Greenwich Palace, Summer. 1536 #3
‘You’ve no choice in the matter,’ he says irritably.
‘If you leave now, we’ll never get you back to court again.
And, without your salary as a lady-in-waiting, you’ll have no money.
George has left a heap of debts; the king has confiscated all his goods as a traitor, and the Boleyns aren’t going to be generous with your jointure – not to a childless widow to a traitor son.
You have no expectations, Jane. You’d have to marry again, and who would have you, looking at what you did to your last husband? ’
‘I didn’t give evidence against him,’ I say wearily. ‘You were judge on the inquiry; you, of all people, know that.’
‘Well, you didn’t try to save him, as Francis Weston’s wife tried to save him.’
‘You told me not to!’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That’s true. But anyway, you can’t come home; you’ll have to stay at court.’
‘I don’t mean that I can’t live at court without them. I mean that I can’t live without them at all! I mean that I cannot be myself without them! I am a third of a person without them. I am two-thirds dead!’
For a moment, he looks interested. ‘Are you really? Do you imagine yourself two-thirds gone? How do you imagine your absence?’
I think for a moment. ‘No,’ I say. ‘You’re right. I can’t imagine my absence, but I do feel a void. But, Father, I didn’t mean philosophy. I just mean I am in despair. Such despair.’
‘Despair at court is an appropriate emotion,’ he tells me. ‘The courtier’s disease is despair.’
‘I want to go to Beaulieu! I want to live as a widow.’
‘It’s been returned to the king.’
I look at him blankly. ‘But it is ours for life.’
‘George’s life is over.’
‘Mine isn’t!’
‘I thought you said it was? So, we make progress. Your husband is dead, your sister-in-law is dead, but your life continues, ergo you will live, ergo you have to live somewhere, ergo you will stay at court. Agreed?’
‘Father, this is logic – but it brings me no comfort.’
‘Logic should always comfort a scholar. Now, I have asked Master Cromwell – y’know he’s to be Lord Cromwell?
His reward for this solution to the paradox of how a man divorces a woman who is not his wife – anyway, I have asked him to consider your widow’s pension from the Boleyns, and he has promised they will make a fair settlement on you.
You are fortunate in your patron. No man but Cromwell could have survived the dislike of the queen, the rivalry of the Howards, and the enmity of the old royals and the Spanish party.
But he turned them on each other. And now, they will destroy themselves. ’
This is more comfort than logic. ‘How will they destroy themselves?’
‘You know that Lady Margaret Pole’s son Reginald has been working for years on his book of theology, commissioned by the king?
To bring together the reformers and the traditionalists in the Church?
Well, he’s finished it. And it’s not at all what the king commissioned.
By all accounts, it denies the king’s divorce of the first queen, his reform of the Church, it says he has no right to the Church lands in England.
It destroys the king’s case from the bedroom to the treasure house.
Reginald Pole has shown it to the pope. The pope has adopted it as his own creed and will issue a bull of excommunication against the king. ’
I look at my father in complete horror. A man excommunicated from the Church cannot take mass, cannot enter a church.
Every good Christian is obliged to disobey him or arrest him, and if he is an excommunicate king, it is a holy duty for all the faithful to make holy war on his country.
The French and Spanish kings will be ordered on a new crusade, against a new infidel – against England.
It is a declaration of war from Christendom on Henry’s England.
I am stunned. ‘My God! How could he? Has he got his mother away to Rome? He cannot have done this with his mother at court! Has Lady Margaret Pole gone, and all her family with her?’
My father looks as if he could laugh. ‘He lives for the truth, not for courtier truth. He’s not published. He’s sent a private copy to the king; he’s asked that someone read it to him. He wants to discuss it.’
I could laugh at this unworldly scholarship if I did not know how dangerous it is to try to teach the king anything. ‘Not you?’ I demand. ‘You won’t be the reader!’
‘Not I! I saw only one chapter, and that was incendiary. I wouldn’t read it to the king for a fortune. I’ve no interest in arousing royal rage on my own account, and none on turning it on the Courtenays and the Poles, the kinsmen of Reginald Pole.’
‘Thomas Cromwell will not be so considerate. He’ll use it to destroy them.’
He nods. ‘I expect so. You’ll see Anne and George avenged. The Courtenays and the Poles will be suspected traitors, constantly watched, and poor Lady Mary will be left without friends, without a party to support her.’
My father pauses for a moment. ‘It’s ironic that it will be the flower of the family, the king’s scholar, Reginald Pole, a royal heir, a Plantagenet prince and scholar, who brings them down. How true it is, as Machiavelli would say: a friend is more dangerous than an enemy!’