There is a tap on my bedroom door in the cool grayness of a spring dawn. It is the queen, returning to her room after Lauds. She is terribly pale. “You are dismissed as Mary’s governess,” she says shortly. “The king told me as we prayed together. He would listen to no argument. He’s gone hunting with the Boleyns.”
“Dismissed?” I repeat, as if I don’t understand the word. “Dismissed from Princess Mary?”
I cannot possibly leave her; she is only five years old. I love her. I guided her first steps, I trimmed her curls. I am teaching her to read Latin, English, Spanish, and French. I kept her steady on her first pony and taught her to hold the reins, I sing with her and I sit beside her when her music master comes to teach her to play the virginal. She loves me, she expects me to be with her. She will be lost without me. Her father cannot, surely cannot, say that I am not to be with her?
The queen nods. “He would not listen to me,” she says wonderingly. “It was as if he could not hear me.”
I should have thought of this, but I did not. I never thought that he would take me from the care of his daughter. Katherine looks blankly at me.
“She is accustomed to me,” I say weakly. “Who will take my place?”
The queen shakes her head. She looks frozen with distress.
“I’d better go then,” I say uncertainly. “Am I to leave court?”
“Yes,” she says.
“I’ll go to Bisham, I’ll live quietly in the country.”
She nods, her lips trembling. Without another word we move into each other’s arms and we cling to each other. “You will come back,” she promises in a whisper. “I will see you soon. I will not allow us to be parted. I will get you back.”
“God bless and keep you,” I say, my voice choked up with tears. “And give my love to Princess Mary. Tell her I will pray for her and see her again. Tell her to practice her music every day. I will be her governess again, I know it. Tell her I will come back. This will all come right. It has to come right. It will be all right.”
It does not come right. The king executes my kinsman Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, for treason, and my friend and kinsman old Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, pronounces the sentence of death with the tears pouring down his face. Right up to the last moment we all expect Henry to grant a pardon, since the duke is his kinsman and was his constant companion; but he does not. He sends Edward Stafford to his death on the scaffold as if he were an enemy and not the greatest duke in the realm, the king’s grandmother’s favorite, and his own greatest courtier and supporter.
I say nothing in his defense, I say nothing at all. So I too perhaps should be blamed for what we all see this year—the strange shadow that falls over our king. As he turns thirty he becomes harder in the eyes, harder of heart, as if the Tudor curse were not about heirs, but about a darkness that slowly creeps over him. When I pray for the soul of my cousin the Duke of Buckingham, I think that perhaps he was an accidental victim of this coldness where there once was warmth. Our golden prince Henry has always had a weakness: a hidden fear that he is not good enough. My kinsman, with his pride and his untouchable confidence, caught the king on the raw, and this is the terrible outcome.
BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, 1521
Our king is not angry for long. He is not like his father the tyrant. The duke is the only one of our family who pays the great price of his life. His son is attainted, he loses his fortune and his dukedom, but he is released. My son Montague is released, without charge. Henry does not pursue suspicion through the generations, he will not commute a death sentence into a fatal debt. He arrested my son, he banished us all from court in a moment of fear, fear of what we might be saying, or fear of who we are. But he does not pursue us, and once we are out of sight he returns to calmness, he is himself again. I have no doubt that the boy I loved in his childhood will summon me back to his side again. He will let me go back to his daughter.
Once he was a golden prince that we thought could do no wrong. This was folly, too high a standard for any young man to reach. But still he is our Henry, he will come right. He is his mother’s son and she was the bravest, steadiest, most loving woman I have ever known. It is not possible that my cousin Queen Elizabeth could have borne and raised a boy who was anything less than loving and trustworthy. I don’t forget her. I believe that he will recover.
BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, 1522
Thinking this, I live quietly, almost invisibly, at my manor at Bisham, secure on my lands, contented with my fortune. I write to no one and I see only my sons. My cousin George Neville is back at his home at Birling Manor in Kent and he writes nothing to me but the occasional letter with the most anodyne of family news, not even sealing it in case a spy traces its passage and wants to see the contents. I reply that we have grieved at the loss of Ursula’s little boy, who died of a fever at less than a year, but that Montague’s wife has had a girl and we have named her Katherine for the queen.
My older boys live quietly with their wives in their grand houses. Arthur is nearby with his wife, Jane, at his house at Broadhurst; Montague is only four miles away at Bockmer and we visit each other every month or so. My son Geoffrey I keep at home for these last precious years of his boyhood. I find I am treasuring him even more as he grows stronger and more handsome and reaches manhood. When we sit together in the evening, we never lower our voices; even when we are alone and the servants have left, we never say anything about the king, about the court, about the princess that I am not allowed to serve. If anyone is listening at the chimney, under the eaves, at the door, they hear nothing but the ordinary talk of a family. We never even agree upon this pact of silence. It is like an enchantment, like a fairy story, we have become mute as if by magic. A silence has fallen on us; we are so quiet that no one would bother to listen.
Reginald is safe in Padua. Not only has he completely escaped the king’s ill will but he is in high favor for the help he gave the king and Thomas More as they write a defense of the true faith against the Lutheran heresy. My son helps them with research into scholarly documents held at the library at Padua. I advise Reginald that he keep away from London, however much he, the king, and Thomas More agree on Bible texts. He can study just as well in Padua as in London, and the king likes having an English scholar working abroad. Reginald may want to come home, but I am not putting him at risk while there is any shadow over the reputation of our family. Reginald assures me that he has no interest in anything but his studies; yet the duke had no interest in anything but his fortune and his lands and now his wife is a widow and his son disinherited.
Ursula writes to me from a new, modest home in Staffordshire. When I made her marriage, I predicted that she would be the wealthiest duchess in England. Never did I think that the great family of the Staffords could be all but ruined. Their title is taken from them, their wealth and their lands quietly absorbed by the royal treasury on the judicious advice of the cardinal. Her great marriage, her wonderful prospects were cut off on Tower Hill with the head of her father-in-law. Her husband does not become Duke of Buckingham, and she will never be a duchess. He is mere Lord Stafford with only half a dozen manors to his name and a yearly income in only hundreds of pounds. She is Lady Stafford and has to turn the panels of her gowns. His name is disgraced and all his fortune is forfeited to the king. She has to manage a small estate and try to make a profit from dry lands when she thought she would never see a plowshare again, and she has lost her little boy so there is no son to inherit the little that there is left.