The King's Curse

by Philippa Gregory

  “The more pity for us,” I say, thinking of Montague at court, Ursula struggling with the Stafford name, and Geoffrey, always at odds with his neighbors, trying to lead Parliament where they are more frightened and troubled than they have ever been. “It would have been better if we had gone unnoticed for a little while.”

  “He had to report,” Montague says firmly. “And it took great courage to say the truth. But he’s better out of the country. Then at least we’ll know that he can’t upset the king again.”

  WINDSOR CASTLE, BERKSHIRE, SUMMER 1531

  Princess Mary and I, with our ladies, travel to Windsor to visit her mother while the king is on progress with his riding court. Once again the court is divided; once again the king and his mistress rattle around the great houses of England, hunting all day and dancing all night and assuring each other that they are wonderfully happy. I wonder how long Henry will tolerate this. I wonder when the emptiness of this life will drive him home to his wife.

  The queen meets us at the castle gate, the great door behind her, the portcullis hanging above her, and even at a distance, as we ride up the hill to the great gray walls, I can see there is something about the straightness of her bearing and the turn of her head that tells me she has gripped tight onto her courage and that is all that is sustaining her.

  We dismount from our horses and I drop into a curtsey, while the queen and her daughter cling to each other wordlessly, as if Katherine of Aragon, the doubly royal queen, does not care for formality anymore but wants to hold her daughter in her arms and never let her go.

  She and I cannot talk privately until after dinner when Princess Mary has been sent to say her prayers and to bed; then Katherine calls me into her bedroom as if to pray together, and we draw up two stools to the fireside, close the door, and are quite alone.

  “He sent the young Duke of Norfolk to reason with me,” she says. I see the humor in her face, and for a moment, forgetting the horror of her situation, we both smile, and then we laugh outright.

  “And was he very very brilliant?” I ask.

  She holds my hand and laughs aloud. “Lord, how I miss his father!” she says, heartfelt. “He was a man with no learning and much heart. But this duke, his son, has neither!” She breaks off. “He kept saying: ‘Highest theological authorities, highest theological authorities,’ and when I asked him what he meant, he said: ‘Levitiaticus, Levitiaticus.’ ”

  I gasp with laughter.

  “And when I said that I thought it was generally accepted that the passage from Deuteronomy indicated that a man should marry his deceased brother’s wife, he said: “What? Deuteronomous? What, Suffolk? Do you mean Deuteronomous? Don’t talk to me about scripture, I’ve never damn well read them. I have a priest to do that. I have a priest to do that for me.”

  “The Duke of Suffolk, Charles Brandon, was here too?” I ask, sobering quickly.

  “Of course. Charles would do anything for the king,” she says. “He always has done. He has no judgment at all. He’s torn, of course. His wife the dowager queen remains my friend, I know.”

  “Half the country is your friend,” I say. “All the women.”

  “But it makes no difference,” she says steadily. “Whether the country thinks I am right or wrong can make no difference. I have to live my life in the position that God appointed. I have no choice. My mother said I should be Queen of England when I was a little girl of no more than four, Prince Arthur himself chose this destiny for me from his deathbed, God placed me here at my coronation. Only the Holy Father can command me differently and he has yet to speak. But how d’you think Mary is taking this?”

  “Badly,” I say truthfully. “She bleeds heavily with her courses, and they give her much pain. I have consulted with wise women and even spoken to a physician, but nothing they suggest seems to make any difference. And when she knows that there is trouble between you and her father, she can’t eat. She is sick with distress. If I force her to eat anything, she vomits it up again. She knows something of what is happening, Our Lady alone knows what she imagines. The king himself spoke of it to her as you failing in your duty. It’s terrible to see. She loves her father, she adores him, and she is loyal to him as the King of England. And she cannot live without you, she cannot be happy knowing that you are fighting for your name and your honor. This is destroying her health.” I pause, looking at her downturned face. “And it goes on and on and on, and I cannot tell her that there will be an end to it.”

  “I can do nothing but serve God,” she says stubbornly. “Whatever it costs, I can do nothing but follow His laws. It blights my life too, and the king’s. Everyone says he is like a man possessed. This isn’t love, we’ve seen him in love. This is like a sickness. She does not call to his heart, to his true, loving heart. She calls to his vanity and she feeds it as if it were a monster. She calls to his scholarship and tricks him with words. I pray every day that the Holy Father writes simply and clearly to the king to tell him to put that woman aside. For Henry’s sake now, not even for mine. For his own dear sake, for she is destroying him.”

  “Has he gone on progress with her?”

  “Gone on progress leaving Thomas More to chase heretics through London and burn them for questioning the Church. The London tradesmen are persecuted, but she is allowed to read forbidden books.”

  For a moment I don’t see the weariness in her face, the lines around her eyes, or the paleness of her cheeks. I see the princess who lost the young man she loved, her first love, and the girl who kept her promise to him. “Ah, Katherine,” I say tenderly. “How have we come to this? However did this come about?”

  “D’you know, he left without saying good-bye?” she says wonderingly. “He has never done that before. Never in all his life. Not even these last few years. However angry he was, however troubled, he would never go to bed without saying good night to me, and he would never leave without saying good-bye. But this time he rode away, and when I sent after him to say that I wished him well, he replied . . .” She breaks off, her voice weakened. “He said that he did not want my good wishes.”

  We are silent. I think that it is not like Henry to be rude. His mother taught him the perfect manners of royalty. He prizes himself on his courtesy, on his chivalry. That he should be discourteous—publicly and crudely discourteous to his wife, the queen—is another distinct line of paint in the portrait of this new king that is emerging: a king who will draw a blade on an unarmed younger man, who will allow his court to hound an old friend to his death, who watched his favorite and her brother and sister miming the act of dragging a cardinal of the Church down to hell.

  I shake my head at the folly of men, at their cruelty, the pointless, bullying cruelty of a stupid man. “He’s showing off,” I say certainly. “In some ways he’s still the little prince I knew. He’s showing off to please her.”

  “He was cold,” the queen says. She draws her shawl around her shoulders as if she feels his coldness in her chamber even now. “My messenger said that when the king turned away, his eyes were bright and cold.”

  Only a few weeks later, just as we are about to go out riding, we get a message from the king. Katherine sees the royal seal and tears it open in the stable yard, her face alight with hope. For a moment I think that the king is commanding us to join him on progress, he has recovered from his ill temper and wants to see his wife and daughter.

  Slowly, as she reads the letter, her face falls. “It’s not good news,” is all she says.

  I see Mary put her hand to her belly as if she is suddenly queasy, and she turns from her horse as if she cannot bear the thought of sitting in a saddle. The queen hands me the letter and walks from the stable yard and into the palace without another word.

  I read. It is a terse command from one of the king’s secretaries: the queen is to pack up and leave Greenwich Palace at once and go to the More, one of the houses of the late cardinal. But Mary and I are not to go with her. We are to return to Richmond Palace, where the king w
ill visit us when he passes on his progress.

  “What can I do?” Mary asks, looking after her mother. “What should I do?”

  She is only fifteen years old; there is nothing that she can do. “We have to obey the king,” I say. “As your mother will do. She will obey him.”

  “She will never agree to a divorce.” Mary rounds on me, her voice raised, her face anguished.

  “She will obey him in everything that her conscience allows,” I correct myself.

  RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SUMMER 1531

  We get home and I have a sense of a storm about to break as soon as the door to Mary’s bedroom is closed behind us. All the way home, in the royal barge with people cheering her from the riverbank, she was dignified and steady. She took her seat at the rear of the barge on her gold throne, turning her head to right and left. When the wherrymen cheered her, she raised a hand; when the fishwives at the Lambeth quay shouted: “God bless you, Princess, and your mother, the queen,” she inclined her head a little, to show that she heard them, but no further to indicate disloyalty to her father. She held herself like a marionette on tight wires, but the moment that we are home and the door is shut behind us, she collapses as if all the strings are cut at once.

  She drops to the floor in a storm of sobbing; there is no comforting her, there is no silencing her. Her eyes run, her nose, her deep sobs turn to retches and then she vomits out her grief. I fetch a bowl and pat her back, and still she does not stop. She heaves again but nothing comes except bile. “Stop,” I say. “Stop this, Mary, stop.”

  She has never disobeyed me in her life before, but I see that she cannot stop; it is as if the separation of her parents has torn her apart. She chokes and coughs and sobs some more as if she would spit out her lungs, her heart. “Stop, Mary,” I say. “Stop crying.”

  I don’t believe she can even hear me. She is eviscerating herself as if she were a traitor being disemboweled, choking on her tears, on bile, or phlegm, and her wailing goes on.

  I pull her up from the floor and I wrap her in shawls, as tightly as if I were swaddling a baby. I want her to feel held, though her mother cannot hold her, though her father has let her fall. I tighten the scarves around her heaving belly, and she turns her head away from me and gasps for breath as I tighten the fabric around her body and wrap her close. I lie her on her back on the bed, holding her thin shoulders, and still her mouth gapes wide on her unstoppable sobs and still her grief racks her. I rock her, as if she were a swaddled baby, I wipe the tears that come from her red swollen eyes, I wipe her nose, I pat the saliva from her drooling mouth. “Hush,” I say gently. “Hush. Hush, little Mary, hush.”

  It grows dark outside and her sobs become quieter; she breathes and then she gives a little hiccough of grief, and then she breathes again. I lay my hand on her forehead where she is burning hot, and I think between the two of them they have nearly killed their only child. All through this long night, while Mary sobs herself to sleep and then wakes and cries out again as if she cannot believe that her father has abandoned her mother and they have both left her, I forget that Katherine is in the right, that she is doing the will of God, that she swore to be Queen of England and that God called her to this place just as He calls those whom He loves. I forget that my darling Mary is a princess and must never deny her name, that God has called her, and it would be a sin to deny her throne as it would be a sin to deny her life. I just think that this child, this fifteen-year-old girl, is paying a terrible price for her parents’ battle; and it would be better for her, as it was better for me, to walk away from a royal name and a royal claim altogether.

  The court splits and divides, like a country readying for war. Some are invited to the king’s progress around the hunting estates of England, riding all day and merrymaking all night. Some stay with the queen at the More, where she keeps a good household and a large court. Very many slip away to go to their own houses and lands and pray that they will not be forced to choose whether to serve the king or the queen.

  Montague travels with the king, his place is at his side, but his loyalty is always with the queen. Geoffrey goes home to Sussex, to his wife at Lordington, who gives birth to their first child. They call him Arthur, for the brother whom Geoffrey loved best. Geoffrey writes at once to me to ask for an allowance for his baby son. He is a young man who cannot hold money, and I laugh at the thought of his lordly extravagance. He is too generous to his friends and keeps too wealthy a household. I know that I should refuse him; but I cannot. Besides, he has given the family another boy, and that is a gift beyond price.

  I stay with Princess Mary at Richmond Palace. She is still hoping to be allowed to join her mother, writing carefully loving letters to her father, receiving only occasional scrawled replies.

  I think it is a message from him when I see, from the window of her presence chamber, half a dozen riders on the road below, coming towards the palace and turning in through the great gates. I wait at the door of the presence chamber for the letter to be brought up. I will take it to the princess herself when she comes from her private chapel. I find I am afraid now what news she will read.

  Yet it is no royal messenger but old Tom Darcy who comes slowly up the stairs, clutching the small of his back until he sees me waiting, when he straightens up and makes his bow.

  “Your lordship!” I say, surprised.

  “Margaret Pole, Countess!” he replies, and holds out his arms to me so that I can kiss him on the cheek. “You look well.”

  “I am well,” I say.

  He glances towards the closed door of the presence chamber and cocks a grizzled eyebrow. “Not so well,” I say shortly.

  “Anyway, it’s you I’ve come to see,” he says.

  I lead the way to my own rooms. My ladies are with the princess in the chapel, so we are quite alone in the pretty, sunny room. “Can I offer you something to drink?” I ask. “Or to eat?”

  He shakes his head. “I hope to come and go unobserved,” he says. “If anyone asks you why I was here, you can say that I called in as I was going to London, to pay my respects to the princess, but came away without seeing her because she was . . .”

  “She’s unwell,” I say.

  “Sick?”

  “Melancholy.”

  He nods. “No surprise. I came to see you about the queen her mother, and about her, poor young woman.”

  I wait.

  “Next Parliament, after Christmas, they are going to try to bring the cause of the king’s marriage into the judgment of England, away from the Pope. They’re going to ask Parliament to support that.”

  Lord Darcy sees my small nod.

  “They mean to annul the marriage and disinherit the princess,” Darcy says quietly. “I’ve told Norfolk that I can’t stand by and see it happen. He’s told me to keep my old mouth shut. I need others to join with me, if I speak out.” He looks at me. “Will Geoffrey speak with me? Will Montague?”

  I find I am twisting the rings on my fingers, and he takes my hands in his firm grip and holds me still. “I need your support,” he says.

  “I am sorry,” I say eventually. “You’re in the right, I know it, my sons know it. But I don’t dare have them speak out.”

  “The king will usurp the rights of the Church,” Tom warns me. “He will usurp the rights of the Church just so that he can give himself permission to abandon a faultless wife and disinherit an innocent child.”

  “I know!” I burst out. “I know! But we don’t dare defy him. Not yet!”

  “When?” he asks shortly.

  “When we have to,” I say. “When we absolutely have to. At the last moment. Not before. In case the king sees sense, in case something changes, in case the Pope makes a clear ruling, in case the emperor comes, in case we can get through this without standing up to be counted against the most powerful man in England, perhaps the most powerful man in the world.”

  He has been listening very carefully, and now he nods and puts his arm around my shoulders
as if I were still a girl and he were a handsome young Lord of the North. “Ah, Lady Margaret, my dear, you’re afraid,” he says gently.

  I nod. “I am. I am sorry. I can’t help it. I am afraid for my boys. I can’t risk them going to the Tower. Not them. Not them as well.” I look into his old face for understanding. “My brother . . .” I whisper. “My cousin . . .”

  “He can’t charge us all with treason,” Tom says stoutly. “If we stand together. He can’t charge us all.”

  We stand in silence for a moment, and then he releases me and reaches into the inside of his jacket and produces a beautifully embroidered badge, such as a man might pin to his collar before going into battle. It is the five wounds of Christ. Two hands with bleeding palms, two feet, stabbed and bleeding, a bleeding heart with a trail of red embroidery, and then, like a halo over it all, a white rose. Gently, he puts it into my hands.

  “This is beautiful!” I am dazzled by the quality of the work and struck by the imagery that links the sufferings of Christ with the rose of my house.

  “I had them embroidered when I was planning an expedition against the Moors,” he said. “D’you remember? Years ago. Our crusade. The mission came to nothing, but I kept the badges. I had this one made with the rose of your house for your cousin who was riding with me.”

  I tuck it into the pocket of my gown. “I am grateful to you. I shall put it with my rosary and pray on it.”

  “And I shall pray that I never have to issue it in wartime,” he says grimly. “Last time I gave it out to my men we were sworn to die to defend the Church against the infidel. Pray God we never have to defend against heresy here.”