Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

“Who was that?” Already I know.

“Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk.”

“And the pardon?”

“As soon as the army had disbanded, he beheaded the leaders and hanged the followers.” She speaks with as little inflection as if she is complaining that the luggage wagon is badly packed. “He promised a parliament and a pardon on the king’s sacred word. He gave his own word, too, on his honor. It meant nothing.”

“They are defeated?”

“Well, he hanged seventy monks from the roof timbers of their own abbey,” she says bitterly. “So they won’t defy him again. But no, I believe the true faith will never be defeated.”

She turns us so that we are strolling back to the door again. She smiles and nods at someone who calls “Safe journey” to her, but I cannot smile, too.

“The king fears his own people,” she says. “He fears rivals. He even fears me. He is my father, and yet sometimes I think he has gone half mad with mistrust. Any fear he has, however foolish, is real to him. If he so much as dreams that Lord Lisle has betrayed him, then Lord Lisle is a dead man. If someone suggests that his troubles with you are part of a plot, then you are in the gravest of danger. If you can get away, you should do. He cannot tell fear from truth. He cannot tell nightmares from reality.”

“I am Queen of England,” I say. “They cannot accuse me of witchcraft.”

She turns to face me for the first time. “That won’t save you,” she says. “It didn’t save Anne Boleyn. They accused her of witchcraft and they found the evidence and they found her guilty. She was as much queen as you.” She suddenly laughs as if I have said something funny, and I see that some of my ladies have come out of the hall and are watching us. I laugh, too, but I am sure anyone could hear the fear in my voice. She takes my arm. “If anyone asks me what we were talking about when we walked out and back to the steps again, I shall say that I was complaining that I would be late, and I was afraid of being tired.”

“Yes,” I agree, but I am so frightened that I am shaking as if I were chilled with cold. “I shall say you were looking to see when they would be ready.”

Princess Mary presses my arm. “My father has changed the laws of this land,” she says. “It is now a crime of treason, punishable by death, even to think ill of the king. You don’t have to say anything; you don’t have to do anything. Your own secret thoughts are treason now.”

“I am queen,” I maintain stubbornly.

“Listen,” she says bluntly. “He has changed the process of justice, too. You don’t have to be condemned by a court. You can be condemned to death on a Bill of Attainder. That is nothing more than the king’s order, supported by his parliament. And they never refuse to support him. Queen or beggar, if the king wants you dead, he just has to order it now. He does not even have to sign the warrant for an execution, he only has to use a seal.”

I find I am clenching my jaw to stop my teeth from chattering. “What do you think I should do?”

“Get away,” she says. “Get away before he comes for you.”

After she has gone I feel as if my last friend has left court. I go back to my rooms and my ladies set up a table of cards. I let them start to play, and then I summon my ambassador and take him into the window bay, where we cannot be overheard, to ask him if anyone has questioned him about me. He says they have not; he is ignored by everyone, isolated as if he were carrying the plague. I ask him if he could hire or buy two fast horses and keep them outside the castle walls in case of my sudden need. He says he has no money to hire or buy horses, and in any case the king has guards on my doors night and day. The men who I thought were there to keep me safe, to open the doors to my presence chamber, to announce my guests, are now my jailers.

I am very afraid. I try to pray, but even the words of the prayers are a trap. I cannot appear as if I am becoming a Papist, a Papist like Lord Lisle is now said to be; and yet I must not appear to have held to my brother’s religion; the Lutherans are suspected of being part of Cromwell’s plot to ruin the king.

When I see the king, I try to behave pleasantly and calmly before him. I dare not challenge him, nor even protest my innocence. Most frightening of all is his manner to me, which is now warm and friendly, as if we were acquaintances about to part after a short journey together. He behaves as if our time together has been an enjoyable interlude that is now naturally drawing to a close.

He will not say good-bye to me, I know that. Princess Mary has warned me of that. There is no point waiting for the moment when he tells me that I am to face an accusation. I know that one of these evenings when I rise from the dinner table and curtsy to him and he kisses my hand so courteously will be the last time I ever see him. I may walk from the hall with my ladies following me to find my rooms filled with soldiers and my clothes already packed, my jewels returned to the treasury. It is a short journey from the palace of Westminster to the Tower; they will take me by river in the darkness and I will go in by the watergate, and I will leave by the block on Tower Green.

The ambassador has written to my brother to say that I am desperately frightened, but I do not hope for a reply. William will not mind my being sick with fear, and by the time they learn of the charges against me it will be too late to save me. And perhaps William would not even choose to save me. He has allowed this peril to come about. He must have hated me more than I ever knew.

If anyone is to save me, it will have to be me, myself. But how can a woman save herself against the charge of witchcraft? If Henry tells the world that he is impotent because I have unmanned him, how can I prove differently? If he tells the world that he can lie with Katherine Howard but not with me, then his case is proved and my denial is just another instance of satanic cunning. A woman cannot prove her innocence when a man bears witness against her. If Henry wants me strangled as a witch, then nothing can save me. He claimed that Lady Anne Boleyn was a witch, and she died for it. He never said good-bye to her, and he had loved her with a passion. They just came for her one day and took her away.

I am waiting now, for them to come for me.

A note, dropped into my lap by one of the servers at dinner as he leans over to clear the meat platter, bids me go to my lord at once, and as soon as dinner is over, I do as I am told. These days, the queen goes into her bedroom straight after dinner; she will not miss me from the nervous huddle of those of us who are left in her depleted rooms. Katherine Howard is missing from court, gone back to her grandmother’s house at Lambeth. Lady Lisle is under house arrest for her husband’s grave crimes; they say she is quite frantic with distress and fear. She knows he will die. Lady Rutland is quiet and goes to her own rooms at night. She must be fearful, too, but I don’t know what accusation she might face. Anne Bassett has gone to stay with her cousin under the pretense of illness; Catherine Carey has been sent for by her mother, Mary. She asks permission for Catherine to come home as she is unwell. I could laugh at the transparent excuse. Mary Boleyn was always skilled at keeping herself and hers far from trouble. A pity she never exerted herself for her brother. Mary Norris has to help her mother in the country with some special tasks. Henry Norris’s widow saw the scaffold last time the king plotted against his wife. She won’t want to see her daughter climb the steps that her husband trod.

We are all of us guarded in our speech and retiring in our behavior. The bad times have come to King Henry’s court once more, and everyone is afraid, everyone is under suspicion. It is like living in a nightmare: every man, every woman knows that every word they say, every gesture they make, might be used in evidence against them. An enemy might work up an indiscretion into a crime; a friend might trade a confidence for a guarantee of safety. We are a court of cowards and tale bearers. Nobody walks anymore; we all tiptoe. Nobody even breathes; we are all holding our breath. The king has turned suspicious of his friends, and nobody can be sure that they are safe.

I creep to my lord duke’s rooms, walking in the shadows, and I open the door and slip in, in silence. My lord duke is standing by the window, the shutters open to the warm night air, the candles on his desk bobbing their flames in the draft. He looks up and smiles when I enter the room; I could almost think that he is fond of me.

“Ah, Jane, my niece. The queen is to go to Richmond with a much-reduced court. I want you to go with her.”

“Richmond?” I hear the quaver of fear in my own voice, and I take a breath. This means house arrest while they inquire into the allegations against her. But why are they sending me in with her? Am I to be charged, too?

“Yes. You will stay with her and keep a careful note of who comes and goes, and anything she says. In particular, you are to be alert for Ambassador Harst. We think he can do nothing, but you would oblige me by seeing that she has no plans to escape, sends no messages, that sort of thing.”

“Please…” I stop myself, my voice has come out weak. I know this is not the way to deal with him.

“What?” He is still smiling, but his dark eyes are intent.

“I cannot prevent her escaping. I am one woman, alone.”

He shakes his head. “The ports are closed from tonight. Her ambassador has discovered that there is not a horse to buy or hire in the whole of England. Her own stables are barred. Her rooms closed. She won’t be able to escape or send for help. Everyone in her service is her jailer. You just have to watch her.”

“Please let me go and serve Katherine,” I take a breath to say. “She will need advice if she is to be a good queen.”

The duke pauses for thought. “She will,” he says. “She is an idiot, that girl. But she can come to no harm with her grandmother.”

He taps his thumbnail against his tooth, considering.

“She will need to learn to be a queen,” I say.

He hesitates. We two have known Queens of England who were queens indeed. Little Katherine is not fit to touch their shoes, let alone walk in them; years of training would not make her regal. “No, she won’t,” he says. “The king doesn’t want a great queen beside him anymore. He wants a girl to pet, a little filly, a young broodmare for his seed. Katherine need be nothing more than obedient.”

“Then let me say the truth: I don’t want to go to Richmond with Queen Anne. I don’t want to bear witness against this queen.”

His sharp, dark eyes look up quickly at me. “Witness of what?” he demands.

I am too weary to fence. “Witness of whatever you want me to see,” I say. “Whatever the king wants me to say, I don’t want to say it. I don’t want to bear witness against her.”

“Why not?” he asks, as if he did not know.

“I am sick of trials,” I say from the heart. “I am afraid of the king’s desires now. I don’t know what he wants. I don’t know how far he will go. I don’t want to give evidence at a queen’s trial – not ever again.”

“I am sorry,” he says without regret. “But we need someone to swear that she had a conversation with the queen in which the queen made it clear that she was a virgin untouched, absolutely untouched, and moreover quite ignorant of any doings between a man and a maid.”

“She has been in bed with him night after night,” I say impatiently. “We all put her to bed the first night. You were there; the Archbishop of Canterbury was there. She was raised to conceive a son and bear an heir; she was married for that single purpose. She could hardly be ignorant of the doings of a man and a maid. No woman in the world has endured more unsuccessful attempts.”

“That is why we need a lady of unimpeachable reputation to swear it,” he says smoothly. “Such an unlikely lie needs a plausible witness: you.”

“Any of the others can do that for you,” I protest. “Since the conversation never happened, since it is an impossible conversation, surely it does not matter who says that it took place?”

“I should like our name entered as witness,” the duke says. “The king would be pleased to see our service. It would do us good.”

“Is it to prove her a witch?” I ask bluntly. I am too weary of my work and sick of myself to pick my way around my ducal uncle tonight. “Is it, in fact, to prove her a witch and have her sent to her death?”

He draws himself up to his full height and looks down his nose at me. “It is not for us to predict what the king’s commissioners might find,” he says. “They will sift the evidence, and give the verdict. All you will provide is a sworn statement, sworn on your faith before God.”