Now that we have our fortune and our name restored he is the most eligible bachelor in England. I will match him only to a great heiress whose fortune will enhance ours, or to a girl with a great name. Of course, I don’t have to look very far. Montague spent his childhood in the nursery of my cousin George Neville, Lord Bergavenny, and was with his cousin Jane almost every day. The boys were educated together as young noblemen should be, they did not share lessons with the daughters of the house; but he saw her at dinner, at church, and at the great feast days and holidays. When the dancing master came, they were paired together; when the lute master played, they sang duets. When the household went hunting, she followed his lead over hedges and stiles. He was thoughtlessly fond of her, as young boys can be, and she set her heart on him, as silly young girls will.
When they grew older, living in the same household, traveling from one great palace to another, she emerged from the schoolroom and he saw her make that transformation, almost alchemical, from a little girl, a playmate, an uninteresting creature, rather like an inferior brother, into a young woman: a thing of mystery, a beauty.
It is Montague who asks me what I think of a match between him and Jane. He does not demand it like a fool, for he knows what is due to his name. He suggests it, cautiously, and tells me that he likes her better than any other young woman he has seen at court.
I ask: “Better than Bessie Blount?” who is popular with all the young men of the court for her sweetness and radiant beauty.
“Better than anyone,” he says. “But it is for you to judge, Lady Mother.”
I think it a happy ending to a hard story. Without the help of her father, my cousin, I could not have fed my children. Now, I am happy that he should profit from his loyalty and care for me and my family by making his daughter Lady Pole, with a jointure of two hundred pounds for now and the prospect of my fortune and title after my death. In marrying my son she nets herself a great title and vast lands. And she is an heiress in her own right, she will bring a fortune as her dowry, and on the death of my cousin George she will inherit half of his wealth. My cousin George Neville is growing old and he has only two girls; it happens that Montague’s fancy has lit on a great heiress and hers on him.
Their children will be Plantagenets from both sides, doubly royal, and will be ornaments to the Tudor court and supporters of their Tudor cousins. Without a doubt they will have handsome children. My son is a tall, good-looking young man of twenty-five, and his bride matches him, her fair head coming up to his shoulder. I hope she is fertile, but as my cousin George says as he signs the detailed marriage contract: “I think we can be confident—eh, Cousin? No Plantagenets ever failed to make a son.”
“Hush,” I say without thinking as I put sealing wax into the candle flame and impress it with the insignia on my ring, the white rose.
“Actually, the king remarks on it himself. He asks everyone why a man as lusty and strong and handsome as himself should not have a son in the nursery by now. Three or four sons in the nursery by now. What do you think? Is it some weakness in the queen? She comes from good breeding stock, after all. What can be wrong? Can it be that the marriage is not blessed?”
“I won’t hear of it.” I make a gesture with my hand as if to halt an army of whispers. “I won’t hear of it, and I won’t speak of it. And I tell all her ladies that they are not to discuss it. Because if it were to be true: what would happen? She’s still his wife, baby or no baby, she’s still Queen of England. She bears all the pain and sorrow of their losses, must she bear the blame as well? To gossip about it and to slander her can only make it worse for her.”
“Would she ever step aside?” he asks very softly.
“She can’t,” I say simply. “She believes that God called her to be Queen of England and made great and terrible changes so that she took the crown beside the king. She has given him a princess, and God willing they will have a son. Otherwise, what are we saying? That a marriage should end because a man does not have a son in eight years? In five years? Is a wife to be a leasehold that he can cancel on quarter day? It is ‘in sickness and in health, till death us do part,’ it is not ‘until I have doubts.’ ”
My cousin smiles. “She has a staunch defender in you,” he says.
“You should be glad of it.” I gesture at the contract. “Your daughter will marry my son and they will swear to be parted only by death. Only if marriage lasts without doubt till death can your daughter, or any woman, be sure of her future. The queen would not overthrow the safety of every woman in England by agreeing that a husband can put a wife aside at will. She would be no good queen to the women of England if she did that.”
“He has to have an heir,” he points out.
“He can name his heir,” I point out. I allow myself the smallest of smiles. “After all, there are heirs,” I say. My cousin’s daughter is marrying one of them, my son Montague. “There are many heirs.”
My cousin is silent for a moment as he thinks of how close we are to the throne. “The return of the Plantagenets,” he says very quietly. “Ironic, if after all this, it should come back to one of us.”
WARBLINGTON CASTLE, HAMPSHIRE, SPRING 1518
Christmas comes and goes; but the king does not return to his capital city, nor does he summon the court to his feast. I visit the baby princess in her nursery at Greenwich and find the palace free from any disease and the little girl chattering and playing and learning to dance.
I spend a happy week with Mary, hand-clasped, obeying her imperious demands to dance up and down the long galleries, while it grows colder and colder and finally snows outside the windows that overlook the river. She is an adorable child, and I leave her with a pile of gifts and the promise to return soon.
The queen writes that they have moved to Southampton, so they can buy provisions that come in from the Flanders merchants; the king does not want English goods, fearing that they are contaminated. He will not let his hosts’ servants go to the town market.
We see no one but the king’s closest friends that he cannot do without. The king will not even receive letters from the City for fear of the disease. Cardinal Wolsey writes to him on special paper from Richmond Palace and is living there, ruling like a king himself. He hears pleas from all over the country and decides on them in the royal presence chamber, seated on a throne. I have urged the king to return home to Westminster and open the court for Easter but the cardinal is firmly against me, and the king listens to no one else. The cardinal fills his letters with warnings of disease and the king thinks it safer to stay away.
I burn the queen’s letter to me, from the old habit of caution, but her words stay with me. The thought of the court of England, my family’s court, hiding like outlaws from the natural lords and advisors, living near a port so they can buy food from foreigners rather than honest fare in the English markets, taking advice only from one man, and he not a Plantagenet, not even a duke, nor a lord, but a man dedicated to his own rise, troubles me very deeply as I celebrate the turn of the year at the heart of my newly built home, and ride around the fields where my people are walking behind the plow, and the plowshare is turning over the rich earth.
I would not choose to live anywhere but on my own lands, I would not eat anything that we have not grown. I would not be served by anyone but my own people. I am a Plantagenet born and bred in the heart of my country. I would never willingly leave. So why does the king, whose father spent his life trying to get to England and risked his life to win it, not feel this deep, loving connection to his kingdom?
BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, EASTER 1518
We celebrate the feast of Easter at Bisham, with just our family. The royal court, still closed to everyone but Henry’s inner circle and the cardinal, is now traveling near Oxford. I begin to wonder if they will ever come home to their capital city.
The cardinal is trusted with all the business of the realm, as no one can see the king; he will not even receive documents. Everything goes to Wolsey and
his ever-expanding household. His clerks write the royal letters, his surveyors know the price of everything, his advisors judge how things should be, and his favorite, Thomas More, who has risen to be the trusted go-between for king and cardinal, is now given the huge responsibility of the health of the court. He commands that any household in the kingdom with a sick member has to show a bundle of hay at the door so that anyone can see the sign and keep away.
People complain that the lawyer More is persecuting the poor by marking them out, but I write to the young lawyer to thank him for his care of the king, and when I hear that he is ill himself, I send him a bottle of oils of my own distilling which are said to reduce fever.
“You’re very generous,” my son Montague observes as he sees the carrier take a basket of precious medicines directed to Thomas More at Abingdon, near Oxford. “I didn’t know that More was a friend of ours.”
“If he’s the favorite of the cardinal, then he’ll be close to the king,” I say simply. “And if he’s close to the king, then I would want him to think kindly of us.”
My son laughs. “We’re safe now, you know,” he points out to me. “Perhaps everyone had to buy the friendship of the court in the old days, when the old king was on the throne, but Henry’s advisors are no threat to us. No one would turn him against us now.”
“It’s a habit,” I admit. “All my life I have lived on the favor of the court. I know no other way to survive.”
Since none of us is invited to the tiny court that is allowed to live with the king, my kinsmen the Nevilles and the Staffords come to stay for a sennight to celebrate the end of Lent and the festival of Easter. The Duke of Buckingham, Edward Stafford, my second cousin, brings with him his son, Henry, sixteen years old and a bright, charming boy. My boy Geoffrey is only three years his junior, and the two cousins take a liking to each other and disappear for a whole day at a time, riding at the ring in the jousting arena, hawking, even fishing in the cold water of the Thames and bringing home a fat salmon which they insist on cooking themselves in the kitchen, to the outrage of the cook.
We indulge their pride, and have trumpeters announce the arrival of the dish in the dining room, where it is carried shoulder-high in triumph, and the three hundred people of our combined households who sit down to dinner in my great hall rise to their feet and applaud the noble salmon and the grinning young fishermen.
“Have you heard when the court will return?” George Neville asks Edward Stafford when dinner is over and we cousins and our boys are seated in my private chamber and at ease with wine and sweetmeats before the fire.
His face darkens. “If the cardinal has his way, he will keep the king apart from his court forever,” he says shortly. “I am ordered not to come to him. Banned from court? Why would such a thing be? I am well, my household is well. It’s nothing to do with illness; it is that the cardinal fears the king will listen to me—that’s why I am barred from attending on him.”
“My lords,” I say carefully. “Cousins. We must watch our words.”
George smiles at me and puts his hand over mine. “You’re always cautious,” he says. To the duke he nods. “Can’t you just go to the king, even without permission, and tell him that the cardinal is not serving his interests? Surely, he’d listen to you. We’re a great family of the realm, we have nothing to gain by causing trouble, he can trust our advice.”
“He doesn’t listen to me,” Edward Stafford says irritably. “He doesn’t listen to anyone. Not to the queen, not to me, not to any of the great men of the realm who carry blood as good or better than his, and who know as well as he does, or better, how the kingdom should be ruled. And I cannot just go to him. He won’t admit anyone to his court unless he is assured that they are not carrying disease. And who do you think is judge of that? Not even a doctor—the cardinal’s new assistant, Thomas More!”
I nod to my sons, Montague and Arthur, to leave the room. It may be safe to speak against the cardinal; there are very few lords of the land who do not speak against him. But I would rather my sons didn’t hear it. If anyone ever asks them, they can truthfully say that they heard nothing.
They both hesitate to go. “Nobody could doubt our loyalty to the king,” Montague says for both of them.
The Duke of Buckingham gives a reluctant laugh, more like a growl. “Nobody had better doubt mine,” he says. “I have breeding as good as the king himself, better in fact. Who believes in loyalty to the throne more than a royal? I don’t challenge the king. I never would. But I do question the motives and the advancement of that damned butcher’s son.”
“I think, Lord Uncle, that the cardinal’s father was a merchant?” Montague queries.
“What difference does that make to me?” Buckingham demands. “Tinker or tailor or beggar? Since my father was a duke and his grandfather was a duke, and my great-great-great-great-grandfather was King of England?”
BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SUMMER 1518
The king’s Knight Harbinger rides up to my front door, with half a dozen yeomen of the guard riding with him, glances at the new stonework that shows my proud crest over the door of my old family home, and dismounts. His eyes travel over the newly renovated towers, the handsome retiled roofs, the meadows that run down to the wide river, the well-tilled fields, the haystacks, the gold of the wheat and the rich greenish shimmer of the barley in the fields. He counts—I know without even seeing the greed in his eyes—the wealth of my fields, the fatness of my cattle, the prosperity of this rolling vast expanse of lush countryside that I own.
“Good day,” I say, stepping out of the great door in my riding gown, a plain hood on my head, the very picture of a working landlord with great lands in her stewardship.
He bows very low, as he should. “Your ladyship, I am sent from the king to say that he will come to stay with you for eight nights, if there is no illness in the village.”
“We are all well, thanks be to God,” I reply. “And the king and court will be welcome here.”
“I see that you can house them,” he says, conceding the grandeur of my house. “We’ve been in much more modest quarters recently. May I speak to the steward of your household?”
I turn and nod, and James Upsall steps forward. “Sir?”
“I have a list of rooms required.” The Knight Harbinger pulls a rolled scroll of paper from an inner pocket in his jacket. “And I shall have to see every one of your stable lads and household servants. I have to see for myself that they are well.”
“Please assist the Knight Harbinger,” I say calmly to Upsall, who is bristling at this high-handed treatment. “When will His Grace the King arrive?”
“Within the week,” the harbinger replies, and I nod as if this is an everyday matter to me, and go quietly into my house, where I pick up my gown and run to tell Montague and Jane, Arthur and Ursula, and especially Geoffrey, that the king himself is coming to Bisham and everything must be absolutely perfect.
Montague himself rides out with the waymarkers and sets up the signs on the road to make sure that the scurriers who go ahead of the court cannot possibly get lost. Behind them will come yeomen of the guard, making sure that the countryside is safe and that there is no point where the king might be ambushed, or attacked. They come into the stables and dismount from their sweating horses, and Geoffrey, who has been on faithful lookout all the morning, comes running to tell me that the guards are here so the court cannot be far behind.
We are ready. My son Arthur, who knows the king’s tastes better than any of us, has ordered musicians and rehearsed them; they will play after dinner for dancing. He has arranged the loan of good horses for hunting from all our neighbors, to supplement the full stable of hunters that will come with the court. Arthur has warned our tenants that the king will ride all over their fields and woodland and any damage to crops will be settled up when the visit is over. They are strictly forbidden to complain before then. The tenants have been primed to cheer the king and shout blessings whenever they see him; the
y may not present complaints or requests. I have sent my steward to every local market to buy up delicacies and cheeses, while Montague sends his own man to London to raid the cellar at L’Erber for the best wines.
Ursula and I set the groom of the ewery to bring out the very best of linen for the two best bedrooms, the king’s room on the west side of the building and the queen’s at the east. Geoffrey runs errands from one room to another, from one tower to another, but even he, in his boyish glee, is not more excited than I that the King of England will sleep under my roof, that everyone will see that I am restored to my place, in the home of my forefathers, and that the King of England is a visiting friend.
It is odd that the best part of it, the best moment—after all the work of preparation and the boastful joy—is when Geoffrey stands by my side as I help Katherine out of her litter and see her face radiant, and she clings to me as if she were my little sister and not my queen, and whispers in my ear: “Margaret! Guess why I am in a litter and not riding?”
And when I hesitate, afraid to say what I am suddenly, wildly hoping, she laughs aloud and hugs me again. “Yes! Yes! It’s true. I am with child.”
It is clear they have been happy together, away from the court, the place servers and flatterers banned from the king’s presence. She has been attended by only a few of her ladies—no flirtatious girls. For a full year they have lived like a private couple with only a handful of friends and companions. Henry has been starved of the constant flood of attention and praise, and it has done him good. In the absence of others they have enjoyed each other’s company. Whenever Henry pays attention to Katherine, she blooms under the warmth of his affection, and he discovers again the steady wisdom and the genuine learning of the charming woman whom he married for love.