by V L Perry
“…About the Northern rebels? I assumed nothing short of that could have frightened you into fits.”
That stung, though I would not show it. “How does His Grace intend to deal with them?”
“Why do you ask me? He is more inclined to share his thoughts with his cap,” she said, which was remarkable folly even for the privacy of her closet; there might be ears everywhere.
“You know why,” I said. Her eyebrows went up, but she made no motion to silence me. “If he sends Norfolk to crush them, it will mean more lives lost on both sides, and probably more destruction of the old faith. It will add fuel to the Reformers’ cause.”
“His Majesty has no more love for Reformers than he does for the rebels” she said, a bit shrilly. “He is as good and faithful a Christian king as ever he was. A king may not deal lightly with traitors, even if they be faithful to the true Church.”
I tried to think of an argument that would persuade her; I did not care a hanging for either the old faith or the reformed, and she knew it. But I cared very much whether England were to be made a charnel-house, like the Low Countries.
“You can persuade him to negotiate,” I said. “Give him your wise and gentle counsel. That’s what queens are supposed to do.”
I hadn’t meant those last words to sound so wrathful, so like an accusation. But something in their tone gave her pause; a shadow crossed her face, and I noted at that moment how changed she was even since the summer, how pinched her neck and how flat the luster of her skin. Of course, it could have been a trick of the light. It also occurred to me to wonder why bin Rahmat had happened to be here in the first place. Could she be…
“You don’t understand.” The words were scarcely above a whisper, carried the exhaustion of defeat. “You don’t know what he’s like these days; he is not as you knew him. Not with Cromwell always in his ear. Not when his leg is so bad.”
His leg; a state secret, not to be spoken aloud. It must have gotten worse, then. Before it had only been an inconvenience, not something to strike this kind of anxiety into a woman who I knew to be no shrinking flower.
A shifting of the clouds brought a shaft of light into the little chamber, and lit on something on the table near my hand: it was the silver letter-casket I had seen so many times before on Anne Boleyn’s writing desk. It must be the only thing Jane had kept. But why?
Looking at it, I suddenly felt very calm, very sure; I had nothing to lose. “They need you. This is what you worked for: to bring England back to a kind of peace. Start now.”
“The king does not wish to talk of such things when he is here,” she said, as if pouring out thoughts she had longed to but had not dared. “It…distracts him.”
So that was it. Her strained look must be from the daily life she led, then, and not from a new life growing within. I remembered some fumbling and frustration in a silk-sheeted bed; kings are rarely acquainted with failure. If his leg had indeed grown worse, that alone would be enough…and of course he would need someone else to blame.
“You can find a way,” I insisted. “Entreat him to listen to them, at least. Or else I will.” I pushed on recklessly. “I might even be able to tell him something about his queen.” Her past before her marriage, why his last queen had lost her prince so suddenly. He might not listen. But if he were ever grown weary of another childless wife and looking for a way to be rid of her, he might.
She looked at me skeptically, and suddenly I felt foolish. But what could either of them do to me, who held no real power? At worst I’d be dismissed back to Kent, not a distressing prospect. But then I remembered Elizabeth Barton, thought of the cells far under the Tower, where light never reached…
She sighed. “I will try. But when I judge the time is right.”
“Thank you.” She looked startled. “Your Grace,” I added, looking at the silver casket.
The news had spread even by the time I left her closet, and it only got worse.
It was, as Nicholas said, exceedingly difficult to make sense of the Pilgrims’ reasons for revolt. They were enraged by the tax on white bread, which their leaders had apparently forgotten to tell them did not exist. Likewise the imaginary tax on pigs, on weddings, burials, christenings, and the plan to make churchgoing illegal and to replace all the silver crosses, censers, fonts and candlesticks with tin.
One of their demands was the removal of “rude and ignorant persons on the Council and in positions to advise the king,” meaning Cromwell and Richard Rich, who had helped bring down Fisher and More. They had at least some sense among their ranks, then.
However garbled the translation, though, the message was clear: turn back to Rome. Turn back the clock. Give us the old ways back again.
And then the most disastrous news of all: the Pope had made the exiled traitor Reginald Pole a Cardinal and sent him to Flanders to gather an army. A foreign invasion…something England had not faced since the Conquest.
What would the king do? Would he crush them, negotiate, send to the Emperor or France for aid? There were at least thirty thousand of them, and England had no ready army; even a military genius like Norfolk would be hard-pressed to muster enough force to meet them in the field before they moved on London.
Lady Mary spent many hours in the queen’s apartments that autumn, coming to Mass each morning and sewing in the afternoons. It quickly became clear that the queen was irritated by her presence, and I could scarcely blame her: the king’s daughter was such twitchy, high-strung thing, always jumping at unexpected noises, always craving approval: see how I have worked this piece, do you think I should change it? If anything, Jane’s coolness made the girl even more desperate to please.
Also, Lady Mary had been educated by Vives himself, and was more accomplished than Jane in every way, which Jane could never stomach. It was even sadder to watch the girl try to hide it, never picking up a lute or touching the virginals unless the king expressly commanded it during his visits.
I have thought that Lady Mary’s hatred of Anne Boleyn was due at least in part to the way that queen had initially reached out to the girl, and been proudly rebuffed. She was haughtily dismissive of Tom Seymour’s attempts to win her over with his teasing gallantry, and the queen herself rebuked him for it in private. He had not the cunning or the observance to discover what his sister already knew: the one sure way to gain Lady Mary’s love was to be indifferent to her.
Yet the people loved her. Each time she rode in procession beside the queen, each time they appeared at a window together, the cries of “God save Your Grace!” and caps waved in the air were truly joyful, not simply ceremonial. The queen knew better than to assume it was entirely for her own sake. Once at Whitehall they stood in a gallery window, each waving with one hand, clasping the other’s hand high where the crowd could see.
“The people love Your Grace well,” Lady Mary said. Such nervousness sounded odd in a voice so low-pitched and gruff.
“They will cheer twice as loudly for a prince,” the queen replied, still smiling out at them, though the smile melted from Lady Mary’s face. As soon as they dropped their clasped hands, the queen let go.
One other thing became very clear in the light of the revolt: Queen Jane hated little Elizabeth.
The king had ordered that she too be brought from Hatfield House to the relative safety of the court. A three-year-old bastard might not make as tempting a rallying point as Katharine of Aragon’s daughter, but he was taking no chances.
Also, he loved her. It was astonishing to see him carry her about, showing her off to the ambassadors and delighting to hear her recite bits of Latin and Greek that her tutors had fed her. She was, pardon the pun, a bewitching child – so like both of her parents that an artist could not have drawn a better composite. There could be no question of her being any courtier’s or musician’s brat.
The queen did not permit her at the high table with the king and Lady Mary, giving Elizabeth’s age as an excuse. Instead she was shunted off to one of the lesser tables with Lady E
xeter’s servants. The little girl watched her father at the high table, calling for dishes and entwining his fingers with the queen’s. Her small black eyes registered nothing. Not so young after all, then.
There were few other things to occupy our minds that autumn. Elizabeth Seymour married the sickly Gregory Cromwell at Wulfhall. The queen did not attend. It was a Lutheran wedding, after all. The bride wore somber black, still in mourning for her late husband, and likely to outlast this one as well. No doubt Cromwell would find a way to offer his daughter-in-law to the king in the event of any mishap with Queen Jane; it would not be the first time one sister replaced another in the king’s bed.
During those endless days as October burned into November and our destruction moved slowly closer to London, Holbein drew us, one after another. It required hours of sitting, without speaking or moving a hair. It was meant to be something to occupy our minds, keep us from fretting and gossiping. She could not have devised a worse torture; in those hours it was all I could do to keep from going mad.
It was a tribute to Holbein’s skill that could capture the widowed Mary Howard’s demure sweetness in charcoal and ink, with no shadow of the sorrow and fear that must have crushed her during those dark days. And they were dark in every sense: the sun rose later and set earlier each day, so that we spent our few daylight hours sitting still as statues. Normally no painter would have attempted such a project under these conditions, but the queen had commanded it. And so he sketched and colored the soft roundness of Mary’s chin, made her downcast eyes look modest rather than haunted, and turned her full lips up ever so slightly at the corners. He begged her to put on something gay to relieve the severity of her widow’s weeds, and so for sittings she borrowed Frances’s black felt hat with the grey plume. Below the white ruff at her throat he left her uncolored, to disguise the fact that she was swathed in black.
What had she known? Was the grief that weighed on Mary Howard solely the grief of a widow, or for the lost chance to wear the crown herself?
The wonder was that any of us were able to look cheerful at all. Many did.
The painter saw it all. He caught the set of Mary Zouche’s jaw and her wide-set brown eyes, turned Frances De Vere’s oval farmwife face in profile to soften her overbite, faithfully rendered Grace’s soft innocence. Many sat with one turned-up lappet, in imitation of our queen.
I could not select a French hood or a gabled one. Holbein was shocked when I determined to sit bareheaded; only the Italians painted women bareheaded, and then only the virginal daughters of nobles. His years in England had finally made him into, of all things, a prude. Yet he drew me with my hair smooth behind my ears, a shiny spill over my shoulders and down my back, the color of quince jelly. He later gave it to Kratzer, who kept it in his larger trunk; the only way he knew to keep me, he joked. I know not where it is now.
As for the queen’s portrait: never let anyone tell you that painters do not make their feelings known through their art. When I saw his first sketch of her, I stifled a gasp. For it looked so much like Queen Anne Boleyn—her eyes large and dark, the brows sweeping boldly against the creamy skin —that I thought the painter’s famously keen eyes had played tricks on him. This was corrected, even overmuch, when he transferred the sketch to canvas: he did full justice to the sumptuousness of her gown, the gold thread in her sleeves and the pins in her bodice, even the warmth of the jewels gleaming on her fingers and throat. (I sucked in my breath when I saw her necklace: an exact replica of the one in the portrait of Beatrice of Milan that hung in the gallery, the one we’d looked at together so long ago. How long had she imagined herself in it?) He brightened her paleness to a luminous glow, captured perfectly the clasp of her small hands. She held nothing, not even a flower or a plum; fleetingly I remembered our giggling together. Perhaps she did too.
But the set of her mouth, though it looked enough like her true self not to raise any objections, I thought had a rather hard cast to it. This queen was aware of the viewer and grimly ignored him. And her right eye was ever, ever so slightly askew.
She was a true queen for her husband: the most corrupt need the most sumptuous disguises of all.
Grace Parker went about white and fearful, her lips alternately pressed together in fear and moving in silent prayer. Her husband had been involved too closely for comfort with the Maid of Kent, and was rumored to have been part of a plan to spirit the Lady Mary away to the Continent with Chapuys’s help. If he had joined with the Northern rebels, he would lose everything, including his head. One may flirt with treason but not climb into bed with it.
Nicholas was the only one to whom I dared speak my thoughts, and only under the bedcovers, after the candle had burned itself down. The idea grew and unfolded itself, there for anyone who had eyes to see: two of the rebel leaders, Sir John Russell and Sir William Parr, who now blocked the Great North Road, had been in Richmond’s service. And the Duke himself had been the most powerful Catholic landowner in the North, married into the huge and hungry python that was the Howard clan. It was impossible for Russell and Parr to have planned their tactics without Richmond’s knowledge. Perhaps even his death had not been a natural one. The king had not inspected the body, I realized with a lurch of my spleen; he had left it to Norfolk to encase the body in lead and have in interred secretly.
I called up his face as I had last seen it, the fair-skinned, copper-haired boy with the long face and wide blue eyes; the serpent in the royal bosom. Was there no loyalty left on earth?
Apparently not. The queen’s own kinsman, Sir Robert Constable, was among the leaders. Even Lord Latimer had gone over to them, turning over Snape Castle to the rebels – though there were reports that he and his family were held hostage instead. I remembered Saville’s long-ago gossip about Maud Parr’s giddy daughter; that the same girl, now Lady Latimer, was in terrible danger no matter where the truth of her husband’s actions lay.
Nicholas pointed out that Richmond’s stepfather Lord Clinton had been the one to ride hell for leather to Derbyshire and warn Shrewsbury about the uprising. Yet family loyalties—especially in the North—were as short-lived as the autumn days.
His mouth was close to my ear, and I felt his words more than I heard them: “Even if they were to march into the city this moment—which they will not, for they are disorganized and the king’s forces will surely route them before they can move even fifty miles.” He held me away a little, looked in my face. “But even if the gravest of dangers were to come here, I swear I would protect you with my life.”
To my horror my first desire was to laugh, long and loud, and I had to keep from shrieking with hysteria. Nicholas, with his robes and instruments, fending off an army of the righteous, his thin scholar’s body against the armor and bulk of men from the hardy North? I could not let him see my struggle, and covered my face with my hands.
At that moment I thought: this is how she must have felt.
No, not quite. To have a man who loves you say he would give his life to keep you safe, to have the luxury of breaking down in privacy, these are riches beyond the reach of the privy purse.
I wept, as I had been unable to do when my mother died, as I had not dared to do for Queen Anne, or for Jane. Nicholas held me against his shoulder as I sobbed, so that I soon had to choose whether to continue having fits or to breathe.
“Are you better now?” he asked later. Such a simple question, impossible to answer.
“Yes,” I said. “I am better now.”
I assumed the queen had forgotten her promise to entreat the king to show mercy to the rebels, so I was more surprised than anyone else the day she approached him in the council chamber. We heard of it later from Sir John Russell, he who had written that “the king hath come out of hell into heaven” by his third marriage, and so I trust his version is accurate:
The king sat under his canopy of estate, with Cromwell and the privy council gathered round, discussing plans for him to take the field himself. She fell to her knees on the
steps before him, begged him with clasped hands to restore some of the smaller abbeys in the North. She always did know how to use drama to effect.
The king waved her away with one hand, grunted at the interruption. “We are busy, sweetheart. ‘Tis no time for womanish entreaties.”
“If Your Grace…” here she swallowed, and seemed to resign herself to her fate: in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum. “Your Grace is just, fair, and wise; the rebels, wrong though they are, know this much, They do not seek to put another on the throne, they make no threat to enforce their own claims, but look to you to do so as their sovereign. Surely this is no treason?”
She failed to read the danger signs, the flush creeping up his cheeks, the stillness in his neck, and pressed recklessly on: “Consider, Your Majesty, that God’s will is at work in all things. It may even be His will that such folk rise up now, crying out against the destruction of His servants and His Church…”
What happened next needed no Russell to report it later; the king’s screaming could be heard as far as the hall, and those within earshot passed it on: “Remember your predecessor, madam, and attend to your sewing! Remember that she who came before you paid the price for meddling overmuch in our affairs with her life!”
No one had ever known the king to shout so, not even about the Princess Dowager or Reginald Pole. No one had ever seen a queen of England scurry so defeated and terrified back to her apartments, taking with her any chance she might have had of serving as regent while the king went North. He would not go now, but would stay to keep one eye on his wife. Or appoint Cromwell to do it for him.
In the fear and confusion of that moment, it was easy to miss the fact that the king had as good as declared that the adultery charges against Anne Boleyn had been false.
The reality was not as bad as my imagination: the so-called Pilgrimage of Grace was proving to be more like a fussy lapdog than the snarling beast we had all feared. But the rebels were thirty thousand strong, far more than the king’s soldiers, and with better supplies and arms. Against Northmen kept in constant practice by fighting the Scots, there was little chance Norfolk’s forces could tear them to pieces as the German princes had done to the Peasants’ Revolt. Which only made the prospect of their marching into London more terrifyingly real.