The King's Curse

by Philippa Gregory

  “I think she’ll have to,” Geoffrey says. “I think we all will. Because I think they will call it treason to refuse to swear.”

  “They can’t put a man to death for speaking the truth.” I cannot imagine a country where the hangman would kick out a stool from under a man who was telling a truth that the hangman knows as well as his victim. “The king is determined, I see that. But he wouldn’t do this.”

  “I think it will happen,” Geoffrey warns.

  “How can she swear that she’s not the princess, when everyone knows that she is?” I repeat. “I can’t swear that, nobody can.”

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1534

  I am summoned with the other peers of the realm to the Privy Council at the Palace of Westminster where the Lord Chancellor, the newly great Thomas Cromwell, stepping into the shoes of Thomas More like a Fool dancing in his master’s boots, is to administer the oath of succession to the nobility of England, who stand before him like puzzled children waiting to recite their catechism.

  We know the truth of the matter, for the Pope has publicly ruled. He has announced that the marriage of Queen Katherine and King Henry is valid, and that the king must set aside all others and live in peace with his true wife. But he has not excommunicated the king, so though we know that the king is in the wrong, we are not authorized to defy him. We each must do what we think best.

  And the Pope is far away, and the king claims that he has no authority in England. The king has ruled that his wife is not his wife, that his mistress is queen, and that her bastard is a princess. The king says that by his declaring this, it is so. He is the new pope. He can declare that something is so; and now it is. And we, if we had any courage or even a sure grasp on the material world, would say that the king is mistaken.

  Instead, one by one we walk up to a great table and there is the oath written out, and the great seal above it. I take up the pen and dip it in the ink and feel my hand tremble. I am a Judas, a Judas even to take the pen into my hand. The beautifully transcribed words dance before me; I can hardly see them, the paper is a blur, the table seems to sway as I lean over. I think: God save me, I am sixty years old, I am too old for this, I am too frail for this, perhaps I can faint and be carried from the room and spared this.

  I glance up, and Montague’s steady gaze is on me. He will sign, and Geoffrey will sign after him. We have agreed that we must sign so that no one can doubt our loyalty; we will sign hoping for better days. Quickly, before I can find the courage to change my mind, I scrawl my name, Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, and so I renew my allegiance to the king, I pledge my loyalty to the children of his marriage with the woman who calls herself queen, and I acknowledge him as head of the Church in England.

  These are lies. Every single one of these is a lie. And I am a liar to set my hand to it. I step back from the table and I am no longer wishing I had pretended to faint, I am wishing that I had the courage to step forward and die as the queen told the princess that she must be ready to do.

  Later they tell me that the saintly old man, confessor to two Queens of England, and God knows a good friend to me, John Fisher, would not sign the oath when they pulled him out of his prison in the Tower and put it before him. They did not respect his age, nor his long loyalty to the Tudors; they forced the oath on him and when he read and reread it and finally said that he did not think he could deny the authority of the Pope, they took him back to the Tower. Some people say that he will be executed. Most people say that no one can execute a bishop of the Church. I say nothing at all.

  Thomas More refused the oath also, and I think of the warm brown eyes and his joke about filial obedience and his pity for me when Arthur went missing. I wish that I had stood beside him when he told them, like the scholar he is, that he would sign a rewritten version of the oath, that he did not disagree with much of it, but that he could not sign it exactly as it stands.

  I think of the sweetness of his spirit that led him on to say that he did not blame those who had drawn up the oath, nor did he have one word of criticism for those who had signed it; but for the sake of his own soul—just his—he could not sign.

  The king had faithfully promised his friend Thomas that he would never put him to the test on this. But the king does not keep his word to the man that he loved, that we all love.

  BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SUMMER 1534

  I go back to Bisham, Geoffrey to Lordington. I have a bad taste in my mouth every day on waking and I think it is the odor of cowardice. I am glad to get away from London, where my friend John Fisher and Thomas More are held in the Tower, and where Elizabeth Barton’s honest eyes stare from a spike on London Bridge until the ravens and the buzzards peck them away.

  They create a new law, one that we never needed before. It is called the Treason Act, and it rules that anyone who wishes for the king’s death, or wills it, or desires it in either speech or writing or craft, or who promises any bodily harm to the king or his heirs, or who names him as a tyrant, is guilty of treason and will be done to death. When my cousin Henry Courtenay writes to me that this act has been passed and we must take great care in everything we commit to paper, I think that he need not warn me to burn his letter; burning writing is nothing, now we have to learn to forget our thoughts. I must never think that the king is a tyrant, I must forget the words his own mother said when she and his grandmother Queen Elizabeth wished for the end of his line.

  Montague travels with the king as he goes on a long progress with his riding court of friends, and Thomas Cromwell sends out his own progress: a handful of his trusted men to discover the value of every religious house in England, of every size and order. Nobody knows exactly why the Lord Chancellor would want to know this; but nobody thinks that it bodes well for the rich, peaceful monasteries.

  My poor princess hides in her bedroom at the palace of Hatfield, trying to avoid the bullying of Princess Elizabeth’s household. The queen has been moved again. Now she is imprisoned in a castle, Kimbolton in Huntingdonshire, a newly built tower with only one way in and out. Her governors, they might as well call them jailers, live on one side of the courtyard, the queen and her women and small household on the other side. They tell me she is ill.

  The woman who calls herself queen stays at Greenwich Palace for the birth of her child, in the same royal apartments where Katherine and I endured her labors, hoping for a boy.

  Apparently, they are certain that this one will be a son and heir. They have had physicians and astrologers and prophecies and they all say that a strong little boy baby is waiting to be born. They are so confident that the queen’s apartments at Eltham Palace have been converted into a grand nursery for the expected prince. A cradle of solid silver has been forged for him, and the maids-in-waiting are embroidering his linen with gold thread. He is to be called Henry, after his all-conquering father; he is to be born in the autumn and his christening will prove that the king is blessed by God and the woman who calls herself queen is right to do so.

  My chaplain and confessor, John Helyar, comes to me as they are getting the harvest in. The great stacks are being built in the fields so that we will have hay for the winter; the corn is being brought by the wagonload to the granaries. I am standing at the granary door, my heart lifting with every load that pours down from the cart like golden rain. This will feed my people through the winter, this will make a profit for my estate. This material comfort is so great to me that it feels like the sin of gluttony.

  John Helyar does not share my joy; his face is troubled as he begs me for a private word. “I can’t take the oath,” he says. “They’ve come to Bisham church, but I can’t bring myself to do it.”

  “Geoffrey did,” I say. “And Montague. And me. We were the first to be called in. We did it. Now it is your turn.”

  “Do you believe, in your hearts, that the king is the true head of the Church?” he asks me very quietly.

  They are singing as the wagons come up the lane, the big oxen pulling in harness now
as in spring they pulled the plow.

  “I confessed to you the lie that I told,” I say quietly. “You know the sin that I undertook when I signed the oath. You know that I betrayed God and my queen and my beloved goddaughter the princess. And I failed my friends John Fisher and Thomas More. I repent of it every day of my life. Every day.”

  “I know,” he says earnestly. “And I believe that God knows too, and that He forgives you.”

  “But I had to do it. I can’t walk towards my death as John Fisher is doing,” I say piteously. “I can’t go willingly to the Tower. I have spent my life trying to keep out of the Tower. I can’t do it.”

  “Neither can I,” he agrees. “So, with your permission, I’m going to leave England.”

  I am so shocked that I turn and catch his hands. Some bawdy fool of a laborer whistles and someone else cuffs him. “We can’t talk here,” I say impatiently. “Come into the garden.”

  We walk away from the noise of the granary yard, through the gate to the garden. There is a stone bench set into the wall, late roses still growing fat around it and dropping their scented petals. I sweep them off with my hand and sit down. He stands before me as if he thinks I am going to scold him. “Oh, sit down!”

  He does as he is ordered and then is silent for a moment as if he is praying. “Truly, I cannot take the oath and I am too afraid of death. I am going to go abroad and I am asking you if there is any way that I can serve you.”

  “In what way?”

  He chooses his words carefully. “I can carry messages, for your sons. I can go to your kinsmen in Calais. I can travel to Rome to see the papal court and speak to them of the princess. I can go to the emperor and speak to him of his aunt the queen. I can discover what the English ambassadors are saying about us, and send you reports.”

  “You are offering to be my spy,” I say flatly. “You are presuming that I want or need a spy and a courier. When you, of all people, know that I took the oath to be a loyal subject to the king and Queen Anne, and their heirs.”

  He does not say anything. If he had protested that he was only making an offer to keep me in touch with my son, I would have known him as a spy from Cromwell, sent to lead us into danger. But he says nothing. He just bows his head and says: “As you wish, my lady.”

  “Will you go anyway, without a commission from me?”

  “If you cannot use me in this work, then I will try to find someone who can. Lord Thomas Darcy, Lord John Hussey, your kinsmen? I know there are many who have taken the oath against their wills. I will go to the Spanish ambassador and ask him if there is anything I can do. I believe that there are many lords who would want to know what Reginald is thinking and doing, what the Pope plans, what the emperor plans. I will serve the interests of the queen and the princess, whoever is my master.”

  I pick a soft-petaled rose, a white rose, and I give it to him. “There’s your answer,” I say. “That’s your badge. Go to Geoffrey’s friend, his old steward, Hugh Holland, he will get you safely across the narrow seas. Then go to Reginald, tell him how things are with us, and then serve him and the princess as one. Tell him that the oath is too much for us all, that England is ready to rise, and he must tell us when.”

  John Helyar goes the next day, and when people ask after him, I say that he left without notice and without warning. I shall have to find another chaplain for the household and a confessor for myself and it is a great nuisance and trouble.

  When Prior Richard summons all the household after church on Sunday to administer the king’s oath in the priory chapel, I report John Helyar as missing and say that I think he has family in Bristol, so perhaps he has gone there.

  I know that we have put another link in the chain that stretches from the queen at Kimbolton Castle to Rome, where the Pope must order her rescue.

  In September, as the court turns back to London as the weather turns colder, Montague comes to Bisham for a brief visit.

  “I thought I would come and tell you myself.” He jumps from his horse and kneels for my blessing. “I didn’t want to write.”

  “What’s happened?” I am smiling. I can tell from the way he springs to his feet that it is not bad news for us.

  “She lost the child,” he says.

  Like any woman in the world I feel a pang of sorrow at the news. Anne Boleyn is my worst enemy and the child would have been her triumph but, even so, I have dawdled to the king’s rooms too many times with bad news of a dead baby not to remember that sense of terrible loss, of promise unfulfilled, of a future so confidently imagined which will now never happen.

  “Oh, God bless him,” I say, and cross myself. “God bless him, the poor innocent.”

  There is to be no Tudor boy this time; the terrible curse that the Plantagenet queen and her witch of a mother put on the Tudor line goes on and on working. I wonder if it will reach its very end as my cousin predicted, and there will be no Tudor boys at all, but only a girl, a barren girl.

  “And the king?” I ask after a moment.

  “I had thought you would be pleased,” Montague remarks, surprised. “I had thought you would triumph.”

  I make a little gesture with my hand. “I don’t have so hard a heart as to wish for the death of an unborn child,” I say. “Whatever his begetting. Was it a boy? How did the king take it?”

  “He went quite mad,” Montague says steadily. “He locked himself in his rooms and roared like an injured lion, banging his head against the wooden paneling, we heard him, but we couldn’t get in. He raged for a day and a night, weeping and shouting, then he fell asleep like a drunkard with his head in the fireplace.”

  I listen to Montague in silence. This is like the rage of a disappointed child, not the grief of a man, a father.

  “And then?”

  “Then the servers of the body went in to him in the morning, and he comes out, washed and shaved, his hair curled, and says nothing of it,” Montague tells me incredulously.

  “He can’t bear to have it spoken?”

  Montague shakes his head. “No, he acts as if it never happened. Not the night of tears, not the loss of the baby, not the wife in childbed. It never was. It beggars belief. After the making of the cradle and the painting of the rooms, knocking the queen’s apartments at Eltham into a dining room and a privy chamber for a prince, he now says nothing about it, and denies that there was ever a child at all. And we all behave as if it never was. We are merry, we are hoping that she conceives soon. We have everything to hope for and we have never known despair.”

  This is more strange than Henry blaming God for forgetting the Tudors. I had thought he would rail against his luck, or even turn on Anne as he turned on the queen. I thought he might claim that she had some terrible fault that she could not give him a son. But this is the strangest of all. He has had a loss that he cannot bear, and so he is simply denying it. Like a madman facing something that he does not want to see—he denies it is even there.

  “And does no one speak to him? Since you all know that it has happened? Does no one even express their sympathy for his loss?”

  “No,” Montague says heavily. “There is not a man at court who would dare. Not his old friend Charles Brandon, not even Thomas Cromwell, who is with him every day and speaks to him every minute. There is not a man at court who would have the courage to tell the king something that he denies. Because we have allowed him to say what is, and what is not, Lady Mother. We have allowed him to say what the world is like. He’s doing it right now.”

  “He says that there was no child at all?”

  “None at all. And so she has to pretend to be happy and pretend to be well.”

  I take a moment to think of a young woman who has lost her child having to behave as if it had never been. “She acts as if she is happy?”

  “Happy is not the half of it. She laughs and dances and flirts with every man at the court. She is in a whirl of excitement, gambling and drinking and dancing and disguising. She has to appear the most desirable, the mo
st beautiful, the wittiest, cleverest, most interesting woman.”

  I shake my head at this portrait of a nightmare court, dancing on the very edge of madness. “She does this?”

  “She is frantic. But if she did not, he would see her as flawed,” Montague says quietly. “Ill. Incapable of bearing a child. She has to deny her loss, because he won’t be married to a woman who is not perfect. She has buried a dead baby in secret and she has to look as if she is endlessly beautiful, clever, and fertile.”

  The process of taking the oath to deny the queen and the princess goes on, from church to courtroom throughout the country. I hear that they arrest Lady Anne Hussey, my kinswoman, who served the princess with me. They charge her with sending letters and little gifts to the princess at Hatfield, and she confesses that she had also called her “Princess Mary” from habit, not from intent. She has to beg forgiveness and spends long months in the Tower before they let her go.

  Then I receive a note from Geoffrey, unsigned and without a seal to identify him.

  The queen will not swear the oath; she has refused to deny herself or her daughter and has said that she is ready for any penalty. She thinks they will execute her privately behind the castle walls of Kimbolton and nobody will know. We have to prepare to rescue her and the princess at once.

  I think that this is the moment I have longed to avoid. I think that I was born a coward. I think that I am a liar. I think that my husband begged me never to claim my own, never to do my duty, to keep myself and our children safe. But now, I think those days have gone, and though I am sick with fear I write to Geoffrey and to Montague.

  Hire men and horses, hire a boat to take them to Flanders. Take every care of yourselves. But get them out of the country.