The King's Curse Read online

  “Prior Richard has resigned,” Thomas Legh says smoothly, speaking over his stammering partner. “Prior William Barlow will take his place and surrender the priory to Lord Cromwell.”

  I don’t know Barlow, except by reputation as a great supporter of reform, which means, as we now all see, stealing from the Church and expelling good men. His brother serves as a Boleyn spy, and he hears George Boleyn’s confession, which must be a pretty tale.

  “Prior Richard will not go!” I say hastily. “Certainly not for a Boleyn chaplain!”

  “He has gone. And you will not see him again.”

  For a moment I think that they mean that they have taken him to the Tower. “Arrested?” I ask with sudden fear.

  “Wisely, he chose that it should not come to that.” Richard recovers himself. “Now I will take your daughter-in-law to London.”

  “Here,” I say with sudden spite. I reach into my purse and I take a silver sixpence. I toss it straight at him, and Richard catches it without thinking, so that he looks a fool for taking such a little coin from me like a beggar. “For her expenses on the road. Because she has nothing.”

  I write to Reginald and I send it to John Helyar in Flanders for him to take to my son.

  They have given our priory to a stranger who will dismiss the priests and close the doors. They have taken Jane away to marry a friend of Cromwell’s. The Church cannot survive this treatment. I cannot survive it. Tell the Holy Father that we cannot bear it.

  I am still reeling from this attack at the very heart of my home, at the church I love, when I get a note from London:

  Lady Mother, please come at once. M.

  L’ERBER, LONDON, APRIL 1536

  Montague greets me at the door of my house, the vine showing green leaves all around him as if he is a Planta genista in an illuminated manuscript, a plant that grows green, whatever the soil or weather.

  He helps me from my horse and holds my arm as we go up the shallow steps to the doorway. He feels the stiffness in my stride. “I am sorry to have made you ride,” he says.

  “I’d rather ride to London than hear about it too late in the country,” I say dryly. “Take me to my privy chamber and close the door on the others and tell me what’s going on.”

  He does as I ask, and in moments I am seated in my chair by the fireside with a glass of mulled wine in my hand and Montague is standing before the fire, leaning against the stone chimney breast, looking into the flames.

  “I need your advice,” he says. “I’ve been invited to dine with Thomas Cromwell.”

  “Take a long spoon,” I reply, and earn a wry smile from my son.

  “This might be the sign of everything changing.”

  I nod.

  “I know what it’s about,” he says. “Henry Courtenay is invited with me; he spoke with Thomas Seymour, who had been playing cards with Thomas Cromwell, Nicholas Carew, and Francis Bryan.”

  “Carew and Bryan were Boleyn supporters.”

  “Yes. But now, as a cousin to the Seymours, Bryan is advising Jane.”

  I nod. “So Thomas Cromwell is now befriending those of us who support the princess or are kin to Jane Seymour?”

  “Tom Seymour promises me that if Jane were to be queen she would recognize the princess, bring her to court, and see her restored as heir.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “How could Jane be queen? How could Cromwell do this?”

  Montague lowers his voice though we are behind a closed door in our own house. “Geoffrey spoke to John Stokesley, the Bishop of London, only yesterday. Cromwell had asked him if the king could legally abandon the Boleyn woman.”

  “Legally abandon her?” I repeat. “What does that even mean? And what did the bishop reply?”

  Montague gives a short laugh. “He’s no fool. He’d like to see the Boleyns thrown down, but he said he would only give his opinion to the king, and then only if he knew what it was he wanted to hear.”

  “And do any of us know what he wants to hear?”

  Montague shakes his head. “The signs are contradictory. On one hand he’s called Parliament, and a meeting of his council. And Cromwell is clearly plotting against the Boleyns. But the king got the Spanish ambassador to bow to her as queen, for the first time ever—so, no, we don’t know.”

  “Then we must wait until we do.”

  Thoughtfully I strip off my riding gloves and put them over the arm of my chair. I hold my hands to the warmth of the fire. “So what does Cromwell want from us? For he owes me a priory at the moment, and I am not feeling kindly towards him.”

  “He wants us to promise that Reginald will not write against him, will cease urging the Pope to act against the king.”

  I frown. “Why does he care so much for Reginald’s good opinion?’

  “Because Reginald speaks for the Pope. And Cromwell is in living terror and the king is in living terror that the Pope will excommunicate them both, and then nobody will obey their commands. Cromwell needs our support for his own safety,” Montague goes on. “The king says one thing at breakfast and contradicts himself at dinner. Cromwell doesn’t want to go the way of Wolsey. If he pulls down Anne, as Wolsey pulled down Katherine, he wants to know that everyone will advise the king that it is a godly thing.”

  “If he pulls down Anne and saves our princess, then we support him,” I say grudgingly. “But he must advise the king to return to obedience to Rome. He must restore the Church. We can’t live in England without our monasteries.”

  “Once Anne is gone then the king will make an alliance with Spain and return the Church to the headship of Rome,” Montague predicts.

  “And Cromwell will advise this?” I ask skeptically. “He has become a faithful papist all at once?”

  “He doesn’t want the bull of excommunication published,” Montague says quietly. “He knows that would ruin the king. He wants us to keep it silent, and pave the way for the king to return to Rome.”

  For a moment I have a sense of the joy that comes with having, at last, some stake in the game, some power. Ever since Thomas Cromwell started to advise the king to betray our queen, to destroy our princess, we have been shouting against the wind. Now it seems the weather is changing.

  “He has to have our friendship against the Boleyns,” Montague says. “And the Seymours want us to support Jane.”

  “Is she the king’s new sweetheart?” I ask. “Do they really think he will marry her?”

  “She must be soothing, after Anne,” Montague points out.

  “And is it love again?”

  He nods. “He is besotted with her. He thinks she is a quiet country girl, shy, ignorant. He thinks she has no interest in matters that concern men. He looks at her family and thinks she will be fertile.”

  The young woman has five brothers. “But he cannot think that she is the finest woman at court,” I object. “He has always wanted the very best. He cannot think that Jane outshines all the others.”

  “No, he’s changed. She is not the best—not by a long way—but she admires him much more than anyone else,” Montague says. “That’s his new benchmark. He likes the way she looks at him.”

  “How does she look at him?”

  “She’s awestruck.”

  I take this in. I can see that for the king, shaken by his own mortality after hours of unconsciousness, facing the prospect of his own death without a male heir, the adoration of a pure country girl might be a relief. “And so?”

  “I dine with Cromwell and Henry Courtenay tonight. Shall I tell him that we will join with them against Anne?”

  I remember the huge newly accreted power of the Boleyns and the vast wealth of the Howards and I think that, even so, we can face them down. “Yes,” I say. “But tell him that our price for this is the restoration of the princess and the abbeys. We will keep the excommunication secret, but the king must return to Rome.”

  Montague comes back from his dinner with Cromwell with his feet weaving under him, so drunk that he can hardly stand. I ha