PETERBOROUGH, CAMBRIDGESHIRE, JANUARY 1536
On the afternoon of the third day I can see the spire of Peterborough Abbey ahead of me, pointing up to an iron gray sky, as my horse dips his head against the cold wind and trudges steadily onward, his big hooves scuffing the snow. I have a dozen men at arms around me and as we enter the gates of the city, the bell tolling for curfew, they close up against the people of the streets who watch resentfully, until they see my banner and start to shout.
For a moment I am afraid that they will shout out against me, seeing me as one of the court, one of the many new lords who have grown rich on the goodwill of the Tudors, even if I have that goodwill no more. But a woman leaning out of an overhanging window shrieks down at me: “God bless the white rose! God bless the white rose!”
Startled, I glance up and see her beam at me. “God bless Queen Katherine! God bless the princess! God bless the white rose!”
The urchin children and beggars clearing out of the way ahead of the soldiers turn and cheer, though they know nothing of who I am. But out of the little roadside shops, stepping out of workhouses and tumbling out of church and alehouse alike come men pulling off their hats and one or two even kneeling down in the freezing mud as I go by, and they call out blessings on the late queen, on her daughter, and on me and my house.
Someone even sets up the old cry “À Warwick!” and I know that they have not forgotten, any more than I have, that there was once an England with a York king on the throne who was content to be king and did not pretend to be Pope, who had a mistress who did not pretend to be queen, who had bastards who did not pretend to be heirs.
I understand, as we ride through the little city, why the king commanded that the queen should not be buried, as befits her dignity, in the abbey at Westminster. It is because the City would have risen up to mourn her. Henry was right to be afraid; I think all of London would have rioted against him. The people of England have turned against the Tudors. They loved this young king when he came to the throne to make everything right again, but now he has taken their Church, and taken their monasteries, and taken their best men, put aside his queen, and death has taken her. They cheer for her still, they mutter and call her martyred, a saint, and they cheer for me as one of the old royal family who would never have led them so badly astray.
We arrive at the guesthouse of the abbey, and find it overcrowded with the retinues of other great ladies from London. Maria de Salinas, Countess Willoughby, the queen’s faithful friend, is here already, and she comes running down the stairs as if she were still a lady-in-waiting to a Spanish princess and I were mere Lady Pole of Stourton. We hold each other tightly, and I can feel her shake with her sobs. When we pull back to look at each other, I know that there are tears in my eyes too.
“She was at peace,” is the first thing she says. “She was at peace at the end.”
“I knew it.”
“She sent you her love.”
“I tried . . .”
“She knew that you would be thinking of her, and she knew that you would continue to guard her daughter. She wanted to give you . . .” She breaks off, unable to speak, her Spanish accent still strong after years in England and her marriage to an English nobleman. “I am sorry. She wanted to give you one of her rosaries, but the king has ordered that everything be taken into his keeping.”
“Her bequests?”
“He has taken everything,” she says with a little sigh. “As is his right, I suppose.”
“It’s not his right!” I say at once. “If she was a widow as he insists, and they were unmarried, then everything she owned at her death was hers to give as she wished!”
There is a little twinkle in Maria’s dark eyes as she hears me. I cannot help myself, I always have to defend a woman’s estate. I bow my head. “It’s not the things,” I say quietly, knowing well enough that her greatest jewels and treasures had already been taken from her and hung around Anne Boleyn’s scrawny neck. “And it’s not that I wanted anything from her, I will remember her without a keepsake. But those things were hers by right.”
“I know,” Maria says, and looks up the stairs as Frances Grey, Marchioness of Dorset, daughter of Mary the Dowager Queen of France, comes down the stairs and makes the smallest of bows to me in return to my curtsey. As the daughter of a Tudor princess married to a commoner Frances is cursed with anxiety about her precedence and her position, the more so as her father is now remarried, and to Maria’s daughter who is here too.
“You are welcome here,” she says, as if it were her own house. “The funeral is tomorrow morning. I shall go in first and you behind me and Maria and her daughter Catherine, my stepmother, behind you.”
“Of course,” I say. “All I want to do is to say good-bye to my friend. Precedence does not matter to me. She was my very dearest friend.”
“And the Countess of Worcester is here, and the Countess of Surrey,” Frances goes on.
I nod. Frances Howard, Countess of Surrey, is a Tudor supporter by birth and by marriage. Elizabeth Somerset, the Countess of Worcester, is one of the Boleyn ladies-in-waiting in constant attendance upon Anne Boleyn. I imagine that they have been sent to report back to their mistress, who will not be pleased to hear that the people in the street called blessings on the queen as her coffin was drawn to the abbey by six black horses with her household and half the county walking, heads bared to the cold wind, behind.
It is a beautiful day. The wind blows from the east, biting and cold, but the sky is clear with a hard wintry light as we walk to the abbey church and inside the hundreds of candles glow like dull gold. It is a simple funeral, not grand enough for a great queen and the victor of Flodden, not enough to honor an Infanta of Spain who came to England with such high hopes. But there is a quiet beauty in the abbey church where four bishops greet the coffin draped in black velvet with a frieze of cloth of gold. Two heralds walk before the coffin, two behind, carrying banners with her arms: her own crest, the royal arms of Spain, the royal arms of England, and her own insignia, the two royal arms together. Her motto “Humble and Loyal” is in gold letters beside the stand for the coffin, and when the requiem Mass is sung and the last pure notes are slowly dying away on the smoky incense-filled air, they lower the coffin into the vault before the high altar, and I know that my friend has gone.
I put my fist against my mouth to stifle a deep sob that tears from my belly. I never thought that I would see her to the grave. She came into my house when I was the lady of Ludlow and she was a girl, twelve years my junior. I could never have dreamed that I would see her buried so quietly, so peacefully in an abbey far from the city that was proud to be her capital and home.