Chapter Greenwich Palace, Summer 1537
Greenwich Palace, Summer
I WATCH HER AS I watched the other two queens, waiting for her to double up in pain, clutch at her belly and rush to her bedroom to start the long vigil of bleeding and weeping.
But Jane – calm, stoical, and uncomplaining – seems to have a womb that her betters did not.
Her baby sits still and calmly in her belly, just as she sits still and calmly wherever we set her down, and her brothers visit with sweetmeats and pastries as if they were stuffing a white goose for paté.
While she eats and sleeps and smiles – acknowledging our concern, always replying that she feels well but just a little tired – the business of the queen’s rooms goes on, and I become more and more important to the smooth running of a court, like a worker bee with a completely idle queen.
I order her summer clothes from the wardrobe, and I audit her jewels with Anne Parr.
I decide on the payments to charities, and I hear petitions from the poor women who come to the palace seeking justice and favour.
I check with her treasurer that we are receiving the correct rents from her royal lands at Midsummer Day, and I make sure that the Court of Augmentations does not forget us when they disburse the profits from the savage fines on monasteries.
When they close a rich monastery and give us gold crucifixes and jewel-encrusted church-ware, I send for goldsmiths and get them remade into jewellery.
I check that new laws for the parliament do not damage the interests of the queen’s lands and rights.
I agree with the Archbishop of Canterbury who shall have the queen’s patronage in the Church, and I sell her priestly livings to the highest bidder.
On the rare occasions when she makes a public appearance, I am at her side, prompting the part she must play, knowing her lines better than she does.
She depends on me as a friend, and I sit with her ladies in her privy chamber or alone with her in the bedroom.
God knows, she is not a demanding companion.
I study as she dozes; she does not interrupt my thoughts.
She rarely sews and never reads; she is content to the idle, saying nothing, with her white hands nesting on her curved belly.
Sometimes, I ask her what she is thinking, and she opens her eyes wide at such a question and says: ‘Nothing. I’m thinking of nothing.’ She is silent for a moment, and then she says, a little anxiously: ‘What should I be thinking of? Is there something I have to do?’
I have to suppress a laugh. ‘No, I have taken care of everything.’
Now that I no longer have a husband in the king’s service, I have no rooms on the king’s side.
The Parr family shield is hammered onto the door of my old rooms, and William Parr lives there alone, his wife never comes to court.
His mother and his younger sister, Kateryn Parr, stay with him when they visit.
Instead, I have a suite of rooms on the queen’s side: a bedroom, a tiny chapel for my private prayers, and a small stool room.
My maidservant sleeps with the other maids, and the royal servants clean my rooms and make up my fire.
The royal grooms care for my horse in the stables.
I have sold all George’s falcons; they fly to another man’s whistle.
All our wealth is gone; it is as if we were never man and wife.
I thought I would feel ashamed to lose my great house and servants, our new furniture and our treasures; but instead, I feel strangely free.
All I have to guard now are my own interests and myself.
Without plotting, without effort, I rise in importance at court as I do the work that others skimp, the work that the queen avoids.
I am a woman in my prime; my girlish prettiness has refined into confident beauty.
My ambition is satisfied. I am a widow without grief.
Nobody ever mentions George or Anne, and they would not recognise what remains of their court.
I don’t think they would recognise me either.
I am not the girl that George married; I am not the wife that he dropped.
I have become a great courtier in my own right, the greatest courtier in the queen’s rooms.