The King's Curse

by Philippa Gregory

  It is not till the court goes to breakfast that I can walk beside Montague and appear to be talking quietly together, a mother and her son. “What’s Tommy Howard done?”

  “He’s seduced the Scottish queen’s daughter, your former ward: Lady Margaret Douglas. They married in secret at Easter.”

  “Lady Margaret!” I exclaim. I have rarely seen her since she left my charge to serve Anne Boleyn. For a moment all I can feel is relief that the princess is not threatened by fresh trouble, but then I think of the pretty girl who was in my keeping, but lost at court. “She would never have done anything which did not befit a princess,” I say fiercely. “She was our princess’s lady-in-waiting, and she is the daughter of Margaret Tudor. Don’t tell me that she has made a secret marriage to a commoner without permission!”

  “I do tell you that,” Montague says flatly.

  “Married to Tom Howard? In secret? How did the king find out?”

  “Everyone is saying that the duke told him. Would Norfolk betray his own half brother?”

  “Yes,” I say instantly. “Because he can’t risk having the king think that there was a plot to marry another royal heir into the Howard family. He’s got Henry Fitzroy in his family already; what does it look like if the family traps another Tudor heir?”

  “To the king, it looks like they are readying to usurp the throne,” Montague says grimly.

  “Better for us that he suspects the Howards than Plantagenets,” I remark. “But what’s going to happen to Lady Margaret? Is the king very angry?”

  “He’s furious. Worse than I would have expected. And angry with Henry Fitzroy’s wife, Mary Howard, who helped them to meet.”

  “How could they be so foolish?” I shake my head. “Lady Margaret knows that anyone courting her is putting himself close to the throne. These days, nobody knows how close. If Princess Elizabeth is declared a bastard and Princess Mary is not restored, then Lady Margaret is third in line for the throne, after her mother and brother.”

  “She knows it now,” Montague says. “The king says that the Duke of Norfolk has put traitorous division into the realm.”

  “He used the word traitor?”

  “He did.”

  “But wait,” I say. “Wait, Montague, let me think.” I take a few steps away from him, and then I come back. “Think for a moment. Why didn’t the Duke of Norfolk snap her up? As you say, if the king denies the princesses then Lady Margaret is in line for the throne. Why didn’t Norfolk take advantage of this secret marriage to get the heir to the throne into his family? Why didn’t he encourage it and keep it secret?”

  Montague is about to answer as I lay out the plot for him. “Norfolk must be absolutely certain that the king is going to name Henry Fitzroy as his heir—and so make Mary Howard his daughter as Queen of England. Otherwise, he’d have supported the marriage and kept it secret as another useful royal connection.”

  “Dangerous words,” Montague says so quietly that I can hardly hear him.

  “Norfolk would never have betrayed his brother for anything less than a better chance at the throne—his daughter, married to the king’s heir,” I breathe. “Norfolk would be looking for the greatest opportunity for himself and his family. He knows that is not Lady Margaret. He must be absolutely sure that Henry Fitzroy will be named as heir.”

  “And so?” Montague says. “What does this mean for us?”

  I can feel myself grow cold as I realize. “It means that you are right and we must get the princess out of the country,” I say. “The king is never going to restore her. And she stands in his way. She is in danger if she stands in his way. Anyone who obstructs him is always in danger.”

  I am with the young Queen Jane in her presence chamber, waiting demurely beside her throne as hundreds of people make their bow to her and ask for one favor or another. Jane looks rather blank at this sudden explosion of interest in her health and well-being. Everyone offers a small gift that she takes and then hands to one of her ladies, who puts it on a table behind her. Every now and then she glances at me, to see that I am watching and approving the conduct of her ladies and the decorum of her room. Gently, I nod. Despite the expenses of the princess’s household I am still the wealthiest woman at court in my own right, with the greatest title in my own right, and by far the oldest. I am sixty-two years old and Jane is the sixth queen whom I have seen on this throne. She is right to glance at me with her shy pale blue gaze and confirm that she is doing everything correctly.

  She has started her reign with a terrible error. Lady Margaret Douglas should never have been allowed to meet in secret with Tom Howard. Mary Howard, the young duchess married to Henry Fitzroy, should never have been allowed to encourage them. Queen Jane, stepping up to a throne which was still warm from the frightened sweat of the last incumbent, dazzled by her own rise, did not watch the behavior of her new court, did not know what was happening. But now Tom is in the Tower charged with treason and Lady Margaret is confined to her rooms and the king is furious with everyone.

  “No, she’s arrested, she’s in the Tower too,” Jane Boleyn tells me cheerfully.

  I feel the familiar plummet of my heart at the thought of the Tower. “Lady Margaret? On what charge?”

  “Treason.”

  That word, from Jane Boleyn, is like a sentence of death.

  “How can she be charged with treason when all she did was marry a young man for love?” I ask reasonably. “Folly, yes. Disobedience, yes. And of course the king is offended. Rightly so. But how is it treason?”

  Jane Boleyn lowers her eyes. “It’s treason if the king says it is so,” she states. “And he says they are guilty. And the punishment is death.”

  I am badly shaken. If the king can accuse his beloved niece of treason and put her in the Tower under a sentence of death, he can certainly charge his daughter too. Especially when he calls her his bastard daughter and sends his worst men to threaten her with violence. I am going to the king’s rooms to confer with Montague when I hear the tramp of soldiers’ feet behind me.

  For a moment I think I will faint with fear, and I flinch back against the wall and feel the cold stone, cold as a cell in the Tower, against my back. I wait, my heart pounding as they go by, two dozen yeomen of the guard in the bright Tudor livery, marching in step through the corridors of Greenwich Palace heading to the king’s presence chamber.

  As soon as they are past me, I am afraid for Montague. I breathe: “My son,” and I go quickly behind the soldiers as they tramp up the stairs to the king’s rooms where the great door to the presence chamber swings open and they go in, two abreast, menacingly strong.

  The room is crowded but the king is not there. The throne is empty; he is inside, in his privy chamber, the door closed on his court. He will not witness the arrest. If there are cries and weeping, he will not be disturbed. As I look round the busy room, I see with relief that Montague is not here either; he is probably inside with the king.

  The soldiers are not here for my son. Instead, the officer walks confidently to Sir Anthony Browne, the king’s favorite, his trusted Master of Horse, and asks him, politely enough, to come with them. Anthony gets to his feet from where he has been lounging at the window, smiles like the courtier he is, and asks negligently: “Why, whatever is the charge?”

  “Treason,” comes the quiet reply, and everyone who is near to Anthony seems to melt away.

  The officer looks around a court that is suddenly stunned into shocked silence. “Sir Francis Bryan!” he calls.

  “Here,” Sir Francis says. He steps forward, and the men he was with slide back, as if they do not know him now, as if they have never known him. He smiles, his black eye patch looking blindly around the court and seeing no friends. “How may I be of service to you, Officer? Do you need my assistance?”

  “You may come with me,” the officer says with a sort of grim humor. “For you are under arrest also.”

  “I?” Francis Bryan says, cousin to this queen, cousin to the former quee
n, a man secure in royal favor after years of friendship. “For what? On what possible charge?”

  “Treason,” the man says for the second time. “Treason.”

  I watch the two men go out with the guard, and I find the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, at my elbow. “What can they possibly have done?” I ask. Bryan in particular has survived a thousand dangers, having been exiled from court at least twice and returned unscathed each time.

  “I’m glad that you don’t know,” comes the threatening reply. “They have been conspiring with Lady Mary, the king’s bastard daughter. They have been plotting to get her out of Hunsdon and, by ship, away to Flanders. I would have them hanged for it. I would see her hanged for it.”

  I go back to the queen’s rooms, fear snapping at my heels all the way. The ladies ask me what is happening and I tell them I have seen the arrest of two of the king’s firmest friends. I don’t tell them what the Duke of Norfolk said. I am too afraid to say the words. Lady Woods tells me that my kinsman Henry Courtenay has been dismissed from the Privy Council under suspicion of plotting for the princess. I give as good a performance as I can manage of a woman shocked by extraordinary news.

  “Don’t you write to Lady Mary?” Lady Woods says. “Don’t you stay in touch with her? Your former charge? Though everyone knows that you love her and came back to court to serve her?”

  “I write to her only through Lord Cromwell,” I say. “I have an affection for her, of course. I write with the queen.”

  “But you don’t encourage her?”

  I glance across the room. Jane Boleyn is holding herself very still over her sewing, quite as if she is not thinking about her sewing at all. “Of course not,” I say. “I took the oath like everyone else.”

  “Not quite everyone,” Jane volunteers, looking up from her work. “Your son Reginald left England without swearing it.”

  “My son Reginald is preparing a report for the king on the marriage of Queen Katherine and the governance of the Church of England,” I say firmly. “The king himself has commissioned it, and Reginald is going to reply. He is a scholar for the king, as he was raised to be. He is working for him. His loyalty cannot be questioned, and nor can mine.”

  “Oh, of course,” Jane says with a little smile, bending her head to her work. “I didn’t mean to suggest anything other.”

  I see Montague at dinner but I cannot easily speak with him until the tables are cleared away and the music starts for dancing. The king seems to be happy as he watches Jane dance with her ladies, and then, when they beg him, he rises to his feet and invites one of the pretty new girls to dance with him.

  I find I am watching him almost as if he were a stranger. He is very unlike the prince whom we all loved so much, when his mother was alive and he was a second son, a long, long time ago, forty years ago. He has grown very broad; his legs which were so strong and supple are curved now, the calf muscles bulge under a straining blue garter. His belly is rounded under the jacket, but the jacket is so padded and thickly stitched that he looks grand rather than fat. His shoulders are wide as any great sportsman’s under the buckram wadding and the frame of this and the cloth overlaid makes him so big that he can only pass through a double door when it is fully opened. His rich mop of ginger curls is thinning and though he has it carefully combed and curled, still the scalp shines palely through. His beard, starting to be flecked with gray, is growing sparse and curly. Katherine would never let him wear a beard, she complained that it scratched her face. This queen can deny him nothing, and would not dare complain.

  And his face—his face, flushed now with his awkward dancing, beaming at the young woman peeping up at him, as if she can think of no greater delight than a man old enough to be her father squeezing her hand and holding her close when the dance allows them to come together—it is his face that makes me hesitate.

  He doesn’t look like Elizabeth’s son anymore. The clean beauty of her family profile, our family profile, is smudged by the fat of his cheeks, of his chin. Her defined features are blurred in the collapsing face of her darling Prince Harry. His eyes look smaller in his puffed cheeks, his rosebud mouth is now pursed so often in disapproval that he looks mean. He is still a handsome man, this is still a handsome face, but the expression is not handsome. He looks petty, he looks self-indulgent. Not his mother, not any of our line were ever petty. They were kings and queens on a grand scale; this, their descendant, though he dresses so richly, though he presents himself as such a great power, is—under the padding, under the fat—a little man, with the spite and vindictiveness of a little man. Our trouble, the court’s trouble, the country’s trouble, is that we have given this small-minded bully the power of the Pope and the army of the king.

  “You look very grave, Lady Pole,” Nicholas Carew remarks to me.

  At once I move my gaze from the king and smile. “I was miles away,” I say.

  “Indeed, I know of one that I wish was miles away tonight,” he says quietly.

  “Oh, do you?”

  “I can help you with saving her,” he says earnestly.

  “We can’t talk of this now, not here,” I say. “Not after today.”

  He nods. “I’ll come to your rooms after breakfast tomorrow, if I may.”

  I wait but he doesn’t come. I can’t be seen to be looking for him, so I go out riding with the ladies of the queen’s court, and when we meet with the gentleman for a picnic by the river, I sit at the ladies’ table and barely glance towards the court. I can see at once that he’s not there.

  At once I look for Montague. The king is at the top table, Queen Jane beside him. He is noisy, laughing, calling for more wine and praising the chef; a huge pastry dish is before him, and he is eating the meat from the inside with the long golden serving spoon, proffering it to Jane, dribbling gravy on her fine gown. I see in a moment that Montague is missing. He is not at the top table, nor with the other gentlemen of the privy chamber. I can feel the sweat prick under my arms and chill. I look at the dozen or so young men and I think that more than Montague and Carew are missing, but I cannot at once see who is absent. It reminds me of the time once before when I looked for Montague, and Thomas More told me that he was exiled from court. Now Thomas More has gone forever, and once again, I don’t know if my son is safe.

  “You’re looking for your son.” Jane Boleyn, seated opposite me, spears a slice of roasted meat on her fork and nibbles the end of it, dainty as a French princess.

  “Yes, I expected him to be here.”

  “You need not worry. His horse went lame and he went back,” Jane volunteers. “I don’t think he has been taken with the others.”

  I look at her slight, teasing smile. “What others?” I ask. “What are you saying?”

  Her dark eyes are limpid. “Why, Thomas Cheyney and John Russell have been taken for questioning. Lord Cromwell believes that they have been plotting to encourage Lady Mary to defy her father.”

  “That’s not possible,” I say coldly. “They are loyal servants to the king, and what you are describing would be treason.”

  She looks directly at me, a mischievous twinkle in her beautiful dark eyes. “I suppose it would. And anyway, there is worse.”

  “What can be worse than this, Lady Rochford?”

  “Nicholas Carew has been arrested. Would you have thought him a traitor?”

  “I don’t know,” I say stupidly.

  “And, your friend who served Lady Mary in your household, the wife of the chamberlain, your friend Lady Anne Hussey! She has been arrested for plotting and been taken to the Tower. I fear that they are going to arrest everyone who prided themselves on being Lady Mary’s friend. I pray that no one suspects you.”

  “I thank you for your prayers,” I say. “I hope I never need them.”

  Montague comes to my rooms before dinner that evening, and I go towards him and lean my forehead against his shoulder. “Hold me,” I say.

  He is always shy with me. Geoffrey will take me in a great hug,
but Montague is always more reticent. “Hold me,” I say again. “I was very afraid today.”

  “We’re safe so far. No one has betrayed us and no one doubts your loyalty to the king. Henry Courtenay is not arrested, just dismissed from the Privy Council under suspicion. William Fitzwilliam with him. Francis Bryan will be released.”

  I take my seat.

  “We can’t get the princess away now,” Montague says. “Courtenay’s man has been taken, disappeared from the stables. There’s no one with a key to her door, and no one can get her out of the house. Carew had a maid in his pay but we can’t reach her without him. He’s under arrest but I don’t know where. We’ll have to wait.”

  “They’ve arrested Anne Hussey.”

  “I heard. I don’t know how many of your old household at Richmond are being questioned.”

  “God help them. Have you warned Geoffrey?”

  “I sent him a message to get in the harvest and keep quiet,” Montague says grimly. “He mustn’t try to see the princess, she’s being watched night and day again. They have broken open the plot like a hatching egg. She has a guard on her door and a maid locked into her chamber with her every night. They don’t even let her walk in the garden.”

  “And the Spanish ambassador?”

  Montague’s face is grim. “He tells me that he is trying to get a dispensation from the Pope so that she can swear the oath to say that her parents’ marriage was invalid, that she is a bastard, and that the king is head of the Church. Chapuys says that she must swear. She will be arrested if she doesn’t.” He sees my horrified expression. “Arrested and beheaded,” he says. “That’s why Chapuys is telling her that she must swear, buy time, and then we’ll get her away.”