“What’s happened?”
Arthur tells me that he has tried to persuade Jane’s father to hand over his lands so that my son can be responsible for the military service that goes with ownership. Arthur is going to inherit them anyway; there is no reason for the old man to hold them now and be responsible for raising the tenants if there should be a call to war. “He really cannot serve the king,” he says, aggrieved. “He’s too old and too frail. It was a fair offer to help him. And I offered to pay rent as well.”
“You were quite right,” I say. Nothing that adds to Arthur’s landholdings could be wrong for me.
“Well, he has complained to Jane, and she thinks I am trying to steal her inheritance before his death, borrowing dead man’s shoes, and she has broken a storm over my poor head. And now he has complained to our cousin Arthur Plantagenet, and to our kinsman the old Earl of Arundel, and now they are threatening to complain of me to the king. They’re suggesting that I am trying to cheat the old fool out of his lands! Robbing my own father-in-law!”
“Ridiculous,” I say loyally. “And anyway, you have nothing to fear. Henry won’t listen to a word against you. Not from your own cousins. Not now. Not while he wants England to win at the jousting.”
L’ERBER, LONDON, SPRING 1521
The king’s favor to my son Arthur continues. Arthur is at the center of the sporting, gambling, drinking, whoring court. All the young men, noisy and disrespectful, who had been banned from court, have come back, one at a time, forgetting that they were prohibited and that the king was supposedly reformed. Henry does not check or reprimand them; he likes to be among them, as wild as them, as free as them. Arthur tells me that the king will let a word or a jest go by that challenges his very majesty, while my cousin the Duke of Buckingham rages that the court is more like a taproom than a place of grandeur and complains that Wolsey has brought the manners of Ipswich to Westminster.
Since they have come back from the Field of the Cloth of Gold they are worse than ever, filled with joy at their triumph, conscious of their youth and beauty like never before. It is a court of young people, raging with desire and zest for life, with no one to halt or control them.
The queen’s ladies, delighted to return to England away from the hotly competitive French court, flaunt their French fashions and practice their French dances. Some of them have even assumed French accents that I find ridiculous, but are generally regarded as very sophisticated—or as they would say themselves: très chic. The most exotic and certainly the vainest of them all is Anne Boleyn, sister to Mary and George, who, thanks to her father’s charm, has spent her childhood at the French royal courts and quite forgotten any English modesty that she might have had. With her return from France we now have Sir Thomas’s full family at court: George Boleyn, his son who has served the king for almost all of his life; Elizabeth, his wife; and his newly married daughter Mary, who both serve with me in the queen’s rooms.
My cousin the Duke of Buckingham is increasingly excluded from this French-mad, fashion-mad court, and he is more protective of his family dignity, for my daughter Ursula has given him a grandson, and there is a new little Henry Stafford whose cradle linen is all embroidered with ducal strawberry leaves, and the duke is proud of another generation bearing royal blood.
There is one truly terrible moment when the king, washing his hands in a golden bowl before his dinner, steps to his throne under his cloth of estate and sits as the cardinal summons the server to his side, and dips his own fingers into the same gold bowl, into the king’s water. My cousin the duke bellows and knocks the bowl down, splashing water over the long red robes, raging like a madman. Henry turns at the noise, looks over his shoulder, and laughs as if it does not matter.
My cousin says something furious about how the dignity of the throne should not be usurped by upstarts, and Henry’s laugh stops short as he looks at my cousin. He looks at him with a long, level look as if he is thinking about something other than the spinning golden bowl which throws flashes of reflected light on the king’s riding boots, the cardinal’s splashed robe, my cousin’s stamping feet. For a moment, we all see it: at the word upstart Henry has the guarded, suspicious expression of his father.
I take leave from court for many of the days of this spring. I divide my time between supervising work on my London house, L’Erber, and staying with the Princess Mary. My duties as her Lady Governess should not really start until she enters the schoolroom, but she is such a clever little girl that I want her to begin lessons early and I love to read her bedtime story, to listen to her sing, to teach her prayers, and to dance with her in her rooms as my musicians play.
I am excused from court as the queen does not need me. She is happy in her rooms with her music and her reading, dining every night with the king and watching her ladies dance. She likes to know I am with her daughter, and often visits. The king is absorbed in a new flirtation but it is such a discreet affair that we only guess at it because he is writing love poetry, and every afternoon finds him bending over a blank page, nibbling at the end of his quill. Nobody knows who has caught his fancy this time. Neither the queen nor I can be troubled over the whimsical shifting of Henry’s attachments; there are so many girls, and they all smile and blush when the king looks at them, and he makes such a performance of his courtship, almost as if he wanted them to be reluctant. Perhaps one goes to his rooms for a private supper; perhaps she does not come back to the queen’s apartment till the early hours. Perhaps the king writes a poem or a new love song. The queen may not like it; but it hardly matters. It makes no real difference to the balance of power at court that is a deathly unstated struggle between the cardinal and the lords, between the cardinal and the queen, for the attention of the king. The girls are a diversion; they make no difference to this.
Besides, the king speaks strongly in favor of the sanctity of the holy sacrament of marriage. His sister Margaret, the Dowager Queen of Scotland, now sees the husband that she chose for love has turned into her enemy, and she wants to replace him in the country, and some say in her bed, with the Duke of Albany, her rival regent. Then we hear even worse. One of the northern lords writes to Thomas Wolsey to warn him bluntly that the king’s sister is asking her lover Albany to help her to get a divorce. The old commander predicts that there will be a murder, not an annulment.
Henry is greatly offended at the suggestion of loose behavior from his sister, and writes to her and her unwanted husband to remind them very grandly that the marriage bond is an indissoluble tie and marriage is a sacrament that no man can put asunder.
“However many laundry maids there may be,” I observe to Montague.
“Marriage is sacred,” Montague agrees with a little smile. “It cannot be set aside. And someone has to do the washing.”
I have much to do with my London house. The great vine that sprawls across the front is pulling down the masonry and threatening the roof. I have to put up a forest of wooden scaffolding to allow the workmen to get as high as the chimneys to trim the monster, and they take up saws and hatchets to hack through the thick boughs. Of course my neighbors complain that the road is blocked, and next thing I have a letter from the Lord Mayor bidding me keep the roadways clear. I ignore it completely. I am a countess, I can block all the roads in London if I want to.