The King's Curse

by Philippa Gregory

  Montague smiles ruefully. “Well, at any rate, I’m sure that Geoffrey would never betray us,” he says. “I think he’s been to Syon and traveled with her to Canterbury. But so have many others. Fisher and More among them.”

  “Thousands have heard her preach,” I point out. “Thousands have met with her privately. If Thomas Cromwell wants to arrest everyone who has prayed with the Maid of Kent, then he will have to arrest most of the kingdom. If he wants to arrest those who think the queen is wrongly put aside, he will have to arrest everyone in the kingdom but the Duke of Norfolk, the Boleyns, and the king himself. Surely we would be safe, my son? We’d be lost in the crowd.”

  But Thomas Cromwell is a bolder man than I realized. A more ambitious man than I realized. He arrests the Maid of Kent, he arrests seven holy men with her, and once again, he arrests John Fisher, the bishop, and Thomas More, the former Lord Chancellor, as if they were nobodies whom he could pick up from the street and fling in the Tower for nothing more than disagreeing with him.

  “He can’t arrest a bishop for speaking with a nun!” Princess Mary says. “He simply cannot.”

  “They say that he has,” I reply.

  BEAULIEU, ESSEX, WINTER 1533

  I don’t expect us to be invited to court for Christmas, though I hear that they are keeping very great estate and celebrating another pregnancy. They say that the woman who calls herself queen is walking with her head stiffly high, and her hand forever clasped to her belly, where they are letting out the laces on her stomacher. They say that she is confident it will be a boy this time. I imagine she is on her knees every night, praying for him.

  Under these circumstances I doubt that they will want my assistance. I have attended so many royal lyings-in that disappointment hangs around me like a dark cloak. I doubt that they will want the princess at court either, so I order the household to prepare for the feast at Beaulieu. I don’t expect the princess to be very merry—she is not even allowed to send her mother a gift or the good wishes of the season. I suspect that the woman who calls herself queen has warned people not to visit or send gifts; but the princess is a princess to us, and her state demands that we hold a Christmas feast.

  Although they are forbidden to pay their respects it’s touching to see how the country people send her their love and support. There is a constant stream of apples and cheeses and even smoked hams coming to the door with the good wishes of the local farmers’ wives. All my family, even the most distant cousins, send her a little Christmas gift. The churches for miles around pray for her by name and for her mother, and every servant in the house and every visitor refers to her as “Her Grace the Princess” and serves her on bended knee.

  I don’t order them to honor her state and defy the king; but in our house at Beaulieu it is as if he never spoke. Many of the people in her service have been with her since she was a little girl. She has always been “Her Grace” to us; even if we wanted to rename her, we would not be able to remember it. Lady Anne Hussey boldly calls her by her true title and when anyone remarks on it says that she’s forty-three and too old to change her ways.

  The princess and I are mounting up to go hunting on a bright winter morning. We are in the central courtyard with her little court on their horses and ready to trot out, passing around the stirrup cup with some hot wine to keep out the cold, the hounds running everywhere, sniffing everything, sometimes bursting into excited yelping. The princess’s Master of Horse helps her into the saddle as I stand at the horse’s head, patting his neck. Without thinking, I ease my finger under the girth of her horse to check that it is as tight as it can be. The Master of Horse smiles at me and ducks his head in a little bow. “I wouldn’t leave Her Grace’s girth loose,” he said. “Never.”

  I have a shamefaced blush. “I know you wouldn’t,” I say. “But I can’t let her mount without checking it.”

  Princess Mary laughs. “She’d have me on a pillion saddle behind you, if she could,” she says naughtily. “She’d have me ride a donkey.”

  “I’m supposed to keep you safe,” I say. “In the saddle or out of it.”

  “She’ll be safe enough on Blackie,” he says, and then something at the gate catches his eye and he turns and says quietly to me, “Soldiers!”

  I scramble up onto the mounting block so I can see over the tossing heads of the horses that there are soldiers running into the yard, and behind them a man on a great horse with a standard unfurling.

  “Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk.”

  Princess Mary moves, as if she would dismount, but I nod to her to stay in the saddle and I stand tall, like a statue on a pedestal, waiting for the Duke of Norfolk to ride up to me.

  “Your Grace,” I say coldly. I loved his father, the old duke, who was a loyal adherent to the queen. I am fond of his wife, my cousin, and he makes her quite miserable. There is nothing I like about him, this man who has stepped into the shoes of a greater father, and inherited all of the ambition and none of the wisdom.

  “My Lady Countess,” he says. He looks past me at the princess. “Lady Mary,” he says very loudly.

  There is a stirring as everyone hears him, and everyone wants to contradict him. I see the head of his guard look quickly around, as if to count our numbers and assess his danger. I see him note that we are going hunting and that many of the men have a dagger at their side or a knife in a scabbard. But Howard is safe enough, he has commanded his guard to come fully armed, ready for a fight.

  Coolly I count their number, and their weapons, and I look at the hard-faced duke and wonder what he hopes to achieve. The Princess Mary’s face is turned slightly away, as if she cannot hear him, as if she does not know that he is there.

  “I have brought you news of changes to the household,” he says, loudly enough for her to hear. Still, she does not deign to look at him. “His Grace the King commands that you are to come to court.”

  That catches her; she turns, her face alight, smiling. “To court?” she asks.

  Grimly, he goes on. I realize that this is no pleasure to him. This is dirty work that he will have to do, and probably worse than this, if he is going to serve the king and the woman who now calls herself queen.

  “You are to go to court to serve the Princess Elizabeth,” he says, his voice clear above the noise of the horses and the hounds, and the swelling discontented murmur from the princess’s household.

  The joy dies from her face at once. She shakes her head. “I cannot serve a princess, I am the princess,” she says.

  “It’s not possible,” I start to say.

  Howard turns on me and thrusts into my hands an open sheet of paper with the king’s scrawled H at the foot and his seal. “Read it,” he says rudely.

  He dismounts and throws the reins to one of his men and walks without invitation through the open double doors into the great hall beyond.

  “I’ll see him,” I say quickly to the princess. “You go riding. I’ll see what we have to do.”

  She is shaking with rage. I glance at her Master of Horse. “Take care of her,” I say warningly.

  “I am a princess,” she spits. “I serve no one but the queen, my mother, and the king, my father. Tell him that.”

  “I’ll see what we can do,” I promise her, and I jump down from the mounting block, wave my hunter away, and follow Thomas Howard into the darkness of the hall.

  “I’ve not come to dispute the rights and wrongs, I’ve come to accomplish the king’s will,” he says the moment I step into the great room.

  I doubt that the duke could dispute the rights and wrongs of anything. He’s no great philosopher. He’s certainly no Reginald.

  I bow my head. “What is the king’s will?”

  “There’s a new law.”

  “Another new law?”

  “A new law that determines the heirs of the king.”

  “It’s not enough that we all know the firstborn son takes the throne?”

  “God has told the king that his marriage to Queen Ann
e is his only valid marriage, and that her children will be his heirs.”

  “But Princess Mary can still be a princess,” I point out. “Just one of two. The senior of two, the oldest of two.”

  “No,” the duke says flatly. I can see this puzzles him and immediately he is irritated that I have raised it. “That’s not how it’s going to be. I am not here to argue with you, but to do the king’s will. I’m to take her to Hatfield Palace. She’s to live there, under the supervision of Sir John and Lady Anne Shelton. She’s to take a lady’s maid, a lady-in-waiting, a groom for her horses. That’s all.”

  The Sheltons are kin to the Boleyns. He is taking my girl and putting her in a house run by her enemies.

  “But her ladies-in-waiting? Her chamberlain? Her Master of Horse? Her tutor?”

  “She’s to take none of them. Her household is to be dismissed.”

  “But I’ll have to go with her,” I say, startled.

  “You won’t,” he says flatly.

  “The king himself put her in my keeping when she was a baby!”

  “That’s over. The king says that she’s to go and serve Princess Elizabeth. There’s not to be anyone to serve her. You’re dismissed. Her household is dismissed.”

  I look at his hard face, and think of his armed men in our Christmas courtyard. I think of Princess Mary coming back from her ride, for me to tell her that she has to go and live in the old palace at Hatfield, with none of the entourage or household of a princess, with none of the companions of her childhood. She has to go into service to the Boleyn bastard in a household supervised by Boleyn cousins. “My God, Thomas Howard, how can you bring yourself to do this?”

  “I’m not going to say no to the king,” he says gratingly. “And neither are you. Any of you.”

  She is sick with pain and white-faced. She is too ill to ride, and I have to help her into a litter. I put a hot brick under her feet and one wrapped in silk in her lap. She puts out her little hands through the curtains, and I cling to her as if I cannot bear to let her go.

  “I will send for you as soon as I can,” she says quietly. “He cannot keep you from me. Everyone knows that we have always been together.”

  “I asked them if I could come with you, I said I would come at my own expense, that I will serve you for nothing. I will pay for your household to serve you.” I am gabbling in my anxiety as from the corner of my eye I see Thomas Howard mount up. The litter rocks as the mules move restlessly, and I grab her hands even more tightly.

  “I know. But they want to get me alone, like my mother, without a friend in the house.”

  “I’ll come,” I swear. “I’ll write to you.”

  “They won’t let me have letters. And I won’t read anything that is not addressed to me as princess.”

  “I’ll write in secret.” I am desperate that she does not see me crying, that I help her to keep her own dignity, as we are dragged apart, in this awful moment.

  “Tell my mother I’m well, and that I am not at all frightened,” she says, white as the curtains of the litter and trembling with fear. “Tell her I never forget that I am her daughter and that she is Queen of England. Tell her that I love her and I will never betray her.”

  “Come on!” Thomas Howard shouts from the head of the troop, and at once they move off, the litter jerking and rolling as her grip tightens on my hand.

  “You may have to obey the king, I can’t tell what he will ask of you,” I say quickly, walking alongside, breaking into a run. “Don’t stand against him. Don’t anger him.”

  “I love you, Margaret!” she calls. “Give me your blessing!”

  My lips form the words but I am choking and cannot speak. “God bless,” I whisper. “God bless you, little princess, I love you.”

  I step back and I all but fall into a curtsey, my head down so she can’t see my face contorted with grief. Behind me, I feel the whole household sink down into the lowest of bows, and the country people lining the avenue, come to see the princess kidnapped from her own house, disobey every shouted order they have heard all day and pull off their caps and drop to their knees to honor the only princess in England as she goes by.

  WARBLINGTON CASTLE, HAMPSHIRE, SPRING 1534

  I should be glad to be at my own home and pleased to rest. I should be glad to wake with the sun shining through my window panes of clear Venetian glass making the lime-washed room bright and light. I should be glad of the fire in the grate and my clean linen airing before it. I am a wealthy woman, I have a great name and a great title, and now that I am released from my service at court I can stay at home and visit my grandchildren, run my lands, pray in my priory, and know that I am safe.

  I am not a young woman, my brother dead, my husband dead, my cousin the queen dead. I look in the mirror and see the deep lines in my face and the weariness in my dark eyes. Under my gable hood my hair has gone silver and gray and white like an old dappled mare. I think it is time that I was put out to grass, it is time for me to rest, and I smile at the thought of it and know that I will never prepare myself for death: I am a survivor, I doubt I will ever be ready to quietly turn my face to the wall.

  I am glad of my hard-won safety. They charged Thomas More with talking treason to Elizabeth Barton, and he had to find a letter he had written warning her not to speak to prove his innocence so that he could stay at his quiet home. My friend John Fisher could not defend himself against the charge and now sleeps in a stone cell in the Tower in these damp spring days. Elizabeth Barton, and those who were her friends, are in the Tower too, and certain to die.

  I should be glad to be safe and free, but I have little joy, for John Fisher has neither safety nor liberty and somewhere out in the flat, cold lands of Huntingdonshire is the Queen of England, ill served by people who are set about only to guard her. Even worse, at Hatfield Palace Princess Mary is cooking her breakfast over her bedroom fire, afraid to eat at the high table because there are Boleyn cooks in the kitchen poisoning the soup.

  She is confined to the house, not even allowed to walk in the grounds, kept from any visitor for fear that they pass her a message or one word of comfort, separated from her mother, exiled from her father. They won’t let me go to her, though I have bombarded Thomas Cromwell with begging letters, and asked the Earl of Surrey and the Earl of Essex to intervene with the king. Nobody can do anything. I am to be parted from the princess whom I love as a daughter.

  I suffer something like an illness, though the physicians can find nothing wrong with me. I take to my bed and find that I cannot easily get up again. I feel as if I have some mysterious illness, a greensickness, a falling sickness. I am so anxious for the princess and for the queen and so powerless to help either of them that my sense of weakness spreads through me till I can barely stand.

  Geoffrey comes to visit from his home at nearby Lordington and tells me that he has a message from Reginald, who is in Rome, begging the Pope to excommunicate Henry, as he said he would, so that the people can rise against him, readying the emperor for the moment that he should invade.

  Geoffrey tells me that my cousin Henry Courtenay’s wife, Gertrude, has spoken out so strongly in favor of the queen and justice for the princess that the king took Courtenay to one side and warned him that one more word from her would cost him his head. Courtenay told Geoffrey that he assumed at first the king was speaking in jest—for whoever beheads a man for his wife’s words?—but it is no laughing matter; now he has ordered his wife to keep silent. Geoffrey is warned by this and does his work in secrecy, going quietly, unseen, along the cold mud tracks to visit the queen and deliver her letter to the princess.

  “It didn’t cheer her,” he says unhappily to me. “I fear that it made things worse.”

  “How?” I ask. I am lying on a daybed near the window for the last light of the setting sun. I feel sick at the thought of Geoffrey taking a letter to Mary that made her feel worse. “How?”

  “Because it was a farewell.”

  I raise myself up on one
elbow. “A farewell? The queen is leaving?” My head spins at the thought of it. Can it be that her nephew is going to offer her a safe haven abroad? Would she leave Mary alone in England to face her father?

  Geoffrey’s face is pale with horror. “No. Worse, far worse. The queen wrote that the princess should not dispute with the king and should obey him in all things except those matters which concerned God and the safety of her soul.”

  “Yes,” I say uneasily.

  “And she said that for herself, she didn’t mind what they did to her, for she was sure that they would meet in heaven.”

  I am sitting up now. “And what do you understand from this?”

  “I didn’t see the whole letter. This is just what I got from the princess as she read it. She held it to her heart, kissed the signature, and she said that her mother could lead and she would follow, and she would not fail her.”

  “Can the queen mean that she will be executed, and is telling the princess to prepare herself too?”

  Geoffrey nods. “She says she won’t fail.”

  I get to my feet, but the room swims around me, and I cling to the headboard of the bed. I will have to go to Mary. I have to tell her that she must take any oath, make any agreement; she must not risk her life. The one thing that she has, this precious Tudor girl, is her life. I didn’t wrap her in swaddling bands as a newborn baby, or carry her in ermine from her christening, or raise her as my own daughter, for her to give up her life. Nothing matters more than life. She must not offer her life against her father’s error. She must not die for this.

  “There’s talk of an oath which everyone is going to have to take. Every one of us is going to have to swear on the Bible that the king’s first marriage was invalid, that his second one is good, and that the Princess Elizabeth is the king’s only heir and Princess Mary is his bastard.”

  “She can’t swear to that,” I say flatly. “Neither can I. Nor can anyone. It’s just a lie. She can’t put her hand on a Holy Bible and insult her mother.”