Chapter 3
They said I might have been queen. They said it the way people say a thing they find delicious, without once considering what it would cost the women around me to make it true.
By the time anyone whispered that particular rumor about me, I had already spent a decade watching the crown consume the women who wore it, one after another. And I had not merely watched from a distance.
I do not think Brandon invented the case against her. That distinction belonged to colder men than my husband ever was. But I watched him do his duty that May all the same. And, young as I was, I understood that “duty” was simply the word powerful men used for doing what the king required.
I did not understand why a grown man would die over words exchanged between two women who had likely never raised their voices to each other in person.
I understood it considerably better four years later when I watched my own husband sit in judgment of that same woman, by then a queen, in the very trial that would end her life.
I did not love Anne Boleyn. I barely knew her.
But I stood beside a man who helped end her life.
I was not yet twenty years old, and I understood something that would only sharpen with every year that followed: A queen’s fall was never truly private, and everyone standing near enough to the throne got some small portion of blood on their own hands whether they asked for it or not.
Henry married again before Anne’s own body was properly cold. By the court’s count, he was a groom again in only eleven days. But I have never been certain anyone counted with anything but disgust.
Jane Seymour gave him what none of his other wives had managed.
She gave him a living son, the boy who would one day become King Edward.
She did not live to see her son grow past a fortnight.
The birth broke something in her that no physician knew how to mend, and she died within days of giving birth.
She was the queen Henry asked to be laid beside when his own death came.
She was the only one he ever mourned as though he had actually loved her.
I do not know whether that says something genuinely positive about his grief or something considerably worse about what it actually took to be loved by that king at all.
Jane taught me that a queen could do everything right and still not survive. I had already learned, watching Anne Boleyn, that failure could kill a queen. Jane taught me that success could kill her just as easily.
***
I was still learning both lessons three years later, when Brandon and I rode to Deal to greet the King’s new bride, another Anne, as she landed from Cleves.
I was the first Englishwoman to take Anne’s hand on English soil.
We escorted her onward to Dover that same night, in weather too foul for the welcome the occasion deserved.
Afterward, I was appointed as one of the Great Ladies of her household, a service that lasted exactly as long as the marriage did, which was not very long at all.
I will not pretend the marriage was ever a love match on either side. I watched it curdle almost from the first week, though the precise reasons took longer to reach the ladies of the household than the King’s own council.
By July, the marriage was quietly annulled.
Anne kept her head, her dignity, and a generous settlement besides.
I have always thought of her as the one wife who managed to out-negotiate Henry rather than simply survive him.
I did not know, watching her ride away from that marriage with both her life and her composure intact, that I was watching the gentlest ending any of his queens would receive.
Catherine Howard came next. She was a queen not much past her own girlhood.
She was poorly educated and, I thought even then, poorly protected by everyone who ought to have looked after her better than they did.
We were near enough in age that people sometimes assumed we would be close.
We weren’t. Not really. She had been raised to please, and I loved to argue.
So the two of us never found much common ground beyond the household itself.
Along with most of Queen Anne’s other ladies, I had simply been passed into Catherine’s service the moment one queen replaced another.
In the summer of 1541, the King’s northern progress stopped at my own house at Grimsthorpe for several days.
The whole court descended on my halls, my kitchens, and my patience all at once.
I did not know then, hosting that visit as any duchess is required to do, that the young queen had just begun meeting privately with a gentleman of the privy chamber named Thomas Culpeper.
Within a year, these meetings would cost her exactly what they were always going to cost her once the King’s suspicion caught up with his pride.
I have not been able to walk the gallery at Grimsthorpe since without wondering which corner of it had witnessed the beginning of Catherine Howard’s end.
While I fretted over nothing more serious than whether the kitchens could feed a king’s full retinue, her ruin started in my own house, under my own roof.
She lost her head in February of 1542, not yet twenty years old. I did not know, watching Catherine go to the block, that I would one day have to make my own choice about King Henry when his attention turned toward me.
I had been Duchess of Suffolk for over a decade by then.
And I had learned enough of court gossip to know that most of it dissolved the moment something more interesting replaced it.
The gossip about Henry and me did not dissolve.
It clung, the way certain rumors do when they carry just enough truth to survive their own repetition.
Because King Henry did look at me. I do not say that with vanity. I say it because I watched him do it. He did it across rooms and across years, with the fixed attention of a man deciding what he might one day want.
That attention cost me nothing while Brandon lived, and I want to set it aside for a moment. Because Brandon was the man who occupied far more of those years than a king ever did. Whatever Henry wanted, he could not simply reach past a living husband to take it.
Brandon and I had built something by then that I still find difficult to name.
It had not started as love. It had started as a transaction with my name attached to the wrong end of it.
But two sons will change any household. And Henry and Charles, born in 1535 and 1537, gave me a place in that house that no wardship contract had ever offered.
I was no longer merely the duke’s possession, but also the mother of his sons.
I became a woman whose voice carried weight at his table, whether he had intended to give it that weight or not.
Somewhere in those years, Brandon and I found ourselves walking toward the same conviction.
The old faith was crumbling around us. Monasteries were being dissolved, scriptures were being translated, and reformers like Hugh Latimer were welcomed into households that would have burned him a decade earlier.
Brandon could have clung to the Catholicism of his youth.
Instead, he chose to let his house become a haven for the new reformed thinking.
I do not know if he did it for faith, for me, or for reasons I never fully understood.
I know that I stopped feeling like a woman who had been placed in his life and started feeling like a woman who belonged there.
I thought nothing of arguing scripture with him over supper, unafraid to tell him when I thought he was wrong.
That boldness did not stay confined to our own table for long. Bishop Gardiner became my enemy years before either of us understood how long the enmity would last. It began, as so many things at that court did, at a dinner table.
Brandon and I hosted often in those years.
And one evening, with wine loosening tongues that were usually more careful, someone proposed a party game.
Each lady at the table was to take the hand of the man she loved best. It was a foolish game, the sort designed to produce blushing, laughter, and nothing more dangerous than mild embarrassment.
Every woman before me played it exactly as intended, choosing husbands and favorites with the expected giggling.
Gardiner sat near enough to reach. He was Bishop of Winchester by then. He had already made his contempt for reformers known. The moment I understood what I was going to do, I felt my resolve settle.
I took his hand.
The table went quiet the way a room does when it senses that entertainment is about to become something sharper. Gardiner looked pleased for exactly as long as it took me to speak.
“I have chosen you,” I told him, loud enough for the whole table to hear it, “because I love you the worst of any man here, and the game asked me to be honest.”
The room made a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a laugh, like it couldn’t decide whether it had just witnessed something delightful or something that would need answering for later.
Gardiner’s face arranged itself into a smile that did not remotely reach the rest of him. He said something courteous and thin in reply. It was the sort of thing a man says when he has decided a public room is not the place to settle a score.
Brandon laughed the loudest of anyone, which told me everything I needed to know about whether he approved.
I do not regret it, though I understood even then that I had made a choice with a cost attached.
Gardiner was not a man who forgot an insult delivered in front of witnesses.
I had just handed him one dressed up as a party game, wrapped in enough laughter that he could not retaliate on the spot without looking smaller than the woman who’d delivered it.
When I publicly insulted him that evening, I did not know that I was opening an account between us that would not close for years. I only knew that the room was watching, and that I intended to give them something worth watching.
That evening became one of the stories people told about me at court. It was the sort of story that made men laugh nervously, and women look at me with something between admiration and caution. But a marriage is not made of dinner parties, and Gardiner was not the only account I was keeping.
Was I happy in those years? I have turned that question over more than any other in the writing of this account, and I still do not have a clean answer.
I was not miserable. Too many stories flatten a woman’s marriage into either misery or romance.
And mine was neither. I had two sons I loved deeply.
Somewhere in the middle of our marriage, I had a husband who had stopped treating me like an asset and started treating me like a person he consulted.
Whether that was love, I can not say. I only know that when he died, on the twenty-second of August, 1545, I grieved a man, not the rank that survived him.
I was widowed at twenty-six years old, wealthy beyond most women’s imagining, and - apparently - available to a king.