Westminster Palace, Spring 1429
Westminster Palace, Spring
WE MAKE NO formal announcement of our marriage – as the greatest man in England, my lord answers to no one. In a few days he will write to France to tell his brother Duke John. His uncle Cardinal Beaufort will learn of our marriage when it is public.
‘He has no right to know my business,’ my husband says, as we take breakfast privately in our rooms at Westminster. ‘He’s my uncle, not my guardian. He can buy favour and power in parliament; but he can’t buy me.’
Roger Bolingbroke and Canon Southwell, breakfasting with us, both nod in agreement.
‘Surely, he shouldn’t have any influence in parliament?’ I ask. ‘As a cardinal of Rome and a bishop of England, he already holds too many offices in the Church. Surely, that’s against Church rules?’
‘He’s been out of the country since he took his cardinal’s hat, so it never occurred to me.
’ Roger Bolingbroke is surprised. ‘You’re right,Your Grace: he cannot be both bishop and cardinal.
He cannot be the government of England and the servant of Rome.
You are thinking like a politician, my lady.You are ahead of us, who should be the duke’s advisors. ’
‘You could raise it in council,’ I tell my husband. ‘Speak up now, while the cardinal’s newly home and hasn’t summoned his friends. Get on the attack while you’re the only protector in England, and your brother is in France.’
‘I’ll raise it with him directly, like an honourable man,’ my husband decides. ‘We’re both knights of the Order of the Garter; there is a brotherhood of honour. He was abroad, fighting for God and honour.’
I glance towards Roger Bolingbroke and see, in his thoughtful expression, my own scepticism. ‘Dr Bolingbroke?’ I prompt him.
He spreads his white hands. ‘Your devotion and your chivalry do you credit.’
‘But remember he was not so chivalrous to you,’ I supplement sweetly. ‘Remember him trying to seize the king! Remember him marching on London!’
‘He begged for forgiveness . . .’
‘Because he lost!’ I laugh, and Bolingbroke and Southwell both nod. ‘This is your chance – while the king is still too young to rule and speak for himself, and before your uncle has regained his power.’
‘Her Grace is right,’ Bolingbroke agrees. ‘This is the very time to diminish the cardinal – the king in his infancy, his tutor John Somerset sharing his progress with us. Now is the moment to stamp your authority on the privy council before the child becomes a man.’
‘If he ever does,’ I say silkily.
‘We can rely on Dr Somerset to keep us aware of the king’s growth,’ Canon Southwell says. He nods to me. ‘Another Oxford scholar, Your Grace.’
I smile at my husband. ‘You have made a university here,’ I say. ‘A university unlike any other, not to create scholars for the Church but scholars for the world. What might we not discover! What might we advise!’
‘A rule of scholars for peace,’ Bolingbroke says thoughtfully.
The duke raises his cup of small ale to me.
I know that he will do as we say. A vain man, he needs his decisions to be applauded before he can be resolute.
Bolingbroke, Southwell and I, working together with Abbot Wheathampstead and the baby king’s tutor, will edge the duke closer and closer to dominating the privy council and, from there, to commanding the king himself.
The first step is to diminish his uncle the cardinal.
The last step is to take the throne itself.
Then I will have the power to punish Owen ap Maredudd, and no one will even notice.
‘What an advisor you are!’ Humphrey exclaims to me. ‘What a helpmeet!’
‘And while you meet with the privy council, I’ll visit the queen and tell her that we are married,’ I say. ‘Just us ladies together.’
‘I thought we’d make an announcement to the court,’ he demurs.
He has been imagining himself as a bridegroom in cloth of gold and people admiring him.
‘No,’ I rule. ‘No one needs to know exactly when we married. It makes the women who abused me look like fools, protesting about things they know nothing about.’
‘Except that the women of London are now saying that since the countess is defeated, it would be a noble thing for my lord to go to Ghent, rescue her and marry her again,’ Canon Southwell remarks. ‘They know she needs help.’
‘That’s ridiculous. Fishwives’ gossip. And we will silence them and all these fairy tales with the announcement of our marriage.
’ I turn to Humphrey. ‘Let me give the queen a little shock with this news. She was preening herself with the thought that you were plotting to marry her, that your law to defend her from Edmund Beaufort was to keep her for yourself.’
I can always rely on his pride. He wants to forget she refused him and swore that she despised him. He shakes his head. ‘Never. I only tried to protect her from adventurers.’
‘She’s so vain – our marriage is a living reprimand for her vanity.
I will tell her, and she will at once tell her ladies, and they will tell their maids, and pretty soon everyone in London will know we are married, and the gossips against our honourable name will be silenced, and those who disrespected us will learn to be sorry. ’
Roger Bolingbroke smiles gently at me. ‘I should think anyone who disrespected you will learn to be sorry.’
‘They certainly should be,’ I say candidly.
‘Owen ap Maredudd?’ he asks.
‘Who?’ I ask, my voice like ice.
Roger Bolingbroke bows. ‘Nobody,’ he says truly.
THE PRIVY COUNCIL meets after breakfast in the council room, and I leave my husband at the door and walk onwards to the queen’s privy chamber. I do not announce my new title at the door. I want to tell the queen myself; I want to see her face as I throw my great position in her teeth.
She is making lace, with the silk cushion on her lap, the bobbins twisting and flying underneath her skilful fingers.
Owen ap Maredudd is beside her, standing at a lectern, looking over some begging letters from people too stupid to know that the country is ruled by my husband and that my husband is advised by me.
They waste their time writing to Queen Catherine, just as Owen wastes his time in serving her.
He looks up as I come in, and his smile is ready and his eyes warm. He takes a little step towards me as if he would take my hand. My face is a frozen mask as I walk past him; I turn my head away from him, as if I don’t even see him.
I give a mean little smile to the queen as I make a shallow curtsey, and I say: ‘Good day, Your Grace,’ very sweetly.
I look around at the other ladies, but I curtsey to nobody: I am a royal duchess, the wife to a prince; I outrank everyone in the room but the queen.
I will never curtsey to anyone but her, ever again.
Everyone sees this, my defiance. There is a little rustle of amazed protest like the flutter in a henhouse when a fox sniffs at the door.
No one can quite understand why I dare to breach court protocol by not curtseying, why I am standing so pert and so pretty before the older seated women who think they are my superiors.
I guess that Owen ap Maredudd, one step behind me, is the only one with a dawning understanding, and I am blind and deaf to him.
‘I greet you with extra affection today,Your Grace.’ I don’t quite dare to sit without invitation, but I sway towards the empty chair beside the queen, ready to plump down the moment that she gives permission. ‘I greet you as your sister-in-law.’
I try to keep my eyes on her; but I cannot resist a swift triumphant glance at Owen ap Maredudd. He looks stunned – everyone else looks at me as if I have shot a monstrous cannonball into the quiet room. One woman actually whispers: ‘No!’
‘I am married,’ I say pleasantly. ‘His Grace the Duke of Gloucester and I are married, and now we are living at Baynard’s Castle, while planning a new palace at Bella Court.’
Everyone looks horrified – but oddly, not the young queen.
She flickers a quick, amused glance at Owen ap Maredudd, too fast for anyone but me to see.
I don’t understand this at all. Then I see that Owen has stepped to the door and turned his face away.
His shoulders are shaking; for a moment, I think he is weeping and I feel a vengeful joy sweep through me that he is so distressed that he has to hide his face.
I am staring at his back, quite forgetting to watch the queen, so I see him as he turns to the room.
He has himself under control again. I see his flushed face and dry eyes, and I realise he was laughing. He is not heartbroken that I have married Duke Humphrey at all; he is fighting not to laugh aloud.
This is incomprehensible. This is my moment of triumph over the queen, who cannot marry without the permission of my husband – which is to say, me.
I will decide who she will marry, and I may decide that she will never marry at all.
I thought she would be shaken to her core at the realisation that I am no longer the young woman who is to be patronised and snubbed, who sits below the salt at the ladies’ table; I am now a duchess, and I will sit beside her at every great event of the kingdom.
I had planned this entry to the queen’s rooms as a duchess as the first step of my revenge on her, on Owen ap Maredudd, on the court itself for eight years of petty insults.
I had expected him to be horrified at the finality of his loss of me.
But instead, she is flushed and biting her lips, and Owen is fighting not to laugh aloud.
‘May I sit?’ I prompt her. But this is the last time I will ever ask.
Owen recovers himself and steps forward to place a chair for me. I sit without a word of thanks, and I know he will smell the perfume that scented his sheets, his own skin. I don’t look at him.