Maid of the King's Court

by Lucy Worsley

  I went to my window in search of a breath of air, something I had not felt for an age. In the courtyard below, I heard a chuckle. I glanced out, suddenly aware that my miserable face, lit below from my candle, must have been visible for all to see, for the panes stood wide to let in the gentle breeze of summer.

  “You look a very picture of melancholy, Eliza!” It was a familiar voice.

  Anne Sweet lifted the horn lantern she carried up near her face, so I could see it and confirm what my ears had already told me. I clucked my tongue with annoyance. In a palace, even to look out of the window was to broadcast one’s private business to the world. I should have known better.

  “Oh, Anne!” I said wearily. “Are you coming up?”

  But she was already halfway up the stairs, and moments later I heard her scratch at the door. When I opened it, she was looking furtively each way along the passage.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, a little peeved at her histrionics.

  She bustled forward into the room, a small smile playing around her lips, and made a great business of taking off the kerchief she’d had over her head.

  “Now!” she said, plumping herself down on the edge of the bed to which I had retired. “I’ve come with some very important news. Come on, sit up and listen.” She was snapping her fingers at me, which was uncharacteristic.

  It would not have taken a fortune-teller to deduce that my thoughts were elsewhere, my gaze once again travelling over the dirty patch on the ceiling.

  But something about Anne did catch my attention. She seemed to be full of fire.

  “What is it, Anne?” I asked, turning my eyes but not my head towards her.

  There was a pause, and Anne laughed gently.

  “You look so sad, Eliza,” Anne said. “But in my pocket here I have the very thing to make you happy.”

  It may have been my imagination, but the room suddenly seemed filled with the scent of rose petals.

  “I’ve come with a message,” she said.

  I kept my face resolutely turned to the ceiling and flicked my eyes back to the vertical. “Please don’t,” I said tonelessly. “I don’t want to see the king tonight. I’ll have to send a message that I’m ill.”

  “No! No!” In her excitement, Anne jumped onto the bed and grabbed my shoulders, and I felt her warm breath on my cheek as she forced me to meet her eye to eye. “My message is from someone else altogether.”

  Now confusion and expectation must have filled my face, and I sat up to see her more clearly, sniffing back my tears.

  “Master Barsby,” she said slowly. “Ned. He wishes to marry you. You know that already, I think, don’t you?”

  I gasped. “But, Anne,” I said weakly, hanging my head in amazement and mumbling down at my chest. “I thought that you … liked him yourself.”

  “I do,” said Anne quietly. “But all he ever wants to do is talk about you.”

  I took this in, silently appreciating her generosity.

  “But I know I can’t think of him,” I went on. “You know that if I marry, it has to be an earl. You know that as well as anyone at court!”

  “It’s not your duty to break so many of God’s commandments,” Anne said, “by lying with the king in his bed. You don’t really want to do it, do you? And you shouldn’t have to.”

  She sighed, and we both knew that my father would not agree. But he was old and weary. I flipped my head from side to side, still astonished at her words.

  “You should marry for love!” Anne declared.

  “Lord!” I snapped. “Why does everyone think I am in love?”

  “Oh, Eliza, everyone knows it,” she said, and now she was laughing again. “You may deceive yourself, but you cannot deceive the world. You are so brave. You go into the lion’s den and put your very head into his mouth. You can stand and look even the king in the eye. But you are too proud and stubborn and dutiful to admit that Ned is kind and good and loving, and more worthy of you than that old man, and that you love him back with all your heart.”

  “‘That old man’?” I gasped at her heresy.

  “Eliza,” she said, “I’m not saying this for your happiness, though I believe that if you go away with Ned, you will be happy. I’m saying it for your survival. There is nothing for you here. You know what has happened to all five of the king’s wives: cast aside or dead. Only by leaving now, immediately, can you escape Katherine’s fate.”

  Now she had me. “But I can never leave,” I said in a toneless drone, echoing words that Ned himself had said to me.

  “Well, Ned has managed it,” she said tartly. “And you can too. Here’s the plan.” Gathering herself together, she rose from the bed and grasped its post. At that moment I would have taken gentle Anne for the commander of an army.

  “You, my dear, are about to succumb to a bout of the sweating sickness. It’s very virulent and very catching. You will not leave this chamber for some days. I will stay here and nurse you, of course, and meanwhile I will send your tiring woman, Henny, back to Stoneton to bring herbs and supplies.”

  “But it’s a long way! Will Henny agree to go?”

  At my words, the door swung open. I could see a familiar plump figure on the threshold, a big smile cracking her rosy face. Someone had been eavesdropping.

  “Indeed, she will not go,” said Henny herself. “You, Eliza, wearing a goodly number of gowns to increase your girth, will go in my place, pretending to be me. That’s how you will escape!”

  “I sense that sickness is coming over you, Eliza,” added Anne in mock seriousness. She was almost shaking with delight and excitement and nerves. Henny was trembling too. They were proposing that we break just about every rule in the book, leaving court without permission and sneaking off in the night like thieves.

  “You will need to keep to your chamber for many days for the protection of His Majesty’s health,” Anne went on, while Henny nodded sagely. “And I will guard your door like a dragon. I won’t let anyone in to see that it’s really Henny in your bed. In fact, no one will even try to come in if they think the sweat is here.”

  I was left speechless, swivelling my head between the two of them in wonder. Their certainty and complicity had me in its spell. Yet one thing dogged me.

  “But does Ned … really … still want me? I have not been … kind to him.”

  “Yes, Eliza!” They spoke simultaneously.

  “Ah, with all the excitement, I quite forgot,” said Anne, plucking at her pocket and imperiously thrusting a much-folded piece of paper at me. “Here’s the letter. He tells you himself.”

  Reluctantly, scarcely able to believe it, I unfolded the scrap of parchment. This time the message was much longer than one word. Come, Eliza, and let me give you my heart, it said. I want nothing more than to live with you, and to love you, for the rest of our days.

  Down below my chamber, I could hear horses moving around and men speaking in low voices to calm them. Over in the Great Hall, I could hear the sound of musicians and the low distant hum of the palace. The courtiers were hard at work, feasting and flirting, busy with their own power play, paying no attention to our quiet courtyard.

  I could scarcely read to the note’s end because my eyes were full of tears. Through them, I dimly saw that Henny’s arms were full of cloaks and dresses, as if she had come already prepared to bundle me up to impersonate her.

  But Henny dumped the cloaks on the bed and beckoned me back out into the passage. “Shh!” she said sternly. “Come quickly and look.” She was peering out through the window that looked the other way, not into the courtyard within but out towards the gardens rolling down to the river. Beyond the perimeter of the gardens, under the dark of the trees, she pointed out two dim shapes. Horses.

  She gave a long low whistle.

  Through the gloom I saw a figure step forward. There was the movement of a gentleman bowing low and sweeping his hat off his head. It was far too distant and too dark to see, but even so my mind filled in every detail o
f his wolfish smile. Ned was here! He was waiting for me!

  So I should dress now as Henny and take an evening stroll in the gardens? It seemed so natural and normal, but it would take nerve. And yet, I could now be as bold and brave as my tiny toy knights. I felt utterly changed. Inside my chest, I could feel a warm steady glow, the glow of Ned’s love and mine.

  “Yes!” I said to Anne and Henny both, laughing and crying at the same time. “Help me! I’ll get ready at once!”

  But now that Anne had done her work of rousing me from my lethargy, I began to see just how nervous she was. She went to the courtyard window, staring and straining out, and letting us know whenever a guard went past on patrol. Meanwhile Henny was helping me to bundle up, both of us moving very quietly, but quickly, confidently. Finally, I was ready.

  Henny gave me a huge hug. At that I almost melted and decided that it would be better to stay here and not run the risk of leaving.

  “Go, Eliza!” Henny hissed. “Go now. He’s waiting!”

  Then Anne came over, and she, too, hugged me for a long time. “I owe you, dear friend,” I said. “I can’t tell you how much.” I could tell that she was crying, but she gave me a shove towards the door.

  By now it was very nearly dark, with just a glimmer of starlight by which to see. I crept along the passage, tripping over the hem of my unaccustomedly long gown.

  Again I smelt that strange scent of roses.

  It was time to commit myself. I gathered up my heavy skirts and started down the staircase. I was out now, in the courtyard, crossing the cobbles, nodding to the sentry on the gate, then running, running through the gardens and climbing over the wall, kicking out at my ridiculous skirt. And finally, Ned was reaching to help me down from the wall and laughing.

  Within seconds I was in his arms, and he was kissing me. It felt wonderful and glorious. At last, I was where I belonged.

  “You came!” he kept saying, amazed. “You came after all!”

  “Yes,” I said into his neck. “I’m sorry it took me so long. I was confused. But I’d rather live on a sheep farm with you than be queen of all the world. I know that now.”

  I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he was smiling. And I knew that we would never be parted that night and the next day and all the days to come.

  If you visit Hampton Court Palace today, you yourself can walk along the so-called Haunted Gallery that leads from the Great Chamber to the chapel. It has red silk hangings and is still lined with Tudor portraits of some of the people in this book: Henry the Eighth himself, his fool Will Summers, the monkey.

  The ghost that’s supposed to visit here at night is the white-dressed figure of Katherine Howard, running to the chapel to beg her husband, Henry the Eighth, to spare her life, exactly as she does in chapter 34.

  There’s a door leading off this gallery, which most visitors don’t spot because it’s disguised behind hangings. It leads to a staircase, which in turn leads to the office where I’m usually to be found working, because I’m one of the curators who look after the buildings and collections at Hampton Court. This ghost, then, has been sighted only metres away from the place where I spend my days. Sometimes when I walk down the Haunted Gallery, especially late in the evening, I think about Katherine’s screams as the guards took her back to her lodgings.

  Personally, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am interested in where ghost stories come from. And they often bear some sort of relationship to real historical events.

  If you read the history books about Hampton Court, though, you’ll see it firmly stated that the story of the ghost of Katherine Howard is complete nonsense. That’s because the palace’s geography dictates that the queen’s rooms — where Katherine Howard would have been — were nowhere near the Haunted Gallery or chapel. And most history books don’t have a good word to say about Katherine herself. Because she had more than one sexual partner, her execution is often explained as something that was almost her own fault. Historians have described her as a “good-time girl,” as an “empty-headed wanton,” and even as a “juvenile delinquent.” The consensus is that she was a ditzy airhead.

  A few years ago, one of our researchers at Hampton Court was looking into the “ghost story” of Katherine Howard, because we wanted to check the facts before installing a “ghost” of our own in the Haunted Gallery for visitors to see. Indeed, we now have one: a very subtle silhouette of a Tudor lady crossing what seems to be a window, which is in fact created by a hidden projector. Most people don’t notice this projection of Katherine’s figure crossing the light, but sometimes, when the palace is quiet, it frightens the living daylights out of a more imaginative visitor who catches sight of it out of the corner of an eye.

  So this researcher of ours looked again at the plan of the palace, to check most historians’ belief that it was impossible for Katherine Howard to get from her rooms to the Haunted Gallery. This is not as straightforward as it sounds because of the changes made to the building over the last four hundred years. But, on examining the sixteenth-century plan of the palace, she noticed that there was indeed a little staircase —“the Queen’s Vice Staircase”— that led from the queen’s apartments to the Haunted Gallery.

  She was quite surprised at this and doubted herself. So she then wrote to a Famous Historian of Hampton Court Palace, asking, “Is it possible that you’ve got it wrong? Could the events that the ‘ghost’ represents really have happened?”

  “No!” came the reply. “Katherine Howard could not have run screaming down that gallery. It’s a silly story, anyway.”

  After she told me this, I looked at the plan myself, and I could plainly see that she was right, and the Famous Historian was wrong. It seemed to me that the Famous Historian hadn’t looked at the facts dispassionately, and that he’d given himself away with his comment that it was a “silly story.” I think that he didn’t want to give any more credence to this silly story about a silly girl, and therefore looked at the palace plan with prejudiced eyes.

  I felt quite annoyed by this on behalf of that girl who died nearly five hundred years ago. And as I learned more about the real Katherine Howard, the more annoyed I felt. She may have been young and foolish, but I felt that the odds at court were so heavily stacked against her that it was unfair that her lasting reputation should be as a silly little strumpet. What if there was something about her that we didn’t know, something that could cast quite a different light upon her actions?

  After thinking about this, I decided that I would write a new version of Katherine’s story myself, and the result is this book.

  Eliza is a made-up character, but many of the scenes and events — for example, when Anne of Cleves reveals that she doesn’t know how babies are made — really did happen, and there are sixteenth-century documents to prove it. Eliza’s home of Stoneton was inspired by South Wingfield Manor in Derbyshire, and her red hair borrowed from my two favourite indomitable redheads of the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I and Bess of Hardwick.

  Of course I can’t prove that the story I’ve told in this book is the real story, the true explanation for Katherine Howard’s horrible fate.

  But then again, no one can prove it isn’t.

  My sincere thanks go to the people who helped me with Maid of the King’s Court. They are all my colleagues, past and present, at Hampton Court Palace, Felicity Bryan, Catherine Clarke, Daisy Goodwin, Hannah Sheppard, Zoe Griffiths, and Deborah Noyes. But most of all I am grateful to my sister-in-law, Kersti Worsley, and dedicate this book to her.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2016 by Lucy Worsley

  Front cover photographs: copyright © 2017 by Magdalena Russocka/Trevillion Images (doorway); copyright © 2017 by Lee Avison/Trevillion Images (girl)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval sy
stem in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  First U.S. electronic edition 2017

  First published as Eliza Rose by Bloomsbury Publishing (U.K.) 2016

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number pending

  Candlewick Press

  99 Dover Street

  Somerville, Massachusetts 02144

  visit us at www.candlewick.com