BEAULIEU, ESSEX, AUGUST 1533
Geoffrey and Montague come openly together to visit me, apparently for a day’s hunting in the great park around Beaulieu. As soon as they are announced, the princess comes down to greet them in the walled garden.
It is a beautiful day. The brick walls hold the heat and not a leaf stirs in the windless air. Montague goes down on one knee as the princess comes towards him and smiles up at her. “I have great news for you,” he says. “Praise God that I can bring you good news at last. The Pope has ruled in favor of your mother. He has commanded the king to put aside all others and take her back to court.”
She gives a little gasp and the color comes to her cheeks. “I am so glad,” she replies. “God be praised for His mercy, and for speaking to the Pope. God bless the Pope for having the courage to say what he should.” She crosses herself and turns away from my sons, as I put my arms around her thin shoulders and hold her for a moment. Her eyes are filled with tears. “I’m all right,” she says. “I am so relieved. I am so glad. At last. At last the Holy Father has spoken, and my father will hear him.”
“If only . . .” I start, and then I trail into silence. It is pointless to wish: if only the Pope had ruled earlier. But at least he has ruled now. The Boleyn woman is with child and has gone through a form of marriage with the king, but this need not prevent the king’s return to his wife. We have had pregnant whores at court before; for years the queen lived alongside a favorite mistress and a bastard son.
“My father will return to his obedience to the Holy Father, won’t he?” She turns back to Montague, her voice carefully steady.
“I think that he will negotiate,” Montague says shrewdly. “He will have to come to terms with Rome, and your mother’s freedom and position as queen must be restored. The Pope’s ruling makes this the business of all Christian kings. Your father is not going to risk France and Spain allying against him.”
She looks as if a great burden has been lifted from her little shoulders. “This is very good news you bring me, Lord Montague,” she says. “And you, Sir Geoffrey.” She turns to me. “You must be glad to see your sons when they bring us such happiness.”
“I am,” I say.
BEAULIEU, ESSEX, SEPTEMBER 1533
It’s a girl. All this trouble for a bastard Boleyn girl. They all say it proves that God has turned his face from the king. They’re calling her Elizabeth.
After the months of waiting it is an intense relief that the Boleyn woman could not give birth to a boy. A son and heir would have proved to the king that he was right all along, that God had smiled on him whatever the Holy Father said. Now there is nothing to prevent him reconciling with the queen and confirming Princess Mary as his heir. Why should he not do so? He has no legitimate son to put in her place. The Boleyns’ great gamble has failed. Their Anne proved to be of no more use than their Mary. The king can return to his wife, she can return to court.
Finally, I think, the wheel of fortune has turned for the princess, and for the queen, her mother. The Pope has declared that the Aragon marriage is lawful, that the Boleyn marriage is a charade. The Boleyn child is a bastard and a girl. The shine is taken off the Boleyn woman and the crown will be taken off her too.
I am confident. We are all waiting for Henry to obey the Pope and restore his wife to her throne, but nothing happens. The bastard Elizabeth is to be christened; the whore, her mother, keeps her place at court.
The princess’s chamberlain, Lord John Hussey, returns to Beaulieu, riding up the great road from London. “He’s been at the christening,” his wife Anne sourly remarks. “He carried the canopy because he was commanded to do so. Don’t think his heart was in it. Don’t think he doesn’t love our princess.”
“My cousin’s wife Gertrude stood as godmother,” I reply. “And nobody loves the queen more than her. We all have to take our places and play our parts.”
She glances at me, as if uncertain how much she should say. “He’s met with a northern lord,” she says. “Better that I don’t say who. He says that the North is ready to rise to defend the queen, if the king does not obey the Pope. Shall I tell him that he can come to you?”
I grit my teeth on my fear. In my pocket wrapped around my rosary is Lord Tom Darcy’s badge of the five wounds of Christ embroidered with the white rose of my house. “With great care,” I say, “tell him that he can come to me with care.”
The boy who brings in the wood for the fire goes past us carrying his basket and we are immediately silent for a moment.
“Anyway, it’s a blessing that the king’s sister was not there to see it, poor princess,” Lady Anne remarks. “She’d never have curtseyed to a Boleyn baby!”
The dowager queen Mary Brandon died at her home in the summer; some people said it was heartbreak that her brother had married his mistress in secret. Both the queen and the princess have lost a good friend, and the king has lost one of the very few people who would tell him the truth about the England he is making.
“The king loved his sister and would have forgiven her almost anything,” I say. “The rest of us have to take the greatest care not to offend him.”
We watch John Hussey from the upper window as the troop of horses ride up the long avenue of trees and halts at the front of the house. He dismounts and throws his reins to a groom and then walks slowly and heavily to the front door like a man on a wearisome errand.
“He can’t be bringing orders that we have to move again, or to take anything from us,” I say uneasily, watching his heavy stride. “He won’t ask for anything. The queen refused to give them the princess’s christening gown for Elizabeth; there’s nothing they can want from us.”
“I’m very sure he’d better not ask anything from me,” she says shortly, and turns away from the window to go to the princess’s rooms.
I wait on the gallery as I hear Lord John come slowly up the stairs. He almost flinches when he sees me, waiting for him. “Your ladyship.” He bows.
“Lord John.”
“I have just come from London. From the christening of the Princess Elizabeth.”
I nod, neither confirming nor denying the name, and I think that he cannot have wined and dined very well at the christening feast, for he looks sluggish and unhappy.
“The king’s secretary, Thomas Cromwell, Cromwell himself, instructs me to get the inventory of the princess’s jewels.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Why would Thomas Cromwell want an inventory of the princess’s jewels?”
He stops for a moment. “He’s the Master of the Jewel House, and it is the king’s command. He asked me himself. And you can’t question that.”
“I can’t,” I agree. “I would not. And so I am sorry to tell you that there is no inventory.”
He takes in the fact that I am going to be difficult. “There must be.”
“There isn’t.”
“But how do you know you have everything safely?”
“Because I myself take out her jewels when she wants them, and then afterwards I put her things away. She’s not a goldsmith’s shop that has to keep a note of stock. She is a princess. She has jewels as she has gloves. Or lace. I don’t have a glove inventory either. I have no register of lace.”
He looks quite baffled. “I’ll tell him,” he says.
“Do.”
But I don’t expect that to be the last of it, and it is not.
“Thomas Cromwell says that you are to make an inventory of the princess’s jewels,” poor John Hussey says to me a few days later.
His wife, passing us on the stairs, shakes her head with something like disdain and says something under her breath.
“Why?” I ask.
He looks baffled. “He didn’t tell me why. He just said it must be done. And so it must be done.”
“Very well,” I say. “A thorough inventory? Of everything? Or just the best pieces?”
“I don’t know!” he exclaims miserably, but then he gets himself in check. “A thorough inventory. An inventory of everything.”
“If it is to be done thoroughly, as Master Cromwell wishes, then you had better do it with me, and bring a couple of your clerks.”
“Very well,” he says. “Tomorrow morning.”
We go through the princess’s wardrobe and open up all the little leather purses with the ropes of pearls and the pretty brooches.
And all the time Thomas Cromwell is making another inventory. His agents travel up and down the land inquiring into the wealth and practices of the monasteries, discovering what they are worth and where their treasures are kept. Neither here among the princess’s boxes nor in the monasteries does anyone explain the purpose of this. Mr. Cromwell seems to be a man very interested in the exact value of other people’s goods.
I cannot say I am any more helpful than the monasteries who claim their holiness and hide their treasures. Indeed, I spin out the inventory for day after day. We bring out all the little boxes, valueless things that she has kept from childhood, a collection of shells from the beach at Dover, some dried berries threaded on silk. Carefully, we list pressed flowers. The diamond brooch from the Emperor Charles turns up as a little ghost from the time when she was the king’s heiress and two of the greatest princes of Europe were proposed for her. Out of little boxes at the back of cupboards I bring the hasp of a belt, and one buckle missing its fellow. She has beautiful rosaries, her piety is well known, she has dozens of golden crucifixes. I bring them all, and the little toy crowns made of gold wire and glass, and the pins with silver heads, and the hair combs of ivory and a couple of rusting lucky horseshoes. We annotate her hairpins, a set of ivory toothpicks, and a silver lice comb. Everything I find, I list in exact detail and make Lord John see that his clerk copies it down in his inventory that runs to page after page, each initialed by us both. It takes days before we are done and the princess’s treasures, great and small, are spread across all the tables in the treasure room, and every last little pin is recorded.
“Now we have to pack these up and give them to Frances Elmer in the privy chamber,” Lord John says. He sounds exhausted. I’m not surprised. It has been tedious and pointless and long, long drawn out by me.
“Oh no, I can’t do that,” I say simply.
“But that is why we made the inventory!”
“It’s not why I made the inventory. I made the inventory to obey the instruction of the king from Master Cromwell.”
“Well, now, he tells me to tell you to give the jewels to Mistress Elmer.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why!” It comes out as a bellow like a wounded bull.
I look at him steadily. We both know why. The woman who calls herself queen has decided to take the princess’s jewels and give them to her bastard. As if a little coronal of diamonds, small enough to be tied on a baby’s head, will transform a child conceived out of wedlock into a Princess of England.
“I can’t do it without a command from the king,” I say. “He told me to guard his daughter and keep her estate. I can’t hand over her goods just on someone’s say-so.”
“It’s Thomas Cromwell’s say-so!”
“He may seem like a great man to you,” I say condescendingly. “But I have not sworn to obey him. I could not give up the jewels, against the king’s own command, unless I have a command from the king to me, directly. When you give me that, I shall give the jewels to whomever His Grace appoints as worthy of them. But let me ask you, who would that be? Who do you think is worthy of the jewels that were given to our princess?”
Lord John lets rip an oath and flings himself out of the room. The door bangs behind him and we hear his boots stamping down the stairs. We hear the front door bang and his snarl at the sentries as they present arms. Then there is silence.
One of the clerks looks up at me. “All you can do is delay it,” he says with sudden clarity, speaking for the first time in days of silent work, and impertinently speaking directly to me. “You have delayed magnificently, your ladyship. But if a man runs mad and wants to dishonor his wife and rob his daughter, it’s very hard to stop him.”