Henry gives a little crow of delight and then kneels before the queen, looking up at her and beaming as she bends down to put the gold chain of victory around his neck. She kisses him on the mouth, and he puts up his hands and gently holds her face for a moment, as if he were in love with her, or at any rate, in love with the picture that they make: the young handsome man on his knee to his wife, his thick copper hair curling under her caress.
That night there is a masque, performed in the new way, with the actors coming in disguised, playing a scene and then inviting members of the court to dance with them. The king is wearing a mask over his face and a great hat, but everyone knows him at once by his height, and by the deference of the players around him. He is delighted when we all pretend that we think he is a stranger and are amazed at the grace of his dancing, and his charm. When the players break from their circle and mingle with the court, all the ladies-in-waiting flutter as he comes near to them. He chooses Elizabeth Carew to dance. Now that Bessie is away, there is an opportunity for another pretty girl who cares more for gifts than her good name.
I am standing behind the queen’s chair when I see a small disturbance at the end of the great hall, through the heat haze of the central fire, which the duke has proudly retained here at Penshurst, keeping the old ways in his grand hall. Someone is talking urgently to one of Cardinal Wolsey’s men, and then the message is passed from one to another down the hall, until it reaches the lawyer Thomas More, who leans over the fat red shoulder and whispers in the attentive ear.
“Something has happened,” I say quietly to the queen.
“Find out,” she replies. I step back from her chair into the shadows of the hall and go—not to the cardinal, who has kept his seat and his bland smile, beating time to the dance as if he has heard nothing—but out of the great hall and across the courtyard, where the stable boy is holding the messenger’s steaming horse, and another is taking off the sweaty saddle.
“He looks hot,” I remark, walking past as if on my way to somewhere else.
They both bow low to me. “Nearly foundered,” complains one lad. “I wouldn’t ride a beauty like this so hard.”
I hesitate and pat the horse’s damp neck. “Poor boy. Did he have to come far?”
“From London,” the lad says. “But the messenger is in a worse state—he rode all the way from Essex.”
“That is a long way,” I agree. “It’ll be for the king, then.”
“It is. But worth the effort. He said he would get a gold noble at the very least.”
I laugh. “Well, you will have to reward the poor horse,” I say, and stroll past.
I turn as soon as I am out of sight and walk through the little courtyard at the side of the great hall, entering through the side door with a nod to the guards. I find Thomas More at the back of the hall, watching the dancing. He smiles and bows to me.
“So Bessie Blount has a boy,” I assert.
He has not been long enough at court to learn to veil his honest brown eyes. “Your ladyship . . . I cannot say,” he stammers.
I smile at him. “You don’t need to say,” I tell him. “Indeed, you didn’t say,” and I return to my place beside the queen before anyone notices that I have gone.
“It’s news from Bessie Blount,” I say to her. “Compose yourself, Your Grace.”
She smiles and leans forward to clap her hands in time with the music as the king steps into the center of the circle, puts his hands on his hips, and dances a rapid jig, his feet pounding the ground.
“Tell me,” she says over the shouts of applause.
“She must have had a boy,” I say. “The messenger was counting on a reward. The king would only pay for news of a boy. And Wolsey’s man Thomas More did not deny it. He’ll never make a courtier, that man, he can’t lie at all.”
Her fixed smile never wavers. Henry twirls around at the burst of applause that greets the end of his dance and sees his wife jumping to her feet in her pleasure at his performance. He bows to her and leads another girl into the ring.
She sits down again. “A boy,” she says flatly. “Henry has a live son.”
GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1520
Bessie’s boy survives the first few months, though none of us ladies in the queen’s rooms who have buried the half-formed bodies of Tudor princes would give thruppence for his survival. Of course nobody can say anything, but there has grown at court a wordless sense that the king cannot get boys, or, if he gets them, a woman cannot raise them. They call the poor little bastard Henry, as if we had not already buried two babies with that name. They give him the surname Fitzroy, as the king acknowledges his by-blow. Bessie is granted an allowance to raise her boy, and he is generally known, widely known, as the king’s own son. There’s no doubt in my mind that the man who publicly stands as his godfather, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, encourages the gossip that spreads across the kingdom, naming the boy as the king’s own in order that everyone shall hear that the king can sire a sturdy little son, and that he has done so.
Bessie comes out of confinement and finds herself promptly churched and married off to Cardinal Wolsey’s ward, young Gilbert Tailboys, whose father is so weak in the head that he cannot protect his son from a wife who is used goods. Just as the queen foresaw, the king does not return to his former lover, as if birth has given him a distaste for her. As he matures the king seems to be developing a taste for either notorious beauties or unspoiled girls.
Queen Katherine says nothing: nothing about Bessie, nothing about Henry Fitzroy, nothing about Mary Boleyn, the daughter of my steward Sir Thomas, who now comes to court from France, and attracts attention for her fair prettiness. She is an inconsequential little thing, newly married to William Carey, who seems to enjoy the court’s admiration of his charming wife. The king singles her out, asks her to dance, promises her a good horse of her very own. She laughs at his pleasantries, admires his music, and clasps her hands in delight like a pretty child when she sees the horse. She plays the part of an innocent, and the king likes to spoil her.
“Better for me that he amuses himself with a wife rather than a maid,” the queen remarks quietly. “It feels less . . .” She chooses her word “. . . injurious.”
“Better for us all,” I reply. “If he has her, and gives her a son, then the bastard will be put in the Carey cradle, named Henry Carey, and we won’t have another Henry Fitzroy.”
“D’you think she will have a boy as well?” she asks me with a sad little smile. “You think Mary Boleyn can carry a Tudor boy? Birth him live? Raise him? You think that it is only I who cannot give the king a son?”
I take her hand, but I cannot look her in the eyes and see her pain. “I didn’t mean to say that, because I don’t know, Your Grace. No one can know.”
What I do know as the Lenten lilies come out along the riverbank and the blackbirds start to sing at dawn, which comes earlier every day, is that the king is certain to bed Mary Boleyn, for the affair has gone beyond little gifts—he is writing poetry. He hires a choir to sing under her window on May Day morning and the court crowns her Queen of the May. Her family—my steward Sir Thomas and his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of the old Duke of Norfolk—see their pretty daughter in a new light, as a step to wealth and position, and like a pair of cheerful bawds wash her and dress her and bejewel her and present her to the king as if she were a fat little pigeon ready for the pie.
THE FIELD OF THE CLOTH OF GOLD, FRANCE, SUMMER 1520
The pinnacle of Thomas Wolsey’s strategy is to be a meeting with Francis of France, a campaign of peace with tents, horses, and an invading army of courtiers bright in their new clothes, thousands upon thousands of guardsmen and groomsmen and equerries, the ladies of both courts dressed like queens, and the two queens themselves constantly changing into fresh gowns with jewel-encrusted headdresses. Wolsey plans, commissions, and builds an extraordinary temporary town, set in a valley outside Calais, with a castle of fairy-tale beauty thrown up like a dream, overnight, and
at the heart of it is our prince, on show like some beautiful rarity, in a setting of his advisor’s making.
They call it the Field of the Cloth of Gold, for the canopies and the standards and even the tents gleam with real gold thread, and the damp fields around Calais become the dazzling center of Christendom. Here the two greatest kings come together in a competition of beauty and strength, swearing peace, a peace that will last forever.
Henry is our golden king, as dashing and handsome and stylish as the King of France, extravagant as his father could never have been, generous in his politics, sincere in his quest for peace: everyone in his train is proud of him. And at his side, rejuvenated, beautiful, taking her place on the greatest stage in Christendom, is my friend the queen, and I am glowing with pride for her, and for them both, for the long struggle they have had to get to peace with France, prosperity in England, and a settled loving accord with each other.
It does not matter to me or to the queen that all of her ladies fold into a curtsey, almost a swoon, when the king—either king—comes by. It does not matter to me that Francis of France kisses every one of the queen’s ladies except old Lady Eleanor, the Duchess of Buckingham, Ursula’s fierce mother-in-law. Katherine and Queen Claude of France strike up an immediate friendship and understanding of each other. They are both married to handsome young kings; I imagine they share more difficulties than they discuss.
My sons Montague and Arthur shine in these two hotly competitive courts; Geoffrey is at my side, learning courtly manners at this, the greatest event that the world will ever see; Ursula is in attendance on the queen, though she will have to go into confinement in the autumn; and one afternoon, without warning, my son Reginald comes into my private room on the queen’s side of the castle, and kneels at my feet for my blessing.
I am breathless with surprise. “My boy! Oh! My boy, Reginald.”
I raise him up and kiss him on both cheeks. He is taller than me and he has filled out; he is a handsome young man now, strong and serious, twenty years old. He has thick brown hair and dark brown eyes. Only I can see in his face the little boy that he was. Only I remember leaving him at Sheen Priory, when his lip trembled but they told him he could not speak to ask me to stay.
“Are you allowed to be here?” I ask.
He laughs. “I am not sworn to an order,” he reminds me. “I am not a child at school. Of course I can be here.”
“But the king—”
“The king expects me to study throughout Christendom. I often travel from Padua to visit a library or a scholar. He expects that. He pays for it. He encourages it. I wrote to him to tell him I would come here. I am to meet with Thomas More. We have written so much to each other and we have promised ourselves an evening of debate.”
I have to remember that my boy is now a respected theologian, a thinker, who talks with the greatest philosophers of the age. “What will you discuss with him?” I ask. “He’s become an important man at court. He’s now the king’s own secretary, he writes the important letters and he leads many of the discussions about peace.”
He smiles. “We’re going to talk about the nature of the Church,” he says. “That’s what we’re all talking about these days. About whether a man’s conscience can teach him, or whether he is bound to rely on the teachings of the Church.”
“And what do you think?”
“I believe that Christ formed the Church to teach us, the liturgy our lesson, and the priests and the clergy translate God to us, just as we scholars translate the teaching of Christ from Greek. There is no better guide than the Church that Christ Himself gave to us. A single man’s imperfect conscience can never be superior to centuries of tradition.”
“And what does Thomas More think?”
“Mostly the same,” he says negligently, as if the subtle shades of theology are not worth discussing with his mother. “And we cite authorities, and counter each other’s arguments. You wouldn’t be interested, it’s quite detailed.”
“And will you be ordained?” I ask eagerly. Reginald cannot rise unless he takes holy orders, and he has been trained to lead the Church.
He shakes his head. “Not yet,” he says. “I don’t feel that I have been called.”
“But surely, your own conscience cannot be your guide! You just said, a man must be guided by the Church.”
He laughs and nods his approval. “Lady Mother, you are a rhetorician, I should take you with me to meet Erasmus and More. You’re right. A man’s conscience cannot be his guide if it is opposed to the teaching of the Church. A man cannot set himself up against his master, the Church. But the teaching of the Church itself tells me that I must wait and study until the time is right for me to be called. Then, if I am called, I will answer. If the Church requires my obedience I must serve it, as must every man, even a king.”
“And be ordained,” I press.
“Haven’t I always done what you order?”
I nod. I don’t want to hear that impatient tone.
“But if I am ordained, I will have to serve wherever the Church sends me,” he points out. “What if I am sent to the East? Or to the Russias? What if they send me so far away that I can never come home?”
I cannot say to this young man that the service of one’s family often means that one cannot live at the heart of the family. I left him when he was a baby, to care for Arthur Tudor, and I won’t attend Ursula’s lying-in if the queen needs me at her side. “Well, I hope that you will come home,” I say inadequately.
“I would want to,” is all he replies. “I feel that I hardly know my family at all, and I have been away a long time.”
“When you have finished your studies—”
“Do you think the king will invite me to court and have me work for him there? Or perhaps teach at the universities?”
“I do. It’s what I hope for. Whenever I can, I mention you. And Arthur keeps you in his mind. Montague too.”
“You mention me?” he asks with a slight skeptical smile. “You find time to mention me to the king, among all the favors you request for your other boys, for Geoffrey?”
“This is a king who commands all the places and all the favors,” I say shortly. “Of course I mention you. I mention all of you. I can hardly do more.”
Reginald stays the night and dines with the lords and his brothers. Arthur comes to see me after dinner and says that Reginald was good company, very knowledgeable and able to explain the new learning that is sweeping Christendom clearly and critically. “He would make a wonderful tutor for the Princess Mary,” he says. “Then he could come home.”
“Princess Mary’s tutor? Oh, what a good idea! I’ll suggest it to the queen.”
“You will live with the princess as her governess next year,” he considers. “When would she be old enough for a tutor?”
“Perhaps six or seven?”
“Two years’ time. Then Reginald could join you.”
“And the two of us could guide her and teach her,” I say. “And if the queen were to give birth to a prince”—neither of us remark how unlikely that seems to be—“then Reginald could teach him too. Your father would have been so proud to see his son as the tutor of the next King of England.”
“He would have been.” Arthur smiles at the memory of his father. “He was proud of anything we did well.”
“And how are you, my son? You must have ridden miles with the kings. Every day they go out for sport or riding or races.”
“I’m well enough,” Arthur says, though he looks weary. “Of course, keeping up with the king is sometimes more like work than play. But I’m a little troubled, Lady Mother. I am quarreling with Jane’s father, and so she is displeased with me.”
“What’s happened?”
Arthur tells me that he has tried to persuade Jane’s father to hand over his lands so that my son can be responsible for the military service that goes with ownership. Arthur is going to inherit them anyway; there is no reason for the old man to hold them now and be re
sponsible for raising the tenants if there should be a call to war. “He really cannot serve the king,” he says, aggrieved. “He’s too old and too frail. It was a fair offer to help him. And I offered to pay rent as well.”
“You were quite right,” I say. Nothing that adds to Arthur’s landholdings could be wrong for me.
“Well, he has complained to Jane, and she thinks I am trying to steal her inheritance before his death, borrowing dead man’s shoes, and she has broken a storm over my poor head. And now he has complained to our cousin Arthur Plantagenet, and to our kinsman the old Earl of Arundel, and now they are threatening to complain of me to the king. They’re suggesting that I am trying to cheat the old fool out of his lands! Robbing my own father-in-law!”
“Ridiculous,” I say loyally. “And anyway, you have nothing to fear. Henry won’t listen to a word against you. Not from your own cousins. Not now. Not while he wants England to win at the jousting.”
L’ERBER, LONDON, SPRING 1521
The king’s favor to my son Arthur continues. Arthur is at the center of the sporting, gambling, drinking, whoring court. All the young men, noisy and disrespectful, who had been banned from court, have come back, one at a time, forgetting that they were prohibited and that the king was supposedly reformed. Henry does not check or reprimand them; he likes to be among them, as wild as them, as free as them. Arthur tells me that the king will let a word or a jest go by that challenges his very majesty, while my cousin the Duke of Buckingham rages that the court is more like a taproom than a place of grandeur and complains that Wolsey has brought the manners of Ipswich to Westminster.
Since they have come back from the Field of the Cloth of Gold they are worse than ever, filled with joy at their triumph, conscious of their youth and beauty like never before. It is a court of young people, raging with desire and zest for life, with no one to halt or control them.