Henry, usually traveling between his rich palaces, mostly by barge, always heavily guarded, has not heard the rumble of a thousand critical whispers before. It’s like a distant thunder, low and yet ominous. He looks around, but he cannot see one person speaking against him. Abruptly, he laughs out loud at nothing, as if he is trying to demonstrate that he is not troubled by this sulky welcome, and he swings himself heavily down from his horse, throws the reins to a groom, and stands stock-still, his arms akimbo, a fat block of a man, as if daring anyone to speak against him. He can see no one to challenge. There is no scowling face in the crowd, no one is going to stand up to be martyred. If Henry saw an enemy, he would cut him down where he stood; he has never lacked courage. But there is no one opposing him. There is just a dull sourceless whisper of discontent. The people don’t like their king anymore, they don’t trust him with their Church, they don’t believe that his will is given to him by God, they miss Queen Katherine, they were horrified by the stories of the guilt and the death of Queen Anne. How can such a woman ever have been the choice of a godly king? He chose her to prove that he was the best, that he could marry the best. Since she is now shown to be the worst, what does that say about him?
They don’t know anything about Queen Jane, but they have heard that she danced on the night of the execution and married the king eleven days after he beheaded his former wife, her mistress. They think she must be a woman quite without pity. To them, the king is no longer the prince whose coming makes all things right, he is no longer the young man whose follies and sports were a byword for joyous excess. Their love for him has grown doubtful, their love for him has grown fearful; in truth, their love for him has gone.
Henry looks around and tosses his head as if he despises the little town and the lowered heads of the silent pilgrims. He reminds me, for one moment, of the way his father used to look, as if he thought we were all fools, that he had taken the throne and the kingdom by his own quick and cunning wits, and that he despised us all for having allowed it. Henry glances down at Jane who stands at his side, waiting to walk with him through the wide-open doors of the inn. His face does not soften at the sight of her blond bowed head. He looks at her as if she is another fool who is going to do exactly as he wants, even if it costs her life.
We are following slavishly behind, when there is a disturbance in the crowd outside, horsemen riding down the road and trying to push their way through. I see Montague, following the king, looking back at the noise. It is one of Henry Fitzroy’s servants, his horse nearly foundered, looking as if it has been ridden hard, perhaps all the way from St. James’s Palace, the young duke’s London home.
A small nod of Montague’s head as he goes into the darkness of the inner hall of the inn prompts me to wait outside and discover the news that has made Fitzroy’s servants ride so hard. The man pushes his way through the crowd, while his groom waits behind holding the horse.
At once people gather around him clamoring for news, and I stand back to listen. He shakes his head and speaks quietly. I clearly hear him say that nothing could be done, the poor young man, and nothing could be done.
I go into the inn, where the king’s presence chamber is filled with the court, talking and wondering what has happened. Jane is seated on the throne, trying to look unconcerned and talking with her ladies. The door to the king’s private room is closed, with Montague nearby.
“He went in there with the messenger,” Montague says to me quietly. “Shut everyone out. What’s happened?”
“I think Fitzroy may be dead,” I say.
Montague’s eyes widen and he gives a little exclamation, but he is such a trained conspirator now that he gives little away. “An accident?”
“I don’t know.”
There is a great bellow from behind the closed door, a terrible roar, like a bull will give when a mastiff has fastened on his throat and he drops to his knees. It is the noise of a man mortally wounded. “No! No! No!”
Jane whirls around at the cry, jumps to her feet, and sways indecisively. The court falls completely silent, and watches her, as she sits back down on her throne and then rises up again. Her brother speaks quickly to her and she obediently goes to the door to the privy chamber, but then she steps back and makes a little gesture with her hand, stopping the guards from opening it. “I can’t,” she says.
She looks across at me, and I go to her side. “What should I do?” she asks.
There is a single loud sob from inside the room. Jane looks quite terrified. “Should I go to him? Thomas says I must go to him. What’s happening?”
Before I can answer Thomas Seymour is at his sister’s side, his hand in the small of her back, literally thrusting her towards the closed door. “Go in,” he says through his teeth.
She digs in her heels, she rolls her eyes towards me. “Shouldn’t Lord Cromwell go in?” she whispers.
“Not even he can raise the dead!” Thomas snaps. “You’ve got to go in.”
“Come with me.” Jane reaches out and grabs my hand as the guard swings the door open. The messenger stumbles out and Thomas Seymour pushes us both in and slams the door behind us.
Henry is on his knees, on the floor, hunched over a richly padded footstool, his face buried in the thick embroidery. He is sobbing convulsively like a child, hoarse-voiced as if his grief is tearing out his heart. “No!” he says when he catches his breath, and then he gives a great groan.
Cautiously, like someone approaching a wounded beast, Jane goes towards him. She pauses and bends down, her hand hovering above his heaving shoulders. She looks at me, I nod, and she pats his back so lightly that he will not feel it through the wadding of his jacket.
He rubs his face one way and another against the knots of gold and sequins on the footstool; his clenched fist thumps the stool and then the wooden planks of the floor. “No! No! No!”
Jane jumps back at this violence, and looks at me. Henry gives a little scream of distress and pushes the footstool away and flings himself facedown on the floor, rolling from one side to the other in the strewing herbs and the straw. “My son! My son! My only son!”
Jane shrinks back from his flailing arms and kicking legs, but I go forward and kneel at his head. “God bless him and keep him, and take him into eternal life,” I say quietly.
“No!” Henry rears up, his hair stuck with herbs and straw, and screams into my face. “No! Not into eternal life. This is my boy! He is my heir! I need him here.”
He is terrifying in his red-faced frustrated rage, but then I see where the footstool cover has scratched his face, torn his eyelid, so blood and tears are running down his face, I see the desperate child that he was when his brother died, when his mother died only a year later. I see Henry the child who had been sheltered from life and now had it breaking into his nursery, into his world. A child who had rarely been refused and now suddenly had everything he loved snatched from him.
“Oh, Harry,” I say, and my voice is filled with pity.
He wails and pitches himself into my lap. He grips around my waist as if he would crush me. “I can’t . . .” he says. “I can’t . . .”
“I know,” I say, I think of all the times that I have had to come to this young man and tell him a son has died, and now he is as old as I was then, and once again I have to tell him that he has lost a son.
“My boy!”
I grip him as tightly as he is holding me, I rock him and we move together as if he were a great baby, crying in his mother’s lap with the heartbreak of childhood.
“He was my heir,” he wails. “He was my heir. He was the very spit of me. Everyone said it.”
“He was,” I say gently.
“He was handsome as I was!”
“He was.”
“It was as if I would never die . . .”
“I know.”
A new burst of sobbing follows, and I hold him as he weeps heartbrokenly. I look over his heaving shoulders to Jane. She is simply aghast. She stares at the king,
hunched on the floor, crying like a child, as if he is some strange monster from a fairy story, nothing to do with her at all. Her eyes slide to the door; she is wishing herself far away from this.
“There is a curse,” Henry says suddenly, sitting up and scrutinizing my face. His eyelids are puffed and red, his face blotchy and scratched, his hair standing up, his cap in the ashes of the fire. “There must be a curse against me. Why else would I lose everyone I love? Why else am I wretched? How can I be king and the most miserable man in the world?”
Even now, with this bereaved father clinging to my hands, I will not say anything. “How did Bessie Blount offend God that He strikes at me?” Henry demands of me. “What did Richmond ever do wrong? Why would God take him away from me if there is not a curse on them?”
“Was he ill?” I ask quietly.
“So fast,” Henry whispers. “I knew he wasn’t well, but it wasn’t serious. I sent my physician, I did everything that a father should do . . .” He catches his breath on a little sob. “I have failed in nothing,” he says more strongly. “It cannot be anything I have done. It has to be the will of God that he was taken from me. It must be something Bessie has done. There must be some sin.”
He breaks off and takes my hand and puts it to his sore, burning cheek. “I can’t bear it,” he says simply. “I can’t believe it. Say it isn’t so.”
The tears are pouring down my own face. Silently, I shake my head.
“I won’t have it said,” Henry says. “Say it’s not so.”
“I can’t deny it,” I say steadily. “I am sorry. I am sorry, Henry. I am so sorry. But he has gone.”
His mouth gapes and he drools, his eyes raw and filled with tears. He can hardly make a sound. “I can’t bear it,” he whispers. “What about me?”
I pick myself up from the floor, sit on the footstool, and hold out my arms to him as if he were the little boy in the royal nursery once again. He crawls towards me and lays his head in my lap and gives himself up to his tears. I stroke his thinning hair, and I wipe his sore cheeks with the linen sleeve of my gown, and I let him cry and cry while the room goes golden with sunset and gray with dusk, and Jane Seymour sits like a little statue at the opposite end of the room, too horrified to move.
As the dusk turns darker and becomes night, the king’s sobs gradually turn to whimpers and then shudders until I think he has fallen asleep, but then he stirs again and his shoulders heave. When it is time for dinner, he does not move and Jane keeps her strange silent vigil with me, as we witness his heartbreak. Then when the bells in the town toll for Compline, the door opens a crack and Thomas Cromwell slips into the room, and takes in everything in one shrewd glance.
“Oh,” Jane exclaims with relief, rises to her feet and makes a little distracted flapping gesture with her hands as if to show the Lord Secretary that the king has collapsed with grief, and the Lord Secretary had better take charge.
“Would you like to go to dinner, Your Grace?” Cromwell asks her with a bow. “You can tell the court that the king is dining in his rooms, privately.”
Jane gives a little mew of assent and slips from the room, and Cromwell turns to me with the king in my arms, as if I pose a knottier problem.
“Countess,” he says to me, bowing.
I incline my head but I don’t speak. It is as if I am holding a sleeping child whom I don’t want to wake.
“Shall I get the grooms of the bedchamber to put him to bed?” he asks me.
“And his physician with a sleeping draft?” I suggest in a whisper.
The physician comes, and the king raises his head and obediently drinks the measure. He keeps his eyes closed, as if he cannot bear to see the looks, curious, sympathetic or, worst of all, amused, of the grooms of the bedchamber who turn down the bed, pierce it with a sword to prevent assassins, warm it with the hot coals in the pan, and then stand at his head and his feet, waiting for instruction.
“Put His Majesty to bed,” Cromwell says.
I start a little at the new title. Now that the king is the only ruler in England and the Pope is nothing but the vicar of Rome, he has taken to claiming that he is as good as an emperor. He is no longer to be called “Your Grace” like any duke, though this was good enough for his father, the first Tudor, and good enough for all of my family. Now he has an imperial title: he is “Majesty.” Now his newly made majesty is so felled by grief that his humble subjects have to lift him into bed, and they are too afraid to touch him.
The grooms hesitate, hardly knowing how to approach him. “Oh, for God’s sake,” Cromwell says irritably.
It takes six of them to lift him from the floor to the bed, and his head lolls and the tears spill from his closed eyes. I order the grooms to pull off his beautifully worked riding boots, and Cromwell tells them to take off the heavy jacket, so we leave him to sleep still half dressed, like a drunkard. One of the grooms will sleep on a pallet bed on the floor; we see them tossing coins for the unlucky one who has to stay. Nobody wants to be with him through the night as he snores and farts and weeps. There are two yeomen guards on the door.
“He’ll sleep,” Cromwell says. “But when he wakes, what do you think, Lady Margaret? Is his heart broken?”
“It is a terrible loss,” I concede. “To lose a child is always terrible, but to lose one when he was through the illnesses of childhood and had everything before him . . .”
“To lose an heir,” Cromwell remarks.
I say nothing. I am not going to share any opinion about the king’s heir.
Cromwell nods. “But from your point of view it is all to the good?”
The question is so heartless that I hesitate and look at him, as if I cannot be sure that I heard him correctly.
“It leaves Lady Mary as the only likely heir,” he points out. “Or do you say princess?”
“I don’t talk of her at all. And I say Lady Mary. I signed the oath, and I know that you passed an act of Parliament to say that the king will choose his own heir.”
I order food brought to my private rooms. I can’t bear to join the court which is noisy with excited chatter and speculation. Montague comes in with the fruit and sweetmeats, pours a glass of wine, and sits opposite me.
“Did he collapse?” he asks coolly.
“Yes,” I say.
“He was like that when he lost the Boleyn baby,” he says. “He cried and raged and then didn’t speak. Then, when he finished with his grief, he denied that it had ever happened. And we had a secret burial.”
“It’s a terrible loss for him,” I remark. “He said he was going to make Fitzroy his heir.”
“And now he has no male heir, just as the curse foretold.”
“I don’t know,” I say.
In the morning the king is flushed and sullen, his eyes red and puffy, his face downcast. He completely ignores me. It is as if I am not there at breakfast, and was not there last night. He eats hugely, calling again and again for more meat, more ale, some wine, some fresh baked bread, some pastries, as if he would gobble up the world, and then goes again to his chapel. I sit with the queen and her ladies in our bright rooms which overlook the high street and so we see the messengers in Norfolk livery come and go, but the death of the young duke is not announced to the court and nobody knows if they should wear mourning or not.
For three days we stay at Sittingbourne, and still the king says nothing about Fitzroy, though more and more people know that he has died. On the fourth day the court moves on, towards Dover, but still no one has announced that the duke is dead, and the court has not gone into mourning, and the funeral has not been planned.
It is as if everything is suspended in time, frozen like a winter waterfall with the cascade pouring down one moment and stopped in silence the next. The king says nothing; the court knows everything, but obediently acts as if it is completely ignorant. Fitzroy does not ride to join us from London, he will never ride again and yet we all have to pretend that we are waiting for him to come.
“This is madness,” Montague says to me.
“I don’t know what I am supposed to do,” the queen says plaintively to her brother. “It’s not really anything to do with me. I have ordered a mourning gown. But I don’t know if I have to put it on.”
“Howard has to speak,” Thomas Seymour rules. “Fitzroy was his son-in-law. There’s no reason for any of us to get the bastard a proper funeral. There’s no reason for us to call the king to account.”
Thomas Howard steps up to the throne as Henry sits in the presence chamber before dinner and asks, his voice so quiet that only the men closest to him can hear, if he has permission to leave court to go home and bury his son-in-law.
Carefully, he does not say Fitzroy’s name. The king beckons him closer and whispers in his ear, and then turns and waves him away. Thomas Howard leaves court without a word to anyone, and goes to his home in Norfolk. Later, we hear that he buried his son-in-law, and his own hopes, in Thetford Priory, with only two men attending the funeral, a plain wooden coffin and a secret service.
“Why?” Montague asks me. “Why is it kept so quiet?”
“Because Henry cannot bear to lose another son,” I say. “And because now he has the court so obedient and we are such fools, if he does not want to think of something, then none of us says it. If he loses his son and cannot bear the grief, then the boy is buried out of sight. And when he next wants to do something which is completely wrong, we will find that he has grown stronger still. He can deny the truth and nobody will argue with him.”
BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, JULY 1536
I stay at my home while the court is on progress and walk in my fields, and watch the wheat turn golden. I go out with the reaping gang on the first day of harvesting and watch them stride side by side across the field, their sickles slicing down the waving crop, the hares and the rabbits darting away before them so the boys race after them with yapping terriers.