She is confined to the house, not even allowed to walk in the grounds, kept from any visitor for fear that they pass her a message or one word of comfort, separated from her mother, exiled from her father. They won’t let me go to her, though I have bombarded Thomas Cromwell with begging letters, and asked the Earl of Surrey and the Earl of Essex to intervene with the king. Nobody can do anything. I am to be parted from the princess whom I love as a daughter.
I suffer something like an illness, though the physicians can find nothing wrong with me. I take to my bed and find that I cannot easily get up again. I feel as if I have some mysterious illness, a greensickness, a falling sickness. I am so anxious for the princess and for the queen and so powerless to help either of them that my sense of weakness spreads through me till I can barely stand.
Geoffrey comes to visit from his home at nearby Lordington and tells me that he has a message from Reginald, who is in Rome, begging the Pope to excommunicate Henry, as he said he would, so that the people can rise against him, readying the emperor for the moment that he should invade.
Geoffrey tells me that my cousin Henry Courtenay’s wife, Gertrude, has spoken out so strongly in favor of the queen and justice for the princess that the king took Courtenay to one side and warned him that one more word from her would cost him his head. Courtenay told Geoffrey that he assumed at first the king was speaking in jest—for whoever beheads a man for his wife’s words?—but it is no laughing matter; now he has ordered his wife to keep silent. Geoffrey is warned by this and does his work in secrecy, going quietly, unseen, along the cold mud tracks to visit the queen and deliver her letter to the princess.
“It didn’t cheer her,” he says unhappily to me. “I fear that it made things worse.”
“How?” I ask. I am lying on a daybed near the window for the last light of the setting sun. I feel sick at the thought of Geoffrey taking a letter to Mary that made her feel worse. “How?”
“Because it was a farewell.”
I raise myself up on one elbow. “A farewell? The queen is leaving?” My head spins at the thought of it. Can it be that her nephew is going to offer her a safe haven abroad? Would she leave Mary alone in England to face her father?
Geoffrey’s face is pale with horror. “No. Worse, far worse. The queen wrote that the princess should not dispute with the king and should obey him in all things except those matters which concerned God and the safety of her soul.”
“Yes,” I say uneasily.
“And she said that for herself, she didn’t mind what they did to her, for she was sure that they would meet in heaven.”
I am sitting up now. “And what do you understand from this?”
“I didn’t see the whole letter. This is just what I got from the princess as she read it. She held it to her heart, kissed the signature, and she said that her mother could lead and she would follow, and she would not fail her.”
“Can the queen mean that she will be executed, and is telling the princess to prepare herself too?”
Geoffrey nods. “She says she won’t fail.”
I get to my feet, but the room swims around me, and I cling to the headboard of the bed. I will have to go to Mary. I have to tell her that she must take any oath, make any agreement; she must not risk her life. The one thing that she has, this precious Tudor girl, is her life. I didn’t wrap her in swaddling bands as a newborn baby, or carry her in ermine from her christening, or raise her as my own daughter, for her to give up her life. Nothing matters more than life. She must not offer her life against her father’s error. She must not die for this.
“There’s talk of an oath which everyone is going to have to take. Every one of us is going to have to swear on the Bible that the king’s first marriage was invalid, that his second one is good, and that the Princess Elizabeth is the king’s only heir and Princess Mary is his bastard.”
“She can’t swear to that,” I say flatly. “Neither can I. Nor can anyone. It’s just a lie. She can’t put her hand on a Holy Bible and insult her mother.”
“I think she’ll have to,” Geoffrey says. “I think we all will. Because I think they will call it treason to refuse to swear.”
“They can’t put a man to death for speaking the truth.” I cannot imagine a country where the hangman would kick out a stool from under a man who was telling a truth that the hangman knows as well as his victim. “The king is determined, I see that. But he wouldn’t do this.”
“I think it will happen,” Geoffrey warns.
“How can she swear that she’s not the princess, when everyone knows that she is?” I repeat. “I can’t swear that, nobody can.”
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1534
I am summoned with the other peers of the realm to the Privy Council at the Palace of Westminster where the Lord Chancellor, the newly great Thomas Cromwell, stepping into the shoes of Thomas More like a Fool dancing in his master’s boots, is to administer the oath of succession to the nobility of England, who stand before him like puzzled children waiting to recite their catechism.
We know the truth of the matter, for the Pope has publicly ruled. He has announced that the marriage of Queen Katherine and King Henry is valid, and that the king must set aside all others and live in peace with his true wife. But he has not excommunicated the king, so though we know that the king is in the wrong, we are not authorized to defy him. We each must do what we think best.
And the Pope is far away, and the king claims that he has no authority in England. The king has ruled that his wife is not his wife, that his mistress is queen, and that her bastard is a princess. The king says that by his declaring this, it is so. He is the new pope. He can declare that something is so; and now it is. And we, if we had any courage or even a sure grasp on the material world, would say that the king is mistaken.
Instead, one by one we walk up to a great table and there is the oath written out, and the great seal above it. I take up the pen and dip it in the ink and feel my hand tremble. I am a Judas, a Judas even to take the pen into my hand. The beautifully transcribed words dance before me; I can hardly see them, the paper is a blur, the table seems to sway as I lean over. I think: God save me, I am sixty years old, I am too old for this, I am too frail for this, perhaps I can faint and be carried from the room and spared this.
I glance up, and Montague’s steady gaze is on me. He will sign, and Geoffrey will sign after him. We have agreed that we must sign so that no one can doubt our loyalty; we will sign hoping for better days. Quickly, before I can find the courage to change my mind, I scrawl my name, Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, and so I renew my allegiance to the king, I pledge my loyalty to the children of his marriage with the woman who calls herself queen, and I acknowledge him as head of the Church in England.
These are lies. Every single one of these is a lie. And I am a liar to set my hand to it. I step back from the table and I am no longer wishing I had pretended to faint, I am wishing that I had the courage to step forward and die as the queen told the princess that she must be ready to do.
Later they tell me that the saintly old man, confessor to two Queens of England, and God knows a good friend to me, John Fisher, would not sign the oath when they pulled him out of his prison in the Tower and put it before him. They did not respect his age, nor his long loyalty to the Tudors; they forced the oath on him and when he read and reread it and finally said that he did not think he could deny the authority of the Pope, they took him back to the Tower. Some people say that he will be executed. Most people say that no one can execute a bishop of the Church. I say nothing at all.