Hampton Court, January 1541
Hampton Court, January
IN THE END, we all have to set our hands to the wheel to make the magic of a royal court for the new year celebrations.
A visit of Anne of Cleves throws the machinery into its highest gear.
She curtseys as low to Kitty as if her former maid is an empress, and she sits with the duchesses, halfway down the table that she once supervised as queen.
After dinner, there is dancing, and the king watches his two wives take hands as partners, and he beats his hand in time to the tune.
Everyone seems to have forgotten that Anne is so ugly that no man could desire her.
Nobody thinks that her breasts are slack and that she smells.
She is beautifully dressed – she must be spending a fortune on new clothes, all cut revealingly in the French style to suit her curves.
She has brought lavish gifts for the king – two horses barded in imperial purple velvet – and he repays her generously.
Even Katheryn shares some of her spoils, passing on the king’s gifts that she doesn’t want: two puppies that Anne snatches up and kisses, and a gold ring that Kitty puts on Anne’s finger.
After her short stay, when it’s time for her to go, Anne bids a cheerful farewell to all her old false friends, and I walk with her to the clock tower yard, where her horse and guards are waiting.
‘You are happy?’ I ask.
‘Happier than you, I think,’ she says. ‘For I am as you said I should be: free of the show and free of the fear. I live without a master. Just think: I’m going to ride six miles through the frosty park and get home before dusk in time for my dinner.
I shall eat what I like; I shall sleep alone in my big bed.
I shall wake tomorrow, and then – I shall do whatever I want to do! ’
‘I’m glad for you.’
‘But what will happen when he dies?’ she asks in German, so that no eavesdropper could understand us.
Even so, I glance around. ‘It’s against the law to speak . . .’ I start to caution her.
‘I know. But it can’t be long. Look at him.’
‘Your place is secure,’ I say. ‘He made it the law that you should be paid your pensions and recognised as his sister.’
‘And you?’ She looks at me. ‘Katheryn Howard’s young; she’ll outlive him by decades, just as I thought that I would.
I thought that I would be a regent queen, ruling over England until my stepson was of age and then he would honour me as a good stepmother.
But it will be Kitty, not me. The king will name her as regent in his will, and then you and the Howard family will be the power behind the throne of a queen regent ruling England.
’ She looks at me, speculatively. ‘You know how to do it. Actually, you’d be good at it! ’
I lower my eyes so that she does not see the flare of my ambition. ‘I’ve thought of it,’ I admit.
She laughs in genuine amusement. ‘It would be funny, after his hunger for a son, if his kingdom was ruled by a woman! It would be so funny if the woman was a Boleyn.’
I REMEMBER MY FATHER’S gloomy prediction that no one could pack a jury like Thomas Cromwell when Sir Thomas Wyatt, our old friend, the poet, is arrested suddenly without warning and taken to the Tower.
He is wearily familiar with the prison rooms; he was released last time only because Cromwell had enough evidence against Anne without having to throw Thomas Wyatt into the scales against her.
But this time, Wyatt’s only friend is Sir John Wallop, ambassador to France, and he is suddenly recalled from Paris, and they are imprisoned together.
And that is where it rests, in an eerie silence and stillness.
Their houses are searched and their servants questioned; but nothing is found against them.
The two men are housed in the Tower but not charged.
It is as if someone knows there is a crime, but he lacks the skills to make a water-tight case against them.
No one seems to know how to write a writ of attainder to have them killed.
All the old lords are on edge, waiting for news, terrified that something will point to one of them: an embroidered banner in the bottom of an old chest, a receipt for a horse.
But whoever has ordered this inquiry does not know their business.
They have started with accusation and now look for evidence.
But a clever advisor sends bread on waters passing forth.
My spymaster spread lies to breed lies long before he made an accusation, knowing very well, thou knowest not what evil shall come on the earth.
I loiter in the gallery outside the privy council room when the old lords are coming out and talking indiscreetly to their friends; but since they know nothing, I learn nothing.
If there was a circle of hidden plotters, they have been well-warned by the arrests.
It is true – as my father said – that nobody can run an inquiry now Cromwell is gone.
‘IS THOMAS WYATT actually guilty of anything?’ I ask my uncle.
‘He’s too clever by half,’ my uncle says crossly.
‘It’s not an offence to be too clever, is it?’
‘It’s an offence to flaunt your learning, to say that none of us old lords can muster more than one wit between all of us, to suggest that England cannot be ruled without a Wolsey or a Cromwell and that the king’s poems don’t scan or rhyme or have enough words to a line or whatever,’ he says irritably.
I scrutinise him; I don’t fear his ill temper now that my future is secure.
I am a wealthy woman in my own right, I am indispensable to a favoured queen, and if she becomes a regent queen, I shall be her chief advisor.
Her inexperience and ignorance are my advantage.
No queen before her had so poor an education; no queen before her had nothing to fill the empty days.
English-born, she cannot serve as an ambassador like Katherine of Aragon.
She has no interest in Catholicism like the first devout queen, nor reform like the second.
She has not a thought in her head about the running of the country, no interest in the poor, nor in rescuing those who have nowhere to go now that the monasteries are closed.
She has no clever brothers like the Seymours to support her authority.
She was raised as a pillion wife, who sits sideways behind her husband on a special saddle and cannot even see where she is going.
If the king makes her queen regent at his death, I will rule England through her.