“Has he gone on progress with her?”
“Gone on progress leaving Thomas More to chase heretics through London and burn them for questioning the Church. The London tradesmen are persecuted, but she is allowed to read forbidden books.”
For a moment I don’t see the weariness in her face, the lines around her eyes, or the paleness of her cheeks. I see the princess who lost the young man she loved, her first love, and the girl who kept her promise to him. “Ah, Katherine,” I say tenderly. “How have we come to this? However did this come about?”
“D’you know, he left without saying good-bye?” she says wonderingly. “He has never done that before. Never in all his life. Not even these last few years. However angry he was, however troubled, he would never go to bed without saying good night to me, and he would never leave without saying good-bye. But this time he rode away, and when I sent after him to say that I wished him well, he replied . . .” She breaks off, her voice weakened. “He said that he did not want my good wishes.”
We are silent. I think that it is not like Henry to be rude. His mother taught him the perfect manners of royalty. He prizes himself on his courtesy, on his chivalry. That he should be discourteous—publicly and crudely discourteous to his wife, the queen—is another distinct line of paint in the portrait of this new king that is emerging: a king who will draw a blade on an unarmed younger man, who will allow his court to hound an old friend to his death, who watched his favorite and her brother and sister miming the act of dragging a cardinal of the Church down to hell.
I shake my head at the folly of men, at their cruelty, the pointless, bullying cruelty of a stupid man. “He’s showing off,” I say certainly. “In some ways he’s still the little prince I knew. He’s showing off to please her.”
“He was cold,” the queen says. She draws her shawl around her shoulders as if she feels his coldness in her chamber even now. “My messenger said that when the king turned away, his eyes were bright and cold.”
Only a few weeks later, just as we are about to go out riding, we get a message from the king. Katherine sees the royal seal and tears it open in the stable yard, her face alight with hope. For a moment I think that the king is commanding us to join him on progress, he has recovered from his ill temper and wants to see his wife and daughter.
Slowly, as she reads the letter, her face falls. “It’s not good news,” is all she says.
I see Mary put her hand to her belly as if she is suddenly queasy, and she turns from her horse as if she cannot bear the thought of sitting in a saddle. The queen hands me the letter and walks from the stable yard and into the palace without another word.
I read. It is a terse command from one of the king’s secretaries: the queen is to pack up and leave Greenwich Palace at once and go to the More, one of the houses of the late cardinal. But Mary and I are not to go with her. We are to return to Richmond Palace, where the king will visit us when he passes on his progress.
“What can I do?” Mary asks, looking after her mother. “What should I do?”
She is only fifteen years old; there is nothing that she can do. “We have to obey the king,” I say. “As your mother will do. She will obey him.”
“She will never agree to a divorce.” Mary rounds on me, her voice raised, her face anguished.
“She will obey him in everything that her conscience allows,” I correct myself.
RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SUMMER 1531
We get home and I have a sense of a storm about to break as soon as the door to Mary’s bedroom is closed behind us. All the way home, in the royal barge with people cheering her from the riverbank, she was dignified and steady. She took her seat at the rear of the barge on her gold throne, turning her head to right and left. When the wherrymen cheered her, she raised a hand; when the fishwives at the Lambeth quay shouted: “God bless you, Princess, and your mother, the queen,” she inclined her head a little, to show that she heard them, but no further to indicate disloyalty to her father. She held herself like a marionette on tight wires, but the moment that we are home and the door is shut behind us, she collapses as if all the strings are cut at once.
She drops to the floor in a storm of sobbing; there is no comforting her, there is no silencing her. Her eyes run, her nose, her deep sobs turn to retches and then she vomits out her grief. I fetch a bowl and pat her back, and still she does not stop. She heaves again but nothing comes except bile. “Stop,” I say. “Stop this, Mary, stop.”
She has never disobeyed me in her life before, but I see that she cannot stop; it is as if the separation of her parents has torn her apart. She chokes and coughs and sobs some more as if she would spit out her lungs, her heart. “Stop, Mary,” I say. “Stop crying.”
I don’t believe she can even hear me. She is eviscerating herself as if she were a traitor being disemboweled, choking on her tears, on bile, or phlegm, and her wailing goes on.
I pull her up from the floor and I wrap her in shawls, as tightly as if I were swaddling a baby. I want her to feel held, though her mother cannot hold her, though her father has let her fall. I tighten the scarves around her heaving belly, and she turns her head away from me and gasps for breath as I tighten the fabric around her body and wrap her close. I lie her on her back on the bed, holding her thin shoulders, and still her mouth gapes wide on her unstoppable sobs and still her grief racks her. I rock her, as if she were a swaddled baby, I wipe the tears that come from her red swollen eyes, I wipe her nose, I pat the saliva from her drooling mouth. “Hush,” I say gently. “Hush. Hush, little Mary, hush.”
It grows dark outside and her sobs become quieter; she breathes and then she gives a little hiccough of grief, and then she breathes again. I lay my hand on her forehead where she is burning hot, and I think between the two of them they have nearly killed their only child. All through this long night, while Mary sobs herself to sleep and then wakes and cries out again as if she cannot believe that her father has abandoned her mother and they have both left her, I forget that Katherine is in the right, that she is doing the will of God, that she swore to be Queen of England and that God called her to this place just as He calls those whom He loves. I forget that my darling Mary is a princess and must never deny her name, that God has called her, and it would be a sin to deny her throne as it would be a sin to deny her life. I just think that this child, this fifteen-year-old girl, is paying a terrible price for her parents’ battle; and it would be better for her, as it was better for me, to walk away from a royal name and a royal claim altogether.
The court splits and divides, like a country readying for war. Some are invited to the king’s progress around the hunting estates of England, riding all day and merrymaking all night. Some stay with the queen at the More, where she keeps a good household and a large court. Very many slip away to go to their own houses and lands and pray that they will not be forced to choose whether to serve the king or the queen.
Montague travels with the king, his place is at his side, but his loyalty is always with the queen. Geoffrey goes home to Sussex, to his wife at Lordington, who gives birth to their first child. They call him Arthur, for the brother whom Geoffrey loved best. Geoffrey writes at once to me to ask for an allowance for his baby son. He is a young man who cannot hold money, and I laugh at the thought of his lordly extravagance. He is too generous to his friends and keeps too wealthy a household. I know that I should refuse him; but I cannot. Besides, he has given the family another boy, and that is a gift beyond price.
I stay with Princess Mary at Richmond Palace. She is still hoping to be allowed to join her mother, writing carefully loving letters to her father, receiving only occasional scrawled replies.