by David Field
Richard made a point of communicating with Cromwell by way of notes left on one of his desks, either in Whitehall Palace or in his home study. He refused to dine at the same table as either the father or the son, but would take such food as he required — which was very little — seated on a stool in the kitchen. The cook reported to Cromwell that Master Richard was rapidly losing weight, but Cromwell’s only reply was to the effect that it would do him no harm, since he had grown ‘pudgy’ during his time in clerical service, having rarely engaged in any physical exercise.
When not carrying out his duties for Cromwell with grim tight-lipped efficiency, Richard took to walking along the Thames west of Whitehall Palace, but deliberately avoided going so far upstream as to be able to view even the chimneys of Hampton Court that Henry had recently added to the original structure commissioned by Cardinal Wolsey. He was therefore barely aware of how Jane’s pregnancy was proceeding, and such information as he had gleaned had come from conversations he overheard between junior clerks in his Whitehall office.
One morning, after completing yet another seemingly endless pile of copying for the Lord Privy Seal, who he would cheerfully have run through with a sword, if he possessed one, he was walking down a main corridor heading for the communal eating hall where minor Whitehall Palace staff would find plates of meats, bread, sometimes fish, and small beer, left out for them as their entitlement. As he passed the opening from a linen store, a hand shot out and grabbed the collar of his tunic, pulling him sideways and twisting his head until his lips were smothered by a mouth that had become a distant memory.
‘Dear God, what that does to my cunny!’ Jane Rochford leered at him as she released her grip. ‘When can we fuck again? Name the time, and leave the place to me. In this cupboard behind me right now, if you’re feeling as randy as me.’
The ‘place’ turned out to be Jane’s quarters in Hampton Court, and the ‘time’ every night, as Richard angrily fornicated away his bitterness between thighs that never seemed to tire of him, whatever his motivation.
XX
Early in September of that year, Queen Jane withdrew to her lying-in chamber at Hampton Court, surrounded by fussing physicians and clucking midwives. Only a select handful of her ladies were allowed access to her, and even then only after performing almost ritualistic cleansing actions designed to prevent any infection entering the chamber. Incense was burned in special holders, rifled during the emptying of the monasteries that was almost complete, pinecones were burned in fireplaces, and high-born ladies were required to rinse their hands in vinegar brought up from the Palace kitchens. All to ensure that nothing might hazard the royal birth, and hopefully the safe delivery of a son and heir to continue the Tudor dynasty.
Jane Rochford was among the select few, and she gleefully ignored the command from the King that the Queen’s Ladies refrain from sexual activity, even with their husbands, in case they thereby incurred the risk of carrying infection into what had almost become a shrine to the impending birth. Night after night she and Richard went to it like parched travellers who had discovered a sweetly flowing stream, and Richard was able, by this means, to block out from his consciousness the celebrations that had attended the marriage of Gregory Cromwell to Elizabeth Seymour in August. Thereafter Bess was in attendance on her older sister Jane as a newly created Lady of the Queen’s Chamber, and given that no-one other than those ladies, and certainly not those men who had recently formed part of Jane’s afternoon audiences, were allowed near the heavily pregnant Queen, Richard was spared the ordeal of seeing Bess in her new role as the wife of his master’s young son.
Because of his nightly attendance on Jane Rochford, Richard was kept up to date with the details of the final days of confinement, which Cromwell demanded that he pass on to him. The two men were back to speaking to each other, but only in strained formal tones that were essential for the business that they had to conduct on behalf of Henry, and any warmth that might previously have crept into their daily discussions seemed to be lost forever. Cromwell refrained from making any reference to his son Gregory and his new bride, and Richard only grudgingly supplied a bare minimum of information from inside the birthing suite, most of it almost irrelevant to Cromwell’s ambitions, such as the fact that Her Majesty had developed a craving for quail.
In the second week of September, Jane’s waters broke, and she went into the first stages of labour. It was obvious from the outset that the baby was not well positioned inside her womb, and physicians came and went with remedies for lining it up with her pelvis. Some of these involved manual indignities that Jane bore with patience, but which did nothing to ease her discomfort, or provide the rest that she was destined to require as the labour went on through the second night, and into the third day.
Henry had obeyed his own stricture that no-one from the outside world be allowed inside the chamber in which Jane was sweating, screaming, cursing uncharacteristically, and yelling to her attendants to ‘get on with what you are summoned to achieve,’ as the Ladies took it in turn to wipe her brow and see to her more intimate needs. But the King was only down the corridor, and one floor below, and a chain of messengers had been established to pass on any information.
For most of those two days, Edward Seymour, the royal brother, closely attended Henry and during that time he and the King grew closer as they discussed anything and everything that might take their minds off what was transpiring on the floor above. Then, at two o’clock in the morning of 12th October, Edward woke Henry where he was dozing in a chair with the joyous tidings that Jane had delivered herself of a boy.
Preparations for the christening had been well under way for some time, although they had been kept hidden from Henry, who was superstitious in such matters. Nevertheless he was delighted with what Cromwell had secretly proposed in conjunction with appropriate members of the Household, and on 15th October, the three-day-old Edward was christened in the chapel at Hampton Court, in a ceremony that brought together all the Tudor offspring, with the twenty-one-year-old Mary acting as godmother, and four-year-old Elizabeth holding the ‘chrisom’ baptismal cloth in place while the holy water was sprinkled on Edward’s head.
During the same ceremony the infant heir to the English throne was proclaimed Duke of Cornwall — the traditional title for a royal heir when born — and Earl of Chester. The closeness of other Seymours with the royal family was also acknowledged in the appointment of the royal uncle, Edward Seymour, as Earl of Hertford.
Queen Jane had not attended the christening of the child to which she had given birth. It was traditional for the royal mother to be absent on such occasions, but Jane would not have been capable, even had it been deemed appropriate. She had not risen from her bed since the birth, and although visited several times by a tearfully grateful and besotted Henry, her body appeared to have paid dearly for the delivery of the royal treasure.
The argumentative physicians who surrounded her bed ultimately agreed that she was suffering from child bed fever, which was their way of obscuring from general knowledge their inability to prevent infection of any afterbirth that had not been delivered along with the child.
A little over a week after the birth, Jane was dead, and the stunned Court lurched into mourning.
Henry was a pitiful sight as he sat slumped in his favourite chair, crying like a child for days at a time, dressed in funereal black and refusing to see anyone other than the menials who delivered his food and drink. Even that was frequently left unheeded as Henry sank deeper and deeper into his own misery, and the mounting conviction that God’s curse had struck once again.
He had defied God by bigamously marrying a whore who he had subsequently executed, and he had blasphemed against God’s will when taking over his Church and removing England from the grace of Rome. Now God was repaying him by robbing him of the greatest love of his life, in exchange for grudgingly granting him the son he had so long craved. Was ever a man more cursed?
A month later, Henry made
his first public appearance since Edward’s birth when he forced himself, weeping openly, to attend Jane’s funeral at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Palace, where he let it be known that when his time came he wished to be buried alongside ‘my true Jane’. The funeral procession was symbolically composed of twenty-nine people, one for each year of Jane’s life, and it was headed, as chief mourner, by a genuinely grieving Lady Mary. The birth of her step-brother had finally blocked her path to the throne, but she had nothing but loving memories of the now lost step-mother who had brought her back into her father’s bosom. She was seen to shed a tear in public on one of the few occasions in her life.
XXI
Jane Rochford shook Richard awake, and he screwed his eyes against the glare of the sun that streamed in through the window of the bedchamber as she pulled back the shutters.
‘Wake up, lover man — we have a visitor.’
They were in their second week at Grimston Manor, on the outskirts of Lynn, in Norfolk. It was a modest estate that Henry had given to George Boleyn on his marriage to Jane Parker, as she had been in those days, and which he had either forgotten to seize back upon George’s execution, or tactfully left unattainted as some sort of reward to Jane for her assistance in ridding him of her sister-in-law Anne Boleyn.
Following the funeral of Jane, the Court had been formally dismissed until resummoned, and Richard had informed Cromwell — rather than seek his permission, as protocol demanded — that he was taking a holiday. Cromwell had not demurred, principally because he was utterly weary of the long face and grim silent expressions of accusation that confronted him every time he gave instruction to the man who only remained in his service because he was reliable and, to a limited extent, talented.
‘Whoever our visitor is, tell them to come back tomorrow,’ Richard grumbled sleepily. ‘Or, should that be too polite, tell them to go and piss in their bonnet.’
‘One does not say that sort of thing to the Duke of Norfolk,’ Jane grinned back at him. ‘Now, get off your beautiful arse.’
‘Norfolk?’ Richard echoed with raised eyebrows. ‘Why is he here?’
Jane inclined her head in a gesture of uncertainty. ‘One might regard it as a family visit, I suppose, since he was uncle to my late husband. But Uncle Norfolk is not famed for his fondness for family — not since he threw his wife bodily from their house, anyway — so I suspect that he has business with you.’
‘Does he know about us?’
‘If he didn’t before, he does now, but I hardly think he’s here to give you a thrashing. Much though it pains me to say this, pull on your hose and hide that lovely cock, then go downstairs and be polite.’
Ten minutes later, Richard descended into the main hall, where Norfolk was pacing up and down impatiently, his dark ferrety face set in a mask of determination.
‘About time,’ he muttered. ‘I set out from Norwich at daybreak, while you were presumably sleeping off your excesses of last night.’
‘I assume that you are not here to chide me regarding either my drinking habits or my choice of bed partner,’ Richard replied sarcastically.
Norfolk allowed himself a wry smile. ‘Cromwell has taught you all he knows about politeness, clearly. How go matters between you?’
‘Why should that be of any concern to you?’
‘None whatsoever in the immediate future,’ Norfolk replied, ‘but I am advised that since he bought the Lady Elizabeth for his son, you and he have hardly been bosom companions.’
‘You are well advised,’ Richard replied coldly, ‘but hardly worth a hard ride from Norwich to have confirmed, I would image. Since I place you in the same sack as my master, I can only assume that the purpose of this visit is one that suits a devious purpose of your own.’
The girl scuttled in with a tray of wine and wafers, followed in a more sedate fashion by Jane, who bowed formally in the direction of their guest.
‘Uncle,’ she murmured in acknowledgment.
Norfolk smiled. ‘It is good to see that since the death of my almost totally useless nephew you do not lack for male company. Now, please leave us.’
With a puzzled expression, Jane left them alone, and Norfolk helped himself to wine, then grimaced. ‘This local sheep’s piss doesn’t improve over the years.’
‘Why did you dismiss Lady Jane?’ Richard asked.
Norfolk gestured for him to take a seat as he stared unseeingly at the far wall and began to explain. ‘My father and grandfather fought on the side of Richard of Gloucester against the usurper Richmond, who became Henry Tudor. That makes my family Yorkist, a fact I underlined by first marrying Anne of York, the daughter of Edward Plantagenet. She was your grandfather’s sister, by my reckoning.’
Richard’s mouth sagged open and he reached for the wine. ‘Who told you this?’
‘I was recently in the company of your great aunt, the Countess of Salisbury, Margaret Pole, who asked me to convey to you her best wishes for your future. But at present, you do not have one, do you?’
‘I certainly do not, if you intend to make known to King Henry who my grandfather was,’ Richard confirmed nervously. ‘May I assume that the purpose of your visit is to bribe me into betraying my master?’
Norfolk smirked. ‘Do not judge me by the low standards you have been taught. I am here to offer you the throne of England — if not for yourself, at least for your descendants.’
‘At least now I understand why you dismissed Lady Jane from our conversation. You speak treason.’
‘Fluently. But only if you believe the Tudors to be the rightful occupiers of the throne. We Howards have for generations supported in arms the true descendants of Edward III, by which I mean the House of York, of which you are the closest surviving member of true blood. The direct descendant of Richard, Duke of York, who was himself from the loins of Edward IV.’
‘You are not here, I assume, to give me a history lesson? And you tell me nothing of which I was not already aware — at least Cromwell did not play me false on that score.’
Norfolk spat into the rushes before responding. ‘Cromwell is typical of that tribe of low-born carrion who have fed off the rotting corpse of a family of usurpers. Before him there was Wolsey, the son of a butcher who I more than once dumped into the Ipswich mud when we were boys at school. Cromwell’s father was a brewer, a publican, a blacksmith, a bully and a knave. Base-born, the lot of them, but gifted with a guile with which the Devil infected them, by which means they have blocked the fortunes of those of us who were born to rule this nation that has fallen into heresy and iniquitous practices. Babylon itself had nothing to compare with what was practised in Queen Anne’s court, all because we have forsaken God as the result of Henry’s desire to be rid of Katherine, that pious daughter of the true Church.’
‘Hardly the way to remember your own niece,’ Richard mocked him, provoking another spit aimed at the rushes.
‘She was only my niece because my idiot sister married that weak, pathetic lump of goat’s shit Thomas Boleyn,’ he snarled. ‘The only true Howards come from male loins like my own.’
‘You clearly feel strongly regarding these matters,’ Richard replied politely, beginning to doubt the man’s mental stability, ‘but apart from employing me as some sort of icon in an uprising, thereby imperilling my head when it comes to nought, how else may I assist? By betraying my master? Much though I feel he has deceived me in the matter of his son’s marriage to the woman I loved, I still owe him my improved existence, since he plucked me from an uncertain future in a Wiltshire shithole, and I would be loath to repay him with treachery.’
‘Your loyalty does you credit, and further underlines the purity of your Yorkist blood,’ Norfolk replied, before taking another swig of wine. ‘But if you have an infection of, say, an arm, as the result of a battle wound, how do you prevent that infection from spreading?’
‘Clearly, you cut it off,’ Richard replied with a faint grimace.
‘Precisely. In just the same way, we ne
ed to cut off infectious limbs such as Cromwell and the fawning Seymours before we can remove the main canker and restore England to its former eminence, with you at its head.’
‘You bring me an army?’ Richard asked sarcastically.
‘I bring you several armies,’ Norfolk replied with a triumphant smile. ‘And a royal bride, only slightly soiled by use, if at all.’
‘Let’s start with the armies,’ Richard invited him, content to humour the man in order to bring the meeting to a close.
‘There is, of course, my own,’ Norfolk replied as he preened himself. ‘That is to say, the army I command in the name of King Henry. But soldiers follow their immediate commanders, and for all that my loyal men care, I could be instructed by the Sultan of Turkey. They will serve any king who commands me, so long as they receive their sixpence a day, and their opportunities to loot houses and ravish women. Then there is the sizeable force that can be assembled by Geoffrey Pole, the Countess’s son. He is in contact with disaffected Yorkists throughout England, and we calculate that between them they could raise another five thousand men. Finally, the Holy Roman Emperor himself, Charles of Spain.’
Richard could not restrain a sceptical guffaw. ‘Our quarrel with Spain is long past! Queen Katherine has been dead for some years now, and the execution of your niece Anne was deemed to be sufficient penance, according to Ambassador Chapuys.’
‘The Emperor speaks for the Pope, remember, and his Holiness would dearly wish to see England back under his wing with a devotee of the true Church at its secular head. Even Francis of France fears the Pope, despite all the support he secretly gives to heretics, and he and Charles would be delighted were the Tudor line that they so detest be cut down.’
‘And the wife you promised me?’ Richard prompted him.
‘You have heard, of course, that Henry’s bastard son Fitzroy died last year?’
