Chapter 8
Eltham Palace, Christmas
I REMEMBER THAT THE fool called the Boleyns fools like himself when the head of our house, my uncle Thomas Howard Duke of Norfolk, brings his daughter Mary to court for Christmas hoping that she will finally be allowed to bed the king’s bastard son Henry Fitzroy.
Surely, this year, at sixteen years old, Fitzroy must be thought strong enough to be a husband?
He’s strong enough to ride all day with his kinsman Lord Thom; they’re strong enough to forever hang around the ladies at court, both of them poets, both of them courtly lovers, exchanging sonnets with Mary Shelton and the king’s niece, Margaret Douglas – brimming with youthful lust and rhymes.
My uncle the duke has been grinding his yellow teeth for two years, waiting for the king to allow his precious only son to confirm the marriage.
Without a bedding, the wedding can be cancelled and denied, and my uncle’s hopes for a Tudor-Howard grandson destroyed.
But Thomas Howard is the only one in a hurry for this consummation, not the king – whose favour to the duke is always half-hearted, unless he needs him to kill somebody – and not Anne, who regrets agreeing to the marriage.
Thomas Howard would not know a hypothetical syllogism if it curtseyed to him, but he must be haunted by the one that runs: if, if, then .
. . If Anne fails to get a son, if Princess Elizabeth is disqualified from the throne for her sex, if Lady Mary – both woman and named bastard – is disqualified too, if the bastard Fitzroy gets a boy on Mary Howard, then there is a Tudor-Howard baby son and royal heir!
But the young couple are in no hurry to serve the Howard ambition.
Young Henry Fitzroy is in love with a different girl every time he walks into the queen’s rooms. He does not need a wife to slake his thirst; there are plenty of girls at the riverside inns where the young men go in the evening.
Mary Howard, the bride, does nothing to encourage the husband she married at her father’s command.
She is a cold-hearted young woman, coolly obedient to her father, and completely estranged from her mother since the woman was locked up on my information.
She’s no great friend to me for that. She probably knows I betrayed her mother for plotting with the Spanish party, and she barely smiles at me when I greet her and my uncle in the huge Eltham Palace presence chamber.
The duke kisses me on the forehead as if I had never been disgraced and sent away from court.
He acts as if he has forgotten that he failed me; but I have not forgotten.
‘Ah, my dear friend Jane! You’re welcome back to court,’ he tells me. ‘Your sister-in-law will need you in her confinement. When does she go into confinement?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say unhelpfully. ‘She has not announced a date.’
‘Because she does not want to raise false hopes?’ he asks acutely. ‘You can tell me, Jane. I cannot be her friend, or a good uncle to you or your husband, if I don’t know what is needed.’
I will never trust him again. ‘You’re very kind, Your Grace. But I don’t think the queen, nor my husband, need your help? The queen is carrying a prince, and my husband is high in the favour of the king on his own merit. He is to be awarded the Order of the Garter at the next ceremony in April.’
His mouth twists into a smile. ‘I shall be glad to welcome him into his stall at Windsor,’ he says. ‘Such a pity he was overlooked last time. But of course, he’ll get my vote.’
My smile is as insincere as his own. ‘We are grateful, my lord.’
‘HE PROMISED HIS vote?’ George asks me.
We are standing either side of Anne, who is seated to watch the bringing in of the Yule log.
The servants are dragging in an enormous trunk of wood, seasoned for a year in the woodyard outside the palace.
Will the fool is dancing around them with a little handaxe, swiping at it as they drag it in and curse him for threatening their fingers.
The choristers are singing a carol and the ladies are dancing in procession.
The gentlemen are laughing and singing with wassail cups in their hands.
Everyone is here to see the Yule log come in, even the old queen’s friends: Henry Courtenay Marquess of Exeter and his wife Gertrude, and Lady Margaret Pole’s son Henry Lord Montagu, and his brother Sir Geoffrey.
They stand together, smiling, as if they are not privately thinking that it was all done better in the time of Queen Katherine.
Sir Geoffrey does not even have the sense to pretend to seasonal joy but looks around, as sulky as a boy.
‘He promised you his vote.’ I raise my voice over the carols and the laughter. ‘But I told him you would get the Garter anyway.’
Anne laughs. ‘Well said! He needs our favour now; it’s not the other way round.’
‘He’ll always be in favour when the king wants dirty work done,’ George says. ‘When the king needs an army to break up a riot against taxes, when some poor women are protesting against their fields being stolen.’
‘He’s welcome to dirty work,’ Anne says.
‘But soon, he’ll have none to do. There’ll be no parish taxes on the poor when I make the king give the monastery fines to poor people.
When Cromwell closes an ill-living monastery, it will reopen as a centre for the new learning, as a school or as a hospital.
The villages will become wealthy on the Church fortunes. ’
‘Thomas Cromwell thinks that, too,’ I remark.
‘Well, he would,’ George says dismissively. ‘It’s his sort of people who are breaking down the fences; it’s his sort of people leading the riots.’
Anne laughs at George’s contempt for Cromwell’s breeding.
The fool leaps onto the moving log as it is dragged towards the red-hot embers in the fireplace.
‘Take care!’ I cry out to him. He does a little running dance along the length of the tree as they haul it onto the hearthstone and then leaps clear as they roll it deep into the grate onto the glowing ashes.
‘You take care!’ he says nonsensically.
‘I don’t find him funny at all,’ Anne says, watching him dance around the court, threatening the ladies’ gowns with his sooty hands. ‘I’ve never heard him say anything witty.’
‘He’s not a witty fool,’ George says. ‘He’s a wise one. He tells the king things that nobody else would dare to say.’
‘We’ve come to that?’ she demands. ‘The king’s wisest advisor is his fool?’
‘Everyone knows that it’s you,’ I say.
‘Yes, with the two of you behind me,’ she says quietly.
I have regained my place as the third point of this triangle, the trigono named by the Greek philosophers as the strongest shape for bearing a load.
Anne’s influence over the king is a heavy load to carry and I do it as my courtier work.
I no longer imagine I am bound to the Boleyns by love.
There is love between the two of them; but it excludes everyone else.
I hardened my heart in my long exile, I dropped my longing for love, as they dropped me and I came back to court for ambition – not for love.
The fool chases people into a chain dance; he starts the dance with hands black with soot from the chimney, and as they go hand to hand, they pass chimney soot to each other and recoil laughing.
Jane Seymour fends him off with both hands outstretched, like a little child trying to keep her dress clean, and she runs to hide behind the king, who takes his own silk handkerchief to wipe her fingers, scolding the fool for teasing her.
‘Fools seem to be in fashion,’ I say sourly.
LIKE THE REST of court, I attend the Christmas gift-giving in the king’s presence chamber.
It’s more a forced tribute than a joyful exchange.
Everyone lines up to hand over their gift to the king’s clerk, who guesses the value and jots it down so the neighbouring clerk can see.
In turn, he chooses a gift from the nearby table, worth a little less, and passes it to the king, who hands it to the kneeling courtier with a word of Christmas cheer.
Nothing could be further from loving, spontaneous giving; it is a well-organised exchange where value is leached from the courtiers to the king, and they pretend they are glad.
In an effort to curry favour and offer something that is difficult to value, I usually give something that I have made: a box of collars for the king’s shirts embroidered with gold thread.
It has taken longer to sew than usual this year – his neck is thicker: a fat eighteen inches.
‘I hear your father has given Lady Mary one of his translations,’ Thomas Cromwell remarks to me, as people file in and present gifts to His Majesty and receive his gifts to them in reply.
‘Yes, Thomas Aquinas’ Angelical Salutation,’ I say. ‘The first part.’
‘Her mother, the dowager princess, is said to be gravely ill,’ Thomas Cromwell remarks. ‘Would your father advise Lady Mary to visit her for the last time? Would he advise her to take the oath, acknowledge the king as Supreme Head of the Church, so that she can say goodbye to her mother?’
I make no comment at the cruelty of making a young woman declare her mother a whore as the price of attending her deathbed. Instead, I emphasise my father’s loyalty to the king. ‘He would always advise her to obey her father.’
Unnoticed by the other people, receiving and giving royal gifts, Thomas Cromwell leans closer to ask: ‘Is it true that Lady Mary is to be invited to visit court? Is the queen trying kindness?’
‘Only as a bribe – she has to take the oath.’
‘I am sure they would be friends! The queen can be enchanting. She made herself beloved of the king through enchantment, didn’t she? Sortilèges? Magic in her smiles?’
I hesitate. ‘It was magical in the sense that they fell in love. She is enchanting in that sense.’