John Helyar goes the next day, and when people ask after him, I say that he left without notice and without warning. I shall have to find another chaplain for the household and a confessor for myself and it is a great nuisance and trouble.
When Prior Richard summons all the household after church on Sunday to administer the king’s oath in the priory chapel, I report John Helyar as missing and say that I think he has family in Bristol, so perhaps he has gone there.
I know that we have put another link in the chain that stretches from the queen at Kimbolton Castle to Rome, where the Pope must order her rescue.
In September, as the court turns back to London as the weather turns colder, Montague comes to Bisham for a brief visit.
“I thought I would come and tell you myself.” He jumps from his horse and kneels for my blessing. “I didn’t want to write.”
“What’s happened?” I am smiling. I can tell from the way he springs to his feet that it is not bad news for us.
“She lost the child,” he says.
Like any woman in the world I feel a pang of sorrow at the news. Anne Boleyn is my worst enemy and the child would have been her triumph but, even so, I have dawdled to the king’s rooms too many times with bad news of a dead baby not to remember that sense of terrible loss, of promise unfulfilled, of a future so confidently imagined which will now never happen.
“Oh, God bless him,” I say, and cross myself. “God bless him, the poor innocent.”
There is to be no Tudor boy this time; the terrible curse that the Plantagenet queen and her witch of a mother put on the Tudor line goes on and on working. I wonder if it will reach its very end as my cousin predicted, and there will be no Tudor boys at all, but only a girl, a barren girl.
“And the king?” I ask after a moment.
“I had thought you would be pleased,” Montague remarks, surprised. “I had thought you would triumph.”
I make a little gesture with my hand. “I don’t have so hard a heart as to wish for the death of an unborn child,” I say. “Whatever his begetting. Was it a boy? How did the king take it?”
“He went quite mad,” Montague says steadily. “He locked himself in his rooms and roared like an injured lion, banging his head against the wooden paneling, we heard him, but we couldn’t get in. He raged for a day and a night, weeping and shouting, then he fell asleep like a drunkard with his head in the fireplace.”
I listen to Montague in silence. This is like the rage of a disappointed child, not the grief of a man, a father.
“And then?”
“Then the servers of the body went in to him in the morning, and he comes out, washed and shaved, his hair curled, and says nothing of it,” Montague tells me incredulously.
“He can’t bear to have it spoken?”
Montague shakes his head. “No, he acts as if it never happened. Not the night of tears, not the loss of the baby, not the wife in childbed. It never was. It beggars belief. After the making of the cradle and the painting of the rooms, knocking the queen’s apartments at Eltham into a dining room and a privy chamber for a prince, he now says nothing about it, and denies that there was ever a child at all. And we all behave as if it never was. We are merry, we are hoping that she conceives soon. We have everything to hope for and we have never known despair.”
This is more strange than Henry blaming God for forgetting the Tudors. I had thought he would rail against his luck, or even turn on Anne as he turned on the queen. I thought he might claim that she had some terrible fault that she could not give him a son. But this is the strangest of all. He has had a loss that he cannot bear, and so he is simply denying it. Like a madman facing something that he does not want to see—he denies it is even there.
“And does no one speak to him? Since you all know that it has happened? Does no one even express their sympathy for his loss?”
“No,” Montague says heavily. “There is not a man at court who would dare. Not his old friend Charles Brandon, not even Thomas Cromwell, who is with him every day and speaks to him every minute. There is not a man at court who would have the courage to tell the king something that he denies. Because we have allowed him to say what is, and what is not, Lady Mother. We have allowed him to say what the world is like. He’s doing it right now.”
“He says that there was no child at all?”
“None at all. And so she has to pretend to be happy and pretend to be well.”
I take a moment to think of a young woman who has lost her child having to behave as if it had never been. “She acts as if she is happy?”
“Happy is not the half of it. She laughs and dances and flirts with every man at the court. She is in a whirl of excitement, gambling and drinking and dancing and disguising. She has to appear the most desirable, the most beautiful, the wittiest, cleverest, most interesting woman.”
I shake my head at this portrait of a nightmare court, dancing on the very edge of madness. “She does this?”
“She is frantic. But if she did not, he would see her as flawed,” Montague says quietly. “Ill. Incapable of bearing a child. She has to deny her loss, because he won’t be married to a woman who is not perfect. She has buried a dead baby in secret and she has to look as if she is endlessly beautiful, clever, and fertile.”
The process of taking the oath to deny the queen and the princess goes on, from church to courtroom throughout the country. I hear that they arrest Lady Anne Hussey, my kinswoman, who served the princess with me. They charge her with sending letters and little gifts to the princess at Hatfield, and she confesses that she had also called her “Princess Mary” from habit, not from intent. She has to beg forgiveness and spends long months in the Tower before they let her go.
Then I receive a note from Geoffrey, unsigned and without a seal to identify him.
The queen will not swear the oath; she has refused to deny herself or her daughter and has said that she is ready for any penalty. She thinks they will execute her privately behind the castle walls of Kimbolton and nobody will know. We have to prepare to rescue her and the princess at once.
I think that this is the moment I have longed to avoid. I think that I was born a coward. I think that I am a liar. I think that my husband begged me never to claim my own, never to do my duty, to keep myself and our children safe. But now, I think those days have gone, and though I am sick with fear I write to Geoffrey and to Montague.
Hire men and horses, hire a boat to take them to Flanders. Take every care of yourselves. But get them out of the country.
BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, CHRISTMAS 1534
I keep the Christmas feast at Bisham as if I were not in a state of frozen anticipation waiting for news from Hatfield and Kimbolton. It takes time to find a way into a royal palace, to bribe a servant in a royal prison. My sons will need to take the greatest care when they talk with the boatmen along the Thames and find who sails to Flanders, and who is loyal to the true queen. I have to behave as if I am thinking of nothing but the Christmas feast and the baking of the great pudding.
My household pretend to a carelessness that they don’t feel. We pretend we are not fearful for our priory, we are not afraid of a visit from Thomas Cromwell’s inspectors. We know that every monastery in the country has been inspected and that the money counters are always followed by an inquiry into morals—especially if a priory is rich. They have come to our priory and looked at our treasures and the richness of the lands and gone away again, saying nothing. We try not to fear their return.
The mummers come and play before the fire in the great hall, the wassailers come and sing. We dress up with great hats and capes and prance about pretending to enact stories from long ago. This year nobody enacts a story about the king, or the queen, or the Pope. This year there is no comedy in the Lord of Misrule; nobody knows what is true and what is treason, everything is Misrule. The Pope who threatened the king with excommunication is dead, and now there is a new Pope in Rome. Nobody knows if God will speak clearly to him, or how he will rule on the king with two wives. He is of the Farnese family: what the world says about him is not fit to be repeated. I pray that he can find holy wisdom. Nobody thinks anymore that God speaks to our king, and there are many who say that he is advised by the Moldwarp in dark and forbidden deeds. Our queen is far away, preparing for her execution, and the woman who calls herself queen can neither bear nor carry a son, proving to everyone that the blessing of God is not on her. Enough here for a hundred masques, but nobody dares even mention these events.