she has the ague. Even he would notice.
I press her into a chair so that she does not fall to the stone floor in a faint.
‘Her Majesty is asleep,’ I call. ‘Shall I wake her?’
Anthony Denny, outside the door with a couple of companions, pauses for a moment. He will be thinking, as we all think, what an ordeal this marriage is for the queen. He may be thinking that the king is drunk and probably incapable.
‘No, don’t wake her,’ he decides. ‘I’ll tell the king she is already abed. It’s all right, Lady Rochford. Let her have her sleep.’
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Goodnight.’
Kitty and I freeze, listening to the steps of half a dozen men going back across the stone-floored hall to the king’s side. The little staircase door swings open, and Culpeper comes out, as pale as if he were still sick.
‘I’d better go,’ he says shortly. ‘If he’s staying up, he’ll ask for me.’
Slowly, they reach for each other, as if they are wading through deep water. She slides into his arms; she lifts her face for his kiss. She clings to him as he wraps his arms around her and kisses her deeply, passionately, wordlessly. She takes a cramp ring off her finger; he holds out his hand, and she puts it on the wedding-ring finger of his left hand. He bends his head and kisses it and her lips. Then he steps back and plunges through the door and down the little staircase, and we hear the door shut at the bottom, and he is gone.
THE WORK GOES on wearily. We are step-perfect in our masque, and all the costumes have been made, and the elaborate machinery of pretend cannon and walls and miniature siege engines is ready. New buildings in the city are topped off by the exhausted workmen with a branch of a tree in the chimney and an allowance of ale, but as soon as they are finished on one building, they are sent to another site. The tents and pavilions arrive on lumbering wagons drawn by oxen up the ruined road from London, and the ground is cleared in the scythed meadows; but still, we wait to hear from King James.
One of the English border lords writes to say that he has heard that James of Scotland has not left Falkland Palace and has no intention of coming south. My uncle the Duke of Norfolk, who urged this meeting as the only way to tame these warring lands, has to face the king with the news that the king of Scots does not trust our guarantees; he will not risk himself so far into English lands. He does not even decline the honour of our invitation; he claims that he never accepted it in the first place. He pretends that he did not promise to attend; he pretends he said nothing. It hardly matters what he says to add insult – he is not coming.
He makes all of us look like fools – all our rehearsals and rebuilding, and the lumbering wagons clogging the roads with our ostentatious treasure. To prepare so richly for a visit and have a guest simply snub us, is worse than if he had refused at the start. By claiming he is unsafe in English lands, he accuses the king of dishonour: putting a fellow monarch at risk, offering a safe passage that he is too weak to deliver.
The worst thing for the king’s men is that they know that James’ belief that the king is dishonourable, and these lands are unsafe, is true. Even though the king did not plan an entrapment he would have been amused if James had been jeered and jostled in the English border lands, and would not have protected him from angry borderers. The entertainments – our masque – were deliberately choreographed to insult James as the weaker king of a smaller kingdom. The grand hospitality was to humiliate him as a poorer king of a poor kingdom. There would have been nothing for him to enjoy, and every agreement – peace on the border or safe passage for merchants – would have come at a high price. King James was wise to refuse, his wife was right to avoid her former suitor, and their insulting absence shows King Henry not only that he cannot command his nephew, but that many believe he has lost control of the north of England, too.
Worse for me, for Kitty, for all of us on the queen’s side, is that there will be no coronation if it does not distress Mary of Guise. Sweating with offence, the king cancels everything. He demands that we go home, and it is as if York’s reconciliation, the peace talks with Scotland, even the queen’s coronation, are of no more value than the painted canvas Aurelian walls, which are torn down and burned.
WE HAVE A week of rain, and although nobody wants to travel for long days, soaking wet on muddy roads, we might as well go back to London as sulk in York. The king sinks into an angry torpor, and no one can please him: not even Kitty; not even his fool, who has too many topics to avoid; not even my uncle, who is given the impossible task of expelling every single Scotsman from English lands – however valuable his trade, however long his family has settled with us. The king will do anything, however petty, to revenge himself on his nephew, and he only speaks to my uncle to sponsor vindictive raids by English reivers on Scots lands. The young men of the court, Thomas Culpeper among them, are mustered to make an army for surprise attack on isolated Scots’ castles. My uncle advises against deploying jousters against fortifications, so the king now thinks his young companions are of no more threat than painted cannon, and he is furious with them too.
It is not until late September that we turn the weary cavalcade and ride down the roads we took before. It was raining when we left, and it is raining now, and the king is in a worse mood than ever. Nothing is well done, nobody can speak without offending him, nothing is organised as Thomas Cromwell would have done it, and nobody understands the pain that he is in. He sends Kitty from dinner to her rooms as if she were a daughter, not a wife; and he stops coming to her bed. He keeps his young men up all night to gamble with him, and they all learn to lose as he cannot tolerate anyone else winning. Night after night, Thomas cannot get to Kitty’s rooms as he has to play with the king, lose a small fortune, and then sit with him late into the night as he complains of perfidy, and smoulders, like a wet peat fire banked down with hatred.
Collyweston Palace, Autumn
1541
THE KING WAKES later and later every day, as he stays up all night gambling and drinking and he rarely comes out of his rooms before midday. So on our first morning at Collyweston Palace, Thomas Culpeper and half a dozen of the young companions come on their own to sing under the windows of the queen’s ladies, and the girls and Kitty throw on gowns and run down into the garden for the sunrise as if it were a May Day for young lovers. Unnoticed by the ladies and young companions, Culpeper wraps a cape around Kitty’s shoulders. For just a moment, he holds her, and then stands beside her to face east, where a rosy sun is rising through wispy clouds. They stand quite still, the sunlight on their rapt faces, as if this moment of stillness and silence at sunrise is a spell which will hold them entranced all through the rest of the day.
Someone laughs and makes a joke, and the magic is broken, and I sweep the ladies back up the stairs and bundle Kitty back into bed and stoke the fire in her bedroom.
‘That’s the last time you’ll be able to run out this season,’ I warn her. ‘You’ll have to take more care when we get home. Has he said anything?’
Her eyes are shining green with happiness at being with Culpeper for one moment. ‘No? What should he say?’
He must know as well as I that they cannot meet at Windsor Castle or Hampton Court or Westminster Palace as they have done on progress. The routines are too fixed, the king more regular in his habits. He will come to Kitty’s bedroom once or twice a week, but always without notice, and we cannot turn his groom of the chamber from her bedroom door ever again. Besides, there are more ladies at court when we are near London; the great ladies of the kingdom who have served other queens expect entrance to the queen’s bedroom. The wives of the lords have nothing to do but watch and gossip. The spy networks of ambassadors, the council, the churches and the advisors have been absent on progress but they will all be watching in London. Kitty cannot meet Thomas in her bedroom in any of the royal palaces, there is nowhere that they can meet secretly and they cannot even speak together for very long.
‘Thomas says the ulcer on the king’s leg is getting worse,’ she whispers. She glances to the door, which is shut and locked; she glances at the curtained windows. ‘He says it’s down to the bone, like a dog bite, and running wet as if it was a rabid dog that bit. Dr Butts has warned the king that he can’t eat and drink as he does. He says he is gambling with his health. He says he might …’ She breaks off.
‘He’s an old man,’ I say cautiously.
‘Thomas says the Seymours are preparing a regency for next spring,’ she says. She puts her hand half over her mouth, as if her pillows cannot be trusted with these treasonous words.
‘Next spring?’ They think as I do that winters are hard on old men; the king nearly died last Lent, and he is heavier and sicker now than he was last year. He can’t live for much longer, and then Kitty will be free – we will all be free of him.
‘Next spring.’ She nods. She taps the wooden headboard of the bed; it makes a hollow knocking sound, as if on a coffin lid. At once, she looks aghast. ‘I meant to touch wood for good luck,’ she says, ‘only good luck.’
‘We won’t speak of this,’ I say. ‘But I wish us good luck, too.’
She holds out her hands. ‘And you’ll stay with me, Jane? When I am dowager queen? And then … when … I remarry?’
I think: yes, I will stay with the dowager queen. If we could get the prince into our keeping, we could have a household which was a royal court. Who could be a better governess for the young prince than me? Who in this court is better read? Where might this life take me? Dear to the dowager queen, the keeper of her secrets, and she the stepmother of the next King of England. My face does not show my leap of excitement, my soaring ambition.
‘I will stay with you,’ I say sweetly. ‘I will stay with you always.’
Chenies Manor, Buckinghamshire, Autumn
1541
OUR ROUTE HOME takes us to the country house of Lord Russell – a firm favourite of the king, one of the old lords who has served the Tudors since their arrival, one of the old lords who has taken my Lord Cromwell’s fall as his own advantage. He was made a baron at the last round of ennoblements, and he is Lord High Admiral.
His house, Chenies Manor, is much changed from when I was here before. Then, I was with my sister-in-law Anne, on the progress we made to celebrate the arrest of Sir Thomas More, when Anne was at her greatest peak of success. If I believed in ghosts, I would be haunted by my younger self and by Anne and George – all three of us supremely confident in our looks, our charm, our wit, and our future. Now, a fifth queen and I ride under the great red-brick archway to the inner courtyard, and there is no Queen Anne waiting for me on the great stone steps before the open double doors, but Lady Russell, beaming with pride, richly dressed waiting to welcome us.
