The King's Curse

by Philippa Gregory

  “I felt . . .” she begins, and then she suddenly scoops the skirts of her gown towards her, as if she would hold the baby inside her womb by sheer force. “Get the midwives,” she says very low and quiet, as if she is afraid that someone might hear. “Get the midwives, and close the door. I’m bleeding.”

  We rush hot water and towels and the cradle into the room, while I send a message to the king that the queen has gone into labor, weeks early of course, but that she is well and we are caring for her.

  I dare to hope; little Mary is flourishing in her nursery, a clever two-year-old, and she came early. Perhaps this will be another frighteningly small baby who will surprise us all by strength and tenacity. And if it were to be a tough little boy . . .

  It is all that we think about, and nobody says it aloud. If the queen were to have a boy, even at this late stage of her life, even though she has lost so many, she would be triumphant. Everyone who has whispered that she is weak or infertile or cursed would look a fool. The grand newly made papal legate Wolsey himself would take second place to such a wife who had given her husband the one thing that he lacks. The girls who accompany the queen when she dines with the king, or walks with him or plays cards with him, always with their eyes modestly downturned, always with their hoods pushed back to show their smooth hair, always with their gowns pulled down in front to show the inviting curve of their breasts, those girls will find that the king has eyes only for the queen—if she can give him a son.

  At midnight she goes into full labor, her gaze fixed on the holy icon, the communion wafer in the monstrance on the altar in the corner of the room, the midwives pulling on her arms and shouting at her to push, but it is all over too quickly, and there is no little cry, just a small creature, hardly visible in a mess of blood and a rush of water. The midwife picks up the tiny body, shrouds it from the queen’s sight in the linen cloth that was supposed to be used to swaddle a lusty son, and says: “I am sorry, Your Grace, it was a girl, but she was already dead inside you. There’s nothing here.”

  I don’t even wait for her to ask me. Wearily she turns to me and silently gives me a nod to send me on my errand, her face twisted with grief. Wearily, I get to my feet and go from the confinement chamber, down the stairs, across the great hall, and up the stairs to the king’s side of the palace. I dawdle past the guards who raise their pikes in a salute to let me through, past a couple of courtiers who drop into a bow and stand aside to let me by, through the outer doors of the presence chamber, through the whispering, staring crowds who are waiting and hoping to see the king. A silence falls all around as I enter the room. Everyone knows what my errand is, everyone guesses that it is bad news from my stony face, as I walk through the doors of the privy chamber, and there he is.

  The king is playing at cards. Bessie Blount is his partner; there is another girl on the other side of the table, but I can’t even be troubled to look. I can see from the pile of gold coins before Bessie that she is winning. This new inner court of friends and intimates, dressed in French fashions, drinking the best wine in the early morning, boisterous, noisy, childish, looks up when I come into the room, reads with perfect accuracy the defeat in my face and the droop of my shoulders. I see, I cannot miss, the avid gleam of some who scent heartbreak and know that trouble brings opportunity. I can hear, as the hubbub of the room drops to silence, someone tut with impatience as they see I have brought bad news again.

  The king throws down his cards and comes quickly towards me as if he would silence me, as if he would keep this as a guilty, shameful secret. “Is it no good?” he asks shortly.

  “I am sorry, Your Grace,” I say. “A girl, stillborn.”

  For a moment his mouth turns down as if he has had to swallow something very bitter. I see his throat clench as if he would retch. “A girl?”

  “Yes. But she never breathed.”

  He does not ask me if his wife is well.

  “A dead baby,” is all he says, almost wonderingly. “It is a cruel world for me, don’t you think, Lady Salisbury?”

  “It is a deep sorrow for you both,” I say. I can hardly make my lips frame the words. “The queen is very grieved.”

  He nods, as if it goes without saying, almost as if she deserves sorrow; but he does not.

  Behind him, Bessie rises up from the table where they were playing cards while his wife was laboring to give birth to a dead child. Something about the way she turns attracts my attention. She averts her face and then she steps backwards, almost as if she were trying to slip away and avoid my notice, as if she were hiding something.

  Unseen, she curtseys to the king’s back and steps away, leaving her winnings as if she has quite forgotten them, and then, as she turns to sidle through the opening door, I see the curve of her belly against the ripple of the rich fabric of her gown. I see that Bessie Blount is with child, and I suppose that it is the king’s.

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, WINTER 1518

  I wait until the queen is ready to return to court, her grief forced down, churched, bathed, and dressed. I think I will try to speak to her in the morning after Matins, as we walk back from her chapel.

  “Margaret, do you not think that I can see that you are waiting to speak to me? Don’t you think after all these years I can read you? Are you going to ask to go home and get your handsome boy Arthur married?”

  “I will ask you that,” I agree. “And soon. But I don’t need to talk to you about it now.”

  “What then?”

  I can hardly bring myself to wipe the smile from her face when she is trying so hard to be merry and carefree. But she does not know quite how carefree and merry the court has become.

  “Your Grace, I am afraid I have to tell you something which will trouble you.” Maria de Salinas, now Countess Willoughby, steps to her side and looks at me as if I am a traitor to bring distress to a queen who has already suffered so much.

  “What now?” is all she says.

  I take a breath. “Your Grace, it is Elizabeth Blount. While you were in confinement she was with the king.”

  “This is old news, Margaret.” She manages a careless laugh. “You’re a very poor gossip to bring me such an ancient scandal. Bessie is always with the king when I am with child. It’s a sort of fidelity.”

  Maria says a word under her breath and turns her face away.

  “Yes, but—what you don’t know is that now she is with child.”

  “It is my husband’s child?”

  “I suppose so. He hasn’t owned it. She’s not drawing any attention to herself except that her gowns are growing tight across her belly. She didn’t tell me. She is making no claims.”

  “Little Bessie Blount, my own lady-in-waiting?”

  Grimly, I nod.

  She does not cry out, but turns from the gallery into an oriel window, and puts Maria’s supporting hand aside with one little gesture. She looks out of the small panes of glass at the water meadows that are gray with sheets of ice and driven snow. She looks towards the cold river, seeing nothing but a memory of her mother, sobbing, facedown on her pillows, breaking her heart over the infidelity of her husband, the King of Spain.

  “That girl has been with me since she was twelve years old,” she says wonderingly. She finds a hard little laugh. “Clearly, I cannot have taught her very well.”

  “Your Grace, it was impossible for her to refuse the king,” I say quietly. “I don’t doubt her affection for you.”

  “It’s no surprise,” she says levelly, as if she were as cold as the flowers of frost on the windowpanes.

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Does the king seem very pleased?”

  “He has said nothing about it. And she’s not here now. She—Bessie –withdrew from court as soon as she . . . as soon as it . . .”

  “As soon as everyone could see?”

  I nod.

  “And where has she gone?” the queen asks without much interest.

  “To a house, the Priory of St. Lawrence,
in the county of Essex.”

  “She won’t be able to give him a child!” Maria suddenly bursts out passionately. “The child will die, for sure!”

  I gasp at her words that sound like a curse. “It cannot be any fault of the king that we have only Princess Mary!” I correct her instantly. To say anything else is to speak against the king’s potency and health. I turn to my friend, the queen. “And no fault of yours either,” I say very low. “It must be God’s will, God’s will.”

  The queen turns her head to look at Maria. “Why would Bessie, so young and so healthy, not give him a child?”

  “Hush, hush,” I whisper.

  But Maria answers: “Because God could not be so cruel to you!”

  Katherine crosses herself and kisses the crucifix that hangs from coral rosary beads at her waist. “I think that I have suffered greater sorrows than the birth of a bastard to little Bessie,” she says. “And anyway, don’t you know that the king will lose all interest in her now?”

  GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, MAY 1519

  My cousins and the other lords of the kingdom, Thomas Howard, the old Duke of Norfolk, and his son-in-law, my steward, Sir Thomas Boleyn, meet in private with the king and papal legate Wolsey and explain that the behavior of the wilder young men of the court reflects badly on us all. Henry, who loves the excitement and the laughter of his comrades, will hear nothing against his friends, until the older men tell him that the young courtiers on a diplomatic visit made fools of themselves in France, in front of King Francis himself.

  This strikes home. Henry is still the boy who looked up to his brother Arthur, who longed to be his equal, who toddled after him on chubby legs and shouted for a horse as big as his brother’s. Now he sees a new version of a glorious prince in Francis of France. He sees in him a model of elegance and style, and he wants to be like him. King Francis has a small inner circle of friends and advisors who are sophisticated and witty and highly cultured. They don’t play pranks and jokes on each other; they don’t cheat at cards and drink themselves sick. Henry is fired with the ambition to have a court as cosmopolitan and elegant as the French.

  For once, the cardinal and the councillors are united, and they persuade Henry that the minions must go. Half a dozen of them are sent from court and told not to return. Bessie Blount has retired for her confinement and nobody even mentions her. Some of the better-behaved young courtiers, including my son Arthur and my heir Montague, are retained. The court is purged of its wilder element, but my family, with our good breeding and good training, stay in place. The cardinal even remarks to me that he is glad that I visit the Princess Mary with such regularity, that she must learn from me as a model of decorum.

  “It’s no hardship to spend time with her,” I say, smiling. “She is a beautiful child; it is a real pleasure to play with her. And I am teaching her letters, and how to read.”

  “She could have no better Lady Governess,” he says. “They tell me that she runs to greet you as if you were a second mother.”

  “I could not love her more if she were my own,” I say. I have to stop myself repeating how bright she is, and how clever, how prettily she dances, and what a good voice she has.

  “Well, God bless you both,” the cardinal says airily, waving his fat fingers in a cross over my head.

  WARBLINGTON CASTLE, HAMPSHIRE, JUNE 1519

  I leave the newly sober and composed court to go to my favorite house and plan Arthur’s marriage. It is a very good one. I would not throw my popular son Arthur away on anyone but a well-born heiress. His wife will be Jane Lewknor, the only daughter—and so the sole heiress—of a Sussex knight, a good old family and one that has amassed a fortune. She was married before and brings a good fortune from that marriage too. She has a daughter, living with her guardian, so I know she is fertile. Best of all, for Arthur, at court among the king’s friends who are ready, at the drop of a glove, to write a poem about Beauty and Unattainable Virtue, she is fair-haired, gray-eyed, and lovely but no fool; she will not write love poems in reply. And she is educated and well mannered enough to serve the queen. Altogether, she is an expensive asset for the family to buy, but I think she will serve us well.

  PENSHURST PLACE, KENT, JUNE 1519

  The king is honoring my cousin Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, with another visit to Penshurst Place, and Cousin Edward begs me to come, bring the newlyweds, and help entertain the king. It is a great moment for my cousin, but an even greater event for my daughter, Ursula, who finds, as I promised her, that being married to little Henry Stafford brings rewards. She stands beside her mother-in-law, Duchess Eleanor, to greet the King of England and his court, and everyone tells me that she will be the most delightful duchess one day.

  I expect a magnificent show, but even so, I am amazed at my cousin’s lavish hospitality. Every day there is a hunt and an entertainment and a picnic in the woods. There are masques and one day a bullbaiting, a fight with dogs, and a bearbaiting with a magnificent beast that goes on for three hours. The duke has prepared the costumed dances and disguisings that the king loves, and commissioned music and performances. There are satirical plays that mock the ambition of Charles of Castile, who has just squandered a fortune buying the position of Holy Roman Emperor. Our king Henry, who hoped for the title for himself, laughs so hard that he nearly weeps when the play accuses Charles of greed and hubris. The queen listens to the abuse of her nephew with a tolerant smile, as if it were nothing at all to do with her.

  We are awakened some mornings by a choir singing under our windows, another day boatmen call us from the lake and we row for pleasure with musicians on the boats and then gather for a tremendous regatta. The king wins the race, battling his way through the water, his face red with effort, his shoulder and chest muscles standing out under his fine linen shirt, just as he wins at cards, at tennis, at horse racing, at wrestling, and of course at the great joust which my cousin the duke stages for the entertainment of the court and to show the skill and courage of the king and his friends. Everything is designed for the king’s entertainment and amusement, not a moment of the day passes without some fresh extravagance, and Henry revels in it all, the winner of every game, a head taller than any man, as undeniably handsome as a carved statue of a prince, his hair curled, his smile wide, his body like a young god’s.

  “You’ve spent a fortune on giving the king the best visit of the year,” I observe to my cousin. “This has been your kingdom.”

  “As it happens, I have a fortune,” he replies nonchalantly. “And this is my kingdom.”

  “You have succeeded in persuading the king that this is the most beautiful and well-ordered house in England.”

  He smiles. “You speak as if that were not a triumph. For me, for my house, for my name. For your daughter too, who will inherit it all.”

  “It’s just that from boyhood, the king has never admired something without wanting it for himself. He’s not given to disinterested joy.”

  My cousin tucks my hand in the crook of his elbow and walks me past the warm sandstone walls of his lower garden towards the archery butts where we can hear the court exclaiming at the contest, and their ripple of applause at a good shot. “You are kind to caution me, Cousin Margaret; but I don’t need a warning. I never forget that this is a king whose father had nothing, who came into England with little more than the clothes on his poor back. Every time his son sees a landowner like you or me whose rights go back to Duke William of Normandy, or even earlier, he feels a little gnaw of envy, a little shiver of fear that he has not enough, that he is not enough. He wasn’t raised like us, in a family who knew that their place was the greatest in England. Not like you and me, born noble, raised as princes, safe in the greatest buildings in England, looking out at the widest fields. Henry was born the son of a pretender. I think he will always feel unsteady on such a new throne.”

  I press his arm. “Take care, Cousin,” I advise. “It’s not wise for anyone, especially for those of us who once owned that throne,
to speak of the Tudors as newcomers. Neither of us was raised by our father.”

  The duke’s father was executed for treason against King Richard, mine for treason against King Edward. Perhaps treason runs in our veins with the royal blood and it would be wise to make sure that no one remembers it.

  “Oh, it’s not polite,” he concedes. “It’s true, of course. But not polite in me, as a host. But I think I have shown him what I wanted him to see. He has seen how a great lord of England lives. Not riding his horse up the stairs like a child, not throwing eggs at his tenants, not fooling like an idiot and playing all day, not promising love to alehouse maids, and sending a well-born mistress into hiding to bear a child as if one was ashamed of dirty doings.”

  I can’t argue with that. “He is contradictory. He always was.”

  “Vulgar,” the duke says under his breath.

  We come to the outskirts of the courtiers and people turn and bow low to us, standing back so that we can see the king, who is just about to draw the bow. Henry is like a beautifully wrought statue of an archer, poised, his weight a little back, his body a long, lean line from curly russet head to outstretched leg. We stand in attentive silence as His Grace bends the heavy longbow, pulls back the string, takes careful aim, and gently releases the arrow.

  It flies through the air with a hiss and clips the central bull in the target, not midcenter, but just on the edge, close—not perfect, but very close. Everyone bursts into enthusiastic applause; the queen smiles and takes up a little gold chain, ready to award it to her husband.

  Henry turns to my cousin. “Could you do better?” he shouts triumphantly. “Could anyone do better?”

  I grip the duke’s hand before he can step forward and take up a bow and arrow. “I am very sure he cannot,” I say, and the duke smiles and says: “I doubt that anyone could outshoot Your Grace.”