The King's Curse

  But my boy Reginald, the bright, happy, cheeky boy, has to be found a place. He is too young to go as a squire into a household, and I have no kinsmen with children who will take him into their nursery. The friends I used to know in the Marches or Wales are well aware that I am not invited to court nor paid a pension. They rightly take this to mean that the Tudors do not look kindly on me. I can think of only one man, too unworldly to calculate the danger of helping me, too kind to refuse. I write to My Lady’s confessor, Bishop Fisher:

  Dear Father,

  I hope you can help me, for I have nowhere else to turn. I cannot pay my bills, nor keep my children at home.

  I have been forced to send my two oldest boys to my cousin Neville; but I would like to find a place in a good religious house for my little son Reginald. If the Church insists, I will give him to God. He is a clever boy, quick-witted and lively, perhaps even a spiritual boy. I think he will serve God well. And anyway, I cannot keep him.

  For myself and my two younger children I hope to find refuge in a nunnery where we can live on the small income that I have.

  Your daughter in Christ,

  Margaret Pole

  He writes back at once. He has done more than I had asked of him—he has found a place for Reginald and a refuge for me. He says I may stay at Syon Abbey, one of my family’s favorite religious houses opposite the old Sheen Palace. The abbey is commanded by a Mother Abbess and attended by about fifty nuns, but they often take noble visitors and I can live there with my daughter and Baby Geoffrey. When Ursula is of age, she can become a novice and then a nun in the order and her future will be secure. At the very least there will be food on the table and a roof over our heads for the next few years.

  Bishop Fisher has found Reginald a place in the brother house to the abbey—Sheen Priory, a monastery of the Carthusian Order. He will be only a few miles from us, across the river. If I were to be allowed a candle to set in my window, he would see the glow of the light and know I was thinking of him. We may be allowed to hire a boatman to row across the river to see him on feast days. We will be separated by the discipline of the religious houses, and by the wide, wide river, but I will be able to see the chimneys of the priory that houses my son. There is every reason for me to be delighted with such a generous solution to my difficulties. My son will be provided for in one house, and the other children and I will have a roof over our heads almost within sight of him. I should be joyous with relief.

  Except, except, except . . . I slide to my knees on the floor and I pray to Our Lady to save us from this refuge. I know with complete conviction this is not the right place for Reginald, my clever, bright, chattering boy. The Carthusians are an order of silent hermits. Sheen Priory is a place of unbroken silence of the strictest of religious discipline. Reginald, my merry little boy who is so proud of learning to sing in a round, who loves to read aloud, who has learned some riddles and jokes and loves to tell them slowly, with intense concentration, to his brothers: this bright, talkative child will have to serve the monks who live like hermits in individual cells, each one praying and working alone. There is not one word spoken in the priory, except for Sundays and feast days. Once a week, the monks take a walk together and then they may talk in quiet tones, among themselves. The rest of the time they are in prayerful silence, each one alone with his thoughts with his own struggle with God, alone in his cell, enclosed by high walls, listening only to the sound of the wind.

  I cannot bear to think of my chattering, high-spirited son silenced in a place of such holy discipline. I try to reassure myself that God will speak to Reginald in the cold quietness, and call him to a vocation. Reginald will learn to be silent, just as he learned to talk. He will learn to value his own thoughts and not laugh or dance or sing or caper and play the fool for his big brothers. Again and again I assure myself that this is a great opportunity for my bright boy. But I know in my heart that if God fails to call this little boy to a lifetime of holy service, then I will have put my bright, loving boy in a wordless prison for life.

  I dream of him locked in a tiny cell, and I wake with a start and cry out his name. I rack my brains to think of something else that I can do with him. But I do not know anyone who would take him as a squire, and I have no money to swear him as an apprentice, and besides—what could he do? He is a Plantagenet—I cannot have him trained up to be a cobbler. Shall an heir to the House of York stir the mash for a brewer? Would I be a better mother if I sent him to learn oaths and blasphemy running errands in an inn, than prayer and silence with a devout order?

  Bishop Fisher has found him a place, a safe place and one where they will feed and educate him. I have to accept it. I can do nothing more for him. But when I think of my lighthearted son in a place where the only sound is the ticking of the clock, telling the hours to the next service of liturgy, I cannot stop my eyes blurring with tears.

  It is my duty to destroy my home and my family, which I created so proudly as the new Lady Pole. I order all the household servants and the grooms into the great hall and I tell them that we have fallen on hard times and that I release them from service. I pay them their wages up to that day; I can offer no more though I know that I am flinging them into poverty. I tell the children that we have to leave our home, and I try to smile and suggest that it is an adventure. I say it will be exciting to live elsewhere. I close down the castle at Stourton, where my husband brought me as a bride, and where my children were born, leaving only John Little to serve as a bailiff and collect the rents and fees. Two thirds he has to send to the king, one third he will send to me.

  We ride away from our home, Geoffrey in my arms as I ride pillion behind John Little, Ursula on the little pony, and Reginald tiny on his brother’s old hunter. He rides well; he has his father’s way with horses and people. He will miss the stables and the dogs and the cheerful noise of the farmyard. I cannot bring myself to tell him his destination. I keep thinking that when we are on the road, he will ask me where we are going and I will find the courage to tell him that we have to part: Ursula and Geoffrey and I to one religious house and he to another. I try to fool myself that he will understand that this is his destiny—not what we might have chosen, yet now inevitable. But trustingly, he does not ask me. He assumes we will stay together; it does not occur to him that he might be sent away.

  He is subdued at leaving his home, while little Geoffrey is excited by the journey and Ursula starts brightly and then starts to whimper. Reginald never asks me where we are going, and then I start to imagine that somehow he already knows, and that he wants to avoid the conversation as I do.

  Only on the very last morning, as we are riding on the towpath beside the river towards Sheen, do I say: “We’ll soon be there. This will be your new home.”

  He looks up at me from his little pony. “Our new home?”

  “No,” I say shortly. “I am going to stay nearby, just a little way across the river.”

  He says nothing, and I think perhaps he has not understood.

  “I have often lived apart from you,” I remind him. “When I had to go to Ludlow, and I left you at Stourton.”

  He turns his wide-eyed face towards me. He does not say, “But then I was with my brothers and sister and with all the people I had known all my life, my nurse in the nursery, my tutor who taught my brothers and me.” He just looks at me, uncomprehending. “You will not leave me alone?” he finally asks. “In a strange place? Mother? You will not just leave me?”

  I shake my head. I can hardly trust myself to speak. “I will visit you,” I whisper. “I promise.”

  The high towers of the priory come into sight, the gate opens, and the prior himself comes out to greet me, takes Reginald by the hand, and helps him down from the saddle.

  “I will come and see you,” I promise from high on my horse, looking down at the golden crown of his bowed head. “And you will be allowed to visit me.”

  He looks very small as he stands beside the prior. He does not pull away or show
any defiance, but he turns up his pale face and he looks at me with his dark eyes and he says clearly: “Lady Mother, let me come with you and my brother and sister. Don’t leave me here.”

  “Now, now,” says the prior firmly. “Let’s have no words from children who should always be silent before their elders and betters. And in this house, you will only speak when you are ordered to do so. Silence, holy silence. You will learn to love it.”

  Obediently, Reginald folds his lower lip under his teeth, and says not another word; but still he looks at me.

  “I shall visit you,” I say helplessly. “You will be happy here. It is a good place. You will serve God and the Church. You will be happy here, I am sure.”

  “Give you good day.” The prior hints me away. “Better done quickly, since it has to be done.”

  I turn my horse’s head and I look back at my son. Reginald is only six; he looks very small beside the prior. He is pale with fear. Obediently, he says nothing, but his little mouth forms the silent word: Mother!

  There is nothing I can do. There is nothing I can say. I turn my horse’s head, and I ride away.

  SYON ABBEY, BRENTFORD, WEST OF LONDON, WINTER 1506

  My boy Reginald has to learn to live among shadows and silence and so do I. Syon Abbey, run by the Bridgettine Order, is not a silent one; the sisters even go into London to teach and to pray, but I live among them as if I were sworn dumb, like my little boy. I cannot speak of my resentment and my bitterness, and I have nothing to say which is not resentful and bitter.

  I will never forgive the Tudors for this heartbreak. They have waded to the throne through the blood of my kinsmen. They pulled my uncle Richard from the mud of Bosworth Field, stripped him naked, slung him over his own saddle, and then threw him into an unmarked grave. My own brother was beheaded to reassure King Henry; my cousin Elizabeth died trying to give him another son. They married me to a poor knight to bring me low, and now he is dead and I am lower than I imagined a Plantagenet could sink. All this—all this!—to legitimize their claim to a throne which in any case they took by conquest.

  And clearly, the Tudors take little joy in their triumph and our subjection. Since the death of his wife, our princess, the king is uncertain of his court, anxious about his subjects, and terrified by us Plantagenets of the House of York. For years he has poured money into the pockets of the Emperor Maximilian, paying him to betray my cousin, Edmund de la Pole, the York claimant to the throne of England, and send him home to his death. Now I learn that the deal has been done. The emperor takes the money and promises Edmund that he will be safe, showing him the letter of safe conduct from the king, signed in his own hand. It is a guarantee that Edmund can come home. Edmund believes the assurances of Henry Tudor, he trusts the word of an ordained king. He sees the signature, he checks the seal. Henry Tudor swears he will have safe passage and an honest welcome. Edmund is a Plantagenet; he loves his country, he wants to come home. But the moment he walks under the portcullis of Calais Castle he is arrested.

  This starts a chain of accusations that tears through my kinsmen like scissors through silk, and now I am on my knees praying for their lives. My cousin William Courtenay, already under arrest, is now charged with treasonous plotting. My kinsman William de la Pole in the Tower is questioned harshly in his cell. My cousin Thomas Grey falls under suspicion, for nothing more than dining with Cousin Edmund, years ago, before he fled from the country. One after another the men of my family disappear into the Tower of London, forced to endure solitude and fear, persuaded to name other dinner guests, and held in that dark keep, or secretly sent overseas to Calais Castle.

  SYON ABBEY, BRENTFORD, WEST OF LONDON, SPRING 1507

  I write to my sons Henry and Arthur to ask them how they are, and if they are studying and learning. I dare not trespass on the generosity of the abbey by inviting them here; the sisters cannot welcome two energetic young men into their quiet cloisters, and anyway I cannot pay for their journey.

  I see my little boy Reginald only once every three months, when they send him across the river to me by a hired rowing boat. He comes as he is commanded, cold and huddled in the prow of the little wherry. He can stay for only one night and then he has to go again. They have taught him to be silent, they have taught him very well; he keeps his eyes down and his hands at his side. When I run to greet him and hug him closely, he is stiff and unwilling, as if my lively, talkative son is dead and buried and all I have left to hold is this cold little headstone.

  Ursula, nearly nine years old, seems to grow every day, and I let down the hems of her secondhand gowns again and again. Two-year-old Geoffrey’s toes are pressed up against the front of his little boots. When I put him to bed at night, I stroke his feet and pull his toes as if I can stop them growing twisted and cramped. The rents from Stourton are collected and faithfully sent to me, but I have to hand them to the abbey for our keep. I don’t know where Geoffrey will go when he is too old to stay here. Perhaps both he and Ursula will have to be sworn to the Church like their brother Reginald, and disappear into silence. I spend hours on my knees praying to God to send me a sign, or send me some hope, or simply send me some money; sometimes I think that when my last two children are safely locked up inside the Church, I will tie a great sack of stones to my belt and walk into the cold deeps of the River Thames.

  SYON ABBEY, BRENTFORD, WEST OF LONDON, SPRING 1508

  I kneel at the chancel steps and look up at the statue of the crucified Christ. I feel as if I have been walking the road of sorrows of the Plantagenets, a Via Dolorosa, just like He did, for two long years.

  Then the danger comes a step closer to me: the king arrests my cousin Thomas Grey, and my cousin George Neville, Lord Bergavenny, who is keeping my two boys, Henry and Arthur. George leaves my boys at his home in Kent and enters the Tower, where people have started to whisper that the king himself visits nightly to oversee the torture of the men he suspects. The pedlar who comes to the door of the abbey with chapbooks and rosaries for sale tells Porteress Joan that in the City they are saying that the king has become a monster who likes to hear the cries of pain: “a Moldwarp.” He whispers the old word for a cursed mole who works in darkness among dead and buried things, who undermines his own pastures.

  I am desperate to send for my boys, to take them away from the household of a man who has been arrested as a traitor. But I do not dare. I am afraid to draw attention to myself, almost in seclusion, almost in hiding, almost in sanctuary. I must not alert the Tudor spy system to Reginald, kept in silence at the Charterhouse at Sheen, Ursula and I hidden by our devotions at Syon, or Geoffrey, the most precious of them all, clinging to my side as the nuns know that there is nowhere that he can go, that even a child of three years cannot be allowed out into the world, since there is no doubt that Henry Tudor, scenting Plantagenet blood, will sniff him out.

  This is a king who has become a dark mystery to his people. He’s not like the kings of my house—open, joyful sensualists who ruled by agreement and made their way by charm. This king spies on his people, imprisons them on a word, tortures them so they accuse and counteraccuse each other and, when he has evidence of treason, amazingly he forgives them, releasing them with a pardon, but burdened by fines so terrible that they will never be free of service to him, not through half a dozen generations. This is a king driven by fear and ruled by greed.

  My second cousin George Neville, my boys’ guardian, comes out of the Tower tight-lipped about a limp which looks as if his leg has been broken and left to set crooked, poorer by a fortune, but free. My other cousins are still imprisoned. George Neville tells no one what agreement he made inside those damp walls; silently he pays the king half of his income every quarter and never complains. He has fines so heavy that twenty-six of his friends have to serve as guarantors, and he is forbidden ever to go home to his beloved house in Kent, or to Surrey, Sussex, or Hampshire. He is an exile in his own country though he has been charged with nothing, and nothing has been proved against him.
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  None of the men who were arrested with him ever speaks of the contracts that each of them signed with the king in the darkened rooms underneath the Tower where the walls are thick and the doors are bolted and only the king stands in the corner of the chamber as his headsman turns a lever on the rack and the ropes bite tight. But people say that their agreements for huge debts are signed in their own blood.

  My cousin George writes to me briefly.

  You can safely leave your boys with me; they did not fall under any suspicion. I am a poorer man than I was, and banned from my home; but I can still house them. Better leave them with me until the fuss dies down. No point in having them lead people to you. You had better stay quietly there. Speak to no one and trust no one. These are hard times for the white rose.

  I burn the letter and I do not reply.

  SYON ABBEY, BRENTFORD, WEST OF LONDON, SPRING 1509

  The king grows more mistrustful every year, retreating into the inner rooms of his palaces to sit with his mother, refusing to allow any strangers over the threshold, doubling the numbers of the yeomen of the guard who stand at his door, going endlessly, endlessly, through his book of accounts, binding men who were already loyalists to keep the peace with massive fines, taking their lands as sureties for good behavior, asking them for goodwill gifts, interfering with court cases and taking the fees. Justice itself can now be bought with a payment to the king. Safety can be bought with a fee to his treasury. Words can be written in the accounts for the price of a gift to the right servant, or erased for a bribe. Nothing is certain but that money offered to the royal treasury can buy anything. I believe that my cousin George Neville is all but ruined, paying for his freedom every quarter; but nobody dares to write and tell me so. I receive occasional letters from Arthur and Henry and they do not mention the arrest of their host and his return, a broken man, barred from the home that was his pride. They are only sixteen and fourteen years old but already they know that the men of our house should stay silent. They were born into the most talented, intellectual, questioning family in England, and they have been taught to hold their tongues for fear that they be cut out. They know that if you are of Plantagenet blood, you should have been born dumb and deaf too. I read their innocent letters and I burn them on reading. I do not dare to keep even these, my boys’ good wishes. None of us dares to own anything.