The King's Curse

by Philippa Gregory

  “If it wins him favor with the Lady, he’ll do it,” Arthur points out. “He’s beside himself. He’ll do anything.”

  “What did you call her?”

  “I called her the Lady. That’s what a lot of them are calling her.”

  I could curse like a stable boy with rage. “For sure they can’t call her ‘Your Grace,’ ” I say sharply. “Or ‘Your Ladyship.’ She’s nothing more than a knight’s daughter. She wasn’t good enough for Henry Percy.”

  “She likes anything that makes her stand out,” Arthur pursues. “She likes to be conspicuous. She likes the king to publicly acknowledge her. She’s terrified that everyone will think her nothing more than his whore, just like her sister, just like all the others. She makes him promise, all the time, that this will be different. She’s not to be another Bessie, she’s not to be another Mary. She’s not to be another laundry maid, or the French slut Jehanne. She’s got to be special, she’s got to be different. Everyone has to see that she is different.”

  “The lead hackney,” I say vulgarly.

  Montague looks at me. “No,” he says. “You have to see this, Lady Mother. It’s important. She’s more than his latest ride.”

  “What more can she be?” I demand impatiently.

  “If the queen should die . . .”

  “God forbid,” I say instantly, crossing myself.

  “Or say: if the queen should retire to live a religious life.”

  “Oh, do you think she would?” Arthur asks, surprised.

  “No, of course she wouldn’t!” I exclaim.

  “She might,” Montague insists. “She might. And really—she should. She knows that Henry has to have a son. Fitzroy isn’t enough. Princess Mary isn’t enough. The king has to leave a legitimate male heir, not a bastard boy or a girl. The queen knows this, every princess knows this. If she could rise to greatness, if she could act with great generosity, she could retire from the marriage, take the veil, then Henry could be free to marry again. She should do that.”

  “Oh, is this your opinion?” I ask bitingly. “The opinion of my son, who owes everything to the queen? Is this the opinion of the young men of the court who have sworn fealty to her?”

  He looks awkward. “I’m not the only one saying it,” he says. “And many more think it.”

  “Even so,” I say flatly. “Even if she were to choose to join a nunnery—and I swear she would not—that would make no difference to Anne Boleyn. If the queen stepped aside, it would only be for the king to marry a princess of Spain or France. The king’s whore would still be nothing but a whore.”

  “A consort?” Montague suggests.

  “A concubine?” Arthur smiles.

  I shake my head. “Are we Mahometans now? In the eyes of God and by the law of the land, there is nothing that girl can be but an adulterous whore. We don’t have concubines in England. We don’t have consorts. She knows it, and we know it. The best she can get for herself is the right to dance at court after the queen has withdrawn, and a title like ‘the Lady,’ for those who are too mealymouthed to call a whore a whore. Anything else means nothing.”

  LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, SUMMER 1527–1528

  I dare not tell Montague to write to me secretly, so everything that I know this summer is learned from tactful pointers in his breezy unsealed letters, or from the gossip at the castle gate from the occasional London tinker or pedlar. Montague writes to me family news: Arthur’s new baby, Margaret, is thriving; Ursula is out of confinement and has given the Staffords another boy, another Henry; and then one day he writes with quiet pride to tell me that he too has a son. I take the letter and I kiss it, and hold it to my heart. There will be another Henry Pole, there will be another Lord Montague after my son and I are long gone. This little baby, this Henry, is another step on our family path to greatness from greatness.

  He has to be silent about all other news. He can tell me nothing about the queen and the court, he cannot tell me that the king summoned Thomas More to walk in the garden with him at Hampton Court, and among the evening birdsong, and with the scent of the roses on the air, confided that he feared his marriage was invalid. He pronounced that his sister Margaret, the Dowager Queen of Scotland, could not get a divorce from the Pope, but that his marriage was a different case, that God had shown him, so painfully but so vividly in the deaths of his children, that his marriage is not blessed by God. And Thomas, good councillor he is, swallowed his own doubts at the divinity of this revelation, and promised the king that he will form an opinion, a thoughtful legal opinion, on the matter and advise his master.

  But Montague’s discretion makes no difference, for by the end of the summer, the whole kingdom knows that the king is seeking to end the marriage with his queen. The whole kingdom knows, but there is not one word of it inside the state rooms at Ludlow. I surprise myself at the power of the rule I have established over my household. Nobody speaks ugly gossip to the young woman in my charge and so the princess’s world is collapsing around her; and she does not know.

  Of course, in the end, I have to tell her. Many times I start; but each time the words simply die in my mouth. It is unreal to me, it is incredible to me, I cannot offer her an account of it, any more than I could seriously tell her the tale of the Lambton Worm as a fact rather than a ridiculous legend. It may be that everyone knows it, but still it is unreal.

  And anyway, just as I hope, nothing happens. Or at any rate, we have no certain report that anything has happened. We are so far away from London, in the very distant west, that we get no reliable news. But even out here, we learn that the queen’s nephew Charles V of Spain has invaded Rome and captured the Pope and is holding him virtually as a prisoner. This changes everything. Not even our all-persuasive cardinal with his honeyed words is going to be able to convince a pope imprisoned by the Spanish king to rule against the Spanish Queen of England. Any of the king’s complicated theological arguments about it being a sin to marry his brother’s widow will simply go unheard by the captive Pope. While the Spanish emperor commands the Pope, his aunt, the Spanish Queen of England, is safe. All she has to do is to assert the simple truth: that God called her to marry the King of England, and that there is no reason that the marriage is invalid. And I know she will assert that truth until she dies.

  In the very castle where Katherine and Arthur lived as passionate lovers, I say nothing to anyone about the love they shared, or about the promise he drew from her—that if he died, she must still be Queen of England and have a daughter called Mary. I say nothing about the lie that I swore to support. I put it from me as if it were a secret from so long ago that I cannot even remember it. My secret fear is that someone, sooner or later, perhaps the cardinal, perhaps Thomas More, or the cardinal’s new servant Thomas Cromwell, another man from nowhere, is going to ask me if Arthur and Katherine were lovers. I am praying that if I continue to study forgetfulness, then I can say in truth that I never knew, and now I cannot remember.

  The summer heat comes and brings with it an outbreak of the Sweat, and the queen summons the princess to join her and the king to travel the country far from London. Once again they are going to live privately while the country suffers.

  “You are to join them at St. Albans,” I say to Princess Mary. “I will take you there and go to my own house. I daresay you will spend the summer with them.”

  “With who?” she asks anxiously. “Who else will be there?”

  Poor child, I think. So she knows. Despite the shield I have put around her, she knows that Anne Boleyn goes everywhere with the king. Her silence about this has not been ignorance, but discretion. But I have good news for her, and I let her see my small, triumphant smile. “Alas,” I say, lingering over the word till her eyes shine and she gleams in return. “Alas, I hear that many of the court are ill. The cardinal has retreated to his home with his physician, and Anne Boleyn has gone to Hever. So it will just be a small court. Probably just your father and mother and perhaps one or two attendants, Thomas
More who is such a good man attending your father, Maria de Salinas with your mother.”

  Her face lights up. “Just my father and mother?”

  “Just them,” I confirm, and I wonder if it would be a sin to pray that the damned whore dies of the disease in Kent.

  “And you?” she asks.

  I hug her to me. “I will go to my home at Bisham and make sure that my family and my people are well. It is a terrible illness, I will be needed. Arthur and Jane have had a new baby, I pray that they are well. And I will write to you that we are well, and I will think of you, my darling.”

  “And I’ll come back to you,” she stipulates. “When the summer is over. We will be together again.”

  “Of course.”

  BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SUMMER 1528

  It is a terrible illness, God forgive England for the sin that has brought it down on us. There are many who say that this was foretold when the first Tudor came. There are many who say that the king cannot get a son and the country cannot enjoy good health. There are many who fear the present and predict a terrible future and blame it on the Tudor line.

  Everyone is talking of a young woman in Kent who has lain as if dead for weeks, and has now come back to life to say that princes should obey the Pope. Now they are calling her a visionary and flocking to hear what else she says. But I don’t need a prophetess to tell me that it will be a bad summer. When I had the message from London that men were dying in the streets, falling in the gutters as they were struggling to get to their homes, I knew that it would be a bad year for us all, even for my family, hiding behind the high walls of my great estate. Geoffrey and his wife, Constance, come to live with me, and Arthur sends me his children Henry and Margaret, my namesake, and the wet nurse with the baby, Mary, with a note to say that the Sweat has come to Broadhurst, he and Jane are both ill, they will pray that they survive it, and will I care for his children as if they were my own?

  I pray to God that it passes us by, he writes. If we are unlucky, Lady Mother, please care for my children, and pray for me as I pray for you.—A

  They are a pitiful pair, little Henry and Margaret, who goes by the name of Maggie. They stand, clutching each other’s hand, in my great hall and I kneel beside them and gather them into my arms and smile at them with a confidence I don’t feel.

  “I am so glad you have come to me, for I have much for you to do, work and play,” I promise them. “And as soon as everyone is well at Broadhurst your mother and father will come here to fetch you and you can show them how much you have grown and what good children you have been this summer.”

  I make sure that the house is run with the usual plague-season care. Anything that comes to us from the outside world is washed in vinegar and water. We buy as little food from the market at Bisham as possible, but live off our own lands. Strangers are not welcome, and anyone traveling through the town from London is invited to stay the night at the priory guesthouse, not in my home. I prepare gallons and gallons of tincture from rosemary and sage and sweet wine, and every servant in the household, every man, woman, and child who dines in the hall or sleeps in the straw, takes a spoonful of it every morning; but I never know if it does any good.

  I don’t attend the priory church and I forbid my household from going into the warm, dark, stinking place where the incense floats over the stench of the midden and unwashed bodies. Instead, I observe the daily liturgy with my own confessor in my own private chapel next to my bedroom and I pray on my knees for hours that this sickness will pass us by. Arthur’s two children say their evening and morning prayers in my chapel; I keep them at a distance from the priest, and when he blesses the baby he signs the cross in the air over her precious head.

  Especially I pray for Geoffrey, whose slight frame and clear skin make him seem so delicate to my worried inspection. I know that in reality he is strong and healthy, nobody could fail to see the color in his cheeks or his energy or his joy in life. But I watch him all the time for any signs of a fever, or a headache, or a shrinking from sunlight. His wife, Constance, is as enduring as her name, stocky as a pony, working hard for me, and I am grateful for her care of her husband. If she did not idolize him, I would hate her.

  I begin to think that we will get through this summer with nothing worse than a few deaths in the village and a kitchen boy who was probably sick but ran away to his own home and died there, when Geoffrey taps on the door of my private chapel as I am praying on my knees for the health of all those that I love, Princess Mary, the queen, and my children. He puts his golden head into the room.

  “Forgive me, Lady Mother,” he says.

  I know it must be important if he disturbs me at my prayers. I sit back on my heels and motion him to come in. He crosses himself and kneels beside me. I see his mouth is trembling almost as if he were a little boy again and fighting to hold back tears. Something terrible must have happened. Then I see his hands are clasped tight together and he closes his eyes for a moment as if summoning the help of God to deliver his message, then he turns and looks at me. His dark blue eyes are filled with tears as he takes my cold hand.

  “Lady Mother,” he says quietly. “I have very bad news for you.”

  “At once,” I say through cold numb lips. “Tell me quickly, Geoffrey.” I think, Is it the Princess Mary, the girl I love as if she were my own daughter? Is it Montague, my heir and the heir of my royal name? Is it one of the little children, could God be so cruel as to take another Plantagenet boy?

  “It’s Arthur,” he says, and his eyes fill with tears. “It’s my brother. He is dead, Lady Mother.”

  For a moment, I cannot hear him. I look at him as if I am deaf and don’t know what he is saying. He has to repeat himself. He says again: “It’s Arthur, my brother. He is dead, Lady Mother.”

  Arthur’s wife, Jane, is sick also, near to death. She has only one woman at her side, caring for her in her private rooms, so nobody tells her that her husband is dead. The steward of their household is so terrified of the sickness that he has abandoned his duty to his lord and his house and barricaded himself into his own rooms. In his absence the place is falling into complete disorder. There is no one to arrange things as they should be done, and so my son Montague commands that Arthur’s body is to be taken from his unlucky house and brought to our priory and laid in our chapel.

  We lay him to rest where the other Plantagenet kings are laid, in our priory at Bisham, and when the church is swept and cleaned and censed, I go with Geoffrey and Constance and we start the prayers for his soul and hear the monks take up the chant.

  We walk back to the house, and I look at the great house that I have renewed, with my family crest above the door, and I think, as bitterly as any sinner, that all the wealth and all the power that I won back for myself and my children could not save my beloved son Arthur from the Tudor sickness.

  BROADHURST MANOR, WEST SUSSEX, SUMMER 1528

  Montague and I ride over to Arthur’s house at Broadhurst and find the house in chaos and the hay uncut in the fields. The crops are ripening well, but the boys who should be scaring the birds are sick or dead, and the village is a silent place with shuttered windows and a bundle of hay at every other door. In the great house it seems everyone has run away. Only one woman is seeing to Jane, and no one is managing the house, or farming the lands.

  “There is no reason why you should do this,” Montague says to me as I stride into the hall and start to give orders to servants who have clearly been sleeping in the unchanged straw and dining out of the larder since the family took to their beds.

  “These are Arthur’s lands,” I say tersely. “This is what I made his marriage for. This is the inheritance of his son, Henry. I can’t see it go to waste. If Arthur cannot leave a fortune to his children, it’s as if he never won it by marrying her at all. If he doesn’t leave a legacy, then what’s the point of his life?”

  Montague nods. He goes outside to the stables and sees that our horses are turned out into the fields and then
tells the bailiff of the estate that, Sweat or no Sweat, he had better get a hay-making gang together tomorrow and start work, or they will die in the winter for lack of forage for the beasts, rather than dying now in the summer of the Sweat.

  Between the two of us, we set the house and the land to rights over weeks of work, and then the news comes from London that the illness seems to have burned out. The cardinal himself took the Sweat and yet survived it. God smiles on Thomas Wolsey for a second time. His ways are mysterious, indeed.

  “There’s no plague in the world that could touch him,” I say grimly. “No disease is poisonous enough to check that massive frame. What news from Hever?”

  “She’s survived as well,” Montague says to me, disdaining to name Anne Boleyn as I do. We exchange a look of baffled sorrow, that the Sweat should spare a troublesome slut and yet take Arthur.

  “Sir Arthur,” I say out loud.

  “God bless him,” Montague says. “Why him and not the others?”

  “God knows best in His wisdom,” I say; but my heart isn’t in it.

  Jane knows that we are in the house, but we don’t go to her rooms for fear of infection, and she doesn’t send any message to us, nor ask after her husband.

  “I’d think better of her if she asked,” I say irritably to Montague. “Has it not occurred to her?”

  “She may be fighting for her own life,” he says.

  He hesitates and then continues. “You do remember, Lady Mother, that there was provision in the marriage contract for Arthur’s early death? The lands that she brought to Arthur as her dowry will revert to her, her future inheritance from her father will go to her, for her to use as she wishes. Her father’s fortune will be hers alone, at his death. We get nothing.”

  I had not remembered this. The very lands that I have been working this month, the house that I have been repairing will bring me nothing. The contract that I wrote to make my son wealthy gave him nothing but worry, and now there is nothing for our family at all. “He never stopped his work for these lands,” I say angrily. “He was prepared to take over their military service and spare her father, he was prepared to command their tenants. He was ready to do everything for them. It was her own father who stood in Arthur’s way—old fool. And she supported her father against Arthur.”