Page 89 of Boleyn Traitor
No one seeing Dereham’s modest bow and cheerful acceptance of the queen’s dismissal can imagine there was anything between them. I dare to hope that the young man has reached the top of his ambition and that he will serve the queen’s household for a season, skim what profits he can, get bored and run away again, and we can all forget about him.
Woking Palace, Autumn
1540
WE SPEND LONGdays at Windsor, make another dull visit to Oatlands Palace, and arrive at Woking Palace as the drought breaks and it starts to rain. Kitty’s days become even more empty. The court cannot go hawking, the birds will not fly in the rain, and we have to stay indoors, as rain streams down the windows all day. The king and his young men friends stay in their own rooms, gambling and drinking. Kitty walks around her quiet rooms, restless and bored, repeatedly asking if I know when we are going to London,when her wedding will be announced, when she will be proclaimed queen, when she will be crowned?
‘She’ll get no coronation until she’s with child,’ my uncle Thomas Howard predicts. ‘The king’ll never crown a barren queen. Never again! Does she know that?’
‘She knows it,’ I say. ‘But she’s determined to be proclaimed as his wife and queen even if the actual coronation comes later. And really, she’s got to be proclaimed. Half the country doesn’t even know he has married her.’
‘Oh, he’ll announce her. He’ll do it at Hampton Court before the Christmas feast,’ he promises. ‘I’ve made the arrangements. Unending detail, thousands of invitations. Christ knows how Cromwell ever did everything. My daughter will carry her train.’ He suddenly remembers his widowed daughter. ‘Mary’s got to be seen. You make sure she’s front and centre of any masques or dancing.’
‘She wants to marry again?’ I ask, knowing that she does not.
‘Thomas Seymour,’ he says very quietly. ‘The heir’s uncle. It’s the very best I can get. We have to be allied with them when...’ He trails off.
He does not need to say more. When the king dies, the Seymours will be the closest kin to Prince Edward. If there is a regency council, the two Seymour brothers, Edward and Thomas, will lead it. Mary Howard would be wife of the lord protector. If the widowed Queen Katheryn was named queen regent, Thomas Howard would have his only daughter and a niece at the very centre of power.
I think of the darkly handsome Thomas Seymour and Mary Howard’s glacial beauty. ‘I can’t see it,’ I say.
‘You will,’ my uncle replies. ‘If bribery and force can make it happen.’
‘Who are you going to bribe?’ I ask curiously.
‘Thomas Seymour.’
‘And who are you going to force?’
‘My daughter.’
Hampton Court, Winter
1540
ALL THE NOBILITYare summoned to greet the new queen in December at Hampton Court; the marriage is formally announced, and Queen Katheryn finally gets the reception she wants, dining under the cloth of estate, with the duke’s daughter, the young widow Mary Howard, holding the golden bowl for her to dip her fingers, and the Duchess of Suffolk, Catherine Brandon, holding a towel for her to dry her hands. Neither of them betrays the smallest flicker of disdain for the girl that they first met as a junior maid-of-honour, one of the silliest of the new cohort. This is not hard for Mary Howard, who learned to hide her true feelings in the cradle, and Catherine Brandon knows better than most that queens come and go.
The Christmas feast is the merriest that the court has held in years – the king adores his young wife; we are at peace with the other countries of Christendom, and the king’s interest in reform has declined so much that only a few heretics are burned this holy season.
He drowns his little queen in new year gifts, table diamonds, ropes of pearls, a muffler of black velvet edged with sable fur, spattered with rubies and hundreds of pearls. She claws the jewels towards herself like a gambler raking winnings from the table, and the constant stream of gifts keeps her temper sweet, even when she is tested by long days of bad weather when the king stays indoors and plays cards and riddles with her.
Lady Mary, the king’s eldest daughter, visits us from her own household at Hunsdon, and the entire court is agog to see how the daughter of a princess of Spain, herself a full royal, seven years older than her dainty stepmother and a cruel lifetime wiser, greets thisformer maid-of-honour sitting on her mother’s throne, flaunting her mother’s jewels.
‘I’m going to get her married off to one of the French princes,’ my uncle remarks in my ear as the first of Lady Mary’s outriders clatters through the clock gateway.
She is on a magnificent Spanish horse, a deep chested bright chestnut Andalusian, and wearing a purple riding jacket – a colour for royals and emperors, with a purple velvet bonnet. A purple feather pinned with a magnificent amethyst sweeps around to frame her intense, pale face. It is an entrance shadowed by storm clouds, as theatrical as the masque before a joust, when the challengers parade their standards and people pick their favourites.
‘Why would you make a good marriage for her?’ I wonder, as the cavalcade pulls up the princess looks towards us, and we bow in welcome. ‘What’s the benefit?’
‘I don’t care for her,’ my uncle says, out of the corner of his mouth. ‘But if she’s married out of the kingdom, then the oldest royal child left in England is our Tudor-Howard girl. Elizabeth will be more noticed.’
The princess dismounts and comes up the steps, where Sir Edward Baynton waits to escort her to the queen’s rooms, her mother’s rooms. She knows the way better than he does.
‘You once told her you would bang her head against the wall until it was as soft as a baked apple,’ I observe quietly.
‘Love talk,’ the duke replies with one of his hawkish smiles. ‘Fatherly love.’
LADYMARY’S PALLORis the only sign of her distress at seeing a second Howard girl throwing down another better-born queen. Her curtsey in the doorway of the queen’s presence chamber, before she approaches the throne, is to the exact depth required – she has been curtseying to inferiors raised to be her stepmothers for all her life.
