The King's Curse Read online

  BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, CHRISTMAS 1534

  I keep the Christmas feast at Bisham as if I were not in a state of frozen anticipation waiting for news from Hatfield and Kimbolton. It takes time to find a way into a royal palace, to bribe a servant in a royal prison. My sons will need to take the greatest care when they talk with the boatmen along the Thames and find who sails to Flanders, and who is loyal to the true queen. I have to behave as if I am thinking of nothing but the Christmas feast and the baking of the great pudding.

  My household pretend to a carelessness that they don’t feel. We pretend we are not fearful for our priory, we are not afraid of a visit from Thomas Cromwell’s inspectors. We know that every monastery in the country has been inspected and that the money counters are always followed by an inquiry into morals—especially if a priory is rich. They have come to our priory and looked at our treasures and the richness of the lands and gone away again, saying nothing. We try not to fear their return.

  The mummers come and play before the fire in the great hall, the wassailers come and sing. We dress up with great hats and capes and prance about pretending to enact stories from long ago. This year nobody enacts a story about the king, or the queen, or the Pope. This year there is no comedy in the Lord of Misrule; nobody knows what is true and what is treason, everything is Misrule. The Pope who threatened the king with excommunication is dead, and now there is a new Pope in Rome. Nobody knows if God will speak clearly to him, or how he will rule on the king with two wives. He is of the Farnese family: what the world says about him is not fit to be repeated. I pray that he can find holy wisdom. Nobody thinks anymore that God speaks to our king, and there are many who say that he is advised by the Moldwarp in dark and forbidden deeds. Our queen is far away, preparing for her execution, and the woman who calls herself queen can neither bear nor carry a son, proving to everyone that the blessing of God is not on her. Enough here for a hundred masques, but nobody dares even mention these events.

  Instead, people put on tableaux that tell stories from a time that is safely long ago. The pages plan and perform a masque about a great sea voyage that takes the adventurers past a sea witch, a monster, and a fearsome waterspout. The cooks come up from the kitchen and play a throwing game with knives, very fast and dangerous, with no words at all—as if thoughts are more dangerous than blades. When the priest comes in from the priory, he reads in Latin from the Bible, incomprehensible to all of the servants, and will not tell us the story of the baby in the manger and the oxen kneeling to him, as if nothing is certain anymore, not even the Word that shone in the darkness.

  Since truth has become only what the king tells us, and since we have sworn to believe whatever he says—however ridiculous—we are uncertain about everything. His wife is not the queen, his daughter is not a princess, his mistress has a crown on her head, and her bastard is served by his true heir. In a world like this, how can we know anything for sure?

  “She’s losing her friends,” Geoffrey tells me. “She has quarreled with her uncle Thomas Howard. Her sister has been sent away from court in disgrace for marrying some passing soldier, her sister-in-law Jane Boleyn has been exiled by the king himself for starting a quarrel with his new fancy.”

  “He’s fallen in love again?” I demand eagerly.

  “A flirtation; but the Boleyn queen tried to get her sent away and lost her sister-in-law in the attempt.”

  “And the girl?”

  “I don’t even know her name. And now he’s courting Madge Shelton,” Geoffrey says. “Sending her love songs.”

  I am suddenly filled with hope. “This is the best New Year’s gift you could have given me,” I say. “Another Howard girl. This will divide the family. They’ll want to push her forward.”

  “It leaves the Boleyn woman very alone,” Geoffrey says, sounding almost sympathetic. “The only people she can count on are her parents and her brother. Everyone else is a rival or a threat.”

  BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SPRING 1535

  I receive an unsigned note from Montague.

  We can do nothing. The princess is ill and they fear for her life.

  I burn the note at once and I go to the chapel to pray for her. I press the heels of my hands into my hot eyes and I beg God to watch over the princess that is the hope and light of England. She is ill, seriously ill, the princess who I love is said to be so weak that she might die, and nobody knows what is wrong with her.

  My cousin Gertrude writes to me that there is a plan to murder the queen by suffocating her in her bed and leave her without a bruise on her body, and that the princess is even now being poisoned by agents of the Boleyns. I can’t be sure whether to believe her or not. I know that Queen Anne is insisting that the true queen be accused of treason by an Act of Attainder and executed behind closed doors. Is she so evil, this woman who was once the daughter of my steward, that she would kill her former mistress in secret?

  Not for a moment do I think that Henry has planned any of this. He has sent his own doctor to the princess and said that she can be moved nearer to her mother to Hunsdon so that the queen’s physician can attend her, but he will not let her live with her mother, where the queen could guard her and nurse her back to health. I write again to Thomas Cromwell and I beg to be allowed to go to her and nurse her, just while she is ill. He says that it is not possible. But he assures me that the moment she signs the oath I can join her, she can come to court, she can be a beloved child of her father—like Henry Fitzroy, he adds, as if that would make me feel anything but horror.

  I reply to him saying that I will take my own household, my own physician, at my own cost. That I will set up house for her, that I will advise her to take the oath as I have done. I remind him that I was among the first to do so. I am not like Bishop Fisher, or Lord Thomas More. I am not guided by my conscience. I am one who bends before the storm like a flexible willow. You can call for a heretic, a turncoat, a Judas, and I will answer willingly, consulting my own safety before anything else. I was raised to be fainthearted, false-hearted; it was the powerful, painful lesson of my childhood. If Thomas Cromwell wants a liar, I am here, ready to believe that the king is head of the Church. I will believe that the queen is a dowager princess, that the princess is Lady Mary. I assure him that I am ready to believe anything, anything that the king commands, if he will only let me go to her and taste the food before she eats it.

  He replies that he would be glad to oblige me; but it is not possible. He writes that he is sorry to also tell me that Princess Mary’s former tutor Richard Fetherston is in the Tower for refusing the oath. “You had a traitor for a tutor,” he observes like a casual threat. And he remarks, as if an aside, that he is very glad to hear that I will swear to anything; for John Fisher and Thomas More are to go before judges for treason, and that no one can doubt the outcome.

  And, he says at the very end, that the king is going to consult Reginald as to these changes! I almost drop the letter in disbelief. The king has written to Reginald for the benefit of his learned opinion on the marriage with Anne Boleyn, and his thoughts on the ownership of the English Church. They trust that Reginald will confirm the king’s view, that the King of England must be head of the Church, since—surely—only a king can rule his kingdom?

  At once I fear that it is an entrapment, that they hope to trick Reginald into such words that he will condemn himself. But Lord Cromwell writes smoothly that Reginald has replied to the king and is studying the matter with much interest, and has agreed to reply to the king as soon as he has reached his conclusions. He will read and study and discuss. Lord Cromwell thinks that there can be no doubt what he will recommend, such a loyal and loving churchman has he promised to be.

  I call for my horse and for a guard to accompany me. I ride to my London house and I send for Montague.

  L’ERBER, LONDON, SPRING–SUMMER 1535

  “They put Bishop Fisher and then Thomas More on trial,” Montague tells me wearily. “It was not hard to see what their verdict wo