by Lucy Worsley
Of course! She had grown taller in her years of imprisonment, and plumper too. These were the gowns of a girl. Mary looked at them sadly, and tried to remember the little girl who had worn them, and what it felt like to be her. It was all so different now.
Twenty years old already, Mary thought. When I first wore this dress, I thought that when I was twenty I’d be married, and living in France, and doing all the things the wives of kings do, like giving to charity and having children. And look at me. I’m only just beginning, all over again.
The women got to work on alterations and expansions, but Mary guessed that the colour and the shape of the gowns wasn’t quite right any more. She sighed. It would be hard work of a different kind going back to court, acting the proper part there. It was a little like going on to a battlefield, and Mary knew that she didn’t have the right armour.
Well, I must go through with it now, Mary thought, turning once more to the dresses and trying to decide which one was the most becoming. There’s no turning back.
In the event, it turned out that her return to court didn’t seem to require a splendid outfit after all.
One night, Mary stayed up late with the sewing women, standing still and straight like a statue while they hung, pinned and altered her sleeves. It was weary work, slightly taxing as she could not relax, yet rather boring. As soon as she got into bed, Mary fell asleep heavily, almost as if she had been given the henbane again.
She was woken up by an insistent tapping at the door.
Strange. Because it was summer, there was a glimmer of dawn light at the window. But even with the harvesting to be done the household servants at Hunsdon were never abroad quite this early.
It was Lady Shelton. ‘My dear,’ she said. ‘The summons has come. The king’s guards are here, to take you to him.’
Mary gasped. Her feet were on the floor at once. This was what the whole household had been waiting for.
It seemed like an eternity since she had last seen her father. Now the moment had come, Mary was excited, but she was dreading it too. She’d missed him, but she also wanted to tell him how cruel he had been. Would he still love her back if she did? Surely he must still have some love in his heart for his eldest daughter?
In truth, she just didn’t know.
Her heart was beating fast and loud as she reached for her dressing things.
‘Congratulations,’ Lady Shelton was saying, ‘congratulations are due.’
Mary noticed, a little too late, that Lady Shelton had spoken drably, without pleasure. She realised that Lady Shelton would be sad to lose her company at Hunsdon. But she had to go.
‘Lady Shelton,’ Mary said. ‘You have been a true friend to me. Thank you.’
Lady Shelton was looking steadily at the floor, and after a moment Mary realised that she was doing so because she was too proud to show that there were tears in her eyes.
‘I have been honoured to be your governess,’ Lady Shelton said at last, quietly. ‘My dearest wish is that your father may see you for what you are. A princess to be proud of.’
She had meant to be kind, and Mary thanked her. But her words had in fact left Mary feeling, if possible, even more tense. Would her father be proud of her? Lady Shelton had raised the possibility that he might not.
Soon Mary was dressed, in the plainest of her refurbished outfits. She thought that an unexpected journey so early in the day would not require the gold embroidery or cloth of silver. For a second, the former Queen Anne Boleyn came into Mary’s mind. What had she worn, for her journey to the scaffold? Had she cared what she looked like that morning? Mary quickly tried to blank out the thought. She was going to be welcomed by her father, she hoped, not slaughtered by him.
Out in the courtyard, though, Mary was brought up short by the sight of the litter that had been sent for her. It was sumptuously cushioned, and would be expertly drawn by the waiting team of fine white horses. For a moment, the memory of her winter departure from Hunsdon, riding pillion and wearing a man’s smelly cloak, came to mind. Nothing could make it clearer that Mary’s status was restored to her. No longer was she her sister’s servant, but was once again her father’s daughter.
The palanquin jolted her across fields and meadows, and the sun grew pink, and then gold. Mary tried to stop her mind from racing, racing ahead to what might happen. Look at the fields, she told herself, and the trees, and all the things in the world you can’t normally enjoy.
She had plenty of opportunity to enjoy them now. She had assumed they were heading towards Westminster or Whitehall. But as the dawn turned into day and the hours passed, Mary discovered that they weren’t going to one of the royal palaces of London after all. They weren’t taking the main road into town.
‘To Hackney, madam,’ said the mounted guard to whom she called for information. ‘We’re going to Hackney, to a private house there.’
Mary was left in consternation. A private house in Hackney? But surely this fine escort meant that she was going to see her father. That’s what she’d been told. What could be going on? Mary was thirsty, and growing tired. Despite her nerves, she was glad when the village of Hackney came into sight.
‘Not long now, my lady,’ said the friendly horseman.
Mary swallowed hard. She must get used to it, and not react angrily when people used that title. She had signed to say that she accepted it. Although she’d wanted the journey to end, the knowledge that it was about to plunged her insides back into a nervous churn.
After passing through farms and fields and a scattering of cottages, the cavalcade drew up near a timber house. It was low, small, but gentlemanlike. Mary guessed that perhaps her father had chosen it as an anonymous rendezvous. It had a neat garden, and Mary could see her father’s yeoman guards, come to keep him safe, standing here and there with their battleaxes. They looked highly incongruous among the flower beds.
Now Mary was walking through the garden gate, and serving men were directing her round the back of the house. Her heart was thudding now, beating so loud that she was afraid that the usher walking so respectfully in front of her could hear it.
There, in the garden behind the house, under a bower with ivy entwined all around it, two figures were waiting. Yes! That was her father, strangely padded in appearance. Why was he wearing such a thick doublet on a July day? Mary wondered. It wasn’t surprising he was looking rather red in the face.
He came towards her, yes, right out on to the grass, rather than waiting for her to come to him. Part of Mary’s mind processed the compliment, in court terms, and another part noticed that there were tears standing in his eyes. The eyes themselves were a more watery blue than she remembered, and lightly rimmed in pink. But she could see no more because in a second he was giving her a great big bear hug.
In all her imaginings, Mary had not thought it would be like this. Her mother had wanted her to hate this man, to defy him. To her dismay, Mary now discovered that she could not hate him after all.
But remember Hatfield! said a little voice in her head. Remember how he saw you and turned away?
Mary knew she could never forget. Yet now he was looking at her with his blue eyes – after all, these were those same old blue eyes – and putting his hands on her shoulders. And now he was smiling, and pulling her roughly towards him again. Hot tears came into her own eyes. She had thought, at this moment, that she would act all proud and cool. But she could not. This was her father. He was clearly happy to see her.
‘There, there,’ he was saying. ‘We have been parted too long, Mary. Evil people have kept us apart. I have had so many trials. How you are grown!’
She looked up at him again. He was the same … but different. His hair, what was visible of it beneath his cap, had streaks of silver in it. And he was larger, softer. That wasn’t a padded doublet; it was his belly. Mary remembered how he used to laugh and say he was growing the belly of a woman. He certainly had one now.
He, for his part, was looking at her in wonder and ama
zement. ‘My daughter!’ he was saying. ‘All grown up! Why did you not come before? Why did you stay away for five whole years?’
Mary looked at him in puzzlement. Surely he knew what had been going on? Surely he knew that she had been kept prisoner?
‘I feared …’ she began uncertainly. ‘I feared I had displeased you.’
‘Well, I have been much displeased,’ he said, with a wry smile. ‘Your mother displeased me, and then, and then, so did another lady about whom I have little to say. But you, Mary! I always thought we were such good friends.’
Mary realised, with a sinking feeling, that he couldn’t understand why she had refused to sign away her rights for so long.
She opened her mouth to explain.
Then she closed it.
Of course, it was coming back to her. This was what he was like. He’d always had a habit of forgetting the past, rewriting it. Her mother used to point out his inconsistencies. But Mary remembered, just in time to stop herself from speaking, that he had come to hate her mother for always knowing and understanding everything.
It’s like a game, she thought. I have forgotten some of the rules, these five years I haven’t been playing it, but I must get back into the swing.
‘Well, I am back now,’ she said, at last. ‘I think wicked people have been causing trouble between us. I wish only to please and to serve you.’ She did her best to curtsey, but he took her arm and prevented her.
‘Not now,’ he said. ‘This is a private family visit. I did not want us to meet under the noses of the court.’
She realised that he was truly touched and moved to see her again. At this, her heart leapt with something strangely like pity. He had missed her too! Yet she couldn’t help wondering if he were a powerful king, the man whom everyone feared, why could he not have simply called for her to come to him. Why had he allowed her to be kept prisoner until her spirit was broken? Was he not as powerful as he seemed?
‘It’s a family visit,’ he said again, ‘and I wish to introduce you to your new stepmother.’
Mary looked up, confused. Her father had beckoned, and now a lady was coming forward from the bower. She was young, very young, and fair in her colouring. She did not look at all like Mary’s idea of a stepmother. Mary sensed her nervousness.
‘Come on, Jane,’ her father was saying, ‘come along. Don’t be bashful. Now, I want you two to be friends. My two beautiful girls.’
Mary looked at the lady, with her blue eyes and her pale skin. She was absolutely nothing like Mary’s mother had been, stately with her golden hair, nor dark and chic like Lady Anne either.
Jane gave a shy smile and held out a hand. She spoke as if she had prepared and memorised the words. ‘I am pleased to meet you, my Lady Mary,’ she said. ‘I am happy that we will live together all three of us in harmony.’
Mary could hardly countenance it.
The girl – she was a girl, not a woman – was hardly any older than Mary herself was. What had her father been thinking? If he had ended his marriage to Anne Boleyn, then surely it was only right to pause a little longer at least? Why had no one told Mary that her father had married … again?
It was wrong, all wrong. Mary couldn’t think of anything at all gracious to say to this strange lady. She stood there tongue-tied.
‘Are you … married to her?’ she said abruptly, turning back to her father. He was nodding, pleased, proud. ‘But what about my mother?’ Mary said, her voice rising out of control. She could not help it. ‘She is scarcely cold! I thought we would go together to see her grave!’
Looking at her father standing there with an enormous smile on his face, as if he was very happy to be married, it was as if he had suddenly flipped back to being a complete stranger. There was no sadness on his face at all for the death of Mary’s mother. He seemed as unknown to her as this ethereal girl who had apparently become Mary’s stepmother.
Mary stepped backwards and raised her arms, as if to protect herself. How else would he trick and surprise her?
The spell was broken by a voice, horribly familiar, from behind them.
‘Joy!’ it said. ‘A joyful occasion, a family reunion.’
Mary’s heart sank still further to realise that yes, it was Master Cromwell. He was coming out of the house. His arms were outstretched; there was a fat smile on his florid face. She saw her father and the new … queen, Mary supposed that this woman must be the new queen, turn towards him eagerly.
Mary felt rebuffed, excluded. She realised that she had inched backwards, towards the bower, and that her hands had clasped themselves firmly behind her, so that there was no chance of Master Cromwell greeting or touching her. Her face had set itself into a grim mask. It was all that she could do not to cry.
‘You are a blessing to us,’ her father was saying. ‘You have brought us back together. Never will I forget, Master Cromwell, how good you have been to this family.’
They all turned now, to look at Mary. What on earth could she say?
‘Yes,’ she said eventually. She swallowed hard. It was clear that something more was expected of her, but she could hardly spit out the words.
‘Yes,’ she said, through gritted teeth, ‘I am grateful to Master Cromwell, for bringing me back into your family, sire.’ The words stuck in her throat. So this was what it would be like to be back at court. Difficult.
Chapter 27
Late summer 1536, Greenwich
Within what seemed like no time at all after the first meeting at Hackney, Mary was back inside her old life as an almost-princess. At least as the daughter of the king. But it was different. Before, she hadn’t taken it seriously. Now, she was deadly earnest. If surviving at court was indeed a game, it still seemed more serious than anything else.
Each day was a performance, once again, of hair, and dress, and deportment.
Now Mary cursed herself for not having taken more pleasure in the long days spent reading at Hunsdon, wearing whatever was to hand, and not having to be … on show. She missed that sense of relaxation. But she also knew that coming back to court, being a good princess, even if she wasn’t one in name, was the only way to survive.
Back at Greenwich, she found surprisingly few changes, apart from the fact that she couldn’t go into the queen’s rooms at will, as she had done when they were her mother’s. Of course not. They were now the new Queen Jane’s.
Sometimes the place seemed exactly like before, but sometimes the changes seemed to Mary almost dizzying. Since she had been here last, as princess to Queen Catherine, there had been not one but two different queens living in this palace, sitting at the high table, leading the ladies into chapel for Mass, having everyone’s eyes follow them at banquets and entertainments.
Mary’s mother had died in January, Anne Boleyn had died in May, and now it was only the summer! She could hardly understand how all the ladies-in-waiting and menservants and grooms lived with these astonishing turns of Fortune’s wheel. But then, maybe the only way to get through it was to accept the changes blindly, like animals might, and to keep on doggedly placing one foot in front of the other.
In the last five years Mary had been imprisoned, and starved, and terribly, terribly lonely. She thought that the life of the servants she saw bustling past on their unknowable business was, in some ways, enviable. No one was likely to play cruel mind games with them.
Mary also now realised, with a pang, as she saw familiar faces among the servants at Greenwich, that many of them didn’t care. A few smiled in welcome when they first saw her, or said they were glad to see her again, but the rest simply went on performing their duties, stolidly, as if she had never been away.
It seemed little had changed with her father too, although he now spent his mornings in his chamber instead of going out riding. He’d hurt his leg, Mary was told, falling heavily in a joust. She watched him at dinner, exchanging what seemed to be the same jokes with the same rowdy friends she remembered her mother disliking so much. He ate joylessly, as if
it were a duty. But then he caught her looking at him, and at once raised his glass as if to toast his Mighty Princess. She could not help but smile back.
Mary was once again the second lady of the court, just as she had been before. But the new queen, Jane, was so young and so unimpressive that it was galling to have to walk behind her into the chapel, or out into the tournament yard.
Mary grew to hate the sight of the back of Jane’s demure little head, especially as she wore the pointed hoods that Mary’s own mother had favoured. Mary should have been happy to see a queen dressed in her mother’s conservative fashion, but it also seemed strangely impertinent, as if Jane were aping someone better than herself. Anne Boleyn, Mary recalled, had never worn a hood like Catherine’s, and Mary remembered being told that she thought them unflattering. But no one at Greenwich ever now mentioned her. It was as if Anne had never existed.
As she walked in the chapel procession one day Mary realised that she was lonely, perhaps even more lonely than she had been at Hunsdon, because there at least she’d had Lady Shelton, and she’d expected to be much alone.
Here at court, living back with her father, and with so many other people all around her, she had not.
The most frustrating thing of all was that she rarely saw her father without other people. Mary had never once seen him by himself, a prerequisite for talking to him about her mother, which she would have liked to do.
Was he weak, like her mother had said, or had he just made mistakes? Surely, Mary prayed, surely her father could not be utterly, knowingly malicious.
But she scarcely had the chance to find out. Mary tried once to go to her father, just to pay her respects, and maybe to chat, but she found Master Cromwell in the outer room, rubbing his hands together, and smiling to see her.
‘I came to see the king,’ she said shortly, in explanation of her presence.
‘Oh, dear lady,’ he cried, with his false-sounding sympathy, ‘how unfortunate. He is busy with the queen.’
And she’d had to turn around, shoulders set, jaw grim, and march out again.