Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

“Yes,” I say. “Oh, yes. Are you?”

He nods. We stand, as if the music has just stopped in a dance, facing each other, looking into each other’s eyes.

“The king?” I ask. For a moment I had forgotten all about him.

“Better this morning,” he says. “The physician came and purged him last night, and he labored painfully for some hours, but now he has passed a great motion and is better for it.”

I turn my head away at the very thought of it, and Thomas gives a little laugh. “I am sorry. I am too accustomed; all of us in his rooms are accustomed to talk in much detail about his health. I did not mean-”

“No,” I say. “I have to know all about it, too.”

“I suppose it is natural, once one reaches such a great age…”

“My grandmama is his age, and she does not talk about purges all the time, nor does she smell of the privy.”

He laughs again. “Well, I swear that if I ever get to forty, I shall drown myself. I couldn’t bear to grow old and flatulent.”

I laugh now at the thought of this radiant young man growing old and flatulent. “You will be as fat as the king,” I predict. “And surrounded by adoring great-grandchildren and an old wife.”

“Oh, I don’t expect to marry.”

“Don’t you?”

“I can’t imagine it.”

“Why ever not?”

He looks at me intently. “I am so much in love. I am too much in love. I can only think of one woman, and she is not free.”

I am breathless. “Can you? Does she know?”

He smiles at me. “I don’t know. D’you think I should tell her?”

The door behind me opens, and Lady Rochford is there. “Your Grace?”

“Here is Thomas Culpepper come to tell me that the king has been purged and is better for it,” I say brightly, my voice high and thin. I turn back to him; I dare not meet his eyes. “Will you ask His Grace if I may visit him today?”

He bows without looking at me. “I will ask him at once,” he says, and goes quickly from the garden.

“What d’you know of Lady Margaret and your brother Charles?” Lady Rochford demands.

“Nothing,” I lie at once.

“Has she asked you to speak to the king for her?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to?”

“Yes. I am hoping that he will be pleased.”

She shakes her head. “Take care how you do it,” she warns me. “It may be that he is not pleased.”

“Why should he not be pleased?” I ask. “I think it is lovely. She is so pretty and a Tudor! It is such a high match for my brother!”

Lady Rochford looks at me. “The king may think it a high match for your brother, too,” she says. “He may think it too high. You may need to use all your charm and all your skills to persuade him to allow them to marry. If you want to save your brother and advance your family, you had better manage him as well as you have ever done. You had better choose your time and be very persuasive. You must do this; your uncle would like it.”

I make a little face at her. “I can do it,” I say confidently. “I shall tell the king that it is my wish that they be happy, and he will grant my wish. Voilà!”

“Voilà perhaps,” she says sourly, the old cat.

But then it all goes wrong. I think I shall tell the king when I see him that night, and Lady Margaret agrees to follow me in and beg for his forgiveness. Actually, we are both quite excited, certain that it will go well. I am going to plead, and she is going to cry. But before dinner Thomas Culpepper comes to my rooms with a message to say that the king will see me on the morrow. I agree and go to my dinner – why should I care? The king has missed dinner so many times I don’t think that it matters. Certainly he’s not going to fade away in a hurry. But poor me! It does matter, for while I am at dinner, and dancing actually, someone pours poison in the king’s ear about his niece and even about me and the poor management of my rooms, and voilà!

The king marches into her private rooms and jerks his head at the three of us ladies-in-waiting, and says, “Outside,” as if we were dogs for his ordering. We scuttle from the rooms like whipped hounds and linger at the half-closed door and hear the terrifying rumble of royal rage. The king, out of bed for only half a day, knows everything and is most displeased.

Perhaps Lady Margaret thought that Katherine would intercede for them before they were caught and that she could be persuasive enough. Perhaps the lovers thought that the king, rising out of his sickbed, returning to wallow in his own uxorious joy, would be forgiving to other lovers, to other Howard lovers. They are sadly mistaken. The king speaks his mind briefly and to the point and then strides out of her room. Katherine comes running after, white as her collar, flooded with tears, and says that the king is scenting plots and conspiracies and lush unchastity at the court of his rose, and he is blaming her.

“What shall I do?” she demands. “He asks if I cannot keep control of my ladies. How should I know how to keep control of my ladies? How should I command his own niece? She is the daughter of the Queen of Scotland; she is royal and six years older than me. Why would she ever listen to me? What can I do? He says he is disappointed in me and that he will punish her; he says the two of them will face his extreme displeasure. What can I do?”

“Nothing,” I tell her. “You can do nothing to save her.” What can be easier to understand than this?

“I cannot let my own brother be sent to the Tower!”

She says this, unthinking, to the woman, me, who saw her own husband go to the Tower. “I’ve seen worse happen,” I say dryly.

“Oh, then, yes.” She flaps her hand dismissively, and twenty diamonds catch the light and dazzle away the ghosts of them, Anne and George, going to the Tower without a word to save them. “Never mind then! What about now? This is Lady Margaret, my friend, and Charles, my own brother. They will expect me to save them.”

“If you so much as admit that you knew they were meddling with each other, then it could be you in the Tower as well as them,” I warn her. “He is against it now; you had better pretend you knew nothing of it. Why can you not understand this? Why should Lady Margaret be such a fool? The king’s ward cannot bestow her favors where she wishes. And the king’s wife cannot put her own brother into bed with a royal. We all know this. It was a gamble, a great and reckless gamble, and it has failed. Lady Margaret must be mad to risk her life for this. You would be mad to condone it.”

“But if she is in love?”

“Is love worth dying for?”

That stops her romantic little ballad. She gives a little shudder. “No, never. Of course not. But the king cannot behead her for falling in love with a man of good family and marrying him?”

“No,” I say harshly. “He will behead her lover, so you had better say farewell to your brother and make sure that you never speak with him again unless you want the king to think you are in a plot to supplant him with Howards.”

She blanches white at that. “He would never send me to the Tower,” she whispers. “You always think of that. You always harp on about that. It happened only once, to one wife. It will never happen again. He adores me.”

“He loves his niece, and yet he will send her to Syon to imprisonment and heartbreak, and her lover to the Tower and death,” I predict. “The king may love you, but he hates to think of others doing their own will. The king may love you, but he wants you like a little queen of ice. If there is any unchastity in your rooms, he will blame you and punish you for it. The king may love you, but he would see you dead at his feet rather than set up a rival royal family. Think of the Pole family – in the Tower for life. Think of Margaret Pole spending year after year in there, innocent as a saint and as old as your grandmother, yet imprisoned for life. Would you see the Howards go that way, too?”

“This is a nightmare for me!” she bursts out; poor little girl, white-faced in her diamonds. “This is my own brother. I am queen. I must be able to save him. All he has done is fall in love. My uncle shall hear of this. He will save Charles.”

“Your uncle is away from court,” I say dryly. “Surprisingly, he has gone to Kenninghall. You can’t reach him in time.”

“What does he know of this?”

“Nothing,” I say. “You will find that he knows nothing about it. You will find that if the king asks him, he will be shocked to his soul at the presumption. You will have to give up your brother. You cannot save him. If the king has turned his face away, then Charles is a dead man. I know this. Of all the people in the world: I know this.”

“You didn’t let your own husband go to his death without a word. You didn’t let the king order his death without praying for mercy for him!” she swears, knowing nothing, knowing nothing at all.

I do not say: “Oh, but I did. I was so afraid then. I was so afraid for myself.” I do not say: “Oh, but I did; and for darker reasons than you will ever be able to imagine.” Instead, I say: “Never mind what I did or didn’t do. You will have to say good-bye to your brother and hope that something distracts the king from the sentence of death, and if not, you will have to remember him only in your prayers.”

“What good is that?” she demands heretically. “If God is always on the king’s side? If the king’s will is God’s will? What good is praying to God when the king is God in England?”

“Hush,” I say instantly. “You will have to learn to live without your brother, as I had to learn to live without my sister-in-law, without my husband. The king turned his face away, and George went into the Tower and came out headless. And I had to learn to bear it. As you will have to do.”

“It isn’t right,” she says mutinously.

I take her wrists and I hold her as I would a maid whom I was about to beat for stupidity. “Learn this,” I say harshly. “It is the will of the king. And there is no man strong enough to stand against him. Not even your uncle, not the archbishop, not the Pope himself. The king will do what he wants to do. Your job is to make sure that he never turns his face from you, from us.”

So: I am to go to court for the Christmas feast. He holds true to his word that I shall be second only to little Kitty Howard (I must learn to say Queen Katherine before I get there). I have a letter from the Lord Chamberlain today, bidding my attendance and telling me I will be housed in the queen’s rooms. No doubt I shall have one of the best bedrooms and the Princess Mary another, and I shall learn to see Kitty Howard (Queen Katherine) go to bed in my bed, and change her clothes in my rooms, and receive her visitors in my chair.

If I am to do this at all, it has to be done gracefully. And I have no choice but to do this.

I can be sure that Kitty Howard will play her part. She will be rehearsing now, if I know her. She likes to practice her moves and her smiles. I imagine she will have a new, gracious smile prepared for my reception, and I must be gracious, too.

I must buy gifts. The king loves gifts, and of course little Kitty Howard (Queen Katherine) is an utter magpie. If I take some very fine things, I will be able to attend with some confidence. I so need confidence. I have been a duchess and the Queen of England, and now I am some sort of princess. I must learn courage to be myself, Anne of Cleves, and enter the court, and my new position in it, with grace. It will be Christmas. My first Christmas in England. I could laugh to think that I had thought that I would be merry, with a merry court, at the Christmas feast. I had thought I would be queen of that court; but, as it turns out, I shall be only a favored guest. So it goes. So it goes in a woman’s life. I am quite without fault, and yet I am not in the position to which I was called. I am quite without fault, and yet I am thrown down. What I must see if I can do is to be a good Princess of England where once I planned to be a good queen.

The king has turned against his wife’s family, against his own niece, and everyone stays quiet, keeps their heads low, and hopes that his disfavor will not turn on them. Charles Howard, warned in advance by someone braver than the rest of us, has skipped downriver in a little fishing boat, begged a place on a coaster, and sailed for France. He will join the growing number of exiles who cannot live in Henry’s England: Papists, reformers, men and women caught in the new treason laws, and men and women whose crime is nothing more than to be kin to someone the king has named as a traitor. The greater their numbers grow, the more suspicious and fearful is this king. His own father took England with a handful of disaffected men, in exile from King Richard. He knows, none better, that tyranny is hated, and that enough exiles, enough pretenders, can overthrow the throne.