“A consort?” Montague suggests.
“A concubine?” Arthur smiles.
I shake my head. “Are we Mahometans now? In the eyes of God and by the law of the land, there is nothing that girl can be but an adulterous whore. We don’t have concubines in England. We don’t have consorts. She knows it, and we know it. The best she can get for herself is the right to dance at court after the queen has withdrawn, and a title like ‘the Lady,’ for those who are too mealymouthed to call a whore a whore. Anything else means nothing.”
LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, SUMMER 1527–1528
I dare not tell Montague to write to me secretly, so everything that I know this summer is learned from tactful pointers in his breezy unsealed letters, or from the gossip at the castle gate from the occasional London tinker or pedlar. Montague writes to me family news: Arthur’s new baby, Margaret, is thriving; Ursula is out of confinement and has given the Staffords another boy, another Henry; and then one day he writes with quiet pride to tell me that he too has a son. I take the letter and I kiss it, and hold it to my heart. There will be another Henry Pole, there will be another Lord Montague after my son and I are long gone. This little baby, this Henry, is another step on our family path to greatness from greatness.
He has to be silent about all other news. He can tell me nothing about the queen and the court, he cannot tell me that the king summoned Thomas More to walk in the garden with him at Hampton Court, and among the evening birdsong, and with the scent of the roses on the air, confided that he feared his marriage was invalid. He pronounced that his sister Margaret, the Dowager Queen of Scotland, could not get a divorce from the Pope, but that his marriage was a different case, that God had shown him, so painfully but so vividly in the deaths of his children, that his marriage is not blessed by God. And Thomas, good councillor he is, swallowed his own doubts at the divinity of this revelation, and promised the king that he will form an opinion, a thoughtful legal opinion, on the matter and advise his master.
But Montague’s discretion makes no difference, for by the end of the summer, the whole kingdom knows that the king is seeking to end the marriage with his queen. The whole kingdom knows, but there is not one word of it inside the state rooms at Ludlow. I surprise myself at the power of the rule I have established over my household. Nobody speaks ugly gossip to the young woman in my charge and so the princess’s world is collapsing around her; and she does not know.
Of course, in the end, I have to tell her. Many times I start; but each time the words simply die in my mouth. It is unreal to me, it is incredible to me, I cannot offer her an account of it, any more than I could seriously tell her the tale of the Lambton Worm as a fact rather than a ridiculous legend. It may be that everyone knows it, but still it is unreal.
And anyway, just as I hope, nothing happens. Or at any rate, we have no certain report that anything has happened. We are so far away from London, in the very distant west, that we get no reliable news. But even out here, we learn that the queen’s nephew Charles V of Spain has invaded Rome and captured the Pope and is holding him virtually as a prisoner. This changes everything. Not even our all-persuasive cardinal with his honeyed words is going to be able to convince a pope imprisoned by the Spanish king to rule against the Spanish Queen of England. Any of the king’s complicated theological arguments about it being a sin to marry his brother’s widow will simply go unheard by the captive Pope. While the Spanish emperor commands the Pope, his aunt, the Spanish Queen of England, is safe. All she has to do is to assert the simple truth: that God called her to marry the King of England, and that there is no reason that the marriage is invalid. And I know she will assert that truth until she dies.
In the very castle where Katherine and Arthur lived as passionate lovers, I say nothing to anyone about the love they shared, or about the promise he drew from her—that if he died, she must still be Queen of England and have a daughter called Mary. I say nothing about the lie that I swore to support. I put it from me as if it were a secret from so long ago that I cannot even remember it. My secret fear is that someone, sooner or later, perhaps the cardinal, perhaps Thomas More, or the cardinal’s new servant Thomas Cromwell, another man from nowhere, is going to ask me if Arthur and Katherine were lovers. I am praying that if I continue to study forgetfulness, then I can say in truth that I never knew, and now I cannot remember.
The summer heat comes and brings with it an outbreak of the Sweat, and the queen summons the princess to join her and the king to travel the country far from London. Once again they are going to live privately while the country suffers.
“You are to join them at St. Albans,” I say to Princess Mary. “I will take you there and go to my own house. I daresay you will spend the summer with them.”
“With who?” she asks anxiously. “Who else will be there?”
Poor child, I think. So she knows. Despite the shield I have put around her, she knows that Anne Boleyn goes everywhere with the king. Her silence about this has not been ignorance, but discretion. But I have good news for her, and I let her see my small, triumphant smile. “Alas,” I say, lingering over the word till her eyes shine and she gleams in return. “Alas, I hear that many of the court are ill. The cardinal has retreated to his home with his physician, and Anne Boleyn has gone to Hever. So it will just be a small court. Probably just your father and mother and perhaps one or two attendants, Thomas More who is such a good man attending your father, Maria de Salinas with your mother.”
Her face lights up. “Just my father and mother?”
“Just them,” I confirm, and I wonder if it would be a sin to pray that the damned whore dies of the disease in Kent.
“And you?” she asks.
I hug her to me. “I will go to my home at Bisham and make sure that my family and my people are well. It is a terrible illness, I will be needed. Arthur and Jane have had a new baby, I pray that they are well. And I will write to you that we are well, and I will think of you, my darling.”
“And I’ll come back to you,” she stipulates. “When the summer is over. We will be together again.”
“Of course.”
BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SUMMER 1528
It is a terrible illness, God forgive England for the sin that has brought it down on us. There are many who say that this was foretold when the first Tudor came. There are many who say that the king cannot get a son and the country cannot enjoy good health. There are many who fear the present and predict a terrible future and blame it on the Tudor line.
Everyone is talking of a young woman in Kent who has lain as if dead for weeks, and has now come back to life to say that princes should obey the Pope. Now they are calling her a visionary and flocking to hear what else she says. But I don’t need a prophetess to tell me that it will be a bad summer. When I had the message from London that men were dying in the streets, falling in the gutters as they were struggling to get to their homes, I knew that it would be a bad year for us all, even for my family, hiding behind the high walls of my great estate. Geoffrey and his wife, Constance, come to live with me, and Arthur sends me his children Henry and Margaret, my namesake, and the wet nurse with the baby, Mary, with a note to say that the Sweat has come to Broadhurst, he and Jane are both ill, they will pray that they survive it, and will I care for his children as if they were my own?
I pray to God that it passes us by,
he writes.
If we are unlucky, Lady Mother, please care for my children, and pray for me as I pray for you.—A
They are a pitiful pair, little Henry and Margaret, who goes by the name of Maggie. They stand, clutching each other’s hand, in my great hall and I kneel beside them and gather them into my arms and smile at them with a confidence I don’t feel.