Chapter 9 #3
‘Get George!’ Her voice is a shriek. She jumps to her feet and sways with faintness.
I have to hold her from running out to find him. ‘Anne, be still! He’s with the king – all his closest men are with him. He’s in his presence chamber; they brought him in. He fell, and his horse fell on him. But he was in full armour; he might just be faint . . .’
She pants and claps her hand to her belly. For a moment, nobody says anything. Then she breathes deeply; her colour comes back. She blinks; she recovers herself. I see her assembling her wits, straightening her back, calculating her advantage.
‘There,’ I say soothingly. ‘There, there,’ meaningless words while I watch the hypothetical syllogism work its magic on the two of them: if, if, then .
. . If the king dies today, if Anne gives birth to a boy, if the Spanish party are weaker than the Howards, then there is a Howard regency for a Tudor-Howard baby king!
Anne turns to her uncle, who is standing beside the cold fireplace, looking down into the cold grate, waiting for her to become the skilled politician he knows that she is. She takes a shuddering breath. ‘Regent,’ she prompts him.
He nods. ‘Understand this: the king’s own sister Margaret was queen regent of Scotland when her husband died, leaving her with a young son.
Queen regent until the boy was crowned. She’s not the only one.
Queen Margaret of Anjou was queen regent for her young son when her husband lost his wits.
It’s been done before. It’s the right thing.
You could do it. With my support, you could take the title.
With my support, you could declare yourself regent and seize the power of a king.
You would rule as a king with parliament and the privy council – we’d call it a regent council – until your son is twenty-one years old.
Together, we could bring it off.’ He looks at her, his dark eyes narrow with suspicion.
‘Mind, neither of us could do it alone.’
‘A Howard regency,’ she says.
He nods. There is a long silence. ‘We’d have to work together,’ he specifies. ‘No tricks.’
‘We’d have to get rid of Lady Mary at once,’ she says. ‘Before anyone suggests her as the heir and queen . . .’
He nods. ‘Marry her off. . . Or . . .’
‘Send her to Spain?’ I suggest quietly.
‘No. I want rid of her forever,’ she repeats. ‘Permanently.’
He understands her before I do. He nods.
‘I must go to him.’ She takes two steps to the door, but she sways slightly, and I take her cold hand.
‘Sit down, Anne. Let me see if—’
‘No, let her go,’ the duke orders me. ‘She has to be seen, taking control, managing everything. I will take her.’ He puts out his arm, and Anne understands exactly how they are to appear: the pregnant queen and her uncle, the duke, who will protect her and the unborn legitimate royal heir.
Nobody can stand against the two of them.
If the king is dead, her baby is his only legitimate heir, and Thomas Howard, with his own private army, will make her queen regent.
The baby in her belly is the next king, and Anne and her uncle will rule in his name until he takes the throne.
This is the very script of Howard dreams.
Thomas Howard smiles one of his rare, sweet smiles at me. ‘Quite so,’ he says politely. He prompts Anne: ‘Queenly. Undeniable.’
Anne puts her hand on his arm and stands tall as I go ahead of them and throw open the door to the presence chamber, where the ladies break off their panic-stricken gossip and sink into deep curtseys as the Boleyn queen and the Howard duke go by.
THE KING LIES like a dead man. They undress him and put him into his bed, and he makes no sound.
He is alive, breathing and warm, but he hears nothing and sees nothing.
There are a few who say this is the same curse that struck an earlier king Henry, who slept for more than a year and woke up to find his country at war and his throne lost.
‘Not at all,’ Thomas Howard says. ‘The country is not divided. No one’s claiming the throne. We are as one.’
Thomas Cromwell, waiting outside the king’s presence chamber for news like the rest of us, exchanges one brief glance with me.
Of course, there are other claimants; there are always other claimants.
There is Lady Mary: now called a bastard but known as a royal princess and the true heir to all the Papists in the country and everyone abroad.
There is the only legitimate child: the Princess Elizabeth, only two years old and a girl at that.
If you count acknowledged bastards, there is Henry Fitzroy, betrothed to Mary Howard.
Other claimants would be the endless royal cousins and nephews from the Plantagenets, the former royal family: the Courtenays, the Poles, the Lisles and their children.
‘Do they think she will be regent?’ Thomas Cromwell asks me, so quietly that I can hardly hear him as he steps up behind me.
‘Yes,’ I say shortly.
‘Were they planning for his death?’
That would be treason. ‘Of course, they’re thinking what the king would want . . .’
Master Cromwell nods and works his way around the room to where Thomas Howard waits at the door to the privy chamber, Anne leaning on his arm. The two men confer rapidly and quietly; Anne listens in silence. Then the door to the king’s presence chamber opens, and Anne goes in alone.
I see from the corner of my eye Henry Courtenay speaking quickly and quietly to one of his men, who bows and leaves the room. We are not the only ones thinking of Lady Mary as her father lies dying.
WE ALL WAIT for an hour, incapable of going away, hardly daring to speak, though outside, the common people whisper and the tournament flags are stirring in the breeze off the river and the horses standing in their heavy saddles. Finally, Dr Butts comes out; the doors close behind him.
‘I am pleased to tell you that His Majesty has recovered his senses,’ he said. ‘God has saved him; he is unhurt. God save the king!’
‘God save the king!’ we sigh – it is almost a groan – and then Anne comes out, white as a ghost and bares her teeth in a joyless smile.
‘The king will rest in his bedchamber,’ Dr Butts announces. ‘I will stay with him.’
He turns back to the king’s bedroom door, and the guards let him in.
Anne beckons me. ‘Help me,’ she says shortly.
She leans on me as we walk back to the queen’s side, and I put her into her chair in her privy chamber. Her ladies straggle in behind us. No one wants to sew. Everyone wants to describe their own shock, what they saw, what they felt; but one look at Anne’s pale face discourages them.
‘You can all go and pray,’ she rules. ‘My sisters, Mary and Jane, will help me to bed. The rest of you change your gowns and go and pray for the king’s health and thanksgiving for his recovery. Dine in my presence chamber, not in hall. No music. No dancing.’
WE ALL DECLARE that we have witnessed a miracle.
A miracle! The king survived a fall that would have killed a normal man.
But he jumped up unhurt. We tell ourselves this every day; we give thanks for his health in chapel four times a day.
But though he is miraculously saved, he does not reappear.
We hear that the old wound on his leg has opened up.
He is in an agony of pain; he cannot get up for days.
Anne, in her quiet rooms, is as pale as when she thought he would die.
There are no more services of thanksgiving for the death of Katherine of Aragon, and the king does not send for Anne.
At last, he comes out of his private rooms, his shaven head printed with the bruise from his helmet, like a dark-blue mask that he can never lift off.
He limps with the pain of his leg, which has worsened, and he looks oddly furtive – like a man hiding a terrible secret.
He has learned his own mortality. Riding in the joust against young men to celebrate his first wife’s death, he thought himself immortal.
Now, he learns that he, too, can die, in a moment, alone as she was, cold as she was, with a great weight crushing the breath out of him.
‘You have to be a very great scholar to be able to imagine death,’ my father remarks, visiting me in my beautifully furnished Rochford rooms.
I am alone; George is keeping Anne company. These days, they sit for hours in silence, as if they, too, have suddenly thought that the king is mortal, and we have no future but the baby in Anne’s belly.
‘It’s almost impossible for a man to imagine his death, except as a tragedy for others,’ my father thinks aloud.
‘How can a mind imagine its own absence? It’s a paradox.
And a king – who spends his life enforcing his will and embodying his desires – how can he imagine that will and those desires are no longer present?
The absence of that will? How imagine a world without his orders?
’ Thoughtfully, my father opens his missal and scribbles a little note to himself on the fly leaf.
‘He’s always disliked the colour black,’ I volunteer.
‘He’s always dreaded the thought of death,’ my father agrees. ‘But he will have to think of it now.’
‘He has named it a treason to even speak of it.’
‘We can be silent, but how can we not think of it? And Sir Thomas More was executed for unspoken thoughts.’
I frown. ‘You didn’t say. He was accused of thinking treason?’
‘Yes, they argued that he would have spoken in good faith – silence meant treason.’
‘Surely, that makes no sense?’
‘It made sense to the Boleyns who ordered the trial,’ my father says, smiling.
‘It was terribly sad.’
‘Any fool can feel sad – look at Master Somer the fool, who is grave now that the king has forgotten how to laugh. I must ask him if he can imagine not being? Perhaps a fool – who has so little will but so much imagination – can imagine his death.’