The King's Curse

by Philippa Gregory

  I think of Tom Darcy, and how he hoped he would die on crusade, fighting for his faith, and when they tell me that he was beheaded as a traitor on Tower Hill in June, as the swallows swooped busily from river to Tower, building their nests for the summer, I know that he died for his faith, just as he wanted.

  A pedlar comes to the back door and says he has a pretty fairing just for me. I go down to the stable yard where he sits on the mounting block with his pack at his feet. He bows when he sees me. “I have something for you,” he says. “I said I would give it to you and leave. So now I’m going on.”

  “How much?”

  He shakes his head and drops a little purse into my hand. “The man who gave it to me said to wish you luck, and that good times will come,” he says, shoulders his pack, and walks from the yard.

  I open the purse and tip the little brooch into my hand. It is the pansy brooch that I gave to old Tom Darcy. He never called on me because he thought that he had won a victory and that the king had given his word of pardon. He never called on me because he thought he was guarded by God. I put the brooch in my pocket and walk away.

  The culling of the North continues. Eight men and one woman come before the juries charged with treason, lords and gentry, two of them distant kinsmen of mine, all of them known to me, all of them good Christians and loyal subjects. And among them is the Yorkshireman, Robert Aske.

  The young man who had the king’s satin coat around his shoulders waits for his trial in the Tower of London with no money and no change of clothes and little food. No one dares to send him anything, and if anyone did, the guards would steal it. He has a full royal pardon for leading the Pilgrimage of Grace, and since then, though there have been uprisings and desperate men fighting for their lives, he neither led nor encouraged them. Ever since he returned to the North from the court, he did nothing but try to persuade men to take the pardon and trust the king’s word. For this, he is in the Tower. Cleverly, Cromwell suggests that since Aske believed that there would be a Parliament in the North, since he swore that the monasteries would be restored, he was assuring people that the pilgrimage had gained its aims, and that this is—must be—treason.

  I walk in the hot sunshine in the fields of my home and look at the ripening wheat. It is going to be a good harvest this year. I think of Tom Darcy sending me a message that good times will come, and that Thomas Cromwell has ruled that such a hope is traitorous. I wonder if the seeds of the wheat are planning to ripen and if this is treason? At sunset, a hare bursts out of the crop and runs in a great half circle before me on the path and then stops, sits on its hinder legs, and looks back at me, its eyes dark and intelligent. “And you?” I say quietly to it. “Are you biding your time? Are you a traitor, waiting for the good times to return?”

  They try everyone whom they bring to London and they find everyone guilty. They accuse churchmen: the prior of Guisborough, the abbot of Jervaulx, the abbot of Fountains Abbey. They arrest Margaret Bulmer for loving her husband so much that she begged him to run away when she thought that the pilgrimage had failed. Her own chaplain gives evidence against her, and her husband, Sir John Bulmer, is hanged and quartered at Tyburn as his wife is burned at Smithfield. Sir John is guilty of treason, she is guilty of loving him.

  They take Robert Aske from the Tower to the courtroom for his trial and back to prison, though when he was last in London he feasted at the court and was embraced by the king. They take him from the Tower to the North of England, so that he can die in full view of the men who had heard him promise their pardon. They take him to York and parade him around the city that is stunned and silent at the fall of its bravest son. They take him to the very top of Clifford Tower on the walls of York and he reads a confession and they put a rope around his neck where the king put his own chain of gold; they wrap him in chains of iron, and they hang him.

  Some of the lords and I spoke to Cromwell for mercy for the northern men. “Mercy! Mercy! Mercy!” He has none.

  Montague comes to visit me in midsummer. There are fresh rushes down in every room and the windows wide open to the sweet-smelling air so that the house is filled with the singing of birds.

  He finds me in the garden, harvesting herbs against the plague, for last summer was terrible, especially for the poor, especially for the North. I have used up all the oils in my physic room and have to make more. Montague kneels before me, and I rest my green-stained hand on his head and notice, for the first time, some silver hairs among the bronze.

  “Son Montague, you are going gray,” I say to him severely. “I can’t have a gray-haired son, it will make me feel too old.”

  “Well, your darling Geoffrey is going bald,” he says cheerfully, getting up. “So how will you bear that?”

  “How will he bear it?” I smile. Geoffrey has always been dreadfully vain about his good looks.

  “He’ll wear a cap all the time,” Montague predicts. “And grow a beard like the king.”

  The smile dies from my face. “How are things at court?” I ask shortly.

  “Shall we walk?” He takes my arm and I stroll with him, away from the gardener and the lads, out through the herb garden, through the little wooden gate, and into the meadow that runs down to the river. The mown grass is growing again nearly to our knees; we will take a second crop of hay from this field, rich and green and starred with moon daisies, buttercups, and the bright, blowsy heads of poppies.

  High above us a lark climbs into the cloudless sky, singing louder and louder with each flutter of its wings. We pause and watch the soaring little dot until it is almost invisible, and then the sound abruptly finishes and the bird plunges down to its hidden nest.

  “I’ve been in touch with Reginald,” Montague says. “The king sent Francis Bryan to capture him, and I had to warn him.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He was at Cambrai. He was trapped in the town for some time with Bryan waiting for him to set one foot outside. Bryan said that if he had put one foot into France he would have shot him down.”

  “Oh, Montague! Did he get the warning?”

  “Yes, but he knows he has to take care. He knows that the king and Cromwell will stop at nothing to silence him. They know that he was in touch with the pilgrims, and that he writes to the princess. They know that he is raising an army against them. Geoffrey wanted to carry the message. Then he told me that he wanted to join Reginald in exile.”

  “You told him he couldn’t?”

  “Of course he can’t. But he can’t bear this country any longer. The king won’t receive him at court, he’s in debt again, and he can’t bring himself to live under Tudor rule. He was convinced that the pilgrims had won, he thought that the king had seen sense. He doesn’t want to stay in England now.”

  “And what does he think would become of his children? And what about his wife? And what about his lands?”

  Montague smiles. “Oh, you know what he’s like. He flared up and said he would go, and then he thought again and said he would stay and hope for better times. He knows that if another of us were to go into exile it would be even worse for those who stay. He knows he would lose everything if he went.”

  “Who took your message to Reginald?”

  “Hugh Holland, Geoffrey’s old steward. He’s set up in shipping wheat in London.”

  “I know him.” This is the merchant who trades with Flanders and shipped John Helyar to safety.

  “Holland was taking over a load of wheat, and wanted to see Reginald and serve the cause.”

  We walk down the little hill, and arrive at the river. A sharp flash of blue like a winged sapphire skims downriver, faster than an arrow, a kingfisher.

  “I could never leave,” I say. “I never even think of leaving. I feel as if I have to bear witness here. I have to be here even when the monasteries are gone, even when the bones of the saints are taken from the shrines and rolled in the gutters.”

  “I know,” he says sadly. “I feel the same. It’s my country. What
ever it has to suffer. I have to be here too.”

  “He can’t go on forever,” I say, knowing that the words are treason, but I am driven to treason. “He has to die soon. And he has no true heir but our princess.”

  “Don’t you think that the queen might give him a son?” Montague asks me. “She’s far on. He held a great Te Deum at St. Paul’s, and then sent her off to Hampton Court for the birth.”

  “And our princess?”

  “At Hampton Court too, attending the queen. She is kept in her true estate.” He smiles at me. “The queen is tender to her, and Princess Mary loves her stepmother.”

  “And is the king not staying with them?”

  “He’s afraid of the plague. He’s gone off with a riding court.”

  “He left the queen to her confinement?”

  Montague shrugs. “Don’t you think that if this baby dies too, he would rather be far away? There are enough people saying that he cannot have a healthy son. He won’t want to see another baby buried.”

  I shake my head at the thought of a young woman left alone to bear her first child and her husband distancing himself from her in case it dies, in case she dies.

  “You don’t think she will have a healthy boy, do you?” Montague challenges me. “The pilgrims were all saying that his line is cursed. They said he would never get a living prince because his father had the blood of innocents on his head, because he killed the princes of York, our princes. Is that what you think? That he killed the two York princes and then your brother?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t like to think of it,” I say quietly, turning to walk along the little path beside the river. “I try never to think of it.”

  “But do you think the Tudors killed the princes?” he asks, very low. “Was it My Lady the King’s Mother? When she was married to the Constable of the Tower and had her son waiting to invade? Knowing that he could have no claim to the throne while they were alive?”

  “Who else?” I reply. “No one else gained anything from their deaths. And for sure, we see now that the Tudors have a strong stomach for almost any sin.”

  L’ERBER, LONDON, AUTUMN 1537

  I am in my great bed in London, with the curtains drawn against the autumn chill, when I hear the bells start to peal, a triumphant clangor that starts up with a single bell and then rings all around the city. I struggle up and wrap a robe around my shoulders as my bedroom door opens and my maid comes in, a candle shaking in her hand in her excitement. “Your Grace! There is news from Hampton Court! The queen has had a boy! The queen has had a boy!”

  “God bless her, and keep her safe,” I say, and I mean it. Nobody could ill-wish Jane Seymour, the mildest of women and a good stepmother to my beloved princess. “Do they say if the baby is strong?”

  The girl smiles and silently shrugs. Of course, under the new laws it is impossible even to ask if the royal baby is well, since this casts a doubt on the king’s potency.

  “Well, God bless them both,” I say.

  “Can we go out?” the girl asks. “Me and the other girls? There is dancing in the streets and they’ve built a bonfire.”

  “You can go as long as you all stay together,” I tell her. “And come home at dawn.”

  She beams at me. “Shall you get dressed?” she asks.

  I shake my head. It feels as if it is a long, long time since I stayed up all night to watch by the royal bed and took the news of a baby to the king. “I’ll go back to sleep,” I say. “And we’ll say prayers for the health of the queen and the prince in the morning.”

  Regular news comes from Hampton Court: the baby is well and thriving, he has been christened Edward, Princess Mary carried him during the ceremony. If he lives, he is the new Tudor heir and she will never be queen; but I know—and who knows better than I, who shared Queen Katherine’s four heartbreaks?—that a healthy baby does not mean a future king.

  Then we hear, just as I had feared, that the queen’s physicians have been called back to Hampton Court. But it is not for the baby; it is the queen who is ill. In those dangerous days after the birth, it seems that the shadow fell on the mother. I go at once to my chapel and pray for Jane Seymour; but she dies that night, only two weeks after the birth of her little son.

  They say that the king is devastated, that he has lost the mother of his child and the only woman he truly loved. They say that he will never marry again, that Jane was matchless, perfect, the only true wife he ever had. I think that she has achieved in death the perfection that no woman could show in life. His own perfection is wholly imaginary, now he has an imaginary perfect wife.

  “Can he love anyone at all?” Geoffrey asks me. “This is the king who ordered women tried for treason for the crime of cutting down their husband’s corpses and giving them a proper burial. Can he even imagine grief?”

  I think of the boy who went white-faced for a year after the death of his mother, but less than a month after the death of his wife he is looking for a new one: a princess of France, or from Spain. Montague, dressed in full mourning, comes to me at L’Erber struggling not to laugh out loud to tell me that the king has asked all the princesses of France to come to Calais so that he can choose the prettiest to be his next bride.

  The French are deeply insulted, since it is as if the royal ladies of France were heifers on market day, and no princess is eager to be the fourth queen to a wife killer; but Henry does not understand that he is no longer highly desirable. He does not realize that he is no longer the handsomest prince in Christendom, famous for his learning and devout life. Now he is aging—forty-six at the last birthday, fatter every day, and the sworn enemy of the Holy Father, head of the Church. And yet he cannot understand that he is not beloved, not admired, not the center of all attention.

  “Lady Mother, there is one good thing that has come from the death of the queen. You’ll find it hard to believe this; but he is restoring the priory,” Montague says.

  “What priory?” I ask.

  “Ours.”

  I don’t understand at all. “He is giving us back Bisham Priory?”

  “Yes,” Montague says. “He called me to his side in the chapel. I went to the royal gallery at Hampton Court, where he sits above the chapel in his own little room so he can see the altar. He reads and signs his papers while the priest celebrates the Mass below. He was praying for once, not working, and he crossed himself, kissed his rosary, and turned to me with a pleasant smile and said that he wants prayers for Jane’s soul and would you oblige him and restore the priory as a chantry for her?”

  “But he is closing the great religious houses up and down the country every day! Robert Aske and all the others, hundreds of them, died trying to save the monasteries.”

  “Well, now he wants to restore one.”

  “But he said that there is no such thing as purgatory and so no need for chantries?”

  “Apparently, he wants one for Jane and himself.”

  “Cromwell himself appointed the false prior and closed our priory.”

  “And that is to be reversed.”

  For a moment I am simply stunned, then I see that I am being given the greatest gift for a devout woman: my family’s priory back in my keeping. “This is a great honor to us.” I am quite awed at the thought that we will be allowed to open our beautiful chapel once again, that the monks will sing the plainsong in the echoing gallery, that the sacred Host will stand behind the altar once more in a shining monstrance, and the candles be lit before it, so that the little light shines out of the window into the darkness of a hard world. “He is really allowing this? Of all the priories and nunneries and monasteries of England that he has closed he is allowing this one light to shine? Our chapel? Where the banners of the white rose hang?”

  “He is,” Montague says, smiling. “I knew it would mean so much to you. I am so glad, Lady Mother.”

  “I can make it beautiful again,” I murmur. Already I can imagine the banners hanging once more in the chancel, the quiet shuffle of people
coming into the church to hear Mass, the gifts at the door, the hospitality to travelers, and the power and quietness of a place of prayer. “It is only one place, and only a little place, but I can restore the church at Bisham. It will be the only priory in England, but it will stand, and it will shine a faint holy little light into the dark of Henry’s England.”

  GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1537

  Montague and I, accompanied by my grandson Harry as our page boy, visit Greenwich to take our gifts to the king and find a court that is still in mourning for Queen Jane. It is the quietest Christmas that I have ever seen. But the king accepts our gifts with a smile and wishes us the compliments of the season. He asks me if I have seen Prince Edward and gives me permission to visit the little baby in his nursery. He says I may take my grandson and gives a smiling nod to Harry.

  The king’s fears for his son are painfully evident. There are double guards on the doors and no one may enter without written permission. No one at all, not even a duke. I admire the baby who looks well and strong and I press a gold coin into his nurse’s hand, saying that I will pray that he stays healthy. I leave him bellowing for a feed, a Tudor in his loud demands.

  Having paid my respects I am free to go to the princess’s rooms. She has her own little court, her ladies around her, but when she sees me she leaps to her feet and runs to me and I wrap her in my arms and hold her, as I always did.

  “And who is this?” She looks down at Harry, who is on one knee, his little hand on his heart.

  “This is my grandson Harry.”

  “I could serve you,” he says breathlessly.

  “I should be so pleased to have you in my service.” She gives him her hand and he gets to his feet and bows, his little face dazed with hero worship.

  “Your grandmother will say when you may join my household,” she tells him. “I expect you are needed at your home.”

  “I am no use at home, I am quite idle, they would not miss me at all,” he says, trying to persuade her but succeeding only in making her laugh.