“Is it our time?”
Montague bows his head farther so that no one can see him smile. “Soon,” he says. “The king is sending Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, to put down the commons. He thinks it will be readily done.”
“Do you?”
“I pray.” Cautiously, Montague does not even say what he prays for. “And the princess sent you her love. The king has brought her and little Lady Elizabeth to court. For a man who says that the commons will be easily put down, it’s telling that he should have his daughters brought to him for safety.”
Montague leaves as soon as the service is over, but I don’t need him to bring me news. Soon all of London is buzzing. The cook’s boy, sent to market to get some nutmeg, comes home with the claim that forty thousand men, armed and horsed, are marching in Boston.
My London steward comes to me to tell me that two lads from Lincolnshire have run away, gone home to join with the commons. “What did they think they were going to do?” I ask.
“They take an oath,” he says, his voice carefully bland. “Apparently, they swear that the church shall have its fees and funds, that the monasteries shall not be thrown down, but shall be restored, and that the false bishops and false advisors who recommended these wrongs shall be exiled from the king and from the kingdom.”
“Bold demands,” I say, keeping my face quite still.
“Bold demands in the face of danger,” he adds. “The king has sent his friend Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, to join with the Duke of Norfolk against the rebels.”
“Two dukes against a handful of fools?” I say. “God save the commons from folly and hurt.”
“The commons may save themselves. They’re not unarmed,” he says. “And there are more than a few of them. The gentry are with them and they have horse and weapons. Perhaps it is the dukes who had better look to their own safety. They say that Yorkshire is ready to rise, and Tom Darcy has sent to the king to ask what his answer must be.”
“Lord Thomas Darcy?” I think of the man who has my pansy badge in his pocket.
“The rebels have a banner,” my steward continues. “They are marching under the five wounds of Christ. They say it is like a holy war. The Church against the infidel, the commons against the king.”
“And where is Lord Hussey?” I ask, naming one of the lords of the country, the princess’s former chamberlain.
“He’s with the rebels,” my steward says, nodding at my blank-faced astonishment. “And his wife is out of the Tower and with him.”
The country is so disturbed with rumors of uprisings, even in the South, that I stay in London in early October. I take my barge downriver one cold day as the mist is lying on the water and the evening sun burning red, and the tide is up and the current strong.
“Best walk round the bridge, my lady,” says the master of my barge, and they set me down on the wet slimy stairs and row the barge out into the middle channel to shoot the stormy waters of the bridge and pick me up on the other side.
One of my granddaughters, Katherine, takes my arm and we have a liveryman before and behind us as we walk the short way around to the water stairs on the other side of the bridge. There are beggars, of course, but they clear from the path when they see us coming. I hide my flinch of dismay when I notice a nun’s habit, fouled by months of sitting and waiting, and see the strained, desperate face of a woman who had given herself to God and then found herself flung into the gutter. I nod to Katherine’s sister Winifred, who, unasked, tosses the woman a coin.
A man comes out of the darkness and stands before us. “Who’s this?” he asks one of my servants.
“I am Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury,” I say briskly, “and you had better let me pass.”
He smiles, as merry as an outlaw in the greenwood, and he bows low. “Pass, your ladyship, pass with our blessing,” he says. “For we know who our friends are. And God be with you, for you too are a pilgrim and have a pilgrimage gate to go.”
I stop short. “What did you say?”
“It’s not a rebellion,” he says very quietly. “You would know that as well as I, perhaps. It is a pilgrimage. We are calling it the Pilgrimage of Grace. And we tell each other that we have to pass through the pilgrimage gate.”
He hesitates and sees my face as I hear the words “Pilgrimage of Grace.” “We are marching under the five wounds of Christ,” he says. “And I know you, and all the good old lords of the white rose, are pilgrims just like us.”
The rebels who say they march on the Pilgrimage of Grace have captured Sir Thomas Percy, or else he has joined with them; nobody seems to know. They are under the leadership of a good man, an honest Yorkshireman, Robert Aske, and in the middle of October we learn that Aske rode into the great northern city of York without an arrow flying in its defense. They threw open the gates to him and to the force that everyone is now calling the pilgrims. They are twenty thousand strong. This is four times the force that took England at Bosworth, this is an army great enough to take all of England.
Their first act was to restore two Benedictine houses in the city, Holy Trinity and the nunnery of St. Clement. When they rang the bells at Holy Trinity, the people cried for joy as they went in to hear Mass.
My guess is that the king will do anything to avoid an open battle. The rebels in Lincolnshire have been offered a pardon if they will only go home, but why should they do so, now the massive county of Yorkshire is up in arms?
“I’m ordered to muster the tenants and to get ready to march,” Montague says to me. He has come to L’Erber as the servants are clearing away the tables after dinner. The musicians are tuning up and there is a masque to be performed. I beckon Montague to sit beside me, and I lean my head towards him so that he can speak softly against my hood.
“I am commanded to go north and put down the pilgrimage,” he says. “Geoffrey has to raise a force too.”
“What will you do?” In my pocket I touch the embroidered badge that Lord Darcy gave me, the five wounds of Christ and the white rose of York. “You can’t fire on the pilgrims.”
He shakes his head. “Never,” he says simply. “Besides, everyone says that when the king’s army sees the pilgrims, they’ll change sides and join them. It’s happening every day. Every letter that the king sends out with orders to his commanders he follows with one asking them if they are staying true to him. He trusts no one. He’s right. It turns out that no one can be trusted.”
“Who’s he got in the field?”
“Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and the king trusts him no farther than he can see him. Talbot, Lord Shrewsbury, is marching in support, but he is for the old religion and the old ways. Charles Brandon refused to go, saying that he wanted to be at home to keep his county down; he’s been ordered to Yorkshire against his will. Thomas Lord Darcy says he’s pinned down by the rebels in his castle, but since he’s been arguing against the pulling down of the monasteries since the first moment of the queen’s divorce, nobody knows if he’s just waiting for the right moment to join the pilgrims. John Hussey sent a letter to say he’s been kidnapped by them, but everyone knows he was the princess’s chamberlain and loves her dearly, and his wife is outright on her side. The king is chewing his nails to the quick; he’s in a frenzy of rage and self-pity.”
“And what . . .” I break off as a messenger in Montague’s livery comes into the hall and walks close to him and waits. Montague beckons him forward, listens intently, and then turns to me.