Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1

by Philippa Gregory

  And it is true, I earn this pleasure, I am not idle; I have my duties to do, and I do them as well as I can. All the work of the queen’s rooms I leave to others of course, my lord Chamberlain deals with all the requests for help and justice and petitions – I should not be bothered with such things, and anyway, I never know what I am supposed to do with all the paupers and homeless nuns and distressed priests. Lady Rochford takes care of the running of my rooms, and making sure that everything is done as well as Queen Anne had it done; but the servicing of the king falls to me alone. He is old and his appetite in the bedroom is strong but the execution is not easy for him at his great age and because he is so very fat. I have to use all my little tricks to help him along, poor old soul. I let him watch me slip off my nightgown, I make sure the candles stay lit. I sigh in his ear as if I am swooning with desire, a thing that all men love to believe. I whisper to him that all the young men of the court are nothing compared to him, that I despise their silly, youthful faces and light desires, that I want a man, a real man. When he has taken too much to drink or is too weary to get himself above me I even do a trick that my dearest Francis taught me, and sit astride him. He loves that, he has only had whores do that for him before, it is a forbidden pleasure, that God doesn’t allow for some reason. So it thrills him that a pretty wife with her hair let down over her shoulders should rear above him and torment him like a Smithfield harlot. I don’t complain of having to do this, actually it is far nicer for me than being crushed beneath him with the smell of his breath and the stench of his rotting leg making me sick as I moan with pretend pleasure.

  This is not easy. Being the wife of a king is not all dancing and parties in the rose garden. I work as hard as any dairymaid, but I work at night in secret and nobody must ever know what it costs me. Nobody must ever know that I am so disgusted that I could vomit, nobody must ever know that it almost breaks my heart that the things I learned to do for love are now done to excite a man who would be better off saying his prayers and going to sleep. Nobody knows how hard I earn my sables and my pearls. And I can never tell them. It can never be said. It is a deep, deep secret.

  When he has finished at last, and is snoring, that is oddly the only time of the day that I feel dissatisfied with my great good fortune. Often then I get up, I feel restless and stirred up. Am I going to spend every night of my womanhood seducing a man old enough to be my father? Almost my grandfather? I am just fifteen years old; am I never going to taste a sweet kiss again from a clean mouth, or feel the smoothness of young skin, or have a hard, muscled chest bearing down on me? Shall I spend the rest of my life jigging up and down on something helpless and limp and then crying out with pretended delight when it slowly, flaccidly stirs beneath me? When he farts in his sleep, a great royal trumpet which adds to the miasma under the bedclothes, I get up in a bad temper and go out to my private chamber.

  And always, like my good angel, Lady Rochford is there, waiting for me. She understands how it is, she knows what I have to do and how, some nights, it leaves me feeling irritable and sore. She has a cup of hot mead and some little cakes ready for me, she seats me in a chair by the fire and puts the warm cup in my hand, and brushes my hair slowly and sweetly until the anger passes and I am calm again.

  ‘When you get a son you will be free of him,’ she whispers so quietly that I can hardly hear her. ‘When you are sure you have conceived a child he will leave you alone. No more false alarms. When you tell him you are with child you must be certain, and then you will have nearly a year at peace. And after you have had a second son your place will be assured and you can take your own pleasures and he will not know and not mind.’

  ‘I shall never have pleasure again,’ I say miserably. ‘My life is over before it has even begun. I am only fifteen and I am tired of everything.’

  Her hands caress my shoulders. ‘Oh, you will,’ she says certainly. ‘Life is long, and if a woman survives she can take her pleasures one way or another.’

  Jane Boleyn, Windsor Palace, October 1540

  Supervising this privy chamber is no sinecure, I must say. Under my command I have girls who in any decent town would be whipped at the cart tail for whores. Katherine’s chosen friends from Lambeth are without doubt the rowdiest sluts that ever came from a noble household where the lady of the house could not be troubled to mind them. Katherine has insisted that her friends from the old days should be invited to her privy chamber and I can hardly refuse, especially since the senior ladies of her privy chamber are no company for her, but are mostly old enough to be her mother and have been foisted on her by her uncle. She needs some friends of her own age but these chosen companions are not biddable girls from good families, they are women, lax women, the very companions who let her run wild and set her the worst example, and they will go on with their loose ways too if they can, even in the royal rooms. It is utterly unlike Queen Anne’s rule, and soon everyone will notice. I cannot imagine what my lord duke is thinking, and the king will give his child-bride anything she asks. But a queen’s chamber should be the finest, most elegant place in the land, not a tiltyard for rough girls with the language of the stables.

  Her liking for Katherine Tylney and Margaret Morton I can understand, though they are equally loud-mouthed and bawdy; and Agnes Restwold was a confidante from the old days. But I don’t believe she wanted Joan Bulmer to come into her service. She never mentioned her name once; but the woman wrote a secret letter and seems to have left her husband and wheedled her way in, and Katherine is either too kind-hearted, or too fearful of what secrets the woman might spill, to refuse her.

  And what does that mean? That she allows a woman to come into her chamber, the privy chamber, the best place in the land, because she can tell secrets of Katherine’s childhood? What can have taken place in the girl’s childhood that she cannot risk it being spoken? And can we trust Joan Bulmer to keep it quiet? At court? At a court such as this? When all the gossip is always centred on the queen herself? How am I to rule over this chamber when one of the girls at least has a secret so powerful hanging over the queen’s head that she can claim admittance?

  These are her friends and companions and there is really no way to improve them; but I had hoped that the senior ladies who have been appointed to wait on her might set a more dignified tone, and make a little headway against the childish chaos that Katherine enjoys. The most noble lady of the chamber is Lady Margaret Douglas, only twenty-one years old, the king’s own niece; but she is barely ever here. She simply vanishes from the queen’s rooms for hours at a time, and her great friend Mary, Duchess of Richmond, that was married to Henry Fitzroy, goes with her. God knows where. They are said to be great poets and great readers, which is no doubt to their credit. But who are they reading and rhyming with all the day? And why can I never find them? The rest of the queen’s ladies are all Howard women: the queen’s older sister, her aunt, her step-grandmother’s daughter-in-law, a network of Howard kin including Catherine Carey, who has reappeared promptly enough to benefit from the rise of a Howard girl. These are women who care only for their own ambitions, and do nothing to help me manage the queen’s rooms so that they at least appear as they should be.

  But things are not as they should be. I am certain that Lady Margaret is meeting someone; she is a fool and a passionate fool. She has crossed her royal uncle once already, and been punished for a flirtation which could have been far worse. She was married to Thomas Howard, one of our kin. He died in the Tower for his attempt to marry a Tudor, and she was sent to live at the nunnery of Syon until she begged the king’s pardon and said she would only marry at his bidding. But now she is wandering out of the queen’s rooms in the middle of the morning and doesn’t come back until she arrives with a rush to go into dinner with us, straightening her hood and giggling. I tell Katherine that she should watch her ladies and make sure that their conduct befits a royal court, but she is hunting or dancing or flirting herself with the young men of the court and her behaviour is as wild as any
one’s, worse than most.

  Perhaps I am over-anxious. Perhaps the king would indeed forgive her anything; this summer he has been like a young man besottedly in love. He has taken her all round his favourite houses on the summer progress and he has managed to hunt with her every day, up at dawn, dining in tented pavilions in the woods at midday, boating on the river in the afternoon, watching her shooting at the butts, or at a tennis tournament, or betting on the young men tilting at the quintain all the afternoon and then a late dinner and a long night of entertainment. Then he takes her to bed and the poor old man is up at dawn again the next day. He has smiled on her as she has twirled and laughed and been embraced by the most handsome young men at his court. He has staggered after her, always beaming, always delighted with her, limping for pain and stuffing himself at dinner. But tonight he is not coming to dinner and they say he has a slight fever. I should think he is near to collapse from exhaustion. He has lived these last months like a young bridegroom when he is the age of a grandfather. Katherine gives him not a second thought and goes into dinner alone, arm-in-arm with Agnes, Lady Margaret arriving in the nick of time to slip in behind her; but I see my lord duke is absent. He is waiting on the king. He, at least, will be anxious for his health. There is no benefit to us if the king is sick and Katherine is not with child.

  Katherine, Hampton Court, October 1540

  The king won’t see me, and it’s as if I have offended him, which is tremendously unfair because I have been an absolutely charming wife for months and months without stopping, two months at least, and never a cross word from me though God knows I have reason. I know well enough that he has to come to my room at night and I endure it without saying a word, I even smile as if I desire him; but does he really have to stay? All night? And does he really have to smell so very badly? It is not just the stink of his leg but he trumps like a herald at a joust and though it makes me want to giggle, it’s disgusting really. In the morning I throw my windows open to be rid of the stink of him, but it lingers in the bed linen and in the hangings. I can hardly bear it. Some days I think, I really think, I cannot bear another day of it.

  But I have never complained of him and he can have no complaint of me. So why will he not see me? They say that he has a fever and he doesn’t want me to see him when he is unmanned. But I can’t help but be afraid that he is tired of me. And if he is tired of me, no doubt he will say that I was married to someone else and my wedding will be put aside. I feel very discouraged by this and though Agnes and Margaret say that he could never tire of me, that he adores me and anyone can see that, they weren’t here when he put Queen Anne aside and that was done so easily and so smoothly that we hardly knew it was happening. Certainly, she didn’t know it was happening. They don’t realise how easy it is for the king to be rid of one his queens.

  I send a message to his rooms every morning and they always send back and say that he is on the mend; and then I have a great fear that he is dying, which would not be surprising for he is so terribly old. And if he dies what will happen to me? And do I keep the jewels and the gowns? And am I still queen even if he is dead? So I wait until the end of dinner and I beckon the king’s greatest favourite, Thomas Culpepper, to step up to the top table, and he comes to my side at once, so deferential and graceful, and I say very seriously, ‘You may sit down, Master Culpepper,’ and he takes a stool beside me and I say, ‘Please tell me truly, how is the king?’

  He looks at me with his honest blue eyes, he is desperately handsome it has to be said, and he says: ‘The king has a fever, Your Grace, but it is from weariness, it is not the wound on his leg. You need not fear for him. He would be grieved if he caused you a moment’s worry. He is overheated and exhausted, nothing more.’

  This is so kind that I feel myself become quite sentimental. ‘I have worried,’ I say a little tearfully. ‘I have been very anxious for him.’

  ‘You need not be,’ he says gently. ‘I would tell you if there was anything wrong. He will be up and about within days. I promise it.’

  ‘My position …’

  ‘Your position is impossible,’ he exclaims suddenly. ‘You should be courting your first sweetheart, not trying to rule a court and shape your life to please a man as old as your grandfather.’

  This is so unexpected from Thomas Culpepper, the perfect courtier, that I give a little gasp of surprise and I make the mistake of telling the truth, as he has done.

  ‘Actually, I can only blame myself. I wanted to be queen.’

  ‘Before you knew what it meant.’

  ‘Yes.’

  There is a silence. I am suddenly aware that we are before the whole of the court and that everyone is looking at us. ‘I may not talk to you like this,’ I say awkwardly. ‘Everyone watches me.’

  ‘I would serve you in any way I can,’ he says quietly. ‘And the greatest service I can do for you now is to go right away from you. I don’t want to make grist for the gossips.’

  ‘I shall walk in the gardens at ten tomorrow,’ I say. ‘You could come to me then. In my privy gardens.’

  ‘Ten,’ he agrees and bows very low and goes back to his table, and I turn and talk to Lady Margaret as if nothing in particular had happened.

  She gives me a little smile. ‘He is a handsome young man,’ she says. ‘But nothing compared to your brother Charles.’

  I look down the hall to where Charles is dining with his friends. I have never thought of him as handsome, but then I hardly ever saw him until I came to court. He was sent away for his upbringing when he was a boy, and then I was sent to my step-grandmother. ‘What an odd thing to say,’ I remark. ‘You surely cannot like Charles.’

  ‘Good gracious, no!’ she says and she flushes up quite scarlet. ‘Everyone knows I’m not allowed even to think about a man. Ask anyone! The king would not allow it.’

  ‘You do like him!’ I say delightedly. ‘Lady Margaret, you sly thing! You are in love with my brother.’

  She hides her face in her hands and she peeps at me through the fingers. ‘Don’t say a word,’ she begs me.

  ‘Oh, all right. But has he promised marriage?’

  She nods shyly. ‘We are so much in love. I hope you will speak for us to the king? He is so strict! But we are so very much in love.’

  I smile down the hall at my brother. ‘Well, I think that’s lovely,’ I say kindly. I so like being gracious to the king’s niece. ‘And what a wonderful wedding we can plan.’

  Anne, Richmond Palace, October 1540

  I have had a letter from my brother, an utterly mad letter, it distresses me as much as it angers me. He complains of the king in the wildest of terms, and commands me either to return home, insist on my marriage, or never more be a sister to him. He offers me no advice as to how I am to insist on my marriage, clearly he does not even know that the king has re-married already, nor any help if I want to return home. I imagine, as he knew well enough when he gave me these impossible choices, that I am left with the single option of never more being a sister to him.

  Little loss to me! When he left me here without a word, gave me an ambassador who was almost unpaid, failed to send adequate proof of the renunciation of the Lorraine betrothal, he was no good brother to me then. He is no good brother now. Least of all is he my good brother when the Duke of Norfolk and half the Privy Council come thundering down to Richmond in a rage, since they have, of course, picked up his letter almost from the moment it left his hand, copied it, translated it, and read it before it ever came to me, and now they want to know if I think my brother will incite the Holy Roman Emperor to war against England and Henry on my behalf?

  As calmly as I can, I point out to them that the Holy Roman Emperor is not likely to make war at my brother’s behest and that (emphatically) I do not ask my brother to make war at my behest.

  ‘I warn the king that I cannot rule my brother,’ I say, speaking slowly and directly to the Duke of Norfolk. ‘William will do as he wishes. He does not take my advice.’

 
; The duke looks doubtful. I turn to Richard Beard and speak in German. ‘Please point out to His Grace that if I could make my brother obey me then I would have told him to send the document which showed that the betrothal to Lorraine was renounced,’ I say.

  He turns and translates and the duke’s dark eyes gleam at my mistake. ‘Except it was not renounced,’ he reminds me.

  I nod. ‘I forgot.’

  He shows me a wintry smile. ‘I know you cannot command your brother,’ he concedes.

  I turn to Richard Beard again. ‘Please point out to His Grace that this letter from my brother actually proves that I have honoured the king, since it makes clear that he has so little faith in me that he threatens me with being cut off from my family forever.’ Richard Beard translates and the duke’s cold smile widens slightly.

  ‘What he thinks and what he does, how he blusters and threatens me, is clearly not of my choosing,’ I conclude.

  Thank God, they may be the king’s council, but they do not share his unreasonable terrors, they do not see plots where there are none – except when it suits them, of course. Only when it suits them to be rid of an enemy like Thomas Cromwell, or a rival like poor Lord Lisle, do they exaggerate the king’s fears and assure him that they are real. The king is in perpetual anxiety about one conspiracy or another and the council play on his fears like a master might tune a lute. Provided that I am neither threat nor rival to any one of them they will not alert any royal fears about me. So the frail peace between the king and I is not broken by my brother’s intemperate speech. I wonder did he even stop for a moment to think if his letter would put me in such danger? Worse still, I wonder, did he intend to put me in such danger?

  ‘Do you think your brother will make trouble for us?’ Norfolk asks me simply.

  I answer him in German. ‘Not for my sake, sir. He would do nothing for me. He has never done anything for my benefit, except to let me go. He might use me as the excuse but I am not his cause. And even if he meant to make trouble, I doubt very much that the Holy Roman Emperor would go to war with the King of England over a fourth wife, when the king has already helped himself to his fifth.’