Maid of the King's Court

by Lucy Worsley

  So, only a couple of weeks later, we said goodbye to Trumpton Hall. Between the layers of clothing in our trunks lay many inexpertly made lavender bags, gifts from our cousins, and we had with us a basket of autumn apples for the journey.

  “Goodbye, girls! You may come to join my household when I am married!” Katherine called confidently out of the wagon’s rear opening.

  “Enough of that!” snapped the old duchess, turning as if to slap heads as shrieks and giggles arose from our former companions. But the hint of a smile played around the creases of her mouth, for Katherine, her favourite, was always to be indulged. The last sound we heard as the wagon moved off was Anne calling out, “Godspeed, Eliza! Godspeed, Katherine! Oh, I wish I were going with you!”

  I would have rather chosen any one of the other girls as a travelling companion. But I knew that the rest of them were jealous as Katherine and I had packed our bags to go away together, and an uneasy truce seemed to have settled itself between us. It was as if we both realised that while we may have been at odds at Trumpton, an ally would be more useful than an enemy in the unknown world of the court.

  “My God, I’m looking forward to fishing in deeper waters!” Katherine said, with her slow and confidential smile, flopping back on the cushions as our journey began. She lazily stretched out her arm along the back of the seat, taking up all the room.

  “Are you going to be a king-fisher?” I asked, trying to ignore the fact that I had either to ask her to move or shrink myself uncomfortably into the corner.

  “Goodness!” Katherine said in mock surprise. “Our little Eliza just made quite a grown-up joke.”

  At that, we both shivered with sheer excitement.

  But then I told myself, sternly, to calm down. This wasn’t a pleasure jaunt or a holiday. It was my duty now to grow up and settle down and find a husband suitable not only for myself but for Stoneton. It was imperative that Katherine did not immediately snap up the best candidate for herself.

  Long hours later, the gloss had faded from the day. We had passed the time sleeping and eating our apples, and it was nearly nightfall when we finally drew near the Palace of Greenwich. The king had many palaces, and we would live in whichever one currently pleased him most, travelling with him as he moved on. We had never been to any palace, let alone this particularly fine one on the banks of the wide River Thames at Greenwich, and neither of us wished to acknowledge the nervousness we felt as our new life began.

  It was well into the evening when we approached the tall brick gatehouse of the palace, its wooden gates firmly shut. It seemed awfully quiet as the horses came to a halt, because our ears had been hammered by the sound of hoof-beats for many hours.

  Nothing happened. There was more silence.

  Eventually, a tiny door in the big gate creaked a little way open, and a porter came out. Our servant had to climb down and speak to him for a long time before he slowly began to swing back the gates.

  “What’s going on?” Katherine called out to our man.

  The reply was disheartening.

  “That stupid fellow did not recognise your names,” he said. “I had to explain that her grace the duchess had sent you.” Katherine and I avoided each other’s gaze.

  In the courtyard, we tumbled stiffly out from our seats, and a red-faced, harassed-looking man perfunctorily welcomed us to Greenwich. “If you run to the Hall, there should still be supper,” he said. But before we could ask which way to go, he was busy instructing our outriders to move forward so that the luggage could be more easily unloaded by a silent and weary-looking team of footmen.

  So, giggling a little from fatigue and tension, Katherine and I made our way through several courtyards. Somehow we even ended up hand in hand. This was a vast warren of a building, like seventeen Stonetons all in one. Even by the dim light of candles in horn lanterns placed at intervals on the stone ledges of windows, we could see that it was richly and brightly coloured, with painting and gilding and heraldic devices crowding every surface.

  Finally, after many twists and turns, we approached a fine doorway that seemed fit for a Great Hall. As we drew near, two tall figures stepped forward from the shadows. Two bulky men dressed in red, with long spears in their hands, barred our way.

  “Who seeks entrance to the king’s chambers?”

  The request was barked out rather than spoken, and the two men had sent their weapons flying forth as if one clockwork mechanism powered them both.

  “Oh, sirs!” said Katherine. “We are new here and seek only supper.” I could tell that we weren’t supposed to have spoken to these grumpy giants. One of them briefly nodded to the left, down the cloister, and off we ran, sniggering from embarrassment, like the schoolgirls we no longer were.

  The Great Hall, when we found it, was a disappointment. Yes, it was enormous, and we could hardly see its rafters through the smoke of the braziers burning at intervals along its length. But the long tables were nearly empty. A rowdy group of young men, rolling dice and drinking, sat at one end. They emitted a volley of crude wolf whistles as we entered, then they proceeded completely to ignore us.

  We sat hesitantly, and with some reluctance a serving man finally came and poured us ale and threw down some slices of beef before us. We hadn’t unpacked our knives from our baggage and were somewhat at a loss how to begin eating without using our unwashed hands.

  “My ladies!” It was the first friendly voice we’d heard. “What brings you to this rough place at this late hour?”

  I turned to see a tall thin boy, about Katherine’s own age, I thought, bringing us a basin of water and a towel. He had yellowish hair and a friendly, if lopsided, smile. I sensed that Katherine was smiling back as if he’d offered us a jug of rare hippocras rather than merely a finger bowl.

  “Ned Barsby, at your service,” he said, doffing his cap in a casually elegant manner that would have made Monsieur Bleu swoon.

  Master Barsby told us that he was a Page of the Presence, and that it was his job to strike the flint to light the fire in the king’s own chambers. He was, in fact, not supposed to be out here in the common dining hall, but he’d had a night off duty and felt the urge to roll a die or two.

  “I’m really no good at these court pursuits like gambling or drinking,” he explained, “but I have to do my best to fit in with the other animals on this particular farm.”

  Right on cue, two of the shouty young men in the corner started grappling with each other, drunkenly play-fighting while their fellows egged them on.

  Our new friend raised his eyebrows, cast a disparaging glance towards them, and turned back to us. “When I saw two pretty new girls,” he said warmly, “I thought it would have been unmannerly not to come over for some more civilised conversation.”

  In a moment, he was lending us his own knife and serving us salt. He was so easy to talk to that soon we were chatting like old friends. Or at least Katherine was, as she explained all about our lives so far and our purpose in coming to court.

  Meanwhile I looked carefully at Ned Barsby. His doublet was very well cut and smart, but it was just a plain dark blue and not fastened up properly. His hair was a little longer than I was used to, but it fell negligently across his forehead in a manner that seemed comfortable rather than vain. He sat with us as if he had all the time in the world, interlacing his fingers and cracking his knuckles. The tension in my stomach began gradually to unwind.

  Although Katherine was still piping on with her rather banal description of our journey and how awfully long it had been, my feelings bubbled up. “Do you know,” I burst out, unable to help myself, “I thought that the court would be more glamorous than this!”

  Master Barsby smiled at me instead of Katherine for what felt like the first time. “Ah, but that’s court life for you,” he said. “Half glamour, half squalor. I’m the squalor,” he quickly added. “You two are clearly the glamour.” He explained that we would normally have our meals in the Great Chamber, with the other ladies of the court
, and regretted that standards of hospitality had fallen so far short that nobody other than himself had come to welcome us.

  When we had finished eating, he led us through the doorway into the Chamber itself, dark and deserted that night, but richly hung with tapestries.

  Katherine, of course, was monopolising Master Barsby, so I resigned myself to being neglected. Taking up a candle, I examined the walls more closely. The light picked out what seemed to be threads of gold. I gasped as I realised that I was looking at a fine tapestry elephant, with an armed hero on his back, in blue and green and scarlet. I had never seen anything as beautiful in my life.

  And suddenly Master Barsby was by my side, taking my elbow in a warm grip and steering me across the room. “I see you appreciate art,” he said. “Come to see the latest work of Master Holbein.” He led me confidently across the vast floor as if he could navigate blindfolded, while I would have tripped and hesitated in the darkness. Standing on an easel at the other end of the room was a painting covered with a red cloth.

  Master Barsby looked both ways, but there was nobody present but the three of us. He quickly tweaked the cloth from the easel, and, as he lifted his candlestick, we saw before us a beautiful woman, eyes downcast, a strange gauzy hood on her head. She was a picture of passive, serene virtue.

  “My ladies,” he said. “Meet your mistress, the future Queen Anne.”

  Master Ned Barsby told us that the king had fallen in love with this portrait. “It has reassured our master,” he told us, “that the Princess of Cleves is beautiful. It’s important that our queen be wondrously fair as well as providing England with an alliance with her German home state.”

  “But the lady Anne Boleyn wasn’t wondrously fair, was she? It is said that she was almost ugly.”

  Master Barsby gave my cousin a cool look. “Well, madam,” he said, “it’s not for me to judge. But it’s also said she had great skills of trickery and flirtation. The king has chosen his fourth wife so carefully because he has been deceived before.”

  I could see Katherine drinking in all this information, and I was doing the same thing myself. My shoulders slumped. I realised that Katherine herself was flirtatious and treacherous and wondrously fair as well. Surely even the former queen Anne Boleyn would have been outclassed by my cousin? Katherine would certainly have her pick of the court’s unmarried men. How could I compete?

  But Master Barsby was smiling at me now, his eyes sparkling in the light of his candle. “May I advise you, madam, to keep your counsel,” he added to my cousin, speaking kindly but decisively, “just as Mistress Eliza here does? The old queens are no longer spoken of at court.”

  I had done the right thing in keeping quiet, then, and Master Barsby had noticed.

  “Anyway, it’s all about the Princess Anne of Cleves now,” Master Barsby went on, turning back to the picture with such enthusiasm that a little wax splashed from his candle and burned his fingers. He yelped and swore, but quickly brushed it off and continued talking.

  “His Majesty the King visits Master Holbein’s picture each morning. He unveils it and talks to it, wishing her good morning. He’ll tell any of the courtiers present in the Chamber about her beauty, her powerful father, the fine Protestant religion they have in Germany, and the desirability that all men should marry. You’ll hear him yourselves. ‘Children!’ he tells us, practically every day. ‘A brother for my baby son, Edward! That’s what we require at this court.’”

  A baby son … we need a baby son. Master Barsby’s words echoed in my mind when I finally lay in our hard new bed, as tired as a dog, next to a gently snoring Katherine. I was determined to become a vital, valued part of the court and to take all its concerns to my own heart.

  The next day, our first morning as maids of honour, we were summoned to the chambers of the Countess of Malpas. Small, blonde-haired, and constantly smiling, this countess was our supervisor and would assign us our duties. As she spelled them out to us in her room high in the inner red-brick gatehouse, they seemed almost laughably simple. Her chamber’s windows looked both ways to provide a good view of not one but two courtyards. “I like to lodge here,” she told us, “because up here in my eyrie I can see the comings and goings of all my young ladies.”

  She pointed out to us the window of the king’s own private bedchamber, which lay directly opposite, and told us how she would watch for the extinguishing of the light, which signalled that service for the day was over.

  “And in the morning,” she said, “we have to watch for the moment that the window is opened. The king’s bedchamber servants open it to refresh the room once the king has gone forth. That’s the signal for us to be on duty.”

  She told us that when the king came out of his own private bedchamber and met members of his court, he wanted entertainment.

  “He needs his senior courtiers to sit with him, laugh at his jokes, compliment him on his performances on the lute or the recorder, or tell him dirty stories,” she said with a trilling laugh.

  “I don’t understand what we are actually supposed to do,” I complained. “Do we just stand there?”

  But the countess was charmingly vague about this.

  “You are to be an ornament to the court, my dears,” she said, “looking pretty and delighting the men. And ravishing beauties you both are too,” she added, kindly including me in her statement. “You will not be many years as maids of honour, for you will both soon find rich husbands.” At this I saw Katherine wriggle her shoulders with glee.

  “The most important thing,” the countess went on, “is to watch and to wait and to be ready. You will know opportunity when you see it.”

  I was left feeling a little mystified and a little anxious. When should I start hunting for a husband? How should I go about it? I was not quite sure, and I didn’t like to ask Katherine. She would surely laugh in my face.

  But I must admit I enjoyed the dressing session that followed with the countess’s tiring woman. She made us get out all our gowns, and she sent half of them to the seamstresses to be altered. “The neckline needs to be a little lower, to show more of your creamy shoulders,” she said to Katherine of her red velvet. “And this one is far too loose, Mistress Camperdowne,” she told me of my cornflower silk. “It will have to be taken in. The king will want to be able to see what shape you are — you can’t wear a sack.”

  She also showed us the casket from which we could borrow jewels, which we were meant to rotate so that all the maids of honour looked freshly magnificent. It was thrilling to handle and examine such a great store of treasures, but after a while I began to think that there were almost too many of them. I hardly knew how to begin selecting which ones to wear. Perhaps it would be simpler just to stick with my mother’s pearls.

  Finally, the countess gave us a little more court insight about the king. We clustered close to her, as if she were revealing state secrets. “He has to sit with his leg raised on a cushion,” she said solemnly, “for he has a painful ulcer. He’s had it for four years now, since he fell off his horse. What a rider he used to be! And an archer! It’s sad to see him missing his sports.”

  “Well, we hear that there’s at least one sport he still enjoys,” said Katherine. I looked at her aghast. It was all very well for Katherine and I to make crude remarks when we were alone, but in front of our supervisor?

  But the countess took her perfectly seriously.

  “Yes,” she said, almost reverently, “our master the king is still a great lover of the ladies.”

  And so, two days later, wearing our gowns court-fashion, we met the king.

  Far from being in my shift, as I had been when I glimpsed him at Westmorland House, I was confident that I had never before been so becomingly dressed. On this first day of court duty, the long-awaited day when we would take our places in palace life, we had risen at dawn to get ready.

  Then, tense and nervous, we waited with the Countess of Malpas in her room. I sat bolt upright in my blue silk, trying to look worl
dly and nonchalant and yet at the same time trying not to crease my dress.

  “He’s only a man with a bad leg!” I mouthed the words silently to myself as I smoothed the fabric with my hands. But the king was also the man whose picture I had seen on the first page of the Bible, laying down the law to all the bishops in the land. I could tell that Katherine was on edge too as she positioned and repositioned her pendant, lowering it a little farther down its chain.

  There was no escaping the fact that we had spent a very long time — years, in fact — preparing for this day.

  We were both watching like hunting hawks when the king’s bedchamber window across the courtyard popped open and a cheerful hand flapped out. “That’s Ned Barsby,” the countess explained, “giving us our signal to attend.” Suddenly moving with great speed, she scurried down the twisting staircase. We followed her across the courtyard and up the stairs into the Great Chamber. The flurry of motion after sitting still made my heart flap like the wings of a swan trying to lift itself into flight.

  The countess thrust us into position, standing meekly in front of the magnificent elephant tapestry, with our hands clasped in front of us. “Lower your eyes,” she hissed, as she whisked into line beside us.

  Reluctantly obeying her, I cast my eyes to the floor, so I was unable to see the king approach.

  I did, however, hear a door being thrown open and the loud thunk of those massive yeomen guards presenting their weapons. There was a heavy step and the thump of a stick. We sensed that a large, hulking figure, gaudy in cloth of gold, had paused before us. Instantly, we fell to the floor in the deep abasement Monsieur Bleu had taught us for royalty. My gown now fitted me so tightly that I had to suck in my breath to get down low, and I definitely heard a stitch pop. When we rose, I sensed the king’s eyes travelling up and down our bodies, for all the world as if he were a farmer looking at cows at a market.

  When his gaze reached Katherine’s chest, I saw him smile. But he said nothing at all.