The King's Curse Read online

  “If it wins him favor with the Lady, he’ll do it,” Arthur points out. “He’s beside himself. He’ll do anything.”

  “What did you call her?”

  “I called her the Lady. That’s what a lot of them are calling her.”

  I could curse like a stable boy with rage. “For sure they can’t call her ‘Your Grace,’ ” I say sharply. “Or ‘Your Ladyship.’ She’s nothing more than a knight’s daughter. She wasn’t good enough for Henry Percy.”

  “She likes anything that makes her stand out,” Arthur pursues. “She likes to be conspicuous. She likes the king to publicly acknowledge her. She’s terrified that everyone will think her nothing more than his whore, just like her sister, just like all the others. She makes him promise, all the time, that this will be different. She’s not to be another Bessie, she’s not to be another Mary. She’s not to be another laundry maid, or the French slut Jehanne. She’s got to be special, she’s got to be different. Everyone has to see that she is different.”

  “The lead hackney,” I say vulgarly.

  Montague looks at me. “No,” he says. “You have to see this, Lady Mother. It’s important. She’s more than his latest ride.”

  “What more can she be?” I demand impatiently.

  “If the queen should die . . .”

  “God forbid,” I say instantly, crossing myself.

  “Or say: if the queen should retire to live a religious life.”

  “Oh, do you think she would?” Arthur asks, surprised.

  “No, of course she wouldn’t!” I exclaim.

  “She might,” Montague insists. “She might. And really—she should. She knows that Henry has to have a son. Fitzroy isn’t enough. Princess Mary isn’t enough. The king has to leave a legitimate male heir, not a bastard boy or a girl. The queen knows this, every princess knows this. If she could rise to greatness, if she could act with great generosity, she could retire from the marriage, take the veil, then Henry could be free to marry again. She should do that.”

  “Oh, is this your opinion?” I ask bitingly. “The opinion of my son, who owes everything to the queen? Is this the opinion of the young men of the court who have sworn fealty to her?”

  He looks awkward. “I’m not the only one saying it,” he says. “And many more think it.”

  “Even so,” I say flatly. “Even if she were to choose to join a nunnery—and I swear she would not—that would make no difference to Anne Boleyn. If the queen stepped aside, it would only be for the king to marry a princess of Spain or France. The king’s whore would still be nothing but a whore.”

  “A consort?” Montague suggests.

  “A concubine?” Arthur smiles.

  I shake my head. “Are we Mahometans now? In the eyes of God and by the law of the land, there is nothing that girl can be but an adulterous whore. We don’t have concubines in England. We don’t have consorts. She knows it, and we know it. The best she can get for herself is the right to dance at court after the queen has withdrawn, and a title like ‘the Lady,’ for those who are too mealymouthed to call a whore a whore. Anything else means nothing.”

  LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, SUMMER 1527–1528

  I dare not tell Montague to write to me secretly, so everything that I know this summer is learned from tactful pointers in his breezy unsealed letters, or from the gossip at the castle gate from the occasional London tinker or pedlar. Montague writes to me family news: Arthur’s new baby, Margaret, is thriving; Ursula is out of confinement and has given the Staffords another boy, another Henry; and then one day he writes with quiet pride to tell me that he too has a son. I take the letter and I kiss it, and hold it to my heart. There will be another Henry Pole, there will be another Lord Montague after my son and I are long gone. This little baby, this Henry, is another step on our family path to greatness from greatness.

  He has to be silent about all other news. He can tell me nothing about the queen and the court, he cannot tell me that the king summoned Thomas More to walk in the garden with him at Hampton Court, and among the evening birdsong, and with the scent of the roses on the air, confided that he feared his marriage was invalid. He pronounced that his sister Margaret, the Dowager Queen of Scotland, could not get a divorce from the Pope, but that his marriage was a different case, that God had shown him, so painfully but so vividly in the deaths of his children, that his marriage is not blessed by God. And Thomas, good councillor he is, swallowed his own doubts at the divinity of this revelation, and promised the king that he will form an opinion, a thoughtful legal opinion, on the matter and advise his master.

  But Montague’s discretion makes no difference, for by the end of the summer, the whole kingdom knows that the king is seeking to end the marriage with his queen. The whole kingdom knows, but there is not one word of it inside the state rooms at Ludlow. I surprise myself at the power of the rule I have established over my household. Nobody speaks ugly gossip to the young woman in my charge and so the princess’s world is collapsing around her; and she does not know.

  Of course, in the end, I have to tell her. Many times I start; but each time the words simply die in my mouth. It is unreal to me, it is incredible to me, I cannot offer her an account of it, any more than I could seriously tell her the tale of the Lambton Worm as a fact rather than a ridiculous legend. It may be that everyone knows it, but still it is unreal.

  And anyway, just as I hope, nothing happens. Or at any rate, we have no certain report that anything has happened. We are so far away from London, in the very distant west, that we get no reliable news. But even out here, we learn that the queen’s nephew Charles V of Spain has invaded Rome and captured the Pope and is holding him virtually as a prisoner. This changes everything. Not even our all-persuasive cardinal with his honeyed words is going to be able to convince a pope imprisoned by the Spanish king to rule against the Spanish Queen of England. Any of the king’s complicated theological arguments about it being a sin to marry his brother’s widow will simply go unheard by the captive Pope. While the Spanish emperor commands the Pope, his aunt, the Spanish Queen of England, is safe. All she has to do is to assert the simple truth: that God called her to marry the King of England, and that there is no reason that the marriage is invalid. And I know she will assert that truth until she dies.

  In the very castle where Katherine and Arthur lived as passionate lovers, I say nothing to anyone about the love they shared, or about the promise he drew from her—that if he died, she must still be Queen of England and have a daughter called Mary. I say nothing about the lie that I swore to support. I put it from me as if it were a secret from so long ago that I cannot even remember it. My secret fear is that someone, sooner or later, perhaps the cardinal, perhaps Thomas More, or the cardinal’s new servant Thomas Cromwell, another man from nowhere, is going to ask me if Arthur and Katherine were lovers. I am praying that if I continue to study forgetfulness, then I can say in truth that I never knew, and now I cannot remember.

  The summer heat comes and brings with it an outbreak of the Sweat, and the queen summons the princess to join her and the king to travel the country far from London. Once again they are going to live privately while the country suffers.

  “You are to join them at St. Albans,” I say to Princess Mary. “I will take you there and go to my own house. I daresay you will spend the summer with them.”

  “With who?” she asks anxiously. “Who else will be there?”

  Poor child, I think. So she knows. Despite the shield I have put around her, she knows that Anne Boleyn goes everywhere with the king. Her silence about this has not been ignorance, but discretion. But I have good news for her, and I let her see my small, triumphant smile. “Alas,” I say, lingering over the word till her eyes shine and she gleams in return. “Alas, I hear that many of the court are ill. The cardinal has retreated to his home with his physician, and Anne Boleyn has gone to Hever. So it will just be a small court. Probably just your father and mother and perhaps one or two attendants, Thomas