“Except I am afraid the king is neglecting his rule,” she says.
“Neglecting?”
Nobody could be a better judge of monarchy than Katherine of Aragon; she was raised to believe that ruling a kingdom is a holy duty to pray for last thing at night, and think of as you wake. When Henry was a little boy, he felt the same, but he has grown to be casual with the work of kingship. When the queen was regent for England, she met with her councillors every day, consulted the experts, took advice from the great lords, and read and signed every single document that was released from the court. When Henry came home, he devoted himself to hunting.
“He leaves all the work to the cardinal,” she says. “And I am afraid that some of the lords may feel that they have been ignored.”
“They have been ignored,” I say bluntly.
She lowers her eyes. “Yes, I know,” she concedes. “And the cardinal is well rewarded for his work.”
“What is he getting now?” I demand. I can hear the irritation in my own voice. I smile, and touch her sleeve. “Forgive me, I too think that the cardinal rules too widely and is paid too much.”
“Favorites are always expensive,” she smiles. “But this new honor will cost the king little. It is from the Holy Father. The cardinal is to be made a papal legate.”
I gasp. “A papal legate? Thomas Wolsey is to rule the Church?”
She raises her eyebrows and nods.
“No one above him but the Pope?”
“No one,” she observes. “At least he is a peacemaker. I suppose we should be glad of that. He is proposing a peace between us and France and the marriage of my daughter to the dauphin.”
With quick sympathy I put my hand on hers. “She’s only two,” I say. “That’s a long way off. It might never happen; there is certain to be a quarrel with France before she has to go.”
“Yes,” she concedes. “But the cardinal—forgive me, His Lordship the Papal Legate—always seems to get what he wants.”
Everything goes smoothly on the royal visit. The king admires the house, enjoys the hunting, gambles with Montague, rides with Arthur. The queen walks around the grounds with me, smilingly praises my presence chamber, my privy chamber, my bedroom. She recognizes the joy that I take in my house, and in the knowledge that I have all my other houses returned to me. She admires my treasure room and my records room and understands that the running of this, my kingdom, is my pride and my joy.
“You were born for a great place,” she says. “You must have had a wonderful year, organizing a wedding and getting everything just as you want it here.”
When the court moves on, they will take Arthur with them. The king swears that no one can keep up with him in the hunting field like Arthur.
“He is to make me a gentleman of the privy chamber.” Arthur comes to my room on the last night.
“A what?”
“It’s a new order of the household that the king is making. All his best friends, just as we are now, but we are to be attached to the privy chamber—just like the King of France has his gentlemen. Henry wants to do whatever the King of France does. He wants to rival him. So we are to have a privy chamber and I am to be one of the very, very few gentlemen.”
“And what will your duties be?”
He laughs. “As now, I think. To be merry.”
“And drink too much,” I supplement.
“To be merry and drink too much, and flirt with ladies.”
“And lead the king into bad ways?”
“Alas, Lady Mother, the king is a young man, and every day he seems younger. He can lead himself into bad ways, he doesn’t need me as his waymarker.”
“Arthur, my boy, I know you can’t stop him, but there are some young ladies who would be happy to break the heart of his wife. If you could steer him away from them . . .”
He nods. “I know. And I know how dear she is to you, and God knows that England could not have a better queen. He would never do anything disrespectful; he loves her truly, it is just . . .”
“If you can keep the king to light pleasures, with women who remember that courtly love is a game, and that it should be played lightly, you would be doing the queen and the country a service.”
“I would always want to serve the queen. But not even William Compton, not even Charles Brandon can lead the king.” Arthur’s face lightens with laughter. “And, Mother, nothing can stop him from falling in love. It is quite ridiculous! He is the oddest mixture of lust and primness. He will see a pretty girl, a laundress in a dye shop, and he could have her for a penny. But instead he has to write a poem to her and speak words of love before he can do an act that most of us would finish and be done with in minutes on the drying green, hidden by the wet sheets.”
“Yes, and it’s this that troubles the queen,” I say. “The words of love, not the penny, not the business of minutes.”
“That’s the king for you.” Arthur shrugs. “He doesn’t want the momentary pleasure, he wants words of love.”
“From a laundress in a dye shop?”
“From anyone.” Arthur says. “He is chivalric.”
He says it as if it were an affliction, and I have to laugh.
I bid the court farewell and I don’t travel with them. Instead, I go to London and visit the Princess Mary for a few weeks and then on to the silk merchants, for I have much to buy. My daughter Ursula is to be married from home this autumn. I have won for her a truly great marriage, and I will celebrate it as my own triumph as well as her happiness. She is to marry Henry Stafford, the son and heir of my cousin Edward, the Duke of Buckingham. She will be a duchess and one of the greatest landowners in England. We will make a new link to our cousins, the greatest ducal family in the land.
“He’s a child,” she says shortly when I tell her the news. “When he was here at Easter, he was Geoffrey’s little playmate.”
“He’s seventeen, he’s a man,” I say.
“I’m twenty years old!” she exclaims. “I don’t want to marry one of Geoffrey’s little friends. Mother, how can I? How can I marry my younger brother’s playmate? I will look like a fool.”
“You’ll look like an heiress,” I say. “And later on, in good time, you’ll look like a duchess. You will find that a great compensation for anything you feel now.”
She shakes her head; but she knows that she has no choice, and we both know that I am right. “And where will we live?” she asks sulkily. “Because I can’t live here with Geoffrey, and see the two of them running out to play every morning.”
“He’s a young man. He will grow out of play,” I say patiently. “But in any case you will live with the duke, his father, who will bring you to court to live in the Buckingham rooms there. I will see you there and you will continue to serve the queen when you are at court. But you’ll go into dinner practically on her heels. You will outrank almost every other woman but the royal princesses.”
I see her face warm to the thought of that, and I hide a smile. “Yes, think of it! You’ll have a greater title than mine. You’ll go ahead of me, Ursula.”
“Oh, will I?”
“Yes. And when you’re not at court, you will live at one of His Grace’s houses.”
“Where?” she asks.
I laugh. “I don’t know which one. At any one of his twelve castles, I suppose. I have provided well for you, Ursula, I have provided for you outstandingly well. You will be a wealthy young woman on your wedding day, even before your father-in-law dies, and when he does, your husband will inherit everything.”
She hesitates. “But will the duke wait on the king anymore? I thought Arthur said that it is always the papal legate who advises the king now, not the lords.”
“The Duke of Buckingham will attend court,” I assure her. “No king can rule without the support of the great lords, not even with Thomas Wolsey doing all the work. The king knows that, his father knew that. The king will never quarrel with his great lords, that is the way to divide the country. The duke has s
uch great lands, and so many men under his command, so many faithful tenants, that no one can rule England without him. Of course he will go to court as one of the greatest lords of the land, and you will be respected everywhere as his daughter and the next Duchess of Buckingham.”
Ursula is no fool. She will disregard the childishness of her new husband for the riches and position that he can bring to her. And she understands something more: “The Stafford family are directly descended from Edward III,” she observes. “They are of royal blood.”
“No less than us,” I agree.
“If I were to have a son, he would be Plantagenet on both sides,” she points out. “Royal on both sides.”
I shrug. “You are of the old royal family of England,” I say. “Nothing can change that. Your son will inherit royal blood. Nothing can change that. But it is the Tudors who are on the throne, the queen is with child, if she has a boy, then he is a Tudor prince—and nothing can change that either.”
I don’t object to improving myself through the rise of a daughter who will be a duchess one day, because, for the first time, I have a moment’s doubt about my own position at court. From the very first moment that he came to the throne, the king has done nothing but single me out for favor: raising me, restoring me to my family lands, giving me the greatest of titles, seeing that I have the best rooms at court, encouraging the queen to appoint me as a principal lady and, of course, trusting me with the future guidance and education of the princess. He could do nothing more to show to the world that I am a favored royal kinswoman. I am one of the wealthiest lords of the country; I am by far the wealthiest woman, and the only one with a title and lands in my own right.
But some sort of shadow has fallen, though I cannot tell why. The king is less free with his smiles, less pleased to see us—me and all my wider family. Arthur remains his favorite, Montague is still in the inner circle, but all the older cousins—the Duke of Buckingham, George Neville, Edward Neville—are slowly being edged out of the king’s privy chamber to join the less-favored guests in the presence chamber outside.
The riding court that the king lived with for his year of exile during the Sweat has become his inner circle, a private ring of friends all his age and younger. They even have a name for themselves: they call themselves the “minions”—the king’s boon companions.
My cousins, especially Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, and George Neville, are too old and too dignified to act like fools to amuse the king. There is an incident when the young men ride their horses up the stairs of the palace and canter round the presence chamber; this is supposed to be the best sport. Someone balances a jug of water over a door, and an ambassador coming on a state visit is drenched. They ambush the kitchen in a miniature military raid and capture dinner and ransom it back to the court, who have to eat it cold after the roasted meats have been speared and thrown hand to hand; nobody thinks this is funny but the young men themselves. They go into London and charge through a market and overturn the stalls, breaking the goods and spoiling the wares, they drink themselves to a standstill and vomit in the fireplaces and they pester the women servants of the court till there is not one honest woman left in the dairy.
Of course, my older kinsmen are excluded from such sports, but they say that it is more serious than high spirits and young men at play. While Henry roisters with the minions, all the work of the kingdom is done by his smiling helper, Cardinal Wolsey. All the gifts and privileges and high-paying places pass through the cardinal’s soft, warm hands, and many of them slide up his capacious red sleeves. Henry is in no hurry to invite grave older councillors back into his presence to question his increasing enthusiasm for another handsome young king, Francis of France, and will not hear anything about the increasing folly and extravagance of his friends.
So I am anxious he is thinking of me as one of the dull old people, and I am worried when he tells me one day that he thinks his grant to me of some of my manors in Somerset was a mistake—for they should really belong to the Crown.
“I don’t think so, Your Grace,” I say at once. I glance around the young men and see my son Montague’s head come up to listen, as I contradict the king.
“Sir William seems to think so,” Henry drawls.
Sir William Compton, my former suitor, gives me one of his most seductive smiles. “Actually, they are crown lands,” he rules. Apparently, he has become an expert. “And three of them belong to the duchy of Somerset. Not to you.”
I ignore him and turn to the king. “I have the documents which show that they are, and always have been, in my family. Your Grace was good enough to return my own to me. I have only what is rightfully mine.”
“Oh, the family!” Sir William yawns. “My God, that family!”
I am stunned for a moment, I don’t know what to say or think. What does he mean by such a remark? Does he mean that my family, the Plantagenet family of England, are not deserving of the greatest respect? My young cousin Henry Courtenay raises his eyebrows at the insult and stares at William Compton, his hand drifting to where his sword would be, on his empty belt.
“Your Grace?” I turn to the king.
To my relief he makes a little gesture with his hand, and Sir William bows, smiles, and withdraws.
“I’ll have my steward look into it,” Henry says simply. “But Sir William is quite sure that they are my lands and you have them in error.”
I am about to say, as I would be wise to say: Oh! let me return them to you at once, now, without delay, whether they are mine by right or not—that would be the work of a good courtier. Everything belongs to the king, we hold our fortunes at his pleasure, and if I give them to him at the first moment of asking, he might return something else to me later.
I am just about to dispossess myself when I see a quick, sly smile on Sir William’s face as he turns away from my son Montague. It’s a gleam of triumph between the man who knows that he is the absolute favorite, allowed all sorts of liberties, guilty of all sorts of indiscretions, to another who is younger, steadier, and a better man by far. And I feel a stubbornness rise up in me as I think I will not give my son’s inheritance away because this popinjay thinks that it is not mine. It is mine. These are my family lands. I had to endure poverty without them and it was hard for me to win them back; I am damned if I am going to give them away at the bidding of such as William Compton, to a king like Henry whom I watched dance around the nursery snatching his sister’s moppets and refusing to share.
“I shall ask my steward Sir Thomas Boleyn to look into it and inform Sir William,” I say coolly. “But I am certain that there is no mistake.”
I am walking away from the king’s privy chamber, with a couple of my ladies-in-waiting, going towards the queen’s rooms, when Arthur catches me up and takes my arm so that he can speak quietly, and no one else can hear.
“Lady Mother—just give him the lands,” he says shortly.
“They are mine!”
“Everyone knows it. Doesn’t matter. Just give them to him. He doesn’t like to be crossed and he doesn’t like to have work to do. He won’t want to read a report, he doesn’t want to make a judgment. Most of all he doesn’t want to have to write anything and sign it.”
I stop and turn to him. “Why would you advise me to give away your brother’s inheritance? Where would we be if I had not dedicated my life to winning back what is ours?”
“He is the king, he’s accustomed to having his own way,” Arthur says briefly. “He gives Wolsey an order, sometimes he gives him nothing more than a nod, and it’s done. But you and my uncle Stafford, and my uncle Neville—you all argue with him. You expect him to act within a set of rules, of traditions. You expect him to explain any change. You hold him to account. He doesn’t like it. He wants to be a power that is not disputed. He really can’t bear being challenged.”
“They are my lands!” I have raised my voice, and I glance around and then speak more quietly. “These are my family lands that I own by right.”
“My cousin the duke would say that we own the throne by right,” Arthur hisses. “But he would never say it out loud before the king. We own these lands, we own the whole of England by right. But we never say such a thing, or even suggest it. Give him back the lands. Let him see that we think we have no rights, that we claim no rights, that we are nothing but his humblest subjects. That we are glad to receive only what he freely gives us.”
“He’s the King of England,” I say impatiently. “I grant you that. But his father got the throne by conquest and, some would say, treachery on the battlefield. He only held it by the skin of his teeth. He did not inherit it, he’s not of the old royal blood of England. And young Henry is first among equals, he is not above us, he’s not above the law, he’s not above challenge. We call him ‘Your Grace,’ as we would call any duke, as we call your cousin Stafford. He is one of us, honored; but not above us. He is not beyond challenge. His word is not that of God. He’s not the Pope.”
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, NOVEMBER 1518
In November the court moves to Westminster and together the queen and I plan her confinement, ordering her favorite bed to be moved into the great chamber and choosing the tapestries which will hang over the windows, blocking out the disturbing daylight.
We are going to use the birthing bed where she had Princess Mary. I even have the same linen ready. Without saying anything, we both hope that it will bring us luck. She is busy and happy and confident, her belly curved like a fat cauldron, nearing her eighth month. We are standing side by side, considering a space in the room where we plan to place a great dresser to show her golden plates, when she suddenly stops and pauses, as if she has heard something, a whisper of unease.
“What is it?”
“Nothing, nothing.” She is uncertain. “I just felt . . .”
“Should you sit down?”
I help her to her chair and she sits gingerly.
“What did you feel?”
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