Those who are not afraid of war are afraid of the rising of the dead from their graves. The shallow graves at Bosworth Field, at Towton, at St. Albans, at Towcester throw up trophies of silver and gold, badges and keepsakes, tokens and livery buttons. Now they say that the quiet earth itself is disturbed in these old battlefields, as if they are being secretly harrowed in darkness, and the men who died for the Yorks have been released from the damp earth and are standing up, brushing off the clinging soil, mustering in their old troops, and coming back to fight again for their princess and for their Church.
Some fool comes to the stable door and tells the grooms that he has seen my brother, his head back on his shoulders, handsome as a boy, knocking at the door of the Tower of London and asking to come back in. Edward is supposed to have cried out that the Moldwarp, a wicked, dark animal King of England, has crawled onto his throne; and these are his years. A dragon and a lion and a wolf will have to rise up to defeat him, and the dragon will be the Emperor of Rome, the wolf will be the Scots, and the lion will be our own true princess who, like a girl in a story, will have to kill her wicked father to set her mother and her country free.
“Get that treasonous, foul-mouthed old gossip out of the yard and throw him in the river,” I say shortly. “And then lock him up in the guardhouse and ask the Duke of Norfolk what he wants done with him. And make sure that everyone knows I never want to hear a word of lions or moles or flaming stars again.”
I speak with such cold fury that everyone obeys me; but that night, as I close the shutters on my bedroom window, I see above our own palace roof a flaming star, like a blue crucifix, above the princess’s bedroom, as if St. Jude, the saint of the impossible, is shining down on her a sign of hope.
L’ERBER, LONDON, SUMMER 1532
Montague and Geoffrey ask me to meet them at our London house, L’Erber, and I make an excuse to the princess that I need to see a physician, buy some warmer tapestries for the walls of the palace, and get her a winter cloak.
“Will you see anyone in London?” she asks.
“I may see my sons,” I say.
She glances around to be sure that we cannot be overheard. “Can I give you a letter for my mother?” she whispers.
I hesitate for only a moment. Nobody has told me if the princess and her mother may exchange letters; but equally no one has forbidden it.
“I want to write to her and know no one else reads it,” she says.
“Yes,” I promise. “I’ll try to get it to her.”
She nods and goes to her private chamber. A little while later she comes out with a letter with no name on the front and no seal on the back and gives it to me.
“How will you get it into her hands?” she asks.
“Better that you don’t know,” I say, kiss her, and walk through the gardens and down to the pier.
I take our barge downriver to the water stairs above London Bridge and walk though the City, surrounded by my personal guards, to my London home.
It seems like a long time since I was pruning back the vine and hoping for English wine. It was a sunny day when Thomas Boleyn warned me of the danger that my cousin the Duke of Buckingham was running into headlong. I could almost laugh now at the thought of Boleyn’s fearful caution, when I think how high he has risen, and how much more danger we are all in as a result of his own ambition—though back then, he was warning me of mine. Who would have thought that a Boleyn could advise the king? Who would have thought that the daughter of my steward should threaten the Queen of England? Who would ever have dreamed that a King of England would overthrow the laws of the land and the Church itself to get such a girl into his bed?
Geoffrey and Montague are waiting for me in my privy chamber, where there is a good fire in the grate and mulled ale in the jug. My house is run as it should be, even though I am here only rarely. I see that everything is just so with a little nod of approval, and then I take the great chair and survey my two sons.
Montague looks far older than his forty years. The task of serving this king, as he goes determinedly down the wrong road against the wishes of his people, against the truth of his Church, against the advice of his councillors, is draining my oldest son. It is exhausting him.
Geoffrey is thriving on the challenge. He is where he loves to be, at the center of things, pursuing something he believes in, arguing the tiniest detail, clamoring for the greatest of principles. He appears to serve the king in Parliament, bringing information to the king’s clever servant, Thomas Cromwell, chatting to men who have come up from the country, puzzled and anxious with no idea of what is happening at court, and he meets with our friends and kinsmen of the Privy Council and speaks for the queen whenever he can. Geoffrey loves an argument; I should have sent him to be a lawyer and then perhaps he would have risen as high as Thomas Cromwell, whose plan it is to set the Parliament against the priests and so divide them to their ruin.
They both kneel and I put my hand on Montague’s head and bless him, and then rest my hand on Geoffrey’s head. His hair is still springy under my palm. When he was a baby, I used to run my fingers through his hair to see the curls lift up. He always was the prettiest of all my children.
“I have promised the princess to get this into her mother’s hands,” I say, showing them the folded paper. “How can we do this?”
Montague puts out his hand for it. “I’ll give it to Chapuys,” he says, naming the Spanish ambassador. “He writes to her in secret, and he delivers her letters to the emperor and the Pope.”
“Nobody must know that it has come by us,” I caution him.
“I know,” he says. “Nobody will.” He tucks the single page inside his doublet.
“So,” I say, gesturing that they can sit. “We will have been observed, meeting like this. What are we to say we have been discussing, should anyone ask?”
Geoffrey is ready with a lie. “We can say that we are troubled by Jane, Arthur’s widow,” he says. “She has written me a letter, asking to be released from her vows. She wants to come out of Bisham Priory.”
I raise an eyebrow at Montague. Grimly, he nods. “She wrote to me too. It’s not the first time.”
“Why didn’t she write to me?”
Geoffrey giggles. “It’s you she blames for putting her inside,” he says. “She has taken it into her head that you want to secure the fortune of your grandson Henry by keeping her locked up and out of sight forever, her dower lands in your keeping, his inheritance safe from her. She wants to come out and get her fortune back.”
“Well, she can’t,” I say flatly. “She took a vow of poverty for life of her own free will; I won’t restore her dower and have her in my house, and Henry’s lands and fortune are in my safe-keeping until he is a man.”
“Agreed,” Montague says. “But we can say that is why we met and talked here.”
I nod. “And so why did you want to see me?” I speak with determination. My boys must not know that I am weary and frightened by the world that we live in now. I did not think that I would ever see the day when a Queen of England did not sit on her throne at her court. I never dreamed that I would see the day when a king’s bastard took titles and wealth and paraded himself as an heir to the throne. And nobody, surely nobody in the long history of this country, ever thought that a King of England could set himself up as an English Pope.
“The king is to go to France again, another meeting,” Montague says briefly. “He hopes to persuade King Francis to support his divorce with the Pope. The hearing is set for Rome this autumn. Henry wants King Francis to represent him. In return, Henry will promise to go on crusade for the Pope against the Turk.”
“Will the King of France support him?”
Geoffrey shakes his head. “How can he? There is neither logic nor morality to it.”
Montague gives a weary smile. “That might not discourage him. Or he might promise it, just to get the crusade started. The point is that the king is taking Richmond.”
“Henry Fitzro
y? What for?”
“He is to stay at the French court, as a visiting prince, and the French king’s son Henri duc d’Orléans is to come home with us.”
I am horrified. “The French are accepting Fitzroy, Bessie Blount’s bastard, in exchange for their prince?”
Montague nods. “It must be certain that the king plans to name him as his heir, and disinherit the princess.”
I cannot help it. I drop my head into my hands so that my sons cannot see the anguish on my face, then I feel Geoffrey’s gentle hand on my shoulder. “We’re not powerless,” he says. “We can fight this.”
“The king is taking the Lady to France also,” Montague goes on. “He is going to give her a title and a fortune; she is to be the Marquess of Pembroke.”
“What?” I ask. It is a strange title; this is to make her a lord in her own right. “And how can he take her to France? She can’t be a lady-in-waiting to the queen, since the queen is not attending. How can she go? What is she to do? What is she to be?”
“What she is—a whore,” Geoffrey sneers.
“A new sort of lady,” Montague says quietly, almost regretfully. “But the new Queen of France won’t meet her, and the King of France’s sister won’t meet her, so she’ll have to stay in Calais when the two kings meet. She’ll never meet the King of France at all.”
For a moment I think of the Field of the Cloth of Gold and the Queens of England and France going to take Mass together, chattering like girls, kissing each other and promising lifelong friendship. “It will be such a shadow of what went before,” I say. “Can the king not see that? Who will attend her?”
Montague allows himself a smile. “The dowager queen Mary is no friend to the Lady, and says that she’s too ill to travel. Even her husband has quarreled with the king about the Boleyn woman. The Duchess of Norfolk won’t go, the duke doesn’t even dare to ask her. None of the great ladies will go, they’ll all find an excuse. The Lady has only her immediate family: her sister and her sister-in-law. Other than Howards and Boleyns she has no friends.”
Geoffrey and I look blankly at Montague’s description of this scratch court. Every great person is always surrounded by a crowd of family, affinity, loyalists, friends, supporters: it is how we parade greatness. A lady without companions signals to the world that she is of no importance. The Boleyn woman is there only at the whim of the king, a very lonely favorite. The king’s whore has no queen’s court around her. She has no setting. “Does he not see her for what she is?” I ask helplessly. “When she has neither friends nor family?”
“He thinks that she prefers him before all company,” Montague says. “And he likes that. He thinks she is a rare thing, untouchable, a prize that only he can approach, only he might win. He likes it that she is not encircled by noblewomen. It’s her strangeness, her Frenchness, her isolation, that he likes.”
“Do you have to go?” I ask Montague.
“Yes,” he says. “God forgive me, I am commanded to go. And that’s why we wanted to see you. Lady Mother, I think the time has come for us to act.”
“Act?” I say blankly.
“We have to defend the queen and the princess against this madness. The time is now. Clearly, if he is parading Henry Fitzroy as his heir, he is going to put the princess aside. So I thought that I would take Geoffrey with me, in my household, and when we get to Calais, he can slip away and meet with Reginald. He can give him a report of our friends and kinsmen in England, take a message to the Pope, carry a letter for the queen to her nephew the King of Spain. We can tell Reginald that one strong ruling from the Pope against Henry will put a stop to this whole thing. If the Pope were to decide against Henry, then he would have to take the queen back. The Pope has to speak out. He can delay no longer. The king is pushing on, but he is blind as a mole in a tunnel. He is taking nobody with him.”
“Yet nobody defies him,” I observe.
“That’s what we must tell Reginald, that we will defy him.” Montague takes the challenge without flinching. “It has to be us. If not us, then who will stand against him? It should have been the Duke of Buckingham, the greatest duke in the land, but he is already dead on the scaffold and his son is a broken man. Ursula can do nothing with him—I’ve already asked her. The Duke of Norfolk should advise the king, but Anne Boleyn is his niece, and his daughter is married to the king’s bastard. He’s not going to argue against the promotion of the unworthy. Charles Brandon should advise the king, but Henry banished him from court for one word against her.
“As to the Church, it should be defended by the Archbishop of York, or of Canterbury; but Wolsey is dead and Archbishop Warham is dead and the king is going to put the Boleyn’s own chaplain in his place. John Fisher is unfailingly brave, but the king ignores him and he is old and his health is broken. The Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, handed back his seal of office rather than speak out, our own brother was silenced with a fist, and now the king listens only to men without principle. His greatest advisor, Thomas Cromwell, is neither of the Church nor of the nobility. He’s a man from nowhere without education, like an animal. He seeks to serve only the king, like a dog. The king has been seduced and entrapped by bad advisors. We have to win him back from them.”
“It has to be us, there is no one but us,” Geoffrey exclaims.
“Henry Courtenay?” I suggest, trying to escape the burden of destiny, naming our Plantagenet kinsman, the Marquess of Exeter.
“He’s with us,” Montague says shortly. “Heart and soul.”
“Can’t he do it?” I ask cravenly.
“On his own?” Geoffrey mocks me. “No.”
“He’ll do it with us. Together we are the white rose,” Montague says gently. “We are the Plantagenets, the natural rulers of England. The king is our cousin. We have to bring him back to his own.”
I look at their two eager faces and think that their father kept me in obscurity and short of money so that I would never have to take a decision like this, so that I would never have to take up my duty as a natural leader of the country, so that I would never have to steer the destiny of the kingdom. He hid me from power so that I should not have to make this sort of choice. But I cannot be hidden any longer. I have to defend the princess in my charge, I cannot deny my loyalty to the queen, my friend, and my boys are right—this is the destiny of our family.
Besides—the king was once a little boy and I taught him to walk. I loved his mother and promised I would keep her sons safe. I can’t abandon him to the terrible mistakes he is making. I can’t let him destroy his inheritance and his honor for the Boleyn bagatelle, I cannot let him put a bastard boy in the place of our true-born princess. I cannot let him enact his own curse by disinheriting a Tudor.
“Very well,” I say at last, and with deep reluctance. “But you must be very, very careful. Nothing written down, nothing told to anyone except those we can trust, not even a word in confession. This must be absolutely a secret. Not a whisper to your wives, especially I don’t want the children to know anything of this.”
“The king doesn’t pursue the families of suspects,” Geoffrey reassures me. “Ursula was unhurt by the sentence against her father-in-law. Her boy is safe.”
I shake my head. I can’t bear to remind him that I saw my eleven-year-old brother taken to the Tower and he never came out again. “Even so. It’s secret,” I repeat. “The children are to know nothing.”
I take out the emblem that Tom Darcy gave me, the embroidered badge of the five wounds of Christ with the white rose of York above it. I spread it flat on the table so that they can see it. “Swear on this badge, that this remains secret,” I say.
“I so swear.” Montague puts his hand on the badge, and I put my hand on his, and Geoffrey puts his hand on top.
“I swear,” he says.
“I swear,” I say.
We are handclasped for a moment and then Montague releases me with a little smile, and examines the badge.
“What is this?” he asks.
> “Tom Darcy gave it to me; he had it made when he went on crusade. It’s the badge of the defender of the Church against heresy. He had one made for our family.”
“Darcy is with us,” Montague confirms. “He spoke against the divorce at the last Parliament.”
“He was there long before us.”
“And we have brought someone to see you,” Geoffrey says eagerly.
“If you wish,” Montague says more cautiously. “She’s a very holy woman, and she says some extraordinary things.”
“Who?” I ask. “Who have you brought?”
“Elizabeth Barton,” Geoffrey says quietly. “The nun that they call the Holy Maid of Kent.”
“Lady Mother, I think you should meet her,” Montague says, forestalling my refusal. “The king himself has met her, William Warham the archbishop, may he rest in peace, brought her to him. The king listened to her, spoke with her. There is no reason that you should not see her.”
“She preaches that Princess Mary will take the throne,” Geoffrey says. “And other predictions that she has made have come true, just as she said they would. She has a gift.”
“Our cousin Henry Courtenay has met her, and his wife, Gertrude, prayed with her,” Montague tells me.
“Where is she now?” I ask.
“She’s staying at Syon Abbey,” Geoffrey says. “She preaches to the Carthusian Brothers, she has visions and understands more than a simple country girl could possible know. But right now, she’s in your chapel. She wants to speak with you.”
I glance at Montague. He nods reassuringly. “She’s not under suspicion,” he says. “She’s spoken to everyone at court.”
I rise from my chair and lead the way through the hall and out to my private chapel at the side of the building. The candles are lit on the altar, as always. One candle burns brightly in a glass of red Venice crystal before the memorial stone for my husband. The scent of the church, a hint of incense, a dry smell like leaves, the wisp of smoke from the candles, comforts me. The triptych above the altar gleams with gold leaf, and the Christ child smiles down on me as I quietly enter the warm darkness, drop a curtsey, and touch my forehead with holy water in the sign of the cross. A slim figure rises up from her seat at the side of the room, nods her head to the altar as if acknowledging a friend, and then turns and curtseys to me.
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