Oatlands Palace, Surrey, Summer 1540
Oatlands Palace, Surrey, Summer
‘MY DARLING, DARLING Jane!’ Kitty Howard flies down the long sunny presence chamber of Oatlands Palace, hands outstretched, her bronze hair streaming out from under a tiny cap.
‘At last you’ve come! I thought you’d never come!
My uncle said that you shall be my chief lady-in-waiting and I said: of course! She knows everything!’
There is no time for me to curtsey; Kitty flings herself into my arms in a swirl of silks and a mist of expensive Turkish perfume: oil of roses.
‘Jane – I have the whole royal wardrobe to choose from. And you won’t believe the jewels!
Oh, of course you will! You know them all!
Well, anyway, they’re all mine now! And Jane, I have houses of my own.
He has given me two dead men’s houses! I shall have rents!
I will be wealthy! Just think what I will buy! ’
I detach myself from her clinging hug and sink into a curtsey.
‘You don’t have to curtsey to me!’
‘Yes I do,’ I tell her. ‘All your ladies have to curtsey to you. You cannot be Kitty Howard any more. You’re going to be the Queen of England.’
She pouts. ‘But what’s the point of that, if I can’t do what I want?’
I see that a stay with her step-grandmother, Agnes Howard, the dowager duchess, has done nothing to prepare little Kitty Howard to be Queen Katheryn. The old lady is notoriously careless and trains all her daughters and nieces to be exquisitely mannered and completely thoughtless.
‘Your Grace, you can’t do just what you want. You know as well as I, that a queen is not free. You get all the jewels and all the clothes and all the money; but you have to play your part.’
‘He says I’m perfect as I am,’ she says, showing me a sulky face. ‘He says I’m never to change, not by a single inch.’
‘Please God, he always thinks so,’ I say carefully. ‘But you wouldn’t want to disappoint him? And you certainly wouldn’t want your uncle to think you’re not fitted for this great place to which God has called you?’
She turns away, and I think: this is not going to be an easy queen to serve – maybe the hardest of them all. She is still only sixteen years old; but she’s going to have to grow up fast. I can teach her cunning, but nothing will teach her wisdom.
‘Don’t be angry with me because I teach you queenly ways, Kitty. I am your friend as much as I was when I tried to teach you to be a good maid-of-honour.’
Instantly she turns, all smiles. ‘No, I know you are my friend! But don’t be dull and cross when it’s my first day in my first palace, and I’m to be married to the King of England tomorrow! Tonight, we can drink wine and dance and misbehave, can’t we?’
‘Not really,’ I say.
DESPITE MY CAUTION, it is a merry dinner in the great hall of Oatlands Palace, and I am not surprised that when the dancing starts our uncle Thomas Howard, flushed with drink and triumph, beckons me to his side.
‘You’re going to have to keep her on a tight rein,’ he says shortly.
‘I am?’
‘She can do no wrong now. He adores her. But we’re not safe until she’s in pup.’
‘You always seem safe, my lord. Whatever happens. You always return; you always rise.’
He narrows his eyes to look at me. ‘I could say the same of you,’ he says pointedly. ‘But you know as well as I, this isn’t the first time a Howard has made it to the throne of England. She has to give us a royal heir. Your fortune depends on this one.’
I glance over at the dancers. Kitty is whirling around with other girls, as wild and as flushed as maenads in a bacchanal.
The king smiles dotingly on his young bride; his poisoned leg, swollen and bulky with bandages, rests on a stool before him.
He leans back in his throne so his belly rests across his big body like an incubus wreathed in cloth of gold.
‘There’s no reason to think that she is not fertile,’ I say carefully. ‘There’s no reason that she should not have a child.’
‘The king’s own doctor says he has his full powers,’ my uncle points out.
‘Now that he’s married to the right woman – a Howard, not a Cromwell choice.
You’ll observe the wedding night closely, Jane.
She’s got to please him. She’s got to entice him.
He has to conceive a child for the good of the kingdom, not only for us. ’
I see that I have become a full Howard; I will do nothing now but sniff shifts.
There will be no discussions of philosophy or theology and the shifting ground of politics.
There will be no wider horizon of Europe, of Christendom; there will be no petitio principii – false arguments for the sake of logic.
As a lady in the House of Howard, I am good for nothing but sex, birth, and death.
The duke puts his stale mouth near to my ear. ‘She’s sixteen years old to his fifty,’ he says. ‘This is not just a Howard queen; this will be a Howard queen regent. You keep control of her, and we’ll rule England through her.’
IT IS A quiet wedding – a secret wedding – at Oatlands Palace, in a summer heat so stifling that more than one lady-in-waiting faints and has to be taken out.
Bishop Bonner officiates; there is none of the glory that Kitty was hoping for – not Westminster Cathedral, not even Greenwich Chapel, no cheering crowds, no admiring ambassadors.
Truth be told: there would be no cheering crowds even if wine was flowing in the fountains of London.
The city is weary of Tudor wives; the city is sweating, as hot as Venice, and racked with plague.
While we are at the wedding breakfast, a messenger comes to the king and is beckoned to the high table to whisper in his ear.
I have a moment of complete dread: that Anne of Cleves, left alone at Richmond Palace, has taken some fatal step: thrown herself in the river and drowned on this summer morning.
But the king’s smiling nod tells me that no disaster has overshadowed his wedding day: it is good news, his beam tells me it is very good news.
Not until the tables have been cleared and Kitty is dancing again do I learn that it is a death.
A death that leaves the king smiling and beating his hand in time to the tune.
The musicians do not miss a beat for this death.
The choir does not catch a breath. It is the death of my friend.
It is the death of a man I loved, who was neither lover nor husband nor father but something dearer to me than all of these.
‘Thomas Cromwell has been executed,’ Catherine Brandon tells me, her voice carefully modulated, expressing no emotion. ‘The old lords have won against the upstart, the old ways of religion against reform, and we are all to be Papists again.’
My sense of loss comes in a sudden sweep, like a flock of crying gulls along an empty shore.
I think: Thomas Cromwell? Thomas Cromwell?
I didn’t say goodbye to you; I didn’t ever tell you .
. . I feel I should go to the City and wash his head on the spike of London Bridge, just as Thomas More’s daughter washed her father’s serene face.
I should go to George and Anne’s tomb in the chapel at the Tower with flowers for this new grave; they will have dropped his body in the vault beside them.
I wish now I had told him how glad I was of his protection; I wish I had told him how much he taught me.
I wish that I had told him that – in a way I don’t try to define – I loved him.
He was my magister – my master, my tutor, the mirror of the world to me.
I listened so carefully, so often, to what he said that I can hear his voice now, although his neck is hacked through.
I can see his smile and the knowing cleverness in his eyes, although they are closed in death.
I can hear his voice. I think I will always hear it.
‘God save the king!’ I say stoutly, looking at Catherine Brandon’s young pale face.
‘And God save the queen,’ she says, not at all like a shouted hurrah – but as if she thinks that being married without consent, to a man nearly old enough to be your grandfather, is not the greatest chance for every girl.
She should know – her guardian, Charles Brandon, took her and her fortune in one smooth gulp.
QUEEN KATHERYN’S MOTTO – chosen by the king in doting confidence – is: ‘no other will but his’. He has no idea how ironic this is – of all the king’s wives, this is the most wilful and the most selfish. She is the last person in the world to put anyone else’s wishes before her own.
But Kitty, a girl barely out of the schoolroom, knows better than any of them how to enact obedience, and Henry pours wealth on her: the royal treasury is mined to bring up jewels for her hair, for her hat, for her fingers, for the hem of her gowns.
The royal wardrobe is harrowed for cloth of silver for new gowns.
Seamstresses throughout London embroider pearls onto stomachers and rubies into sleeves, while Katheryn and her husband ride out every day into Hampton Court Park, along the riverside and deep into the country.
The king is back in the saddle; he rides a great horse beside his bride for hours every day.
Even the wound on his leg seems to be healing.
The bandages get lighter and thinner, his limp less noticeable; the smell fades away.
His colour improves; he loses weight; his doctors speak of the miracle power of true love.
‘Is he swiving her?’ my uncle asks, bringing his horse up beside mine as we watch Katheryn take the hand of her master of horse, John Dudley, to step onto the mounting block in the courtyard under the great clock tower.
‘My lord?’ I say irritably, pretending I can’t hear him above the yell of the Irish wolfhounds giving tongue and the shouts of the whippers-in.
‘You heard me.’
‘I can guess. For you never ask me anything else.’
‘Is he?’
‘Yes. He is.’
‘Fully? Completely?’
‘So she says.’
‘And she’d know?’
I say nothing. All royal brides know. It is their one and only task. The suggestion that Anne of Cleves was ignorant about her one duty as queen was ridiculous.
‘So, we can expect a baby?’ he pursues, as keen as the wolfhounds who are baying with impatience.
‘We can hope for a baby,’ I correct him.
‘I’m not a man for hope. You tell me when she’s expecting. I don’t care about your hopes.’
‘I’ll tell you. But remember: even if she does conceive, even if it’s a boy, he won’t be the next king; he’ll only be a second son.’
‘Prince Edward’s sickly,’ he says cheerfully. ‘Plenty of second sons take the throne. The king himself was a second son.’
I bow my head. I wonder who would be interested in the information that the Duke of Norfolk is hoping for the death of the Seymour boy?
Everyone would be interested; but I have no one that I want to tell.
No one will turn a dark, smiling gaze on me and say: You have news for me?
No one will make me laugh when he says: The one thing I like about your uncle is that he is always so predictable.
I think: no one enjoys the endless theatre of court ambition as Thomas Cromwell did – and without him, it’s not as good.
They bring up Katheryn’s well-trained palfrey, and she is helped into the saddle.
They check her girth, her bridle, that she is holding the reins correctly, that she is not nervous, and she brings her horse alongside the king.
The huntsmen know not to let the hounds go too fast. The king swears he feels like a twenty-year-old; but he is not the rider he was, and Katheryn is not a horsewoman like my sister-in-law Anne, though she wears her red velvet riding jacket.
The hunt moves off; the hounds and the whippers-in first, the king’s master of horse next, John Dudley beside him, and then the king and queen, side by side, like a doting old man and his favourite granddaughter.
The rest of us follow behind them, chattering and looking forward to the day, as if we have not ridden out like this, hundreds of times before, following four previous queens.