Chapter 22
Greenwich Palace, Winter
THE KING DECLARES that he will never marry again, that he has lost the love of his life.
The part of heartbroken widower is new to him, though this is his third dead wife, and he takes to it as his greatest role.
He orders her buried at Windsor and swears that he will lie beside her; they must enter heaven together.
He likes her far better dead than he ever did alive.
Her final service, is to restore his sense of eternal youth.
She was a young woman, and yet she died before him: in his mind, that makes him her junior.
He is elated to be alive though she is dead, to be healthy and strong, while she is in her grave, to have his whole life before him, while her life is over.
And now he has his own baby, a son and heir, and no woman can claim the credit of having birthed him; he feels divine: like Zeus he can produce a child from his forehead.
Once again, a queen is dead, and once again, the queen’s ladies are not dismissed.
The queen’s chambers are closed, but the king cannot live without women admirers.
We have to stay at court. Married ladies live with their husbands, young women return to their fathers.
My uncle invites me to an elegant suite of rooms in the Howard chambers.
This is not for love nor family loyalty; my uncle knows that my patron is on the rise: Lord Cromwell has taken the post of lord privy seal from Thomas Boleyn and has been awarded the Order of the Garter that George wanted so much.
The king’s daughter, Lady Mary, has outlived two stepmothers and is now the first lady of the court.
Lord Cromwell is negotiating foreign marriages; but with a boy in the royal cradle, the king can spare no thought for either of his daughters and cannot be brought to say whether Lady Mary is a legitimate princess or a bastard by-blow.
Not even the Howards dare to ask about Lady Elizabeth, whose servants are transferred to serve a true, legitimate baby prince.
Margaret Douglas, also displaced by this baby boy, is released from the Tower, desperately ill, and sent to Syon Abbey to recover.
Her husband, poor Lord Thom, has died of fever, so she is a widow who was, so briefly, a secret wife.
If she recovers from gaol fever and heartbreak, she will return to court to join this strange half-life that we all now live: ladies-in-waiting with no one to wait on, princesses without titles, heiresses with no inheritance, the queen’s ladies without queen’s rooms to attend or a queen to serve.
It is a sign of how little the king truly values the ladies that he keeps us on with nothing to do, except for the evenings when he wants company, or dancing or singing.
The grooms would not leave his horses standing idle; the huntsmen would not leave his hounds cooped up; but the ladies of his court are picked up and dropped.
‘He has no special favourite?’ Lord Cromwell asks me again, as the tables are put away after dinner in the king’s presence chamber and the musicians tune up for the ladies to dance.
We go through our paces like mares in a market as the king watches and taps his one sound leg.
‘I don’t want to arrange a marriage for him with a foreign princess if another Jane is going to pop up from the countryside and overturn everything. ’
‘He’s attentive to Anne Basset,’ I warn, looking towards the dancers where the king is taking his place in a circle dance which will take him around every lady.
‘Daughter of Lady Lisle of Calais, the Spanish party put her forward. And Mary Shelton as well as her sister. But he likes an audience more than a partner. He likes us in a flock.’
‘Bedding any?’ he asks me.
It is treason to say that the king is impotent. ‘Not that I’ve noticed,’ I say discreetly. ‘Not noticeably at all.’ I am rewarded with his little grunt of amusement.
‘I understand you. Tell me if there is a rising star. Or if anything is rising at all . . .’ He lets the sentence trail away, and I incline my head with a hidden smile. I know what he means, but Jane taught her ladies to ignore bawdy jokes.
‘Won’t your cousin Mary Howard have a try at the king?’ he suggests. ‘She’s pretty enough, and clever enough? I can’t believe her father hasn’t suggested it? He’s always pushing a Howard into a royal bed. He wouldn’t wink at her marrying her father-in-law.’
I shake my head. ‘She’s a young woman of principle; she’s adopted the reformed religion, and she’s sincere about it.’
He crinkles his dark eyes in a smile. ‘And what about you, my dear Lady Rochford? You don’t deploy your charms – you don’t try sortilèges?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I am no longer mad, Lord Cromwell. I am sane and cold and dry. I live my own life, and I want neither court nor love nor courtly love.’
He gives me a sympathetic, crooked smile. ‘I am a widower myself,’ he says. ‘There is a lot to be said for sane and cold and dry.’