BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, CHRISTMAS 1534
I keep the Christmas feast at Bisham as if I were not in a state of frozen anticipation waiting for news from Hatfield and Kimbolton. It takes time to find a way into a royal palace, to bribe a servant in a royal prison. My sons will need to take the greatest care when they talk with the boatmen along the Thames and find who sails to Flanders, and who is loyal to the true queen. I have to behave as if I am thinking of nothing but the Christmas feast and the baking of the great pudding.
My household pretend to a carelessness that they don’t feel. We pretend we are not fearful for our priory, we are not afraid of a visit from Thomas Cromwell’s inspectors. We know that every monastery in the country has been inspected and that the money counters are always followed by an inquiry into morals—especially if a priory is rich. They have come to our priory and looked at our treasures and the richness of the lands and gone away again, saying nothing. We try not to fear their return.
The mummers come and play before the fire in the great hall, the wassailers come and sing. We dress up with great hats and capes and prance about pretending to enact stories from long ago. This year nobody enacts a story about the king, or the queen, or the Pope. This year there is no comedy in the Lord of Misrule; nobody knows what is true and what is treason, everything is Misrule. The Pope who threatened the king with excommunication is dead, and now there is a new Pope in Rome. Nobody knows if God will speak clearly to him, or how he will rule on the king with two wives. He is of the Farnese family: what the world says about him is not fit to be repeated. I pray that he can find holy wisdom. Nobody thinks anymore that God speaks to our king, and there are many who say that he is advised by the Moldwarp in dark and forbidden deeds. Our queen is far away, preparing for her execution, and the woman who calls herself queen can neither bear nor carry a son, proving to everyone that the blessing of God is not on her. Enough here for a hundred masques, but nobody dares even mention these events.
Instead, people put on tableaux that tell stories from a time that is safely long ago. The pages plan and perform a masque about a great sea voyage that takes the adventurers past a sea witch, a monster, and a fearsome waterspout. The cooks come up from the kitchen and play a throwing game with knives, very fast and dangerous, with no words at all—as if thoughts are more dangerous than blades. When the priest comes in from the priory, he reads in Latin from the Bible, incomprehensible to all of the servants, and will not tell us the story of the baby in the manger and the oxen kneeling to him, as if nothing is certain anymore, not even the Word that shone in the darkness.
Since truth has become only what the king tells us, and since we have sworn to believe whatever he says—however ridiculous—we are uncertain about everything. His wife is not the queen, his daughter is not a princess, his mistress has a crown on her head, and her bastard is served by his true heir. In a world like this, how can we know anything for sure?
“She’s losing her friends,” Geoffrey tells me. “She has quarreled with her uncle Thomas Howard. Her sister has been sent away from court in disgrace for marrying some passing soldier, her sister-in-law Jane Boleyn has been exiled by the king himself for starting a quarrel with his new fancy.”
“He’s fallen in love again?” I demand eagerly.
“A flirtation; but the Boleyn queen tried to get her sent away and lost her sister-in-law in the attempt.”
“And the girl?”
“I don’t even know her name. And now he’s courting Madge Shelton,” Geoffrey says. “Sending her love songs.”
I am suddenly filled with hope. “This is the best New Year’s gift you could have given me,” I say. “Another Howard girl. This will divide the family. They’ll want to push her forward.”
“It leaves the Boleyn woman very alone,” Geoffrey says, sounding almost sympathetic. “The only people she can count on are her parents and her brother. Everyone else is a rival or a threat.”
BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SPRING 1535
I receive an unsigned note from Montague.
We can do nothing. The princess is ill and they fear for her life.
I burn the note at once and I go to the chapel to pray for her. I press the heels of my hands into my hot eyes and I beg God to watch over the princess that is the hope and light of England. She is ill, seriously ill, the princess who I love is said to be so weak that she might die, and nobody knows what is wrong with her.
My cousin Gertrude writes to me that there is a plan to murder the queen by suffocating her in her bed and leave her without a bruise on her body, and that the princess is even now being poisoned by agents of the Boleyns. I can’t be sure whether to believe her or not. I know that Queen Anne is insisting that the true queen be accused of treason by an Act of Attainder and executed behind closed doors. Is she so evil, this woman who was once the daughter of my steward, that she would kill her former mistress in secret?
Not for a moment do I think that Henry has planned any of this. He has sent his own doctor to the princess and said that she can be moved nearer to her mother to Hunsdon so that the queen’s physician can attend her, but he will not let her live with her mother, where the queen could guard her and nurse her back to health. I write again to Thomas Cromwell and I beg to be allowed to go to her and nurse her, just while she is ill. He says that it is not possible. But he assures me that the moment she signs the oath I can join her, she can come to court, she can be a beloved child of her father—like Henry Fitzroy, he adds, as if that would make me feel anything but horror.
I reply to him saying that I will take my own household, my own physician, at my own cost. That I will set up house for her, that I will advise her to take the oath as I have done. I remind him that I was among the first to do so. I am not like Bishop Fisher, or Lord Thomas More. I am not guided by my conscience. I am one who bends before the storm like a flexible willow. You can call for a heretic, a turncoat, a Judas, and I will answer willingly, consulting my own safety before anything else. I was raised to be fainthearted, false-hearted; it was the powerful, painful lesson of my childhood. If Thomas Cromwell wants a liar, I am here, ready to believe that the king is head of the Church. I will believe that the queen is a dowager princess, that the princess is Lady Mary. I assure him that I am ready to believe anything, anything that the king commands, if he will only let me go to her and taste the food before she eats it.
He replies that he would be glad to oblige me; but it is not possible. He writes that he is sorry to also tell me that Princess Mary’s former tutor Richard Fetherston is in the Tower for refusing the oath. “You had a traitor for a tutor,” he observes like a casual threat. And he remarks, as if an aside, that he is very glad to hear that I will swear to anything; for John Fisher and Thomas More are to go before judges for treason, and that no one can doubt the outcome.
And, he says at the very end, that the king is going to consult Reginald as to these changes! I almost drop the letter in disbelief. The king has written to Reginald for the benefit of his learned opinion on the marriage with Anne Boleyn, and his thoughts on the ownership of the English Church. They trust that Reginald will confirm the king’s view, that the King of England must be head of the Church, since—surely—only a king can rule his kingdom?
At once I fear that it is an entrapment, that they hope to trick Reginald into such words that he will condemn himself. But Lord Cromwell writes smoothly that Reginald has replied to the king and is studying the matter with much interest, and has agreed to reply to the king as soon as he has reached his conclusions. He will read and study and discuss. Lord Cromwell thinks that there can be no doubt what he will recommend, such a loyal and loving churchman has he promised to be.
I call for my horse and for a guard to accompany me. I ride to my London house and I send for Montague.
L’ERBER, LONDON, SPRING–SUMMER 1535
“They put Bishop Fisher and then Thomas More on trial,” Montague tells me wearily. “It was not hard to see what their verdict wo
uld be. The judges were Thomas Howard, the Boleyn uncle, and Boleyn father and Boleyn brother.” He looks tired, as if he is exhausted by these times and by my outrage.
“Why could they not swear it?” I grieve. “Swear the oath and know that God would forgive them?”
“Fisher could not pretend.” Montague puts his head in his hands. “The king asks us all to pretend. Sometimes we have to pretend that he is a handsome stranger come to court. Sometimes we have to pretend that his bastard is a duke. Sometimes we have to pretend that there is no dead baby; and now we have to pretend that he is supreme head of the Church. He is calling himself Emperor of England, and no one may raise their voice to disagree.”
“But he’ll never hurt Thomas More,” I argue. “The king loves Thomas, he allowed him to stay silent when others had to advise about the marriage. He made Reginald speak out, but he allowed Thomas to stay quiet. He allowed him to give up his seal of office and go home. He said that if Thomas was silent, then he could live quietly, privately. And Thomas has done this. He lived with his family and told everyone he was glad to be a private scholar. It’s not possible that the king should condemn his friend, such a beloved friend, to death.”
“I bet you he will,” Montague says. “They’re just trying to find a day which won’t disturb the apprentice boys. They don’t dare to execute John Fisher on a saint’s day. They fear they are making another saint.”
“For God’s sake, why don’t they both beg for pardon, submit to the king’s will, and come out?”
Montague looks at me as if I am a fool. “You imagine that John Fisher, confessor to Lady Margaret Beaufort, one of the holiest men who ever guided the Church, is going to publicly declare that the Pope is not head of the Church? Swear to a heresy in the sight of God? How could he ever do that?”
I shake my head, blinded by the rush of tears to my eyes. “So that he might live,” I say despairingly. “Nothing matters more than that. So that he doesn’t have to die! For words!”
Montague shrugs. “He won’t do it. He can’t bring himself to it. Nor Thomas More. Don’t you think that it will have occurred to him? Thomas? The cleverest man in England? I imagine that he thinks of it every day. I imagine, given Thomas’s passion for life and for his children, especially his daughter, that it is his great temptation. I imagine that he puts it aside from him every day of his life, every minute.”
I sink into a chair, and I cover my face with my hands. “Son, are those good men going to die rather than sign their name on a piece of paper delivered to them by a scoundrel?”
“Yes,” Montague says. “And if I were more of a man, I would have done the same and I would be in the Tower with them and not let them go as if I were Judas, worse than Judas.”
I raise my face at once. “Don’t wish it,” I say quietly. “Don’t wish yourself in there. Don’t ever wish such a thing.”
He pauses. “Lady Mother, the time is coming when we will have to make a stand, either against the king’s advisors or against him himself. John Fisher and Thomas More are making that stand now. We should stand with them.”
“And who will stand with us?” I demand. “When you tell me that the emperor is setting sail to invade, then we can stand. Alone, I don’t dare it.”
I look at his determined pale face, and I have to get a grip on myself so that I don’t break down. “Son, you don’t know what it’s like, you don’t know the Tower, you don’t know what it’s like to look out of the little window. You don’t know what it’s like to hear them building the scaffold. My father was executed there, my own brother walked across the drawbridge to Tower Hill and laid down his head on the block. I can’t risk you, I can’t risk Geoffrey. I can’t see another Plantagenet walk into the place. We can’t stand without the certainty of support, we can’t stand without the certainty of victory. We can’t go towards death like trusting beasts to slaughter. Promise me that we will not throw ourselves on the scaffold. Promise me that we will only stand against the Tudors if we are certain that we can win.”
The new Holy Father sends the king a message that cannot be mistaken. He makes John Fisher a cardinal of the Church, a sign to everyone that this great man, in failing health in the Tower, must be treated with respect. The Pope is head of the universal Church, and the man held as a traitor, praying for strength, is his cardinal, under his explicit protection.
The king swears aloud, before all the court, that if the Pope sends a cardinal’s hat, then the bishop will be unable to wear it for he will have no head.
It is a brutal, brutish joke. But the gentlemen of the court hear Henry and they do not silence him. Nobody says “Hush” or “God forgive you.” The court, my sons shamefully among them, allow the king to say anything, and then in June, beyond belief, they let him do it. They let him execute the saintly man who was his grandmother’s greatest friend and chosen confessor. They let him execute the friend who was his wife’s spiritual advisor. John Fisher was a good, kind, loving man, he found me a refuge when I was a young woman and desperate for a friend; and I don’t stand up and say one word in his defense.
His long vigil in the Tower did not frighten the old man; they say that he never tried to escape the fate that Thomas Cromwell prepared for him. On the morning of his execution he sent for his best clothes as if he were a bridegroom, and went to his death gladly as if to his wedding. I shudder when I hear this and go to my chapel to pray. I couldn’t do that. I would never do that. I lack the faith and, besides, I have spent all my life clinging onto life.
In July, Thomas More, after writing and praying and thinking, and finally realizing that there is no way to satisfy God and the king, walks out of his cell, looks up at the blue sky and the crying seagulls, and strolls up to Tower Hill quietly, as if taking the air on a summer’s day, and lays his head down on the block as he too chooses death rather than deny his Church.
And no one in England objects. Certainly, we don’t say a word. Nothing happens. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
I read in a terse note from Reginald that the Holy Father, the King of France, and the emperor agree that the King of England must be stopped; not another death can be permitted. It is a horror breaking out in England, and the whole world is shamed by it. The whole of Christendom is stunned that a king should dare to execute a cardinal, should martyr the greatest theologian in his country, his dearest friend. Everyone is horrified and soon they start to ask: If the king can do this, what else will he do? Then they start to ask: What about the queen? What might this tyrant do to his queen?
At the end of August, Reginald writes to us and says that he has achieved the goal he has been working for—the king is to be excommunicated. This could not be more important; it is the declaration of war by the Pope on the king. It is the Pope telling the English, telling all of Christendom, that the king is not blessed by God, is not authorized by the Church; he is outside, he is certain to go to hell. No one need obey him, no Christian can defend him, no one should take up arms for him, indeed anyone fighting against him is blessed by the Church as a crusader riding against a heretic.
He is excommunicated but the sentence is suspended. He is to be allowed two months to return to his marriage with the queen. If he persists in his sins, the Pope will call on the Christian kings of Spain and France to invade England, and I shall come in with their army and raise the English with you.
Montague has been so sick since the death of Thomas More that his wife writes to me and asks me to come to his bedside. She fears that he might die.
What’s the matter with him? I reply heartlessly.
He has turned his face to the wall and will not eat.
He is heartsick. I cannot help him. This is heartbreak, like the Sweat—a disease that came in with the Tudors. Tell him to get up and meet me in London; there is no time for anyone to ill-wish themselves. Burn this.
Montague arises from his sick bed and comes to see me, pale and grave. I call all of us together, as if for a family party to celebrate the birth of two n
ew boys. My daughter, Ursula, has another boy whom she has named Edward, and Geoffrey has a fourth child, Thomas. My cousin Henry Courtenay and his wife, Gertrude, come with two silver christening cups, and my son-in-law Henry Stafford takes one for his son, with thanks. We look like a family party celebrating the birth of new children.
The court is away from the city, riding with the king and the woman who calls herself queen in a great round of the principal houses going west. Years ago, they would have come to stay with me, and the beautiful royal chamber at Bisham would have housed the handsome young king and my dearest friend, the queen. Now they stay with the men who have built new homes on the wealth that the king has given them, with men who think that the new learning and the new religion are the way to heaven. These are men who do not believe in purgatory, ready to make a hell on earth to prove it, and sleep under stolen slates.
The court on progress is flirtatious. In its desperation to appear triumphantly happy, it is becoming lax. The king has moved on from his infatuation with Madge Shelton and apparently is now favoring one of the Seymour girls, visiting her home at Wulf Hall. I know her, Jane, too shy to take advantage of a lovesick man nearly old enough to be her father, but dutiful enough to receive his poems with a wan smile.
The woman who calls herself queen has to experience the humiliation of watching his eyes go past her, to a younger, prettier woman, just as she once was. Who would know better how dangerous it is when Henry’s attention wanders? Who would know better that a lady-in-waiting can so easily wait in the wrong place, waiting for the king rather than her mistress the queen?
“This means nothing,” I say irritably to Geoffrey, who reports to me that the Seymours say they have a girl who draws the king’s gaze as she walks across his wife’s rooms. “If he does not return to the queen, he should be excommunicated. Is the Pope going to fulfill his threat?”
The King's Curse Page 40