The King's Curse

I don’t doubt that the day will come when he sees that he was wrong over Queen Katherine too, and shows justice to her daughter. Of course he will. He gains nothing by naming her as his bastard now. He will name her as his eldest daughter, he will recall me to her service, and he will make a great marriage for her with one of the crowned heads of Europe. I will go with her, and make sure that she is safe and happy in her new palace, wherever she has to go, whoever she has to marry.

“I will be her page,” Harry says, chiming with my thoughts. “I shall serve her, I will be her page.” I smile down at him and touch his cold cheek.

A great bawl goes up from the waiting crowd as the yeomen of the guard come marching along, keeping time though now and then someone slips. Nobody falls; they sometimes have to use the heel of the pike to stay upright but they look brave and bright in their green and white livery, and then finally, at last, there is the king, riding behind them, glorious in imperial purple as if he were the Holy Roman Emperor himself, with Jane beside him, overloaded with furs.

He is a massive figure now. High on the back of a big horse, almost a plow horse, Henry matches the broad shoulders and the huge rump of the horse with his own brawn. His jacket is padded so thick and fat that he is as wide as two men, his hat trimmed all round with fur, like a great basin on his balding head. He wears his cape thrown back, so that we can all see the glory of his jacket and waistcoat, and yet admire the flow of the cape, a rich purple velvet, sweeping almost to the ground.

His hands are on the reins in leather gloves glinting with diamonds and amethysts. He has precious stones in his hat, on the hem of his cape, on his very saddle. He looks like a gloriously triumphant king entering his own, and the citizens and the commons and the gentry of London bellow their approval of this larger-than-life giant astride his giant horse as he rides on a great frozen river.

Jane beside him is tiny. They have dressed her in blue and she looks cold and insubstantial. She has a blue hood that stands high and heavy on her head. She has a rippling blue cloak that catches and jerks her backwards from time to time and makes her clutch at her reins. She is mounted on a beautiful gray horse but she does not ride like a queen; she looks nervous as the horse slides once on the ice, and finds its feet again.

She smiles at the loud cheers but she looks around her, almost as if she thinks they are for someone else. I realize that she has seen two other wives respond to the bellow of “God save the queen,” and she has to remind herself that the loyal shout means her.

We wait till the whole court has ridden by, the lords and their households, and all the bishops, even Cromwell in his modest dark gown lined with hidden rich fur, and then the foreign ambassadors. I see the dainty little Spanish ambassador, but I pull up the hood of my fur-lined cape and make sure that he does not see me. I don’t want any hidden sign from him; this is not a day for plotting. We have won the victory that we needed: this is a day for celebration. I wait with my household until the last of the soldiers have gone by and all that will follow them are the household wagons, and I say: “That’s the end of the show, Harry, Katherine, Winifred. Time to go home.”

“Oh, Lady Grandmother, can’t we wait till the huntsmen take the hounds by?” Harry pleads.

“No,” I rule. “They’ll have taken them already, and all the hawks will be on their perches with the curtains drawn against the cold. There’s nothing to see and it’s getting too late.”

“But why can’t we go with the court?” Katherine asks. “Don’t we belong at court?”

I tuck her little hand under my elbow. “Next year we will,” I promise her. “I am sure the king will have us back at his side, with all our family, and next year we will have Christmas at court.”

It is Christmas Eve at L’Erber, and I am in the chapel, on my knees, waiting for the moment when I will hear first one, then another, then a hundred bells chime the hour for midnight, and then break into a full peal to celebrate the birth of Our Lord.

I hear the outside door suddenly open, then thud shut, and feel the swirl of cold air as the candles bob, and then suddenly my son Montague is bowing to the altar and then kneeling before me for my blessing.

“My son! Oh, my son!”

“Lady Mother, blessings of the season.”

“Happy Christmas, Montague. Have you just come from the North?”

“I rode down with Robert Aske himself,” he says.

“He’s here? The pilgrims are in London?”

“He’s bidden to court. He is the king’s guest at the Christmas feast. He is honored.”

I hear his words but I cannot believe them. “The king has asked Robert Aske, the leader of the pilgrims, to court for Christmas?”

“As a loyal subject, as an advisor.”

I put out my hand to my son. “The pilgrim leader and the king?”

“It is peace. It is victory.”

“I can’t believe that our troubles are over.”

“Amen,” he says. “Who would have believed it?”

L’ERBER, LONDON, JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1537

Montague goes to court himself the next day, taking Harry with him, who trots in his train, very solemn and serious, and when he comes back at the end of the twelve days of Christmas he comes straight to my private rooms to tell me about the meeting between the king and the pilgrim.

“He spoke to the king with unbelievable frankness. You would not think it possible.”

“What did he say?”

Montague glances around, but only my granddaughters are with me, and a couple of ladies, and besides, the time for fearing spies is over.

“He told His Majesty to his face that he was there only to tell him the hearts of the people, and that they cannot tolerate Cromwell as an advisor.”

“Was Cromwell there, listening to this?”

“Yes. That’s what made it so brave. Cromwell was furious, swore that all northern men were traitors—and the king looked from one to the other and put his arm around Robert Aske’s shoulders.”

“The king favored Aske over Cromwell?”

“In front of everyone.”

“Cromwell must be beside himself.”

“He’s afraid. Think of what happened to his master, Wolsey! If the king turns against him, he has no friends. Thomas Howard would see him hanged on his own scaffold tomorrow. He has invented laws that can be bent to catch anyone. If he is caught in his own net, none of us would lift a hand to save him.”

“And the king?”

“Gave Aske his own jacket, scarlet satin. Gave him the gold chain from his neck. Asked him what he wanted. My God, but he’s a brave man, that Yorkshireman! He bent the knee but he lifted his head and he spoke to the king without fear. He said that Cromwell was a tyrant and the men he had thrown out of the monasteries were good men, thrown into poverty by Cromwell’s greed, and the people of England could not live without the abbeys. He said that the Church is the heart of England; it cannot be attacked without hurting us all. The king listened to him, listened to every word, and at the end of it he said that he would make him one of the council.”

I break off to look at Harry’s bright face. “Did you see him? Did you hear this?”

He nods. “He’s very quiet and you don’t notice him at first, but then you see that he’s the most important person there. And he is nice to look at though he’s blinded in one eye. He’s quiet and smiling. And he’s really brave.”

I turn back to Montague. “I see he’s very taking. But—a privy councillor?”

“Why not? He’s a Yorkshire gentleman, a kin to the Seymours, better born than Cromwell. But anyway, he refused. Think of it! He bowed and said that it wasn’t necessary. What he wants is a free Parliament, and that the council should be governed by the old lords, not new upstarts. And the king said that he will hold a free Parliament at York to show his goodwill, and the queen will be crowned there, and the Church convocation will meet there to declare their learning.”

For a moment I am stunned at this change, then, at Montague’s quiet certainty, I make the sign of the cross and I bow my head for a moment. “Everything we have ever asked for.”

“More,” my son confirms. “More than we dreamed of asking, more than we imagined the king would ever grant.”

“What more?” I ask.

Montague beams at me. “Reginald is waiting to be called. He’s in Flanders, a day’s sail away. The moment that the king sends for him, he will come and restore the Church to England.”

“The king will send for him?”

“He will appoint him as the cardinal for the restoration.”

I am so amazed at the thought of Reginald coming home with honor, to put everything to rights, that I close my eyes for a moment and give thanks to God who has allowed me long enough life to see this. “How has this come about?” I ask Montague. “Why is the king doing this, and so easily?”

Montague nods; he has thought about this too. “I think that he finally understands that he has gone too far. I think Aske told him of the numbers of the pilgrim army and their simple hopes. Aske said that they love the king but blame Cromwell, and the king wants to be loved more than anything. In Aske he sees a good man, a man of principle who is representing good men. He sees a good Englishman, ready to love and follow a good king, driven to rebellion by intolerable changes. When he met Aske, he saw another way to be beloved, he saw another way to be kingly. He can throw Cromwell’s reputation to them as a sop, he can restore the monasteries. He loves the Church himself, he loves the pilgrim ways. He’s never stopped his observance of the liturgy or the rituals. It’s as if he suddenly sees a new part in a masque—the king who makes everything well again.”

Montague pauses for a moment, puts a gentle hand on his little son’s shoulder. “Or perhaps, Lady Mother, it’s even better than this. Perhaps I am speaking bitterly when I should see a miracle has happened in my lifetime. Perhaps the light has shone on the king, perhaps at last God really has spoken to him, and he has truly changed his mind. Then God be praised, for He has saved England.”

I am normally melancholy in the cold days after the feast of Christmas. The thought of the long winter stretches before me, and I cannot imagine spring. Even when the snow melts on the roof and drips into the gutters I don’t think of warmer weather, but gather my furs around me and know that there are many days and weeks of damp and gray mornings before the weather lifts. The thick ice melts and releases the river which is gray and angry, the deep snow clouds roll away from the sky to leave a light which is cold and hard. Normally, at this time of year I huddle indoors and complain if anyone leaves a door open anywhere in the house. I can feel the draft, I tell them. I can feel it on my ankles, chilling my feet.

But this year I am contented, like a spoiled cat, soothed by the fire, watching the sleet patter against the window where my grandson Harry draws in the mist on the windowpanes. This year I imagine Robert Aske riding north, greeted at every inn and house along the way by people wanting to know the news, and him telling them that the king has come to his senses, that the queen is to be crowned in York, that the king has promised a free Parliament, and that the abbeys are to be restored to the faithful.

I imagine the monks who hang around the old buildings, begging where they once served, gathering around his horse and asking him to tell them again, to swear that it is true. I think of them opening the doors of the chapel, kneeling before the space where the altar was, promising that they will start again, tolling the bell for the first service. And I think of Robert showing them his golden chain and telling them the king took it from his own neck to put around his shoulders, and told him it was a sign of his favor and offered him a seat on the Privy Council.

But then we hear of odd reports. Some of the pilgrims who had taken a general pardon seem to have broken the terms of their truce, and are in arms again. Thomas Howard arrests half a dozen ill doers and sends their names to Thomas Cromwell—and Thomas Cromwell is still in office.

Some of the gentlemen and most of the northern lords go to talk with Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and share their concerns about the North becoming unruly in this feast of freedom. Robert Aske assures them, he assures the pilgrims that there is no rebellion against the rule of the king—for see! he carries the king’s pardon, he wears the king’s scarlet satin jacket. There will always be men who will take advantage of troubled times—they make no difference to the peace and the pardon. The peace will hold, the pardon will hold, the pilgrims have won everything they asked for, and the king has given them his word.

And yet Sir Thomas Percy and Sir Ingram Percy, who rode with the pilgrims who marched under the banner of the five wounds, are ordered to come to court, and when they arrive in London, they are arrested immediately and sent to the Tower.

“It means nothing,” Geoffrey says to me as he passes through L’Erber on his way home to Lordington. “The Percys have always been a law unto themselves, they were using the pilgrims as a shield to defy the king. They are rebels, not pilgrims; they should be in the Tower.”

“But they had been given a pardon?”

“No man would expect the king to honor a pardon to a pair like that.”

I don’t argue since Geoffrey is confident, and the news from the North is good. The abbeys are reopening, the pilgrims are dispersing with their pardons, each of them swearing an oath of loyalty to the king, all of them convinced that good times have come at last. Slowly, quietly, the religious women and men return to the abbeys and they open their doors again. Every village church has the story of a little miracle. People bring a crystal monstrance out of its hiding place under a thatch. Carpenters resurrect the beautiful carvings of saints from where they had been tumbled for safety into the wood piles, farmers dig carefully in the drainage ditches and bring out bright crucifixes. Vestments come out of hidden wardrobes, the monks come back to their cells. They mend the windows, they repair the roofs, I tell my steward to find Prior Richard and invite him back to Bisham.

“Lady Grandmother, do you think my uncle Reginald will come home?” Harry, Montague’s boy, asks me. And I answer him smiling: “Yes. Yes, I think he will.”

But in York in February, nine men are charged with treason by Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and they are sentenced to be hanged.

“How can they be hanged? Don’t they have a pardon?” I ask Geoffrey.

“Lady Mother, the duke is a hard man. He will feel that he has to show the king that though he sympathizes with the pilgrims he is hard on the rebels. He’ll hang one or two just to show his strength.”

Once again, I don’t argue with my son, but I am afraid that the king’s pardon is not proving to be a certain guarantee of safety. Certainly, the commons seem to think so, for Carlisle musters its men in desperation and they march against Thomas Howard’s army as if they are marching for their lives, staking everything on one last throw of the dice. Hundreds are killed by the well-armed, well-fed, well-mounted lords of the North who were beside them during the pilgrimage, but have abandoned them in the truce.

We get the news in London in the middle of February and the citizens peal the bells in joy that the landless poor men of the North have been defeated by the lords who, only a few months ago, stood by them. They say that Sir Christopher Dacre killed seven hundred men and took the rest prisoner, hanging them on the stunted little trees which is all that grow in the hard northwest, and Thomas Cromwell has promised him an earldom for his service.

Inspired by brutality, Thomas Howard now declares martial law in the North, which means that the magistrates and lords have no power against his rule. Howard can be judge, jury, and hangman to men who have no defense to offer. He declares war on his own countrymen—this is no difficulty for the man who beheaded his own niece and nephew. He holds impromptu hearings in little towns and hands down instant sentences of death. Hundreds of men are forced before him. The chain makers of Carlisle run out of iron and men have to be hanged wrapped in ropes to signify their shame. Thomas Howard marches out to hang villagers in their own little gardens, so that everyone knows that the pilgrim way led them home to death. His men go into every little village and every hungry hamlet, in the coldest time of year, and demand to know who rode out with the pilgrims and swore an oath? Who rang the church bells backwards? Who prayed for the return of the Church? And who rode out and did not come home again?

Montague writes to me a note from Greenwich, where he is at court.

The king has ordered Norfolk to go to all the monasteries that offered any resistance. He says the monks and canons must be a terrible example for others. I think he means to kill them. Pray for us.

I don’t understand the times that I am living in. I read my son’s letter, once, twice, three times, and I burn it as soon as I have remembered the terrible words by heart. I go to my chapel and kneel on the cold stone floors and pray, but I find all I am doing is running my beads through my hands and shaking my head, as if I want to deny the terrible things that are happening to the men who called themselves the pilgrims and marched for grace.

The king has heard that some widows and orphans have cut down the bodies of their husbands and fathers, executed as rebels, and buried them secretly, at night, in their churchyards. He has sent to Thomas Howard telling him to find these families and punish them. The bodies are to be dug up out of sanctified ground. He wants the corpses hanged until they rot.

Lady Mother, I think he has run mad.

Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, straining against his own conscience, obeys the king in everything, closing monasteries, and slamming the doors shut on those that had reopened. No one has any explanation of this, none seems needed. Now the buildings are to be handed to the neighboring lords for them to use as quarries for stone; the lands are to be sold to nearby farmers. The commons are to look no more to the abbeys for their comfort and help, the monks are to be homeless beggars. Our Lady is not to be invoked in a hundred, a thousand side chapels and roadside shrines. There are to be no more pilgrimages, there is to be no hope. A song comes out of the North that says there is to be no May, and I look out of the thick glass into the gray courtyard where the snow is slowly melting away, and think that the spring is coming this year without joy, without love, and it is true, the months will change but there will be no merry May.

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SPRING 1537

As soon as the roads are dry enough for travel I leave London and go to Bisham. Harry goes home with his father, his little face puzzled that the season which promised so much does not feel like spring at all. I ride pillion behind my Master of Horse and take some comfort in leaning against the man’s broad back as the big horse takes his rolling strides down the muddy road to Berkshire.

So I am out of the city when they bring in Tom Darcy to the Tower, and question him. He has little patience with them, God bless the old man for his fierce temper. He has the king’s pardon in his pocket and yet he is under arrest. He looks Thomas Cromwell in the face, and knows him for his judge and jury and yet says to him as they write down his words as evidence against him: “Cromwell, it is thou that art the very original and chief causer of all this rebellion and mischief.” When the blacksmith’s son blinks at this plain speaking, Darcy promises him a certain future death on the scaffold, telling him that if the day comes when there is only one nobleman left alive in England, that single lord will surely behead Thomas Cromwell.

They bring in John Hussey too, the princess’s old chamberlain, and I think of him, patiently watching me waste time over the inventory of her jewels, and of his wife’s faithful love for her. I pray no one tells the princess that her former chamberlain is under arrest in the Tower for questioning.

His inquisition, long, detailed, vindictive with petty threats, is of little help to Cromwell, for neither Tom Darcy nor John Hussey will name a single other man or woman. Darcy says nothing about riding with the pilgrims or opening the gates of Pontefract Castle to them. He says that he had the pilgrim badges left in a chest at the castle from his old crusade to the holy land, and he refuses to reveal who received them from his hands. He says: “Old Tom has not one traitor’s tooth in his head,” and he is faithful to the very last.

Henry Courtenay writes to me:

Pray for me, Cousin, for I have been named as Lord High Steward for the trial of those two good lords, John Hussey and Tom Darcy. I have Cromwell’s promise that if we find Tom guilty, he will have his sentence commuted to banishment—and he can come home later. But there is no hope for John Hussey.

I read the letter standing by the forge, waiting for my horse to be shod, and the moment that I have taken in the meaning I plunge it into the heart of the fire and turn to the messenger in the Exeter livery. “Are you going straight back to your master?”

He nods.

“Tell him this from me. Make sure you make no mistake. Tell him I recited an old saying; these are not my words but a riddle that the countryfolk say. Tell him the countrymen say not to put a man’s head on the block unless you want it struck off. Can you remember that?”

He nods. “I know it. My grandfather used to say it. He lived in troubled times. ‘Not to put a man’s head on the block unless you want it struck off.’ ”

I give him a penny. “And don’t tell anyone else,” I say. “And these are not my words.”

I wait for news of the trial. Montague writes to me.

John Hussey is a dead man. Darcy has been found guilty but will be pardoned and spared.

It’s a lie from that great liar, Cromwell. And the saying of the people was true—don’t put a man’s head on the block unless you want it struck off. The lords think they have a promise that will save Tom Darcy and so they find him guilty and wait for the king to commute his sentence of execution into banishment.

But the king fails this great Englishman and he is sent to the block.

BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SUMMER 1537

I think of Tom Darcy, and how he hoped he would die on crusade, fighting for his faith, and when they tell me that he was beheaded as a traitor on Tower Hill in June, as the swallows swooped busily from river to Tower, building their nests for the summer, I know that he died for his faith, just as he wanted.

A pedlar comes to the back door and says he has a pretty fairing just for me. I go down to the stable yard where he sits on the mounting block with his pack at his feet. He bows when he sees me. “I have something for you,” he says. “I said I would give it to you and leave. So now I’m going on.”

“How much?”

He shakes his head and drops a little purse into my hand. “The man who gave it to me said to wish you luck, and that good times will come,” he says, shoulders his pack, and walks from the yard.

I open the purse and tip the little brooch into my hand. It is the pansy brooch that I gave to old Tom Darcy. He never called on me because he thought that he had won a victory and that the king had given his word of pardon. He never called on me because he thought he was guarded by God. I put the brooch in my pocket and walk away.

The culling of the North continues. Eight men and one woman come before the juries charged with treason, lords and gentry, two of them distant kinsmen of mine, all of them known to me, all of them good Christians and loyal subjects. And among them is the Yorkshireman, Robert Aske.

The young man who had the king’s satin coat around his shoulders waits for his trial in the Tower of London with no money and no change of clothes and little food. No one dares to send him anything, and if anyone did, the guards would steal it. He has a full royal pardon for leading the Pilgrimage of Grace, and since then, though there have been uprisings and desperate men fighting for their lives, he neither led nor encouraged them. Ever since he returned to the North from the court, he did nothing but try to persuade men to take the pardon and trust the king’s word. For this, he is in the Tower. Cleverly, Cromwell suggests that since Aske believed that there would be a Parliament in the North, since he swore that the monasteries would be restored, he was assuring people that the pilgrimage had gained its aims, and that this is—must be—treason.

I walk in the hot sunshine in the fields of my home and look at the ripening wheat. It is going to be a good harvest this year. I think of Tom Darcy sending me a message that good times will come, and that Thomas Cromwell has ruled that such a hope is traitorous. I wonder if the seeds of the wheat are planning to ripen and if this is treason? At sunset, a hare bursts out of the crop and runs in a great half circle before me on the path and then stops, sits on its hinder legs, and looks back at me, its eyes dark and intelligent. “And you?” I say quietly to it. “Are you biding your time? Are you a traitor, waiting for the good times to return?”

They try everyone whom they bring to London and they find everyone guilty. They accuse churchmen: the prior of Guisborough, the abbot of Jervaulx, the abbot of Fountains Abbey. They arrest Margaret Bulmer for loving her husband so much that she begged him to run away when she thought that the pilgrimage had failed. Her own chaplain gives evidence against her, and her husband, Sir John Bulmer, is hanged and quartered at Tyburn as his wife is burned at Smithfield. Sir John is guilty of treason, she is guilty of loving him.

They take Robert Aske from the Tower to the courtroom for his trial and back to prison, though when he was last in London he feasted at the court and was embraced by the king. They take him from the Tower to the North of England, so that he can die in full view of the men who had heard him promise their pardon. They take him to York and parade him around the city that is stunned and silent at the fall of its bravest son. They take him to the very top of Clifford Tower on the walls of York and he reads a confession and they put a rope around his neck where the king put his own chain of gold; they wrap him in chains of iron, and they hang him.

Some of the lords and I spoke to Cromwell for mercy for the northern men. “Mercy! Mercy! Mercy!” He has none.

Montague comes to visit me in midsummer. There are fresh rushes down in every room and the windows wide open to the sweet-smelling air so that the house is filled with the singing of birds.

He finds me in the garden, harvesting herbs against the plague, for last summer was terrible, especially for the poor, especially for the North. I have used up all the oils in my physic room and have to make more. Montague kneels before me, and I rest my green-stained hand on his head and notice, for the first time, some silver hairs among the bronze.

“Son Montague, you are going gray,” I say to him severely. “I can’t have a gray-haired son, it will make me feel too old.”

“Well, your darling Geoffrey is going bald,” he says cheerfully, getting up. “So how will you bear that?”

“How will he bear it?” I smile. Geoffrey has always been dreadfully vain about his good looks.

“He’ll wear a cap all the time,” Montague predicts. “And grow a beard like the king.”

The smile dies from my face. “How are things at court?” I ask shortly.

“Shall we walk?” He takes my arm and I stroll with him, away from the gardener and the lads, out through the herb garden, through the little wooden gate, and into the meadow that runs down to the river. The mown grass is growing again nearly to our knees; we will take a second crop of hay from this field, rich and green and starred with moon daisies, buttercups, and the bright, blowsy heads of poppies.

High above us a lark climbs into the cloudless sky, singing louder and louder with each flutter of its wings. We pause and watch the soaring little dot until it is almost invisible, and then the sound abruptly finishes and the bird plunges down to its hidden nest.

“I’ve been in touch with Reginald,” Montague says. “The king sent Francis Bryan to capture him, and I had to warn him.”

“Where is he now?”

“He was at Cambrai. He was trapped in the town for some time with Bryan waiting for him to set one foot outside. Bryan said that if he had put one foot into France he would have shot him down.”

“Oh, Montague! Did he get the warning?”

“Yes, but he knows he has to take care. He knows that the king and Cromwell will stop at nothing to silence him. They know that he was in touch with the pilgrims, and that he writes to the princess. They know that he is raising an army against them. Geoffrey wanted to carry the message. Then he told me that he wanted to join Reginald in exile.”

“You told him he couldn’t?”

“Of course he can’t. But he can’t bear this country any longer. The king won’t receive him at court, he’s in debt again, and he can’t bring himself to live under Tudor rule. He was convinced that the pilgrims had won, he thought that the king had seen sense. He doesn’t want to stay in England now.”

“And what does he think would become of his children? And what about his wife? And what about his lands?”

Montague smiles. “Oh, you know what he’s like. He flared up and said he would go, and then he thought again and said he would stay and hope for better times. He knows that if another of us were to go into exile it would be even worse for those who stay. He knows he would lose everything if he went.”

“Who took your message to Reginald?”

“Hugh Holland, Geoffrey’s old steward. He’s set up in shipping wheat in London.”

“I know him.” This is the merchant who trades with Flanders and shipped John Helyar to safety.

“Holland was taking over a load of wheat, and wanted to see Reginald and serve the cause.”

We walk down the little hill, and arrive at the river. A sharp flash of blue like a winged sapphire skims downriver, faster than an arrow, a kingfisher.

“I could never leave,” I say. “I never even think of leaving. I feel as if I have to bear witness here. I have to be here even when the monasteries are gone, even when the bones of the saints are taken from the shrines and rolled in the gutters.”

“I know,” he says sadly. “I feel the same. It’s my country. Whatever it has to suffer. I have to be here too.”

“He can’t go on forever,” I say, knowing that the words are treason, but I am driven to treason. “He has to die soon. And he has no true heir but our princess.”

“Don’t you think that the queen might give him a son?” Montague asks me. “She’s far on. He held a great Te Deum at St. Paul’s, and then sent her off to Hampton Court for the birth.”

“And our princess?”

“At Hampton Court too, attending the queen. She is kept in her true estate.” He smiles at me. “The queen is tender to her, and Princess Mary loves her stepmother.”

“And is the king not staying with them?”

“He’s afraid of the plague. He’s gone off with a riding court.”

“He left the queen to her confinement?”

Montague shrugs. “Don’t you think that if this baby dies too, he would rather be far away? There are enough people saying that he cannot have a healthy son. He won’t want to see another baby buried.”

I shake my head at the thought of a young woman left alone to bear her first child and her husband distancing himself from her in case it dies, in case she dies.

“You don’t think she will have a healthy boy, do you?” Montague challenges me. “The pilgrims were all saying that his line is cursed. They said he would never get a living prince because his father had the blood of innocents on his head, because he killed the princes of York, our princes. Is that what you think? That he killed the two York princes and then your brother?”

I shake my head. “I don’t like to think of it,” I say quietly, turning to walk along the little path beside the river. “I try never to think of it.”

“But do you think the Tudors killed the princes?” he asks, very low. “Was it My Lady the King’s Mother? When she was married to the Constable of the Tower and had her son waiting to invade? Knowing that he could have no claim to the throne while they were alive?”

“Who else?” I reply. “No one else gained anything from their deaths. And for sure, we see now that the Tudors have a strong stomach for almost any sin.”

L’ERBER, LONDON, AUTUMN 1537

I am in my great bed in London, with the curtains drawn against the autumn chill, when I hear the bells start to peal, a triumphant clangor that starts up with a single bell and then rings all around the city. I struggle up and wrap a robe around my shoulders as my bedroom door opens and my maid comes in, a candle shaking in her hand in her excitement. “Your Grace! There is news from Hampton Court! The queen has had a boy! The queen has had a boy!”

“God bless her, and keep her safe,” I say, and I mean it. Nobody could ill-wish Jane Seymour, the mildest of women and a good stepmother to my beloved princess. “Do they say if the baby is strong?”

The girl smiles and silently shrugs. Of course, under the new laws it is impossible even to ask if the royal baby is well, since this casts a doubt on the king’s potency.

“Well, God bless them both,” I say.

“Can we go out?” the girl asks. “Me and the other girls? There is dancing in the streets and they’ve built a bonfire.”

“You can go as long as you all stay together,” I tell her. “And come home at dawn.”

She beams at me. “Shall you get dressed?” she asks.

I shake my head. It feels as if it is a long, long time since I stayed up all night to watch by the royal bed and took the news of a baby to the king. “I’ll go back to sleep,” I say. “And we’ll say prayers for the health of the queen and the prince in the morning.”

Regular news comes from Hampton Court: the baby is well and thriving, he has been christened Edward, Princess Mary carried him during the ceremony. If he lives, he is the new Tudor heir and she will never be queen; but I know—and who knows better than I, who shared Queen Katherine’s four heartbreaks?—that a healthy baby does not mean a future king.

Then we hear, just as I had feared, that the queen’s physicians have been called back to Hampton Court. But it is not for the baby; it is the queen who is ill. In those dangerous days after the birth, it seems that the shadow fell on the mother. I go at once to my chapel and pray for Jane Seymour; but she dies that night, only two weeks after the birth of her little son.

They say that the king is devastated, that he has lost the mother of his child and the only woman he truly loved. They say that he will never marry again, that Jane was matchless, perfect, the only true wife he ever had. I think that she has achieved in death the perfection that no woman could show in life. His own perfection is wholly imaginary, now he has an imaginary perfect wife.

“Can he love anyone at all?” Geoffrey asks me. “This is the king who ordered women tried for treason for the crime of cutting down their husband’s corpses and giving them a proper burial. Can he even imagine grief?”

I think of the boy who went white-faced for a year after the death of his mother, but less than a month after the death of his wife he is looking for a new one: a princess of France, or from Spain. Montague, dressed in full mourning, comes to me at L’Erber struggling not to laugh out loud to tell me that the king has asked all the princesses of France to come to Calais so that he can choose the prettiest to be his next bride.

The French are deeply insulted, since it is as if the royal ladies of France were heifers on market day, and no princess is eager to be the fourth queen to a wife killer; but Henry does not understand that he is no longer highly desirable. He does not realize that he is no longer the handsomest prince in Christendom, famous for his learning and devout life. Now he is aging—forty-six at the last birthday, fatter every day, and the sworn enemy of the Holy Father, head of the Church. And yet he cannot understand that he is not beloved, not admired, not the center of all attention.

“Lady Mother, there is one good thing that has come from the death of the queen. You’ll find it hard to believe this; but he is restoring the priory,” Montague says.

“What priory?” I ask.

“Ours.”

I don’t understand at all. “He is giving us back Bisham Priory?”

“Yes,” Montague says. “He called me to his side in the chapel. I went to the royal gallery at Hampton Court, where he sits above the chapel in his own little room so he can see the altar. He reads and signs his papers while the priest celebrates the Mass below. He was praying for once, not working, and he crossed himself, kissed his rosary, and turned to me with a pleasant smile and said that he wants prayers for Jane’s soul and would you oblige him and restore the priory as a chantry for her?”

“But he is closing the great religious houses up and down the country every day! Robert Aske and all the others, hundreds of them, died trying to save the monasteries.”

“Well, now he wants to restore one.”

“But he said that there is no such thing as purgatory and so no need for chantries?”

“Apparently, he wants one for Jane and himself.”

“Cromwell himself appointed the false prior and closed our priory.”

“And that is to be reversed.”

For a moment I am simply stunned, then I see that I am being given the greatest gift for a devout woman: my family’s priory back in my keeping. “This is a great honor to us.” I am quite awed at the thought that we will be allowed to open our beautiful chapel once again, that the monks will sing the plainsong in the echoing gallery, that the sacred Host will stand behind the altar once more in a shining monstrance, and the candles be lit before it, so that the little light shines out of the window into the darkness of a hard world. “He is really allowing this? Of all the priories and nunneries and monasteries of England that he has closed he is allowing this one light to shine? Our chapel? Where the banners of the white rose hang?”

“He is,” Montague says, smiling. “I knew it would mean so much to you. I am so glad, Lady Mother.”

“I can make it beautiful again,” I murmur. Already I can imagine the banners hanging once more in the chancel, the quiet shuffle of people coming into the church to hear Mass, the gifts at the door, the hospitality to travelers, and the power and quietness of a place of prayer. “It is only one place, and only a little place, but I can restore the church at Bisham. It will be the only priory in England, but it will stand, and it will shine a faint holy little light into the dark of Henry’s England.”

GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1537

Montague and I, accompanied by my grandson Harry as our page boy, visit Greenwich to take our gifts to the king and find a court that is still in mourning for Queen Jane. It is the quietest Christmas that I have ever seen. But the king accepts our gifts with a smile and wishes us the compliments of the season. He asks me if I have seen Prince Edward and gives me permission to visit the little baby in his nursery. He says I may take my grandson and gives a smiling nod to Harry.

The king’s fears for his son are painfully evident. There are double guards on the doors and no one may enter without written permission. No one at all, not even a duke. I admire the baby who looks well and strong and I press a gold coin into his nurse’s hand, saying that I will pray that he stays healthy. I leave him bellowing for a feed, a Tudor in his loud demands.

Having paid my respects I am free to go to the princess’s rooms. She has her own little court, her ladies around her, but when she sees me she leaps to her feet and runs to me and I wrap her in my arms and hold her, as I always did.

“And who is this?” She looks down at Harry, who is on one knee, his little hand on his heart.

“This is my grandson Harry.”

“I could serve you,” he says breathlessly.

“I should be so pleased to have you in my service.” She gives him her hand and he gets to his feet and bows, his little face dazed with hero worship.

“Your grandmother will say when you may join my household,” she tells him. “I expect you are needed at your home.”

“I am no use at home, I am quite idle, they would not miss me at all,” he says, trying to persuade her but succeeding only in making her laugh.

“Then you shall come to me when you are very useful and hardworking,” she says.

She draws me into her privy chamber, where we are alone and I can look at her pale face and wipe the tears from her cheeks and smile at her.

“My dearest child.”

“Oh, Lady Margaret!”

At once I can see that she has not been eating properly, there are shadows under her eyes and she is too pale. “Are you not well?”

She shrugs. “Nothing out of the ordinary. I was so grieved for the queen. I was so shocked . . . I could not believe that she would die like that . . . for a little while I even doubted my faith. I couldn’t see how God could take her . . .”

She breaks off and leans her forehead against my shoulder, and I gently pat her back, thinking, Poor child, to lose such a mother and then to love and lose a stepmother! This girl will spend the rest of her life longing for someone she can trust and love.

“We have to believe that she is with God,” I say gently. “And we sing Masses for her soul in my own chapel at Bisham.”

She smiles at this. “Yes, the king told me. I am so glad. But Lady Margaret! The other abbeys!”

I put a finger gently over her lips. “I know. There is much to mourn.”

“Do you hear from your son?” she whispers, her voice so soft that I have to bend to hear her. “From Reginald?”

“He was raising support for the pilgrims when they made peace and forged their agreement with your father,” I say. “When he got news of their defeat, he was recalled to Rome. He’s there now, safe.”

She nods. There is a tap at her door and one of the new maids puts her head into the room. “We can’t talk now,” the princess decides. “But when you write to him, you can tell him, that I am well treated, I think I am safe. And now that I have a little brother my father is at peace with me, and with my half sister, Elizabeth. He has a son, at last. Perhaps he can be happy.”

I take her hand and we go out to where her ladies, some of them friends and some of them spies, all rise and curtsey to us. I smile equably at all of them.

WARBLINGTON CASTLE, HAMPSHIRE, SUMMER 1538

I spend the summer at my house at Warblington. The court on progress passes nearby, but this year there are no Knights Harbinger, riding down the road to make sure that I can house the great party. The king does not want to stay, though the fields are as green and as wide and the forests as richly stocked with game as they were when he said it was his favorite house in England.

I look at the great wing that I built for the comfort of Queen Katherine and her young husband and think that it was money wasted, and love wasted. I think that money or love offered to the Tudors is always wasted, for the Tudor boy who was so well loved by his mother has been spoiled by us all.

I hear from my house at Bisham that Thomas Cromwell has taken the priory away from us, for the second time. The monks who were to pray for Jane Seymour have been told to leave, the chantry that was to stand forever, the only chantry in England, is quiet. The bishop’s cope is taken away, our priory is closed again. It was reopened on a Tudor whim; it closes on Cromwell’s command. I do not even write to protest.

At least I am confident that the princess is safe at Hampton Court, visiting her half brother at Richmond Palace. Without doubt she will have a new stepmother before the year is out, and I pray every night that the king chooses a woman who will be kind to our princess. They will be looking for a husband for her too, the Portuguese royal family has been suggested, and Montague and I agree that whatever my age and wherever she is sent, I must go with her to see her settled in her new home.

I am busy this summer in Warblington, preparing for the harvest and bringing the records up to date, but one day my steward comes to tell me that a new patient at our little hospital, a man called Gervase Tyndale, has been asking the surgeon Richard Eyre why there are no books of the new learning in the church or at the hospital. Someone tells him that it is common knowledge that I, and all my family, believe in the old ways, in the priest telling the word of God to the faithful, in the holy Mass, in faith not deeds.

“He asked after that horse groom that you dismissed, my lady. The Lutheran that would have converted half the stable yard? And he asked after your chaplain, John Helyar, and if he ever visits your son Reginald in Rome or wherever he is. And he asks what your son Reginald is doing, staying away from England for so long.”

There is always gossip in a small village. There is always gossip about the big house. But I feel a sense of unease that this is gossip about the castle, about the hospital, about our faith, just as we have come unscathed through the pilgrimage, and just as our princess has found some safety where she belongs.

“I think you had better tell this man to mind his manners towards his hosts,” I say to the steward. “And tell Mr. Eyre the surgeon that I don’t need my opinions shared with half the country.”

The steward grins. “No harm done,” he says. “There’s nothing to know. But I’ll have a quiet word.”

I think little more of this until I am in my presence chamber, dealing with the business of the estate, Montague at my side, when Geoffrey comes in with Richard Eyre the surgeon, and Hugh Holland, his friend the grain merchant. At the sight of him I find myself sharply alert, like a deer freezing at the snap of a twig. I wonder why Geoffrey has brought these men to me.

“Lady Mother, I would speak with you,” Geoffrey says, kneeling for my blessing.

I know my smile is strained. “Is there trouble?” I ask him.

“I don’t think so. But the surgeon here says that a patient at the hospital—”

“Gervase Tyndale,” the surgeon interrupts with a bow.

“A patient at the hospital wanted to set up a school here for the new learning, and someone told him that there was no call for that here, and that you would not allow it. Now he’s gone off full of ill will, telling everyone that we don’t allow the books that the king has licensed, and that Hugh Holland here, my friend, comes and goes between us and Reginald.”

“There’s nothing wrong with this,” I say cautiously, glancing at Montague. “It’s gossip that we could do without, but there’s no evidence.”

“No, but it can be made to sound wrong,” Geoffrey points out.

“And this is the merchant that went to Reginald with my warning,” Montague says quietly in my ear. “And he shipped your chaplain overseas for us. So there is a little fire under this smoke.” Aloud he turns to the surgeon. “And where is this Mr. Tyndale now?”

“I sent him away as soon as he was well,” the surgeon says promptly. “My lady’s steward told me that she didn’t like gossip.”

“You can be sure that I don’t,” I say sharply to him. “I pay you to heal the poor, not to chatter about me.”

“Nobody knows where he is,” Geoffrey says nervously. “Or if he has been watching us for a while. Do you think he might have gone to Thomas Cromwell?”

Montague smiles without amusement. “It’s a certainty.”

“How are you so sure?”

“Because anyone with any information always goes to Cromwell.”

“What should we do?” Geoffrey looks from me to his older brother.

“You’d better go to Cromwell yourself. Tell him about this little disagreement, and that this bunch of old women are gossiping about nothing.” I glare at the surgeon. “Assure him of our loyalty. Remind him that the king himself restored our priory at Bisham and say that we have a Bible in English at the church that anyone may read. Tell him that we teach the new learning in the little school from books that His Majesty licenses. Tell him that the schoolmaster is teaching the children to read so that they may study their prayers in English. And let these good men explain what is said against them, and that we are all loyal servants to the king.”

Geoffrey looks anxious. “Will you come with me?” he asks Montague very quietly.

“No,” Montague says firmly. “This is nothing. There is nothing to fear. Better that just one of us goes to tell Cromwell that there is nothing to interest him here, not here at the castle, not at the manor. Tell him that Mr. Holland took a message of family news to Reginald, months ago, nothing more. But go today, and tell him everything. He probably knows everything already. But if you go and tell him, then you have the appearance of openness.”

“Can’t you come?”

Geoffrey asks so pitifully that I turn to Montague and say: “Son, won’t you go with him? You can talk more easily with Thomas Cromwell than Geoffrey can.”

Montague laughs shortly and shakes his head. “You don’t know how Cromwell thinks,” he says. “If we both go, it looks as if we are worried. You go, Geoffrey, and tell him everything. We’ve got nothing to hide, and he knows that. But go today, so that you can get our side of the story told before this Tyndale gets there and puts his report in to his master.”

“And take some money,” I say very quietly.

“You know I don’t have a penny in the world!” Geoffrey says irritably.

“Montague will give you something from the treasure room,” I say. “Give Thomas Cromwell a gift and my good wishes.”

“How will I know what to give him?” Geoffrey exclaims. “He knows I have a pocket full of debt.”

“He will know this comes from me as a pledge of our friendship,” I say smoothly. I take my great keys and lead the way to our treasure room.

The door opens with two locks. Geoffrey pauses on the threshold and looks around with a sigh of longing. There are shelves of chalices for use in the chapel, there are boxes of coin, copper for the woodcutters and the day laborers, silver for the quarterly wages, and locked chests of gold bolted to the floor. I take a beautifully worked cup of silver gilt from its wool cover. “This is perfect for him.”

“Silver gilt?” Geoffrey asks doubtfully. “Wouldn’t you send something in gold?”

I smile. “It’s flashy, it’s new made, it sparkles more than it shines. It’s Cromwell to the life. Take that to him.”

Geoffrey comes back from London, filled with pride at his own cleverness. He tells me how he spoke to Thomas Cromwell—“not as if I was anxious or anything, but man to man, easily, as one great man to another”—and that Cromwell had understood at once this was the gossip of jealous village people about their betters. He told the Lord Chancellor that of course we wrote to Reginald about family matters, and that Hugh Holland had carried messages from us, but that we had never stopped blaming Reginald for his terrible letter to the king, and indeed, had begged him to make sure that it was never published, and that he had promised us that it would be suppressed.

“I told him it was bad theology and badly written!” Geoffrey tells me gleefully. “I reminded him that you wrote to Reginald and sent a message through Cromwell himself.”

Geoffrey succeeds so well with Thomas Cromwell that Hugh Holland’s goods which had been seized on the quayside are returned in full to him, and the three men, Holland, my son, and the surgeon, are at liberty to come and go as they please.

Geoffrey and I ride down to Buckinghamshire together to take the good news to Montague, who is at his house at Bockmer. We have half a dozen outriders and my granddaughters Katherine and Winifred come with me to their family home.

We ride towards the familiar fields and trees of Montague’s lands and then I see, coming towards us, the rippling royal standard at the head of a guard, riding fast. The captain of my guard shouts: “Halt!” and “Stand by!” as we give way to the king’s men on the highway, as all good subjects must do.

There are a dozen of them, dressed for riding but wearing breastplates and carrying swords and lances. The rider at the front has the royal standard of the three fleurs-de-lys and the three lions, which he dips in salute to my standard as he sees us waiting for him to pass. They are traveling fast, at a punishing sitting trot, and at the center of the cavalcade is a prisoner, a man, bare-headed with his jerkin torn at the shoulder, a bruise darkening his cheekbone, his hands tied behind him and his feet lashed under the horse’s belly.

“God save me,” Geoffrey breathes. “It’s Hugh Holland, the corn merchant.”

The round, smiling face of the London merchant is blenched and pale, his hands gripping the crupper behind him to hold himself on the swiftly moving horse, as he is badly jolted with the hammering pace.

They ride past us without slowing. The captain throws us a swift suspicious glare, as if he thinks we might have ridden to rescue Hugh Holland. I raise my hand to recognize his authority and this draws Hugh’s attention. He sees our standard and my men’s livery, and shouts out to Geoffrey: “Keep on your way, for you’ll come after me!”

In the noise of the horses’ bits and the jostle of the riders, in the confusion of the dust and the rush of their passing, they are gone before Geoffrey can reply. He turns to me, white-faced, and says: “But Cromwell was clear. He was satisfied. We explained.”

“This might be something else altogether,” I say, though I don’t think that it is. “Let’s get to Montague’s house and ask your brother.”

BOCKMER HOUSE, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, SUMMER 1538

Montague’s house is in uproar. The king’s men broke tables, settles, and benches in the great hall when they arrested Hugh Holland, and he fought against them and ran around the hall as they crashed after him like clumsy hounds after a terrified deer.

My daughter-in-law Jane has gone to her private room in tears. Montague is supervising the servants setting up the tables in the hall and trying to make light of it all. But I can tell that he is shaken when Geoffrey bursts in shouting: “Why have they taken him? What reason did they give?”

“They don’t have to give a reason, Geoffrey. You know that.”

“But Cromwell himself assured me!”

“Indeed. And the king pardoned Robert Aske.”

“Hush,” I say instantly. “There is some mistake here, there is no need for us to fear. This is between Hugh Holland and the law. Nothing to do with us.”

“They searched my private rooms,” Montague says tightly, turning away from the men who are picking up the scattered pewter. “They tore my house apart. It is to do with us.”

“What did they find?” Geoffrey whispers.

“Nothing,” Montague says tightly. “I burn my letters as soon as I have read them.” He turns to me. “You keep nothing, do you, Lady Mother? You burn them as you read?”

I nod. “I do.”

“Nothing as a keepsake? Not even from Reginald?”

I shake my head. “Nothing. Ever.”

Geoffrey is pale. “I have some papers,” he confesses. “I have kept some papers.”

Montague rounds on him. “What?” he demands. “No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Fool! You’re a fool, Geoffrey. Get them destroyed. I don’t want to know how.”

He takes me by the arm to lead me from the hall. I hesitate; this is my son, my darling son.

“Send the chaplain, John Collins,” I say quickly to Geoffrey over my shoulder. “You can trust him. Send him to your steward or, better, to Constance and tell her to burn everything in your room.”

Geoffrey nods, white-faced, and scurries out.

“Why is he such a fool?” Montague demands, dragging me up the stairs to his wife’s presence chamber. “He should never keep anything, he knows that.”

“He’s not a fool,” I say, catching my breath and making the men pause before opening the door. “But he loves the Church as it was. He was raised at Syon Abbey, it was our refuge. You can’t blame him for loving his home. He was a little boy and we had nothing, we lived off the Church as if it were our family. And he loves the princess, as I do. He can’t help but show it.”

“Not in these times,” Montague says shortly. “We can’t afford to show our love. Not for a moment. The king is a dangerous man, Lady Mother. You never know these days how he will take something. One minute he’s suspicious and anxious and the next he’s draped around your shoulder and is your best friend. He watches me like he could eat me up, gobble me for his pleasure; and then he sings ‘Pastime with Good Company’ and it’s like the old days. You never know where you are with him.

“But he always remembers—he never forgets—that his throne was won on a battlefield by chance and by treason. Chance and treason can turn against him, just as easily. And he has one frail son in a cradle and no one who would defend him. And he knows that there is a curse, and he knows that it justly falls on his house.”

Montague’s wife, Jane, is frightened and crying in her room as I enter with Katherine and Winifred, and she pulls them towards her, blesses them, and says that she will never forgive their father for exposing them to danger. Little Harry makes his bow to me and stands staunchly beside his father as if he is afraid of nothing.

“I don’t want to hear another word, Jane,” I say flatly to her. “Not another word.”

That checks her and she curtseys to me. “I am sorry, Lady Mother. It was a shock. And that terrible man running away from the guard, and they broke some glasses.”

“We must be glad that Lord Cromwell seized him if he is guilty, and if he is innocent he will be quickly freed,” I say stoutly. I drop my hand onto Harry’s straight little shoulder. “We have nothing to fear for we have always been loyal to the king.”

He looks up at me. “We are loyal cousins,” he volunteers.

“We are, and we always have been.”

Jane follows my cue and for the rest of the day we try to act as if we were making a normal family visit. We dine in the great hall and the household pretends to be merry as we on the high table, looking down on them feasting and drinking, try to smile and chatter.

After dinner we send the children to their rooms, leave the household to their drink and gambling, and go into Montague’s private chambers. Geoffrey cannot settle, cannot sit in one place. He prowls about from window to fireplace, from settle to stool.

“I had a copy of a sermon,” he says suddenly. “But it was preached before the king! There can be no harm in that. And anyway, Collins will have burned it.”

“Peace.” Montague looks up at him.

“I had some letters from Bishop Stokesley, but there was nothing in them,” he says.

“You should have burned them the moment that you got them,” Montague says. “As I told you. Years ago.”

“There was nothing in them!” Geoffrey exclaims.

“But he, in turn, may have written something to someone else. You don’t want to bring trouble to his door, nor for his other friends to bring trouble to yours.”

“Oh, do you burn everything?” Geoffrey suddenly demands, thinking that he will catch out his brother.

“Yes, as I told you, years ago,” Montague replies calmly. He looks at me. “You do, don’t you, Lady Mother?”

“Yes,” I say. “There is nothing at any of my homes for them to find, should they ever come to look.”

“Why should they ever come to look?” Jane says irritably.

“Because we are who we are,” I answer her. “And you know that, Jane. You were born a Neville yourself. You know what it means. We are the Plantagenets. We are the white rose, and the king knows that the people love us.”

She turns her bitter face away. “I thought I was marrying into a great house,” she says. “I didn’t think that I was joining a family in danger.”

“Greatness means danger,” I say simply. “And I think you knew that then, as now.”

Geoffrey walks to the window, looks out, turns back to the room. “I think I’ll go to London,” he says. “I’ll go and I’ll see Thomas Cromwell and find out what he is doing with Hugh Holland, and tell him,” he snatches a breath, he has quite run out of air, “tell him,” he says more strongly, “that there is nothing against Holland and nothing against me, and nothing against any of us.”

“I’ll come with you,” Montague says, surprisingly.

“Will you?” I ask, as Jane suspends her needle and looks up at her husband as if she would forbid it. Her gaze flicks to me as if she would ask me to send my youngest son without a protector, so that she can keep her husband safe at home.

“Yes,” Montague says. “Cromwell needs to know that he cannot play cat and mouse with us. He is a great cat in the king’s barn, none greater. But still, I think we have credit that we can draw on. And he needs to know he does not frighten us.” He looks at Geoffrey’s aghast expression. “He does not frighten me,” he corrects himself.

“What do you think, Lady Mother?” Jane prompts me to forbid my two sons going together.

“I think it’s a very good idea,” I say calmly. “We have nothing to hide and we have nothing to fear. We have done nothing against the law. We love the Church and honor the princess but that’s no crime. Not even Cromwell can compose a law that makes that a crime. You go, Son Montague, you go with my blessing.”

I stay at Bockmer House for a week, waiting for news with Jane and the children. Montague sends us a letter the moment that he arrives in London, but after that there is silence.

“I think I’ll go to London myself,” I say to her. “And I will write to you as soon as I have news.”

“Please do, Lady Mother,” she says stiffly. “I am always glad to know that you are in good health.”

She comes down with me to the stable yard and stands by my horse as I wearily climb from mounting block to the pillion saddle behind my Master of Horse. In the stable yard my companions mount their horses: my two granddaughters, Jane’s girls, Katherine and Winifred. Harry will stay home with his mother, though he is fidgeting from one foot to another, trying to catch my eye, hoping that I will take him with me. I smile down at her pale face. “Don’t be frightened, Jane,” I say. “We’ve got through worse than this.”

“Have we?”

I think of the history of my family, of the defeats and battles, the betrayals and executions which stain our history and serve as fingerposts to our ceaseless march on and off the throne of England. “Oh yes,” I say. “Much worse.”

L’ERBER, LONDON, SUMMER 1538

Montague comes to me the moment that I arrive in London. We dine in the hall as if this was an ordinary visit, he talks pleasantly of the court and the good health of the baby prince, and then we withdraw to the private room behind the high table and close the door.

“Geoffrey’s in the Tower,” he says quietly the moment that I am seated, as if he feared I would fall at the news. He takes my hand and looks into my stunned face. “Try to be calm, Lady Mother. He’s not accused of anything, there is nothing that they can put against him. This is how Cromwell works, remember. He frightens people into rash words.”

I feel as if I am choking, I put my hand to my heart and I can feel the hammering of my pulse under my fingers like a drum. I snatch at a breath and find that I cannot breathe. Montague’s worried face looking into mine becomes blurred as my eyesight grows dim, I even think for a moment that I am dying of fear.

Then there is a gust of warm air on my face, and I am breathing again, and Montague says: “Say nothing, Lady Mother, until you have your breath, for here are Katherine and Winifred that I called to help you when you were taken faint.”

He holds my hand and pinches my fingertip so that I say nothing but smile at my granddaughters and say: “Oh, I am quite well now. I must have overeaten at dinner for I had such a gripping pain. It serves me right for taking so much of the pudding.”

“Are you sure that you are well?” Katherine says, looking from me to her father. “You’re very pale?”

“I’m quite well now,” I say. “Would you bring me a little wine and Montague can mull it for me, and I shall be well in a moment.”

They bustle off to fetch it, while Montague closes the window, and the sounds of evening on a London street are cut off. I straighten a shawl around my shoulders and thank them as they come back with the wine and curtsey and go.

We say nothing while Montague plunges the heated rod into the silver jug and it seethes and the scent of the hot wine and spices fills the little room. He hands me a cup and pours his own, and pulls up a stool to sit at my feet, as if he were a boy again, in the boyhood that he never had.

“I am sorry,” I say. “Behaving like a fool.”

“I was shocked myself. Are you all right now?”

“Yes. You can tell me. You can tell me what is happening.”

“When we got here, we asked to see Cromwell, and he put us off for days. In the end I met him as if by accident, and told him that there were rumors about us, contrary to our good name, and that I would be glad to know that Gervase Tyndale had his tongue slit as a warning to others. He didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no, but he asked me to bring Geoffrey to his house.”

Montague leans forward and pushes the logs of the fire with the toe of his riding boot. “You know what the Cromwell house is like,” he says. “Apprentices everywhere, clerks everywhere, you can’t tell who is who, and Cromwell walking through the middle of it all as if he is a lodger.”

“I’ve never been to his home,” I say disdainfully. “We’re not on dining terms.”

“Well, no,” Montague says with a smile. “But at any rate, it is a busy, friendly, interesting place, and the people waiting to see him would make your eyes stand out of your head! Everyone of every sort and condition, all of them with business for him or reports for him, or spying for him—who knows?”

“And you and Geoffrey saw him?”

“He talked with us and then he asked us to dine with him, and we stayed and ate a good dinner. Then he had to go and he asked Geoffrey to come back the next day, as there were some few things he wanted to clear up.”

I feel my chest become tight again, and I tap the base of my throat, as if to remind my heart to keep beating. “And Geoffrey went?”

“I told him to go. I told him to be completely frank. Cromwell had read the message that Holland took to Reginald. He knew it wasn’t about the price of wheat in Berkshire last summer. He knew we warned him that Francis Bryan had been sent to capture him. He accused Geoffrey of disloyalty.”

“But not treason?”

“No, not treason. It’s not treason to tell a man, your own brother, that someone is coming to kill him.”

“And Geoffrey confessed?”

Montague sighs. “He denied it to start with, but then it was obvious that Holland had told Cromwell both messages. Geoffrey’s message to Reginald, and Reginald’s replies to us.”

“But still they are not treason.” I find I am clinging to this fact.

“No. But obviously he must have tortured Holland to get the messages.”

I swallow, thinking of the round-faced man that came to my house, and the bruise on his cheek when he was hurried past us on the road. “Would Cromwell dare to torture a London merchant?” I ask. “What about his guild? What about his friends? What about the City merchants? Don’t they defend their own?”

“Cromwell must think he’s on to something. And apparently, he does dare, and that’s why, yesterday, he arrested Geoffrey.”

“He won’t . . . he won’t . . .” I find I can’t name my fear.

“No, he won’t torture Geoffrey, he wouldn’t dare touch one of us. The king’s council would not allow it. But Geoffrey is in a panic. I don’t know what he might say.”

“He’d never say anything that would hurt us,” I say. I find I am smiling, even in this danger, at the thought of my son’s loving, faithful heart. “He’d never say anything that would hurt any of us.”

“No, and besides, at the very worst, all we have done is warn a brother that he is in danger. Nobody could blame us for that.”

“What can we do?” I ask. I want to rush to the Tower at once, but my knees are weak, and I can’t even rise.

“We’re not allowed to visit; only his wife can go into the Tower to see him. So I’ve sent for Constance. She’ll be here tomorrow. And after she’s seen him and made sure that he’s not said anything, I’ll go to Cromwell again. I might even speak with the king when he comes back, if I can catch him in a good mood.”

“Does Henry know of this?”

“It’s my hope he knows nothing. It might be that Cromwell has overreached himself and that the king will be furious with him when he finds out. His temper is so unreliable these days that he lashes out at Cromwell as often as he agrees with him. If I can catch him at the right time, if he is feeling loving towards us, and irritated by Cromwell, he might take this as an insult to us, his kinsmen, and knock Cromwell down for it.”

“He is so changeable?”

“Lady Mother, none of us ever knows from dawn to dusk what mood he will be in, nor when or why it will suddenly change.”

I spend the rest of the evening and most of the night on my knees in my chapel, praying to my God for the safety of my son; but I can’t be sure that He is listening. I think of the hundreds, thousands of mothers on their knees in England tonight, praying for the safety of their sons, or for the souls of their sons who have died for less than Geoffrey and Montague have done.

I think of the abbey doors banging open in the moonlight of the English summer night, of the sacred chests and holy goods tumbled onto shining cobbles in darkened squares as Cromwell’s men pull down the shrines and throw out the relics. They say that Thomas Becket’s shrine, which the king himself approached on his knees, has been broken up and the rich offerings and the magnificent jewels have disappeared into Lord Cromwell’s new Court of Augmentations, and the saint’s sacred bones have been lost.

After a little while I sit back on my heels and feel the ache in my back. I cannot bring myself to trouble God; there is too much for Him to put right tonight. I think of Him, old and weary as I am old and weary, feeling as I do, that there is too much to put right and that England, His own special country, has gone all wrong.

L’ERBER, LONDON, AUTUMN 1538

Constance goes straight to the Tower as soon as she arrives in London, and then comes to L’Erber. I take her into my privy chamber and give her a cup of mulled ale, take her gloves from her cold hands, and unwrap her cape and her shawls from her thin shoulders. She looks from me to Montague as if she thinks the two of us can save her.

“I’ve never seen him like this before,” she says. “I don’t know what I can do.”

“What is he like?” Montague asks gently.

“Crying,” she says. “Raging round the room. Banging on the door but no one comes. Taking hold of the bars of the window and shaking them as if he thinks he might bring down the walls of the Tower. And then he turned and fell on his knees and wept and said he could not bear it.”

I am horrified. “Have they hurt him?”

She shakes her head. “They’ve not touched his body—but his pride . . .”

“Did he say what they put to him?” Montague asks patiently.

She shakes her head. “Don’t you hear me? He’s raving. He’s in a frenzy.”

“He’s not coherent?”

I can hear the hope in Montague’s voice.

“He’s like a madman,” she says. “He’s praying and crying, and then he suddenly declares that he’s done nothing, and then he says that everyone always blames him, and then he says he should have run away but that you stopped him, that you always stop him, and then he says that he cannot stay in England anyway for the debts.” Her eyes slide to me. “He says that his mother should pay his debts.”

“Could you tell if he has been properly questioned? Has he been charged with any offense?”

She shakes her head. “We have to send him clothes and food,” she says. “He’s cold. There’s no fire in his room, and he has only his riding cape. And he threw that down on the floor and stamped on it.”

“I’ll do that at once,” I say.

“But you don’t know if he has been properly questioned, nor what he has said?” Montague confirms.

“He says that he has done nothing,” she repeats. “He says that they come and shout at him every day. But he says nothing for he has done nothing.”

Geoffrey’s ordeal goes on another day. I send my steward with a parcel of his warm clothes and with orders to buy food from the bakehouse near the Tower and take in a proper meal for my boy, although he comes back and says that the guards took the clothes but he thought they would keep them, and that he was not allowed to order a meal.

“I’ll go with Constance tomorrow, and see if I can command them to take him a dinner at least,” I say to Montague, as I enter the echoing presence chamber at L’Erber. It is empty of anyone, no petitioners, no tenants, no friends. “And she can take in a winter cape and some linen for him, and some bedding.”

He is standing at the window, his head bowed, in silence.

“Did you see the king?” I ask him. “Could you speak to him for Geoffrey? Did he know that Geoffrey is under arrest?”

“He knew already,” Montague says dully. “There was nothing I could say, for he knew already.”

“Cromwell acted with his authority?”

“That we’ll never know. Lady Mother. Because the king didn’t know about Geoffrey from Cromwell. He knew from Geoffrey himself. Apparently, Geoffrey has written to him.”

“Written to the king?”

“Yes. Cromwell showed me the letter. Geoffrey wrote to the king that if the king will order him some comforts, then he will tell all he knows, even though it touches his own mother, or brother.”

For a moment I hear the words but I cannot make out the meaning. Then I understand. “No!” I am horror-struck. “It can’t be true. It must be a forgery. Cromwell must be tricking you! It’s what he would do!”

“No. I saw the note. It was Geoffrey’s hand. I am not mistaken. Those were his exact words.”

“He offered to betray me and you for some warm clothes and a good dinner?”

“It seems so.”

“Montague, he must have lost his mind. He would never do such a thing, he would never hurt me. He must be witless. My God, my poor boy, he must be in a delirium.”

“Let’s hope so,” Montague says spitefully. “For if he is mad, he cannot testify.”

Constance comes back from the Tower supported by two manservants, unable to walk, unable to speak.

“Is he ill?” I take her by the shoulders and stare into her face as if I can see what is wrong with my son by the blank horror of his wife’s expression. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter, Constance? Tell me?”

She shakes her head. She moans. “No, no.”

“Has he lost his wits?”

She hides her face in her hands and sobs.

“Constance, speak to me! Have they racked him?” I name my worst fear.

“No, no.”

“He doesn’t have the Sweat, does he?”

She raises her head. “Lady Mother, he tried to kill himself. He took a knife from the table and he threw himself on it and stabbed himself nearly to his heart.”

Abruptly, I let her go and grab a tall chair to support myself. “Is it fatal? A fatal wound? My boy?”

She nods. “It’s very bad. They wouldn’t let me stay with him. I saw thick bandages around his chest, they had him strapped twice. He didn’t speak. He couldn’t speak. He was lying on his bed, blood seeping through the bandages. They told me what he had done and he didn’t speak. He just turned his face to the wall.”

“He has seen a physician? They had bandaged him?”

She nods.

Montague comes into the room behind us, his face ghastly, his smile twisted. “A knife from his dinner table?”

“Yes,” she says.

“And did he have a good dinner?”

It is a question so odd, so strange to ask in the middle of this tragedy, that she turns and stares at him.

She does not know what he means; but I do.

“He had a very good dinner, several dishes, and there was a fire in the grate, and someone had sent him new clothes,” she replies.

“Our clothes?”

“No,” she says, bewildered. “Someone had sent him some comforts, new things; but they didn’t tell me who.”

Montague nods and goes from the room without another word, without looking at me.

Next morning, at a quiet breakfast in my chamber, the two of us close together at the little table before my bedroom fire, Montague tells me that his manservant did not come home last night, and nobody knows where he is.

“What d’you think?” I ask quietly.

“I think that Geoffrey has named him as a servant who takes letters and messages for me, and that he has been arrested,” Montague says quietly.

“Son, I cannot believe that Geoffrey would betray us, or any of our people.”

“Lady Mother, he promised the king that he would betray us both for warm clothes, firewood, and a good dinner. He was served a good dinner yesterday and they have taken his breakfast in to him today. Right now he is being questioned by William Fitzwilliam, the Earl of Southampton. He is leading the inquiry. It would have been better for Geoffrey, and better for us, if he had put the knife in his heart and driven it home.”

“Don’t!” I raise my voice to Montague. “Don’t say that! Don’t say that foolish thing. Don’t say that wicked thing. You speak like a child who knows nothing of death. It is never, never better to die. Never think that it is. Son, I know you are afraid. Don’t you think I am too? I saw my brother go into that very Tower and he only came out to his death. My own father died in there, charged with treason. Don’t you think that the Tower is a constant horror to me, and to think that Geoffrey is in there is like the worst of nightmares? And now I think that they might take me? And now I think that they might take you? My son? My heir?” I fall silent at the sight of his face.

“You know, sometimes I think of it as our family home,” he says very quietly, so quietly that I can hardly hear him. “Our oldest and truest family seat. And that the Tower graveyard is our family tomb, the Plantagenet vault where we are all, in the end, going.”

Constance visits her husband again but finds him in a haze of fever from his wound. He is well nursed and well served, but when she goes to see him there is a woman in the room—the one who usually comes to lay out the dead—and a guard at the door and he can say nothing to her in private.

“But he has nothing to say,” she says quietly to me. “He didn’t look at me, he didn’t ask after the children, he didn’t even ask after you. He turned his face to the wall and he wept.”

Montague’s servant Jerome does not reappear at L’Erber. We have to assume that he is either under arrest or he is held in Cromwell’s house, waiting for the day when he will offer evidence.

And then, just after Terce, the doors to the street are flung open and the yeomen of the guard march into the entrance hall, to arrest my son Montague.

We were going to breakfast, and Montague turns as the golden leaves from the vine blow in from the street about the feet of the guards. “Shall I come at once, or take my breakfast first?” he asks, as if it is a small matter of everyone’s convenience.

“Better come now, sir,” the captain says a little awkwardly. He bows to me and to Constance. “Begging your pardon, your ladyship, my lady.”

I go to Montague. “I’ll get food and clothing to you,” I promise him. “And I’ll do what I can. I’ll go to the king.”

“No. Go back to Bisham,” he says quickly. “Keep far away from the Tower. Go today, Lady Mother.”

His face is very grave; he looks far older than his forty-six years. I think that they took my brother when he was only a little boy, and killed him when he was a young man; and now here is my son, and it has taken all this long time, all these many years, for them to come for him. I am dizzy with fear, I cannot think what I should do. “God bless you, my son,” I say.

He kneels before me, as he has done a thousand, thousand times, and I put my hand on his head. “God bless us all,” he says simply. “My father lived his life trying to avoid this day. Me too. Perhaps it will end well.”

And he gets up and goes out of the house without a hat or a cape or gloves.

I am in the stable yard, watching them pack the wagons for us to leave, when one of the Courtenay men brings me a message from Gertrude, wife to Henry Courtenay, my cousin.

They have arrested Henry this morning. I will come to you when I can.

I cannot wait for her, so I tell the guards and the household wagons to go ahead, down the frozen roads to Warblington, and that I will follow later on my old horse. I take half a dozen men and my granddaughters Katherine and Winifred and ride through the narrow streets to Gertrude’s beautiful London house, the Manor of the Rose. The City is getting ready for Christmas, the chestnut sellers are standing behind glowing braziers stirring the scorching nuts and the evocative scents of the season—mulled wine, cinnamon, woodsmoke, burnt sugar, nutmeg—are hanging in trails of gray smoke on the frosty air.

I leave the horses at the great street door, and my granddaughters and I walk into the hall and then into Gertrude’s presence chamber. It is oddly quiet and empty. Her steward comes forward to greet me.

“Countess, I am sorry to see you here.”

“Why?” I ask. “My cousin Lady Courtenay was coming to see me. I have come to say good-bye to her. I am going into the country.” Little Winifred comes close to me and I take her small hand for comfort.

“My lord has been arrested.”

“I knew that. I am certain that he will be released at once. I know that he is innocent of anything.”

The steward bows. “I know, my lady. There is no more loyal servant to the king than my lord. We all know that. We all said that, when they asked us.”

“So where is my cousin Gertrude?”

He hesitates. “I am sorry, your ladyship. But she has been arrested too. She has gone to the Tower.”

I suddenly understand that the silence of this room is filled with the echoes of a place that has been abruptly cleared. There are pieces of needlework on the window seat, and an open book on the reader in the corner of the room.

I look around and I realize that this tyranny is like the other Tudor disease, the Sweat. It comes quickly, it takes those you love without warning, and you cannot defend against it. I have come too late, I should have been earlier. I have not defended her, I did not save Montague, or Geoffrey. I did not speak up for Robert Aske, nor for Tom Darcy, John Hussey, Thomas More, nor for John Fisher.

“I’ll take Edward home with me,” I say, thinking of Gertrude’s son. He is only twelve, he must be frightened. They should have sent him to me at once, the minute his parents were arrested. “Fetch him for me. Tell him that his cousin is here to take him home while his mother and father are detained.”

Inexplicably, the steward’s eyes fill with tears, and then he tells me why the house is so quiet. “He’s gone,” he says. “They took him too. The little lord. He’s gone to the Tower.”

WARBLINGTON CASTLE, HAMPSHIRE, AUTUMN 1538

My steward comes into my private chamber, tapping on the door and then stepping in, closing the door behind him as if to keep something secret. Outside I can hear the buzz of the people who have come to see me. I am alone, trying to find the courage to go out and face the inquiries about rents, boundaries of land, the crops that should be grown next season, the tithe that should be paid, the hundred little worries of a great estate that has been my pride and joy for all my life but now seems like a pretty cage, where I have worked and lived and been happy while outside the country I love has slipped down to hell.

“What is it?”

His face is scowling with worry. “The Earl of Southampton and the Bishop of Ely to see you, my lady,” he says.

I rise to my feet, putting my hand to the small of my back where a nagging pain comes and goes with the weather. I think briefly, cravenly, how very tired I am. “Do they say what they want?”

He shakes his head. I force myself to stand very straight, and I go out into my presence chamber.

I have known William Fitzwilliam since he played with Prince Henry in the nursery, and now he is a newly made earl. I know how pleased he will be with his honors. He bows to me but there is no warmth in his face. I smile at him and turn to the Bishop of Ely, Thomas Goodrich.

“My lords, you are very welcome to Warblington Castle,” I say easily. “I hope that you will dine with us? And will you stay tonight?”

William Fitzwilliam has the grace to look slightly uncomfortable. “We are here to ask you some questions,” he says. “The king commands that you answer the truth upon your honor.”

I nod, still smiling.

“And we will stay until we have a satisfactory answer,” says the bishop.

“You must stay as long as you wish,” I say insincerely. I nod to my steward. “See that the lords’ people are housed, and their horses stabled,” I say. “And set extra places at dinner, and the best bedchambers for our two honored guests.”

He bows and goes out. I look around my crowded presence chamber. There is a murmur, nothing clear, nothing stated, just a sense that the tenants and petitioners in the room do not like the sight of these great gentlemen riding down from London to question me in my own house. Nobody speaks a disloyal word but there is a rustle of whispers like a low growl.

William looks uneasy. “Shall we go to a more convenient room?” he asks.

I look around and smile at my people. “I cannot talk with you today,” I say clearly, so that the poorest widow at the back can hear. “I am sorry for that. I have to answer some questions for these great lords. I will tell them, as I tell you, as you know, that neither I nor my sons have ever thought, done, or dreamed anything which was disloyal to the king. And that none of you has ever done anything either. And none of us ever will.”

“Easily said,” the bishop says unpleasantly.

“Because true,” I overrule him, and lead the way into my private room.

Under the oriel window there is a table where I sometimes sit to write, and four chairs. I gesture that they may sit where they please, and take a chair myself, my back to the wintry light, facing the room.

William Fitzwilliam tells me, as if it were a matter of mild interest, that he has been questioning my sons Geoffrey and Montague. I nod at the information, and I ignore the swift pang of murderous rage at the thought of this upstart interrogating my boys, my Plantagenet boys. He says that they have both spoken freely to him; he implies he knows everything about us, and then he presses me to admit that I have heard them speak against the king.

I absolutely deny it, and I say that I have never said a word against His Majesty either. I say that my boys have never said that they wanted to join Reginald, and that I have written no secret letters to my most disappointing son. I know nothing of Geoffrey’s steward Hugh Holland except that he left Geoffrey’s service and went into business, London, I think, a merchant, I think. He may have carried family letters with family news to Flanders for us. I know that Geoffrey went to Lord Cromwell and explained everything to his satisfaction, that Holland’s goods were returned to him. I am glad of that. Lord Cromwell has the keeping of the safety of the king, we all owe him our thanks while he does that great duty. My son was glad to be accountable to him. I have never received secret letters, and so I have never burned secret letters.

Again and again they ask me the same things, and again and again I tell them simply what I have told them already: I have done nothing, my sons have done nothing, and they can prove nothing against us.

Then I rise from the table and tell them that I am accustomed to praying at this time, in my family chapel. We pray here in the new way, and there is a Bible in English for anyone to read. After prayers, we will dine. If they lack anything in their rooms, they must ask, and I shall be delighted to ensure their comfort.

A pedlar with Christmas fairings coming from the London goose fair tells the maids at the kitchen door that my cousin Sir Edward Neville has been arrested and so has Montague’s chaplain John Collins, the Chancellor of Chichester Cathedral, George Croftes, a priest, and several of their servants. I tell the maid who whispers this to me to buy whatever fairings she likes and not to listen to gossip. This is nothing to do with us.

We serve a good dinner to our guests, and after the dinner we have carol singing and my ladies and maids dance, then I excuse myself and go outside as the sky is turning gray, to walk around the ricks. It comforts me, when my precious sons are in danger, to see that the straw and the hay are battened down against the winds, and that everything is dry and safe. I step into the barn, the cows shifting quietly among the straw at one end and my valuable handsome tup at the other, and I smell the scent of warm animals safely penned up against cold weather. I wish I could stay here, all night, in the light of the little horn lantern with the quiet breathing of animals, and perhaps on Christmas Eve at midnight I would see them kneel in memory of that other stable, where the animals knelt at the crib and the Light of the World founded the Church which I have honored all my life and which is not, and has never been, under the command of any king.

Next day, William and the bishop come to my room again and ask me the same questions. I give them the same answers, and they carefully write them down and send them to London. We can do this every day until the end of the world and the harrowing of hell. I am never going to say anything that would throw suspicion on either of my imprisoned sons. It is true that I am weary of my inquisitors and their repeated questions, but I will not fail because of weariness. I will not be putting my head on the block and desiring eternal rest. They can ask me until the dead step out of their graves, they will find me as mute as my headless brother. I am an old woman, sixty-five years old now, but I am not ready for the grave, and I am not so weak as to be bullied by men whom I knew as toddlers. I will say nothing.

In the Tower, the prisoners wait too. The newly arrested churchmen break down and acknowledge that although they swore the king’s oath they never believed in their hearts that Henry was supreme head of the Church. They promise that they did nothing more than break their own hearts over their false swearing; they raised neither money nor men, they did not plot nor speak. Silently, they wished for the restoration of the monasteries and the return of the old ways. Innocently, they prayed for better times.

Edward Neville, my cousin, did only a little more than they. Once, only once, he told Geoffrey that he wished the princess could come to the throne and Reginald could come home. Geoffrey tells the inquisitors of this exchange. God forgive him, my beloved, false-hearted, fainthearted son tells them what his cousin once said, in confidence, years ago, speaking to a man whom he trusted as a brother.

My cousin Henry Courtenay cannot be charged for they can find nothing against him. He may have spoken with Neville, or with my son Montague; but neither of them says anything about any conversation, and they confess nothing themselves. They remain true to each other, as kinsmen should. Neither one says anything about the other, nor confesses anything on his own account. Not even when they are told that the other has betrayed him. They smile like the true chivalric lords they are, they know a lie when it is told against the honor of their family. They keep their silence.

Of course, my cousin Henry’s wife Gertrude was well known to have visited the Holy Maid of Kent and to pity Queen Katherine; but she has already been pardoned for this. Still, they keep her a prisoner and question her every day as to what the Maid of Kent told her about the death of the king and the failure of his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Her son Edward lives in a little room beside hers and is allowed a tutor and to take exercise in the gardens. I think this is a good sign that they plan to release him soon, for surely they would not keep him at his lessons if they did not think he would someday go to university?

All that they have against Henry Courtenay is one sentence; he is recorded as saying: “I trust to see a merry world one day.” When I hear this, I go to my chapel and put my head in my hands to think of my cousin Henry hoping for a merry world one day, and that this commonplace optimism should be cited as evidence against him.

As I kneel before the altar, I think, God bless you, Henry Courtenay; and I cannot disagree. God bless you, Henry, and all prisoners who are held for their faith and for their beliefs, wherever they are tonight. God bless you, Henry Courtenay, for I think as you did, and Tom Darcy did. Like you, I still hope for a merry world one day.

Even before my son and his cousin Henry Courtenay come to trial they put Lord Delaware into the Tower for refusing to sit on a jury to try them. There is nothing against him, not even a whisper, nothing that Thomas Cromwell can invent; Delaware simply shows his distaste for these trials. He swore he would not try another old friend after sending Tom Darcy to the scaffold, and now he refuses to sit in judgment on my son. They hold him as a prisoner for a day or two, scouring London for gossip against him, and then they have to release him to his house and command him to stay indoors.

Of course I cannot go to him, I cannot even send a message to thank him while my own inquisitors sit with me between breakfast and dinner and ask me over and over again if I remember eighteen years ago, when Montague said something while walking in the garden with Henry Courtenay, if the clerk of my kitchens Thomas Standish sang songs of hope and rebellion. If anybody mentioned Maytime. If anyone said that May would never come. But my stable boy runs an errand for me to L’Erber, and when Lord Delaware is walking in his garden the next day, he finds, flung over the garden wall and lying in his path, a white rosebud made of silk, and he knows that I am grateful to him.

“I am afraid, Countess, that you are to be my guest,” William says to me at dinner.

“No,” I say. “I have to stay here. There is much work to be done on an estate this large, and my presence here keeps the country calm.”

“We’ll have to take that risk,” the bishop says, smiling at his own humor. “For you are to be imprisoned at Cowdray. You can keep them calm in Sussex. And please, do not be troubled about your estate and your goods, for we are seizing them.”

“My home?” I ask. “You are seizing Warblington Castle?”

“Yes,” William says. “Please be ready to leave at once.”

I think of Hugh Holland’s white face as his horse was dragged from Bockmer to London with him strapped to the saddle. “I shall need a litter,” I say. “I cannot ride all that way.”

“You can ride pillion behind my commander,” William says coldly.

“William Fitzwilliam, I am old enough to be your mother, you should not treat me so harshly,” I suddenly burst out, and then I see the quickening of interest in his face.

“Your sons are far worse than me,” he says. “For they are confessing that they are rebels against the king. That is harsh treatment to a mother for they will be your undoing.”

I draw back, smooth my gown, and bite back my temper. “They are not saying any such thing,” I say quietly. “And I know nothing against them.”

It takes us two days to ride south to Midhurst, the roads are so bad with mud and flooding, and we lose our way half a dozen times. Only last year we would have been able to stay in comfort at one of the great monasteries on the way, and the monks would have sent a lad with us to put us on the right road, but now we ride past a great abbey church and it is dark, with the stained-glass windows smashed for the lead, and the slates stolen from the roof.

There is nowhere to stay at night but a dirty old inn at Petersfield, and the beggars at the kitchen door and in the street bear witness with their hunger and their despair to the closure of the abbey kitchens and the abbey hospital, and the abbey charities.

COWDRAY HOUSE, SUSSEX, WINTER 1538

It is a beautiful frosty evening as we reach the broad fields before Cowdray and ride beneath the leafless trees. The sky is palest pink as the sun sinks behind the thick forested folds of the Rother valley. I miss my own fields as I see the resting pastures of Cowdray. I have to trust that I will see them again, that I will get home, that my sons will come home to me, that this cold sunset will pass into darkness and then a dawn and tomorrow will be a better day for me and mine.

This is Fitzwilliam’s new house, and he has all the pride of a man who has entered into a new property. We dismount stiffly before the open door which leads into a dark paneled hall and there is Mabel Clifford, his wife, with her ladies around her, in her best gown, an English hood crushed low on her head, her face dark with bad temper.

I give her the slightest of curtseys and I watch her begrudgingly reply. Clearly, she knows that there is no need for her best manners; but she does not know exactly how she is to behave.

“I have made the tower rooms ready,” she says, speaking past me to her husband as he comes into the hall, throwing off his cape and pulling off his gloves.

“Good,” he says. He turns to me. “You will dine in your rooms and you will be served by your people. You can walk in the gardens or by the river if you wish, as long as two of my men are with you. You are not allowed to ride.”

“Ride where?” I ask insolently.

He checks. “Ride anywhere.”

“Obviously, I don’t wish to ride anywhere but to my home,” I say. “If I had wanted to go overseas, as you seem to suggest, I would have done so long ago. I have lived at my home for many years.” I let my gaze go to his wife’s flushed, angry face and the new gilding on their woodwork. “Many years. My family have been there for centuries. And I hope to live there for many years yet. I’m no rebel, and I don’t have rebel blood.”

This enrages Mabel, as I knew it would, since her father was in hiding for most of his life as a traitor to my family, the Plantagenets. “So please show me to my rooms at once, for I’m tired.”

William turns and gives an order and a server of the household leads the way to the side of the building, where the tower rooms are set one above the other around a circular stair. I mount it wearily, slowly, every bone in my body aching. But still, I am not allowed to go alone, and I will not hold the handrail and haul myself upward when someone is watching. William comes with me, and when I am longing to sit before a fire and eat my dinner, he asks me again what I know of Reginald, and whether Geoffrey was planning to run away to him.

Next morning, before breakfast, while I am saying my prayers, he comes to me again, and this time he has papers in his hand. As soon as we left my home at Warblington, they searched my rooms, turning them upside down for anything that might be used against me. They found a letter that I was in the middle of writing to my son Montague; but it says nothing but that he should be loyal to the king and trust in God. They have questioned the clerk of my kitchen, poor Thomas Standish, and made him say that he thought that Geoffrey might slip away. William makes much of this, but I remember the conversation and interrupt him: “You are mistaken, my lord. This was after Geoffrey had hurt himself while held in the Tower. We were afraid that he might die, that was why Master Standish said that he feared Geoffrey might slip away.”

“I see you chop and change words, my lady,” William says angrily.

“Indeed, I don’t,” I say simply. “And I would rather have no words at all with you.”

I am ready for him to come to me again after breakfast but it is Mabel who comes to my privy chamber where I am listening to Katherine reading the collect for the day, and she says: “My lord has gone to London and will not question you today, madam.”

“I am glad of it,” I say quietly. “For it is weary work telling the truth over and over.”

“You won’t be glad of it when I tell you where he has gone,” she says in spiteful triumph.

I wait. I take Katherine’s hand.

“He has gone to give evidence against your sons at their trials. They will be charged with treason and sentenced to death,” she says.

This is Katherine’s father; but I keep her hand in a steady grip and the two of us look straight at Mabel Fitzwilliam. I am not going to weep in front of such a woman, and I am proud of my granddaughter’s composure. “Lady Fitzwilliam, you should be ashamed of yourself,” I say quietly. “No woman should be so heartless towards another woman’s grief. No woman should torment a man’s daughter as you are doing. No wonder that you cannot give your lord a child, for since you have no heart you probably have no womb either.”

Her cheeks flame red with temper. “I may have no sons, but very soon, neither will you,” she shouts, and whirls out of the room.

My son Montague goes before his friends and kinsmen sitting as his jury and is charged with speaking against the king, approving Reginald’s doings, and dreaming that the king was dead. It seems that now Cromwell may inquire into a man’s sleep. His confessor reported to Cromwell that one morning Montague said to him that he dreamed that his brother had come home and was happy. They have interrogated Montague’s sleep and found his dreams guilty. He pleads his innocence but is not allowed to speak in his own defense. Nobody is allowed to speak for him.

Geoffrey, the child whom I kept at my side when I sent his brothers away, my favorite child, my spoiled son, my baby, gives evidence against his brother Montague, and against his cousins Henry and Edward, and against us all. God forgive him. He says that his first choice was to kill himself rather than bear witness against his brother but that God so wrought on him that if he had ten brothers, or ten sons, he would bring them all to the peril of death rather than leave his country, his sovereign lord, and his own soul in danger. Geoffrey addresses his friends and kinsmen with tears in his eyes. “Let us die, we be but few, according to our deserts rather than our whole country be brought to ruin.”

What Montague thinks when Geoffrey argues in favor of his death, and for the death of our cousins and friends, I don’t know. I don’t think at all. I try very hard not to hear of his trial, and I try not to think what it means. I am on my knees in the little room at Cowdray where I have put my crucifix and my Bible, my clasped hands against my face, praying and praying that God will move the king to pity and that he will let my innocent son go, and send my poor witless son home to his wife. Behind me, Katherine and Winifred pray for their father, their faces dazed and fearful.

I live in silence in my rooms, looking out over the river meadows towards the high green of the South Downs, wishing I was at my home, wishing my sons were with me, wishing I was a young woman again and my life was constrained and my hopes were defined by my dull, safe husband, Sir Richard. I love him now as I failed to love him before. I think now that he set himself his life’s task to keep me safe, to keep all of us safe, and that I should have been more grateful. But I am old enough and wise enough to know that all regrets are futile, so I bend my head in my prayers and hope he hears that I acknowledge what he did, when he married a young woman from a family too close to the throne, and that I know what he did when he spent all his time moving us further and further away from its dangerous glamour. I too tried to keep us hidden; but we are the white rose—the bloom shines even in the darkest, thickest hedgerow; it can be seen even in the dark of night like a fallen moon, palely gleaming among thrusting leaves.

COWDRAY HOUSE, SUSSEX, DECEMBER 1538

In my room in the tower at Cowdray, I hear the household start to prepare for Christmas, just as we do at Bisham, just as the king will be doing at Greenwich. They fast for Advent; they cut the boughs from the holly and the ivy, the brambles and the gorse, and weave a green Christmas crown; they drag in a mighty log that will burn in the grate until the end of the Christmas feast, they rehearse their carols and they practice dances. They order special spices and they start the long preparation of the seasonal dishes for the twelve days of feasting. I listen to the household bustling outside my door and I dream that I am at home, until I wake and remember that I am far from home, waiting for William Fitzwilliam to come from London and tell me that my sons are dead and my hopes are ended.

He comes in early December. I hear the clatter of his troop of horse on the track and their shouts for the stable lads, and I crack open the shutter of my bedroom window and look down to see William and his men around him, the bustle of his arrival, and his wife going out to greet him, the horses’ breaths smoking in the cold air, the frost crackling on the grass under their feet.

I watch him as he dismounts, his bright cape, his embroidered hat, the way he thumps his fists one against the other as his hands are cold. His absentminded kiss for his wife, his shouted commands at his men. This is the man who is going to bring me heartbreak. This is the man who is going to tell me that it was all for nothing, that my whole life has been worthless, that my sons are dead.

He comes straight to my room, as if he cannot wait to relish his triumph. His face is solemn, but his eyes are bright.

“Your ladyship, I am sorry to tell you, but your son Lord Montague is dead.”

I face him, dry-eyed. “I am sorry to hear it,” I say steadily. “On what charge?”

“Treason,” he says easily. “Your son and his cousins Henry Courtenay and Edward Neville were brought before their peers and tried and found guilty of treason against the king.”

“Oh, did they plead guilty?” I ask, my voice sharp between my cold lips.

“They were found guilty,” he says, as if this were an answer, as if this could ever be a just answer. “The king showed them mercy.”

I can feel my heart leap. “Mercy?”

“He allowed them to be executed on Tower Hill, not at Tyburn.”

“I know that my son and his cousins were innocent of any treason to our most beloved king,” I say. “Where is Henry’s wife, Lady Courtenay, and her son, Edward?”

He checks at this. Fool that he is, he had almost forgotten them. “Still in the Tower of London,” he says sullenly.

“And my son Geoffrey?”

He does not like questions. He blusters. “Madam, it is not for you to interrogate me. Your son is a dead traitor and you are suspect.”

“Indeed,” I say swiftly. “It is for you to interrogate me, so skillful as you are. They all pleaded guiltless and you found no evidence against them. I am guiltless and you will find no evidence against me. God help you, William Fitzwilliam, for you are in the wrong. Interrogate me as you wish, though I am old enough to be your mother. You will find that I have done nothing wrong, as my own dear son Montague had done nothing wrong.”

It is a mistake to say his name. I can hear that my voice has grown thin and I am not sure that I can speak again. William swells in his pride at my weakness.

“Be very sure that I will interrogate you again,” he says.

Out of sight, behind my back, I pinch the skin of my palms. “Be very sure that you will find nothing,” I say bitterly. “And at the end, this house will fall down around you, and this river will rise against you, and you will regret the day that you came against me in your pomp and stupidity and taunted me with the death of a better man, my son Montague.”

“Do you curse me?” he pants, all white and sweating, shaking with the knowledge that his house is already cursed for the putting down of Cowdray Priory, cursed by fire and water.

I shake my head. “Of course not. I don’t believe in such nonsense. You make your own destiny. But when you bear false witness against a good man like my son, when you put me to the question, when you know that I have done no wrong, you are on the side of the evil in the world and your friend and ally will draw you close.”

Mabel comes to taunt me with the full list of deaths. George Croftes, John Collins, and Hugh Holland have been hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, their heads set on London Bridge. My son Montague, my precious son and heir, was beheaded on Tower Hill, his cousins Henry Courtenay and Edward Neville followed him to the scaffold and the axe.

“Dead like traitors,” she says.

“Death instead of evidence,” I reply.

COWDRAY HOUSE, SUSSEX, SPRING 1539

I spend the day, from dawn till dusk, in the chapel at Cowdray, the de Bohun tomb before me, and the gray quietness of the winter daylight around me. I pray for Montague, for his cousins Edward and Henry, taken out onto Tower Hill, where his uncle laid down his innocent head and died. I pray for all our kinsmen who are in danger, today. I pray for their sons, especially Henry Courtenay’s son, Edward, who may have watched from his window and seen his father’s last walk across the frosty grass to the outer gate, and beyond that, up to Tower Hill and the block and the black-masked axeman and his death.

I pray for Montague’s children, his son, Harry, safe with his mother at Bockmer, his daughters Katherine and Winifred, who have come with me to this miserable vigil, and more than anyone else I pray for Geoffrey, who has brought us to this tragedy and will—for I know my son—be wishing himself dead tonight.

They keep me here, as the winter turns, though my son is in his grave and my boy Geoffrey is left in the Tower. They tell me that he tried to suffocate himself, crushing himself under his bed with the quilt against his face. This is how, it was said, that his cousins the princes in the Tower died, stuffed between two mattresses. But it is not fatal for my son; and perhaps it was not true of the princes either. Geoffrey remains, as he has been for all this winter, a traitor to his king, to his brother, and to himself, a terrible betrayer of his family and me, his mother. They leave him inside the cold walls of the Tower, and I know that if they leave him there long enough he will die anyway, of the cold in winter, or of the plague in summer, and it will hardly matter whether his testimony was true or false because this boy, this boy who promised so much, will be dead. As dead as his brother Arthur, who died in the prime of his handsome youth, as dead as his brother Montague, who died keeping the faith, and trying to save his cousins.

They take Sir Nicholas Carew into the Tower and give it out that he has been planning to destroy the king, seize the throne, and marry his son to Princess Mary. William Fitzwilliam tells me this, his eyes all bright, as if I am going to fall to my knees and say that this has been my secret plan all along.

“Nicholas Carew?” I say disbelievingly. “The king’s Master of Horse? That he has loved and trusted every single day these forty years? His best-loved companion in joust and war since they were boys together?”

“Yes,” William says, the glee fading from his face because he was their companion too, and he knows what folly this is. “The same. Don’t you know that Carew loved Queen Katherine and disagreed with the king about his treatment of the princess?”

I shrug, as if it does not matter much. “Many people loved Queen Katherine,” I say. “The king loved Queen Katherine. Is your Thomas Cromwell going to put every one of her court to death? For that would be thousands of people. And you among them.”

William flushes. “You think you’re so wise!” he blurts out. “But you will come to the scaffold at last! Mark my words, Countess. You will come to the scaffold at last!”

I hold my temper and my words, for I think there is more here than a young man’s frustration at an older woman knowing more than he will ever learn. I look at his face as if I would read the red veins, and the thinning hair, the fat of self-indulgence under the chin, and the petty pout of his face. “Perhaps I will,” I say quietly. “But you can tell your master Cromwell that I am guilty of nothing, and that if he kills me, he kills an innocent woman and that my blood and that of my kinsmen will stain his record for all eternity.”

I look at his suddenly pale face. “And yours too, William Fitzwilliam,” I say. “People will remember that you held me in your house against my will. I doubt that you will hold your house for long.”

All through the cold weather I mourn for my son Montague, for his honesty, for his steadfast honor, and for his companionship. I blame myself for not having valued him before, for letting him think that my love for Geoffrey was greater than my love for all my boys. I wish I had told Montague how dear he was to me, how I depended on him, how I loved watching him grow and rise to his great position, how his humor warmed me, how his caution warned me, that he was a man his father would have been proud of, that I was proud of him, that I still am.

I write to my daughter-in-law, his widow, Jane; she does not reply but she leaves her daughters in my keeping. She has, perhaps, had enough of letters sealed with a white rose. My chamber in the Cowdray tower is small and cramped and my bedroom even smaller, so I insist that my granddaughters walk with me by the cold river in the gardens every day, whatever the weather, and that they ride out twice a week. They are constantly watched in case they send or receive a letter and they become pale and quiet with the caution of habitual prisoners.

Strangely, the loss of Montague recalls the loss of his brother Arthur, and I grieve for him all over again. I am glad in a way that Arthur did not live to see his family’s tragedy and the madness of his former friend, the king. Arthur died in the years of sunshine when we thought everything was possible. Now we are in the cold heart of a long winter.

I dream of my brother, who walked to his death where my son walked to his, I dream of my father who died in the Tower too. Sometimes I just dream of the Tower, its square bullying bulk like a white finger pointing up, accusing the sky, and I think that it is like a tombstone for the young men of my family.

Gertrude Courtenay, now a widow, is still held there, in a freezing cell. The case against her gets worse rather than obscured by time, as Thomas Cromwell keeps finding letters that he says are hers in the rooms of others that he hopes to convict. If Cromwell is to be believed, my cousin Gertrude spent her life writing treason to everyone whom Cromwell suspects. But Cromwell cannot be challenged, since he forges the king’s whims into reality. When Nicholas Carew comes to trial this spring, they produce with a flourish a sheaf of Gertrude’s letters as evidence against him, though no one looks at them closely but Cromwell.

Nicholas Carew, dearest friend to the king, loving courtier to Queen Katherine, loyal constant friend to the princess, goes to the scaffold on Tower Hill, walking in the footprints of my son, and dies like him, for no cause.

Poor Geoffrey, the saddest of all of my boys, living a life worse than death, receives a pardon and is released. His wife is with child at their home, so he staggers out of the postern gate, hires himself a horse, and rides back to her at Lordington. He does not write to me, he sends no message, he does not try to release me, he does not try to clear my name. I imagine that he lives like a dead man, locked inside his failure. I wonder if his wife despises him. I imagine that he hates himself.

This spring I think that I am as low as I have ever been. Sometimes I think of my husband Sir Richard and that he spent his life trying to save me from the destiny of my family and that I have failed him. I did not keep his sons safe, I did not manage to hide my name in his.

“If you were to confess, you would have a pardon and could go free,” Mabel says on one of her regular visits to my little rooms. She comes once a week as if to ensure, like a good hostess, that I have everything I need. In reality, she comes at the bidding of her husband to question me and to torment me with thoughts of escape. “Just confess, your ladyship. Confess and you can go back to your home. You must long to go to your home. You always say that you miss it so much.”

“I do long to be at home, and I would go, if I could,” I say steadily. “But I have nothing to confess.”

“But the charge is almost nothing!” she points out. “You could confess that you once dreamed that the king was not a good king, that’s enough, that’s all they want to hear. That would be a confession of treason under the new law and they could pardon you for it, like they have done Geoffrey, and you could be freed! Everyone that you loved or plotted with is dead anyway. You save nobody by making your life a misery.”

“But I never dreamed such a thing,” I say steadily. “I never thought such a thing or said such a thing or wrote such a thing. I never plotted with any man, dead or alive.”

“But you must have been sorry when John Fisher was executed,” she says quickly. “Such a good man, such a holy man?”

“I was sorry that he opposed the king,” I say. “But I did not oppose the king.”

“Well then, you were sorry when the king put the Dowager Princess Katherine of Aragon aside?”

“Of course I was. She was my friend. I was sorry that their marriage was invalid. But I said nothing in her defense, and I swore the oath to declare it was invalid.”

“And you wanted to serve the Lady Mary even when the king declared that she was a bastard. I know you did, you can’t deny that!”

“I loved the Lady Mary, and I still do,” I reply. “I would serve her whatever her position in the world may be. But I make no claim for her.”

“But you think of her as a princess,” she presses me. “In your heart.”

“I think the king must be the one to decide that,” I say.

She pauses, stands up, and takes a short turn around the cramped room. “I won’t have you here forever,” she warns me. “I’ve told my husband that I can’t house you and your ladies forever. And my lord Cromwell will want to make an end to this.”

“I would be happy to leave,” I say quietly. “I would undertake to stay quietly at my home and see no one and write to no one. I have no sons left to me. I would see only my daughter and my grandchildren. I could promise that. They could release me on parole.”

She turns and looks at me, her face alive with malice, and she laughs outright at the poverty of my hopes. “What home?” she asks. “Traitors don’t have homes, they lose everything. Where do you think you will go? Your great castle? Your beautiful manor? Your fine house in London? None of these is yours anymore. You won’t be going anywhere unless you confess. And I won’t have you here. There’s only one other place for you.”

I wait in silence for her to name the one place in the world that I most dread.

“The Tower.”

THE ROAD TO THE TOWER, MAY 1539

They take me, riding pillion behind one of William Fitzwilliam’s guard. We leave before dawn as the sky slowly lightens and the birds start to sing. We ride up the narrow lanes of Sussex where the verges are starred with daisies and the hawthorn is foaming white with blossoms in the hedges, past meadows where the grass is growing thick and lush and the flowers are a tumble of color and the songbirds are ripple of notes as if delighting in life itself. We ride all day, as far as Lambeth, where a plain barge is waiting for us with no standard flying at the pole. Clearly, Thomas Cromwell does not want the citizens of London to see me follow my sons into the Tower.

It is a strange, almost dreamlike journey on the water. I am alone in an unmarked barge, as if I have shed my family standards and my name, as if I am at last free from my dangerous inheritance. It is dusk and the sun is setting behind us, laying a long finger of golden light along the river, and the waterbirds are flying to the shore and settling down, splashing and quacking, for the night. I can hear a cuckoo somewhere in the water meadows and I remember how Geoffrey used to listen for the first cuckoo of spring when he was a little boy and we lived with the sisters at Syon. Now the abbey is closed, and Geoffrey is destroyed, and only that faithless bird, the cuckoo, is still calling.

I stand at the stern and look back at the swirling gray waters of the wake and watch the setting sun turning the mackerel sky pink and cream. I have sailed down this river many times in my life; I have been in the coronation barge, as an honored guest, a member of the royal family, I have been in my own barge, under my own standard, I have been the wealthiest woman in England, holding the highest of honors, with four handsome sons standing beside me, each of them fit to inherit my name and my fortune. And now I have almost nothing, and the nameless barge goes quietly down the river unobserved. As the muffled drum sounds and the rowers keep the beat and the barge moves forward with a steady swishing thrust through the water, I feel that it has been like a dream, all of it a dream, and that the dream is coming to an end.

As the dark figure of the Tower comes into sight, the great portcullis of the water gate rolls up at our approach; the Constable of the Tower, Sir William Kingston, is waiting on the steps. They run out the gangplank and I walk steadily towards him, my head high. He bows very low as he sees me, and I see his face is pale and strained. He takes my hand to help me to the steps, and as he moves forward I see the boy who was hidden behind him. I see him, and I recognize him, and my heart stops still at the sight of him as if I have been jolted awake and I know that this is not a dream but the worst thing that has ever happened in a long, long life.

It is my grandson Harry. It is my grandson Harry. They have arrested Montague’s boy.

He is whooping with joy to see me, that’s what makes me weep as his arms come round my waist and he dances around me. He thinks I have come to take him home, and he is laughing with delight. He tries to board the barge, and it takes me a few moments before I can explain to him that I am imprisoned myself, and I see his little face blench with horror as he tries not to cry.

We grip each other’s hand and go towards the dark entrance together. They are housing us in the garden tower. I fall back and look at Sir William. “Not here,” I say. I will not tell him that I cannot bear to be imprisoned where my brother waited and waited for his freedom. “Not this tower. I cannot manage the stairs. They’re too narrow, too steep. I can’t go up and down them.”

“You won’t be going up and down them,” he says with grim humor. “You’re just going up. We’ll help you.”

They half carry me up the winding circular stair to the first-floor room. Harry has a little room above mine, overlooking the green. I have a larger room, overlooking the green out of one window and the river through a narrow arrow-slit. There is no fire made in either grate, the rooms are cold and cheerless. The walls are bare stone, carved here and there with the names and insignia of previous prisoners. I cannot bear to look for the names of my father or my brother or of my sons.

Harry goes to the window and points out his cousin, Courtenay’s boy, in the narrow streets below. He is housed with his mother Gertrude in the Beauchamp Tower; their rooms are more comfortable, Edward is very bored and very lonely but he and his mother get enough to eat and were given warm clothes this winter. With the high spirits of an eleven-year-old boy, Harry is more cheerful already, pleased that I am with him. He asks me to come to visit Gertrude Courtenay and is shocked when I say that I am not allowed to leave my room, that when he comes in to see me, the door will be locked behind him, and he can only go out when a guard comes to release him. He looks at me, his innocent face frowning, as if he is puzzled. “But we will be able to go home?” he asks. “We will go home soon?”

I am almost brave enough to assure him that he will go home soon. There may be evidence, real or pretend, against Gertrude, they may concoct something against me, but Harry is only eleven and Edward is thirteen years old and there can be nothing against these boys but the fact that they were born Plantagenets. I think even the king cannot be so far gone in his fear of my family as to keep two boys like this in the Tower as traitors.

But then I pause in my confident reckoning, pause and remember that his father took my brother at just this age, for just this reason, and my brother came out only to walk along the stone path, to Tower Hill, to the scaffold.

THE TOWER, LONDON, SUMMER 1539

The Parliament meets and Cromwell puts before it an Act of Attainder, which declares all of us Plantagenets to be traitors, without trial or evidence. Our good name is a crime, our goods are forfeit to the Crown, our children disinherited. Gertrude’s name and mine are listed among those of dead men.

They produce the dozens of letters that Gertrude is said to have written, they produce one letter which I wrote to my son Reginald to assure him of my love which was never delivered, and then Thomas Cromwell himself lifts a satchel and like a street magician draws out the badge that Tom Darcy gave me, the white silk badge embroidered with the five wounds of Christ with the white rose above it.

The house is silent as Thomas Cromwell flourishes this. Perhaps he hoped that they would clamor in an uproar, shouting for my head. Cromwell offers it as conclusive evidence of my guilt. He does not accuse me of any crime—even now, having an embroidered badge in an old box in your house is not a crime—and the houses of the commons and the lords barely respond. Perhaps they are sated with attainders, perhaps they are weary of death. Perhaps many of them have a badge just like it, tucked away in an old box in their country houses, from the time when they thought that good times might come, and there were many pilgrims marching for grace. At any rate, it is all that Cromwell has for evidence and I am to be kept in the Tower at His Majesty’s wish and my grandson Harry and Gertrude and her little boy must stay too.

THE TOWER, LONDON, WINTER 1539

It is as though our lives become motionless as the cold weather freezes the water in our jugs and the drips from the slates become long pointed icicles. Harry is allowed to attend Edward’s lessons, and stays in the Courtenay rooms for dinner, where there is a better table than mine. Gertrude and I exchange messages of goodwill but we never write one word to each other. My cousin William de la Pole dies alone in the cold cell where he has lived a prisoner, an innocent man, a kinsman. He has been in here for thirty-seven years. I pray for him; but I try not to think about him. I read when the light is good enough, I sew, sitting beside the window overlooking the green. I pray at the little altar in the corner of my room. I don’t wonder about my release, about freedom, about the future. I try not to think at all. I study endurance.

Only the outside world moves on. Ursula writes to me that Constance and Geoffrey have a baby, to be called Catherine, and that the king is to marry a new wife. They have found a princess who is prepared to marry a man she has never seen and of whom she can only have heard the worst reports. Anne of Cleves is to make the long journey, from her Protestant homeland to the country that the king and Cromwell are destroying, next spring.

THE TOWER, LONDON, SPRING 1540

We endure a long year and a bitterly cold winter as prisoners in our cells, seeing the sky only as slats of gray framed by iron bars, smelling the wind from the river in cold drafts under the thick doors, hearing the single call of the winter robin and the ceaseless lament of the seagulls at a distance.

Harry grows taller and taller, out of his hose and out of his shoes, and I have to beg the warder to request new clothes for him. We are allowed a fire in our rooms only when it gets very cold, and I see my fingers thicken and redden with chilblains. It grows dark very early in the little rooms, it stays dark for a long time, dawn comes later and later through this cold winter, and when there is a mist coming off the river or the clouds are very low it never gets light at all.

I try to be cheerful and optimistic for Harry’s sake, and read with him in Latin and French; but when he has gone to sleep in his little cell and I am locked in mine, I pull the thin blanket over my head and lie dry-eyed in the fusty darkness and know that I am too beaten by grief to cry.

We wait as spring comes to green the trees in the Tower garden and we can hear the blackbirds singing in the constable’s orchard. The two boys are allowed out on the green to play, and someone sets up a butt for them and gives them bows and arrows; someone else gives them a set of bowls and marks out a green for them. Though the days get warmer, it is still very cold in our rooms, and so I ask the warder to allow me to send for some clothes. I am served by my lady-in-waiting and by the master controller’s maid, and I am ashamed that I cannot pay their wages. The warder presents a petition for me and I receive some clothes and some money, and, then, surprisingly, for no reason, Gertrude Courtenay is released.

William Fitzwilliam himself comes in with the warder to tell me the good news.

“Are we to go too?” I ask him calmly. I put my hand on Harry’s thin shoulder and feel him shudder like a captive merlin at the thought of freedom.

“I am sorry, your ladyship,” Thomas Philips, the warder, says. “There are no orders to release you yet.”

I feel Harry’s shoulders slump, and Thomas sees the look on my face. “Maybe soon,” he says. He turns to Harry. “But you are not to lose your playmate, so you won’t be lonely,” he says, trying to sound cheerful.

“Is Edward not going with his mother?” I ask. “Why would they release Lady Courtenay and keep her little son prisoner?”

As he meets my eyes he realizes, as I do, that this is the imprisonment of the Plantagenets, not of traitors. Gertrude can go for she was born a Blount, the daughter of Baron Mountjoy. But her son, Edward, must stay for his name is Courtenay.

There is no charge, there can be no charge, he is a child and had never even left home. It is the king gathering the Plantagenet sons into his keeping, like the Moldwarp undermining a house, like a monster in a fairy tale, eating children, one by one.

I think of little Harry and Edward, their bright, eager eyes and Harry’s curly auburn hair, and I think of the cold walls of the Tower and the long, long days of captivity, and I find a new level of endurance, of pain. I look at William Fitzwilliam, and I say to him: “As the king wishes.”

“You don’t find this unjust?” he says wonderingly, as if he is my friend and might plead for the boys’ release. “You don’t think you should speak out? Appeal?”

I shrug my shoulders. “He is the king,” I say. “He is the emperor, the supreme head of the Church. His judgment must be right. Don’t you think his judgment is infallible, my lord?”

He blinks at that, blinks like the mole his master, and gulps. “He’s not mistaken,” he says quickly, as if I might spy on him.

“Of course not,” I say.

THE TOWER, LONDON, SUMMER 1540

It is easier in summertime, for though I am not allowed out of my cell, Harry and Edward can come and go as long as they stay within the walls of the Tower. They try to amuse themselves, as boys always will, playing, wrestling, daydreaming, even fishing in the dark depths of the water gate and swimming in the moat. My maid comes and goes from the Tower every day and sometimes brings me the little treats of the season. One day she brings me half a dozen strawberries and the moment I taste them I am back in my fruit garden at Bisham Manor, the warm squashy juice on my tongue, the hot sun on my back, and the world at my feet.

“And I have news,” she says.

I glance at the door where a jailer may be passing. “Take care what you say,” I remind her.

“Everyone knows this,” she says. “The king is to put his new wife aside though she has been in the country only seven months.”

At once I think of my princess, Lady Mary, who will lose another stepmother and friend. “Put her aside?” I repeat, careful with the words, wondering if she is to be charged with something monstrous and killed.

“They say that the marriage was never a true one,” my maid says, her voice a tiny whisper. “And she is to be called the king’s sister and live at Richmond Palace.”

I know that I look quite blankly at her; but I cannot comprehend a world where a king may call his wife his sister and send her to live on her own in a palace. Is nobody advising Henry at all? Is nobody telling him that the truth is not of his making, cannot be of his own invention? He cannot call a woman wife today, and name her as his sister on the next day. He cannot say that his daughter is not a princess. He cannot say that he is the Pope. Who is ever going to find the courage to name what is more and more clear: that the king does not see the world as it is, that his vision is unreal, that—though it is treason to say it—the king is quite mad.

The very next day I am gazing out of my arrow-slit window over the river when I see the Howard barge come swiftly downriver, and turn, oars feathering expertly to rush into the inner dock as the water gate creaks open. Some poor new prisoner, taken by Thomas Howard, I think, and watch with interest as a stocky figure is wrestled from the barge, fighting like a drayman, and struggles with half a dozen men onto the quay.

“God help him,” I say as he plunges this way and that like a baited bear with no hope of freedom. They have guards ready to fall on him and he fights them, all the way up the steps and out of sight, under the lee of my window as I press against the stone and push my face against the arrow-slit.

I have a solitary prisoner’s curiosity, but also I think I recognize this man who flings himself against his jailers. I knew him the moment that he pitched off the barge, his dark clerkly clothes in the best-cut black, his broad shoulders and black velvet bonnet. I stare down in amazement, my cheek pressed to the cold stone so that I can see Thomas Cromwell, arrested and imprisoned and dragged, fighting, into the same Tower where he has sent so many others.

I fall back from the arrow-slit, and I stagger to my bed and fall to my knees and put my face in my hands. I find I am crying at last, hot tears running between my fingers. “Thank God,” I cry softly. “Thank God who has brought me safe to this day. Harry and Edward are saved, the little boys are safe, for the king’s wicked councillor has fallen, and we will be freed.”

Thomas Philips, the warder, will tell me only that Thomas Cromwell, deprived of his chain of office and all his authority, has been arrested and is held in the Tower, crying for pardon, as so many good men have cried before him. He must hear, as I hear, the sound of them building the scaffold on Tower Hill, and on a day as fine and as sunny as the day they took out John Fisher or Thomas More, their enemy, the enemy of the faith of England, walks in their footsteps and goes to his death.

I tell my grandson Harry and his cousin Edward to keep from the windows and not to look out as the defeated enemy of their family walks through the echoing gate, over the drawbridge, and slowly up the cobbled road to Tower Hill; but we hear the roll of the drums and the jeering roar of the crowd. I kneel before my crucifix and I think of my son Montague predicting that Cromwell, who was deaf to calls for mercy, mercy, mercy, would one day cry out these words, and find none for himself.

I wait for my cell door to be flung open and for us to be released. We were imprisoned on Thomas Cromwell’s Act of Attainder; now that he is dead we shall surely be released.

Nobody comes for us yet; but perhaps we are overlooked as the king is married again, and is said to be half mad with joy in his new bride, another Howard girl, little Kitty Howard, young enough to be his granddaughter, pretty as all the Howard girls are. I think of Geoffrey saying that the Howards to the king are like hare to a Talbot hound, and then I remember to not think of Geoffrey at all.

I wait for the king to return from his honeymoon brimming with a bridegroom’s goodwill, and for someone to remind him of us and for him to sign our release. Then I hear that his happiness has ended abruptly, and that he is ill and has shut himself away in a sort of mad desolation and has imprisoned himself, just as I am confined, inside two small rooms, maddened with pain and tormented with failed hopes, too tired and sick at heart to attend to any business.

All summer I wait to hear that the king has come out of his melancholy, all autumn, then when the weather starts to get cold again, I think that perhaps the king will pardon and free us in the new year, after Christmas, as part of the celebrations of the season; but he does not.

THE TOWER, LONDON, SPRING 1541

The king is to take the bride whom he calls his “rose without a thorn” on a great progress north, to make the journey that he has never dared to show himself to the people of the North and to accept their apologies for the Pilgrimage of Grace. He will stay with men who have houses newly built with stone from the pulled-down monasteries, he will ride through lands where the bones of traitors still rattle in the chains on the wayside scaffolds. He will go blithely among people whose lives were ended when their Church was destroyed, whose faith has no home, who have no hope. He will dress his hugely fat body in Lincoln green and pretend to be Robin Hood and make the child he has married dance in green like Maid Marian.

I still hope. I still hope, like my dead cousin Henry Courtenay once hoped, for better days and a merry world. Perhaps the king will release Harry and Edward and me before he goes north, as part of his clemency and pardon. If he can forgive York, a Plantagenet city that threw open its gates to the pilgrims, surely he can forgive these two innocent boys.

I wake at dawn in these light mornings and I hear the birds singing outside my window and watch the sunlight slowly walk across the wall. Thomas Philips, the warder, surprises me by knocking on my door, and when I have got up and pulled a robe over my nightgown, he comes in looking as if he is sick. “What’s the matter?” I ask him, anxious at once. “Is my grandson ill?”

“He is well, he is well,” he says hastily.

“Edward then?”

“He is well.”

“Then what is the matter, Mr. Philips, for you look troubled. What is wrong?”

“I am grieved,” is all that he can say. He turns his head away and shakes his head and clears his throat. Something is distressing him so much that he can barely speak. “I am grieved to say that you are to be executed.”

“I?” It is quite impossible. The execution of Anne Boleyn was preceded by a trial in which the peers of the realm were convinced that she was an adulterous witch. A noblewoman, one of the royal family, cannot be executed, not without a charge, not without a trial.

“Yes.”

I go to the low window that overlooks the green and look out. “It cannot be,” I say. “It cannot be.”

Philips clears this throat again. “It is commanded.”

“There’s no scaffold,” I say simply. I gesture to Tower Hill, beyond the walls. “There’s no scaffold.”

“They’re bringing a block,” he says. “Putting it on the grass.”

I turn and stare at him. “A block? They’re going to put a block on the grass and behead me in hiding?”

He nods.

“There’s no charge, there’s no trial. There’s no scaffold. The man who accused me is dead himself, accused of treason. It cannot be.”

“It is,” he says. “I beg you to prepare your soul, your ladyship.”

“When?” I ask. I expect him to say the day after tomorrow, or at the end of the week.

He says: “At seven of the clock. In an hour and a half,” and he goes from the room, his head down.

I cannot comprehend that I have only an hour and a half left of life. The chaplain comes and hears my confession, and I beg him to go at once to the boys and give them my blessing and my love and to tell them to stay away from the windows that face the green and the little block that has been set there. A few people have gathered; I see the chain of the Lord Mayor of London, but it is early in the morning and all unprepared, and so only a few people have been told and only a few have come.

This makes it even worse, I think. The king must have decided it on a whim, perhaps as late as last night, and they must have sent out the order this morning. And nobody has dissuaded him. Of all my numerous fertile family, there was nobody left who could dissuade him.

I try to pray, but my mind skitters around like a foal in a meadow in springtime. I have ordered in my will that my debts should be paid and prayers said for my soul and that I should be buried in my old priory. But I doubt that they will trouble themselves to take my body—I suddenly remember with surprise that my head will be in a basket—all the way to my old chapel. So perhaps I will lie in the Tower chapel with my son, Montague. This comforts me until I remember his son, my grandson Harry, and I wonder who will care for him, and if he will ever be released, or if he will die here, another Plantagenet boy buried in the Tower.

I think all this while my lady-in-waiting dresses me, puts my new cape over my shoulders, and ties up my hair under my hood so as to leave my neck clear for the axe.

“It’s not right,” I say irritably, as if the ties of the dress are wrong, and she drops to her knees and cries, mopping her eyes with the hem of my gown.

“It’s wicked!” she cries out.

“Hush,” I say. I feel I cannot be troubled by her sorrow, I cannot understand it. I feel dazed, as if I cannot understand her words nor what is about to happen.

The priest is waiting at the door and the guard. Everything seems to be happening very quickly and I fear I am not prepared. I think, of course, it may be that just as I get to the grass, a pardon comes from the king. It would be typical of his sense of a grand show to condemn a woman to death after dinner and pardon her before breakfast so that everyone can remark on his power and his mercy.

I dawdle down the stairs, with my lady-in-waiting’s arm under mine, not just because my legs are stiff and unaccustomed to the exercise, but because I want to allow plenty of time for the king’s messenger to come in with the scroll and ribbons and the seal. But when we get to the door of the Tower there is no one there, just the small crowd around the straight stone path, and at the end of the path an impromptu block of wood, and a youth with a black hood and an axe standing beside it.

I have my pennies to pay him cold in my hand as the chaplain precedes me, and we walk the little way towards him. I don’t look up at the Beauchamp Tower to see if my grandson has disobeyed me and is looking out of Edward’s window. I don’t think I would be able to set one foot before another if I saw their little faces looking down on me as I walk to my death.

There is a gust of wind from the river and the standards suddenly flap. I take a deep breath and I think of the others who have walked out of the Tower before me, in the certainty that they were going to heaven. I think of my brother, walking to Tower Hill, feeling the rain on his face and the wet grass under his boots. My little brother, as innocent as my grandson of everything but his name. None of us is imprisoned for what we have done; we are imprisoned for being who we are, and nothing can change that.

We get to the headsman though I have hardly noticed the walk. I wish that I had thought more about my soul and prayed as I walked along. I have no coherent thoughts, I have not completed my prayers, I am not ready for death. I give him the two pennies in his black-leather mittened hand. His eyes glint through the holes in the mask. I notice that his hand is trembling and he thrusts the coins in his pocket and grips tightly to the axe.

I stand before him and I say the words that every condemned person is to say. I stress my loyalty to the king and recommend obedience to him. There is a moment when I feel like laughing out loud at this. How can anyone obey the king when his wishes change by the minute? How can anyone be loyal to a madman? I send my love and my blessings to the little Prince Edward, though I doubt that he will live to be a man, poor boy, poor accursed Tudor boy, and I send my love and blessings to the Princess Mary and I remember to call her Lady Mary and I say that I hope that she blesses me, who has loved her so dearly.

“That’s enough,” Philips interrupts. “I am sorry, your ladyship. You are not allowed to speak for long.”

The headsman steps forward and says: “Put your head on the block and stretch out your hands when you are ready for it, ma’am.”

Obediently, I put my hands on the block and awkwardly lower myself down to the grass. I can smell the scent of it under my knees. I am aware of the ache in my back and the sound of a seagull crying and someone weeping. And then suddenly, just as I am about to put my forehead against the rough top of the wooden block, and spread my arms wide to signal that he can strike, a rush of joy, a desire for life, suddenly comes over me, and I say: “No.”

It’s too late, the axe is up over his head, he is bringing it down, but I say: “No” and I sit up, and pull myself up on the block to get to my feet.

There is a terrible blow on the back of my head, but almost no pain. It fells me to the ground and I say “No” again, and suddenly I am filled with a great ecstasy of rebellion. I do not consent to the will of the madman Henry Tudor, and I do not put my head meekly down upon the block, and I never will. I am going to fight for my life and I say “No!” as I struggle to rise, and “No” as the blow comes again, and “No” as I crawl away, blood pouring from the wound in my neck and my head, blinding me but not drowning my joy in fighting for my life even as it is slipping away from me, and witnessing, to the very last moment, to the wrong that Henry Tudor has done to me and mine. “No!” I cry out. “No! No! No!”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This novel is the story of a long life lived at the center of events—one which, since it was a woman’s life, has been largely ignored by chroniclers at the time and historians since. Margaret Pole’s greatest claim to fame was that she was Henry VIII’s oldest victim on the scaffold—she was sixty-seven when she was brutally killed on Tower Green—but her life, as I have tried to show here, was lived at the heart of the Tudor court and at the center of the former royal family.

Indeed, the more I have studied and thought about her life and her wide-ranging family, the Plantagenets, the more I have had to wonder if she was not at the center of conspiracy: sometimes actively, sometimes quietly, perhaps always conscious of her family’s claim to the throne, and always with a claimant in exile, preparing to invade, or under arrest. There was never a time when Henry VII or his son were free from fear of a Plantagenet claimant, and although many historians have seen this as Tudor paranoia, I wonder if there was not a constant genuine threat from the old royal family, a sort of resistance movement: sometimes active but always present.

The novel opens with the controversial suggestion that Katherine of Aragon decided to lie about her marriage to Arthur so that she might be married for a second time to his brother, Henry. I think that an examination of the agreed facts—the official bedding, the young couple cohabiting at Ludlow, their youth and health, and the absence of any concern about the consummation of their marriage—convincingly indicates that they were wedded and bedded. Certainly, everyone thought so at the time, and Katherine’s own mother had requested a dispensation from the Pope that would permit her daughter to remarry whether or not intercourse had taken place.

Decades later, when she was asked if the marriage to Arthur had been consummated, she had every reason to lie: she was defending her marriage to Henry VIII and the legitimacy of her daughter. It was the stereotyped view of women by later historians (especially the Victorian historians) who suggested that since Katherine was a “good” woman, she must have been incapable of telling a lie. I tend to take a more liberal view of female mendacity.

As a historian, I can examine one side against the other and share these thoughts with the reader. As a novelist, I have to fix the story with one coherent viewpoint, thus the account of Katherine’s first marriage and her decision to marry Prince Harry is fictional and based on my interpretation of the historical facts.

I have drawn from the work of Sir John Dewhurst the dates of Katherine of Aragon’s pregnancies. There has been much work on the loss of Henry VIII’s babies. Current interesting research from Catrina Banks Whitley and Kyra Kramer suggests that Henry may have had the rare Kell positive blood type, which can cause miscarriages, stillbirths, and infant deaths when the mother has the more common Kell negative blood type. Whitley and Kramer also suggest that Henry’s later symptoms of paranoia and anger may have been caused by McLeod syndrome—a disease found only in Kell positive individuals. McLeod syndrome usually develops when sufferers are aged around forty and causes physical degeneration and personality changes resulting in paranoia, depression, and irrational behavior.

Interestingly, Whitley and Kramer trace Kell syndrome back to Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, the suspected witch and mother of Elizabeth Woodville. Sometimes, uncannily, fiction creates a metaphor for an historical truth: in a fictional scene in the novel, Elizabeth, together with her daughter Elizabeth of York, curse the murderer of her sons, swearing that they shall lose their son and their grandsons, while in real life her genes—unknown and undetectable at the time—entered the Tudor line through her daughter and may have caused the deaths of four Tudor babies to Katherine of Aragon and three to Anne Boleyn.

This novel is about the decline of Henry VIII from the young, handsome prince, seen as the savior of his country, into the sick, obese tyrant. The young king’s deterioration has been the subject of many fine histories—I list some of the ones I found most helpful below—but this is the first time in my research that I have fully understood the brutality of the reign and the depth of his corruption. It has made me think about how easily a ruler can slide into tyranny, especially if no one opposes him. As Henry moved from one advisor to another, as his moods deteriorated and his use of the gallows became an act of terror against his people, one sees in this well-known, well-loved Tudor world the rising of a despot. Henry could hang the faithful men and women of the North because nobody rose up to defend Thomas More, John Fisher, or even the Duke of Buckingham. He learned that he could execute two wives, divorce another, and threaten his last because no one effectively defended his first. The picture of the beloved Henry in the primary school histories—of an eccentric glamorous ruler who married six women—is also the ugly portrait of a wife and child abuser and a serial killer who made war against his own people, even against his own family.

Henry’s response to the appeal of the pilgrims for the maintenance of their traditional rulers and religion was to attack the North of England, and the Roman Catholic faithful. The king was consciously dishonest in his persecution of people who believed, firstly, that they could appeal to him for justice and, then, that he had given them a full pardon and would abide by his word. This is one of the worst episodes in our history, yet it is little known, perhaps because it is a history of defeat and tragedy, and the losers rarely tell the story.

Margaret went to the scaffold without a charge, a trial, or even adequate notice, as I describe here. Her execution was clumsy, perhaps because of an incompetent executioner, perhaps because she refused to put her head down on the block. As a tribute to her, and to all woman who refuse to take punishment meted out to them by an unjust world, I have described her in this novel as dying as she may have lived—resisting the Tudor tyranny. She was beatified in 1886 as a martyr for the faith and is honored by the Church as Blessed Margaret Pole on 28 May each year.

Her grandson Henry disappeared, probably dying in the Tower. Edward Courtenay was released only on the accession of Mary I, who freed him and gave him the title Earl of Devon in September 1553. Geoffrey Pole fled England and obtained absolution from the Pope for betraying his brother, returning only when Mary I came to the throne, as did Reginald, who was ordained and became Archbishop of Canterbury, working closely with Mary I to restore the Roman Catholic Church to England for the duration of her reign.

There is something in this story—of an old family displaced against their will, of their loyalty to a young woman who suffered extraordinarily unjust treatment, of their adherence to their faith and their attempt to survive—that I have found very moving to research and write. The fiction, as always, is secondary to the history; the real women are always more complex and more conflicted, greater than the heroines of the novel, just as real women now, as then, are often greater than they are reported, sometimes greater than the world wants them to be.

Touchstone Reading Group Guide

The King’s Curse

Philippa Gregory

Introduction

Lady-in-waiting Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, has spent her entire life attempting to deny her own royal blood and Plantagenet name while in service of the Tudor court. Her proximity and understanding of the court give her a unique view of Henry VIII’s stratospheric rise to power in Tudor England.

England is under a Tudor king. Henry VII, has two sons with Elizabeth of York, which should have secured his line, yet his court is still filled with fear and suspicion. Plantagenet is a dangerous name to carry and the heiress Margaret Pole, cousin to Elizabeth of York (known as the White Princess) and daughter of George, Duke of Clarence, is married off to a steady and kind Lancaster supporter—Sir Richard Pole. But her brother Edward’s claim cannot be ignored. Henry executes him on Tower Hill, leaving Margaret to face a lifetime of uncertainty. Caught between the old world and the new, Margaret has to find her own way as she carries the knowledge of an old curse on the house of Tudor.

For Discussion

1. The King’s Curse spans over forty years of Lady Margaret Pole’s presence in and around the Tudor court, as she and her family rise and fall from favor with Henry VII and then Henry VIII. How do Lady Margaret, her characteristics, and her goals change over the course of her life at and away from court?

2. Discuss the meaning of the title, The King’s Curse. What is the actual curse? How does Henry VIII’s belief that he is cursed affect his behavior? Do you believe that the curse that Elizabeth of York and her mother spoke against the Tudors comes to fruition?

3. Consider how deeply Margaret is affected by the execution of her brother Edward, “Teddy,” the Earl of Warwick. How does this affect her familial loyalty and influence her actions? What does it mean to Margaret to bear the name Plantagenet? What does the White Rose mean to her?

4. How does Margaret see Henry VIII change over the course of his life? As a child, how was he different from his brother Arthur, Prince of Wales? What are his primary characteristics as a young king, and then as an aging monarch?

5. Describe the ways in which motherhood and maternity are portrayed in The King’s Curse. How does the pressure to produce a male heir define the role of royal mothers? How does Margaret’s presence at the loss of so many royal babies affect her own view of motherhood? Compare the differences between Katherine of Aragon’s and Margaret’s sense of motherhood.

6. Lady Margaret Pole is a unique figure in the Tudor court: when her title is restored to her, she becomes one of the wealthiest individuals in England in her own right. In what ways does Margaret use her position and influence that was unusual for a woman of this time?

7. “ ‘It’s just that from boyhood, the king has never admired something without wanting it for himself,’ ” Margaret cautions her cousin Edward, Duke of Buckingham. How does Margaret’s advice to her family to desire obscurity, and therefore safety, contradict her ambitions for her family, her sons in particular, and desire for power?

What does the loss of Margaret’s son Arthur mean to her? Consider this moment: “We walk back to the house, and I look at the great house that I have renewed, with my family crest above the door, and I think, as bitterly as any sinner, that all the wealth and all the power that I won back for myself and my children could not save my beloved son Arthur from the Tudor sickness.”

8. Margaret forces Reginald to stay in the king’s service as a scholar and theologian, even if it means being exiled to Padua, Paris, and Rome and separated from his family; Reginald resents his mother for much of his life because of this. Do you think this shaped Reginald’s opinion toward the new religion and his eventual letter to the king on his findings? Why or why not?

9. Compare and contrast Margaret’s attitudes about illness, contagion, and death with those of Henry VIII. How does each handle the Sweat and other diseases among their subjects? How is each affected by the death of Katherine of Aragon?

10. Think back to the promise that Margaret made to Katherine when she first revealed Prince Arthur’s deathbed wish to his young wife: If Margaret had not promised to keep Katherine’s secret then, how might have the following events turned out differently?

11. The wheel of fortune, or rota fortunae, is a popular notion in medieval philosophy that refers to the unpredictability of fate: the goddess Fortuna spins the wheel at random, changing the positions of those on the wheel. Keeping this in mind, discuss the many great fortunes and misfortunes that befall Margaret and her family, and England as a whole, throughout the novel. What is the driving force behind these quick changes of fortune?

12. “The one thing I would have taught him, if I had kept him at my side, is to never weary of life, but to cling to it. Life: at almost any cost. I have never prepared myself for death, not even going into childbed, and I would never put my head down on the block.” Margaret encourages her children to choose life on multiple occasions, even over loyalty or truth. What does this tell us about Margaret’s moral compass? How does this guide the decisions she makes for herself and her children?

13. Lady Margaret Pole was beatified by the Catholic Church as a martyr in 1886 by Pope Leo XIII; her feast day is celebrated on May 28. In The King’s Curse, Margaret is portrayed as devout to the church and the old ways and is outraged when Henry VIII allows Cromwell to shut down England’s abbeys, priories, and monasteries. How does Margaret’s religious devotion influence her family’s involvement with the Pilgrimage of Grace? How do you think Margaret reconciles her disagreement with the king over religious issues, but outward loyalty to the throne?

A Conversation with Philippa Gregory

What first interested you in Margaret Pole?

I was aware of Margaret as the daughter of George, Duke of Clarence, as one of the children of the three brothers of York: Edward, George, and Richard. But she really came to my attention when I was writing The White Princess and I understood her intimacy and shared interests with Elizabeth of York, her cousin.

How did Margaret’s role on the outskirts of the Tudor court allow you to create a unique insight into the events of Henry VIII’s rise and reign?

She is a marvelous character to use as a narrator since she is intimate with Henry from his earliest years, a close friend of his mother, and then the friend and constant companion of his first wife. She sees him as only a member of his family could see him grow and mature, and she is uniquely placed to watch his deterioration.

What were some of the challenges of using a lesser-known historical figure as a narrator at the center of a novel compared to one that has been written about extensively, such as Anne Boleyn or Henry VIII himself?

The advantage of a character whose life has not been thoroughly researched is that you avoid strong preconceptions and prejudices from the reader; as a writer of fiction based on the facts you are able to tell the story as you see it—and not be constantly compared to another writer’s version. The disadvantage of course is that there are gaps in the historical record and gaps in the speculation which historians bring to well-worked topics. For much of the time we don’t know what Margaret was doing in response to the great events of her time or what she thought of them. Even the evidence for her treason—the badge of the white rose—was produced by Thomas Cromwell but there is no proof that it was hers. As I looked at her life I began to think that she must have supported the Pilgrimage of Grace, and the attempts to secure the safety of Mary Tudor—but this was a conspiracy and the secrets are still hidden.

What kind of research did you do for this book?

I read! It’s almost always lots and lots of reading. I visited some of the places, even driving around her home at the village of Stourton. I revisited Ludlow Castle and the Tower of London and the familiar Tudor places. But the main research for all these Plantagenet and Tudor books is the extensive reading of primary but mostly secondary sources.

Margaret holds a strong opinion for her entire life that the Plantagenets were the true royal family of England. Do you agree with her?

Absolutely, there is no argument that Henry VII took the throne by force, that he tried to justify the claim through his marriage to Elizabeth, and the blackening of Richard III’s reputation was to bolster his taking of the throne in combat. The true heir to Richard III’s throne would have been his nephews by Edward IV (the Princes in the Tower if they had survived) or his nephew by George, Duke of Clarence—Margaret’s brother, Edward of York.

Is there any evidence of a curse on the house of Tudor, spoken by Elizabeth of York and her mother, or by any other?

This has been one of the fascinating unfolding research stories during the course of writing fiction. I first invented a curse when I wanted Elizabeth Woodville (Edward’s queen) and her mother, Jacquetta, to respond to the news that the Princes in the Tower were missing, presumed dead. Writing a novel it seemed to be a nicely rounded piece of fiction for them to curse the line of the murderer of their boys, which raised a question about the guilt of both Richard III and Henry VII—the two suspects. The curse also foreshadowed the great tragedy for the Tudors—their inability to raise to manhood a son to carry the line. So I described this in three books previous to The King’s Curse without any idea that it would play through the series in this way. Then when I came to research the deterioration of Henry VII’s reputation and that of his son I discovered that there were rumours that the line was cursed, and that people responded to the loss of the Tudor babies with gossip that the line was certain to fail. Finally, as a fascinating piece of research I came across the work of Catrina Banks Whitley and Kyra Kramer who suggest that Henry may have had the rare Kell positive blood type which can cause miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant death when the mother has the more common Kell negative blood type. Whitley and Kramer also suggest that Henry’s later symptoms of paranoia and anger may have been caused by McLeod syndrome, which can develop in midlife. Sometimes fiction seems to have an understanding of fact. If Henry did have this disease and syndrome it would have been a hereditary disease, like a curse, and it would have come through the matrilineal line—from his mother, Elizabeth of York, from her mother, Jacquetta.

There are persistent themes in several of your historical novels: maternity and motherhood, the relationships between mothers and sons, and the role that apparently powerless women seem to play: why is it important for you to write about these topics?

I didn’t plan to write fictions based on womens’ history, but this has become a natural subject for me because of my interest in women generally, and because one fascinating woman’s story has led me to another. This has meant that I have had the privilege of researching less well-known women and bringing their stories to a wide public. What has been interesting about this also is finding how many women who are in the background of published histories were often working powerfully and effectively behind the scenes, and you can see this if you read their stories with a feminist eye. For instance, many historians write off Margaret Beaufort as the obedient wife of three men, a pawn in family dynamics, and a woman better suited to be a nun because of her proclaimed piety. But if you look beyond the obvious circumstances of her life and consider whether she was making conscious and deliberate political choices, you see a woman whose first marriage may have been outside her control but whose second and third marriages placed her (and thus her son) in a powerful position to draw close to, and take the crown. She was massively ambitious for her sons to be king, and hugely acquisitive for her own fortune and lands. She’s very far from the passive saint of the older histories. I write about mothers and children because this is such a key role for women of this time—both as emotional beings and as founders of dynasties. I also think a lot and write about female connections—another area often overlooked by earlier historians—who traced male kinship and comradeship but failed to see that sisters, cousins, mothers and daughters, and especially women with young kinswomen in their service make profound connections and forge alliances with female bonds. As to why I am interested in women’s history—it’s partly because I am a woman, it’s partly because I am a historian who likes new research, it’s because I am a novelist and women’s stories resonate for me, and more than anything else—these are our foremothers, these are our heroines.

What are you working on next?

I’m starting work on a new historical novel but I am not yet sure who is going to be the principal character. I’m reading around.

Enhance Your Book Club

1. The King’s Curse provides a different perspective on some of the same events that are included in many Tudor novels, including books by Philippa Gregory, such as The Other Boleyn Girl. Compare Margaret Pole’s version of events with those in works of historical fiction set in this era. If you haven’t read any, check out the other books in Philippa Gregory’s Cousins’ War series and Tudor Court novels.

2. Read a nonfiction account of the life of the real Lady Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, born Margaret of York, such as Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, 1473–1541: Loyalty, Lineage and Leadership by Hazel Pierce, and don’t miss the extensive bibliography at the end of The King’s Curse for further reading.

3. Visit Philippa Gregory’s website, www.philippagregory.com, to learn more about the author, the Plantagenet family tree, and history.

4. Follow Philippa Gregory on Facebook, www.facebook.com/PhilippaGregoryOfficialFanPage, or Twitter, @philippagbooks, for regular updates about Philippa’s research and historical characters.

Buy the complete book

A novel about two queens, Anne of Cleves and Catherine Howard—and the woman who destroys them.

The Boleyn Inheritance

This novel seeks to answer the great question: Why would Katherine of Aragon, a woman of unimpeachable spirituality, tell an enormous lie and cling to it until she changed the course of history?

The Constant Princess

A novel set in Tudor England about a young woman who makes her way in the world with only her looks, her cunning and her magic to give her power—but at what price?

The Wise Woman

Philippa Gregory conquers a new period of English history with her first book to be published simultaneously by all Simon & Schuster companies around the globe.

The White Queen

This tells the riveting story of Elizabeth of York, daughter of the White Queen, caught between loyalty to the new crown and to her royal family.

The White Princess

The Red Queen crosses the battle lines to the Lancaster side, where Margaret Beaufort plots to win the throne of England for her family.

The Red Queen

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is the author of several bestselling novels, including

The Other Boleyn Girl

, and is a recognized authority on women’s history. Her Cousins’ War novels are the basis for the critically acclaimed Starz miniseries

The White Queen

. She studied history at the University of Sussex and received a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh. She welcomes visitors to her website,

PhilippaGregory.com

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GARDENS FOR THE GAMBIA

Philippa Gregory visited The Gambia, one of the driest and poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa, in 1993 and paid for a well to be hand-dug in a village primary school at Sika. Now—more than 200 wells later—she continues to raise money and commission wells in village schools, community gardens, and in The Gambia’s only agricultural college. She works with her representative in The Gambia, headmaster Ismaila Sisay, and their charity now funds pottery and batik classes, beekeeping, and adult literacy programs.

GARDENS FOR THE GAMBIA is a registered charity in the UK and the United States, and a registered NGO in The Gambia. Every donation, however small, goes to The Gambia without any deductions. If you would like to learn more about the work that Philippa calls “the best thing that I do,” visit her website www.PhilippaGregory.com and click on GARDENS FOR THE GAMBIA where you can make a donation and join with Philippa in this project.

“Every well we dig provides drinking water for a school of about 6oo children, and waters the gardens where they grow vegetables for the school dinners. I don’t know of a more direct way to feed hungry children and teach them to farm for their future.”

Philippa Gregory

By the same author

The Cousins’ War

The Lady of the Rivers

The White Queen

The Red Queen

The Kingmaker’s Daughter

The White Princess

History

The Women of the Cousins’ War:

The Duchess, the Queen, and the King’s Mother

The Tudor Court Novels

The Constant Princess

The Other Boleyn Girl

The Boleyn Inheritance

The Queen’s Fool

The Virgin’s Lover

The Other Queen

Historical Novels

The Wise Woman

Fallen Skies

A Respectable Trade

Earthly Joys

Virgin Earth

The Wideacre Trilogy

Wideacre

The Favored Child

Meridon

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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