Boleyn Traitor, page 27
He shakes his head. ‘People believe anything if it is said often enough, loudly enough. You of all people know that, who lost your family to noise.’
‘There’s been enough deaths,’ I say quietly; my lips are so cold that I can hardly speak. ‘Someone should speak up against the deaths.’
‘You speak up!’ he says encouragingly. ‘You save them! Help me save them all! If the queen will agree that her marriage was no true wedding, that she was married before, then the king’s not impotent but guided by God to holy celibacy. There’s no fat ugly woman, no smells, no bewitching, and no witch – even the Lisles are safe! She can stay in England for the rest of her life. I will see she’s paid a pension: 8,000 nobles a year – a fortune – and she shall have Richmond Palace as her home.’
It is a fortune; but it is a poor exchange for the throne of England.
‘It’s not in exchange for the throne of England,’ Lord Cromwell says, reading my thoughts. ‘It’s instead of a scandalous accusation of witchcraft that would be the deaths of a dozen people and blacken her name forever as a fat, stinking woman that a king could not bear to bed.’
‘There must be another way!’
‘Not that I can imagine.’
My head is whirling. I can’t imagine another way out either. ‘Then – yes,’ I say simply. ‘I’ll advise her to lie. I’ll tell her to say that she was precontracted and take an annulment … if you swear she has no other choice.’
He bows his head. ‘I always prefer to leave people without a choice,’ he says. ‘It makes deciding so much quicker.’
Hampton Court, Spring
1540
THE SEASON OF Lent is observed only lightly this year. We eat no beef, but the new Church of England confirms chicken and game and eggs as ‘fish’ for the forty days of fasting. Lady Lisle sends quail from her aviaries and dotterel for the queen’s table, and her daughter Anne Basset gives the king marmalade to her mother’s recipe. But neither quails nor marmalade take the king’s gaze from Kitty Howard, who encourages him like a demure granddaughter hoping to be given a pony. Her inviting smiles disappear the moment that our uncle, wearing a new French cape, strides into the queen’s rooms with the other lords before dinner.
‘You won’t tell him about Thomas Culpeper, will you, Lady Rochford?’ she whispers urgently to me. ‘It was a kiss on Shrove Tuesday; he said he would give me up for Lent. I’d never do it again; it was only because it was Shrove Tuesday – like a pancake, you know. So sorry.’
‘I won’t mention it,’ I say, and she fades away among the other girls and keeps a good distance from her overpowerful uncle, who comes to me and kisses my cheek.
‘All well?’ he asks.
‘All well,’ I say. ‘Did you have a successful embassy to France, sir?’
One glance at his hawk-faced gleam tells me that he has won a treaty with our nearest neighbour and separated them from the alliance with Spain.
‘I did. But I came back to news that I should’ve heard first from you. Remember you’re a Howard, whoever your paymaster is. I expect you to keep me abreast of things in the queen’s rooms.’
‘I’ve withheld nothing,’ I reply, wondering what he can have learned on the road from Harwich. ‘I have no paymaster. I couldn’t have written secrets to you, anyway.’
‘The king told his council that he can’t consummate his marriage. You didn’t tell me.’
‘He said that?’ I show him a shocked face. ‘But he comes to the queen’s bed every few nights? And she’s said nothing to anyone.’
I see he is uncertain. He was sure that I had played him false; but now he is wondering if his informant is lying. ‘She’s said nothing?’
‘No, my lord. I would have told you.’
‘You must know! Don’t you listen at the door? You must have heard …’
I shake my head. ‘Sometimes His Majesty stays all night, and sometimes he calls for his page and goes to his own bed around midnight. He’s never said anything to us ladies. Nor has she. We’ve been hoping for a prince, as you know.’
‘Forlorn hope! The king says that nothing’s happened and it never will.’
‘Oh!’
‘He says God has saved him from the sin of bigamy.’
‘Oh.’
My uncle narrows his eyes to glare at me. ‘So, the council must decide if the queen is a bigamist. What d’you say about that? Going to say “oh” again?’
‘No, my lord. I’d heard there was a childhood betrothal; but the new Cleves ambassador is coming to Hampton Court for Lent. Won’t he bring the papers to show the childhood betrothal was ended?’
‘Better for us, if he doesn’t,’ my uncle whispers. ‘If the king’s marriage was annulled, he’d be free to marry. And he’s seen the bride he wants, hasn’t he? He’s all over Kitty?’
‘He’s given her several gifts.’
‘And she’s behaving herself?’
I nod without committing myself to words.
‘Very well. If the queen asks you for advice, you know what your answer should be: that the king can’t and won’t consummate, and she should admit a prior contract and let the marriage be annulled, and the king can be free to marry our girl, and Cromwell’s girl can go back to Cleves. We own the queen, and he looks like a fool.’
THE KING REVELS in the Easter rituals of the old church, creeping to the cross, blessing cramp rings, washing the feet of the poor men, and the queen obeys him in this, as everything else, though the traditions must seem completely pagan to her. They take Easter mass dressed in cloth of gold, side by side before an altar smoking with incense and drenched in holy water.
After the long church service, there is a dinner with roast beef, veal, lamb, porpoise, and puddings to celebrate the end of Lent. Then there is masquing and dancing by the younger noblemen and the queen’s ladies. The king’s older friends stand beside him, drink and watch the girls dance with a new generation of handsome sons of the great houses: Lord Lisle’s stepson, John Dudley; Anthony Kingston, son of my husband’s gaoler; Richard Cromwell, my spymaster’s nephew, and Gregory Cromwell, his son. George Carew, Sir Nicholas’ kinsman, is home on leave from Rysbank Fort, Calais, and there are several handsome young Howard men newly come to court, including Charles, my cousin. Margaret Douglas, back at court having learned nothing from disgrace and widowhood, dances twice with Charles Howard; but I tell the queen to nod her to a new partner for the third dance.
My spymaster, Lord Cromwell, is smilingly watching the dancing, chatting from time to time with the other lords and the king. My uncle’s belief he would fall is proved wrong by the king, who rewards him with a great honour: the title of Earl of Essex. Lord Cromwell takes the news with quiet pride; the king gives a dinner for him in the council chamber. Cromwell himself heads the table; and the court is treated to a new masque which could be called The Rise of the Common Man, as the new earl is seated on one side of the king, and Thomas Howard the Duke of Norfolk, stiff with offended pride, on the other.
Westminster Palace, May
1540
THE MAY DAY joust is held at the beautiful tiltyard in Westminster Palace, and Thomas Seymour is the king’s challenger. He defeats all comers. Queen Anne, with the restored H and A curtains billowing in the warm breeze, awards him the trophy with a smile. Lord Lisle’s stepson John Dudley rides well, as does George Carew, who hopes to take the king’s eye for promotion before he returns to service at Calais. Gregory Cromwell, as brave as any nobleman’s son, breaks a spear on my young cousin Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, and Thomas Culpeper carries Bess Harvey’s favour.
‘Not yours?’ I ask Kitty.
She is red-eyed and defiant. ‘No!’ she says sharply. ‘He seems to prefer Mistress Harvey to me.’ Her lower lip trembles. ‘I don’t care, I am sure, Lady Rochford. If you see him, you can tell him that I don’t care at all.’
‘He probably decided to avoid you when he saw that the king favoured you,’ I comfort her. ‘The king makes much of you, doesn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ she sniffs. ‘He gave me a gold chain, which is nice, but he’s older than my uncle!’
I laugh. ‘Not at all! His Majesty is in the prime of his life!’
She gives me her courtier smile. ‘I just forgot for a moment,’ she apologises.
ON THE DAY after May Day, Richard Cromwell, my spymaster’s nephew, is knighted and is now Sir Richard, and Lord Lisle, visiting from Calais, hosts a great banquet at Dereham House. The queen looks beautiful in the French hood which I have persuaded her to wear, and the king beside her is noisy and cheerful, praising the jousters and the dinner. The wealth of the monasteries and the abbey lands pouring into the royal treasury makes the king as generous as Plutus. He gives every one of the champions a purse of a gold and a house of their own. Lord Lisle beams at the honour shown to his stepson and applauds the wildly extravagant gift to the jousters. Lord Cromwell, dressed plainly as usual in his black suit, claps his boy Richard on the back when no one is looking.
Lord Lisle is a tall, handsome man, good-looking and charming as all the royal Plantagenet family – all of them more kingly than any Tudor. He is high in royal favour; he, too, is to get an earldom for his loyal service in holding and managing Calais – a difficult posting, so close to France and so far from London, an exchequer for all spies and heretics going between France and Spain, Scotland and England. He has no idea that Thomas Cromwell and I imagined his downfall, and I am glad that the plot stayed as a speculation.
The deaths of my husband and sister-in-law have been fully avenged by the fall of the Courtenays. I don’t need more. I hope that Lord Lisle will use his time basking in the king’s favour to speak for his kinswoman, Lady Margaret Pole, who should be released from the Tower to finish her long life in the comfort of her own home. I will believe that a good tyranny is in power when I see her return to Bisham Abbey.
Lord Lisle attends a meeting of the privy council, confidently expecting his earldom to be announced by his beloved cousin the king, and I have the ladies ready in our best clothes for a late dinner to celebrate his new honour, though the queen is looking strained and Kitty Howard dazzling. I expect the king and his friends to come late after drinking the health of the new earl, and I take a moment to look out of the window of the queen’s chamber, over the river to the gardens and fields on the south bank, and upstream where the sun is setting over Lambeth Palace.
Below me, threading through the little boats on the Thames, is a dark barge silently rowing upriver, turning on the flat water and mooring, in complete silence, at the pier. As I watch, Sir William Kingston – the constable of the Tower – and his friend Lord Lisle come out of a little garden door below my window and walk through the golden light of the garden, down the stairs to the quay.
Lord Lisle is wearing his cloak, though the evening is mild. Sir William Kingston keeps pace beside him with his head bowed. They’re not arm in arm chatting, as if they were leaving a joyful party; they are both silent as they walk along the pier, past other gaily-painted barges with standards flying, up the gangplank of the black unmarked barge. They cast off and row away without a word, without anyone on the bank saying farewell. There is no escort to honour the new-made earl; there are no trumpeters. There is no sound but the crying of seagulls, no cheers from the rowers, no word from the bargemaster. It is all silent, like a bad dream. It can be nothing but an arrest; it has to be an arrest, though they are old friends and their sons were jousting together as comrades on May Day only yesterday.
I stare out of the window without moving, without a word. For once in my life, I don’t think: what does this mean, and how should I use this information? For once in my life, I think nothing, and I do nothing. I don’t even tap on the window so that his lordship knows someone has seen his departure and will write to his wife Lady Lisle in Calais and warn his stepdaughter Anne Basset, who is practising dance steps in the room behind me, with no idea that her stepfather has just stepped into the Tower barge and gone swiftly and silently downstream, like a dark cormorant speeding east, low over shining water.
Only at dinner, when everyone notices that Lord Lisle is missing from his place and his chamberlain says he has been summoned to London, do I allow myself to think: can this be the false supposition, the petitio principii that Thomas Cromwell and I played when we said: suppose that the king is unmanned by witchcraft? Suppose that Papists have hired a witch? Did I help my spymaster imagine a supposition which was not an intellectual game but a new masque of entrapment?
LORD LISLE’S SILENT disappearance launches a wave of arrests, as a stone thrown into a millpond sends ripples spreading in dark water. Dr Richard Sampson, the king’s reliable advisor on divorce, is arrested, too – no reason is given out, but perhaps he thought – as I did – that three prior contracts for three successive wives was straining belief.
George Carew, young kinsman of the executed Sir Nicholas Carew, follows his commander, Lord Lisle, into the Tower, both of them accused of giving the keys of England’s last foothold in France to our enemies.
Anne Basset cries all day in her room for her mother Lady Lisle, who sends an anguished note to say that she has been turned out of her home in Calais, and her household goods and her wardrobes of beautiful clothes have been taken from her. Even her famous aviary of quails has been seized by Robert Radcliffe the Earl of Sussex – one of the king’s brutish old lords who wins not only the quails but the captaincy of Calais, too.
‘Poor little birds!’ Kitty Howard says, holding Anne Basset in her arms. ‘He’ll never look after them properly.’
THE EARL OF Sussex dives into the riches of Calais and all the spy records. It’s a town riven with gossip, heresy, disloyalty, and treason. Thomas Cromwell has friends throughout the Staple where the merchants gather, half of them Lutherans, some even worse. Reginald Pole is said to have the keys to the castle; the King of France is said to be a friend of the Lisles. Robert Radcliffe finds a document which shows that Lord Lisle once sold a horse to the emperor of Spain: a dishonest broker can make much of this – and he does. And if Arthur, Lord Lisle is accused of treason, will the imaginary plot run on? Will Lord Hungerford be accused of witchcraft next? And then, will anyone mention the queen?
Every day, we hear of another arrest and not all of them are Papists; many are Lutherans, the queen’s religion. Suspicion spreads like a plague mist as I walk around the Palace of Westminster, wrapped against the cold like a masquer, with a cloak hiding my gown and a hood hiding my face. It is so like the May of only four years ago, when nobody knew what was happening and who had offended, that I feel as if I am reliving the days when I wrote to George and wrote to my father and met with Master Cromwell and the duke, and asked everyone: what is happening? What is happening?
This time, I don’t need to ask. I can imagine it all; because I was in the room where the unthinkable was first thought, built like a dark downward stair: one step after another – and the lowest point was naming the queen as a witch.
I think: I must speak to her. I must warn her against any questions about witchcraft. I must make sure that she knows the words: witchcraft, enchantment, sortilège, dark arts, curse, impotence, and death, to deny them if they are ever put to her in questioning. I must warn her to tell someone that she fears that her marriage to the king is not valid. She should do this today, before the music changes again and someone – like the Earl of Sussex, who is dancing through Calais, or William Fitzwilliam, who was such a strong partner to Margaret Pole – gets hold of her and swirls her around in a new dance called the Liar’s Volta.
Only Thomas Cromwell can reassure me that the queen is safe, and I lie in wait for him as he arrives early one morning, with a servant carrying his great wooden box full of warrants for the king to sign as he prays at Prime.
‘Lord Cromwell?’ I curtsey. ‘My lord?’
He beams at me. ‘Lord Essex it is now, Lady Rochford!’
‘Lord Essex, I will not delay you. I know you’re going to mass.’
‘I have a moment for you, Lady Rochford. The bell is not yet tolling.’
‘The ladies in the queen’s rooms are much concerned about the arrests, Lord Essex.’
‘Are they?’ he asks me, smiling. ‘I would be surprised if they thought about anything but their own ambition. Or is it just you? Just you who is concerned? Since I have a moment. But only a moment?’
I step closer. ‘You’re not pursuing the petitio principii?’ I whisper. ‘Not the witchcraft accusation?’
‘I am,’ he says frankly. ‘But not up to the queen’s door. She can be kept out of it as long as she agrees to an annulment. The matter can begin and end with the unfortunate Lord Hungerford and his friends on one scaffold and the unfortunate Lord Lisle on another, and no connection from them to the queen at all.’
‘But there is no connection,’ I point out. ‘No connection to the queen at all!’
Lord Cromwell smiles. ‘None at all, none will be made – if she agrees to an annulment.’
‘But if she does not, then you have this … this possible third act?’
‘This inducement,’ he says gently. ‘She can make a false admission of invalidity or face a false accusation of witchcraft – it can be her choice. I have no preference. They both achieve the same end – I want a final blow to the Spanish party and to set the king free of a marriage that he doesn’t want.’
He is so smilingly cheerful that I feel foolish when I take hold of his hands and say, breathlessly: ‘But, Lord Essex, one way gives an innocent woman 8,000 nobles a year and the Palace of Richmond and the other names her as a witch. And the punishment for witchcraft is death.’
He bows over my hands and lets me go. ‘That’s why I know that you will advise her to make the right choice. Will you bring ladies to the Tower to give evidence, Lady Rochford? I will send a barge for you. I should like one – no, I should like two other ladies to sign evidence. You choose whomever you think would be the most convincing.’
‘There’s been enough deaths,’ I say quietly; my lips are so cold that I can hardly speak. ‘Someone should speak up against the deaths.’
‘You speak up!’ he says encouragingly. ‘You save them! Help me save them all! If the queen will agree that her marriage was no true wedding, that she was married before, then the king’s not impotent but guided by God to holy celibacy. There’s no fat ugly woman, no smells, no bewitching, and no witch – even the Lisles are safe! She can stay in England for the rest of her life. I will see she’s paid a pension: 8,000 nobles a year – a fortune – and she shall have Richmond Palace as her home.’
It is a fortune; but it is a poor exchange for the throne of England.
‘It’s not in exchange for the throne of England,’ Lord Cromwell says, reading my thoughts. ‘It’s instead of a scandalous accusation of witchcraft that would be the deaths of a dozen people and blacken her name forever as a fat, stinking woman that a king could not bear to bed.’
‘There must be another way!’
‘Not that I can imagine.’
My head is whirling. I can’t imagine another way out either. ‘Then – yes,’ I say simply. ‘I’ll advise her to lie. I’ll tell her to say that she was precontracted and take an annulment … if you swear she has no other choice.’
He bows his head. ‘I always prefer to leave people without a choice,’ he says. ‘It makes deciding so much quicker.’
Hampton Court, Spring
1540
THE SEASON OF Lent is observed only lightly this year. We eat no beef, but the new Church of England confirms chicken and game and eggs as ‘fish’ for the forty days of fasting. Lady Lisle sends quail from her aviaries and dotterel for the queen’s table, and her daughter Anne Basset gives the king marmalade to her mother’s recipe. But neither quails nor marmalade take the king’s gaze from Kitty Howard, who encourages him like a demure granddaughter hoping to be given a pony. Her inviting smiles disappear the moment that our uncle, wearing a new French cape, strides into the queen’s rooms with the other lords before dinner.
‘You won’t tell him about Thomas Culpeper, will you, Lady Rochford?’ she whispers urgently to me. ‘It was a kiss on Shrove Tuesday; he said he would give me up for Lent. I’d never do it again; it was only because it was Shrove Tuesday – like a pancake, you know. So sorry.’
‘I won’t mention it,’ I say, and she fades away among the other girls and keeps a good distance from her overpowerful uncle, who comes to me and kisses my cheek.
‘All well?’ he asks.
‘All well,’ I say. ‘Did you have a successful embassy to France, sir?’
One glance at his hawk-faced gleam tells me that he has won a treaty with our nearest neighbour and separated them from the alliance with Spain.
‘I did. But I came back to news that I should’ve heard first from you. Remember you’re a Howard, whoever your paymaster is. I expect you to keep me abreast of things in the queen’s rooms.’
‘I’ve withheld nothing,’ I reply, wondering what he can have learned on the road from Harwich. ‘I have no paymaster. I couldn’t have written secrets to you, anyway.’
‘The king told his council that he can’t consummate his marriage. You didn’t tell me.’
‘He said that?’ I show him a shocked face. ‘But he comes to the queen’s bed every few nights? And she’s said nothing to anyone.’
I see he is uncertain. He was sure that I had played him false; but now he is wondering if his informant is lying. ‘She’s said nothing?’
‘No, my lord. I would have told you.’
‘You must know! Don’t you listen at the door? You must have heard …’
I shake my head. ‘Sometimes His Majesty stays all night, and sometimes he calls for his page and goes to his own bed around midnight. He’s never said anything to us ladies. Nor has she. We’ve been hoping for a prince, as you know.’
‘Forlorn hope! The king says that nothing’s happened and it never will.’
‘Oh!’
‘He says God has saved him from the sin of bigamy.’
‘Oh.’
My uncle narrows his eyes to glare at me. ‘So, the council must decide if the queen is a bigamist. What d’you say about that? Going to say “oh” again?’
‘No, my lord. I’d heard there was a childhood betrothal; but the new Cleves ambassador is coming to Hampton Court for Lent. Won’t he bring the papers to show the childhood betrothal was ended?’
‘Better for us, if he doesn’t,’ my uncle whispers. ‘If the king’s marriage was annulled, he’d be free to marry. And he’s seen the bride he wants, hasn’t he? He’s all over Kitty?’
‘He’s given her several gifts.’
‘And she’s behaving herself?’
I nod without committing myself to words.
‘Very well. If the queen asks you for advice, you know what your answer should be: that the king can’t and won’t consummate, and she should admit a prior contract and let the marriage be annulled, and the king can be free to marry our girl, and Cromwell’s girl can go back to Cleves. We own the queen, and he looks like a fool.’
THE KING REVELS in the Easter rituals of the old church, creeping to the cross, blessing cramp rings, washing the feet of the poor men, and the queen obeys him in this, as everything else, though the traditions must seem completely pagan to her. They take Easter mass dressed in cloth of gold, side by side before an altar smoking with incense and drenched in holy water.
After the long church service, there is a dinner with roast beef, veal, lamb, porpoise, and puddings to celebrate the end of Lent. Then there is masquing and dancing by the younger noblemen and the queen’s ladies. The king’s older friends stand beside him, drink and watch the girls dance with a new generation of handsome sons of the great houses: Lord Lisle’s stepson, John Dudley; Anthony Kingston, son of my husband’s gaoler; Richard Cromwell, my spymaster’s nephew, and Gregory Cromwell, his son. George Carew, Sir Nicholas’ kinsman, is home on leave from Rysbank Fort, Calais, and there are several handsome young Howard men newly come to court, including Charles, my cousin. Margaret Douglas, back at court having learned nothing from disgrace and widowhood, dances twice with Charles Howard; but I tell the queen to nod her to a new partner for the third dance.
My spymaster, Lord Cromwell, is smilingly watching the dancing, chatting from time to time with the other lords and the king. My uncle’s belief he would fall is proved wrong by the king, who rewards him with a great honour: the title of Earl of Essex. Lord Cromwell takes the news with quiet pride; the king gives a dinner for him in the council chamber. Cromwell himself heads the table; and the court is treated to a new masque which could be called The Rise of the Common Man, as the new earl is seated on one side of the king, and Thomas Howard the Duke of Norfolk, stiff with offended pride, on the other.
Westminster Palace, May
1540
THE MAY DAY joust is held at the beautiful tiltyard in Westminster Palace, and Thomas Seymour is the king’s challenger. He defeats all comers. Queen Anne, with the restored H and A curtains billowing in the warm breeze, awards him the trophy with a smile. Lord Lisle’s stepson John Dudley rides well, as does George Carew, who hopes to take the king’s eye for promotion before he returns to service at Calais. Gregory Cromwell, as brave as any nobleman’s son, breaks a spear on my young cousin Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, and Thomas Culpeper carries Bess Harvey’s favour.
‘Not yours?’ I ask Kitty.
She is red-eyed and defiant. ‘No!’ she says sharply. ‘He seems to prefer Mistress Harvey to me.’ Her lower lip trembles. ‘I don’t care, I am sure, Lady Rochford. If you see him, you can tell him that I don’t care at all.’
‘He probably decided to avoid you when he saw that the king favoured you,’ I comfort her. ‘The king makes much of you, doesn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ she sniffs. ‘He gave me a gold chain, which is nice, but he’s older than my uncle!’
I laugh. ‘Not at all! His Majesty is in the prime of his life!’
She gives me her courtier smile. ‘I just forgot for a moment,’ she apologises.
ON THE DAY after May Day, Richard Cromwell, my spymaster’s nephew, is knighted and is now Sir Richard, and Lord Lisle, visiting from Calais, hosts a great banquet at Dereham House. The queen looks beautiful in the French hood which I have persuaded her to wear, and the king beside her is noisy and cheerful, praising the jousters and the dinner. The wealth of the monasteries and the abbey lands pouring into the royal treasury makes the king as generous as Plutus. He gives every one of the champions a purse of a gold and a house of their own. Lord Lisle beams at the honour shown to his stepson and applauds the wildly extravagant gift to the jousters. Lord Cromwell, dressed plainly as usual in his black suit, claps his boy Richard on the back when no one is looking.
Lord Lisle is a tall, handsome man, good-looking and charming as all the royal Plantagenet family – all of them more kingly than any Tudor. He is high in royal favour; he, too, is to get an earldom for his loyal service in holding and managing Calais – a difficult posting, so close to France and so far from London, an exchequer for all spies and heretics going between France and Spain, Scotland and England. He has no idea that Thomas Cromwell and I imagined his downfall, and I am glad that the plot stayed as a speculation.
The deaths of my husband and sister-in-law have been fully avenged by the fall of the Courtenays. I don’t need more. I hope that Lord Lisle will use his time basking in the king’s favour to speak for his kinswoman, Lady Margaret Pole, who should be released from the Tower to finish her long life in the comfort of her own home. I will believe that a good tyranny is in power when I see her return to Bisham Abbey.
Lord Lisle attends a meeting of the privy council, confidently expecting his earldom to be announced by his beloved cousin the king, and I have the ladies ready in our best clothes for a late dinner to celebrate his new honour, though the queen is looking strained and Kitty Howard dazzling. I expect the king and his friends to come late after drinking the health of the new earl, and I take a moment to look out of the window of the queen’s chamber, over the river to the gardens and fields on the south bank, and upstream where the sun is setting over Lambeth Palace.
Below me, threading through the little boats on the Thames, is a dark barge silently rowing upriver, turning on the flat water and mooring, in complete silence, at the pier. As I watch, Sir William Kingston – the constable of the Tower – and his friend Lord Lisle come out of a little garden door below my window and walk through the golden light of the garden, down the stairs to the quay.
Lord Lisle is wearing his cloak, though the evening is mild. Sir William Kingston keeps pace beside him with his head bowed. They’re not arm in arm chatting, as if they were leaving a joyful party; they are both silent as they walk along the pier, past other gaily-painted barges with standards flying, up the gangplank of the black unmarked barge. They cast off and row away without a word, without anyone on the bank saying farewell. There is no escort to honour the new-made earl; there are no trumpeters. There is no sound but the crying of seagulls, no cheers from the rowers, no word from the bargemaster. It is all silent, like a bad dream. It can be nothing but an arrest; it has to be an arrest, though they are old friends and their sons were jousting together as comrades on May Day only yesterday.
I stare out of the window without moving, without a word. For once in my life, I don’t think: what does this mean, and how should I use this information? For once in my life, I think nothing, and I do nothing. I don’t even tap on the window so that his lordship knows someone has seen his departure and will write to his wife Lady Lisle in Calais and warn his stepdaughter Anne Basset, who is practising dance steps in the room behind me, with no idea that her stepfather has just stepped into the Tower barge and gone swiftly and silently downstream, like a dark cormorant speeding east, low over shining water.
Only at dinner, when everyone notices that Lord Lisle is missing from his place and his chamberlain says he has been summoned to London, do I allow myself to think: can this be the false supposition, the petitio principii that Thomas Cromwell and I played when we said: suppose that the king is unmanned by witchcraft? Suppose that Papists have hired a witch? Did I help my spymaster imagine a supposition which was not an intellectual game but a new masque of entrapment?
LORD LISLE’S SILENT disappearance launches a wave of arrests, as a stone thrown into a millpond sends ripples spreading in dark water. Dr Richard Sampson, the king’s reliable advisor on divorce, is arrested, too – no reason is given out, but perhaps he thought – as I did – that three prior contracts for three successive wives was straining belief.
George Carew, young kinsman of the executed Sir Nicholas Carew, follows his commander, Lord Lisle, into the Tower, both of them accused of giving the keys of England’s last foothold in France to our enemies.
Anne Basset cries all day in her room for her mother Lady Lisle, who sends an anguished note to say that she has been turned out of her home in Calais, and her household goods and her wardrobes of beautiful clothes have been taken from her. Even her famous aviary of quails has been seized by Robert Radcliffe the Earl of Sussex – one of the king’s brutish old lords who wins not only the quails but the captaincy of Calais, too.
‘Poor little birds!’ Kitty Howard says, holding Anne Basset in her arms. ‘He’ll never look after them properly.’
THE EARL OF Sussex dives into the riches of Calais and all the spy records. It’s a town riven with gossip, heresy, disloyalty, and treason. Thomas Cromwell has friends throughout the Staple where the merchants gather, half of them Lutherans, some even worse. Reginald Pole is said to have the keys to the castle; the King of France is said to be a friend of the Lisles. Robert Radcliffe finds a document which shows that Lord Lisle once sold a horse to the emperor of Spain: a dishonest broker can make much of this – and he does. And if Arthur, Lord Lisle is accused of treason, will the imaginary plot run on? Will Lord Hungerford be accused of witchcraft next? And then, will anyone mention the queen?
Every day, we hear of another arrest and not all of them are Papists; many are Lutherans, the queen’s religion. Suspicion spreads like a plague mist as I walk around the Palace of Westminster, wrapped against the cold like a masquer, with a cloak hiding my gown and a hood hiding my face. It is so like the May of only four years ago, when nobody knew what was happening and who had offended, that I feel as if I am reliving the days when I wrote to George and wrote to my father and met with Master Cromwell and the duke, and asked everyone: what is happening? What is happening?
This time, I don’t need to ask. I can imagine it all; because I was in the room where the unthinkable was first thought, built like a dark downward stair: one step after another – and the lowest point was naming the queen as a witch.
I think: I must speak to her. I must warn her against any questions about witchcraft. I must make sure that she knows the words: witchcraft, enchantment, sortilège, dark arts, curse, impotence, and death, to deny them if they are ever put to her in questioning. I must warn her to tell someone that she fears that her marriage to the king is not valid. She should do this today, before the music changes again and someone – like the Earl of Sussex, who is dancing through Calais, or William Fitzwilliam, who was such a strong partner to Margaret Pole – gets hold of her and swirls her around in a new dance called the Liar’s Volta.
Only Thomas Cromwell can reassure me that the queen is safe, and I lie in wait for him as he arrives early one morning, with a servant carrying his great wooden box full of warrants for the king to sign as he prays at Prime.
‘Lord Cromwell?’ I curtsey. ‘My lord?’
He beams at me. ‘Lord Essex it is now, Lady Rochford!’
‘Lord Essex, I will not delay you. I know you’re going to mass.’
‘I have a moment for you, Lady Rochford. The bell is not yet tolling.’
‘The ladies in the queen’s rooms are much concerned about the arrests, Lord Essex.’
‘Are they?’ he asks me, smiling. ‘I would be surprised if they thought about anything but their own ambition. Or is it just you? Just you who is concerned? Since I have a moment. But only a moment?’
I step closer. ‘You’re not pursuing the petitio principii?’ I whisper. ‘Not the witchcraft accusation?’
‘I am,’ he says frankly. ‘But not up to the queen’s door. She can be kept out of it as long as she agrees to an annulment. The matter can begin and end with the unfortunate Lord Hungerford and his friends on one scaffold and the unfortunate Lord Lisle on another, and no connection from them to the queen at all.’
‘But there is no connection,’ I point out. ‘No connection to the queen at all!’
Lord Cromwell smiles. ‘None at all, none will be made – if she agrees to an annulment.’
‘But if she does not, then you have this … this possible third act?’
‘This inducement,’ he says gently. ‘She can make a false admission of invalidity or face a false accusation of witchcraft – it can be her choice. I have no preference. They both achieve the same end – I want a final blow to the Spanish party and to set the king free of a marriage that he doesn’t want.’
He is so smilingly cheerful that I feel foolish when I take hold of his hands and say, breathlessly: ‘But, Lord Essex, one way gives an innocent woman 8,000 nobles a year and the Palace of Richmond and the other names her as a witch. And the punishment for witchcraft is death.’
He bows over my hands and lets me go. ‘That’s why I know that you will advise her to make the right choice. Will you bring ladies to the Tower to give evidence, Lady Rochford? I will send a barge for you. I should like one – no, I should like two other ladies to sign evidence. You choose whomever you think would be the most convincing.’
