Maid of the King's Court

by Lucy Worsley

  My misery was deepened by the realisation that I had wasted so many years hating Katherine. Now, when it was almost too late, I understood that I had been wrong to do so. She was not quite the conniving, grasping schemer I had always thought, anxious to take what others wanted.

  Of course she had been ambitious and false and selfish, but our conversation had made me see the last few years in a new light. Of course the old duchess had been training us up to be bait for the king. We were just pawns in the game of winning more power for our families. If I had played the game a little better, it could have been me instead of Katherine in the Tower. And if I had played the game quite a lot better, I could have had the crown on my head and hopefully a baby in my arms.

  It should not have been a surprise. After all, I had been told for as long as I could remember that I must do my duty for my family.

  Long before dawn, there were men and guards knocking at our door, demanding that we prepare ourselves. The priests were in and out, along with the lawyers. I was shocked by the absence of Katherine’s relatives — I was the nearest to her in terms of blood, and everyone else stayed away. I knew that I was running a risk myself, of guilt by association, in remaining with her and serving her to the last. But I could not have left now for the world.

  All of Katherine’s tears and storms seemed to be over, and if she still expected the king’s message of reprieve, she did not speak of it. I was the one who could not stop weeping.

  With a heavy heart, I brushed what had been her lovely hair. So much of it had fallen out in the last few weeks that there was little left, and that I covered with her cap. I straightened her black skirt and finally took her in my arms and sobbed. She remained stiff as a corpse, looking over my shoulder, I could tell, as if she had already gone from the world.

  The guards led us down on to the green below the window. It was hardly light yet, and a flaming torch helped us to find our footing on the stairs. A huddle of men in black stood around a small, low wooden platform, the scaffold. These were the official witnesses, lawyers, and priests.

  Bearing herself like the queen she was, Katherine now mounted the platform. With dignity and poise, she knelt to say her prayers and to make a confession of all her faults to the priest. I now felt proud of her, proud on behalf of all the maids of honour, proud on behalf of all of us courtiers who knew how to smile in the face of pain, as she stood and looked at this great danger with such calmness and resolution.

  Eventually, her prayers were done. She took off her cap and knelt before the block, just as she had practised the night before.

  A masked figure, darkly dressed, detached himself from the crowds of waiting men and stepped up next to her. This, I realised, was the executioner, his face hidden so that men afterwards would not be able either to praise or condemn him for taking a woman’s life.

  I felt a strong grip upon each of my arms. The guards were trying to pull me back, to shield me from the sight. But I also felt that I should be there with Katherine for as long as I could. “Get your hands off me!” I hissed violently, so that they were forced either to make a noise and a disturbance or let me be.

  And so, straining against the grasp of the guards, I watched as the executioner raised his axe against the dawn sky. I saw every tiny movement as he grunted and brought it down with a swift, almost graceful chop. Finally, I saw every drop of the blood that spilled from Katherine’s beautiful, broken neck.

  After the execution, I spent a few more days in the Tower, tidying up and disposing of Katherine’s goods and letters and trinkets. During my time there, which I spent pretty much alone, I fretted about my return to the court.

  Of course I wondered whether to return at all, whether it was better not to go back to Stoneton and consider the great game to be over. I could see more clearly than ever that Hampton Court, so glamorous, was full of fearful danger. But I wanted to see Anne and Ned and Will and the countess. They would sympathise with me over what I’d seen, what I’d experienced, whereas my father would not understand at all. And if I failed to return to court, I would face his wrath. Ultimately, I did not propose to risk that. I knew my duty.

  I need not have been worried about whether I’d be welcome back at court. I was far from tainted by association with Katherine. My time in the Tower seemed almost to enhance my status. Once I had returned, and as life began to resume something more like its normal course, I began to understand that my fellow courtiers wanted — no, needed — a trusted witness to tell them about their former queen’s end. One by one, they took me aside for a quiet word. Among them was the Countess of Malpas.

  “And did she praise God and the king at the last?” she asked me out of the corner of her mouth. We were seated side by side at a feast, and the room was so noisy with drunken singing and laughing that it provided cover enough for her words. At this moment Will Summers, seated opposite us, chivalrously toasted me with a glass of wine, and I paused before replying in order to raise my goblet in return.

  “Indeed, she died a Christian death.”

  Now the countess, too, was forced to pause in order to select a sweetmeat from the basket being brought around by Anne Sweet.

  “And was there very much … blood?” she continued.

  “Yes, there was a vast amount,” I said, raising my fan and shielding myself behind it so as not to be observed, “and it entirely soiled and spoiled her black velvet dress and all her linen beneath.”

  The red raspberry tart the countess held in her hand looked so disgustingly shiny and sticky that it made my stomach heave.

  “Ah, that’s a great pity! You should have had the use of her left-behind clothes yourself.”

  Always the courtier, the countess sympathised with me over what would normally have been a major setback in a maid of honour’s life: being cheated of an expected gift of cast-off clothing. She turned from me and bit into her tart.

  The countess, and each and every questioner, left my presence, I felt, with a sense that the story of Katherine Howard had been satisfactorily finished.

  The only person who asked me nothing was Master Ned Barsby. As soon as I had returned to court, I asked where he was, for I was eager to see him again.

  But Master Summers told me that Ned had gone from court. “Simple soul!” he said to me that evening, as we walked in the procession behind the king to chapel. “He went off without permission, meaning that he’ll be in serious trouble if ever he tries to come back. Burnt his bridges. The king was quite cut up for two whole days.”

  “But where did he go?” I asked, tucking my hand into Will’s elbow as we promenaded.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Will said vaguely. “The death of your cousin rattled him.” We took another few steps, each of us nodding to the crowds of petitioners who lined the gallery whenever the king passed to chapel. “He couldn’t really handle court life, you know. He was too honest. If you ask me, he’ll marry that sweetie-pie friend of yours and they’ll settle down in a cottage.”

  Will suddenly looked at me sharply, as if recollecting that this might be painful news. “Never mind,” he said, patting my hand on his arm. “You’ve bigger fish to fry, my dear,” he said.

  It was true that my time with Ned seemed to belong to an age before the Flood in the Bible, and I had been only a child then. But the memory of his kind word in my darkest hour was fresh and vivid. The news that I would not see him again gave me such a pang that it was as much as I could do to keep putting one foot in front of the other and not to double up against the wall in pain.

  But I had to walk on. “Really, Master Summers?” I said smoothly, adopting my best bland courtier voice. “That is most interesting news.” My speech was so steady that he might have just confided in me his hopes that tomorrow would be a fine day.

  Of course that’s what Ned would do, I thought to myself, as Will Summers and I strolled onwards towards Mass. I had to steel myself, as I had done once before when I’d cut him out of my life. It had been weak and stupid to let him
in again. Nothing must touch me ever again. The note he sent me in the Tower was just typical, I told myself. Sentimental and naive. Courtiers could not afford emotion, I said in my head. I could not afford emotion.

  In the days that followed, I did what I could to burnish the court’s memory of Katherine. I kept to myself the explosive information she had given me on her last evening alive and revealed nothing about Francis Manham’s role in the tragedy. I always professed ignorance of her motives, although I was scrupulous to say that maybe we did not know all the facts. Master Manham himself was long since dead, from the horrible traitor’s death of hanging, drawing, and quartering. I did not allow myself to think about this too much.

  Instead I stressed that my cousin had faced her death with dignity, strength, and Christian belief, trusting in the goodness of God and the king. I did not describe her collapse and hysterics at Syon, only her stoicism and poise at the Tower of London. But despite my efforts, I knew that evil rumours were still circulating about all the misdeeds she was said to have done.

  Perhaps the strangest conversation I had of all was with the king himself. When I was summoned to his chamber, I feared the worst and felt that my days must surely be numbered. He must have decided that the former queen’s cousin was not to be trusted and was preparing to send me, also, to the Tower.

  When I entered his secret, inner room, I found it lit only by the dim light of a low fire. In the gloom, I could see his great hulking body stranded on his carved bed like a whale washed up upon a beach. The hulk shuddered gently, and I perceived that the king was crying. As I drew close, I could see that his face was a horrible mess of tears and mucus. He held out a hand to me and made me sit down beside him on the feather mattress.

  “I loved her,” he said over and over again, as I felt myself beginning to weep once more. “She was my rose without a thorn.”

  I understood why Katherine had clung to her belief that the king would spare her, for his grief convinced me that he had genuinely felt a grand passion for her. “I wax old now,” he snuffled. “She was the last love of my life.”

  Once again the contradictions of our master overwhelmed me. How could he send the woman he loved to the scaffold, yet be this distraught about doing so? But then the king had always been a romantic man. The deeper his love ran, the more violently he reacted when it turned sour.

  I believe the king took some comfort from my presence — even though I was nothing but cowed, silent, and shaking — for he called me back again the next day.

  I had to steel myself to bear the stench of his ulcer, as did everyone who spent any time in his chamber. When he wasn’t lying on his bed, I had to watch him wolfing great slices of pie and gingerbread, washing them down with spirits and ale, as if he could find some comfort there in his food now that he was all alone in the world.

  “All alone!” he would sigh, pouring himself another drink. “All alone, except for my fool and myself.”

  At that Will Summers and I would exchange glances as we stood waiting at the king’s table, and make a mock bow and curtsey to each other.

  Will Summers was another member of the select group of courtiers whose presence the king seemed able to bear. He, too, tried to make the hours pass, if not merrily, then at least smoothly and without paroxysms of royal tears.

  During those hours I spent sitting with the weeping king, I had plenty of time to ponder on the strangeness of the situation. I gradually grew to understand that he didn’t hate Katherine — he only hated what she’d done. And he felt that I had been a good friend to her and was therefore a good servant of his.

  The situation was dangerous, but it was gratifying too. As I was so often in the king’s chamber, the guards now simply nodded me in. At meals I was sometimes served even before the countess. I recognised that this was not an error but a concealed compliment from the Lord Steward. I knew that it was wrong, but it was almost impossible to resist the rising tide of pride that this brought me.

  In the summer of that year, with Katherine dead and buried for some months, my father came down from Stoneton once more. The old Howard Duchess of Northumberland and Katherine’s uncles were nowhere to be seen at court this season, as the power of their faction had been broken. But my father was riding high on the back of my position as the king’s confidant.

  When he called me to the gardens on the day after his arrival to walk with him and my aunt Margaret, I knew already what they would say. I understood all too well where my road led.

  As I approached the bower where the two of them sat waiting for me, they knew, and I knew, that they need not speak at all. They were expecting, and all the rest of our family, and indeed the whole court was expecting me to take advantage of my opportunity. Two years after our first conversation on the topic, my hour had come at last.

  “You, Rosebud,” my father said. “It is your time. It is your turn. The king in his grief is vulnerable. He’s lonely and sad. He needs you. Your family needs you. It is your chance to make yourself, and us, great. Take the hand that the king will offer and grasp it.”

  Two years ago, my father’s suggestion that I should become the king’s mistress had filled me with horror and dismay. Now, however, I had nearly twenty summers behind me. As well as a failed marriage of my own, I had experienced intimacy with the great King Henry the Eighth of England, and I had seen my cousin die in front of my eyes.

  I was not shocked and did not cry, nor did I need to go running for help from Ned Barsby or Will Summers or anyone else.

  In fact, now we had come to the brink, I felt nothing at all. I could see with the clarity of expensive Venetian glass the future that lay before me. If I followed in the footsteps of Katherine, my journey might end with great success and great riches. I could be queen. With careful arrangement, I could be the mother of a future king, and my family would be secure and overjoyed.

  On the other hand, if I fluffed, I could fall. One slip, one false step, and I could end up on the block like Katherine. Perhaps I was already in danger. I might even now find it difficult, having come this far, to withdraw from the king’s affection. I knew that he was starting to lean upon me.

  That evening the king’s chamber was dim and close, the air stale in my nostrils. I stepped forward and closed the door quickly, confidently, almost slamming it. Despite the gloomy, murky atmosphere of the room, I smiled.

  I was buoyed up from the admiring glances I had received as I strode through the palace cloisters. I had observed the servants and courtiers I had passed admiring my green dress, tightly belted around my waist, my shining copper-coloured hair coiled up on the back of my head, my long, white throat, and my green, cat-like eyes.

  Mistress … the new mistress. I’d heard the whispers in my wake. People recognised me. I felt deliberate and confident, almost like a queen.

  And now, here in the shadows, lurching to his feet from his velvet chair, was the king himself, the great lumbering bear of a man. I could smell his sour breath from ten paces away.

  “Ah, my green fairy!” he said. “Oh, you’ve come at last. Come and sit with me.” He lowered himself — no, collapsed — onto the edge of his enormous ebony bed, crushing the fine furs upon it heedlessly under his massive weight. His leg must have been giving him pain again.

  I curtseyed low, with grace and poise. I remained down upon the floor in my obeisance for a ridiculously long drawn-out pause. I stole a glance up through my lashes, then quickly returned my gaze to the floor. We both knew that this was just a sham of deference. He needed me, depended upon me, desired me. In this room, power flowed from me. He drank it up; he could not take his eyes off me.

  At last he sighed.

  “Please come and sit here,” he said, patting the bed. His voice was lower than it had been and croaky. I had taken his breath away. Slowly I rose, savouring the moment, taking my own time. I took a slinky step, then another, towards the bed. I sensed that he was nervous, this great beast of a man of whom the whole world was afraid.

&nbs
p; Tentatively, he put out a hand towards me.

  I took it with a show of reluctance, looking away, still standing, still refusing to meet his eyes.

  This gave him confidence. “Eliza!” he said huskily. He grabbed my arm and tugged me down to the bed beside him. His great paw of a hand dropped down lower — directly onto my thigh beneath the green skirt. I felt his breath on my cheek.

  My heart almost stopped. All too soon, the moment had come. This was crossing a line. I stared at his hand, the hand of an old man, which now shyly moved up my leg.

  I watched it. I waited to feel something. I had strived for this moment for years. I had steeled myself for it, trained for it. Hadn’t I?

  I sat there undecided as he slobbered all over my hand with his hot red lips. I remained still as a statue, either afraid or unwilling to draw back — I was not sure which. I don’t know how far things would have gone, but the French ambassador was announced, and I took the first opportunity to leave.

  “I shall see you later, Mistress Camperdowne!” were the king’s last words as I hurried out.

  Later that evening I was slumped on my bed, alone in my chamber. I was supposed to be at the great court dinner, and my place beside my father would be empty. I knew that my absence would give rise to comment, but I felt so tired I could hardly stir.

  I wanted time and solitude to think about this choice before me, but it felt like no choice at all. Every lesson in my life so far had prepared me to go to the king, take his hand, and offer him everything I had to give. I loosened my gown and kicked off my slippers. Feeling weary and immensely old, I leaned back on the bolster and stared up at the smoke-stained ceiling near the window. It was dirty, plain plaster, nothing like the wonderful gilded ribs and patterns in the queen’s rooms.

  Why, with success staring me in the face and the prospect of living beneath the best ceiling in the palace, could I think of nothing but the fresh wind of Derbyshire and the sound of the brook beneath my old bedchamber window? Why did I heave such a deep and loud sigh that it sounded almost like a sob?