St Mary’s, York, Autumn 1541 #2
‘Your Majesty will remember from your extensive reading – Emperor Aurelian saved Rome from the barbarians. Famously saved them! And – Your Majesty will remember – he built the Aurelian Walls to keep the barbarians from Rome. How is that as a slight to the Scots?’
‘Just like Hadrian’s Wall!’ the king crows, finally getting the point.
‘That says everything! Of course. That’s my choice.
Tell the master of revels that I command a masque based on the building of the Aurelian Walls.
He won’t know anything about it, but he can ask Jane.
Don’t trouble me. I’m busy enough with ordering repairs to these buildings to house them all. ’
‘Would Your Majesty play the part of Aurelian?’ I ask, sweet as honey.
‘In a toga – a long toga – and crowned with laurel.’ He will look more like Nero than Aurelian, but he still loves to dress up and disguise, and a long robe will hide his rotting leg.
‘You could be carried in on a throne at the end in triumph, when the masque wall has been built by the dancers and the choristers. The queen could be Peace?’
‘Yes,’ he says, pleased. ‘That’s very good, Jane.’ He turns to my uncle. ‘What a scholar your niece is, Howard! You’d never have thought of Aurelian – I doubt you’ve even heard of him!’
‘Indeed,’ my uncle says, the falsest of smiles glozing his face. ‘She is such a treasure.’
THE KING, THE whole court, and the city of York throw themselves into frantic preparation for the visit of the Scots king; but first, the city must be cleared of the private armies of the border lords who have fought the Scots for generations and are more likely to dig in for a siege than prepare a peaceful welcome.
Orders stream from the court that buildings shall be prepared, that great tents and pavilions shall come from London, that furniture, carpets, tapestries must come north, labouring up the muddy Great North Road, and must not be delayed.
Everyone knows there is to be a great event at York; but no one knows what it is.
Of course, given that Jane Seymour was to be crowned at York after the birth of her child, everyone assumes that all this fuss is for Kitty.
Everyone thinks that she is secretly with child and the coronation is to be her reward.
‘What am I to do?’ she asks me, blank-faced. ‘I don’t want to deny it!’ She flushes with annoyance. ‘And I should be crowned! Why can’t the king just say he’s crowning me? So everyone stops talking?’
‘I’m hoping he will do it during the visit of the King of Scots.’
‘Then why not say that the King of Scots is coming?’
‘He doesn’t want the embarrassment of waiting for a less important man.’
‘He’s embarrassing me!’
We both know that Kitty’s embarrassment does not matter to King Henry, who – however much he pets her – will always put himself first.
‘I have to tell Thomas that it’s not true,’ Kitty frets. ‘I must tell him I am not with child. What would he think of me?’
‘You can’t: he’s still in his bed with fever.’
‘Then I’ll have to write,’ she says, as if it is a mighty undertaking.
‘You can’t write anything like that.’
‘But I have to tell him.’ She turns to me, her eyes filling with tears.
‘Jane, you don’t know what it’s like, day after day not seeing him, and only hearing that he is getting better but never seeing him.
I can’t live like this. I can’t be fitted with dresses and practise dances and listen to the king going on and on about the King of Scots if I never see Thomas. ’
‘Be calm.’ I try to soothe her. ‘Be calm, Kitty. This is just ordinary courtier work: dancing and rehearsing and being seen by the people. You can do this, even without Thomas, and, anyway, you have no choice.’
‘But let me write to him!’
I am afraid that she is going to start crying, and we have to rehearse the masque in just a few minutes.
‘Jane, I swear to you, I won’t dance, I’ll say I am ill, and I’ll go to bed and not get up again, unless I can write to him.’
‘Yes, yes, you can write,’ I surrender. ‘Shall you dictate, and I write it for you?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I want to write to him myself, in my own hand. I don’t care if it’s dangerous. I want him to know what he is to me.’
I won’t let her start until she has practised her part and is released from the rehearsal.
Then she sends for a quill and a ream of paper.
She asks me to comb the paper to give her invisible lines to follow, she asks me to mend the pen and get her a pot of the best ink from her secretary.
Then she insists on writing the letter herself.
Her education has been completely neglected.
This is a great effort for her to write even in English.
She works as hard as any spy transcribing into code, she asks me how to spell ‘recommend’.
Despite the guide-lines drawn across the page, her words waver hopelessly, and there is a blot from a tear.
It is a letter that a schoolgirl would write – aspiring to formality but shot through with a childish longing.
It is a letter that should never be written by a queen – not even if she were writing to a king, a beloved husband.
It is too revealing; it is suffused with her love.
I cannot bring myself to tell her she may not write this; it is far too late to tell her not to feel like this.
This is the passion of a young untutored woman who has lived all her life in a heartless family, commanded by her husband, and now she has someone who cherishes her for the very first time.
I could as easily repress this, spoil it, censor it, as I could slap a trusting child.
Master Culpeper,
I never longed so much . . . to see you and to speak with you .
. . it makes my heart die to think . . .
that I cannot be always in your company.
Yet my trust is always in you that you will be as you have promised me .
. . praying you that you will come when my Lady Rochford is here .
. . and thus I take my leave of you, trusting to see you shortly again, and I would you was with me now that you might see what pain I take in writing to you.
Yours as long as life endures,
Katheryn
KITTY CANNOT SLEEP or eat while Thomas Culpeper fights his fever.
A dozen times a day, she asks me how he is, and will I send to ask?
I order the queen’s usher, Henry Webb, to leave his post and go into Master Culpeper’s service so that he can come and go between the queen’s household and the king’s side.
All the other servants think he has been unfairly dismissed, and Lucy Luffkynn swears darkly that the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk will send another favourite into the queen’s service and that new servants will come up with the baggage train from London and replace everyone.
There are long days while Kitty goes hunting beside the king and walking with him in the garden, sits beside him through interminable dinners, and dances after dinner, going hand to hand with his handsome young companions, but never sees Thomas.
The king is preoccupied with his building works, every day he goes out into the city, changing his mind on the rebuilding of the abbey, shouting for the master builder, demanding a tower be restored which is to be called Henry’s Tower and will be a lookout over the great walls of York for a thousand years, posting a man on it to warn of the arrival of the Scots king.
Kitty bears the boasting and the outbursts of complaining very patiently; but tells me that she has a pain in her belly that comes on at dinnertime, when she sits down to eat beside the king.
Sometimes, she cannot swallow when he puts a great haunch of meat on her plate; she pretends she is eating for hour after hour of dining, as he calls for another dish and another to be brought to the table.
We assume that King James will come with a riding court of some hundreds, but we have to be ready to house a thousand courtiers – the English cannot look unprepared or too poor to pay for rebuilding.
The old tents from the Field of the Cloth of Gold are pulled out of storage, reburnished, and sent on their way up the North Road too.
They will be set up on the meadows outside the walls, to house the Scots court overflowing from the rebuilt abbey and castle.
While the king redraws plans and spurs on the builders to throw up halls and rooms and kitchens and stables, he dreams of dominating the younger man.
He will resolve the constant border warfare; he will separate the king from his alliance with France.
He will win Scotland to peace. More than anything else, he will make Mary of Guise regret her choice of James of Scotland over Henry of England.
This visit to York – originally just one of the many stops on the progress around the north – has become the centre of his plans, the legacy of his reign.
Every day, we rehearse the new masque. Dressmakers work on togas, and all the artists in the north of England are summoned to York to make masks, headdresses, scenery, and to build the Aurelian walls of plaster.
They have to design and build pretend siege engines; this Roman army is to have cannon and thunderflashes.
Aurelian, the king himself, swathed in a toga of cloth of gold with a crown of gold laurel, is to enter on a throne of gold pulled by the white mules of the queen’s litter.
Stands are built for an audience of thousands.