Chapter 6
Morley Hallingbury, Norfolk, Summer
JUST BEFORE MIDSUMMER day, Father is summoned to London on royal business.
‘They don’t ask for me?’ I check.
He shakes his head. ‘You don’t want to come to court this summer, Jane, and I wish I didn’t have to. It’s a bad business. The trials of Bishop Fisher and the king’s dearest friend, Thomas More.’
Mother and I stand on the great steps of the new hall to wave him goodbye, the bright oak double doors behind us, open to the summer sunshine.
‘I’ll be back in a sennight,’ my father promises dourly. ‘This won’t take long.’
I go down the steps to his horse’s head to ask him quietly, so that no one else can hear: ‘What if they plead not guilty? What if Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas refuse to swear the oath and refuse to say anything at all? You can’t be guilty of treasonous words if you don’t speak – can you?
You can’t find them guilty if won’t take the oath; but don’t say why? ’
My father makes a grimace. ‘I’m not riding up to London in the heat of summer to find them not guilty,’ he says shortly.
‘This is a treason trial organised by Master Cromwell for the benefit of the Boleyns. The verdict is as secure as that man’s grasp of the law – which is to say clawlike – unguibus.
I’m going to show loyalty to the king and to enforce his will – not to judge guilt or innocence. ’
I bend my head for his blessing, and he puts his heavy hand on my hood.
‘Anyway,’ he says more cheerfully. ‘Cromwell has promised me the pick of the books from Thomas More’s library – I’d go for that alone. Your husband’s already got More’s lands.’
‘Before the verdict?’ I ask, shocked, though I also want to know: what lands? And how much?
‘Aye,’ my father says. ‘Before the verdict. Before us judges even arrive, before we’re sworn in. So that tells you there’s no doubt, doesn’t it? Thomas More isn’t going to go home and find his furniture gone and his books missing. He’s never going home at all.’
He wheels his horse, and his men form up around him, two before, two on either side, and two behind; the roads have become dangerous in Anne’s England.
He waves to my mother and pats his pocket to show her that he has the list of things that she needs from the London merchants.
He throws a salute to me, and he sets off down the long drive between the fresh green beech trees, to sentence the Bishop of Rochester and the Lord High Chancellor of England to death – because these two good men, great men, refused to obey Anne’s new law.
WHEN HE COMES home, a pack horse behind him laden with books from Thomas More’s library, he brings the news – that is no news – that Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher – and five holy men were all sentenced to death, for refusing to acknowledge that there is a new pope and he is Henry.
Thomas More and John Fisher have gone to the scaffold, true to the faith of their childhoods.
‘There’s no greater power than the King of England in England,’ my father says shortly. ‘Ergo, the king is pope and emperor in England.’
I open my mouth to ask that – since there is only one church – if the king is pope in England, is he also pope in Italy, where the other pope sits on his throne at Rome? Is he an emperor in Spain, where the emperor is Charles?
But my father shakes his head, draws me very close, and whispers in my ear: ‘Seven better scholars than I answered that question, and they are dead for it. A wise man or woman does not ask it. A good courtier does not think it. Prepare yourself to return to court, Jane, and don’t think of things where the king has been advised, parliament has enacted, and the executioner has confirmed – most finally as only he can do. ’
AFTER THE DEATHS of Bishop Fisher and Thomas More, the court goes on summer progress without a care in the world. Protestants and Papists, enemies and friends leave the crowded, diseased capital city for weeks, and Church and people are forgotten by the man who demanded complete power over them.
‘Nobody is going to invite you back to court while they are on progress.’ My mother states the obvious.
‘I know,’ I say patiently. ‘I don’t expect it.’
‘So, when do you expect to go? If you know everything?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, gritting my teeth on my irritation. ‘Master Secretary will send for me, when the queen needs me.’
‘She gets everything she wants,’ she says with mild spite.
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘She’s queen.’
IT IS NOT until the end of summer that another letter comes for me, with the Cromwell seal on the outside and the loopy round initials of T for Thomas and C for Cromwell at the foot of the page.
Again, it is letterlocked: folded over and over and spliced on itself, though again, there is nothing in it to interest any spy.
Cromwell writes the usual courtesies: he tells me of the summer progress the court made to the West Country; they chose not to stay at Margaret Pole’s great palace at Bisham – which I read as a snub to the lady of the old royal family and a blow to the Spanish party, who are reeling with the death of their champions, Fisher and More – and their majesties are so merry that progress is to be prolonged into autumn.
Only at the very end of the letter do I find the invitation.
The queen’s rooms have missed your good sense, and her ladies have missed your supervision.
Her Majesty will need the ladies of her family at her next confinement, and her sister, Mary Boleyn – now Mary Stafford – will never return to court.
You may come back to your former place as senior lady-in-waiting in the queen’s rooms, living with your husband on the king’s side, on the usual terms. The queen commands me to say that you may come at once, and I trust you will consider me as your friend.
I note that Anne – now the wife of a pope and an emperor – is now ‘Her Majesty’. I don’t care. I will call her Holy Father if she wants.
I tap on the door of the library, and enter, confident of my welcome.
My father is seated at his great carved table, parchment unrolled and weighted down around him, writing on a great folio of paper, with one of the many quills I trimmed for him.
I see the scribbled versions of different translations and the blotted tries at rhyming words.
He looks up as I come in, and he smiles at me. ‘Master Secretary told me he would invite you back to court after the summer progress. Has he done so?’
I lay the letter before him, and I see his satisfied smile as he reads it.
‘You could not have a better man for your sponsor,’ my father says.
‘He’s not noble blood; but don’t despise him on that account, Jane.
He’s a man of great abilities and a favourite of the king.
In him, you see how a common man rises through work and education.
His Italian is better than mine; I envy him his years in Florence. ’
‘He says I am to consider him as my friend.’ I point to the looping words.
‘Yes, he means you’re to tell him all that passes in the queen’s rooms.’ My father picks up his pen and corrects an error in spelling, just for his own satisfaction, because he cannot help but improve a line, even from another author.
‘I’ll never interfere in royal business again,’ I say hotly. ‘I shan’t fight Anne’s battles for her!’
‘You’ll do your duty,’ he corrects me. ‘He’s not invited you back to court to be idle.
You’ll observe her, and her ladies, and tell him what you see.
He’s putting you in the queen’s rooms to give him forewarning.
He’ll want to know everything before it gets out – that the pregnancy is going as it should, that her ladies are fit for their posts, that no one’s speaking against the new laws, who’s in favour of the old queen – that sort of thing.
More than anything, he’ll want to know what Anne is thinking, before he hears from the king that he has had a new idea – quite his own – and it must be law tomorrow. ’
‘As the queen’s senior lady, it is my duty to keep the king’s principal secretary informed,’ I say carefully.
‘Warn him what she’s thinking,’ he tells me. ‘If you can, tell him what she’s going to say, before she puts it into the king’s mind as his own idea. Get ahead of her, and you’re ahead of the king, and so – more to the point – is Cromwell.’
I hesitate. ‘But Father, is this not to make a tyrant? To do his will before he’s asked it?
If the king is first among equals, should he not speak his wishes and his peers debate it in parliament?
And now, as Head of the Church – should he not put his ideas to the bishops and scholars for them to test against the Bible and the philosophers?
Otherwise, he is the only power in England?
Is that not tyranny instead of monarchy? Wasn’t that the dilemma of Rome?’
My father puts a gentle hand on mine. ‘Yes,’ he says very quietly.
‘But I have just come from the execution of a man who warned of this. Think, Jane, as I have trained you to think. Machiavelli says that all kings have to become tyrants or be overthrown. This is the rise of the Tudors to tyranny; this is the rise of Anne to tyranny. Make sure you rise with them.’