On Progress, Summer 1540
On Progress, Summer
IN AUGUST, WE move from hunting lodge to hunting lodge, which pleases the king as a prolonged honeymoon, but disappoints Katheryn, who wants to be queen of a palace.
The heat of the summer goes on; some days, it is too hot to ride out at all, and Katheryn stands beside the king and watches him fish in the moat or practise archery at the butts.
Every catch, every bullseye, he turns to her, as proud as a spoiled boy, and she smiles with delight and sometimes prettily claps her hands.
Of course, she is getting more and more bored by this old man in the first flush of his happiness.
I make her rest alone in her bedroom in the afternoon, so that she can have time away from blushing and smiling.
I bribe her to good behaviour with sweetmeats and sugarplums. The king has bought himself a little pet like Anne’s lapdog Purkoy, and it is my task to train her to do pretty tricks to please him.
She dances like an angel; she walks as if she was dancing.
Purkoy used to beg, sitting up on his hind legs, most prettily. I teach her to beg.
She is rescued from boredom by the appointment of her ladies-in-waiting.
Many transfer so fast from Queen Anne of Cleves to Queen Katheryn that they just come back to their old places.
Katheryn has to employ ladies of her own family: her sister Isabel Baynton, whose husband Sir Edward Baynton is vice chamberlain; Catherine Tilney, her kinswoman and childhood friend from Norfolk House.
Even the queen’s step-grandmother, the dowager duchess, has a place as chief lady if she comes to court.
Katherine Edgcumbe and Eleanor Manners the Countess of Rutland are rewarded for their outstanding skills as the writers of an impossible conversation with Anne of Cleves about virginity.
Mistress Stonor, who spied on my sister-in-law Anne in her final days in the Tower of London, gets a place.
Anne Parr – now Mistress Herbert – takes charge of the royal jewels, having served every one of the four previous queens with me.
Back in harness like the white mules of the queen’s litter, we are accustomed to the pace of royal service.
The burden is a different woman, but it makes no difference to us.
Katheryn has scores of men servants – her master of horse is John Dudley.
Thomas Manners the Earl of Rutland will manage her lands – she is given everything that Jane Seymour had – though she had to earn it with a fatal pregnancy.
An entire council of treasury and land agents and managers meets weekly to manage her vast estates.
She does not attend; she says it is too boring, and I must go in her place.
She has a stable full of grooms and two muleteers to drive the French litter.
The entire household was barely appointed to their roles, hardly started work, when we go on progress with a small riding court for the summer.
It is rushed – almost a flight – as if the king is avoiding a state entry to London with yet another queen, as if he doesn’t want the people to see that he is getting older and the wives are getting younger and younger.
The progress feels like a rout, without a plan.
For the last ten years, everything was meticulously organised by my spymaster.
All the departments of government that he created grind on: reporting, inspecting, and taxing; but they are the turning sails of a windmill catching a passing wind.
There is no miller watching the clouds, steering the sails; the cogs and gears are not engaged.
The old lords have no skill in business, church reform, taxation, running the counties or controlling the towns.
They cannot manage the Houses of Parliament.
They have influence only in their own areas; they have no nationwide view.
They have no idea of foreign alliances and overseas trade.
They have no unified policy; they rule for themselves, only themselves.
No one can plan a route as Cromwell did: threatening restless towns with our armed retinue, rewarding supporters with a smiling visit, weaving a path between threat and bribery. The old lords don’t even know the country outside of their own borders; they have no maps of any lands but their own.
SEVERAL LADIES COME on progress only long enough to secure their places, before they announce that they are pregnant and retire to their homes for the summer, perhaps for the rest of this reign.
Anne Parr now Mistress Herbert gives the keys to the jewel house to Elizabeth Tyrwhitt and tells me that she is going to leave when we reach Ampthill.
It’s a bad evening on another disorganised day: the queen’s own brother-in-law and fifteen men of her household got drunk and fought with the porters the night before.
‘You can’t leave us!’ I exclaim. ‘Not until I’ve got some proper order in the queen’s rooms!’
‘I can’t stay,’ she says. She gestures to her belly, which is flat as a board. ‘You can see that I have to leave.’
‘I see nothing, Anne Herbert!’ I say crossly. ‘And I can’t be everywhere. The queen likes the place in chaos; she likes everyone running around screaming. And if her own vice chamberlain is going to brawl . . .’
Anne Herbert leans towards me to whisper. ‘You’ll have seen her brother, Charles Howard, is courting Lady Margaret Douglas?’
‘Jesu save us!’
‘Another coup for the Howards,’ she observes neutrally.
‘It didn’t work out so well the last time.’
‘No – but this time, with a Howard queen on the throne . . .’
‘I doubt that even Kitty Howard can persuade the king that his royal niece should marry her brother Charles. Remember what he said last time about entrapment! Lady Margaret’s only just got out of Syon Abbey, you’d have thought she’d have learned her lesson.’
‘It’s not as bad as last time. Not a betrothal – only poetry-promises. But I wouldn’t leave court without warning you.’
‘You shouldn’t leave court at all,’ I say crossly. ‘All the queen’s friends are young and foolish, and the king is not a young and foolish husband.’
‘She can enchant him, and you can manage her,’ she reassures me.
‘Oh, he dotes on her; but a young court reminds him that he is old enough to be their grandfather. Her youth is a memento mori for him.’
‘A courtier’s work is to build up the king,’ Anne Herbert warns. ‘Not diminish him.’
‘She’s just seventeen!’ I say despairingly. ‘How can she not make him feel old and tired by comparison?’