Page 55 of Boleyn Traitor
‘It’s been returned to the king.’
I look at him blankly. ‘But it is ours for life.’
‘George’s life is over.’
‘Mine isn’t!’
‘I thought you said it was? So, we make progress. Your husband is dead, your sister-in-law is dead, but your life continues,ergoyou will live,ergoyou have to live somewhere,ergoyou will stay at court. Agreed?’
‘Father, this is logic – but it brings me no comfort.’
‘Logic should always comfort a scholar. Now, I have asked Master Cromwell – y’know he’s to be Lord Cromwell? His reward for this solution to the paradox of how a man divorces a woman who is not his wife – anyway, I have asked him to consider your widow’s pension from the Boleyns, and he has promised they will make a fair settlement on you. You are fortunate in your patron. No man but Cromwell could have survived the dislike of the queen, the rivalry of the Howards, and the enmity of the old royals and the Spanish party. But he turned them on each other. And now, they will destroy themselves.’
This is more comfort than logic. ‘How will they destroy themselves?’
‘You know that Lady Margaret Pole’s son Reginald has been working for years on his book of theology, commissioned by the king? To bring together the reformers and the traditionalists in the Church? Well, he’s finished it. And it’s not at all what the king commissioned. By all accounts, it denies the king’s divorce of the first queen, his reform of the Church, it says he has no right to the Church lands in England. It destroys the king’s case from the bedroom to the treasure house. Reginald Pole has shown it to the pope. The pope has adopted it as his own creed and will issue a bull of excommunication against the king.’
I look at my father in complete horror. A man excommunicated from the Church cannot take mass, cannot enter a church. Every good Christian is obliged to disobey him or arrest him, and if he is an excommunicate king, it is a holy duty for all the faithful to make holy war on his country. The French and Spanish kings will be ordered on a new crusade, against a new infidel – against England. It is a declaration of war from Christendom on Henry’s England.
I am stunned. ‘My God! How could he? Has he got his mother away to Rome? He cannot have done this with his mother at court! Has Lady Margaret Pole gone, and all her family with her?’
My father looks as if he could laugh. ‘He lives for the truth, not for courtier truth. He’s not published. He’s sent a private copy to theking; he’s asked that someone read it to him. He wants to discuss it.’
I could laugh at this unworldly scholarship if I did not know how dangerous it is to try to teach the king anything. ‘Not you?’ I demand. ‘You won’t be the reader!’
‘Not I! I saw only one chapter, and that was incendiary. I wouldn’t read it to the king for a fortune. I’ve no interest in arousing royal rage on my own account, and none on turning it on the Courtenays and the Poles, the kinsmen of Reginald Pole.’
‘Thomas Cromwell will not be so considerate. He’ll use it to destroy them.’
He nods. ‘I expect so. You’ll see Anne and George avenged. The Courtenays and the Poles will be suspected traitors, constantly watched, and poor Lady Mary will be left without friends, without a party to support her.’
My father pauses for a moment. ‘It’s ironic that it will be the flower of the family, the king’s scholar, Reginald Pole, a royal heir, a Plantagenet prince and scholar, who brings them down. How true it is, as Machiavelli would say: a friend is more dangerous than an enemy!’
On Progress, Summer
1536
IT IS CLEARto the Spanish party that they have not yet won Lady Mary’s return as princess, and when Henry Fitzroy, the king’s bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, opens the parliament at Westminster, they realise they have not even put her into first place in her father’s erratic affections. Fitzroy is proud as a prince. The whole ceremony is designed to honour him. He walks before his royal father, seventeen years old, carrying the cap of estate. Parliament,instructed by my spymaster, invites the king to nominate his own heir – an extraordinary idea, nodded through lords and commons as if it were not the destruction of the rights of Englishmen.
In this one move, the monarchy of England, always hereditary and always confirmed by parliament, has become a Caesarship, the property of Henry Tudor, to be left by him like his goods, like a tapestry, like a barge, to his chosen heir. The long public discussion between God and Henry Tudor, if his marriage (first or second or third) is to be blessed with an heir, has been abruptly resolved by Henry simply taking it out of God’s hands. God is to have no say in it. Henry Tudor will decide if he is blessed with an heir, and who it shall be. He can nominate a true-born princess, Lady Mary, or he can nominate the girl he has named as his bastard, our Lady Elizabeth. Or he can nominate a true-born bastard: Henry Fitzroy. Neither their mothers, nor God, have anything to do with their claim to the throne. Our king has become a Fallen Angel; he sets up his will against God.
I meet with Cromwell – now Lord Cromwell – in the rose garden at Greenwich, and I say: ‘I think I am going mad, Master Cromwell. I think I am going mad.’
And he says, very soothingly: ‘Lord Cromwell. It is Lord Cromwell now. It is a new reign, and I have a new title.’
‘It’s not a new reign,’ I protest. ‘It is the same king but now immeasurably greater, a king so mighty that he needs a succession of queens. I am serving a third queen – the third in four years! And everyone acts as if it were normal. And now he does not need to conceive a son with her anyway! He can just name one! So what’s it all for? I think I am going mad!’
‘There’s no need for you to go mad,’ he says soothingly. ‘You are accused of nothing.’
‘What?’
‘A madman cannot be executed,’ he says, smiling. ‘Nor can a madwoman. But since you are accused of nothing, there’s no need for you to be mad, my dear Lady Rochford. You don’t need that refuge.’
‘I’m not pretending!’ I exclaim. ‘I feel mad! – or as if I am theonly sane person in a mad world?’
He nods sympathetically. ‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘Now I know what you mean. Yes, I feel that, too.’
For a moment, our eyes meet: his, blackcurrant and implacable; mine, grey and blinded with tears.
