The King's Curse

by Philippa Gregory

  Lord Darcy is not our only visitor to Richmond Palace as the hot weather goes on and the king’s court stays away from his capital city. Elizabeth, my kinswoman, the Duchess of Norfolk, Thomas Howard’s wife, comes to visit us and brings a gift of game and much gossip.

  She pays her compliments to the princess and then comes to my privy chamber. Her ladies sit with mine at a distance, and she requests two of them to sing. Shielded from observation and with our quiet voices drowned out by the music, she says to me: “The Boleyn whore has commanded the marriage of my own daughter.”

  “No!” I exclaim.

  She nods, keeping her face carefully impassive. “She commands the king, he commands my husband, and nobody consults me at all. In effect, she commands me, me: a Stafford by birth. Wait till you hear her choice.”

  Obediently, I wait.

  “My daughter Mary is to be married to the king’s bastard.”

  “Henry Fitzroy?” I ask incredulously.

  “Yes. My lord is delighted, of course. He has the highest of hopes. I would not have had my Mary mixed up in this for the world. When you next see the queen, tell her that I have never wavered in my love and loyalty to her. This betrothal is none of my doing. I think of it as my shame.”

  “Mixed up?” I ask cautiously.

  “I tell you what I think is going to happen,” she says in a quick, furious whisper. “I think the king is going to put the queen aside, whatever anyone says, send her to a nunnery, and declare himself a single man.”

  I sit very still, as if someone was telling me of a new plague at my doorstep.

  “I think he will deny the princess, say that she is illegitimate.”

  “No,” I whisper.

  “I do. I think that he will marry the Boleyn woman, and if she gives him a son, he will declare that boy his heir.”

  “The marriage wouldn’t be valid,” I say quietly, holding on to the one thing that I know.

  “Not at all. It will be made in hell against the will of God! But who in England is going to tell the king that? Are you?”

  I swallow. No one is going to tell him. Everyone knows what happened to Reginald when he merely reported the opinion of the French universities.

  “He will disinherit the princess,” she says. “God forgive him. But if the king cannot get a son on the Boleyn woman, he has Fitzroy in reserve and he will make him his heir.”

  “Bessie Blount’s boy? In the place of our princess?” I try to sound scathing but I am finding it all too easy to believe her.

  “He is the Duke of Richmond and Somerset,” she reminds me. “Commander of the North, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The king has given him every great title, so why not Prince of Wales among all the others?”

  I know this was the cardinal’s old plan. I had hoped it had fallen with him. “No one would support such a thing,” I say. “No one would allow a legitimate heir to be replaced with a bastard.”

  “Who would rise against it?” she demands. “No one would like it but who would have the courage to rise against it?”

  I close my eyes for a moment and I shake my head. I know that it should be us. If anyone, it should be us.

  “I’ll tell you who would rise if you would lead them,” she says in a quiet, passionate whisper. “The common people and everyone who would carry a sword at the Pope’s command, everyone who would follow the Spanish when they invade for their princess, everyone who loves the queen and supports the princess, and every Plantagenet that has ever been born. One way or another that’s nearly everyone in England.”

  I put out a hand. “Your Grace, you know I cannot have this talk in the princess’s household. For her sake as well as mine I cannot hear it.”

  She nods. “But it’s true.”

  “But why would the Boleyn woman want such a match?” I ask her curiously. “Your daughter Mary brings a great dowry, and her father commands great acres of England—and all his tenants. Why would the Boleyn woman give such power to Henry Fitzroy?”

  The duchess nods. “Better for her than his other choice,” she says. “She can’t bear his marriage to the Princess Mary. She can’t bear to see the princess as heir.”

  “That would never have happened,” I say flatly.

  “Who would stop it?” she challenges me.

  My hand creeps to my pocket where I keep my rosary and Tom Darcy’s badge of the five wounds of Christ under the white rose of my house. Would Tom Darcy stop it? Would we join him? Would I sew this badge onto my son’s collar and send him out to fight for the princess?

  “Anyway,” she concludes. “I came to tell you that I don’t forget my love and loyalty to the queen. If you see her tell her that I would do anything, I will do everything I can. I speak with the Spanish ambassador, I speak to my kinsmen.”

  “I can be no part of it. I am not gathering her supporters.”

  “Well, you should be,” the duchess says bluntly.

  RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SUMMER 1531

  Lady Margaret Douglas, the king’s niece, daughter of the Scottish queen, his sister, is ordered to leave us, though she and the princess have become the firmest of friends. She is not to be sent to her mother, but going into service at court, to wait upon the Boleyn woman, as if she were a queen.

  She is excited at the thought of being at court, hopeful that her dark prettiness will turn heads; brunettes are in fashion, with the Boleyn woman’s black hair and olive skin being much praised. But she hates the thought of serving a commoner, clinging to Princess Mary and holding me tightly before she steps into the royal barge that has come for her.

  “I don’t know why I can’t stay with you!” she exclaims.

  I raise my hand in farewell. I don’t know why either.

  I have a summer wedding to prepare, and I turn from my fears for the princess to write the contracts and agree the terms with the same joy that I pick the flowers to make a garland for the bride, my granddaughter, Katherine, Montague’s oldest. She is only ten, but I am glad to get Francis Hastings for her. Her sister Winifred is betrothed to his brother Thomas Hastings, so our fortunes are safely linked to a rising family; the boys’ father, my kinsman, has just been made an earl. We have a pretty betrothal ceremony and a wedding feast for the two little girls, and Princess Mary smiles when the two couples come handfasted down the aisle, as if she were their older sister and as proud of them as I am.

  ENGLAND, CHRISTMAS 1531

  This Christmas season has little joy in it, not for the princess, nor for her mother the queen. Not even her father the king seems to be happy; he keeps the feast at Greenwich in the most lavish style, but people say that it was a merry court when the queen was on the throne and now he is hagridden by a woman who cannot be satisfied and will give him no pleasure.

  The queen is at the More, well served and honored; but alone. Princess Mary and I are ordered to go to Beaulieu in Essex, and we keep the Christmas feast there. I make the twelve days of Christmas as happy as I can for her; but through all the wassailing, and dancing, disguising and feasting, the bringing in of the Yule log and the raising of the Christmas crown, I know that Mary is missing her mother, and praying for her father, and that there is very little joy anywhere in England these days.

  RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, MAY 1532

  It is a beautiful early summer, as lovely as if the countryside itself wanted to make everyone remember this time. Every morning there is a pearly mist on the river that hides the quietly lapping water, and the duck and geese rise out of it with slowly beating wings.

  At sunrise the heat burns the mist away and leaves the grass sparkling with dew, every cobweb a work of lace and diamonds. Now I can smell the river, damp and wet and green, and sometimes, if I sit very still on the pier, looking down through the floating weed and the clumps of sweet-smelling water mint, I see schools of little fish and the movement of trout.

  In the water meadows running down from the palace to the river the cows wallow hock-deep in thick, lush grass bright with
buttercups, and flick their tails against the flies that buzz around them. Amorously, they walk shoulder to shoulder with the bull, and the little calves wobble on unsteady legs after their dams.

  First the swifts arrive, and then the swallows and then the martins, and soon on every wall of the palace there is a frenzy of building and rebuilding the little mud cups of nests. All day long the birds are flying from river to eaves, stopping only to preen on the roofs of the stables, pretty as little nuns in their black and white. When the parents fly past the nests, the newly hatched chicks bob up their little heads and cry out, each yellow beak wide open.

  We are filled with the joy of the season, and we bring in the May, and have dances in the woods, rowing races and swimming contests. The courtiers take a fancy to fishing and every young man brings a rod and a line and we have a bonfire by the river, where the cooks seethe the catch in butter in cauldrons set in the ashes, and serve it sizzling hot. As the sun lies low and the little silver moon rises, we go out in the barges and the musicians play for us and the music drifts across the water as the sky turns to peach, and the river becomes a pathway of rose gold that might lead us anywhere, and the tide feels as if it will draw us far away.

  We are coming home at dusk, singing softly with the lute player, without torches so the gray of twilight lies on the water and the bats dipping in and out of the silvery river are undisturbed, when I hear a drum for rowers echoing across the water like distant cannon fire, and I see Montague’s barge carrying torches fore and aft coming swiftly towards us.

  Our barges land at the pier, and I order Princess Mary into the palace, thinking that I will meet Montague alone, but for once, for the very first time, she does not make the face of a sulky child and slowly go where she is bidden. She stops to face me, and says: “My dear, my dearest Lady Governess, I think I should meet your son. I think he should tell us both what he has come to tell you. It is time. I am sixteen. I am old enough.”

  Montague’s barge is at the pier; I can hear the rattle of the gangplank behind me and the footsteps of the rowers as they make a guard of honor, their oars held high.

  “I am brave enough,” she promises. “Whatever he has to say.”

  “Let me find out what is happening, and I will come at once and tell you,” I temporize. “You are old enough. It is time. But . . .” I break off, I make a little gesture as if to say, you are so slight, you are so fragile, how are you going to bear bad news?

  She raises her head, she puts back her shoulders. She is her mother’s daughter in the way that she prepares herself for the very worst. “I can bear anything,” she says. “I can bear any trial that God sends to me. I was raised for this; you yourself educated me for this. Tell your son to come and report to me, his future sovereign.”

  Montague stands before us, bows to us both, and waits, looking from one to the other: the mother whose judgment he trusts, and the young royal in my keeping.

  She nods her head to him as if she were a queen already. She turns and seats herself in a little bower that we have made, a seat for lovers to enjoy the river in the shade of a rosebush and honeysuckle. She sits as if it is a throne, and the flowers breathing their scent into the night air are her canopy of state. “You can tell me, Lord Montague. What grave news do you have, that you come from London with your oars pulling so fast and the drum beating so loud?” And when she sees him glance at me, she says again: “You can tell me.”

  “It is bad news. I came to tell my Lady Mother.” Almost without thinking he pulls off his cap and drops to one knee before her as if she were queen.

  “Of course,” she says steadily. “I knew it as soon as I saw your barge. But you can tell us both. I am no child, and I am no fool. I know my father is moving against the Holy Church, and I need to know what has happened, Lord Montague, help me. Be a good advisor to me, and tell me what has happened.”

  He looks up at her as if he would spare her this. But he tells her simply and quietly. “Today the Church surrendered to the king. Only God knows what will happen. But from today the king will rule the Church himself. The Pope is to be disregarded in England. He is no more than a bishop, the Bishop of Rome.” He shakes his head in disbelief as he says it. “The Pope is overthrown by the king, and the king sits below God with the Church below him. Thomas More has returned the seal of Lord Chancellor and resigned his post and gone home.”

  She knows that her mother has lost a true friend and her father the last man who would tell him the truth. She is silent as she takes in the news. “The king has made the Church his own?” she asks. “All its wealth? And its laws and its courts? This is to take England entirely into his own possession.”

  Neither I nor my son can contradict her.

  “They are calling it the submission of the clergy,” he says quietly. “The Church cannot make law, the Church cannot convict heresy, the Church may not pay its wealth to Rome, and it may not take commands from Rome.”

  “So that the king can rule on his own marriage,” the princess says. I realize that she has thought deeply on this, and that her mother will have told her the many clever measures that the king and his new advisor Thomas Cromwell have undertaken.

  We are silent.

  “Jesus Himself appointed his servant Peter to rule the Church,” she observes. “I know this. Everyone knows this. Is England to disobey Jesus Christ?”

  “This is not our battle,” I interrupt. “This is a matter for churchmen. Not for us.”

  Her blue York gaze turns to me as if she hopes that I will tell the truth, but knows that I will not.

  “I mean it,” I insist. “This is a great matter. It is for the king and the Church to decide. It is for the Holy Father to remonstrate, if he thinks best. It is for the king to take advice and make his claim, as he thinks best. It is for the churchmen in Parliament to respond to the king. Thomas More must speak out, John Fisher will speak out, your own tutor Richard Fetherston has spoken out, it is for the men, the bishops, and archbishops. Not us.”

  “Oh, they have spoken,” Montague says bitterly. “The churchmen spoke at once. Most of them agreed without an argument, and when it came to a vote, they stayed away. That is why Thomas More has gone home to Chelsea.”

  The little princess rises from the garden seat and Montague gets to his feet. She does not take his offered arm but turns to me. “I shall go to my chapel and pray,” she says. “I shall pray for wisdom to guide me in these difficult days. I wish that I knew what I should do.”

  She is silent for a moment, looking at us both. “I shall pray for my tutors and for Bishop Fisher. And I shall pray for Thomas More,” she says. “I think that he is a man who does know what he should do.”

  RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SUMMER 1532

  That was the end of our carefree summer, and the end of the good weather too, for as the princess prayed in the private chapel, turning over her rosary beads naming her mother, Bishop Fisher, and Thomas More, to St. Jude, the saint for the hopeless and the despairing, the clouds rolled up the valley, making the river dark, and then it started to rain with the thick, heavy drops of a summer storm.

  The bad weather lasted for weeks, heavy clouds lay over the city, and people grew bad-tempered and exhausted in the heat. When the clouds cleared at night, instead of the familiar stars there was a succession of constant burning comets crossing the sky. People watching the troubled stars saw standards and banners and unmistakable signs of war. One of Reginald’s former friends, one of the Carthusian monks, told my confessor that he had clearly seen a burning red globe hanging above their church, and from this he knew that the king’s anger would fall on them for keeping their prophecy safe, and hiding the manuscript.

  The fishermen who came to the pier with fresh trout for the household said that they were catching dead bodies in their nets, so many men were throwing themselves into the flood waters of the unusually high tides. “Heretics,” one said, “for the Church will burn them if they don’t drown themselves. Thomas More will see t
o that.”

  “Not anymore,” said the other. “For More will be burned himself, and the heretics are safe in England now that the king’s whore is a Lutheran. It is those who love the old ways and who pray to the Virgin and honor the queen who are drowning themselves in the new tide.”

  “That’s enough from both of you,” I say, pausing at the kitchen door while the cook picks out her baskets of fish. “We don’t want any talk like that in this household. Take your money and go, and don’t come here again or I will report you.”

  I can silence the men at the door, but every man, woman, and child on the road to or from London who passes our door and calls in for the free food given out at the end of every meal has one story or another, and they all have the same ominous theme.

  They are talking of miracles, of prophecies. They believe that the queen is receiving daily messages from her nephew the emperor, promising that he will defend her, and there will be a Spanish fleet sailing up the Thames any dawn. They don’t know for sure, but they heard from someone that the Pope is consulting with his advisors, hammering out a compromise because he is afraid that the Christian kings will turn on each other over this matter, while the Turk is at the door of Christendom. They don’t know, but everyone seems to be sure that the king is advised only by the Boleyns and by their lawyers and churchmen, and they are telling him wicked lies: that the only way ahead to his desires is to steal the Church, to set aside his coronation oath, to tear up Magna Carta itself and act the tyrant and defy anyone who says that he cannot do such a thing.

  No one knows anything for sure; but they know very well that there are dangerous times ahead, and that the smell of danger is in the air, and that every time the thunder rumbles someone, somewhere in England, says: “Listen. Was that guns? Is the war starting again?”