A tide of wealth and prosperity flows out of the open doors of the treasury. Incredulously, they throw open cupboards, boxes, and chests in every royal house, and everywhere they find plate and gold, jewels and fabrics, carpets and spices. The old king took his taxes and fines in money and goods, indiscriminately sucking in household furnishings, tradesmen’s stores, even the tools of apprentices, impoverishing the poor. The new king, the young Henry, gives back to innocent people what his father stole from them, in a festival of redress. Unjust fines are repaid from the exchequer, noblemen are restored to their lands, my kinsman George Neville who guarded my sons is released from his crippling debts and given the post of Chief Larderer, a patron to thousands, the master of hundreds, a royal fortune at his disposal just waiting to be spent on good things. He is high in the king’s favor, Henry admires him, calls him a kinsman, and trusts him. Nobody mentions his ill-set leg; he is allowed to go to any, to all of his beautiful homes.
His brother, Edward Neville, is a favorite and serves in the king’s bedchamber. The king swears that Edward is the very match of him, calls him to stand beside him, to compare heights and the color of their hair, assures my cousin that they could be mistaken for brothers, that he loves us all as his brothers and sisters. He is warm to all my family—Henry Courtenay of Devon, my cousin Arthur Plantagenet, the de la Poles, the Staffords, the Nevilles, all of us—as if he were seeking his mother in our smiling, familiar faces. Slowly, we return to where we were all born to be, at the center of power and wealth. We are the king’s cousins, there is no one closer to him.
Even My Lady the old King’s Mother is rewarded with the return of her palace of Woking, though she does not live to enjoy it for long. She sees her grandson crowned and then she takes to her bed and dies. Her confessor, dear John Fisher, preaches the eulogy at her funeral and describes a saint who spent her life in the service of her country and her son, who laid down her work only when it was done. We listen in polite silence but, truth be told, she is little mourned; most of us experienced her family pride more than her cousinly love. And I am not the only one who secretly thinks that she died of fatal pique, in fear that her influence had run out, and so that she would not have to see our Queen Katherine looking beautiful and making merry in the rooms where the old woman had ruled so meanly for so long.
God is blessing the new generation, and we care nothing for those who have gone. Queen Katherine conceives a child almost at once, during the carefree days of the summer progress, and announces her happy state before Christmas, at Richmond Palace. For a moment, in that season of celebration, in a constant rush of entertainments, I start to think that my cousin’s curse is forgotten and that the Tudor line will inherit my family’s luck and be as sturdy and prolific as we have always been.
RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SPRING 1510
It is a bad night for her when she loses the baby, and then worse days follow. The fool of a physician tells her and, even worse, assures the king that she was carrying twins, and there is another healthy baby in her belly. She may have had an agonizing miscarriage, but there is no cause for dismay: she is still carrying an heir, there is a Tudor boy, waiting to be born.
This is how we learn that the young king likes to hear good news, indeed he insists on hearing good news, and in the future it may take some courage to force the truth on him. An older man, a more thoughtful man, would have questioned such an optimistic doctor; but Henry is eager to believe that he is blessed, and joyfully continues to celebrate his wife’s pregnancy. At the Shrove Tuesday feast he walks all around the diners proposing toasts to the queen and the baby that he thinks she is carrying in her swollen womb. I watch him, incredulously. This is the first time that I see that his sickly father and his fearful grandmother have instilled in him an absurd devotion to physicians. He listens to anything they say. He has a deep, superstitious terror of illness, and he longs for cures.
GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1510
Obediently, Katherine goes into confinement at Greenwich Palace, and as her swollen belly slims down to nothing, she waits with grim determination, knowing that there is going to be no birth. When her time is over and she has nothing to show for it, she bathes like a Spanish princess, in jug after jug of boiling-hot water with rose oil and the finest of soap, dresses in her best gown, and summons her courage to come out and face the court, looking like a fool. I stand beside her like a fierce guardian, my eyes raking the room, daring anyone to comment on her long pointless absence and now her surprise reappearance.
Her bravery is poorly rewarded. She is greeted without sympathy, for nobody is much interested in the return to court of a childless bride. Something far more intriguing is going on; the court is agog with scandal.
It is William Compton, my former suitor, who seems to have comforted himself by flirting with my second cousin, Anne, one of the two beautiful sisters of the Duke of Buckingham, newly married to Sir George Hastings. I failed to see this foolish affair develop as I was absorbed in Katherine’s grief, and I am sorry to learn that matters have gone so far that my cousin Stafford has had high words with the king at the insult to his family, and taken her away from court.
This is madness from the duke, but typical of his prickly sense of pride. There is no doubt in my mind that his sister will have been guilty of almost any indiscretion; she is the daughter of Katherine Woodville, and like most Woodville girls she is outstandingly beautiful and willful. She is unhappy with her new husband, and he will apparently allow any misdemeanor. But then, as the court continues to whisper of nothing else, I begin to think that there must be more to this than a courtier’s escapade, an episode of courtly lovemaking, playacting desire which went beyond the rules. Henry, who is normally pompous about the rules of courtly love, seems to side with Compton, who declares himself insulted by the duke. The young king flies into a rage, orders Buckingham to stay away from court, and goes everywhere arm in arm with Compton who looks both sheepish and rakish all at once, like a young tup in a lush field full of ewes.
Whatever has been taking place here seems to be more troubling than William Compton playing fast and loose with the duke’s sister. There must be some reason that the king supports his friend and not the cuckolded husband; there must be some reason that the duke is disgraced but the seducer is in favor. Someone is lying, and someone is hiding something from the queen. The ladies of her household are no use, they are not going to tell tales. My cousin Elizabeth Stafford maintains an aristocratic discretion since it is her kinswoman who is the center of the scandal. Lady Maud Parr says she knows nothing more than common gossip.
Katherine sends for the books of the household and sees that while she was confined, waiting for a baby that she knew was long gone, the court was making merry and it was Anne Hastings who was Queen of the May.