He had told me in his nursery that to be a king was a holy duty. I thought of him then as a lovable little braggart: a boy spoiled by doting women, a loving boy of good intentions. Yet who would have thought that he would have leaped up to defy the mean old man, to take Katherine as his betrothed wife, to declare himself king and ready to marry her in one breath? It was the first thing he did, this boy of seventeen, the very first thing that he did. Just like my uncle King Edward, he took the throne and he took the woman he loved. Who would have thought that Harry Tudor had the courage of a Plantagenet? Who would have thought he had the imagination? Who would have thought he had the passion?
He is his mother’s son; that can be the only explanation. He has her love and her courage and her bright optimism, which is the nature of our family. He is a Tudor king but he is a boy of the House of York. In his joy and his optimism, he is one of ours. In his willing grasping of power, in his quick execution: he is one of ours.
Katherine the princess sends for me with a short note that bids me come to the house of Lady Williams, where I will find rooms waiting for me suitable for a noblewoman of my station. Then I am to come at once to the Palace of Westminster, go straight to the wardrobe rooms, pick out half a dozen gowns, and attend her, richly dressed, as her first lady-in-waiting. It is my release. I am free. It is my restoration.
I leave the children at Syon while I go downriver to London. I dare not take them with me yet; I feel as if I have to make sure that we are safe, to see that we are truly free before I dare summon them to be with me.
London does not look like a city which has lost a king. It is not a capital in mourning; it is a city mad with joy. They are roasting meat at the street corners; they are sharing ale out of the windows of the brewhouses. The king has not been buried long, the prince is not yet crowned, but the place is elated. They are opening the debtors’ prisons and men are coming out who had thought they would never see daylight again. It is as if a monster has died and we are freed from the grip of a bad spell. It is like waking from a nightmare. It is like spring after a long, long winter.
Dressed in my new gown of pale Tudor green, wearing a gable hood as heavy as that of the princess, I walk into the presence chamber of the King of England and see the prince, not on his throne, not standing in a stiff pose under the cloth of estate as if he were the portrait of majesty, but laughing with his friends strolling around the room, with Katherine at his side, as if they were a pair of lovers, enchanted with each other. And at the end of the room, seated on her chair with a circle of silent ladies all around her, a priest on either side for support, is My Lady, wearing deepest black, torn between grief and fury. She is no longer My Lady the King’s Mother—the title that gave her so much pride is buried with her son. Now, if she chooses it, she can be called My Lady the King’s Grandmother, and by the thunderous look on her face she does not choose it.
ENGLAND, 1509
For the commons of England it is a merciful release from hardship. For the lords it is an escape from tyranny. For the people of my family and my house it is the miraculous lifting of a death sentence. Anyone with Plantagenet blood or affinity to York has been living on license, achingly aware that at any moment the king might revoke permission and there would be a knock on the door from the green-and-white-liveried yeomen of the guard and a swift trip in their unmarked barge to the water gate of the Tower. The great portcullis would slide up, the barge would enter—and the prisoner would never come out again.
But now we do come out. William Courtenay emerges from the Tower with a royal pardon, and we pray that William de la Pole will be out soon. My cousin Thomas Gray is released from Calais castle and comes home. Disbelievingly, like householders slowly opening their painted doors after plague has passed through a village, we all start to emerge. Cousins come to London from their distant castles hoping it is safe to be seen at court again. Kinsfolk whom have not written for years now dare to send a message, sharing family news, telling of the birth of babies and the death of members of the family, asking, fearfully, how is everyone else? Has anyone seen such a man? Does anyone know if a distant cousin is safe abroad? The deathlike grip of the old king on every one of us is suddenly released. Harry the prince has not inherited his father’s fearful suspicions; he dismisses the spies, he cancels the debts, he pardons the prisoners. It feels as if we can all come out, blinking into the light.
Servants and tradesmen who have avoided me since the death of my husband and my fall from favor come to me in their dozens to offer their services now that my name is no longer written somewhere, on some list, with a question mark beside it.
Slowly, hardly able to believe my luck, like the rest of the country I find I am safe. I seem to have survived the dangerous twenty-four years of the first Tudor reign. My brother died on King Henry’s scaffold, my husband in his service, my cousin in childbed trying to give him another heir; but I have survived. I have been ruined, I have been heartbroken, I have been estranged from all but two of my children and lived in hiding with them, but now I can emerge, half blinded, into the sunlight of the young prince’s summer.
Katherine, once a widow as poor as me, soars upward into the sunshine of the Tudor favor like a kestrel spreading her russet wings in the morning light, her debts excused, her dowry forgotten. The prince marries her, in haste, in private, in the delight of passion finally expressed. Now he says he has loved her in silence and at a distance for all this time. He has been watching her, he has been desiring her. Only his father, only his grandmother, My Lady, enforced his silence. The ambiguous papal dispensation for this marriage that Katherine’s mother cunningly provided so long ago makes the marriage legal beyond question; nobody asks about her first husband, nobody cares, and they are wedded and bedded in days.
And I take my place at her side. Once again I have the right to draw the finest velvets from the royal wardrobe, I help myself to ropes of pearls and gold and jewels from the royal treasury. Once again, I am the senior lady-in-waiting to the Queen of England and I follow nobody but a Tudor into dinner. Katherine’s new husband, King Henry—Henry VIII as we all delightedly remind ourselves—pays me a grant of a hundred pounds a year the moment that I arrive at court, and I settle my debts: to my faithful steward John Little at Stourton, to my cousins, to the nuns at Syon, to Reginald’s priory. I send for Henry and Arthur, and the king offers them a place in his household. The king speaks highly of an education in the new learning, and orders that Reginald shall be well taught in his monastery; he will come to court as a philosopher and a scholar. I keep my boy Geoffrey and Ursula in the queen’s rooms for now, but soon I will send them home, and they can live again in the country and be raised as Plantagenet heirs should be.
I even receive a proposal of marriage. Sir William Compton, the young king’s dearest friend and companion in his revels and jousting, asks me, humbly on his knees, with his smiling eyes looking boldly up at me, if I would consider him as a husband. His bowed knee indicates that I could have the ruling of him, his warm hand holding mine suggests that this might be pleasurable. I have lived as a nun for nearly five years; the thought of a handsome man between good linen sheets cannot help but make me pause for a moment and look into William’s brown smiling eyes.
It takes me only one minute to decide, but to serve his urgent sense of his own dignity as a man come from next to nowhere, I spin it out for a couple of days. Thank God that I do not need his newly minted name, I don’t have to hide my name now. I don’t need the royal favor that he carries. My own popularity at court is high, and only grows as the young king turns to me for advice, for stories of the old days, for my memories of his mother. I tell him of the fairy-tale Plantagenet court and I see that he longs to re-create our reign. So I do not need Compton’s newly built house; I am so restored, I have such great prospects, that the king’s favorite thinks me an advantageous match. Gently, I tell him no. Graciously, courteously, he expresses his disappointment. We conclude the passage like two skilled performers performing the steps of an elegant dance. He knows that I am at the height of my triumph, I am his equal, I don’t need him.