Woking Palace, Autumn 1540
Woking Palace, Autumn
WE SPEND LONG days at Windsor, make another dull visit to Oatlands Palace, and arrive at Woking Palace as the drought breaks and it starts to rain.
Kitty’s days become even more empty. The court cannot go hawking, the birds will not fly in the rain, and we have to stay indoors, as rain streams down the windows all day.
The king and his young men friends stay in their own rooms, gambling and drinking.
Kitty walks around her quiet rooms, restless and bored, repeatedly asking if I know when we are going to London, when her wedding will be announced, when she will be proclaimed queen, when she will be crowned?
‘She’ll get no coronation until she’s with child,’ my uncle Thomas Howard predicts. ‘The king’ll never crown a barren queen. Never again! Does she know that?’
‘She knows it,’ I say. ‘But she’s determined to be proclaimed as his wife and queen even if the actual coronation comes later. And really, she’s got to be proclaimed. Half the country doesn’t even know he has married her.’
‘Oh, he’ll announce her. He’ll do it at Hampton Court before the Christmas feast,’ he promises.
‘I’ve made the arrangements. Unending detail, thousands of invitations.
Christ knows how Cromwell ever did everything.
My daughter will carry her train.’ He suddenly remembers his widowed daughter.
‘Mary’s got to be seen. You make sure she’s front and centre of any masques or dancing. ’
‘She wants to marry again?’ I ask, knowing that she does not.
‘Thomas Seymour,’ he says very quietly. ‘The heir’s uncle. It’s the very best I can get. We have to be allied with them when . . .’ He trails off.
He does not need to say more. When the king dies, the Seymours will be the closest kin to Prince Edward.
If there is a regency council, the two Seymour brothers, Edward and Thomas, will lead it.
Mary Howard would be wife of the lord protector.
If the widowed Queen Katheryn was named queen regent, Thomas Howard would have his only daughter and a niece at the very centre of power.
I think of the darkly handsome Thomas Seymour and Mary Howard’s glacial beauty. ‘I can’t see it,’ I say.
‘You will,’ my uncle replies. ‘If bribery and force can make it happen.’
‘Who are you going to bribe?’ I ask curiously.
‘Thomas Seymour.’
‘And who are you going to force?’
‘My daughter.’