Chapter 25
Hampton Court, Winter
AS IF TO defy the shadow over the old royal family, Lady Lisle braves the stormy Narrow Seas in November and visits us from the English fortress of Calais, to see her daughter Anne Basset, who is slowly inching her way forward to be the king’s new favourite.
We hold a banquet to celebrate Lady Lisle’s arrival.
She is a big-boned, handsome woman, and Thomas Culpeper, the king’s new favourite groom of the chamber, has obviously been primed to show her all sorts of little attentions.
Anne Basset – who had her eye on Thomas Culpeper herself – is hugely offended by this flirtation and is heard to say that if Master Thomas Culpeper wants a hawk from Calais, he can no doubt pay for it like anyone else, and there is no need for him to make sheep eyes at a woman old enough to be his mother.
Lady Lisle stays at court for several days, hunting and hawking, walking in the gardens – friendly with everyone and wheedlingly flirtatious with the king.
I never see her alone with her many kinsmen – the Poles, the Courtenays, and the Roman Catholic lords – she only meets them casually in public.
She is in a position of high trust: her husband, Arthur, Lord Lisle, is of the old royal family the Plantagenets and holds the English fort of Calais for England, and the English Church in the sea of envious papistry that is Europe.
He could not be in a more tactically important position; he could not be more trusted.
Lady Lisle, walking into a banquet in her honour, on the king’s arm, reminds everyone that the former royal family, the Spanish party, are still riding high, and she and her husband are trusted with the keys to the gateway of the kingdom.
But after she has said her farewells and set sail for Calais, as the court prepares for Christmas, we hear extraordinary news from the Tower.
Sir Geoffrey Pole has confessed to a plot against the king and against the Church of England.
He says his family supported the rebellion of the pilgrims and planned an invasion of England to be led by their exiled son, Reginald Pole, who was going to throw down king and Church, marry Lady Mary and take the throne.
No sooner has he signed his name to this death warrant for his family than he lapses into remorseful panic and stabs himself in the heart with his butter knife, after enjoying the good dinner that was his reward for betrayal.
If he had used a proper knife and succeeded in killing himself, his family would have declared him insane and his words valueless: the ravings of a madman.
But he did not hurt himself enough to save them.
His blunt knife, his weeping survival, only proves his sanity and their guilt. An avalanche of arrests follows.
His brother, Henry Pole Lord Montague, is taken to the Tower with Sir Edward Neville.
Henry Courtenay the Marquess of Exeter and his wife Gertrude are arrested for treason as well.
Even the children of the family are taken with their parents: Edward Courtenay and young Henry Pole disappear into the darkness under the portcullis.
Sir Geoffrey names others: a canon from Chichester cathedral, a priest from the newly closed Bisham Abbey, a merchant who carried secret letters to the traitor Reginald Pole.
Even Sir Nicholas Carew – who got George’s Order of the Garter – is arrested.
One of the old lords, poor Lord De La Warr, says no more than that he cannot bear another trial of old and loyal friends, and is arrested for that – and held in the Tower along with them.
None of them confess anything. Gertrude Courtenay declares that everyone is innocent of everything, and she herself is a fool whose word cannot be trusted, and the many things she said in defence of Lady Mary, her insistence on calling her ‘Princess’, were nothing but feminine folly.
The old lady, Margaret Pole – too tough for feminine folly – is questioned, her home Bisham Palace is searched, and she is taken to Cowdray Castle in Sussex and interrogated for hours, day after day, by William Fitzwilliam, the newly appointed Earl of Southampton.
The old lady is too wise and too brave to be caught by Fitzwilliam’s bullying.
She does not break or even bend while her beloved son Geoffrey and his brother, his cousin Henry Courtenay, and his kinsman Sir Edward Neville, and their priests and messenger are tried for treason as the court has a merry Christmas.
We do not even pause the music when we hear that Henry and Edward have been beheaded.
I MEET LORD CROMWELL at the king’s gift-giving, and companionably, we watch the courtiers coming forward as if to pour sacrifices of blood on a reeking altar.
‘You are keeping Lady Margaret Pole and Gertrude Courtenay in the Tower with the little boys?’ I confirm. ‘But they will be released?’
‘Of course – nobody would execute such great ladies, and the boys are just children. But I’ve no doubt they will return to plotting as soon as they are free.
I’m surrounded by rivals who take the king’s fancy and drag him their way.
There’s always some bright lad coming up through the ranks; there’s always a pretty Howard girl in the nursery. ’
I laugh at the truth of this. ‘My uncle was speaking to me of a cousin – Katheryn Howard, his niece – who should come to court. And the king’s rooms eat up young men like a manticore – he needs a constant supply of companions. But you are secure?’
‘While the king wants a well-run country, a fortune without the trouble of earning it, and everything done his way before he’s thought of it – I am secure.
’ He looks at the king, receiving gifts that cost a fortune and handing out baubles.
‘But serving a man of power is to feed a furnace. The more that he has, the more he wants.’
‘Wealth?’ I ask.
‘Wealth I can easily get,’ says the destroyer of the Church. ‘It is power that is harder. The greatest want for a rich man is power over others.’