Page 108 of Boleyn Traitor
‘Oh, send to his rooms and find out, Jane. Has he had a fall from his horse, or – God save him – an illness? Do find out if he has a fever – or – Jane, ask them if it is the Sweat?’
‘I can’t. It looks odd.’
‘It looks like nothing,’ she says impatiently. ‘Send one of your maids to ask. There’s no reason that you should not ask how he is? Or I’ll send Catherine Tilney.’
‘Don’t send her!’ I exclaim. It’s better that I’m seen chasing after Master Culpeper than Catherine Tilney.
My maid comes back with the news that Master Culpeper is hot with a fever but expects to be well within the week.
Kitty sends one of the good dishes from her dinner table to the king’s favourite. It’s a gracious gesture, and nobody notices. Only I know that Master Culpeper – however ill – will laugh and take the dish as proof that I told Kitty that he was in love with her on the very day that he told me.
He sends a note to thank for the dish, and she replies to him. They make me their go-between, forgetting that in courtly love stories, there are two messengers – of two different natures:Honte, the prude who will prevent love and betray the lovers, andVenus, who helps them. But I am neither of these: I have no interest in helping a flirtation, and I would never betray Kitty. She trusts me as she trusts no one else. Every secret she tells is an extra thread to bind us. Like Francis Dereham, lounging around at Norfolk House, because of her girlhood indiscretions, I will be at her side, on her pay, and eating her bouche at her dining table, as long as I want. My future depends upon her being the greatest woman in the next reign: dowager queen, on the council of regency.
Far more powerful thanHonte, far more thanVenus, I am the watchman, the nightwatchman. I use the spy skills I learned from Thomas Cromwell to open, read, and reseal every note that passes between Kitty and Culpeper – banalities about the weather and the dances that Kitty would prefer. I know everything that happens, and I work in darkness. It’s not hard for me to be completely discreet, to tell no one. Now that my spymaster is dead, I have no one to tell.
ITHINK OF HIM– my friend, my only friend, Thomas Cromwell – at the end of May when his old enemy Lady Margaret Pole, the matriarch of the Spanish party and of the Papist family Pole, is finally released from her long, unjust imprisonment – not to freedom – which God knows she deserves; but to her death. The king, nagged by his conscience for keeping an innocent kinswoman in prison, relieves himself by having her beheaded. She goes to her death for no reason but the king’s peace of mind.
It is a shock for me to realise that this is truly what has happened. This is the act of the king, the king himself: his free choice and his independent act. This is not a decision made by one of the many advisors that have guided him through his life: his grandmother, Queen Katherine, Cardinal Wolsey, Queen Anne, my uncle, or Thomas Cromwell. His advisors have always been blamed for past cruelties. I have blamed them myself. But this is his decision, his own: taken freely at a time of peace. Margaret Pole never raised a finger against her cousin the king. She never admitted guilt: not under torture, not even on the scaffold. She fought for her good name and her life until the last moment of it, demanding why should she walk to Tower Green, resisting the guards, even running away from the headsman’s raised axe. She was a woman of nearly seventy, the king’s mother’s dearest friend, and he killed her without cause, without pity.
This is a revelation to me. As a courtier, I have thought of the king as a creature to be steered and managed and controlled – a creaturethat can be petted into docility or tempted into a new direction. All courtiers think like this. But now, for the first time I know different.
Nobody put the idea of killing Lady Margaret into the king’s head; nobody persuaded him against his conscience. It was in no one’s interest that she die; no one gained a position or earned a fortune at her death. It was a redundant death, a pointless death. This is not how a courtier thinks; this is not what an advisor plans; this is not what a good king orders. No person of any sense would have ordered the death of Margaret Pole. No one of any honour would have imagined it. It is madness, it is madman-thinking. Death on a madman’s say-so, death as his mad choice, death only to show that he can cause death. Death as a comfort to him, to ease his mad mind.
The madman who decided this is the madman who rules us now without warders. All his advisors are dead, and they were all killed by him: men who he loved deeply, like Thomas More; men who were indispensable, like Thomas Cromwell; his spiritual father Bishop Fisher; the woman he adored, my sister-in-law Anne; my husband; their friends. The king kills those closest to him, because he cannot bear to need them. He cannot bear that they are wiser or better or even more beautiful than him. He loves them at first, calling them to his side to make himself shine, and then he cannot tolerate that they eclipse him. That, he cannot bear. The headsman is so overworked that he had to send out an apprentice who had not learned his trade to behead Margaret Pole. He hacks her to death in clumsy swipes as she screams defiance.
We dine in the great hall that evening, and after dinner, there is music and dancing. My smile is falser than ever before; there is a new joyless lightness in my voice. I have been afraid at court, constantly spying on the way that power moves from one lord or another, the rise and fall of one man or another, the favouring of one woman over another. I have been alert to the comings and goings of dozens of people. But now, I realise that it was all a waste of study. The court is an illusion of power, just as it is an illusion of happiness. There is no happiness at court, and there is no power here either.It is all the king’s. Power has always been in the hands of the king, and those of us who thought we were steering him or controlling him are victims in waiting. Only the king is in power: only he is happy; only he is unhappy. The rest of us are all pretending, and it does not matter what we feel.
There is no one left who dares to quarrel with him. There is no one who dares to contradict him. No one would ever suggest that he is wrong. We have guided his steps with our eyes on the path for so long that we have lost our way; only he is looking up and around. Only he has a destination in view. We have agreed to insane laws and now we find ourselves in a legal tyranny. We have winked at manic cruelty, and now we close our eyes in fear. We thought that we were steering a galloping horse, but we are tangled in the reins and being dragged to our deaths. We have birthed and dandled and fed a tyrant, and now we do not even mourn when our monstrous baby kills a woman that he once called the ‘finest in England’.
She was a princess of the House of Plantagenet, the daughter of the Duke of Clarence, the greatest friend to the king’s mother, advisor to his wife. She taught Lady Mary, Lady Margaret Douglas and me in the royal schoolroom, with the care that she lavished on her sons and daughter. We hear the news that she is dead without a break in our laughter, and the three of us, her beloved pupils, dance after dinner.
On Progress, Summer
1541
WE DON’T LEAVEon progress until the end of June, and there are times when it seems impossible that we can ever start. Thousands of horses, an army with all the equipment readyfor warfare, will march north with us. All the household furniture and goods – carpets, tapestries and furniture – will lumber behind us in a baggage train which will clog the roads for miles arriving hours after we get to our destination.
Lady Mary joins us with her household, servants, guards, and ladies-in-waiting. The surveyor of the king’s buildings goes ahead of us to inspect and repair royal palaces at every stop, but he finds so much neglect and damage that he has no time to make good. We are bogged down in the muddy roads half an hour after leaving and have to give up on the journey for another week.
Kitty cries and says she is too ill to ride. She will not get up in the morning; her childish energy as a maid-of-honour has drained from her now she is the wife of the king. She has a pain in her belly, in her groin. She says she cannot sit on a horse nor lie in the mule litter. She swears she cannot go. The rain falls constantly, and they say on the North Road that there are puddles of standing water deeper than a man, and travellers drown when night falls.
We are staging a moving spectacle of power and authority, but when the wagons are stuck in the mud and the horses cannot get past, we betray ourselves. The people see we cannot even manage a simple journey. Our court is supposed to be a masque of infallible power and beauty, triumphing over distance and weather, weakness and old age. But here we are: stuck on a muddy road, trying to move an old angry man from one shabby palace to another.
Enraged at the delay, the king blames every parish for failing to maintain their roads, which are flooded by the early summer storms. He says – again and again – that nobody looks after details since Cromwell was taken from him and that people who don’t help themselves can drown in their own puddles. The common people reply – in whispered songs and hidden poems – that God has cursed England with a king who has become a mouldwarp: an underground, underworld king, bringing death to his people under a sky that rains down tears of grief while he is dry-eyed.
We travel no more than eight miles that first day, and lodge inDunstable priory, speedily adapted from a great house of religion into a royal palace with adjoining king’s and queen’s rooms. We pray every morning in the chapel where the king’s first marriage was annulled, but nobody remembers this; except the daughter who was bastardised on that day. Lady Mary exchanges a brief look with me as I walk into the church behind her, and I think: no wonder they say you are in constant pain – every time you visit a chapel or a palace, it must be an anniversary of loss. In a court that prides itself on forgetfulness, it feels as if only Lady Mary and I have survived five queens and remember every one of them.
Finally, the weather clears, and we can ride with our hoods down and look about us. Kitty has a new riding gown and matching jacket and her aches disappear. We go hunting and rein our horses in so that the king can get in front with the hounds and claim it is his arrow that brings down a great stag and two bucks. We cannot store or carry meat, so that evening, we dine well on venison at the long tables where the monks used to fast, and the king orders the spare joints taken to the Lord Mayor of London with the compliments of his sovereign.
After dinner, the great hall is cleared, the musicians play for dancing. The king orders Kitty to dance with her ladies, and she takes the centre of the floor. She is eating well again; I think she can tolerate the king’s visits to her bedroom if he is not raging or coldly furious. When he has a good day – like today – she does not dread his company; when she has the court around her, she can face him.
She takes me by the hand, and I feel a folded note. ‘Get it to him,’ she whispers as the king waves the men forward to dance with the ladies, and Thomas Culpeper bows before me and takes me to lead the forming columns of dancers.
‘Her Grace is happy tonight,’ Thomas Culpeper observes, with a smile at me. ‘Are you happy, dear Lady Rochford?’
‘The queen’s happiness is my own,’ I observe primly.
‘And do you love where she loves?’ he teases me.
