On Progress, Summer. 1536 #2
He makes a grimace as if he is chewing on a lemon. ‘Margaret’s done nothing – it’s another attack on me, on our house. The Spanish party accuse my half-brother Thom of flirting with Lady Margaret.’
‘Have they told the king?’
‘It’ll blow over,’ he says certainly. ‘Lady Margaret’ll be in disgrace for a few days. I’ll take young Thom home. Keep it quiet.’
I turn back to the stable-yard and smile at the queen and say: ‘No need to wait for Lady Margaret. My uncle says she’s delayed on the king’s business.’
Jane peeps up from the sables in the litter and asks stupidly: ‘But what business can have delayed her? What business does she do?’
Jane is easy to silence. I lean down and I whisper against her jewel-encrusted hood: ‘She’s in trouble for loving young Lord Thom Howard. Didn’t you know?’
Jane goes as white as the curtains of the litter. ‘I don’t know anything!’ she peeps.
I nod. ‘That’s what we’ll all say. We’ll say that we didn’t know anything, and nothing happened anyway.’
She looks sick with fear. ‘My brother . . .’ she says, looking round for help.
‘Let’s keep this to ourselves, to us ladies,’ I advise. ‘Let’s say that you know nothing. Everyone will believe that, after all!’
‘But, Lady Rochford, I really do know nothing!’
‘I know,’ I say reassuringly. I prompt her to raise her hand, and the muleteers start, and the rest of us follow her litter on horseback, and we leave the Duke of Norfolk on the steps, waving us out of sight as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
THE FIRST NIGHT of the progress we stop at Cobham Hall – showing royal favour to Anne, Lady Cobham.
Nobody asks what she did in May that is rewarded by this royal visit in July.
She is at the door of the great hall with her husband to welcome the king and Jane.
I wonder if Jane remembers that Lady Cobham curtseyed as low to Queen Anne, and kissed her with just as much affection, and if Jane knows that she offered evidence that took Anne to the scaffold?
I doubt Jane minds either way. Since she was dancing with Anne’s widower at the very moment that Anne died – why should she balk at her betrayer?
Jane waits politely to hear the speech of welcome from the Cobham herald, but the king hurries into the house, with Lord Cobham scuttling after him to show him his bedroom. His leg will be aching from a long day in the saddle, and he will need to piss and eat sweetmeats.
The next day, the court is ready to go hunting, but the king says his horse is overtired and blames his groom for not keeping it in good heart.
The groom bows a contrite head and begs pardon.
Will Somer the fool says that he is too tired to go another step and demands that the groom to carry him to his bed and mount him for a gallop in the morning, and the king roars with laughter, his good mood restored.
I see Jane look inquiringly from her husband to the fool – either she does not understand the pun of ‘mounting’, or else she has decided – with the non exemplar of Anne before her – to hang on to her virgin innocence.
We take a rest day, and the day after, the king complains that now his horse is too fresh and ill mannered.
We all know from this that he is still tired and probably in pain; but he cheers up as his horse goes steadily down Watling Street, the broad pilgrim road from London to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury.
The king waves to groups of pilgrims lining either side of the road as the heralds blast on their trumpets and shout: ‘Make way for the king!’
But something has soured in England this summer, like cream left out in sunshine.
People still push back their hoods or pull off their caps as the court passes by; but there are no smiling faces turned towards us.
Everyone making a pilgrimage from one religious house to another knows that the convents and monasteries are being inspected.
Everyone knows that they are mostly well-run, and devout; but wrongly accused of being corrupt or wasteful or ill disciplined.
They are harshly fined for imaginary misdeeds and sometimes even closed down, their treasures taken away, and their great lands given to court favourites.
And then what will happen to the hospital?
To the library? To the school? To the church where people have prayed for hundreds of years?
Will Saint Thomas Becket’s own shrine be one day taken by the king and its rich treasures sucked into his treasury?
Will his sacred body be kidnapped and slung into a storeroom with all the other relics, even though everyone has seen and heard of miracles they have done?
An assault on Thomas Becket’s body would be a second martyrdom by a second King Henry – and everyone fears that this Henry may have even worse advisors than the other, for these have killed not one turbulent priest but a bishop of Rochester, Sir Thomas More, another priest, four monks, a queen and even the whore who took her place and half a dozen men accused with her.
The king sets his shoulders square, and his little mouth pouts beneath his moustache.
He orders the heralds to push people back – right off the highway, into the ditches and hedges.
By the time we get to the Lyon Inn at Sittingbourne, we are all as quiet as Jane, who sits like a little doll behind her curtains of white silk and leans forward to draw them tightly closed when she hears someone shout defiantly: ‘God bless Bishop Fisher!’
We are dismounting in the inn yard, and the gates are closing on the staring crowd outside, when there is a shout from the high road and a band of exhausted riders wearing the livery of Henry Fitzroy rattles in.
Thomas Cromwell, who rides ahead of the court to ensure the king’s reception, is out of the inn to meet them before the lead rider has even dismounted, and he rushes Fitzroy’s herald into the great hall to speak to the king in private.
Jane, climbing slowly from her litter, asks me: ‘Who was that? They were in such a hurry?’ and when I tell her, she says: ‘Oh, what should I do?’
I gesture that she should go forward to stand beside the king, to receive whatever news Fitzroy has sent with such urgency, and I take her gloves and follow behind, feeling that I am pushing an unwilling broodmare into a pen.
But she is so slow that Cromwell has already closed the door on the king’s private room.
Jane looks from the panels of the closed door to me, and I whisper: ‘Better wait.’
We stand awkwardly before the door, everyone watching us, and then I hear a great bellow from inside, as if the king has been gored by a bull or stabbed to the heart. I nearly run in I am so sure he has been attacked, and I hear him shout: ‘No! No! No!’
Thomas Seymour barrels his way through the shocked courtiers to get to his sister. ‘You’ve got to go in,’ he says urgently. ‘I think Henry Fitzroy is dead. I think they’ve just told him.’
‘Oh no!’ she says. ‘Oh why? Poor boy! But – oh no, Thomas, I can’t go in there . . .’
Even in my shock, I could laugh at this new brother pushing this queen towards the door, and this one – so unlike her predecessor – refusing to seize her chance.
The door is suddenly thrown open before us, and the messenger and Thomas Cromwell stride out.
For a moment, before the door is slammed shut and the guard takes up arms before it, I can see inside: the king on his hands and knees on the rush-strewn floor, bellowing like a stag brought down by a spear.
He looks wounded beyond recovery, his big mouth gaping wide with screams of pain.
It is like a death, a moment of shocking intimacy.
Jane clings to me. ‘I’m not going in there,’ she tells her brother.
Only one person, Lady Margaret Pole, born royal, the king’s cousin, has the courage to intervene. She says a quick word to her sons, Henry and Geoffrey, and takes Jane by the hand. ‘We’ll both go in to him,’ she says firmly.
The guard lifts his halberd for her as for a royal princess, and she leads Jane inwards.
The door closes behind them, and Thomas Cromwell is at my side.
‘Send the ladies to their rooms, dinner will be served late,’ he tells me.
‘Henry Fitzroy is dead – a short illness. The king will dine alone in his privy chamber.’
From behind the door, we hear agonised sobbing. ‘Fitzroy! My heir! How could God do this to me? How can God turn against me? Why would God punish me? This must be women’s sin? Women’s sin! Cursed be the woman that did this!’
WE STAY AT the Lyon for three days; the king keeps to his private rooms. We don’t see him.
We don’t even hear him after that first night of screaming.
Jane, legless with fear, comes out of the room clinging to Margaret Pole and the king locks the door behind them.
He only admits servants with trays heaped with food: unbelievable amounts of food, enough for half a dozen men, as if he is choking down sobs with manchet bread and butter.
Everything is ended: his secret triumph that he had a strong son, ready and waiting to be named as heir.
His pushing the new law through an obedient parliament.
Even the Howard plan to put Mary Howard into the royal line is valueless: her husband, Henry Fitzroy, is dead; and all the plans are for nothing.
The king has no heir but girls: Lady Mary a named bastard, Lady Elizabeth another one, and Lady Margaret Douglas, a legitimate half-Tudor niece, has disappeared and nobody even knows where she is.
‘In the Tower,’ Thomas Cromwell tells me by the way, as if it is of little interest. ‘Arrested for marrying young Lord Thom Howard without permission.’
I have to school myself to keep my face perfectly still. ‘I thought my kinsman, Lord Thom, was going home to Kenninghall?’
‘I’d drop the connection if I were you,’ Lord Cromwell advises me. ‘He’s in the Tower, for seducing an heir to the throne. His baby face won’t save him. Courtly love has become treason.’
I find my hands are trembling, and I put them behind my back. ‘A secret marriage is not treason . . .’
‘It’s against the law.’
‘No, it isn’t . . .’ I know it is not.
‘A new law, not yet passed. A new law that will say that the royal family can only marry with the king’s permission. If Lord Thom and Lady Margaret married in secret then they have broken that law.’
‘But it was not written when they married . . .’
Blandly, he nods.
‘This is not justice,’ I say, thinking of the last time that I said that something was unjust. Then it was the king’s warhorse, beheaded for treason.
Since then, he has beheaded his wife and my husband.
Will he behead his niece as well? Will I say nothing for a niece – just as I said nothing for his wife or his warhorse? Just as I said nothing for my husband?
‘The king is the law,’ Cromwell reminds me. ‘He cannot be unjust.’
‘Rex non potest peccare?’ I quote. ‘The king cannot be wrong?’
Cromwell smiles. ‘Quite so.’
Sir William Paulet, the comptroller of the new queen’s household, comes up to his patron, Lord Cromwell, to ask him for orders.
‘Are we staying here another day, my lord?’
Cromwell nods. ‘Another day, I think.’
‘I’ll have to order mourning clothes for the queen and her ladies from the royal wardrobe in London,’ I say to Sir William.
Lord Cromwell shakes his head. ‘No mourning.’
‘When we get back to Greenwich? For the funeral?’
‘No funeral.’
‘No funeral for the king’s own son?’ I ask disbelievingly.
‘Dead,’ Cromwell mutters in my ear. ‘So nothing to do with the king after all.’
‘The king has ordered the Duke of Norfolk to organise the burial of the body in his family chapel at Thetford Priory,’ Sir William says, as if this is completely normal.
‘Thomas Howard is to bury the king’s son?’ I ask incredulously.
‘He is his father-in-law,’ Sir William reminds me pompously. ‘Henry Fitzroy will be buried by his father-in-law, in his family vault.’
Thomas Cromwell and I silently enjoy the irony that my uncle, who so longed for Henry Fitzroy in his short life, now has him in death.
The dead youth is all Howard and no Tudor.
The king has sworn he will have no more dead sons, so his beloved boy has not died but vanished, like a seraph in a miracle play.
It is as if he never was, and the court has another ghost that we will never mention.
THE KING EMERGES from his rooms without a word about his vigil of gorging, and we resume our journey to Dover, as if nothing has happened at all.
Jane hardly dares to look at him; she was so frightened by the roaring and then the solitary feasting.
When she has to stand at the king’s side, for the presentations at Dover, I have to prop her up from behind; she floats away from him unless she is anchored.
Lord Lisle and his wife Honor have sailed across the Narrow Seas from their fortress at Calais to greet the king and his new queen and hide their delight that his heir is dead.
Not even the king’s sullen greeting overshadows the splendour of their rising sun.
They are of the Plantagenet family, old royal blood and the traditional religion, they loved the old queen and pray for her daughter Lady Mary.
After the banquet – where the king crams food into his mouth as if gorging on despair – they slip away to the Pole rooms to celebrate the triumph of their family over the Boleyns.
Everything is going their way: Anne Boleyn the reform queen disgraced and dead, Henry Fitzroy the Protestant heir, dead, too, Elizabeth is declared bastard, so their darling, Lady Mary, is the only possible royal heir and who could be a better husband for her, and king consort for England, than the favoured son of the old royal family: Reginald Pole himself?
The red rose of Tudor Lancaster and the white rose of Plantagenet York will unite to bring lasting peace, and the young royal couple will return England to the Church of Rome.
Sir Geoffrey Pole – hopelessly indiscreet – is radiantly happy and all the way home from Dover to London, the Poles and the Courtenays ride with shining faces, as if they have been called to greatness.
Lord Cromwell drops back from the king’s side to bring his big cob beside my pretty roan.
‘Looks as if they didn’t overreach after all – they have greatness in their grasp,’ I remark to him.
‘They’ve been lucky,’ he says grudgingly. ‘They killed Anne the Protestant queen, but God Himself took Fitzroy, the Protestant heir. Now, they think they’ve won – they’ve got the only heir left standing.’
‘It is an annuntiatio,’ I say sourly. ‘And Sir Geoffrey Pole as the Virgin Mary.’
I smile at his snort of laughter.