Her godmother, my cousin Catherine, carries her down the aisle, and hands her at the church door to the other godmother, Agnes Howard, Duchess of Norfolk. As the ladies file by, each one dipping a little curtsey to the royal baby, the duchess hands her back to me. She is not a sentimental woman, she does not love to hold a baby; I see her brisk nod at her stepdaughter Lady Elizabeth Boleyn. Gently, I put the little princess in the arms of her Lady Mistress, Margaret Bryan, and I walk alongside her, wrapped in ermine against the cold wind blowing down the Thames valley, yeomen of the guard around me, the cloth of estate carried over our regal heads, and all the ladies of the baby’s nursery following me.
It is a moment of greatness for me, even grandeur. I am Lady Governess of the royal baby and heir; I should be relishing this moment. But I can’t revel in it. All I can do, all I want to do, is to go on my knees and pray that this baby lives longer than her poor little brothers.
ENGLAND, SUMMER 1517
The sweating sickness comes to London. The Dowager Queen of Scotland, Margaret, hopes to avoid it by traveling north, returning to her own country to rejoin her husband and son. As soon as she leaves, the king orders that the court pack up and go to Richmond, farther away from the dirt and the smells and the low-lying mists of the city.
“He’s gone on ahead with just a riding court,” my son Montague tells me, leaning on the doorway of my room and watching my maids go one way and another, packing all of our goods into traveling chests. “He’s terrified.”
“Hush,” I say cautiously.
“It’s no secret that he’s sick with fear.” Montague steps inside and closes the door behind him. “He’d admit it himself. He has a holy terror of all diseases but the Sweat is his particular dread.”
“No wonder, since it was his father who brought it in, and it killed his brother Arthur,” I remark. “They called it the Tudor curse even then. They said that the reign had begun in sweat and would end in tears.”
“Well, please God they were wrong,” my son says cheerfully. “Will the queen come with us today?”
“As soon as she’s ready. But she’s making a pilgrimage to pray at Walsingham later in the month. You won’t see her change her plans for the Sweat.”
“No, she doesn’t imagine herself dying with every cough,” he says. “Poor lady. Is she going to pray for another child?”
“Of course.”
“She still hopes for a boy?”
“Of course.”
Reports of the disease grow worse, and worse still in the telling. It is the most terrifying of sicknesses because of its speed. A man at dinnertime, reporting to his household that he is well and strong, and that they are lucky to have escaped, will complain of a headache and heat in the evening and will be dead by sunset. Nobody knows why the disease goes from one place to another, nor why it takes one healthy man but spares another. Cardinal Wolsey takes the disease and we are all prepared to hear of his death, but the cardinal survives it. Henry the king is not comforted by this; he is completely determined to escape even the breath of it.
We stay at Richmond and then one of the servers takes ill. Henry is at once plunged into terror at the thought that a boy under the wing of death handed him his meat; he thinks of the poor victim as an assassin. The whole court packs up to leave. Every head of each service is told to go through his staff and examine each one minutely, demand of every man if he has any symptoms, any heat, any pain, any faintness. Of course, everyone denies that he is ill—nobody wants to be left behind with the dying page boy at Richmond; and besides, the disease comes on so fast that by the time everyone has sworn to good health, the first of them could be taking to their beds.
We rush downriver to Greenwich, where the clean air smells of salt from the sea, and the king insists that the rooms are swept and washed daily and that no one comes too close to him. The king, who is supposed to be blessed with a healing touch, will let no one come near him at all.
He is distracted from his fears by the Spanish, who send an embassy hoping for an alliance against France, and under their urbane scrutiny we pretend for weeks that there is nothing wrong, that the kingdom is not dogged by sickness and that our king is not terrified. As ever with the king, when he is meeting with the Spanish he prizes his Spanish wife more highly, so he is kind and attentive to the queen, listening to her advice, admiring her elegant conversation with the emissaries in their language, coming to her bed at night, resting in her clean sheets. Her dear friend Maria de Salinas has married an English nobleman, William Willoughby, and there are compliments about the natural love between the two countries. There are feasts and celebrations and jousts, and for a brief while it is like the old days; but after the Spanish visitors ride away we hear of sickness in the village of Greenwich, and the king decides that he would be safer at Windsor Castle.
This time, he shuts down the court altogether. Only the queen, a small riding court of the king’s friends, and his personal doctor are allowed to travel with them. I go to my own house at Bisham and pray that the Sweat passes us by in Berkshire.
But death follows the Tudor king, just as it followed his father. The pages who serve in his bedchamber take the illness, and when one of them dies, the king is certain that death is tracking him like a dark hound. He goes into hiding, leaves all his servants behind, abandons his friends and, taking only the queen and his doctor, travels from one house to another like a guilty man seeking sanctuary.
He sends outriders ahead, wherever he plans to go, and the king’s doctor interrogates his hosts, asking if anyone is ill in the house, or if the Sweat has passed them by. Henry will only go to a house where he is assured that everyone is well, but even so, time and again, he has to order that the horses be saddled and they rush on, because a lady’s maid complained of the heat at noon, or a child was crying with toothache. The court loses its dignity and its elegance careering from one house to another, leaving furniture, linen, even silverware behind in the confusion. The king’s hosts cannot prepare for him, and when they have ordered in costly food and entertainment, he declares that it is not safe, and he cannot stay. While other people rest at home, try to avoid travel, discourage strangers, and quietly, trustingly, put their faith in God, the king roams the countryside demanding safety in a dangerous world, trying to get a guarantee in an uncertain realm, as if he fears that the very air and streams of England are poison to the man whose father claimed them against their will.
In London, a leaderless city plagued with illness, the apprentices take to the streets in running riots, demanding to know: Where is the king? Where is the Lord Chancellor? Where are the Lord Mayor and the City fathers? Is London to be abandoned? How far will the king run? Will he go to Wales? To Ireland? Beyond? Why does he not stand alongside his people and share their troubles?
The common people—fainting as they walk behind the plow, resting their burning heads on their workbenches, the brewers dropping down their malting spoons and saying they have to rest, the spinners lying down with a fever and not getting up—the common people take against the young king whom they had adored. They say that he is a coward, running away from the sickness that they cannot escape, fearful of the disease that carries his name. They curse him, saying that his Tudor father brought in death and now the son abandons them to its pains.
BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SUMMER 1517
Released from court by the king’s flight, I am not required to care for Princess Mary, who is safe and well in her nursery. I can take the summer to myself, working on my own buildings, my own lands, my own farms, my own profit and—at long last—the marriage of my son Montague.