The Fifth Queen Series

by Ford Madox Ford

  ‘Ha, magister,’ Katharine said, knowing no other man that could visit her. But the firelight shone upon a heavy, firm jaw that was never the magister’s, on white hands and in threatening, steadfast eyes.

  ‘I am the unworthy Bishop Gardiner, of Winchester,’ a harsh voice said. ‘I seek one Katharine Howard. Peace be with you in these evil days.’

  Katharine fell upon her knees before this holy man. He gave her his blessing perfunctorily, and muttered some words of the exorcism against demons.

  ‘I am even cured,’ Katharine said.

  He sent Margot Poins from the room, and stood in the firelight that threw his great shadow to shake upon the hangings, towering above Katharine Howard upon her knees. He was silent, as if he would threaten her, and his brooding eyes glowed and devoured her face. Here then, she thought, was the man from the other camp descending secretly upon her. He had no need to threaten, for she was of his side.

  He said that a Magister Udal had reported that she stood in need of Christian aid, and, speaking Latin with a heavy voice, he interrogated her as to her faith. The times were evil: many and various heresies stalked about the land: let her beware of trafficking with them.

  Kneeling still in the firelight, she answered that, so far as was lawful, she was a daughter of the Church.

  He muttered: ‘Lawful!’ and looked at her for a long time with brooding and fanatical eyes. ‘I hear you have read many heathen books under a strange master.’

  She answered: ‘Most Reverend, I am for the Old Faith in the old way.’

  ‘A prudent tongue is also a Christian possession,’ he muttered.

  ‘Nay there is no one to hear in this room,’ she said.

  He bent over her to raise her to her feet and holding before her eyes his missal, he indicated to her certain prayers that she should recite in order to prevent the fiend’s coming to her again. Suddenly he commanded her to tell him how often she had conversed with the King’s Highness.

  Gardiner was the bitterest of all whom Cromwell had to hate him. He had been of the King’s Council, and a secretary before Cromwell had reached the Court, and, but for Cromwell, he might well have been the King’s best minister. But Cromwell had even taken his secretaryship; and he was set upon having Privy Seal down all through those ten years. He had been bishop before any of these changes had been thought of, and by such Papists as Katharine Howard he was esteemed the most holy man in the land.

  She told him that she had seen the King but once for a little time.

  ‘They told me it was many times,’ he answered fiercely. ‘Should I have come here merely to chatter with you?’

  There was something sinister and harsh even in the bluish tinge of his shaven jaws, and his agate-blue eyes were sombre, threatening and suspicious.

  She answered: ‘But once,’ and related the story very soberly.

  He threatened her with his finger.

  ‘Have a care that you speak truth. Things will not always remain in this guise. I come to warn you that you speak the King with a loyal purpose. His Highness listens sometimes to the promptings of his women.’

  ‘You might have saved your journey,’ she answered. ‘I could speak no otherwise if he loved me.’

  He gazed involuntarily round at the hangings as if he suspected a listener.

  ‘Your Most Reverence does ill to doubt me,’ Katharine said submissively. ‘I am of a true house.’

  ‘No house is true save where it finds its account,’ he answered moodily. He could not believe that she spoke the truth—for he was unable to believe that any man could speak the truth—but it was true she was poorly housed, raggedly dressed and hidden up in a corner. Nevertheless, these might be artifices. He made ostentatiously and disdainfully towards the door.

  ‘Why, God keep you,’—he moved his fingers in a negligent blessing—‘I believe you are true, though you are of little use.’ Suddenly he shot out:

  ‘If you would stay here in peace your cousin Culpepper must begone.’

  Katharine put her hand to her heart in sudden fear of these men who surrounded her and knew everything.

  ‘What hath Tom done?’ she asked.

  ‘He hath put a shame upon thee,’ the bishop answered. He had fallen upon Sir Christopher Aske: he had been set in chains for it, in the Duke’s ward room. But upon the coming of the Queen the night before, all misdemeanants had been cast loose again. Culpepper had been kept by the guards from entering the palace, where he had no place. But he had fallen in with the Magister Udal in the courtyard. Being maudlin and friendly at the time, he had cast his arms round the magister’s neck claiming him for a loved acquaintance. They had drunk together and had started, towards midnight, to find the chamber of Katharine Howard, Culpepper seeking his cousin, and the magister, Margot Poins. On the way they had enlisted other jovial souls, and the tumult in the corridor had arisen. ‘These scandals are best avoided,’ the bishop finished. ‘I have known women lose their lives through them when they came to have husbands.’

  ‘I could have calmed him,’ Katharine said. ‘He is always silent at a word from me.’

  Gardiner stood pondering, his head hanging down. His eyes, hard and blue, flashed at her and then down again at the floor.

  ‘They told me you were the King’s good friend,’ he said, resentfully. ‘Your gossip Udal told my chaplain, and it hath been repeated.’

  ‘They will talk where there are a many together,’ Katharine answered; ‘the magister is a notorious babbler and will have told many lies.’

  ‘He is a spy of Privy Seal’s and deep in his councils,’ Gardiner answered gloomily.

  A heavy wind that had arisen hurled itself against the dark casement. Little flaws of cold air penetrated the room, and the bishop pulled his cap further down over his ears.

  ‘My Lord Privy Seal would send my cousin to Calais where there is fighting to come,’ Katharine said.

  Gardiner raised his head sharply at Cromwell’s name.

  ‘You speak sense at the end,’ he muttered. To him too it had occurred that if she was to be the King’s peaceably, this madman must begone. If Cromwell wished this lover of this girl out of the way, the reason was not obscure.

  ‘A man of his hath been here this very day,’ Katharine said.

  ‘Privy Seal learned whoremastering in Italy,’ Gardiner cried triumphantly. ‘He saw signs that his Highness inclined to you. Have a care for your little soul.’

  ‘Why, I think Privy Seal had no such vain imagination,’ Katharine answered submissively. She would have laughed that the magister’s insane babblings should have raised such a coil; but Gardiner was a man esteemed very saintly, and she kept her eyes on the floor.

  ‘Give thou ear to no doctrines of Privy Seal’s,’ he answered swiftly. ‘Thy soul should burn: I will curse thee. If the King shall offer thee favours for thy friends come thou to me for spiritual guidance.’

  She opened amazed and candid eyes upon him.

  ‘But this is a folly,’ she said. ‘A King may regard one for a minute, then it is past. Privy Seal would not bring me up against the King.’

  He flashed his gloomy blue eyes at her, suspecting her, and still threatening.

  ‘I know how Privy Seal will plot,’ he said passionately. ‘Having failed with one woman he will bring another.’

  He clenched his hands angrily and unclenched them: the wind moaned for a moment among the chimney stacks.

  ‘So it is!’ he cried, from deep down in his chest. ‘If it were not so, how is there all this clamour about his Highness and a woman?’

  ‘Most Reverend,’ she said, ‘there is no end to the inventions of Magister Udal.’

  ‘There is none to the machinations of the fiend, and Udal is of his councils,’ he said. ‘Be careful, I tell you, for your soul’s sake. Cromwell shall come to you offering you great bribes. Have a care I say!’

  She attempted to say that Udal had no voice at all in Privy Seal’s councils, being a garrulous magpie that no sane man would
trust. But Gardiner had crossed his arms and stood, immense and shadowy, in the firelight. He hissed irritably between his teeth when she spoke, as if she interrupted his meditation.

  ‘All the world knows Udal for his spy,’ he said, sombrely. ‘If Udal hath babbled, God be thanked. I say again: if Privy Seal bring thee to the King, come thou to me. But, by the Grace of Heaven, I will forestall Privy Seal with thee and the King!’

  She forbore to contradict him any more; he had this maggot in his head, and was so wild to defeat Privy Seal with his own tool.

  He muttered: ‘Think you Privy Seal knoweth not the King’s taste? I tell you he hath seen an inclination in him towards you. This is a plot, but I have sounded it!’

  She let him talk, and asked, with a malice too fine for him to discern:

  ‘I should not shun the King’s presence for my soul’s sake?’

  ‘God forbid,’ he answered. ‘I may use thee to bring down Privy Seal.’

  He picked up a piece of bark from a faggot beside the fire and rolled it between his fingers. She stood looking at him intently, her lips a little parted, tall, graceful and submissive.

  ‘You are more fair-skinned than any his Highness has favoured before,’ he said in a meditative voice. ‘Yet Cromwell knows the King’s tastes better than any man.’ He sank down into her tall-backed chair and suddenly tossed the piece of bark into the fire. ‘I would have you walk across the floor, elevating your arms as you were the goddess Flora.’

  She tripped towards the door, held her arms above her head, turned her long body to right and left, bent very low in a courtesy to him, and let her hands fall restfully into her lap. The firelight shone upon the folds of her dress and in the white lining of her hood. He looked at her, leaning over the arm of the chair, his blue eyes hard with the strenuous rage of his new project.

  ‘You could take a part in an Italian interlude? A masque?’

  ‘I have a better memory of the French or Latin,’ she answered.

  ‘You do not turn pale? Your knees knock not together?’

  ‘I think I blush most,’ she said seriously.

  He answered, ‘You will be the better of a little colour,’ and began muffling his face with his cloak.

  ‘See you, then,’ his harsh voice commanded. ‘You shall see their Highnesses at Privy Seal’s house on the Saturday; but they shall see you at mine on the Tuesday. If you are good enough to serve the turn of Privy Seal, you may be good enough to serve mine. The King listens sometimes to the promptings of his women. I will teach you how you may bring this man down and set me in his place.’

  She reflected for a moment. ‘I would well serve you,’ she said. ‘But I do not believe this fable of the King, and I have no memory of Italian.’ She talked of being the Lady Mary’s servant, or that she must get her lady’s leave.

  His brows grew heavy, his eyes threatening and alarming beneath their heavy lids.

  ‘Be you faithful to me,’ he thundered. Even his thin and delicate hands seemed to menace her. ‘Retain your obedience to your Faith. Your duty is to that, and to no earthly lady before that.’

  Her eyes were cast down, her lips did not move. He said, harshly, ‘It will go ill with you if it become known to Cromwell I have visited you. Keep this matter secret as you love your liberty. I will send you the words you shall say by a private bearer. After, maybe, his Highness shall safeguard you, I admonishing him. But the Lady Mary shall bid you obey me in all things.’

  He opened the door and put his head out cautiously. Suddenly he drew it back and said in Latin, ‘Here is a spy.’ He did not flinch, but advanced into the corridor, keeping his back to the servitor whom already Master Viridus had sent to keep her door. Gardiner fumbled in his robes and pulled out his missal. He turned the pages over, and, speaking in a feigned and squeaky voice, once more indicated to her prayers against the visitations of fiends. Reading them aloud, he interspersed the Latin of the missal with the phrases, ‘You may pray to God he have not seen my face. Be you very silent and secret, or you are undone. I could in no wise save you from Cromwell unless the King becomes your protector.’ He finished in the vulgar tongue. ‘I pray my prayers with you may have availed to give you relief. But a simple priest as myself is of small skill in these visitations. You should have sent to some great Churchman or one of the worshipful bishops.’

  ‘Good Father Henry, I thank you,’ she answered, having entered into his artifice. He went away, feigning to limp on his right knee, and keeping his face from the spy.

  At the corner of the corridor Margot Poins, an immense blonde and gentle figure in Lutheran grey, stood back in the hangings. The Magister Udal leant over her, supporting himself with one hand against the wall above her head and one leg crossed beneath his gown.

  ‘Come you into my room,’ Katharine said to the girl; and to the magister, ‘Avoid, man of books. I will have no maid of mine undone by thee.’

  ‘Venio honoris causa,’ he said pertly, and Margot uttered, ‘He seeks me in wedlock,’ in a gruff, uncontrolled voice of a great young girl’s confusion, and immense blushes covered her large cheeks.

  Katharine laughed; she was sorely afraid of the serving man behind her, for that he was a spy set there by Viridus she was very sure, and she was casting about in her mind for a device that should let her tell whether or no he had known the bishop. The squeaky voice and the feigned limp seemed to her stratagems ignoble and futile on the part of a great Churchman, and his mania of plots and counter-plottings had depressed and wearied her, for she expected the great to be wise. But she played her part for him as it was her duty. She spoke to the girl with her scarlet cheeks.

  ‘Believe thou the magister after he hath ta’en thee afore a priest. He hath sought me and two score others in the cause of honour. Get you in, sweetheart.’

  She pushed the girl in at the door. The serving man sat on his stool; his shock of yellow hair had never known a comb, but he had a decent suit of a purplish wool-cloth. He had his eyes dully on the ground.

  ‘As you value your servitorship, let no man come into my room when I be out,’ Katharine said to him. ‘Saving only the Father Henry that was here now.’

  The man raised expressionless blue eyes to her face.

  ‘I know not his favours,’ he said in a peasant’s mutter. ‘Maybe I should know him if I saw him again. I am main good at knowing people.’

  ‘Why, he is from the Sheeres,’ Katharine added, still playing, though she was certain that the man knew Gardiner. ‘You shall know him by his voice and his limp.’

  He answered, ‘Maybe,’ and dropped his eyes to the ground. She sent him to fetch her some candles, and shut the door upon him.

  II

  THE QUEEN CAME TO THE REVELS given in her honour by the Lord Privy Seal. Cromwell had three hundred servants dressed in new liveries: pikemen with their staves held transversely, like a barrier, kept the road all the way from the Tower Steps to Austin Friars, and in that Lutheran quarter of the town there was a great crowding together. Caps were pitched high and lost for ever, and loud shouts of praise to God went up when the Queen and her Germans passed, with boys casting branches of holm, holly, bay and yew, the only plants that were green in the winter season, before the feet of her mule. But the King did not come. It was reported to the crowd that he was ill at Greenwich.

  It was known very well by those that sat at dinner with her that, after three days, he had abandoned his Queen and kept his separate room. She sat eating alone, on high beneath the dais, heavy, silent, placid and so fair that her eyebrows appeared to be white upon her red forehead. She did not speak a word, having no English, and it was considered disgusting that she wiped her fingers upon pieces of bread.

  Hostile lords remarked upon all her physical imperfections, which the King, it was known, had reported to his physicians in a writing of many pages. Besides, she had no English, no French, no Italian; she could not even play cards with his Highness. It was true that they had squeezed her into English stays, but she w
as reported to have wept at having to mount a horse. So she could not go a-hawking, neither could she shoot with the bow, and her attendants—the women, bound about the middle and spreading out above and below like bolsters, and the men, who wore their immense scolloped hats falling over their ears even at meal-times—excited disgust and derision by the noises they made when they ate.

  The Master Viridus had Katharine Howard in his keeping. He took her up into a small gallery near the gilded roof of the long hall and pointed out to her, far below, the courtiers that it was safe for her to consort with, because they were friends of Privy Seal. His manner was more sinister and more meaning.

  ‘You would do well to have to do with no others,’ he said.

  ‘I am like to have to do with none at all,’ Katharine answered, ‘for no mother’s son cometh anigh me.’

  He looked away from her. Down below she made out her cousin Surrey, sitting with his back ostentatiously turned to a Lord Roydon, of Cromwell’s following; her uncle, plunged in his silent and malignant gloom; and Cromwell, his face lit up and smiling, talking earnestly with Chapuys, the Ambassador from the Emperor.

  ‘Eleven hundred dishes shall be served this day,’ Viridus proclaimed, seeming to warn her. ‘There can no other lord find so many plates of parcel gilt.’ His level and cold voice penetrated through all the ascending din of voices, of knives, of tuckets of trumpets that announced the courses of meat and of the three men’s songs that introduced the sweet jellies which only Privy Seal, it was said, could direct to be prepared.

  ‘Other lordings all,’ Viridus continued with his sermon, ‘ha’ ruined themselves seeking in vain to vie with my lord. Most of those you see are broken men, whose favour would be worth naught to you.’

  Tables were ranged down each side of the great hall, the men sitting on the right, each wearing upon his shoulder a red rose made of silk since no flowers were to be had. The women, sitting upon the left, had white favours in their caps. In the wide space between these tables were two bears; chained to tall gilt posts, they rolled on their hams and growled at each other. From time to time the serving men who went up and down in the middle let fall great dishes containing craspisces, cranes, swans or boars. These meats were kicked contemptuously aside for the bears to fight over, and their places supplied immediately with new. Other serving men broke priceless bottles of Venetian glass against the corners of tables, and let the costly Rhenish wines run about their feet.