“My son! Oh, my son!”
“Lady Mother, blessings of the season.”
“Happy Christmas, Montague. Have you just come from the North?”
“I rode down with Robert Aske himself,” he says.
“He’s here? The pilgrims are in London?”
“He’s bidden to court. He is the king’s guest at the Christmas feast. He is honored.”
I hear his words but I cannot believe them. “The king has asked Robert Aske, the leader of the pilgrims, to court for Christmas?”
“As a loyal subject, as an advisor.”
I put out my hand to my son. “The pilgrim leader and the king?”
“It is peace. It is victory.”
“I can’t believe that our troubles are over.”
“Amen,” he says. “Who would have believed it?”
L’ERBER, LONDON, JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1537
Montague goes to court himself the next day, taking Harry with him, who trots in his train, very solemn and serious, and when he comes back at the end of the twelve days of Christmas he comes straight to my private rooms to tell me about the meeting between the king and the pilgrim.
“He spoke to the king with unbelievable frankness. You would not think it possible.”
“What did he say?”
Montague glances around, but only my granddaughters are with me, and a couple of ladies, and besides, the time for fearing spies is over.
“He told His Majesty to his face that he was there only to tell him the hearts of the people, and that they cannot tolerate Cromwell as an advisor.”
“Was Cromwell there, listening to this?”
“Yes. That’s what made it so brave. Cromwell was furious, swore that all northern men were traitors—and the king looked from one to the other and put his arm around Robert Aske’s shoulders.”
“The king favored Aske over Cromwell?”
“In front of everyone.”
“Cromwell must be beside himself.”
“He’s afraid. Think of what happened to his master, Wolsey! If the king turns against him, he has no friends. Thomas Howard would see him hanged on his own scaffold tomorrow. He has invented laws that can be bent to catch anyone. If he is caught in his own net, none of us would lift a hand to save him.”
“And the king?”
“Gave Aske his own jacket, scarlet satin. Gave him the gold chain from his neck. Asked him what he wanted. My God, but he’s a brave man, that Yorkshireman! He bent the knee but he lifted his head and he spoke to the king without fear. He said that Cromwell was a tyrant and the men he had thrown out of the monasteries were good men, thrown into poverty by Cromwell’s greed, and the people of England could not live without the abbeys. He said that the Church is the heart of England; it cannot be attacked without hurting us all. The king listened to him, listened to every word, and at the end of it he said that he would make him one of the council.”
I break off to look at Harry’s bright face. “Did you see him? Did you hear this?”
He nods. “He’s very quiet and you don’t notice him at first, but then you see that he’s the most important person there. And he is nice to look at though he’s blinded in one eye. He’s quiet and smiling. And he’s really brave.”
I turn back to Montague. “I see he’s very taking. But—a privy councillor?”
“Why not? He’s a Yorkshire gentleman, a kin to the Seymours, better born than Cromwell. But anyway, he refused. Think of it! He bowed and said that it wasn’t necessary. What he wants is a free Parliament, and that the council should be governed by the old lords, not new upstarts. And the king said that he will hold a free Parliament at York to show his goodwill, and the queen will be crowned there, and the Church convocation will meet there to declare their learning.”
For a moment I am stunned at this change, then, at Montague’s quiet certainty, I make the sign of the cross and I bow my head for a moment. “Everything we have ever asked for.”
“More,” my son confirms. “More than we dreamed of asking, more than we imagined the king would ever grant.”
“What more?” I ask.
Montague beams at me. “Reginald is waiting to be called. He’s in Flanders, a day’s sail away. The moment that the king sends for him, he will come and restore the Church to England.”
“The king will send for him?”
“He will appoint him as the cardinal for the restoration.”
I am so amazed at the thought of Reginald coming home with honor, to put everything to rights, that I close my eyes for a moment and give thanks to God who has allowed me long enough life to see this. “How has this come about?” I ask Montague. “Why is the king doing this, and so easily?”
Montague nods; he has thought about this too. “I think that he finally understands that he has gone too far. I think Aske told him of the numbers of the pilgrim army and their simple hopes. Aske said that they love the king but blame Cromwell, and the king wants to be loved more than anything. In Aske he sees a good man, a man of principle who is representing good men. He sees a good Englishman, ready to love and follow a good king, driven to rebellion by intolerable changes. When he met Aske, he saw another way to be beloved, he saw another way to be kingly. He can throw Cromwell’s reputation to them as a sop, he can restore the monasteries. He loves the Church himself, he loves the pilgrim ways. He’s never stopped his observance of the liturgy or the rituals. It’s as if he suddenly sees a new part in a masque—the king who makes everything well again.”
Montague pauses for a moment, puts a gentle hand on his little son’s shoulder. “Or perhaps, Lady Mother, it’s even better than this. Perhaps I am speaking bitterly when I should see a miracle has happened in my lifetime. Perhaps the light has shone on the king, perhaps at last God really has spoken to him, and he has truly changed his mind. Then God be praised, for He has saved England.”
I am normally melancholy in the cold days after the feast of Christmas. The thought of the long winter stretches before me, and I cannot imagine spring. Even when the snow melts on the roof and drips into the gutters I don’t think of warmer weather, but gather my furs around me and know that there are many days and weeks of damp and gray mornings before the weather lifts. The thick ice melts and releases the river which is gray and angry, the deep snow clouds roll away from the sky to leave a light which is cold and hard. Normally, at this time of year I huddle indoors and complain if anyone leaves a door open anywhere in the house. I can feel the draft, I tell them. I can feel it on my ankles, chilling my feet.
But this year I am contented, like a spoiled cat, soothed by the fire, watching the sleet patter against the window where my grandson Harry draws in the mist on the windowpanes. This year I imagine Robert Aske riding north, greeted at every inn and house along the way by people wanting to know the news, and him telling them that the king has come to his senses, that the queen is to be crowned in York, that the king has promised a free Parliament, and that the abbeys are to be restored to the faithful.
I imagine the monks who hang around the old buildings, begging where they once served, gathering around his horse and asking him to tell them again, to swear that it is true. I think of them opening the doors of the chapel, kneeling before the space where the altar was, promising that they will start again, tolling the bell for the first service. And I think of Robert showing them his golden chain and telling them the king took it from his own neck to put around his shoulders, and told him it was a sign of his favor and offered him a seat on the Privy Council.
But then we hear of odd reports. Some of the pilgrims who had taken a general pardon seem to have broken the terms of their truce, and are in arms again. Thomas Howard arrests half a dozen ill doers and sends their names to Thomas Cromwell—and Thomas Cromwell is still in office.
Some of the gentlemen and most of the northern lords go to talk with Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and share their concerns about the North becoming unruly in this feast of freedom. Robert Aske assures them
, he assures the pilgrims that there is no rebellion against the rule of the king—for see! he carries the king’s pardon, he wears the king’s scarlet satin jacket. There will always be men who will take advantage of troubled times—they make no difference to the peace and the pardon. The peace will hold, the pardon will hold, the pilgrims have won everything they asked for, and the king has given them his word.
And yet Sir Thomas Percy and Sir Ingram Percy, who rode with the pilgrims who marched under the banner of the five wounds, are ordered to come to court, and when they arrive in London, they are arrested immediately and sent to the Tower.
“It means nothing,” Geoffrey says to me as he passes through L’Erber on his way home to Lordington. “The Percys have always been a law unto themselves, they were using the pilgrims as a shield to defy the king. They are rebels, not pilgrims; they should be in the Tower.”
“But they had been given a pardon?”
“No man would expect the king to honor a pardon to a pair like that.”
I don’t argue since Geoffrey is confident, and the news from the North is good. The abbeys are reopening, the pilgrims are dispersing with their pardons, each of them swearing an oath of loyalty to the king, all of them convinced that good times have come at last. Slowly, quietly, the religious women and men return to the abbeys and they open their doors again. Every village church has the story of a little miracle. People bring a crystal monstrance out of its hiding place under a thatch. Carpenters resurrect the beautiful carvings of saints from where they had been tumbled for safety into the wood piles, farmers dig carefully in the drainage ditches and bring out bright crucifixes. Vestments come out of hidden wardrobes, the monks come back to their cells. They mend the windows, they repair the roofs, I tell my steward to find Prior Richard and invite him back to Bisham.
“Lady Grandmother, do you think my uncle Reginald will come home?” Harry, Montague’s boy, asks me. And I answer him smiling: “Yes. Yes, I think he will.”
But in York in February, nine men are charged with treason by Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and they are sentenced to be hanged.
“How can they be hanged? Don’t they have a pardon?” I ask Geoffrey.
“Lady Mother, the duke is a hard man. He will feel that he has to show the king that though he sympathizes with the pilgrims he is hard on the rebels. He’ll hang one or two just to show his strength.”
Once again, I don’t argue with my son, but I am afraid that the king’s pardon is not proving to be a certain guarantee of safety. Certainly, the commons seem to think so, for Carlisle musters its men in desperation and they march against Thomas Howard’s army as if they are marching for their lives, staking everything on one last throw of the dice. Hundreds are killed by the well-armed, well-fed, well-mounted lords of the North who were beside them during the pilgrimage, but have abandoned them in the truce.
We get the news in London in the middle of February and the citizens peal the bells in joy that the landless poor men of the North have been defeated by the lords who, only a few months ago, stood by them. They say that Sir Christopher Dacre killed seven hundred men and took the rest prisoner, hanging them on the stunted little trees which is all that grow in the hard northwest, and Thomas Cromwell has promised him an earldom for his service.
Inspired by brutality, Thomas Howard now declares martial law in the North, which means that the magistrates and lords have no power against his rule. Howard can be judge, jury, and hangman to men who have no defense to offer. He declares war on his own countrymen—this is no difficulty for the man who beheaded his own niece and nephew. He holds impromptu hearings in little towns and hands down instant sentences of death. Hundreds of men are forced before him. The chain makers of Carlisle run out of iron and men have to be hanged wrapped in ropes to signify their shame. Thomas Howard marches out to hang villagers in their own little gardens, so that everyone knows that the pilgrim way led them home to death. His men go into every little village and every hungry hamlet, in the coldest time of year, and demand to know who rode out with the pilgrims and swore an oath? Who rang the church bells backwards? Who prayed for the return of the Church? And who rode out and did not come home again?
Montague writes to me a note from Greenwich, where he is at court.
The king has ordered Norfolk to go to all the monasteries that offered any resistance. He says the monks and canons must be a terrible example for others. I think he means to kill them. Pray for us.
I don’t understand the times that I am living in. I read my son’s letter, once, twice, three times, and I burn it as soon as I have remembered the terrible words by heart. I go to my chapel and kneel on the cold stone floors and pray, but I find all I am doing is running my beads through my hands and shaking my head, as if I want to deny the terrible things that are happening to the men who called themselves the pilgrims and marched for grace.
The king has heard that some widows and orphans have cut down the bodies of their husbands and fathers, executed as rebels, and buried them secretly, at night, in their churchyards. He has sent to Thomas Howard telling him to find these families and punish them. The bodies are to be dug up out of sanctified ground. He wants the corpses hanged until they rot.
Lady Mother, I think he has run mad.
Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, straining against his own conscience, obeys the king in everything, closing monasteries, and slamming the doors shut on those that had reopened. No one has any explanation of this, none seems needed. Now the buildings are to be handed to the neighboring lords for them to use as quarries for stone; the lands are to be sold to nearby farmers. The commons are to look no more to the abbeys for their comfort and help, the monks are to be homeless beggars. Our Lady is not to be invoked in a hundred, a thousand side chapels and roadside shrines. There are to be no more pilgrimages, there is to be no hope. A song comes out of the North that says there is to be no May, and I look out of the thick glass into the gray courtyard where the snow is slowly melting away, and think that the spring is coming this year without joy, without love, and it is true, the months will change but there will be no merry May.
BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SPRING 1537
As soon as the roads are dry enough for travel I leave London and go to Bisham. Harry goes home with his father, his little face puzzled that the season which promised so much does not feel like spring at all. I ride pillion behind my Master of Horse and take some comfort in leaning against the man’s broad back as the big horse takes his rolling strides down the muddy road to Berkshire.
So I am out of the city when they bring in Tom Darcy to the Tower, and question him. He has little patience with them, God bless the old man for his fierce temper. He has the king’s pardon in his pocket and yet he is under arrest. He looks Thomas Cromwell in the face, and knows him for his judge and jury and yet says to him as they write down his words as evidence against him: “Cromwell, it is thou that art the very original and chief causer of all this rebellion and mischief.” When the blacksmith’s son blinks at this plain speaking, Darcy promises him a certain future death on the scaffold, telling him that if the day comes when there is only one nobleman left alive in England, that single lord will surely behead Thomas Cromwell.
They bring in John Hussey too, the princess’s old chamberlain, and I think of him, patiently watching me waste time over the inventory of her jewels, and of his wife’s faithful love for her. I pray no one tells the princess that her former chamberlain is under arrest in the Tower for questioning.
His inquisition, long, detailed, vindictive with petty threats, is of little help to Cromwell, for neither Tom Darcy nor John Hussey will name a single other man or woman. Darcy says nothing about riding with the pilgrims or opening the gates of Pontefract Castle to them. He says that he had the pilgrim badges left in a chest at the castle from his old crusade to the holy land, and he refuses to reveal who received them from his hands. He says: “Old Tom has not one traitor’s tooth in his head,” and he is faithful to the very l
ast.
Henry Courtenay writes to me:
Pray for me, Cousin, for I have been named as Lord High Steward for the trial of those two good lords, John Hussey and Tom Darcy. I have Cromwell’s promise that if we find Tom guilty, he will have his sentence commuted to banishment—and he can come home later. But there is no hope for John Hussey.
I read the letter standing by the forge, waiting for my horse to be shod, and the moment that I have taken in the meaning I plunge it into the heart of the fire and turn to the messenger in the Exeter livery. “Are you going straight back to your master?”
He nods.
“Tell him this from me. Make sure you make no mistake. Tell him I recited an old saying; these are not my words but a riddle that the countryfolk say. Tell him the countrymen say not to put a man’s head on the block unless you want it struck off. Can you remember that?”
He nods. “I know it. My grandfather used to say it. He lived in troubled times. ‘Not to put a man’s head on the block unless you want it struck off.’ ”
I give him a penny. “And don’t tell anyone else,” I say. “And these are not my words.”
I wait for news of the trial. Montague writes to me.
John Hussey is a dead man. Darcy has been found guilty but will be pardoned and spared.
It’s a lie from that great liar, Cromwell. And the saying of the people was true—don’t put a man’s head on the block unless you want it struck off. The lords think they have a promise that will save Tom Darcy and so they find him guilty and wait for the king to commute his sentence of execution into banishment.
But the king fails this great Englishman and he is sent to the block.
BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SUMMER 1537
The King's Curse Page 52