“Then I fear that Bisham Manor will be too noisy for you, too busy,” he says. “The king visits when he is on progress, the whole court comes for weeks during the summer, my mother entertains her family during the winter, the Staffords, the Courtenays, the Lisles, the Nevilles. You know how many cousins we have! The Princess Mary is certain to honor us with a long stay in the summer and she brings her entire court with her. It is not like a private house, not like your lovely house here; it is a palace, a working palace.”
“I don’t want to see any of those people,” she says crossly. “I wish to live completely retired. Perhaps my Lady Mother will give me another property of my own on her lands, where I can live in complete peace. I don’t want much, just a manor house with a private park would be all I would need.”
Even Montague flinches at this request. “My Lady Mother has worked hard to put the lands together,” he says quietly. “I don’t think she would parcel them out now.”
“I can’t live in a noisy, busy house.” She turns to me. “I don’t want to live in a palace. I want to be as quiet and still as a nun.”
Montague says nothing.
He waits.
I say nothing, I wait too. Slowly, we can see a new idea dawning on her.
“What if I were to live at a nunnery?” she asks. “Or even—what if I were to take my vows?”
“Do you feel you have a calling?” I have to ask her. I think, guiltily, of the queen who has sworn that she could not consider a nunnery unless she knew that God had called her to a religious life, that no man or woman should take their vows unless they know for sure that they have a calling. Anything else is a blasphemy. My son Reginald still refuses to take vows without a calling. He says it is an insult to God Himself.
“I do,” she says with sudden enthusiasm. “I think I do.”
“And I am sure you do,” Montague, the courtier, says smoothly. “From the very beginning you said that you wanted to withdraw from the world, that you would never marry again.”
“Exactly,” she says. “I want to be completely quiet and alone with my grief.”
“Then this is the very best solution,” I say, succumbing without much reluctance to temptation. “And I shall find you a place in a good house, and I shall pay for your keep.”
She clearly does not realize that when she agrees to be a nun she will return her dower to me, just as if she were remarrying. I will pay out only what it costs to keep her in a nunnery sworn to poverty.
“I think it would be the very best thing,” she says. “But what about this house and lands? My inheritance? And the fortune that will come to me from my father?”
“You could assign them to Henry, as your heir,” I suggest. “And I could make him my ward and keep them for him. They need not trouble you at all.”
Carefully, Montague makes sure that he does not exchange a single triumphant glance with me. “Whatever you wish, sister,” he says respectfully.
I wait to be commanded to open up Richmond Palace for the princess to return to London, but there is no sign of the king coming to the city, and a rumor spreads that he has barricaded himself into a tower so that no unhealthy person can breathe on him. When the citizens hear this, they break off from burying their thousands of dead and laugh with the bitter cackle of a hangman, that their king so brave and showy in the jousting ring should be such a coward before disease.
It is not just Londoners who suffer. My former suitor and lately enemy Sir William Compton dies, and with him I hope dies the dispute over my lands. Anne Boleyn takes the disease and then bounces up from her bed at Hever Castle none the worse for it; but her sister’s husband Sir William Carey dies, leaving a luscious and fertile Boleyn girl with two copper-headed fatherless children. Here is another healthy bastard boy, here is another redheaded Henry. I cannot help but wonder if the king will look at Mary—the prettier and the warmer of the two, with a Tudor boy and a girl in her nursery—and think to put his wife aside and take Mary Boleyn and her little family and declare them as his own.
Jane takes her vows and becomes a novice at Bisham Priory, and I write at once to the newly recovered cardinal to apply for the wardship of my grandson Henry. Wolsey has triumphed over an illness that killed better men than him, and is now well enough to dispose of their heirs. However greedy he is for Henry’s inheritance for himself, he surely cannot deny my claim. Who could be more suitable than I to manage my grandson’s estates until he reaches his majority?
But I leave nothing to chance. A wealthy ward is a treasure that others will want. I have to promise the cardinal a handsome fee, and this is in addition to the one hundred marks that I pay him anyway every year just for his goodwill. It will be worth it, if he will only favor my claim. I have lost my beloved son Arthur; I cannot bear it that I should lose his fortune too, and that his son should fail to benefit from the marriage contract I composed.
This is not my only worry in these times. I had hoped that the king’s choice to hide from the Sweat with his wife and daughter would have its usual consequence of reminding him what a pleasant companion is his wife of nearly twenty years. But I hear from Montague who visits the small touring court that every day the king writes passionate letters to the absent Boleyn girl, and composes poetry to her dark eyes, and openly yearns for her. Extraordinary though it seems, the court will return to London headed by a king and queen who have clung together through danger, but once they are back in Westminster the king will resume his attempt to get the queen to step aside for a young commoner.
At least my son Geoffrey gives me no cause for concern. Neither he nor Constance take the Sweat, and when I go to London, they return to their house at Lordington in Sussex. Geoffrey manages the land so well and is so skilled with his tenants and neighbors that I have no hesitation in giving him the right to be a member of Parliament. The seat of Wilton is in my gift and I hand it to him.
“You can use this as a stepping-stone at court,” I tell him after dinner, on our last night together before he goes to his home and I go to court. Constance has tactfully withdrawn, as she knows I love to be with Geoffrey and free to talk to him about everything. Of all my boys he is the one who has always been closest to my heart. From babyhood, he is the one who has never been far from my side.
“Like Thomas More?” he suggests.
I nod. Geoffrey has all of my political skills. “Exactly so, and look how far he has risen.”
“But he used to speak against the king and in favor of the power of Parliament,” he reminds me.
“Yes, and there’s no need to follow him in that. Besides, once he became the speaker of Parliament he persuaded them to do the will of the king. You can follow his example in using your speeches in Parliament to draw the attention of people. Let them see you as thoughtful and loyal. Let the king know that in you he has a man who can put his case to the Parliament, and make friends so that when you propose something for the king, you will have influence, and it will be agreed.”
“Or you could just put me at court and I could befriend the king,” he suggests. “That’s what you did for Arthur and Montague. You didn’t send them to the Parliament to study and speak and persuade people. They just walked into royal favor, and all they had to do was to be good company for the king, to entertain him.”
“Those were different times,” I say ruefully. “Very different.” I think of my son Arthur and how the king loved him for his courage and quickness at every game that the court might play. “It is harder to befriend the king now. Those were more lighthearted times, when all Arthur had to do was joust and play games. The king was a happy young man and easy to please.”
RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, AUTUMN 1528