Page 85 of Boleyn Traitor
‘Yes. He is.’
‘Fully? Completely?’
‘So she says.’
‘And she’d know?’
I say nothing. All royal brides know. It is their one and only task. The suggestion that Anne of Cleves was ignorant about her one duty as queen was ridiculous.
‘So, we can expect a baby?’ he pursues, as keen as the wolfhounds who are baying with impatience.
‘We can hope for a baby,’ I correct him.
‘I’m not a man for hope. You tell me when she’s expecting. I don’t care about your hopes.’
‘I’ll tell you. But remember: even if she does conceive, even if it’s a boy, he won’t be the next king; he’ll only be a second son.’
‘Prince Edward’s sickly,’ he says cheerfully. ‘Plenty of second sons take the throne. The king himself was a second son.’
I bow my head. I wonder who would be interested in the information that the Duke of Norfolk is hoping for the death of the Seymour boy? Everyone would be interested; but I have no one that I want to tell. No one will turn a dark, smiling gaze on me and say:You have news for me?No one will make me laugh when he says:The one thing I like about your uncle is that he is always so predictable. I think: no one enjoys the endless theatre of court ambition as Thomas Cromwell did – and without him, it’s not as good.
They bring up Katheryn’s well-trained palfrey, and she is helped into the saddle. They check her girth, her bridle, that she is holding the reins correctly, that she is not nervous, and she brings her horse alongside the king. The huntsmen know not to let the hounds go too fast. The king swears he feels like a twenty-year-old; but he is not the rider he was, and Katheryn is not a horsewoman like my sister-in-law Anne, though she wears her red velvet riding jacket.
The hunt moves off; the hounds and the whippers-in first, the king’s master of horse next, John Dudley beside him, and then the king and queen, side by side, like a doting old man and his favourite granddaughter. The rest of us follow behind them, chattering and looking forward to the day, as if we have not ridden out like this, hundreds of times before, following four previous queens.
On Progress, Summer
1540
INAUGUST, WEmove from hunting lodge to hunting lodge, which pleases the king as a prolonged honeymoon, but disappoints Katheryn, who wants to be queen of a palace. The heat of the summer goes on; some days, it is too hot to ride out at all, and Katheryn stands beside the king and watches him fish in the moat or practise archery at the butts. Every catch, every bullseye, he turns to her, as proud as a spoiled boy, and she smiles with delight and sometimes prettily claps her hands. Of course, she is getting more and more bored by this old man in the first flush of his happiness.
I make her rest alone in her bedroom in the afternoon, so that she can have time away from blushing and smiling. I bribe her to good behaviour with sweetmeats and sugarplums. The king has bought himself a little pet like Anne’s lapdog Purkoy, and it is my task to train her to do pretty tricks to please him. She dances like an angel; she walks as if she was dancing. Purkoy used to beg, sitting up on his hind legs, most prettily. I teach her to beg.
She is rescued from boredom by the appointment of her ladies-in-waiting. Many transfer so fast from Queen Anne of Cleves to Queen Katheryn that they just come back to their old places. Katheryn has to employ ladies of her own family: her sister Isabel Baynton,whose husband Sir Edward Baynton is vice chamberlain; Catherine Tilney, her kinswoman and childhood friend from Norfolk House. Even the queen’s step-grandmother, the dowager duchess, has a place as chief lady if she comes to court. Katherine Edgcumbe and Eleanor Manners the Countess of Rutland are rewarded for their outstanding skills as the writers of an impossible conversation with Anne of Cleves about virginity. Mistress Stonor, who spied on my sister-in-law Anne in her final days in the Tower of London, gets a place. Anne Parr – now Mistress Herbert – takes charge of the royal jewels, having served every one of the four previous queens with me. Back in harness like the white mules of the queen’s litter, we are accustomed to the pace of royal service. The burden is a different woman, but it makes no difference to us.
Katheryn has scores of men servants – her master of horse is John Dudley. Thomas Manners the Earl of Rutland will manage her lands – she is given everything that Jane Seymour had – though she had to earn it with a fatal pregnancy. An entire council of treasury and land agents and managers meets weekly to manage her vast estates. She does not attend; she says it is too boring, and I must go in her place. She has a stable full of grooms and two muleteers to drive the French litter.
The entire household was barely appointed to their roles, hardly started work, when we go on progress with a small riding court for the summer. It is rushed – almost a flight – as if the king is avoiding a state entry to London with yet another queen, as if he doesn’t want the people to see that he is getting older and the wives are getting younger and younger. The progress feels like a rout, without a plan.
For the last ten years, everything was meticulously organised by my spymaster. All the departments of government that he created grind on: reporting, inspecting, and taxing; but they are the turning sails of a windmill catching a passing wind. There is no miller watching the clouds, steering the sails; the cogs and gears are not engaged. The old lords have no skill in business, church reform, taxation,running the counties or controlling the towns. They cannot manage the Houses of Parliament. They have influence only in their own areas; they have no nationwide view. They have no idea of foreign alliances and overseas trade. They have no unified policy; they rule for themselves, only themselves.
No one can plan a route as Cromwell did: threatening restless towns with our armed retinue, rewarding supporters with a smiling visit, weaving a path between threat and bribery. The old lords don’t even know the country outside of their own borders; they have no maps of any lands but their own.
SEVERAL LADIES COMEon progress only long enough to secure their places, before they announce that they are pregnant and retire to their homes for the summer, perhaps for the rest of this reign. Anne Parr now Mistress Herbert gives the keys to the jewel house to Elizabeth Tyrwhitt and tells me that she is going to leave when we reach Ampthill. It’s a bad evening on another disorganised day: the queen’s own brother-in-law and fifteen men of her household got drunk and fought with the porters the night before.
‘You can’t leave us!’ I exclaim. ‘Not until I’ve got some proper order in the queen’s rooms!’
‘I can’t stay,’ she says. She gestures to her belly, which is flat as a board. ‘You can see that I have to leave.’
‘I see nothing, Anne Herbert!’ I say crossly. ‘And I can’t be everywhere. The queen likes the place in chaos; she likes everyone running around screaming. And if her own vice chamberlain is going to brawl...’
Anne Herbert leans towards me to whisper. ‘You’ll have seen her brother, Charles Howard, is courting Lady Margaret Douglas?’
‘Jesu save us!’
‘Another coup for the Howards,’ she observes neutrally.
‘It didn’t work out so well the last time.’
