The King's Curse Read online

  She is only twenty years old. Only twenty years old and her mother has not been buried a year. She is separated from her friends and held under arrest like a sinner, like a criminal. She has nothing but her belief in God to support her, and she is afraid that it is God’s will that she die a martyr for her faith.

  A panel of judges, convened to inquire into her treasonous disobedience to the king, struggle briefly with their consciences, and agree to send one more time to Hunsdon where she is now held as a prisoner with no attempt at concealing her disgrace. They prepare a document called “The Lady Mary’s Submission,” and tell her that she must sign it or they will charge her with treason. The charge of treason carries a death sentence and she knows that half a dozen men are held in the Tower accused of trying to rescue her, and that their lives depend on what she does next. She believes that her mother was poisoned by her father’s wife, she believes that her father will have her beheaded if she does not obey him. No one can rescue her, no one can even reach her.

  Poor child, poor darling child. She signs the three clauses. First she signs that she accepts her father as King of England and that she will obey all his laws. Then she signs that she recognizes him as supreme head on earth of the Church of England; then she signs the last clause:

  I do freely and frankly recognize and acknowledge that the marriage between His Majesty and my mother was by God’s law and Man’s law incestuous and unlawful.

  “She signed it?” Geoffrey asks me on a brief visit to London, come to borrow money from me, and horrified at the news.

  I nod. “God only knows what it cost her to swear on His holy name that her mother was an incestuous whore. But she signed it, and she accepts that she is Lady Mary and no princess, and a bastard.”

  “We should have taken her away long before this!” Geoffrey exclaims furiously. “We should have gone in before the lawyers got there and snatched her away!”

  “We couldn’t,” I say. “You know that we couldn’t. We delayed when she was ill, then we delayed because we thought she was safe after the death of Anne, and then the plot was broken wide open. We’re lucky not to be in the Tower with the others as it is.”

  Lord Cromwell now puts an act before the houses of Parliament that rules the king shall nominate his own heir. His heir shall be of his choosing, from Jane, or—as it cheerfully declares—any subsequent wife.

  “He’s planning to marry again?” Geoffrey demands.

  “He’s not ruling it out,” Montague says. “Our princess is denied, and the bastard Elizabeth loses her title. It clearly says that if he has no children with Queen Jane, then he can choose his heir. Now he has three children all declared bastards of his own begetting to choose from: the true princess, the bastard princess, and the bastard duke.”

  “Everyone keeps asking who he means to name,” Geoffrey says. “In Parliament, as they were reading the bill, men kept asking me who the king intended as his heir. Someone even asked me if I thought the king would name our cousin Henry Courtenay as heir and restore our family.”

  Montague laughs shortly. “Does he destroy his children so that he has to turn to cousins?”

  “Does no one think he will get a child from Jane?” I ask. “Does this act show that he is doubting his own potency?”

  Ever since Anne Boleyn went to the scaffold for laughing with her brother that the king could not do the act, we are all well aware that it is illegal to say such a thing. I see Montague glance at the closed door and the barred windows.

  “No. He’s going to name Fitzroy,” Geoffrey says certainly. “Fitzroy walked before him at the opening of Parliament carrying the king’s cap in full sight of everyone. He could not have been more conspicuous. He’s been given half of poor Henry Norris’s lands and places, and the king is going to set him up at Baynard’s Castle with his wife, Mary Howard.”

  “That’s where Henry Tudor stayed when he first came to London,” I point out. “Before his coronation as Henry VII, before he moved to Westminster.”

  Geoffrey nods. “It’s a signal to everyone. Princess Mary and the bastard Elizabeth and the bastard Fitzroy are all equal bastards, but Princess Mary is only now released from prison and Elizabeth is a weak baby. Fitzroy is the only one with his own castle and his own lands, and now a palace in the heart of London.”

  “The king could still get a son from Jane,” Montague points out. “That’s what he’ll be hoping for. If this marriage is good in the sight of God, why should he not have a son now? She’s a young woman of twenty-eight, from good, fertile stock.”

  Geoffrey looks at me as if I know why not. “He’ll not get a live son. He never will. There’s a curse, isn’t there, Lady Mother?”

  I say what I always say: “I don’t know.”

  “If there ever was such a curse that the king should have no son and heir, then it means nothing because he has Fitzroy,” Montague says irritably. “This talk of curses is a waste of time, for there is the duke, on the brink of being named the king’s heir and displacing the princess, living proof that there is no curse.”

  Geoffrey ignores his brother and turns to me. “Was there a curse?”

  “I don’t know.”

  KING’S PLACE, HACKNEY, LONDON, JUNE 1536

  I am almost singing with hope as we ride out through the city walls into the fields and go north and east to the village of Hackney. It’s a summer day, promising good weather and gilded with sunshine, and Geoffrey rides on my right with Montague on my left, and for a moment, between my boys, riding away from London and the looming Tower, I have a moment of intense joy.

  As soon as Princess Mary denied her mother and denied her faith the king sent for her and gave her his beautiful hunting lodge, only a few miles from Westminster, and promised her a return to court. She is allowed to see her friends, she is allowed to walk and ride as she wishes; she is free. She sends for me at once, and she is allowed to see me.

  “You’ll be shocked when you see her,” Geoffrey warns me. “It’s been more than two years since you saw her last, and she has been ill and very unhappy.”

  “We have both been ill and very unhappy,” I say. “She will be beautiful to me. My only regret is that I couldn’t spare her unhappiness.”

  “Mine is that we couldn’t get her away,” Geoffrey says grimly.

  “Enough of that.” Montague cuts him short. “Those days are over, thank God, and we have all survived them, one way or another. Never mention them again.”

  “Any news of Carew?” Geoffrey asks Montague, keeping his voice low, though there is no one near us but half a dozen of our own guards, riding before and behind, too distant to eavesdrop.

  Grimly, Montague shakes his head.

  “Nothing to link us to him?” Geoffrey presses him.

  “Everyone knows that our Lady Mother loves the princess like a daughter,” Montague says irritably. “Everyone knows that I talked with the plotters. We all dined with Cromwell and plotted the fall of Anne. You don’t have to be a Cromwell to make a case against us. We just have to hope that Cromwell doesn’t want to make a case against us.”

  “Half the Privy Council opposed the king disinheriting the princess,” Geoffrey complains. “Most of them spoke against it to me.”

  “And if Cromwell wants to bring half the Privy Council down, then you can be sure he’ll have evidence.” Montague looks across me to his younger brother. “And by the sound of it, you’ll be the first one he’ll come to.”

  “Because I am the first to speak up for her!” Geoffrey bursts out. “I defend her!”

  “Hush, boys,” I say. “Nobody doubts either of you. Montague, don’t tease your brother, you’re like children again.”

  Montague ducks his head in a half apology and I look ahead, where the old hunting lodge sits on a little rise of ground, the turrets just visible above the trees.

  “She is expecting us?” I ask. I find I am nervous.

  “Of course,” Montague confirms. “As soon as she had greeted the king she a