Montague stands before us, bows to us both, and waits, looking from one to the other: the mother whose judgment he trusts, and the young royal in my keeping.
She nods her head to him as if she were a queen already. She turns and seats herself in a little bower that we have made, a seat for lovers to enjoy the river in the shade of a rosebush and honeysuckle. She sits as if it is a throne, and the flowers breathing their scent into the night air are her canopy of state. “You can tell me, Lord Montague. What grave news do you have, that you come from London with your oars pulling so fast and the drum beating so loud?” And when she sees him glance at me, she says again: “You can tell me.”
“It is bad news. I came to tell my Lady Mother.” Almost without thinking he pulls off his cap and drops to one knee before her as if she were queen.
“Of course,” she says steadily. “I knew it as soon as I saw your barge. But you can tell us both. I am no child, and I am no fool. I know my father is moving against the Holy Church, and I need to know what has happened, Lord Montague, help me. Be a good advisor to me, and tell me what has happened.”
He looks up at her as if he would spare her this. But he tells her simply and quietly. “Today the Church surrendered to the king. Only God knows what will happen. But from today the king will rule the Church himself. The Pope is to be disregarded in England. He is no more than a bishop, the Bishop of Rome.” He shakes his head in disbelief as he says it. “The Pope is overthrown by the king, and the king sits below God with the Church below him. Thomas More has returned the seal of Lord Chancellor and resigned his post and gone home.”
She knows that her mother has lost a true friend and her father the last man who would tell him the truth. She is silent as she takes in the news. “The king has made the Church his own?” she asks. “All its wealth? And its laws and its courts? This is to take England entirely into his own possession.”
Neither I nor my son can contradict her.
“They are calling it the submission of the clergy,” he says quietly. “The Church cannot make law, the Church cannot convict heresy, the Church may not pay its wealth to Rome, and it may not take commands from Rome.”
“So that the king can rule on his own marriage,” the princess says. I realize that she has thought deeply on this, and that her mother will have told her the many clever measures that the king and his new advisor Thomas Cromwell have undertaken.
We are silent.
“Jesus Himself appointed his servant Peter to rule the Church,” she observes. “I know this. Everyone knows this. Is England to disobey Jesus Christ?”
“This is not our battle,” I interrupt. “This is a matter for churchmen. Not for us.”
Her blue York gaze turns to me as if she hopes that I will tell the truth, but knows that I will not.
“I mean it,” I insist. “This is a great matter. It is for the king and the Church to decide. It is for the Holy Father to remonstrate, if he thinks best. It is for the king to take advice and make his claim, as he thinks best. It is for the churchmen in Parliament to respond to the king. Thomas More must speak out, John Fisher will speak out, your own tutor Richard Fetherston has spoken out, it is for the men, the bishops, and archbishops. Not us.”
“Oh, they have spoken,” Montague says bitterly. “The churchmen spoke at once. Most of them agreed without an argument, and when it came to a vote, they stayed away. That is why Thomas More has gone home to Chelsea.”
The little princess rises from the garden seat and Montague gets to his feet. She does not take his offered arm but turns to me. “I shall go to my chapel and pray,” she says. “I shall pray for wisdom to guide me in these difficult days. I wish that I knew what I should do.”
She is silent for a moment, looking at us both. “I shall pray for my tutors and for Bishop Fisher. And I shall pray for Thomas More,” she says. “I think that he is a man who does know what he should do.”
RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, SUMMER 1532
That was the end of our carefree summer, and the end of the good weather too, for as the princess prayed in the private chapel, turning over her rosary beads naming her mother, Bishop Fisher, and Thomas More, to St. Jude, the saint for the hopeless and the despairing, the clouds rolled up the valley, making the river dark, and then it started to rain with the thick, heavy drops of a summer storm.
The bad weather lasted for weeks, heavy clouds lay over the city, and people grew bad-tempered and exhausted in the heat. When the clouds cleared at night, instead of the familiar stars there was a succession of constant burning comets crossing the sky. People watching the troubled stars saw standards and banners and unmistakable signs of war. One of Reginald’s former friends, one of the Carthusian monks, told my confessor that he had clearly seen a burning red globe hanging above their church, and from this he knew that the king’s anger would fall on them for keeping their prophecy safe, and hiding the manuscript.
The fishermen who came to the pier with fresh trout for the household said that they were catching dead bodies in their nets, so many men were throwing themselves into the flood waters of the unusually high tides. “Heretics,” one said, “for the Church will burn them if they don’t drown themselves. Thomas More will see to that.”
“Not anymore,” said the other. “For More will be burned himself, and the heretics are safe in England now that the king’s whore is a Lutheran. It is those who love the old ways and who pray to the Virgin and honor the queen who are drowning themselves in the new tide.”
“That’s enough from both of you,” I say, pausing at the kitchen door while the cook picks out her baskets of fish. “We don’t want any talk like that in this household. Take your money and go, and don’t come here again or I will report you.”
I can silence the men at the door, but every man, woman, and child on the road to or from London who passes our door and calls in for the free food given out at the end of every meal has one story or another, and they all have the same ominous theme.
They are talking of miracles, of prophecies. They believe that the queen is receiving daily messages from her nephew the emperor, promising that he will defend her, and there will be a Spanish fleet sailing up the Thames any dawn. They don’t know for sure, but they heard from someone that the Pope is consulting with his advisors, hammering out a compromise because he is afraid that the Christian kings will turn on each other over this matter, while the Turk is at the door of Christendom. They don’t know, but everyone seems to be sure that the king is advised only by the Boleyns and by their lawyers and churchmen, and they are telling him wicked lies: that the only way ahead to his desires is to steal the Church, to set aside his coronation oath, to tear up Magna Carta itself and act the tyrant and defy anyone who says that he cannot do such a thing.
No one knows anything for sure; but they know very well that there are dangerous times ahead, and that the smell of danger is in the air, and that every time the thunder rumbles someone, somewhere in England, says: “Listen. Was that guns? Is the war starting again?”
Those who are not afraid of war are afraid of the rising of the dead from their graves. The shallow graves at Bosworth Field, at Towton, at St. Albans, at Towcester throw up trophies of silver and gold, badges and keepsakes, tokens and livery buttons. Now they say that the quiet earth itself is disturbed in these old battlefields, as if they are being secretly harrowed in darkness, and the men who died for the Yorks have been released from the damp earth and are standing up, brushing off the clinging soil, mustering in their old troops, and coming back to fight again for their princess and for their Church.