The King's Curse Read online

  “All our kinsmen, of course,” Montague says. “Courtenay and the West of England, Arthur Plantagenet in Calais, the Staffords, the Nevilles. Charles Brandon, probably, if we make it clear we are against the advisors and not against the king, all the Church lands and their tenants—that’s nearly a third of England alone. Wales of course, because of the princess and you living there, the North and Kent with my uncle Lord Bergavenny. The Percys would rise to defend the Church, and there would be many who would rise up for the princess, more than have ever ridden out before. Lord Tom Darcy, Lord John Hussey, and the old Warwick affinity for you.”

  “You have spoken to our kinsmen?”

  “I have taken great care,” Montague assures me. “But I spoke to Arthur Viscount Lisle. He and Courtenay have met with the Maid of Kent and been convinced by her that the king will fall. Everyone else has come to me, to ask what we will do, or spoken to the Spanish ambassador. I am certain that the only lords who would stand with the king are the people he has newly made: the Boleyns and the Howards.”

  “How will we know when the emperor is coming?”

  Geoffrey beams. “Reginald will send to me,” he says. “He knows he has to give us time enough for everyone to arm their tenants. He understands.”

  “We wait?” I confirm.

  “We wait for now.” Montague looks warningly at Geoffrey. “And we only speak of it among ourselves. No one outside the family, only those who we know are already sworn to the queen or the princess.”

  RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, WINTER 1532–SUMMER 1533

  Like the slow tolling of a funeral bell that rings out sorrowfully again and again as a prisoner is brought from the darkness of the Tower, to walk up to the hill where the headsman waits by the ladder to the scaffold, bad news comes beat by slow beat from the court in London.

  In December the king and Anne inspect the works to repair the Tower of London and are reported as saying that the work must be hurried. The City is agog, thinking that the queen is to be taken from the More and imprisoned in the Tower.

  She says that she is ready for a trial for treason, and instructs that Princess Mary is never to deny her name or her birth. She knows this means they may both be arrested and taken to the Tower. It is her command. Burn this.

  Geoffrey comes to tell me that Anne holds great state at court, wearing the queen’s jewels, preceding everyone into dinner. She has come back from Calais holding her head stiffly erect, as if she is bearing the weight of a crown, invisible to everyone but herself. The true ladies of the realm are disregarded, the French dowager queen Mary avoids her own brother’s court altogether and gives out that she is ill. The other ladies of the kingdom—Agnes, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk; Gertrude, the Marchioness of Exeter; even I, especially I—are not invited. Anne is guarded by her tight little circle: Norfolk’s daughter Mary Howard, her own sister Mary, and her sister-in-law Jane. She spends all her time with the young men of Henry’s court and her brother George, a wild circle headed by the one-eyed Sir Francis Bryan, whom they call the vicar of hell. It is a feverishly witty, worldly court that the king has allowed to come about that is driven by sexual desire and ambition. There are fearless and bold young men, and women of doubtful virtue, all celebrating their daring in a new world with the new learning. It is a court that is perpetually on tenterhooks for the new fashion, for the new heresy, waiting for the Pope’s ruling, and for the king to decide what he will do. A court that has staked everything on the king being able to force the Pope into consent, knowing that this is the greatest sin in the world and the destruction of the kingdom, believing that this is a leap into freedom and into a new way of thinking.

  In January, the king’s envoy to the Pope returns home wreathed in smiles and with the news that the Holy Father has approved the king’s choice for the Archbishop of Canterbury. In place of William Warham, a holy, thoughtful, gentle man, tortured by what the king was doing to his Church, we are to have the Boleyn family chaplain, Thomas Cranmer, whose reading of the Bible so conveniently agrees with the king’s and who is nothing less than a heretic Lutheran, like his mistress.

  “It’s the very agreement that Reginald predicted,” Montague says gloomily. “The Pope accepts the Boleyn chaplain but he saves the English Church.”

  Thomas Cranmer does not look like much of a savior. With the sacred cope of Archbishop of Canterbury around his shoulders he uses his first ever sermon to tell the court that the king’s marriage to the queen is sinful, and that he must make a new and better union.

  I cannot keep this from the princess, and anyway, she has to be prepared for bad news from London. It is as if the slow ringing of the bell in my mind has become so loud that I think she must hear it too.

  “What does it mean?” she asks me. Her blue eyes have violet shadows under them. She cannot sleep for the pain in her belly, and nothing I can do seems to cure it. When she has her monthly courses, she has to go to bed, and she bleeds heavily, as if from a deep wound. Other times she does not bleed at all, and I fear for her future. If grief has made her sterile, then the king has enacted his own curse. “What does it mean?”

  “I think your father the king must have secretly obtained the permission of the Holy Father to leave your mother, and Thomas Cranmer is announcing this. Perhaps he will make the marquess his wife but not crown her as queen. But it makes no difference to your estate, Your Grace. You were conceived in good faith, you are still his only legitimate child.”

  I do not say, your mother requires you to swear this, whatever the cost. I cannot bring myself to repeat the order. I know that I should, but I fail in my duty. I cannot tell a young woman of seventeen years that to say her name may cost her life; but she must take that risk.

  “I know,” she says, in a very small voice. “I know who I am, and my mother knows that she never did a dishonorable act in her life. Everyone knows that. The only unknown thing is the marquess.”

  We learn a little more in spring, when I get a series of notes from Montague in London. They are unsigned, unsealed. They appear at my plate, or pinned to my saddle, or tucked in my jewel box.

  The new archbishop has ruled that the marriage of the king to the queen is, and always has been, invalid. Bishop John Fisher argued all day against it, and at the end of the day they arrested him. Burn this.

  The king is to send the Duke of Norfolk to the queen to tell her that she is now to be known as the Dowager Princess, and that the king is married to Lady Anne, now called Queen Anne. Burn this.

  I know what must happen next. I wait for the arrival of the king’s herald, and when he arrives I take him to the princess’s rooms. She is seated at a table with the bright spring sunshine pouring over her bent head, transcribing some music for the lute. She looks up as I come in, and then I see her smile die as she sees the liveried messenger behind me. At once she ages, from a happy young woman to a bitterly suspicious diplomat. She rises to her feet and observes his bow. He bows as low as a herald should bow to a princess. Cautiously, she inspects the name on the front of the sealed letter. She is correctly addressed as Princess Mary. Only then, when she is sure that he is not attempting some trickery of disrespect, does she break the royal seal and impassively read the king’s brief scrawl.

  From my place at the door I can see it is a few words, signed with a swirling H. She turns and smiles broadly at me, and hands me the letter. “How very good His Grace is to tell me of his happiness,” she says, and her voice is perfectly steady. “After dinner I shall write to congratulate him.”

  “He is married?” I ask, copying her tone of pleased surprise for the benefit of the herald and the ladies-in-waiting.

  “Indeed, yes. To Her Grace the Marquess of Pembroke.” She recites the newly invented title without a quaver.

  June—I saw her crowned, it’s done. Geoffrey was her servitor, I followed the king. I carved at her coronation dinner. The meat choked me. There was not one cheer along the whole procession route. The women cried out for the true que