The King's Curse

by Philippa Gregory

  “The king is loyal to his friends,” she observes.

  “Of course,” I agree. “He was always a most sweet-tempered boy. He never bears a grudge.”

  The wedding feast is a joyous one. Mary is a favorite of everyone at court and we are glad to have her back with us, though we are all anxious as to the health and safety of her sister Margaret in Scotland. Since Margaret was widowed, and remarried a man whom the Scots lords cannot accept, we all wish that she too would come home to safety.

  My son Arthur comes to find me during the dancing, kisses me on both cheeks, and kneels for my blessing.

  “Not dancing?” I ask.

  “No, for I have someone to meet you.”

  I turn to him. “No trouble?” I say quickly.

  “Merely a visitor to court who wants to see you.”

  He winds his way through the dancers with a smile to one and the touch of an arm to another, through an arched door and into an inner room. I go through, and there is the last person I would have expected to see: my boy Reginald, lanky as a colt, his wrists showing at the cuffs of his jacket, his boots scuffed and his shy smile. “Lady Mother,” he says, and I put my hand on his warm head and then hold him as he springs up. “My boy!” I say in delight. “Ah, Reginald!”

  I hold him in my arms but I feel the tension in his shoulders. He never embraces me as my two older boys do, he never clings to me like his younger brother, Geoffrey. He was taught to be a diffident child; now, at fifteen years old, he is a young man made by a monastery.

  “Lady Mother,” he repeats, as if he is testing the words for meaning.

  “Why are you not at Oxford?” I release him. “Does the king know you are here? Do you have permission to be away?”

  “He’s graduated, Lady Mother!” Arthur reassures me. “He need not go back to Oxford ever again! He’s done very well. He’s completed his studies. He’s triumphant. He’s regarded as a very promising scholar.”

  “Are you?” I ask him doubtfully.

  Shyly, he ducks his head. “I am the best Latinist in my college,” he says quietly. “They say the best in the town.”

  “That’s the best in England!” Arthur declares exuberantly.

  The door behind us opens, and a gust of music comes in with Montague, Geoffrey at his side. Ten-year-old Geoffrey bounds towards his older brother like an excited child, and Reginald fends him off and embraces Montague.

  “He debated for three days on the nature of God,” Arthur tells me. “He’s much admired. Turns out our brother is a great scholar.”

  I laugh. “Well, I am glad of it,” I say. “And so what now, Reginald? Has the king commanded you? Are you to join the Church? What does he want you to do?”

  Reginald looks at me anxiously. “I have no calling for the Church,” he says quietly. “So I hope you will allow me—Lady Mother . . .”

  “No calling?” I repeat. “You have lived behind the walls of an abbey since you were six years old! You have spent almost all your life as a churchman. You have been educated as a churchman. Why would you not take orders?”

  “I have no vocation,” he repeats.

  I turn to Montague. “What does he mean?” I demand. “Since when did a churchman have to be called by God? Every bishop in the land is there for the convenience of his family. Obviously, he has been educated for the Church. Arthur tells me that he is well regarded. The king himself could not have done more for him. If he takes holy orders, he can be given the livings that come with our great estates and he will, no doubt, be made a bishop. And he could rise, perhaps even become an archbishop.”

  “It’s a matter of conscience.” Arthur interrupts his brother’s answer. “Really, Lady Mother . . .”

  I go to the chair at the head of the table, seat myself, and look down the long polished surface at my boys. Geoffrey follows me, and stands behind my chair looking gravely at his older brothers, as if he is my page boy, my little squire, and they are supplicants to the two of us. “Everyone in this family serves the king,” I say flatly. “That’s the only way to wealth and power. That is safety as well as success. Arthur, you are a courtier, one of the best jousters in the court, an ornament to the court. Montague, you have won your place as a server of the body, the best position at court, and you are rising in favor; you will be a senior advisor, I know. Geoffrey will go into the king’s rooms when he is a little older and will serve the king as well as any one of you. Ursula will marry a nobleman, link us to the greatest family we can obtain, and continue our line. Reginald here will be a churchman and serve the king and God. What else is possible? What else can he do?”

  “I love and admire the king,” Reginald says quietly. “And I am grateful to him. He has offered me the deanship of Wimborne Minster, a valuable place. But I don’t have to take holy orders to get it, I can be a dean without being ordained. And he says he will pay for me to study abroad.”

  “He does not insist you take your vows?”

  “He does not.”

  I am surprised. “This is a sign of great favor,” I say. “I would have thought he would have demanded it of you, after all he has done for you.”

  “The king has read one of Reginald’s essays,” Arthur explains. “Reginald says that the Church should be served by no one but men who have heard the call of God, not men that hope to rise in the world by using the Church as their ladder. The king was very impressed. He admires Reginald’s logic, his judgment. He thinks he is both inspired and educated.”

  I try to conceal my surprise at this son of mine who seems to have become a theologian rather than a priest. I cannot force him to take his vows at this stage in his life, especially if the king is willing to patronize him as a lay scholar. “Well, so be it,” I agree. “Very well for now. Later on, you will have to take holy orders to rise through the Church, Reginald. Don’t think that you can avoid that. But for the time being you can take the deanship and study as you wish, since His Grace approves.” I glance at Montague. “We’ll collect the fees for him,” I say. “We’ll pay him an allowance.”

  “I don’t want to go abroad,” Reginald says very quietly. “If you will allow me, Lady Mother, I would like to stay in England.”

  I am so shocked, that for a moment I say nothing, and Arthur speaks into the silence. “He has never lived with us since he was a child, Lady Mother. Let him study at Oxford and live at L’Erber, and spend his summers with us. He can join us when we are on progress, and when we go to Warblington or Bisham, he can come with us. I am sure the king would allow it. Montague and I could ask it for Reginald. Now that he has completed his degree surely he can come home?”

  Reginald, the boy I could not afford to feed or house, looks directly at me. “I want to come home,” he says. “I want to live with my family. It’s time. It’s my turn. Let me come home. I have been away from all of you for so long.”

  I hesitate. To gather my family together again would be the greatest triumph of my return to wealth and favor. To have all my sons under my roof and see them working for the power and strength of our family is my dream. “It’s what I want,” I tell him. “I have never told you, I never will tell you how much I missed you. Of course. But I shall have to ask the king,” I say. “None of you will ask him. I shall ask the king, and if he agrees, then that would be my dearest wish.”

  Reginald flushes like a girl and I see his eyes grow suddenly dark with tears. I realize that though he may be a scholar of brilliance and promise he is still only fifteen—a boy who never had a childhood. Of course he wants to live with us all. He wants to be my beloved son once more. We have found our home again, he wants to be with us. It is right that he should be with us.

  RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, JUNE 1515

  The return of our Princess Mary as Dowager Queen of France brings an energy and beauty to a court where joy had been wearing thin. She runs in and out of the queen’s rooms to show her the swirl of a new gown, or to bring a book of the new scholarship. She teaches the queen’s ladies the d
ances that are fashionable in France, and the presence of her entourage brings all the king’s young men, and the king himself, into the queen’s rooms to sing and play and flirt and write poetry.

  It brings the king back into his wife’s company, and he discovers again the charm and wit that are naturally hers. He realizes once more that he is married to a beautiful, educated, amusing woman, and he is reminded that Katherine is a true princess: beautiful, admired, the finest woman at the court. Compared to the girls who throw themselves at his attention, Katherine simply shines. As the summer becomes warmer and the court starts to go boating on the river and eating dinner in the lush fields around the city of London, the king comes often to Katherine’s bed, and though he dances with Bessie Blount, he sleeps with his wife.

  In these sunny days I take the chance to ask the king if Reginald may stay in England.

  “Ah, Lady Margaret, you have to say good-bye to your boy, but not for long,” he says pleasantly enough. I am walking beside him on the way back from the bowling green. Ahead of us are some of the queen’s ladies dawdling along with much affected laughter and playfulness, hoping that the king notices them.

  “Every kingdom in Europe is taken up with the new learning,” Henry explains. “Everyone is writing papers, drawing plans, inventing machines, building great monuments. Every king, every duke, the lowliest lord wants scholars in his house, wants to be a patron. England needs scholars just as much as Rome does. And your son, they tell me, will be one of the greatest.”

  “He is pleased to study,” I say. “Truly, I think he has a gift. And he is grateful to you for sending him to Oxford. We all are. But surely, he can be a scholar for you at Westminster as well as anywhere else, and he can live at home.”

  “Padua,” the king rules. “Padua is where he must go. That’s where everything is happening, that’s where all the greatest scholars are. He needs to go there and learn all that he can, and then he can come home to us and bring the new learning to our universities, and publish his thoughts in English. He can translate the great texts that they are writing into English so that English scholars can study them. He can bring their scholarship to our universities. I expect great things of him.”

  “Padua?”

  “In Italy. And he can find and buy books for us and manuscripts, and translate them. He can dedicate them to me. He can found a library for me. He can direct Italian scholars to our court. He will be my scholar and servant in Padua. He will be a shining light. He will show Christendom that here in England we too are reading and studying and understanding. You know I have always loved scholarship, Lady Margaret. You know how impressed Erasmus was with me when I was just a boy! And all my tutors remarked that when I entered the Church I would be a great theologian. And a linguist too. I still write poetry, you know. If I had the chances that Reginald has before him, I don’t know what I might have been. If I had been raised as he has been, as a scholar, I would want to do nothing but study.”

  “You’ve been very good to him.” I cannot shift the king from the flattering picture of his court as a center of the new learning and Reginald as his ambassador to an admiring world. “But surely he need not go at once?”

  “Oh, as soon as possible, I would think,” Henry says grandly. “I will pay him an allowance and he has his fees from . . .” He turns, and Thomas Wolsey, who has been walking behind us and clearly listening, says: “Wimborne Minster.”

  “Yes, that’s it. And there will be other livings he can have, Wolsey will see to it. Wolsey is so clever at giving men places and matching them to their needs. I want Reginald to be our representative; he must look like a well-regarded scholar in Padua and live like one. I am his patron, Lady Margaret, his position reflects my own scholarship. I want the world to know that I am a thoughtful man at the forefront of the new learning, a scholar-king.”

  “I thank you,” I say. “It is just that we, his family, wanted to have him home with us for a while.”

  Henry takes my hand and tucks it in the crook of his arm. “I know,” he says warmly. “I miss my mother too, you know. I lost her when I was younger than Reginald is now. But I had to bear it. A man has to go where his destiny calls him.”

  The king strolls with my hand tucked under his arm. A pretty girl goes by and flashes a radiant smile at him. I can almost feel the burn of Henry’s interest as she curtseys, her fair head lowered.

  “All the ladies seem to have changed their hoods,” Henry remarks. “What is this fashion that my sister has brought in? What are they wearing these days?”

  “It’s the French hood,” I say. “The Dowager Queen of France brought it back with her. I think I shall change too. It’s a lot lighter and easier to wear.”

  “Then Her Grace must wear them,” he says. He draws me a little closer. “She is well, do you think? We might be lucky this time? She tells me she has missed her course.”

  “It’s very early days, but I hope so,” I say steadily. “I pray so. And she prays every day for the blessing of a child, I know.”

  “So why does God not hear us?” he asks me. “Since she prays every day, and I pray every day, and you do too? And half of England as well? Why would God turn his face away from my wife and not give me a son?”

  I am so horrified at him speaking this thought aloud to me, with Thomas Wolsey within earshot, that my feet stumble as if I am wading in mud. Henry slowly turns me to face him and we stand still. “It’s not wrong to ask such a question,” he insists, defensive as a child. “It’s not disloyal to Her Grace whom I love and always will. It’s not to challenge God’s will, so it’s not heretical. All I am saying is: why can any fat fool in a village get a son and the King of England cannot?”

  “You might have one now,” I say weakly. “She might be carrying your son right now.”

  “Or she might have one that dies.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  He shoots a suspicious glance at me. “Why not? D’you fear ill-wishing now? Do you think she is unlucky?”

  I choke on my words. This young man asks me do I believe in ill-wishing when I know for a fact that his own mother cursed his father’s line, and I remember very clearly going down on my knees and praying God to punish the Tudors for the harm they have done to me and mine. “I believe in God’s will,” I say, avoiding the question. “And no woman as good and as dear and as holy as the queen could be anything but blessed.”

  He is not comforted; he looks unhappy, as if I have not said enough for him. I cannot think what more he could want to hear. “I should be blessed,” he reminds me as if he were still a spoiled boy in a nursery that revolved around his childish will. “It is me that should be blessed. It can’t be right that I cannot have a son.”

  ENGLAND, SUMMER 1515

  The court goes on progress to the west, the queen traveling with them in a litter so that she does not get too tired. The king, eager as a boy, gets up at dawn every morning to go hunting, and comes back to wherever we are staying, shouting that he is starving! Starving to death! The cooks serve a huge breakfast at midday, sometimes in the hunting field where they put up a village of tents as if we were on campaign.

  Thomas Wolsey travels with us, always riding a white mule as did the Lord, but his modest mount is tacked up in the best leather of cardinal red which I don’t believe was the preference of Jesus. The clerk from humble beginnings has made the greatest jump that any churchman can make, and now has a cardinal’s hat and is preceded everywhere by a silver cross and a household in full livery.

  “The greatest ascent possible, unless he can persuade them to make him Pope,” the queen whispers through the curtains of her litter as I ride alongside her.

  I laugh, but I cannot help but wonder what answer the cardinal would make if the king asked him why God did not bless him with a son. A churchman—so near to Rome, so well read, so high in the Church—must surely have an answer for the master who raised him up just because he could answer any question. I am certain that Henry will ask him. I a
m certain that his answer will be what Henry wants to hear; and I do wonder what that is.

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1515

  At last we hear from Scotland. The king’s sister the dowager queen Margaret has escaped from the country that she so markedly failed to rule and collapsed in a northern castle to give birth to a little girl, to be called Lady Margaret Douglas. God help the child, for her mother is in exile and her father has run back to Scotland. The dowager queen will have to make her way south to safety with her brother, and Queen Katherine sends her everything she could want for the journey.

  GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1516

  We are preparing the queen’s rooms for her confinement. Her ladies watch while the servants hang the rich tapestries from wall to wall, blotting out all light from the windows, and supervise the arranging of the gold and silver cups and plates in the cupboards. They will not be used by the queen, who will eat off her usual gold plates, but every confinement chamber has to be richly stocked to honor the prince who will be born here.

  One of the ladies, Elizabeth Bryan now Carew, oversees the making of the huge bed of state with creamy white linen sheets, and the overlaying of the rich velvet spreads. She shows these careful preparations to the girls who are newly come to court; they have to know the correct rituals for the confinement of a queen. But it is no novelty to Bessie Blount and the other ladies, and we go about our work quietly, without excitement.

  Bessie is so subdued that I stop to ask her if she is well. She looks so troubled that I draw her into the queen’s private chamber, and the dipping flame of the candle on the little altar throws her face alternately into golden light and shadows.

  “It just feels like a waste of time for us, and grief for her,” she says.

  “Hush!” I say instantly. “Take care what you say, Bessie.”