“Of course not,” I say.
THE TOWER, LONDON, SUMMER 1540
It is easier in summertime, for though I am not allowed out of my cell, Harry and Edward can come and go as long as they stay within the walls of the Tower. They try to amuse themselves, as boys always will, playing, wrestling, daydreaming, even fishing in the dark depths of the water gate and swimming in the moat. My maid comes and goes from the Tower every day and sometimes brings me the little treats of the season. One day she brings me half a dozen strawberries and the moment I taste them I am back in my fruit garden at Bisham Manor, the warm squashy juice on my tongue, the hot sun on my back, and the world at my feet.
“And I have news,” she says.
I glance at the door where a jailer may be passing. “Take care what you say,” I remind her.
“Everyone knows this,” she says. “The king is to put his new wife aside though she has been in the country only seven months.”
At once I think of my princess, Lady Mary, who will lose another stepmother and friend. “Put her aside?” I repeat, careful with the words, wondering if she is to be charged with something monstrous and killed.
“They say that the marriage was never a true one,” my maid says, her voice a tiny whisper. “And she is to be called the king’s sister and live at Richmond Palace.”
I know that I look quite blankly at her; but I cannot comprehend a world where a king may call his wife his sister and send her to live on her own in a palace. Is nobody advising Henry at all? Is nobody telling him that the truth is not of his making, cannot be of his own invention? He cannot call a woman wife today, and name her as his sister on the next day. He cannot say that his daughter is not a princess. He cannot say that he is the Pope. Who is ever going to find the courage to name what is more and more clear: that the king does not see the world as it is, that his vision is unreal, that—though it is treason to say it—the king is quite mad.
The very next day I am gazing out of my arrow-slit window over the river when I see the Howard barge come swiftly downriver, and turn, oars feathering expertly to rush into the inner dock as the water gate creaks open. Some poor new prisoner, taken by Thomas Howard, I think, and watch with interest as a stocky figure is wrestled from the barge, fighting like a drayman, and struggles with half a dozen men onto the quay.
“God help him,” I say as he plunges this way and that like a baited bear with no hope of freedom. They have guards ready to fall on him and he fights them, all the way up the steps and out of sight, under the lee of my window as I press against the stone and push my face against the arrow-slit.
I have a solitary prisoner’s curiosity, but also I think I recognize this man who flings himself against his jailers. I knew him the moment that he pitched off the barge, his dark clerkly clothes in the best-cut black, his broad shoulders and black velvet bonnet. I stare down in amazement, my cheek pressed to the cold stone so that I can see Thomas Cromwell, arrested and imprisoned and dragged, fighting, into the same Tower where he has sent so many others.
I fall back from the arrow-slit, and I stagger to my bed and fall to my knees and put my face in my hands. I find I am crying at last, hot tears running between my fingers. “Thank God,” I cry softly. “Thank God who has brought me safe to this day. Harry and Edward are saved, the little boys are safe, for the king’s wicked councillor has fallen, and we will be freed.”
Thomas Philips, the warder, will tell me only that Thomas Cromwell, deprived of his chain of office and all his authority, has been arrested and is held in the Tower, crying for pardon, as so many good men have cried before him. He must hear, as I hear, the sound of them building the scaffold on Tower Hill, and on a day as fine and as sunny as the day they took out John Fisher or Thomas More, their enemy, the enemy of the faith of England, walks in their footsteps and goes to his death.
I tell my grandson Harry and his cousin Edward to keep from the windows and not to look out as the defeated enemy of their family walks through the echoing gate, over the drawbridge, and slowly up the cobbled road to Tower Hill; but we hear the roll of the drums and the jeering roar of the crowd. I kneel before my crucifix and I think of my son Montague predicting that Cromwell, who was deaf to calls for mercy, mercy, mercy, would one day cry out these words, and find none for himself.
I wait for my cell door to be flung open and for us to be released. We were imprisoned on Thomas Cromwell’s Act of Attainder; now that he is dead we shall surely be released.
Nobody comes for us yet; but perhaps we are overlooked as the king is married again, and is said to be half mad with joy in his new bride, another Howard girl, little Kitty Howard, young enough to be his granddaughter, pretty as all the Howard girls are. I think of Geoffrey saying that the Howards to the king are like hare to a Talbot hound, and then I remember to not think of Geoffrey at all.
I wait for the king to return from his honeymoon brimming with a bridegroom’s goodwill, and for someone to remind him of us and for him to sign our release. Then I hear that his happiness has ended abruptly, and that he is ill and has shut himself away in a sort of mad desolation and has imprisoned himself, just as I am confined, inside two small rooms, maddened with pain and tormented with failed hopes, too tired and sick at heart to attend to any business.
All summer I wait to hear that the king has come out of his melancholy, all autumn, then when the weather starts to get cold again, I think that perhaps the king will pardon and free us in the new year, after Christmas, as part of the celebrations of the season; but he does not.
THE TOWER, LONDON, SPRING 1541
The king is to take the bride whom he calls his “rose without a thorn” on a great progress north, to make the journey that he has never dared to show himself to the people of the North and to accept their apologies for the Pilgrimage of Grace. He will stay with men who have houses newly built with stone from the pulled-down monasteries, he will ride through lands where the bones of traitors still rattle in the chains on the wayside scaffolds. He will go blithely among people whose lives were ended when their Church was destroyed, whose faith has no home, who have no hope. He will dress his hugely fat body in Lincoln green and pretend to be Robin Hood and make the child he has married dance in green like Maid Marian.
I still hope. I still hope, like my dead cousin Henry Courtenay once hoped, for better days and a merry world. Perhaps the king will release Harry and Edward and me before he goes north, as part of his clemency and pardon. If he can forgive York, a Plantagenet city that threw open its gates to the pilgrims, surely he can forgive these two innocent boys.
I wake at dawn in these light mornings and I hear the birds singing outside my window and watch the sunlight slowly walk across the wall. Thomas Philips, the warder, surprises me by knocking on my door, and when I have got up and pulled a robe over my nightgown, he comes in looking as if he is sick. “What’s the matter?” I ask him, anxious at once. “Is my grandson ill?”
“He is well, he is well,” he says hastily.
“Edward then?”
“He is well.”
“Then what is the matter, Mr. Philips, for you look troubled. What is wrong?”
“I am grieved,” is all that he can say. He turns his head away and shakes his head and clears his throat. Something is distressing him so much that he can barely speak. “I am grieved to say that you are to be executed.”
“I?” It is quite impossible. The execution of Anne Boleyn was preceded by a trial in which the peers of the realm were convinced that she was an adulterous witch. A noblewoman, one of the royal family, cannot be executed, not without a charge, not without a trial.
“Yes.”
I go to the low window that overlooks the green and look out. “It cannot be,” I say. “It cannot be.”
Philips clears this throat again. “It is commanded.”
“There’s no scaffold,” I say simply. I gesture to Tower Hill, beyond the walls. “There’s no scaffold.”
“They’re bringing a blo
ck,” he says. “Putting it on the grass.”
I turn and stare at him. “A block? They’re going to put a block on the grass and behead me in hiding?”
He nods.
“There’s no charge, there’s no trial. There’s no scaffold. The man who accused me is dead himself, accused of treason. It cannot be.”
“It is,” he says. “I beg you to prepare your soul, your ladyship.”
“When?” I ask. I expect him to say the day after tomorrow, or at the end of the week.
He says: “At seven of the clock. In an hour and a half,” and he goes from the room, his head down.
I cannot comprehend that I have only an hour and a half left of life. The chaplain comes and hears my confession, and I beg him to go at once to the boys and give them my blessing and my love and to tell them to stay away from the windows that face the green and the little block that has been set there. A few people have gathered; I see the chain of the Lord Mayor of London, but it is early in the morning and all unprepared, and so only a few people have been told and only a few have come.
This makes it even worse, I think. The king must have decided it on a whim, perhaps as late as last night, and they must have sent out the order this morning. And nobody has dissuaded him. Of all my numerous fertile family, there was nobody left who could dissuade him.
I try to pray, but my mind skitters around like a foal in a meadow in springtime. I have ordered in my will that my debts should be paid and prayers said for my soul and that I should be buried in my old priory. But I doubt that they will trouble themselves to take my body—I suddenly remember with surprise that my head will be in a basket—all the way to my old chapel. So perhaps I will lie in the Tower chapel with my son, Montague. This comforts me until I remember his son, my grandson Harry, and I wonder who will care for him, and if he will ever be released, or if he will die here, another Plantagenet boy buried in the Tower.
I think all this while my lady-in-waiting dresses me, puts my new cape over my shoulders, and ties up my hair under my hood so as to leave my neck clear for the axe.
“It’s not right,” I say irritably, as if the ties of the dress are wrong, and she drops to her knees and cries, mopping her eyes with the hem of my gown.
“It’s wicked!” she cries out.
“Hush,” I say. I feel I cannot be troubled by her sorrow, I cannot understand it. I feel dazed, as if I cannot understand her words nor what is about to happen.
The priest is waiting at the door and the guard. Everything seems to be happening very quickly and I fear I am not prepared. I think, of course, it may be that just as I get to the grass, a pardon comes from the king. It would be typical of his sense of a grand show to condemn a woman to death after dinner and pardon her before breakfast so that everyone can remark on his power and his mercy.
I dawdle down the stairs, with my lady-in-waiting’s arm under mine, not just because my legs are stiff and unaccustomed to the exercise, but because I want to allow plenty of time for the king’s messenger to come in with the scroll and ribbons and the seal. But when we get to the door of the Tower there is no one there, just the small crowd around the straight stone path, and at the end of the path an impromptu block of wood, and a youth with a black hood and an axe standing beside it.
I have my pennies to pay him cold in my hand as the chaplain precedes me, and we walk the little way towards him. I don’t look up at the Beauchamp Tower to see if my grandson has disobeyed me and is looking out of Edward’s window. I don’t think I would be able to set one foot before another if I saw their little faces looking down on me as I walk to my death.
There is a gust of wind from the river and the standards suddenly flap. I take a deep breath and I think of the others who have walked out of the Tower before me, in the certainty that they were going to heaven. I think of my brother, walking to Tower Hill, feeling the rain on his face and the wet grass under his boots. My little brother, as innocent as my grandson of everything but his name. None of us is imprisoned for what we have done; we are imprisoned for being who we are, and nothing can change that.
We get to the headsman though I have hardly noticed the walk. I wish that I had thought more about my soul and prayed as I walked along. I have no coherent thoughts, I have not completed my prayers, I am not ready for death. I give him the two pennies in his black-leather mittened hand. His eyes glint through the holes in the mask. I notice that his hand is trembling and he thrusts the coins in his pocket and grips tightly to the axe.
I stand before him and I say the words that every condemned person is to say. I stress my loyalty to the king and recommend obedience to him. There is a moment when I feel like laughing out loud at this. How can anyone obey the king when his wishes change by the minute? How can anyone be loyal to a madman? I send my love and my blessings to the little Prince Edward, though I doubt that he will live to be a man, poor boy, poor accursed Tudor boy, and I send my love and blessings to the Princess Mary and I remember to call her Lady Mary and I say that I hope that she blesses me, who has loved her so dearly.
“That’s enough,” Philips interrupts. “I am sorry, your ladyship. You are not allowed to speak for long.”
The headsman steps forward and says: “Put your head on the block and stretch out your hands when you are ready for it, ma’am.”
Obediently, I put my hands on the block and awkwardly lower myself down to the grass. I can smell the scent of it under my knees. I am aware of the ache in my back and the sound of a seagull crying and someone weeping. And then suddenly, just as I am about to put my forehead against the rough top of the wooden block, and spread my arms wide to signal that he can strike, a rush of joy, a desire for life, suddenly comes over me, and I say: “No.”
It’s too late, the axe is up over his head, he is bringing it down, but I say: “No” and I sit up, and pull myself up on the block to get to my feet.
There is a terrible blow on the back of my head, but almost no pain. It fells me to the ground and I say “No” again, and suddenly I am filled with a great ecstasy of rebellion. I do not consent to the will of the madman Henry Tudor, and I do not put my head meekly down upon the block, and I never will. I am going to fight for my life and I say “No!” as I struggle to rise, and “No” as the blow comes again, and “No” as I crawl away, blood pouring from the wound in my neck and my head, blinding me but not drowning my joy in fighting for my life even as it is slipping away from me, and witnessing, to the very last moment, to the wrong that Henry Tudor has done to me and mine. “No!” I cry out. “No! No! No!”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This novel is the story of a long life lived at the center of events—one which, since it was a woman’s life, has been largely ignored by chroniclers at the time and historians since. Margaret Pole’s greatest claim to fame was that she was Henry VIII’s oldest victim on the scaffold—she was sixty-seven when she was brutally killed on Tower Green—but her life, as I have tried to show here, was lived at the heart of the Tudor court and at the center of the former royal family.
Indeed, the more I have studied and thought about her life and her wide-ranging family, the Plantagenets, the more I have had to wonder if she was not at the center of conspiracy: sometimes actively, sometimes quietly, perhaps always conscious of her family’s claim to the throne, and always with a claimant in exile, preparing to invade, or under arrest. There was never a time when Henry VII or his son were free from fear of a Plantagenet claimant, and although many historians have seen this as Tudor paranoia, I wonder if there was not a constant genuine threat from the old royal family, a sort of resistance movement: sometimes active but always present.
The novel opens with the controversial suggestion that Katherine of Aragon decided to lie about her marriage to Arthur so that she might be married for a second time to his brother, Henry. I think that an examination of the agreed facts—the official bedding, the young couple cohabiting at Ludlow, their youth and health, and the absence of any concern about the consummat
ion of their marriage—convincingly indicates that they were wedded and bedded. Certainly, everyone thought so at the time, and Katherine’s own mother had requested a dispensation from the Pope that would permit her daughter to remarry whether or not intercourse had taken place.
Decades later, when she was asked if the marriage to Arthur had been consummated, she had every reason to lie: she was defending her marriage to Henry VIII and the legitimacy of her daughter. It was the stereotyped view of women by later historians (especially the Victorian historians) who suggested that since Katherine was a “good” woman, she must have been incapable of telling a lie. I tend to take a more liberal view of female mendacity.
As a historian, I can examine one side against the other and share these thoughts with the reader. As a novelist, I have to fix the story with one coherent viewpoint, thus the account of Katherine’s first marriage and her decision to marry Prince Harry is fictional and based on my interpretation of the historical facts.
I have drawn from the work of Sir John Dewhurst the dates of Katherine of Aragon’s pregnancies. There has been much work on the loss of Henry VIII’s babies. Current interesting research from Catrina Banks Whitley and Kyra Kramer suggests that Henry may have had the rare Kell positive blood type, which can cause miscarriages, stillbirths, and infant deaths when the mother has the more common Kell negative blood type. Whitley and Kramer also suggest that Henry’s later symptoms of paranoia and anger may have been caused by McLeod syndrome—a disease found only in Kell positive individuals. McLeod syndrome usually develops when sufferers are aged around forty and causes physical degeneration and personality changes resulting in paranoia, depression, and irrational behavior.
Interestingly, Whitley and Kramer trace Kell syndrome back to Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, the suspected witch and mother of Elizabeth Woodville. Sometimes, uncannily, fiction creates a metaphor for an historical truth: in a fictional scene in the novel, Elizabeth, together with her daughter Elizabeth of York, curse the murderer of her sons, swearing that they shall lose their son and their grandsons, while in real life her genes—unknown and undetectable at the time—entered the Tudor line through her daughter and may have caused the deaths of four Tudor babies to Katherine of Aragon and three to Anne Boleyn.
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