He says it as if it were an affliction, and I have to laugh.
I bid the court farewell and I don’t travel with them. Instead, I go to London and visit the Princess Mary for a few weeks and then on to the silk merchants, for I have much to buy. My daughter Ursula is to be married from home this autumn. I have won for her a truly great marriage, and I will celebrate it as my own triumph as well as her happiness. She is to marry Henry Stafford, the son and heir of my cousin Edward, the Duke of Buckingham. She will be a duchess and one of the greatest landowners in England. We will make a new link to our cousins, the greatest ducal family in the land.
“He’s a child,” she says shortly when I tell her the news. “When he was here at Easter, he was Geoffrey’s little playmate.”
“He’s seventeen, he’s a man,” I say.
“I’m twenty years old!” she exclaims. “I don’t want to marry one of Geoffrey’s little friends. Mother, how can I? How can I marry my younger brother’s playmate? I will look like a fool.”
“You’ll look like an heiress,” I say. “And later on, in good time, you’ll look like a duchess. You will find that a great compensation for anything you feel now.”
She shakes her head; but she knows that she has no choice, and we both know that I am right. “And where will we live?” she asks sulkily. “Because I can’t live here with Geoffrey, and see the two of them running out to play every morning.”
“He’s a young man. He will grow out of play,” I say patiently. “But in any case you will live with the duke, his father, who will bring you to court to live in the Buckingham rooms there. I will see you there and you will continue to serve the queen when you are at court. But you’ll go into dinner practically on her heels. You will outrank almost every other woman but the royal princesses.”
I see her face warm to the thought of that, and I hide a smile. “Yes, think of it! You’ll have a greater title than mine. You’ll go ahead of me, Ursula.”
“Oh, will I?”
“Yes. And when you’re not at court, you will live at one of His Grace’s houses.”
“Where?” she asks.
I laugh. “I don’t know which one. At any one of his twelve castles, I suppose. I have provided well for you, Ursula, I have provided for you outstandingly well. You will be a wealthy young woman on your wedding day, even before your father-in-law dies, and when he does, your husband will inherit everything.”
She hesitates. “But will the duke wait on the king anymore? I thought Arthur said that it is always the papal legate who advises the king now, not the lords.”
“The Duke of Buckingham will attend court,” I assure her. “No king can rule without the support of the great lords, not even with Thomas Wolsey doing all the work. The king knows that, his father knew that. The king will never quarrel with his great lords, that is the way to divide the country. The duke has such great lands, and so many men under his command, so many faithful tenants, that no one can rule England without him. Of course he will go to court as one of the greatest lords of the land, and you will be respected everywhere as his daughter and the next Duchess of Buckingham.”
Ursula is no fool. She will disregard the childishness of her new husband for the riches and position that he can bring to her. And she understands something more: “The Stafford family are directly descended from Edward III,” she observes. “They are of royal blood.”
“No less than us,” I agree.
“If I were to have a son, he would be Plantagenet on both sides,” she points out. “Royal on both sides.”
I shrug. “You are of the old royal family of England,” I say. “Nothing can change that. Your son will inherit royal blood. Nothing can change that. But it is the Tudors who are on the throne, the queen is with child, if she has a boy, then he is a Tudor prince—and nothing can change that either.”
I don’t object to improving myself through the rise of a daughter who will be a duchess one day, because, for the first time, I have a moment’s doubt about my own position at court. From the very first moment that he came to the throne, the king has done nothing but single me out for favor: raising me, restoring me to my family lands, giving me the greatest of titles, seeing that I have the best rooms at court, encouraging the queen to appoint me as a principal lady and, of course, trusting me with the future guidance and education of the princess. He could do nothing more to show to the world that I am a favored royal kinswoman. I am one of the wealthiest lords of the country; I am by far the wealthiest woman, and the only one with a title and lands in my own right.
But some sort of shadow has fallen, though I cannot tell why. The king is less free with his smiles, less pleased to see us—me and all my wider family. Arthur remains his favorite, Montague is still in the inner circle, but all the older cousins—the Duke of Buckingham, George Neville, Edward Neville—are slowly being edged out of the king’s privy chamber to join the less-favored guests in the presence chamber outside.
The riding court that the king lived with for his year of exile during the Sweat has become his inner circle, a private ring of friends all his age and younger. They even have a name for themselves: they call themselves the “minions”—the king’s boon companions.
My cousins, especially Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, and George Neville, are too old and too dignified to act like fools to amuse the king. There is an incident when the young men ride their horses up the stairs of the palace and canter round the presence chamber; this is supposed to be the best sport. Someone balances a jug of water over a door, and an ambassador coming on a state visit is drenched. They ambush the kitchen in a miniature military raid and capture dinner and ransom it back to the court, who have to eat it cold after the roasted meats have been speared and thrown hand to hand; nobody thinks this is funny but the young men themselves. They go into London and charge through a market and overturn the stalls, breaking the goods and spoiling the wares, they drink themselves to a standstill and vomit in the fireplaces and they pester the women servants of the court till there is not one honest woman left in the dairy.
Of course, my older kinsmen are excluded from such sports, but they say that it is more serious than high spirits and young men at play. While Henry roisters with the minions, all the work of the kingdom is done by his smiling helper, Cardinal Wolsey. All the gifts and privileges and high-paying places pass through the cardinal’s soft, warm hands, and many of them slide up his capacious red sleeves. Henry is in no hurry to invite grave older councillors back into his presence to question his increasing enthusiasm for another handsome young king, Francis of France, and will not hear anything about the increasing folly and extravagance of his friends.
So I am anxious he is thinking of me as one of the dull old people, and I am worried when he tells me one day that he thinks his grant to me of some of my manors in Somerset was a mistake—for they should really belong to the Crown.
“I don’t think so, Your Grace,” I say at once. I glance around the young men and see my son Montague’s head come up to listen, as I contradict the king.
“Sir William seems to think so,” Henry drawls.
Sir William Compton, my former suitor, gives me one of his most seductive smiles. “Actually, they are crown lands,” he rules. Apparently, he has become an expert. “And three of them belong to the duchy of Somerset. Not to you.”
I ignore him and turn to the king. “I have the documents which show that they are, and always have been, in my family. Your Grace was good enough to return my own to me. I have only what is rightfully mine.”
“Oh, the family!” Sir William yawns. “My God, that family!”
I am stunned for a moment, I don’t know what to say or think. What does he mean by such a remark? Does he mean that my family, the Plantagenet family of England, are not deserving of the greatest respect? My young cousin Henry Courtenay raises his eyebrows at the insult and stares at William Compton, his hand drifting to where his sword would be, on his empty belt.