The King's Curse

by Philippa Gregory

  A widow for four years, with no prospect of help, barely enough money to eat, no roof to put over my children’s heads, no dowry for my daughter, no brides for my sons, no lover, no friends, no chance of remarriage since I never even see a man who is not a priest, I go on my knees eight hours a day every day alongside the nuns to observe the liturgy of the hours, and I watch my prayers change.

  In the first year I prayed for help, in the second year for release. By the end of the third year I am praying for the death of King Henry and the damnation of his mother and the return of my House of York. In the silence I have grown into a bitter rebel. I damn the Tudors to hell and I come to hope that the curse that my cousin Elizabeth and her mother laid on them rings true, down through the long years to the end of the Tudors and the destruction of their line.

  SYON ABBEY, BRENTFORD, WEST OF LONDON, APRIL 1509

  I have the news first from the old porteress at the abbey who comes to the door of my cell and throws it open without knocking. Ursula is in her truckle bed and does not stir but Geoffrey sleeps in my narrow bed, held in my arms, and he pops up his little head as Joan bangs into the room and says: “The king is dead. Wake up, my lady. We are free. God is merciful. He has blessed us. God has saved us. The curse of the Red Dragon has passed over us. The king is dead.”

  I was dreaming that I was in the court of my uncle Richard at Sheriff Hutton and my cousin Elizabeth was dancing with him in a swirl of gold and silver brocade. I sit up at once and say to her: “Hush. I won’t hear it.”

  Her old wizened face is cracked open with a smile. I have never seen her beam before. “You’ll hear this!” she says. “And anyone can say it, and anyone can hear it. For the spymaster is dead and the spies are thrown out of employment. The king is dead and the bonny, bonny prince has come to his throne just in time to save us all.”

  Just then the bell of the abbey starts to toll, a steady, deep, sonorous note, and Geoffrey scrambles to his knees and says: “Hurrah! Hurrah! Is Henry to be king?”

  “Of course,” the old woman says, catching at his little hands and dancing him on the bed. “God bless him and the day he comes to the throne.”

  “My brother Henry!” Geoffrey squeaks. “King of England!”

  I am so horrified by this innocent speaking of treason that I snatch him to me, put my hand over his mouth, and turn to her in an agonized appeal for her silence. But she just shakes her head at him and laughs at his pride. “By rights—yes,” she says boldly. “It should be your brother Henry. But we have a bonny Tudor boy to come after the old sweat master, and Prince Harry Tudor will take the throne and the spies and the taxmen will be gone.”

  I jump out of bed and start to pull on my clothes.

  “Will she send for you?” Joan the porteress asks me, swinging Geoffrey from the bed and letting him dance around her. Ursula rises up and rubs her eyes and says: “What’s happening?”

  “Who?” I am thinking of My Lady the King’s Mother, who has buried her grandson and will now bury her son, just as Elizabeth’s curse foretold. She will be a broken woman. She will believe, as I do, that the Tudors signed their own death warrant when they killed our princes in the Tower. She will think, as I do, that they are accursed murderers.

  “Katherine, Dowager Princess of Wales,” Joan says simply. “Won’t he marry her and make her Queen of England as he promised to do? Won’t she send for you, her dearest friend? Won’t you be able to have your children with you at court and live as you were born to? Won’t it be like a miracle for you, like the stone rolling from the tomb and letting you all out?”

  I stop short. I am so unaccustomed to hope that I hardly know what to say. I had not even thought of this.

  “He might,” I say wonderingly. “He might marry her. And she might send for me. You know, if he does—she will.”

  It is like a miracle, a release as powerful as spring after a cold, gray winter. It comes in springtime and ever after when I see the hawthorn blossom making the hedges as white as snow, or the daffodils leaning over in the wind, I think of that spring when the old Tudor king was dead and the Tudor boy took the throne and made everything right.

  He had told me in his nursery that to be a king was a holy duty. I thought of him then as a lovable little braggart: a boy spoiled by doting women, a loving boy of good intentions. Yet who would have thought that he would have leaped up to defy the mean old man, to take Katherine as his betrothed wife, to declare himself king and ready to marry her in one breath? It was the first thing he did, this boy of seventeen, the very first thing that he did. Just like my uncle King Edward, he took the throne and he took the woman he loved. Who would have thought that Harry Tudor had the courage of a Plantagenet? Who would have thought he had the imagination? Who would have thought he had the passion?

  He is his mother’s son; that can be the only explanation. He has her love and her courage and her bright optimism, which is the nature of our family. He is a Tudor king but he is a boy of the House of York. In his joy and his optimism, he is one of ours. In his willing grasping of power, in his quick execution: he is one of ours.

  Katherine the princess sends for me with a short note that bids me come to the house of Lady Williams, where I will find rooms waiting for me suitable for a noblewoman of my station. Then I am to come at once to the Palace of Westminster, go straight to the wardrobe rooms, pick out half a dozen gowns, and attend her, richly dressed, as her first lady-in-waiting. It is my release. I am free. It is my restoration.

  I leave the children at Syon while I go downriver to London. I dare not take them with me yet; I feel as if I have to make sure that we are safe, to see that we are truly free before I dare summon them to be with me.

  London does not look like a city which has lost a king. It is not a capital in mourning; it is a city mad with joy. They are roasting meat at the street corners; they are sharing ale out of the windows of the brewhouses. The king has not been buried long, the prince is not yet crowned, but the place is elated. They are opening the debtors’ prisons and men are coming out who had thought they would never see daylight again. It is as if a monster has died and we are freed from the grip of a bad spell. It is like waking from a nightmare. It is like spring after a long, long winter.

  Dressed in my new gown of pale Tudor green, wearing a gable hood as heavy as that of the princess, I walk into the presence chamber of the King of England and see the prince, not on his throne, not standing in a stiff pose under the cloth of estate as if he were the portrait of majesty, but laughing with his friends strolling around the room, with Katherine at his side, as if they were a pair of lovers, enchanted with each other. And at the end of the room, seated on her chair with a circle of silent ladies all around her, a priest on either side for support, is My Lady, wearing deepest black, torn between grief and fury. She is no longer My Lady the King’s Mother—the title that gave her so much pride is buried with her son. Now, if she chooses it, she can be called My Lady the King’s Grandmother, and by the thunderous look on her face she does not choose it.

  ENGLAND, 1509

  For the commons of England it is a merciful release from hardship. For the lords it is an escape from tyranny. For the people of my family and my house it is the miraculous lifting of a death sentence. Anyone with Plantagenet blood or affinity to York has been living on license, achingly aware that at any moment the king might revoke permission and there would be a knock on the door from the green-and-white-liveried yeomen of the guard and a swift trip in their unmarked barge to the water gate of the Tower. The great portcullis would slide up, the barge would enter—and the prisoner would never come out again.

  But now we do come out. William Courtenay emerges from the Tower with a royal pardon, and we pray that William de la Pole will be out soon. My cousin Thomas Gray is released from Calais castle and comes home. Disbelievingly, like householders slowly opening their painted doors after plague has passed through a village, we all start to emerge. Cousins come to London from their distant castle
s hoping it is safe to be seen at court again. Kinsfolk whom have not written for years now dare to send a message, sharing family news, telling of the birth of babies and the death of members of the family, asking, fearfully, how is everyone else? Has anyone seen such a man? Does anyone know if a distant cousin is safe abroad? The deathlike grip of the old king on every one of us is suddenly released. Harry the prince has not inherited his father’s fearful suspicions; he dismisses the spies, he cancels the debts, he pardons the prisoners. It feels as if we can all come out, blinking into the light.

  Servants and tradesmen who have avoided me since the death of my husband and my fall from favor come to me in their dozens to offer their services now that my name is no longer written somewhere, on some list, with a question mark beside it.

  Slowly, hardly able to believe my luck, like the rest of the country I find I am safe. I seem to have survived the dangerous twenty-four years of the first Tudor reign. My brother died on King Henry’s scaffold, my husband in his service, my cousin in childbed trying to give him another heir; but I have survived. I have been ruined, I have been heartbroken, I have been estranged from all but two of my children and lived in hiding with them, but now I can emerge, half blinded, into the sunlight of the young prince’s summer.

  Katherine, once a widow as poor as me, soars upward into the sunshine of the Tudor favor like a kestrel spreading her russet wings in the morning light, her debts excused, her dowry forgotten. The prince marries her, in haste, in private, in the delight of passion finally expressed. Now he says he has loved her in silence and at a distance for all this time. He has been watching her, he has been desiring her. Only his father, only his grandmother, My Lady, enforced his silence. The ambiguous papal dispensation for this marriage that Katherine’s mother cunningly provided so long ago makes the marriage legal beyond question; nobody asks about her first husband, nobody cares, and they are wedded and bedded in days.

  And I take my place at her side. Once again I have the right to draw the finest velvets from the royal wardrobe, I help myself to ropes of pearls and gold and jewels from the royal treasury. Once again, I am the senior lady-in-waiting to the Queen of England and I follow nobody but a Tudor into dinner. Katherine’s new husband, King Henry—Henry VIII as we all delightedly remind ourselves—pays me a grant of a hundred pounds a year the moment that I arrive at court, and I settle my debts: to my faithful steward John Little at Stourton, to my cousins, to the nuns at Syon, to Reginald’s priory. I send for Henry and Arthur, and the king offers them a place in his household. The king speaks highly of an education in the new learning, and orders that Reginald shall be well taught in his monastery; he will come to court as a philosopher and a scholar. I keep my boy Geoffrey and Ursula in the queen’s rooms for now, but soon I will send them home, and they can live again in the country and be raised as Plantagenet heirs should be.

  I even receive a proposal of marriage. Sir William Compton, the young king’s dearest friend and companion in his revels and jousting, asks me, humbly on his knees, with his smiling eyes looking boldly up at me, if I would consider him as a husband. His bowed knee indicates that I could have the ruling of him, his warm hand holding mine suggests that this might be pleasurable. I have lived as a nun for nearly five years; the thought of a handsome man between good linen sheets cannot help but make me pause for a moment and look into William’s brown smiling eyes.

  It takes me only one minute to decide, but to serve his urgent sense of his own dignity as a man come from next to nowhere, I spin it out for a couple of days. Thank God that I do not need his newly minted name, I don’t have to hide my name now. I don’t need the royal favor that he carries. My own popularity at court is high, and only grows as the young king turns to me for advice, for stories of the old days, for my memories of his mother. I tell him of the fairy-tale Plantagenet court and I see that he longs to re-create our reign. So I do not need Compton’s newly built house; I am so restored, I have such great prospects, that the king’s favorite thinks me an advantageous match. Gently, I tell him no. Graciously, courteously, he expresses his disappointment. We conclude the passage like two skilled performers performing the steps of an elegant dance. He knows that I am at the height of my triumph, I am his equal, I don’t need him.

  A tide of wealth and prosperity flows out of the open doors of the treasury. Incredulously, they throw open cupboards, boxes, and chests in every royal house, and everywhere they find plate and gold, jewels and fabrics, carpets and spices. The old king took his taxes and fines in money and goods, indiscriminately sucking in household furnishings, tradesmen’s stores, even the tools of apprentices, impoverishing the poor. The new king, the young Henry, gives back to innocent people what his father stole from them, in a festival of redress. Unjust fines are repaid from the exchequer, noblemen are restored to their lands, my kinsman George Neville who guarded my sons is released from his crippling debts and given the post of Chief Larderer, a patron to thousands, the master of hundreds, a royal fortune at his disposal just waiting to be spent on good things. He is high in the king’s favor, Henry admires him, calls him a kinsman, and trusts him. Nobody mentions his ill-set leg; he is allowed to go to any, to all of his beautiful homes.

  His brother, Edward Neville, is a favorite and serves in the king’s bedchamber. The king swears that Edward is the very match of him, calls him to stand beside him, to compare heights and the color of their hair, assures my cousin that they could be mistaken for brothers, that he loves us all as his brothers and sisters. He is warm to all my family—Henry Courtenay of Devon, my cousin Arthur Plantagenet, the de la Poles, the Staffords, the Nevilles, all of us—as if he were seeking his mother in our smiling, familiar faces. Slowly, we return to where we were all born to be, at the center of power and wealth. We are the king’s cousins, there is no one closer to him.

  Even My Lady the old King’s Mother is rewarded with the return of her palace of Woking, though she does not live to enjoy it for long. She sees her grandson crowned and then she takes to her bed and dies. Her confessor, dear John Fisher, preaches the eulogy at her funeral and describes a saint who spent her life in the service of her country and her son, who laid down her work only when it was done. We listen in polite silence but, truth be told, she is little mourned; most of us experienced her family pride more than her cousinly love. And I am not the only one who secretly thinks that she died of fatal pique, in fear that her influence had run out, and so that she would not have to see our Queen Katherine looking beautiful and making merry in the rooms where the old woman had ruled so meanly for so long.

  God is blessing the new generation, and we care nothing for those who have gone. Queen Katherine conceives a child almost at once, during the carefree days of the summer progress, and announces her happy state before Christmas, at Richmond Palace. For a moment, in that season of celebration, in a constant rush of entertainments, I start to think that my cousin’s curse is forgotten and that the Tudor line will inherit my family’s luck and be as sturdy and prolific as we have always been.

  RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SPRING 1510

  It is a bad night for her when she loses the baby, and then worse days follow. The fool of a physician tells her and, even worse, assures the king that she was carrying twins, and there is another healthy baby in her belly. She may have had an agonizing miscarriage, but there is no cause for dismay: she is still carrying an heir, there is a Tudor boy, waiting to be born.

  This is how we learn that the young king likes to hear good news, indeed he insists on hearing good news, and in the future it may take some courage to force the truth on him. An older man, a more thoughtful man, would have questioned such an optimistic doctor; but Henry is eager to believe that he is blessed, and joyfully continues to celebrate his wife’s pregnancy. At the Shrove Tuesday feast he walks all around the diners proposing toasts to the queen and the baby that he thinks she is carrying in her swollen womb. I watch him, incredulously. This is the first time that I see that his sickly f
ather and his fearful grandmother have instilled in him an absurd devotion to physicians. He listens to anything they say. He has a deep, superstitious terror of illness, and he longs for cures.

  GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1510

  Obediently, Katherine goes into confinement at Greenwich Palace, and as her swollen belly slims down to nothing, she waits with grim determination, knowing that there is going to be no birth. When her time is over and she has nothing to show for it, she bathes like a Spanish princess, in jug after jug of boiling-hot water with rose oil and the finest of soap, dresses in her best gown, and summons her courage to come out and face the court, looking like a fool. I stand beside her like a fierce guardian, my eyes raking the room, daring anyone to comment on her long pointless absence and now her surprise reappearance.