The Last Wífe of Henry VIII

by Carolly Erickson

  “But his son is among the rebels. He’s one of them. How can he lead an army against his own son?” For a moment the question hung heavy in the room.

  “I don’t know that Johnny is part of this rebellion,” John answered at length, “only that he has left home and has been seen at St. Mary’s Abbey.”

  “Then let me enlighten you,” came another voice from among the council members. “Young Johnny is at Cairncliffe, near my estate at Highfield, wearing the gray robe of a pilgrim of Saint Agatha. He’s in charge of a band of three hundred men.”

  John’s face went pale. The bishop spoke up.

  “I have no doubt that John can discipline his own boy. How old is he now? Fifteen? Sixteen?” My kinsman was coming to John’s defense.

  “About that.”

  “A boy that age has no experience of war. He’ll run when he hears the sound of cannon firing.”

  “But we have no cannon.” The objection came from Viscount Moreton, one of the few men in the room I recognized. Like John, he was one of the most powerful of the northern lords, wealthy and with vast estates. He was often at court and the king, so John had told me, trusted him and relied on him.

  “None of the guns north of the Trent is fit to be fired, I’m told. We’re short of gunners, in any case. And short of powder. I wonder, have any of you ever shot a cannon? Or an old bombard? They explode, you know, if they haven’t been properly cleaned and maintained.”

  He rose, and began pacing around the room as he spoke. His voice was strangely light, bitterly ironical, yet his dark eyes were shrewd as they surveyed the faces of his colleagues, missing nothing.

  “But the guns are only part of the problem. Our fortresses cannot withstand a sustained assault. The walls of Pontefract Castle are leaning and crumbling. The ramparts have fallen in places. No one has thought of repairing them in years, there’s been no need. Everywhere you look—everywhere the rebels look—there is weakness, defenselessness. A land ripe for the plucking!”

  Now others joined in, adding what they knew or had heard. The rebels had thousands, even tens of thousands, in their ranks. Members of the king’s forces were deserting their garrisons and joining the pilgrims. Great ladies of the North were donating their jewels to the cause.

  Amid the mounting babble John stood, his stooped, balding figure more prepossessing than I had ever seen it before. He stretched out his arms to calm the commotion.

  “If only the pilgrims of Saint Agatha could see us now!” he shouted. “They’d think we were cowards! Mice! Bedbugs! Vermin, to be frightened out of their nests and destroyed!”

  The talk became subdued, then died away.

  “If there are disloyal men or women among us, even in our own families, we will punish them and imprison them. If our cannon need repair we will hire armorers or gunmakers to repair them. Powder can be sent from the Tower armory. As for our castles, we will find means to defend them.”

  Some of the men were nodding and murmuring assent. John went on.

  “When King Harry was crowned, many years ago, I knelt before him to swear my allegiance. I became his liegeman for life. My oath was clean, and I have never betrayed it. I fought with the king in France and against the Scots in the marches, and I intend to fight now, against these rebels who call themselves pilgrims, to defend the might and honor of the crown. Who will fight with me?”

  Every man in the room shouted his affirmation.

  Having restored the bellicose mood, John turned his attention to practical matters, laying out a map and assigning each local lord his district to defend. I sat quietly, listening to it all, proud of my husband yet knowing that despite his confident demeanor he was well aware of the danger posed by the rebels. And I knew, too, that he was tired. Lines of weariness scored his forehead. I saw him grimace and knew that his leg was hurting him. I imagined that what he had learned about Johnny, his having joined the rebels and now leading a rebel band, angered him and worried him.

  We dined that night with Bishop Tunstall, and started out early the next morning for York. I was to return to Snape Hall, then leave with Margaret for Kent where we would stay with Will until it was safe to return. John would go to York and remain there to coordinate the defense of the city, muster all the local militias, and ensure that the Great North Road would remain open for the use of royal troops.

  We left the episcopal palace under gray skies and by the time we parted next day, John taking the road for York and I the path that led to Snape Hall, it was raining heavily. I was drenched when I arrived home, and gratefully handed my horse to a groom.

  Tired though I was, I took notice of the man’s face. I knew all our grooms, or thought I did; this man was a stranger to me.

  “You there,” I called out to him as he was leading the limping horse away, “I do not know you. Are you newly come into my Lord Latimer’s employ?”

  He hesitated. He turned toward me and said, in a broad Yorkshire accent, “Yes, milady.”

  My senses were alert. Something was wrong. I looked more closely at the man’s clothes and saw that they were the ragged trews and torn tunic of a laborer, not the brown uniform worn by all our stable hands.

  I started to cry out, then felt rough hands seize me from behind. The cool metal of a knife blade touched my throat.

  “The pilgrims of Saint Agatha are in charge here now, Lady Catherine,” one of my captors said. “Let us go inside, where it is warm, and get out of the rain.”

  13

  THE PILGRIMS OF SAINT AGATHA HAD TAKEN OVER SNAPE HALL, AND Margaret and I were their prisoners.

  All our servants had fled—or joined the ranks of the pilgrims. Every room in the mansion had been ransacked, all the valuable furnishings dislodged. Paintings and tapestries, carpets and statues were heaped in untidy mounds in the corridors, to make room for dozens of makeshift beds where the pilgrims slept, dormitory-style. Margaret and I were shut in a tiny room in one of the castle towers, too high above the ground to climb out the windows and escape. The cold wind blew in through cracks in the old walls and we had very little wood for our fire. Margaret quickly developed a cough and we both shivered day and night.

  I asked the girl who brought us our soup and bread if she could allow us to have more wood.

  She was young, barely sixteen I guessed, and she looked at me unhappily, evidently uncomfortable. She wore the gray woollen gown of a pilgrim.

  “I’ll do my best, milady,” she said, eyes downcast. “It isn’t up to me, you know.”

  “I understand. You’re only doing what you are told.”

  She wanted to say more, but bit her lip. After a moment’s struggle she found her courage.

  “I do what I’m told, indeed,” she whispered. “But I don’t like it. They say we are doing God’s work. But how can it be God’s work to take what isn’t ours, and hurt people, and keep fine ladies locked up in the cold?

  “I’ll never forget you, milady,” she went on. “How you came to Grundleford—that’s my village, milady—when the snow was deep and brought us baskets of food and candles and a tun of cider. It helped us get through the winter, it did.”

  “It was little enough,” I told her. “The Bible teaches us to share what we have. I’m sure you would have done the same, if you had plenty to share.”

  “I hope so, milady. Now I will see what I can do about getting you some wood.”

  By the fourth day of our captivity I was worried about Margaret, whose cough was getting worse, and about John. Was he still in York? Had he been captured? Were the royal forces really as weak as the critics in the Council of the North had said?

  We had no word of what was happening outside our tiny tower room. From the windows I could see riders and carts on the road, groups of pilgrims arriving and leaving. I longed to see John, riding at the head of a hundred strong men, gallop into view and storm the castle, throwing down the banners of Saint Agatha and rescuing us and restoring our great house to what it had been before the devastation the invaders
had caused.

  How I longed to see him! But he did not come, and I continued to watch from the windows, and try to comfort Margaret—and to befriend the girl who served us.

  Her name, I discovered, was Becca. She was seventeen years old, and with her fellow-villagers of Grundleford she had been swept up into the rebellion after witnessing the disinterring of Saint Agatha. Just when the pilgrims began marching and all the turmoil in the neighborhood started Becca had been on the point of getting married. Her betrothed, I learned, was also at Snape Hall and was a tenant of St. Mary’s Abbey.

  Becca was talkative. She admired and trusted me, and disliked the position in which she found herself, keeping watch over me and my stepdaughter—in effect, serving as our jailer—while providing for our needs. She told me, among other things, that there were two pilgrim guards outside our room, that there was plague in Grundleford and that royal troops had taken over St. Mary’s Abbey.

  This was startling news. Royal troops were in the abbey, only four miles away! If only I could get word to them, I thought. If only they would come for us.

  “When the king’s soldiers marched into the abbey, Saint Agatha was moved out,” Becca said. “She was taken from her tomb and brought here, to Snape Hall.”

  Now I was truly surprised. Saint Agatha, the wonderworking, uncorrupt saint, in our house?

  “It was necessary. The king’s soldiers would not have shown her proper respect.” Becca paused, then bent toward me and whispered in my ear. “Besides, she was starting to smell.”

  “But I thought her body was preserved, free of corruption.”

  “So they say. I believed it—until I was cleaning the floor of the abbey chapel one day three months ago and looked down into the tomb, and I could swear that Saint Agatha had changed. The face I saw in the tomb was longer and narrower than the face I had seen when her casket was first opened.

  “I was very upset. I went to the prior, Brother Wulfstan, and told him what I noticed. I thought grave-robbers had stolen the saint’s body and left another one in its place.”

  Becca looked at me. I was utterly focused on the story she was telling me. I did not move or speak.

  “Do you know what he said to me?” she whispered. “He said they had to bring in a new body every few weeks. Otherwise the smell became very noticeable.”

  Stunned and bewildered by what I was hearing, I shook my head in disbelief—yet what this girl was telling me rang true. I saw no reason for her to lie, and there was nothing but candor in her eyes. Candor—and the sorrow of disillusionment.

  “Do all the pilgrims know that a new Saint Agatha is put into the tomb every few weeks?” I asked.

  “Oh no, milady. Hardly anyone knows. And Prior Wulfstan made me swear never to tell anyone about it. He said the saint would strike me dead if I told.”

  I could not help but smile, Becca was so serious, despite the evident fraud with which she was confronted. “Aren’t you worried?” I asked her.

  “No, milady. Not about Saint Agatha. The real saint is in heaven, isn’t she, and not in some tomb or in the banqueting hall downstairs.”

  I thought of our banqueting hall, a long, narrow room with an immense hearth and tall windows and a magnificent hammer-beam ceiling. Apparently the current body of Saint Agatha was enshrined there. It was hard to imagine.

  “Yes,” I said to Becca. “You’re right. It is the soul that truly matters, not the body. All the same, it would come as a shock for the pilgrims to discover that their miraculous ancient saint is really a dairymaid who died a day or so ago.”

  “Or a plague victim,” said Becca in a low voice. “The new Saint Agatha is a girl from my village, Emma Hauser. She died of the plague. I know. I recognized her.”

  Margaret, who had been asleep, stirred and opened her eyes. Her face had an unhealthy flush. She needed medicine for her fever, and a poultice for her cough. I had to get help for her, and I had to get word to John.

  I lay awake most of the night worrying over these things, and pondering all that Becca had told me, as I listened to Margaret’s coughing and, at cock crow, heard the guards outside our door exchange brief greetings with their replacements.

  I finally fell asleep, only to be awakened after far too short a time by noise outside our window.

  A large company of pilgrims was arriving, most of the gray-gowned men and women on foot but some mounted. They carried aloft banners with Saint Agatha’s image, the banners hanging limp and damp as a light rain was falling. At the head of the group, mounted on a black horse, was a fair young man who rode with the assurance of a leader. When the group reached the courtyard of Snape Hall others rushed to hold his horse while he dismounted, and listened attentively to the orders he gave.

  Not long after the arrival of these newcomers a guard opened the door of our Tower room, and the fair young man came in.

  “Johnny!” I could not help exclaiming when I saw him, and realized that it had been he who led the newly arrived pilgrim band. He looked so much older than he had the day he left Snape Hall so many months earlier. Then he had been an angry, grim boy, rebellious and truculent. Now he had become a man, imposing and vigorous and confident despite his youth. He looked at me for a moment, his gaze level, then called out to those in the corridor behind him. “Bring the prisoner in.”

  A hunched, thin figure was half-pushed, half-dragged into the small room and all but thrown onto the bed. His balding head was lowered, his hands tied behind his back with a piece of thick rope. With a shock I realized that it was John.

  At once I moved to his side and took his weary drooping head in my arms. Margaret gasped. “Father!” she called out, and tried to raise herself, only to fall back with a spasm of coughing.

  “What have you done to him! How dare you!”

  “There, there, Gwennidor,” I heard John say. “Have a care in what you say. I am not hurt, only tired and hungry.”

  Johnny regarded his father coolly, turning to glance at Margaret who continued to cough spasmodically, her every breath loud and effortful. Her face was white.

  I heeded John’s warning and kept silent, though I felt my own face grow hot and it was all I could do to keep myself from slapping Johnny and shouting at him in my anger. I sat down beside John on the bed and put my arm protectively around his shoulder. He was shaking.

  “Father has been liberated from the evil army,” Johnny was saying. “He was leading the king’s men, defending St. Mary’s Abbey. Now he will take his rightful place at the head of Saint Agatha’s pilgrims, when we march into York and capture it.”

  “He will do this,” Johnny went on, “because he is a good Catholic and because he would not want any harm to come to you, stepmother, or to Margaret.”

  So these were Johnny’s cruel terms. His father would lead the pilgrims into battle against the forces of King Henry or else condemn us to continued imprisonment and possibly worse. John would be forced to compromise his honor, and his sworn loyalty to the king, his sovereign lord, for our sakes.

  “He knows that you, stepmother, are not a good Catholic but a reformist, a follower of the apostate Luther and other blasphemers who read the Scriptures in English and presume to interpret them. If the faithful soldiers of Saint Agatha were to discover that you possess an English Bible, they would bring down the wrath of the saint on you without mercy.”

  I thought of the dreadful execution John and I had seen, the man torn to pieces by dogs, and of other assaults by the pilgrims that we had witnessed and heard about on our journey to Durham.

  “I believe you have also taught Margaret to read the English Scriptures. This puts her in danger as well.”

  I could no longer restrain myself.

  “Margaret, as you can see for yourself, has a tertian fever. She is very ill. We have not been allowed any medicine. She badly needs syrup of poppy, and a poultice for her chest.”

  “When father leads us into York, we will get her what she needs.”

  “She needs the medic
ines now. Do you want your sister to die?”

  I thought I saw the merest shadow of an anxious look cross Johnny’s impassive features, but it came and went in a heartbeat. He drew himself up to his full height and looked down at his wretched father, who met his glance.

  “Well father, what say you? Are you ready to put on the gray gown of a pilgrim, and lead the army of Saint Agatha?”

  With tears in his eyes, John nodded.

  “Very well then.” With a deft slice of the knife he wore at his belt Johnny cut the rope that bound his father’s hands and, taking his arm, helped him to his feet.

  “Come, father, we will find you bread and mutton, and a mug of cider to wash it down.” Together they went out into the corridor, leaving the thick oaken door of the Tower room ajar. I went to the doorway and looked out. There were no guards in the corridor. Margaret and I were free.

  14

  WE WERE FREE BUT STILL PRISONERS OF THE PILGRIM ARMY, AND OF Johnny. Margaret and I were allowed to move back into what had been my bedchamber, and I was not hampered in moving about the manor. Yet I was aware of being watched, my movements noted. And Becca continued to serve as our maid and guardian—with the one alteration in our arrangements that at night, Becca went back to her village of Grundleford and we were left in peace.

  John was not allowed to stay in the same room with us. He was kept under Johnny’s care in another room far from ours. Together John and Johnny were making plans and readying the pilgrims for the march to York, which Becca said was to be in a few days. Word had come that more royal troops were on their way northward to defend York, and this news gave renewed urgency to the coming rebel campaign to seize York and bring all the North Country under the dominion of the rebels, the Pilgrims of Saint Agatha.

  I walked through the corridors and rooms of Snape Hall almost as if I were a stranger. Everywhere I turned I saw devastation.

  “We mean no harm,” Becca told me as we stood in one of the great chambers, which before the rebellion had been hung with beautiful tapestries in gleaming reds and blues and golds. Now the tapestries were heaped on tables and piled in an untidy mound at the center of the room. Chests, upholstered benches, overmantels and candelabra were stacked carelessly on top of one another; some had fallen and been broken. Carved paneling was scraped and marred, the result of the pilgrims’ hasty moving in and making themselves at home. No one, it appeared, had done any cleaning; dust and dirt lay on everything, and a layer of soot darkened the hearth, the windows and even the floors.