Page 58 of Boleyn Traitor
Even in my shock, I could laugh at this new brother pushing this queen towards the door, and this one – so unlike her predecessor – refusing to seize her chance.
The door is suddenly thrown open before us, and the messenger and Thomas Cromwell stride out. For a moment, before the door is slammed shut and the guard takes up arms before it, I can see inside: the king on his hands and knees on the rush-strewn floor, bellowing like a stag brought down by a spear. He looks wounded beyond recovery, his big mouth gaping wide with screams of pain. It is like a death, a moment of shocking intimacy.
Jane clings to me. ‘I’m not going in there,’ she tells her brother.
Only one person, Lady Margaret Pole, born royal, the king’s cousin, has the courage to intervene. She says a quick word to her sons, Henry and Geoffrey, and takes Jane by the hand. ‘We’ll both go in to him,’ she says firmly.
The guard lifts his halberd for her as for a royal princess, and she leads Jane inwards. The door closes behind them, and Thomas Cromwell is at my side. ‘Send the ladies to their rooms, dinner will be served late,’ he tells me. ‘Henry Fitzroy is dead – a short illness. The king will dine alone in his privy chamber.’
From behind the door, we hear agonised sobbing. ‘Fitzroy! My heir! How could God do this to me? How can God turn against me? Why would God punish me? This must be women’s sin? Women’s sin! Cursed be the woman that did this!’
WE STAY ATthe Lyon for three days; the king keeps to his private rooms. We don’t see him. We don’t even hear him after that first night of screaming. Jane, legless with fear, comes out of the room clinging to Margaret Pole and the king locks the door behind them. He only admits servants with trays heaped with food: unbelievable amounts of food, enough for halfa dozen men, as if he is choking down sobs with manchet bread and butter.
Everything is ended: his secret triumph that he had a strong son, ready and waiting to be named as heir. His pushing the new law through an obedient parliament. Even the Howard plan to put Mary Howard into the royal line is valueless: her husband, Henry Fitzroy, is dead; and all the plans are for nothing. The king has no heir but girls: Lady Mary a named bastard, Lady Elizabeth another one, and Lady Margaret Douglas, a legitimate half-Tudor niece, has disappeared and nobody even knows where she is.
‘In the Tower,’ Thomas Cromwell tells me by the way, as if it is of little interest. ‘Arrested for marrying young Lord Thom Howard without permission.’
I have to school myself to keep my face perfectly still. ‘I thought my kinsman, Lord Thom, was going home to Kenninghall?’
‘I’d drop the connection if I were you,’ Lord Cromwell advises me. ‘He’s in the Tower, for seducing an heir to the throne. His baby face won’t save him. Courtly love has become treason.’
I find my hands are trembling, and I put them behind my back. ‘A secret marriage is not treason...’
‘It’s against the law.’
‘No, it isn’t...’ I know it is not.
‘A new law, not yet passed. A new law that will say that the royal family can only marry with the king’s permission. If Lord Thom and Lady Margaret married in secret then they have broken that law.’
‘But it was not written when they married...’
Blandly, he nods.
‘This is not justice,’ I say, thinking of the last time that I said that something was unjust. Then it was the king’s warhorse, beheaded for treason. Since then, he has beheaded his wife and my husband. Will he behead his niece as well? Will I say nothing for a niece – just as I said nothing for his wife or his warhorse? Just as I said nothing for my husband?
‘The king is the law,’ Cromwell reminds me. ‘He cannot be unjust.’
‘Rex non potest peccare?’ I quote. ‘The king cannot be wrong?’
Cromwell smiles. ‘Quite so.’
Sir William Paulet, the comptroller of the new queen’s household, comes up to his patron, Lord Cromwell, to ask him for orders.
‘Are we staying here another day, my lord?’
Cromwell nods. ‘Another day, I think.’
‘I’ll have to order mourning clothes for the queen and her ladies from the royal wardrobe in London,’ I say to Sir William.
Lord Cromwell shakes his head. ‘No mourning.’
‘When we get back to Greenwich? For the funeral?’
‘No funeral.’
‘No funeral for the king’s own son?’ I ask disbelievingly.
‘Dead,’ Cromwell mutters in my ear. ‘So nothing to do with the king after all.’
