Some of this is done: the marriage is annulled, the child Elizabeth declared a bastard. And yet still the woman is kept in the Tower and the plans for an execution go on.
I am glad to be away from the city but I cannot put the woman in the Tower out of my mind. In the closed and derelict priory I go into the cold chapel and kneel on the stone floor facing east, though the beautiful cross and altar silverware have been taken away. I find myself praying to an empty altar for the woman whom I have hated, whose agent stole my holy things.
There is no precedent for the execution of a Queen of England. It is not possible for a queen to be beheaded. No woman has ever walked from the Tower to the little patch of grass before the chapel to her death. I cannot imagine it. I cannot bear to imagine it. And I cannot believe that Henry Tudor, the prince whom I knew, could turn against a woman he had loved like this. He is a king whose courtly lovemaking is a byword at his court. He cannot be brutal; it is always love, true love, for Henry. Surely, he cannot sentence his wife, and the mother of his child, to death. I know that he turned against his own good queen, that he sent her away and neglected her. But it is a different thing, a different thing altogether, to ride away from a disappointing woman and ignore her, than to change overnight and command a lover’s death.
I pray for Anne, but I find my thoughts turning again and again to the king. I think he must be in a fury of jealous rage, shamed at what men are saying about him, exposed by the spiteful wit of the Boleyns, feeling his age, feeling the good looks of his youth blurred by the fatness of his face. Every day he must look in his mirror and see the young, handsome prince disappearing behind the bloated face of an old, laughable king, the golden child becoming the Moldwarp. Everyone adored Henry when he was a young king; he cannot understand that his court, the wife whom he raised from nothing, could have turned against him and—worse—laughed at him as a fat old cuckold.
But I am mistaken in this. While I think of the sensitive man recoiling with shame, raging at the loss of the woman for whom he destroyed so much, Henry is repairing his pride, courting the Seymour girl. He is not looking in the mirror and mourning his youth. He is going upriver in his barge with lute players twanging away, to dine with her every night. He is sending her little gifts and planning their future as if they are a bride and groom betrothed in May. He is not mourning his youth, he is reclaiming it; and just a few days after the cannon shot from the Tower tells all of London that the king has committed one of the worst crimes a man can do—killed his wife—the king marries again and we have a new queen: Jane.
“The Spanish ambassador told me that Jane will bring the princess to court, and see her honored,” Geoffrey tells me. We are walking in the fields towards Home Farm, looking at the greening crop. Somewhere among the white hawthorn of the hedgerow there is a blackbird singing defiance to the world, lilting notes, filled with hope.
“Really?”
Geoffrey is beaming. “Our enemy is dead, and we have survived. The king himself called Henry Fitzroy to him, took him in his arms, and said that the Boleyn woman would have killed him and our princess, and that he was lucky to still have them.”
“He’ll send for the princess?”
“As soon as Jane is proclaimed queen, and sets up her household. Our princess will live with her new mother, the queen—within days.”
I tuck my hand in the crook of my favorite son’s arm and rest my head briefly on his shoulder. “You know, in a life of such reverses, I find I am almost surprised to still be here. I am very surprised to see it all coming right again.”
He pats my hand. “Who knows? You might yet see your beloved princess crowned.”
“Shh, shh,” I say, though the fields are empty but for a distant laborer digging out a blocked ditch. It is now treason even to speak of the death of the king. Every day Cromwell makes a new law to protect the king’s reputation.
I can hear the sound of hooves on the road and we turn back to the house. I see Montague’s standard rippling above the hedgerows and when we walk into the stable yard he is dismounting from his horse. He comes quickly towards the two of us, smiling, drops to his knee for my blessing, and then rises. “I have news from Greenwich,” he says. “Good news.”
“The princess is to return to court?” Geoffrey guesses. “Didn’t I say so?”
“Even better than that,” Montague says. He turns to me. “It is you who are invited to return to court,” he says. “Lady Mother, I am here with the king’s own invitation. The exile is over, you are to return.”
I don’t know what to say. I look at his smiling face, and I struggle for words. “A restoration?”
“A complete restoration. It will be as it was before. The princess in her palace, you at her side.”
“God be praised,” Geoffrey exclaims. “You will command Princess Mary’s household again, just as you used to do. You will be where you should be, where we all should be, at court, and places and fees will come your way again, will come to all of us.”
“In debt, Geoffrey?” Montague asks with a slight mocking smile.
“I doubt you could manage on a small estate, constantly going to law with the neighbors,” Geoffrey says irritably. “All I want is for us to have our own again. Our Lady Mother should be at the head of the court, and we should all be there too. We are Plantagenets; we were born to rule, the least we can do is advise.”
“And I will care for the princess,” I say—the only thing that matters to me.
“Lady Governess to the princess again.” Montague takes my hand and smiles at me. “Congratulations.”
GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, JUNE 1536
I return to London with Montague, his standard going before us, the white rose over my head, his guards beautifully mounted and dressed around me, and almost as soon as we are in the city, heading for our barge at the river, I see that people are pointing and running ahead of us, and starting to cheer. By the time we get close to the river there are thousands of people in the streets, shouting my name, shouting blessings, asking for the princess, and finally calling out “À Warwick! À Warwick!”.
“That’s enough.” Montague nods to one of the guards who rides into the crowd, crushing people with his big horse, and takes the flat of his sword and delivers a thudding blow to the young loyalist.
“Montague!” I say, shocked. “He was just cheering for us.”
“He can’t,” Montague says grimly. “You’re back at court, Lady Mother, and we are restored, but it’s not all just as it was. The king is not as he was. I think he will never be the same again.”
“I thought he was so happy with Jane Seymour?” I ask. “I thought she was the only woman he has ever loved?”
Montague hides a grim smile at my sarcasm. “He’s happy with her,” he says cautiously. “But he’s not so much in love that he can bear even one word of criticism, one word of doubt. And someone shouting for you, or for the princess, or for the Church, is the sort of criticism that he cannot bear to hear.”
My rooms at court are the ones I had before, so long ago, when I was here as lady-in-waiting to Katherine and she was a queen of only twenty-three years old, pulled out of poverty and despair by a seventeen-year-old king, and we thought that nothing would ever go wrong again.
I go to pay my respects to the new queen in her rooms, and make my curtsey to Jane Seymour, a girl I first met as a shy, rather incompetent maid-in-waiting to Katherine. From her blanched hauteur, I assume that she remembers being scolded by me for clumsiness, and I make sure I curtsey low, and stay down until she invites me to rise.
I show not the slightest hint of my amusement as I survey her room and her ladies. Every wooden boss that used to bear a falcon or a bold A has been lathed clean and sanded down, and now there is a J or a rising phoenix. Her unctuous motto, “Bound to Obey and Serve,” is being embroidered by her ladies on a banner of Tudor green. They greet me pleasantly. Some of them are old friends. Elizabeth Darrell served Katherine with me, Frances Grey’s half sister Mary Brandon is here and, most surprisingly of all, Jane Boleyn, the widow of George Boleyn, who provided fatal evidence against her own husband and her sister-in-law Anne. She seems to have recovered with remarkable swiftness from her grief and the disaster in her family, and she curtseys to me very politely.