Holy Cross, Waltham, Essex, May, 1541
Holy Cross, Waltham, Essex, May
KITTY’S VISITS TO Lady Elizabeth and little Prince Edward are a triumph.
The king is mawkish about the motherless three-year-old boy and weeps over him.
Kitty is horrified by his tears, and the stilted wariness of the child.
I put a firm hand in her back and push her towards the little boy.
The king gives a gulping sob, and Kitty puts out a tentative hand, and the child bows.
Realising how pretty they would look together, Kitty puts her arm around his shoulders and bends down to put her bronze head against his, her cheek to his round face.
The child’s staring eyes widen, but still he says nothing but the formal greeting that has been drilled into him.
When I take him back to his nurse, I realise he has wet himself with fear.
Lady Elizabeth is presented to her father and has a poem to recite which she has translated from Latin. The king shows little interest in her, though she tries hard to gain his attention. I watch her dark eyes flick from him to Kitty, as she takes the measure of this new stepmother.
‘My little kinswoman!’ Kitty coos, stretching out her arms, and the seven-year-old girl curtseys and steps forward for a kiss, as if she does not much value the Howard connection or put much faith in a third stepmother.
Lady Mary is also visiting the royal nursery, and although Kitty makes a gallant attempt to be charming – the young woman is too experienced a courtier to show anything but false respectful affection.
We meet in what were once Lady Mary’s own rooms in a wealthy devout abbey, ruled by the king and queen, her mother and father.
Not by a flicker of expression does she indicate that this rich centre of holiness is now an echoing shell, shrill with worldly ambition, where she visits occasionally, as an unwelcome guest.
‘And where is Master Culpeper?’ Kitty asks me, with an air of complete indifference. ‘He wasn’t at dinner last night?’
One of the pages of the king’s chamber tells me that Master Culpeper is in bed.
‘Ill?’ Kitty asks the young man. ‘Seriously ill?’
‘Ill or injured, Your Grace. I just know he’s taken to his bed.’
‘Oh, send to his rooms and find out, Jane. Has he had a fall from his horse, or – God save him – an illness? Do find out if he has a fever – or – Jane, ask them if it is the Sweat?’
‘I can’t. It looks odd.’
‘It looks like nothing,’ she says impatiently. ‘Send one of your maids to ask. There’s no reason that you should not ask how he is? Or I’ll send Catherine Tilney.’
‘Don’t send her!’ I exclaim. It’s better that I’m seen chasing after Master Culpeper than Catherine Tilney.
My maid comes back with the news that Master Culpeper is hot with a fever but expects to be well within the week.
Kitty sends one of the good dishes from her dinner table to the king’s favourite. It’s a gracious gesture, and nobody notices. Only I know that Master Culpeper – however ill – will laugh and take the dish as proof that I told Kitty that he was in love with her on the very day that he told me.
He sends a note to thank for the dish, and she replies to him.
They make me their go-between, forgetting that in courtly love stories, there are two messengers – of two different natures: Honte, the prude who will prevent love and betray the lovers, and Venus, who helps them.
But I am neither of these: I have no interest in helping a flirtation, and I would never betray Kitty.
She trusts me as she trusts no one else.
Every secret she tells is an extra thread to bind us.
Like Francis Dereham, lounging around at Norfolk House, because of her girlhood indiscretions, I will be at her side, on her pay, and eating her bouche at her dining table, as long as I want.
My future depends upon her being the greatest woman in the next reign: dowager queen, on the council of regency.
Far more powerful than Honte, far more than Venus, I am the watchman, the nightwatchman.
I use the spy skills I learned from Thomas Cromwell to open, read, and reseal every note that passes between Kitty and Culpeper – banalities about the weather and the dances that Kitty would prefer.
I know everything that happens, and I work in darkness.
It’s not hard for me to be completely discreet, to tell no one.
Now that my spymaster is dead, I have no one to tell.
I THINK OF HIM – my friend, my only friend, Thomas Cromwell – at the end of May when his old enemy Lady Margaret Pole, the matriarch of the Spanish party and of the Papist family Pole, is finally released from her long, unjust imprisonment – not to freedom – which God knows she deserves; but to her death.
The king, nagged by his conscience for keeping an innocent kinswoman in prison, relieves himself by having her beheaded.
She goes to her death for no reason but the king’s peace of mind.
It is a shock for me to realise that this is truly what has happened.
This is the act of the king, the king himself: his free choice and his independent act.
This is not a decision made by one of the many advisors that have guided him through his life: his grandmother, Queen Katherine, Cardinal Wolsey, Queen Anne, my uncle, or Thomas Cromwell.
His advisors have always been blamed for past cruelties.
I have blamed them myself. But this is his decision, his own: taken freely at a time of peace.
Margaret Pole never raised a finger against her cousin the king.
She never admitted guilt: not under torture, not even on the scaffold.
She fought for her good name and her life until the last moment of it, demanding why should she walk to Tower Green, resisting the guards, even running away from the headsman’s raised axe.
She was a woman of nearly seventy, the king’s mother’s dearest friend, and he killed her without cause, without pity.
This is a revelation to me. As a courtier, I have thought of the king as a creature to be steered and managed and controlled – a creature that can be petted into docility or tempted into a new direction. All courtiers think like this. But now, for the first time I know different.
Nobody put the idea of killing Lady Margaret into the king’s head; nobody persuaded him against his conscience.
It was in no one’s interest that she die; no one gained a position or earned a fortune at her death.
It was a redundant death, a pointless death.
This is not how a courtier thinks; this is not what an advisor plans; this is not what a good king orders.
No person of any sense would have ordered the death of Margaret Pole.
No one of any honour would have imagined it.
It is madness, it is madman-thinking. Death on a madman’s say-so, death as his mad choice, death only to show that he can cause death.
Death as a comfort to him, to ease his mad mind.
The madman who decided this is the madman who rules us now without warders.
All his advisors are dead, and they were all killed by him: men who he loved deeply, like Thomas More; men who were indispensable, like Thomas Cromwell; his spiritual father Bishop Fisher; the woman he adored, my sister-in-law Anne; my husband; their friends.
The king kills those closest to him, because he cannot bear to need them.
He cannot bear that they are wiser or better or even more beautiful than him.
He loves them at first, calling them to his side to make himself shine, and then he cannot tolerate that they eclipse him.
That, he cannot bear. The headsman is so overworked that he had to send out an apprentice who had not learned his trade to behead Margaret Pole.
He hacks her to death in clumsy swipes as she screams defiance.
We dine in the great hall that evening, and after dinner, there is music and dancing.
My smile is falser than ever before; there is a new joyless lightness in my voice.
I have been afraid at court, constantly spying on the way that power moves from one lord or another, the rise and fall of one man or another, the favouring of one woman over another.
I have been alert to the comings and goings of dozens of people.
But now, I realise that it was all a waste of study.
The court is an illusion of power, just as it is an illusion of happiness.
There is no happiness at court, and there is no power here either.
It is all the king’s. Power has always been in the hands of the king, and those of us who thought we were steering him or controlling him are victims in waiting.
Only the king is in power: only he is happy; only he is unhappy.
The rest of us are all pretending, and it does not matter what we feel.
There is no one left who dares to quarrel with him.
There is no one who dares to contradict him.
No one would ever suggest that he is wrong.
We have guided his steps with our eyes on the path for so long that we have lost our way; only he is looking up and around.
Only he has a destination in view. We have agreed to insane laws and now we find ourselves in a legal tyranny.
We have winked at manic cruelty, and now we close our eyes in fear.
We thought that we were steering a galloping horse, but we are tangled in the reins and being dragged to our deaths.
We have birthed and dandled and fed a tyrant, and now we do not even mourn when our monstrous baby kills a woman that he once called the ‘finest in England’.
She was a princess of the House of Plantagenet, the daughter of the Duke of Clarence, the greatest friend to the king’s mother, advisor to his wife.
She taught Lady Mary, Lady Margaret Douglas and me in the royal schoolroom, with the care that she lavished on her sons and daughter.
We hear the news that she is dead without a break in our laughter, and the three of us, her beloved pupils, dance after dinner.