BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, EASTER 1518
We celebrate the feast of Easter at Bisham, with just our family. The royal court, still closed to everyone but Henry’s inner circle and the cardinal, is now traveling near Oxford. I begin to wonder if they will ever come home to their capital city.
The cardinal is trusted with all the business of the realm, as no one can see the king; he will not even receive documents. Everything goes to Wolsey and his ever-expanding household. His clerks write the royal letters, his surveyors know the price of everything, his advisors judge how things should be, and his favorite, Thomas More, who has risen to be the trusted go-between for king and cardinal, is now given the huge responsibility of the health of the court. He commands that any household in the kingdom with a sick member has to show a bundle of hay at the door so that anyone can see the sign and keep away.
People complain that the lawyer More is persecuting the poor by marking them out, but I write to the young lawyer to thank him for his care of the king, and when I hear that he is ill himself, I send him a bottle of oils of my own distilling which are said to reduce fever.
“You’re very generous,” my son Montague observes as he sees the carrier take a basket of precious medicines directed to Thomas More at Abingdon, near Oxford. “I didn’t know that More was a friend of ours.”
“If he’s the favorite of the cardinal, then he’ll be close to the king,” I say simply. “And if he’s close to the king, then I would want him to think kindly of us.”
My son laughs. “We’re safe now, you know,” he points out to me. “Perhaps everyone had to buy the friendship of the court in the old days, when the old king was on the throne, but Henry’s advisors are no threat to us. No one would turn him against us now.”
“It’s a habit,” I admit. “All my life I have lived on the favor of the court. I know no other way to survive.”
Since none of us is invited to the tiny court that is allowed to live with the king, my kinsmen the Nevilles and the Staffords come to stay for a sennight to celebrate the end of Lent and the festival of Easter. The Duke of Buckingham, Edward Stafford, my second cousin, brings with him his son, Henry, sixteen years old and a bright, charming boy. My boy Geoffrey is only three years his junior, and the two cousins take a liking to each other and disappear for a whole day at a time, riding at the ring in the jousting arena, hawking, even fishing in the cold water of the Thames and bringing home a fat salmon which they insist on cooking themselves in the kitchen, to the outrage of the cook.
We indulge their pride, and have trumpeters announce the arrival of the dish in the dining room, where it is carried shoulder-high in triumph, and the three hundred people of our combined households who sit down to dinner in my great hall rise to their feet and applaud the noble salmon and the grinning young fishermen.
“Have you heard when the court will return?” George Neville asks Edward Stafford when dinner is over and we cousins and our boys are seated in my private chamber and at ease with wine and sweetmeats before the fire.
His face darkens. “If the cardinal has his way, he will keep the king apart from his court forever,” he says shortly. “I am ordered not to come to him. Banned from court? Why would such a thing be? I am well, my household is well. It’s nothing to do with illness; it is that the cardinal fears the king will listen to me—that’s why I am barred from attending on him.”
“My lords,” I say carefully. “Cousins. We must watch our words.”
George smiles at me and puts his hand over mine. “You’re always cautious,” he says. To the duke he nods. “Can’t you just go to the king, even without permission, and tell him that the cardinal is not serving his interests? Surely, he’d listen to you. We’re a great family of the realm, we have nothing to gain by causing trouble, he can trust our advice.”
“He doesn’t listen to me,” Edward Stafford says irritably. “He doesn’t listen to anyone. Not to the queen, not to me, not to any of the great men of the realm who carry blood as good or better than his, and who know as well as he does, or better, how the kingdom should be ruled. And I cannot just go to him. He won’t admit anyone to his court unless he is assured that they are not carrying disease. And who do you think is judge of that? Not even a doctor—the cardinal’s new assistant, Thomas More!”
I nod to my sons, Montague and Arthur, to leave the room. It may be safe to speak against the cardinal; there are very few lords of the land who do not speak against him. But I would rather my sons didn’t hear it. If anyone ever asks them, they can truthfully say that they heard nothing.
They both hesitate to go. “Nobody could doubt our loyalty to the king,” Montague says for both of them.
The Duke of Buckingham gives a reluctant laugh, more like a growl. “Nobody had better doubt mine,” he says. “I have breeding as good as the king himself, better in fact. Who believes in loyalty to the throne more than a royal? I don’t challenge the king. I never would. But I do question the motives and the advancement of that damned butcher’s son.”
“I think, Lord Uncle, that the cardinal’s father was a merchant?” Montague queries.
“What difference does that make to me?” Buckingham demands. “Tinker or tailor or beggar? Since my father was a duke and his grandfather was a duke, and my great-great-great-great-grandfather was King of England?”
BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SUMMER 1518
The king’s Knight Harbinger rides up to my front door, with half a dozen yeomen of the guard riding with him, glances at the new stonework that shows my proud crest over the door of my old family home, and dismounts. His eyes travel over the newly renovated towers, the handsome retiled roofs, the meadows that run down to the wide river, the well-tilled fields, the haystacks, the gold of the wheat and the rich greenish shimmer of the barley in the fields. He counts—I know without even seeing the greed in his eyes—the wealth of my fields, the fatness of my cattle, the prosperity of this rolling vast expanse of lush countryside that I own.
“Good day,” I say, stepping out of the great door in my riding gown, a plain hood on my head, the very picture of a working landlord with great lands in her stewardship.
He bows very low, as he should. “Your ladyship, I am sent from the king to say that he will come to stay with you for eight nights, if there is no illness in the village.”
“We are all well, thanks be to God,” I reply. “And the king and court will be welcome here.”
“I see that you can house them,” he says, conceding the grandeur of my house. “We’ve been in much more modest quarters recently. May I speak to the steward of your household?”
I turn and nod, and James Upsall steps forward. “Sir?”
“I have a list of rooms required.” The Knight Harbinger pulls a rolled scroll of paper from an inner pocket in his jacket. “And I shall have to see every one of your stable lads and household servants. I have to see for myself that they are well.”
“Please assist the Knight Harbinger,” I say calmly to Upsall, who is bristling at this high-handed treatment. “When will His Grace the King arrive?”
“Within the week,” the harbinger replies, and I nod as if this is an everyday matter to me, and go quietly into my house, where I pick up my gown and run to tell Montague and Jane, Arthur and Ursula, and especially Geoffrey, that the king himself is coming to Bisham and everything must be absolutely perfect.
Montague himself rides out with the waymarkers and sets up the signs on the road to make sure that the scurriers who go ahead of the court cannot possibly get lost. Behind them will come yeomen of the guard, making sure that the countryside is safe and that there is no point where the king might be ambushed, or attacked. They come into the stables and dismount from their sweating horses, and Geoffrey, who has been on faithful lookout all the morning, comes running to tell me that the guards are here so the court cannot be far behind.