Edward Seymour comes to my rooms to consult with me. ‘He’s hardly well enough to travel,’ he says. ‘I thought the court would stay here for Christmas.’
‘Doctor Wendy says that he should not be crossed.’
‘Nobody wants to cross him,’ Edward rejoins. ‘God knows that. But he cannot risk his health going by barge on the winter river to Oatlands.’
‘I know. But I can’t tell him that.’
‘He listens to you,’ he reminds me. ‘He trusts you with everything, his thoughts, his son, his country.’
‘He listens to his grooms of the chamber as much as he does to me,’ I say stubbornly. ‘Ask Anthony Denny or William Herbert to speak to him. I will agree with them if he asks me. But I can’t advise him against his wishes.’ I think of the whip that he keeps in a cupboard somewhere in his bedroom. I think of the ivory codpiece stained with blood from the broken skin of my lips. ‘I do what he commands,’ I say shortly.
Edward looks at me with a thoughtful expression. ‘In the future,’ he says carefully, ‘in the future, you may have to make decisions for his son, and for his country. You may be the one who commands.’
It is illegal to speak of the death of the king. It is treason to even suggest that his health is failing. I shake my head in silence.
OATLANDS PALACE, SURREY, WINTER 1546
With Gardiner absent there is only one group of men surviving at court that still favours the old church, but it is a great family that has survived many changes. Nothing can destroy the Howards. They will parlay their daughters and throw their own heirs overboard rather than let their house sink. The Howards, Dukes of Norfolk, have kept their place next to the throne even when the kings have changed, even when two girls of their house have risen to the throne and walked to the scaffold. Thomas Howard is not easily dislodged.
But one evening his son and heir goes missing. Henry Howard, recalled from the command of Boulogne because of his terrible arrogance and risk-taking, does not appear at his father’s table at dinner, and his servants have not seen him; none of his friends know where he can be.
This is a wild young man, a fool who boasted that he could hold Boulogne forever, who has displeased the king with his rowdy grandeur more than once, but always played his way back into favour. He was the best friend of Henry Fitzroy, the king’s bastard son, and has always before been able to draw on that brotherly tragic love to win royal forgiveness.
Although everyone is quick to say that it is no surprise that the duke’s heir is missing from his father’s table, that the Howards are always storming off, everyone knows the young man would not disappear into the stews of London without his retinue and friends. Henry Howard is far too pleased with himself to go anywhere without a full entourage to admire him: somebody must know where he is.
One man knows: Lord Thomas Wriothesley. Slowly, it emerges that his men were seen bundling the young earl into a boat on the river late at night. Apparently there were a dozen of them in the Wriothesley livery and they had the young man between them, carrying him as he struggled and cursed them, and then they slung him in the bottom of the barge and sat on him. The boat went swiftly downstream into the darkness, and then it seemed to simply disappear. It was not an arrest, there was no warrant, and they did not arrive at the Tower. If it was a kidnap then Wriothesley has somehow found the mad courage to attack a son of the House of Norfolk, and to do it in the precincts of a royal palace. Nobody knows how he could do this, on what authority, nor on what quiet stretch of the dark river the barge with its honoured cargo can be moored, nor where the heir of the Howards is tonight.
It is inconceivable that Wriothesley could wage a private vendetta against the young man. Wriothesley and the Howards were conspiring against me only a few weeks ago and Wriothesley was ready to take me in the royal barge down the river where he has now disappeared with the young Howard heir. So perhaps he was authorised by the king to take the young man. But nobody can think what Henry Howard can have done to invite such an attack, and Wriothesley is absent, and his servants are saying nothing.
His father swears that Henry is innocent of anything. It is his brother, Tom, who was accused of reading heretical books and attending the sermons in my rooms, and besides, that is now allowed. Henry Howard, the older boy, is mostly interested in his own self-importance and his own pleasures. He is too busy with sport and jousting, poetry and whoring to seriously reflect. He will never have engaged in difficult study. Nobody can imagine him as a heretic, people begin to think that Wriothesley has overreached himself.
Norfolk, after a few days’ silence, thinks he is strong enough to challenge the Lord Chancellor. He demands to know where his son is kept, what are the charges, and that he be released at once. He shouts at the Privy Council meeting, he says he must see the king. He even demands an audience with me. Everyone at court understands that nobody, not even the Lord Chancellor, can trouble a Howard without questions being asked. Norfolk rages in the meeting, cursing Wriothesley to his face, and the councillors watch these two powers, the old aristocrat and the new administrator, collide.
As if in a terrible silent reply, without a public command from the king, and without warning, the yeomen of the guard march Henry Howard through the streets of London from Lord Wriothesley’s London house to the Tower on foot, like a common criminal. The great gates open as if they are expecting him, the constable of the Tower orders him to be taken to a cell. The doors close on him.
At the Privy Council meeting the duke is foaming at the mouth. Still there is no word of accusation, no charge against his son. This is the work of his enemies, he swears to them; this is an attack by craven men, men of no family or position, men like Wriothesley, who have wriggled their way up into power by a show of learning and cleverness with the law, while old aristocrats, noblemen like the duke himself and his son, the flower of chivalry, are embarrassed by these new councillors.
They don’t even hear him out. They don’t even answer his bellowed demands. The yeomen of the guard march into the Privy Council chamber and strip the sash of the Order of the Garter from his shoulders. They take his staff of office and break it before him as if he were a dead man and they were going to throw the pieces on top of the coffin as it rests in the grave, while Norfolk swears at them for fools, and reminds them of his nearly fifty years of service for the Tudors – hard service and dirty work that no-one else would do. They manhandle him from the room as he bellows his superiority, his innocence, his threats. Everyone can hear the scrape of his boots on the floor and the yell of his protest, all the way down the long gallery.
The door to the king’s privy chamber is open a crack; nobody knows if the king has heard. Nobody knows if this is by royal command or if Wriothesley is staging a coup against his rivals. So nobody knows what to do.
Now, two Howards – the Duke of Norfolk and his heir, the earl – are held in the Tower without charge, without accusation, without reason given. The unthinkable has happened to them: the Howards, father and son, who have brought so many innocent people to the scaffold, who have sat high on their horses and watched innocent men hang, are imprisoned themselves.