“Put His Majesty to bed,” Cromwell says.
I start a little at the new title. Now that the king is the only ruler in England and the Pope is nothing but the vicar of Rome, he has taken to claiming that he is as good as an emperor. He is no longer to be called “Your Grace” like any duke, though this was good enough for his father, the first Tudor, and good enough for all of my family. Now he has an imperial title: he is “Majesty.” Now his newly made majesty is so felled by grief that his humble subjects have to lift him into bed, and they are too afraid to touch him.
The grooms hesitate, hardly knowing how to approach him. “Oh, for God’s sake,” Cromwell says irritably.
It takes six of them to lift him from the floor to the bed, and his head lolls and the tears spill from his closed eyes. I order the grooms to pull off his beautifully worked riding boots, and Cromwell tells them to take off the heavy jacket, so we leave him to sleep still half dressed, like a drunkard. One of the grooms will sleep on a pallet bed on the floor; we see them tossing coins for the unlucky one who has to stay. Nobody wants to be with him through the night as he snores and farts and weeps. There are two yeomen guards on the door.
“He’ll sleep,” Cromwell says. “But when he wakes, what do you think, Lady Margaret? Is his heart broken?”
“It is a terrible loss,” I concede. “To lose a child is always terrible, but to lose one when he was through the illnesses of childhood and had everything before him . . .”
“To lose an heir,” Cromwell remarks.
I say nothing. I am not going to share any opinion about the king’s heir.
Cromwell nods. “But from your point of view it is all to the good?”
The question is so heartless that I hesitate and look at him, as if I cannot be sure that I heard him correctly.
“It leaves Lady Mary as the only likely heir,” he points out. “Or do you say princess?”
“I don’t talk of her at all. And I say Lady Mary. I signed the oath, and I know that you passed an act of Parliament to say that the king will choose his own heir.”
I order food brought to my private rooms. I can’t bear to join the court which is noisy with excited chatter and speculation. Montague comes in with the fruit and sweetmeats, pours a glass of wine, and sits opposite me.
“Did he collapse?” he asks coolly.
“Yes,” I say.
“He was like that when he lost the Boleyn baby,” he says. “He cried and raged and then didn’t speak. Then, when he finished with his grief, he denied that it had ever happened. And we had a secret burial.”
“It’s a terrible loss for him,” I remark. “He said he was going to make Fitzroy his heir.”
“And now he has no male heir, just as the curse foretold.”
“I don’t know,” I say.
In the morning the king is flushed and sullen, his eyes red and puffy, his face downcast. He completely ignores me. It is as if I am not there at breakfast, and was not there last night. He eats hugely, calling again and again for more meat, more ale, some wine, some fresh baked bread, some pastries, as if he would gobble up the world, and then goes again to his chapel. I sit with the queen and her ladies in our bright rooms which overlook the high street and so we see the messengers in Norfolk livery come and go, but the death of the young duke is not announced to the court and nobody knows if they should wear mourning or not.
For three days we stay at Sittingbourne, and still the king says nothing about Fitzroy, though more and more people know that he has died. On the fourth day the court moves on, towards Dover, but still no one has announced that the duke is dead, and the court has not gone into mourning, and the funeral has not been planned.
It is as if everything is suspended in time, frozen like a winter waterfall with the cascade pouring down one moment and stopped in silence the next. The king says nothing; the court knows everything, but obediently acts as if it is completely ignorant. Fitzroy does not ride to join us from London, he will never ride again and yet we all have to pretend that we are waiting for him to come.
“This is madness,” Montague says to me.
“I don’t know what I am supposed to do,” the queen says plaintively to her brother. “It’s not really anything to do with me. I have ordered a mourning gown. But I don’t know if I have to put it on.”
“Howard has to speak,” Thomas Seymour rules. “Fitzroy was his son-in-law. There’s no reason for any of us to get the bastard a proper funeral. There’s no reason for us to call the king to account.”
Thomas Howard steps up to the throne as Henry sits in the presence chamber before dinner and asks, his voice so quiet that only the men closest to him can hear, if he has permission to leave court to go home and bury his son-in-law.
Carefully, he does not say Fitzroy’s name. The king beckons him closer and whispers in his ear, and then turns and waves him away. Thomas Howard leaves court without a word to anyone, and goes to his home in Norfolk. Later, we hear that he buried his son-in-law, and his own hopes, in Thetford Priory, with only two men attending the funeral, a plain wooden coffin and a secret service.
“Why?” Montague asks me. “Why is it kept so quiet?”
“Because Henry cannot bear to lose another son,” I say. “And because now he has the court so obedient and we are such fools, if he does not want to think of something, then none of us says it. If he loses his son and cannot bear the grief, then the boy is buried out of sight. And when he next wants to do something which is completely wrong, we will find that he has grown stronger still. He can deny the truth and nobody will argue with him.”
BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, JULY 1536
I stay at my home while the court is on progress and walk in my fields, and watch the wheat turn golden. I go out with the reaping gang on the first day of harvesting and watch them stride side by side across the field, their sickles slicing down the waving crop, the hares and the rabbits darting away before them so the boys race after them with yapping terriers.
Behind the men come the women, embracing great armfuls of stooks and tying them with one practiced movement, their gowns hitched up so that they can stride, their sleeves rolled up high over their brawny arms. Many of them have a baby strapped to their back, most of them have a couple of children trailing behind with the old people gleaning the fallen heads of wheat so that nothing is wasted.
I feel all the wild joy of a miser watching gold come into the treasury. I would rather have a good crop than all the plate I could steal from an abbey. I sit on my horse and watch the tenants work, and I smile when they call out to me and tell me that it is a good year, a good year for us all.
I ride back to the house and notice a strange horse in the stables and a man taking a drink of ale at the kitchen door. He looks up as I ride into the yard and pulls his hat from his head—it’s an odd cap, Italian-made I should guess. I dismount and wait for him to come towards me.
“I have a message from your son, Countess,” he says. “He is well, and sends you good wishes.”
“I am glad to hear from him,” I say, hiding my anxiety. We are all waiting, we have been waiting for months, for Reginald to complete his report on the king’s claim to be supreme head of the English Church. Reginald has promised that the work will be finished soon and that it will support the king’s views. How he will walk through the maze that lost Thomas More, how he will avoid the trap that snapped shut on John Fisher, I don’t know. But there is no one in Christendom better read than my son Reginald. If there is a precedent for a king like ours in the long history of the Church, he will find it, and perhaps he can find a way to restore Princess Mary too.