Westminster Palace, May 1540
Westminster Palace, May
THE MAY DAY joust is held at the beautiful tiltyard in Westminster Palace, and Thomas Seymour is the king’s challenger.
He defeats all comers. Queen Anne, with the restored H and A curtains billowing in the warm breeze, awards him the trophy with a smile.
Lord Lisle’s stepson John Dudley rides well, as does George Carew, who hopes to take the king’s eye for promotion before he returns to service at Calais.
Gregory Cromwell, as brave as any nobleman’s son, breaks a spear on my young cousin Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, and Thomas Culpeper carries Bess Harvey’s favour.
‘Not yours?’ I ask Kitty.
She is red-eyed and defiant. ‘No!’ she says sharply. ‘He seems to prefer Mistress Harvey to me.’ Her lower lip trembles. ‘I don’t care, I am sure, Lady Rochford. If you see him, you can tell him that I don’t care at all.’
‘He probably decided to avoid you when he saw that the king favoured you,’ I comfort her. ‘The king makes much of you, doesn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ she sniffs. ‘He gave me a gold chain, which is nice, but he’s older than my uncle!’
I laugh. ‘Not at all! His Majesty is in the prime of his life!’
She gives me her courtier smile. ‘I just forgot for a moment,’ she apologises.
ON THE DAY after May Day, Richard Cromwell, my spymaster’s nephew, is knighted and is now Sir Richard, and Lord Lisle, visiting from Calais, hosts a great banquet at Dereham House.
The queen looks beautiful in the French hood which I have persuaded her to wear, and the king beside her is noisy and cheerful, praising the jousters and the dinner.
The wealth of the monasteries and the abbey lands pouring into the royal treasury makes the king as generous as Plutus.
He gives every one of the champions a purse of a gold and a house of their own.
Lord Lisle beams at the honour shown to his stepson and applauds the wildly extravagant gift to the jousters.
Lord Cromwell, dressed plainly as usual in his black suit, claps his boy Richard on the back when no one is looking.
Lord Lisle is a tall, handsome man, good-looking and charming as all the royal Plantagenet family – all of them more kingly than any Tudor.
He is high in royal favour; he, too, is to get an earldom for his loyal service in holding and managing Calais – a difficult posting, so close to France and so far from London, an exchequer for all spies and heretics going between France and Spain, Scotland and England.
He has no idea that Thomas Cromwell and I imagined his downfall, and I am glad that the plot stayed as a speculation.
The deaths of my husband and sister-in-law have been fully avenged by the fall of the Courtenays.
I don’t need more. I hope that Lord Lisle will use his time basking in the king’s favour to speak for his kinswoman, Lady Margaret Pole, who should be released from the Tower to finish her long life in the comfort of her own home.
I will believe that a good tyranny is in power when I see her return to Bisham Abbey.
Lord Lisle attends a meeting of the privy council, confidently expecting his earldom to be announced by his beloved cousin the king, and I have the ladies ready in our best clothes for a late dinner to celebrate his new honour, though the queen is looking strained and Kitty Howard dazzling.
I expect the king and his friends to come late after drinking the health of the new earl, and I take a moment to look out of the window of the queen’s chamber, over the river to the gardens and fields on the south bank, and upstream where the sun is setting over Lambeth Palace.
Below me, threading through the little boats on the Thames, is a dark barge silently rowing upriver, turning on the flat water and mooring, in complete silence, at the pier.
As I watch, Sir William Kingston – the constable of the Tower – and his friend Lord Lisle come out of a little garden door below my window and walk through the golden light of the garden, down the stairs to the quay.
Lord Lisle is wearing his cloak, though the evening is mild.
Sir William Kingston keeps pace beside him with his head bowed.
They’re not arm in arm chatting, as if they were leaving a joyful party; they are both silent as they walk along the pier, past other gaily-painted barges with standards flying, up the gangplank of the black unmarked barge.
They cast off and row away without a word, without anyone on the bank saying farewell.
There is no escort to honour the new-made earl; there are no trumpeters.
There is no sound but the crying of seagulls, no cheers from the rowers, no word from the bargemaster.
It is all silent, like a bad dream. It can be nothing but an arrest; it has to be an arrest, though they are old friends and their sons were jousting together as comrades on May Day only yesterday.
I stare out of the window without moving, without a word.
For once in my life, I don’t think: what does this mean, and how should I use this information?
For once in my life, I think nothing, and I do nothing.
I don’t even tap on the window so that his lordship knows someone has seen his departure and will write to his wife Lady Lisle in Calais and warn his stepdaughter Anne Basset, who is practising dance steps in the room behind me, with no idea that her stepfather has just stepped into the Tower barge and gone swiftly and silently downstream, like a dark cormorant speeding east, low over shining water.
Only at dinner, when everyone notices that Lord Lisle is missing from his place and his chamberlain says he has been summoned to London, do I allow myself to think: can this be the false supposition, the petitio principii that Thomas Cromwell and I played when we said: suppose that the king is unmanned by witchcraft?
Suppose that Papists have hired a witch?
Did I help my spymaster imagine a supposition which was not an intellectual game but a new masque of entrapment?
LORD LISLE’S SILENT disappearance launches a wave of arrests, as a stone thrown into a millpond sends ripples spreading in dark water.
Dr Richard Sampson, the king’s reliable advisor on divorce, is arrested, too – no reason is given out, but perhaps he thought – as I did – that three prior contracts for three successive wives was straining belief.
George Carew, young kinsman of the executed Sir Nicholas Carew, follows his commander, Lord Lisle, into the Tower, both of them accused of giving the keys of England’s last foothold in France to our enemies.
Anne Basset cries all day in her room for her mother Lady Lisle, who sends an anguished note to say that she has been turned out of her home in Calais, and her household goods and her wardrobes of beautiful clothes have been taken from her.
Even her famous aviary of quails has been seized by Robert Radcliffe the Earl of Sussex – one of the king’s brutish old lords who wins not only the quails but the captaincy of Calais, too.
‘Poor little birds!’ Kitty Howard says, holding Anne Basset in her arms. ‘He’ll never look after them properly.’
THE EARL OF Sussex dives into the riches of Calais and all the spy records.
It’s a town riven with gossip, heresy, disloyalty, and treason.
Thomas Cromwell has friends throughout the Staple where the merchants gather, half of them Lutherans, some even worse.
Reginald Pole is said to have the keys to the castle; the King of France is said to be a friend of the Lisles.
Robert Radcliffe finds a document which shows that Lord Lisle once sold a horse to the emperor of Spain: a dishonest broker can make much of this – and he does.
And if Arthur, Lord Lisle is accused of treason, will the imaginary plot run on?
Will Lord Hungerford be accused of witchcraft next?
And then, will anyone mention the queen?
Every day, we hear of another arrest and not all of them are Papists; many are Lutherans, the queen’s religion.
Suspicion spreads like a plague mist as I walk around the Palace of Westminster, wrapped against the cold like a masquer, with a cloak hiding my gown and a hood hiding my face.
It is so like the May of only four years ago, when nobody knew what was happening and who had offended, that I feel as if I am reliving the days when I wrote to George and wrote to my father and met with Master Cromwell and the duke, and asked everyone: what is happening? What is happening?
This time, I don’t need to ask. I can imagine it all; because I was in the room where the unthinkable was first thought, built like a dark downward stair: one step after another – and the lowest point was naming the queen as a witch.
I think: I must speak to her. I must warn her against any questions about witchcraft.
I must make sure that she knows the words: witchcraft, enchantment, sortilège, dark arts, curse, impotence, and death, to deny them if they are ever put to her in questioning.
I must warn her to tell someone that she fears that her marriage to the king is not valid.
She should do this today, before the music changes again and someone – like the Earl of Sussex, who is dancing through Calais, or William Fitzwilliam, who was such a strong partner to Margaret Pole – gets hold of her and swirls her around in a new dance called the Liar’s Volta.
Only Thomas Cromwell can reassure me that the queen is safe, and I lie in wait for him as he arrives early one morning, with a servant carrying his great wooden box full of warrants for the king to sign as he prays at Prime.
‘Lord Cromwell?’ I curtsey. ‘My lord?’
He beams at me. ‘Lord Essex it is now, Lady Rochford!’
‘Lord Essex, I will not delay you. I know you’re going to mass.’
‘I have a moment for you, Lady Rochford. The bell is not yet tolling.’