“The Maid speaks of a curse,” Montague says, rubbing my icy hands in his big palms. “She says that you know of a curse.”
I turn my head away from his anxious face.
“Do you, Mother?”
“No.”
We don’t speak privately again until after dinner, when the princess complains of weariness and a pain in her belly. I send her to bed early and take a glass of warm spiced ale to her bedside. She is praying before her crucifix, but she gets up and slides between the sheets that I hold open for her. “Go and gossip with Montague,” she says, smiling. “I know he is waiting for you.”
“I’ll tell you everything that is entertaining in the morning,” I promise her, and she smiles as if she too can pretend that news of her father and his mistress triumphant in France could possibly be amusing.
He is waiting for me in my privy chamber, and I order wine and sweetmeats before sending everyone away. He gets up and listens at the door and then he goes down the little stair to the stable yard. I hear the outer door click and then he comes into the room with Geoffrey and I lock the door behind them.
Geoffrey comes to me and kneels at my feet, his face bright with excitement. “I do hope you’re not enjoying this too much,” I say dryly. “It’s not a game.”
“It’s the greatest game in the world,” he says. “For the highest stakes there are. I have just been with the queen. I went to her the moment we landed, to tell her the news.” He draws a letter from his shirt. “I have this from her to the princess.”
I take it and slip it down the top of my gown. “Is she well?”
He shakes his head, his excitement draining away. “Very sorrowful. And I had no joy to bring her. The king has forged an alliance with the French king, and we think they’ll propose an agreement to the Holy Father: Thomas Cranmer to be made archbishop, and given the power to hear the divorce in England. So the king gets his divorce. In return, he calls off the ruin of the Church, and the monasteries can keep their fortunes and send their fees to Rome. Henry must forgot his claim to be head of the Church, that will be all forgotten.”
“A massive bribe,” Montague says with distaste. “The Church wins its safety by abandoning the queen.”
“Would the Pope allow Cranmer to put the king’s marriage on trial?”
“Unless Reginald can change his mind before the King of France gets there,” Geoffrey says. “Our brother is working with Spain, he is working with the queen’s lawyers. He completely persuaded the scholars at the Sorbonne. He says he thinks he can do it. He has the law of the Church on his side, and the Spanish and God.”
“Henry will insist on a divorce whatever the scholars say, if the Lady is with child,” Montague points out. “And everyone thinks he’s married her already, without waiting for the Pope’s license. Why else would she give herself now, after holding out so long?”
“A haystack wedding,” Geoffrey says scornfully. “A secret wedding. The queen says that she will never regard such a marriage and none of us is to recognize it either.”
I take this terrible news in silence. Then I ask: “What else does Reginald say? And how does he look?”
“He’s well,” Geoffrey says. “Nothing wrong with him, don’t worry about him, going between Rome and Paris and Padua, dining with the best, everyone agreeing with him. He’s at the very heart of all of this, and everyone wants his opinion. He’s very influential, very powerful. He’s the one that the Holy Father listens to.”
“And what does he advise us?” I ask. “When you told him that we are ready to rise?”
Geoffrey nods, suddenly sobering. “He says that Emperor Charles will invade to defend his aunt and we must rise and march with him. The emperor has sworn that if Henry publicly marries the Boleyn woman and sets the princess aside, then he will invade to defend the rights of his aunt and his cousin.”
“Reginald says it is certain to come to war,” Montague says quietly.
“Who is with us?” I ask. I have a sense of everything rushing towards us too quickly, as if, like the prophetess Elizabeth Barton, I can see a future and it is suddenly here and now.
“All our kinsmen, of course,” Montague says. “Courtenay and the West of England, Arthur Plantagenet in Calais, the Staffords, the Nevilles. Charles Brandon, probably, if we make it clear we are against the advisors and not against the king, all the Church lands and their tenants—that’s nearly a third of England alone. Wales of course, because of the princess and you living there, the North and Kent with my uncle Lord Bergavenny. The Percys would rise to defend the Church, and there would be many who would rise up for the princess, more than have ever ridden out before. Lord Tom Darcy, Lord John Hussey, and the old Warwick affinity for you.”
“You have spoken to our kinsmen?”
“I have taken great care,” Montague assures me. “But I spoke to Arthur Viscount Lisle. He and Courtenay have met with the Maid of Kent and been convinced by her that the king will fall. Everyone else has come to me, to ask what we will do, or spoken to the Spanish ambassador. I am certain that the only lords who would stand with the king are the people he has newly made: the Boleyns and the Howards.”
“How will we know when the emperor is coming?”
Geoffrey beams. “Reginald will send to me,” he says. “He knows he has to give us time enough for everyone to arm their tenants. He understands.”
“We wait?” I confirm.
“We wait for now.” Montague looks warningly at Geoffrey. “And we only speak of it among ourselves. No one outside the family, only those who we know are already sworn to the queen or the princess.”
RICHMOND PALACE, WEST OF LONDON, WINTER 1532–SUMMER 1533
Like the slow tolling of a funeral bell that rings out sorrowfully again and again as a prisoner is brought from the darkness of the Tower, to walk up to the hill where the headsman waits by the ladder to the scaffold, bad news comes beat by slow beat from the court in London.
In December the king and Anne inspect the works to repair the Tower of London and are reported as saying that the work must be hurried. The City is agog, thinking that the queen is to be taken from the More and imprisoned in the Tower.
She says that she is ready for a trial for treason, and instructs that Princess Mary is never to deny her name or her birth. She knows this means they may both be arrested and taken to the Tower. It is her command. Burn this.
Geoffrey comes to tell me that Anne holds great state at court, wearing the queen’s jewels, preceding everyone into dinner. She has come back from Calais holding her head stiffly erect, as if she is bearing the weight of a crown, invisible to everyone but herself. The true ladies of the realm are disregarded, the French dowager queen Mary avoids her own brother’s court altogether and gives out that she is ill. The other ladies of the kingdom—Agnes, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk; Gertrude, the Marchioness of Exeter; even I, especially I—are not invited. Anne is guarded by her tight little circle: Norfolk’s daughter Mary Howard, her own sister Mary, and her sister-in-law Jane. She spends all her time with the young men of Henry’s court and her brother George, a wild circle headed by the one-eyed Sir Francis Bryan, whom they call the vicar of hell. It is a feverishly witty, worldly court that the king has allowed to come about that is driven by sexual desire and ambition. There are fearless and bold young men, and women of doubtful virtue, all celebrating their daring in a new world with the new learning. It is a court that is perpetually on tenterhooks for the new fashion, for the new heresy, waiting for the Pope’s ruling, and for the king to decide what he will do. A court that has staked everything on the king being able to force the Pope into consent, knowing that this is the greatest sin in the world and the destruction of the kingdom, believing that this is a leap into freedom and into a new way of thinking.