“We’ll have to deny him,” I say unhappily. “I know we will.”
Montague flings himself into a chair and runs his hands through his hair. “Doesn’t he realize what life is like in England today?”
“He knows very well,” I say. “Probably nobody knows better. He’s warning the king that if he goes on with the destruction of the monasteries, the people will rise against him and the emperor will invade. And already the North is up.”
“The commons turned on the bishop’s chancellor at Horncastle,” Montague tells me, his voice low. “They’re burning beacons as far as Yorkshire. But Reginald declares against the king too soon. His letter is treason.”
“I don’t see what else he could write,” I say. “The king asked for his opinion. He has given it. He says that the princess should have her title, and the Pope should have the headship of the Church. Would you say any different?”
“Yes! Dear God, I’d never tell the truth to this king.”
“But if you were far away, and ordered to write your honest opinion?”
Montague gets out of his chair and kneels beside mine so that he can whisper into my ear. “Lady Mother, he is far away; but we are not. I am afraid for you, and for me, and for my son Harry, all my children, and for all our kin. It doesn’t matter that Reginald is right—I know he is! It doesn’t matter that most of England would agree with him—almost every lord of the land would agree with him. It’s not just the commons who are marching in Lincolnshire, they’re taking the gentry with them and calling on the lords to turn out for them. Every day someone seeks me out or sends me a message or asks me what we are going to do. But telling this truth has put all of us into terrible danger. The king is no longer a thoughtful scholar, he is no longer a devout son of the Church. He has become a man quite out of the control of his teachers, of the priests, perhaps of himself. There is no point giving the king an honest opinion, he wants nothing but praise of himself. He cannot bear one word of criticism. He is merciless against those who speak against him. It is death to speak the truth in England now. Reginald is far away and enjoying the luxury of speaking out, but we are here; it is our lives he is risking.”
I am silent. “I know,” I say. “I don’t think that he could have done differently, he had to speak out. But I know that he has put us in danger.”
“Geoffrey too,” Montague says. “Think of your precious Geoffrey. Reginald’s letter has endangered us all.”
“What can we do to make ourselves safe?”
“There’s no safety for us. We are the royal family, whether we publicly proclaim it as Reginald does, or not. All we can do is draw a line between Reginald and ourselves. All we can say is that he does not speak for us, that we deny what he says, that we urge him to be silent. And we can beg him not to publish, and you can order him not to go to Rome.”
“But what if he publishes this letter, and what if he goes to Rome and persuades the Pope to publish the excommunication and order a crusade against England?”
Montague puts his head in his hands. “Then I am ready,” he says very quietly. “When the emperor invades, I will raise the tenants and we will march with the commons of England, defend the Church, overthrow the king, and put the princess on her throne.”
“We will do it?” I ask, as if I don’t know that the answer is yes.
“We have to,” Montague says grimly. Then he looks up at me, and I see my own fear in his face. “But I am afraid,” he admits honestly.
Both Montague and I write to Reginald. Geoffrey writes too and we send the letters by Thomas Cromwell’s messengers, so that he can see how loudly we condemn Reginald for his folly, for the abuse of his position as the king’s own scholar, and how clearly we call on him to withdraw everything he has said.
Take another way and serve our master as thy bounden duty is to do, unless thou wilt be the confusion of thy mother.
I leave the letter unsealed, but I kiss my signature and hope that he will know. He will not withdraw one word of what he has written, and I know that he has written nothing but the truth. He will know that I wouldn’t have him deny the truth. But he can never come to England while the king lives, and I cannot see him. Perhaps, given my great age, I will never see him again. The only way that my family can be together again will be if Reginald comes with an army from Spain to rouse the commons, restore the Church, and put the princess on the throne. “Come the day!” I whisper, and then I take my letter to Thomas Cromwell for his spies to study for a hidden code of treason.
The great man, Lord Secretary and Vicegerent of the Church, invites me into his privy chamber where three men are bowed over letters and accounts books. The work of the world revolves around Thomas Cromwell, just as it did around his old master, Thomas Wolsey. He takes care of everything.
“The king requests that your son come to court and explain his letter,” he says to me. Out of the corner of my eye I see one of the clerks pause with his pen raised, waiting to copy down my reply.
“I pray that he will come,” I say. “I will tell him, as his mother, that he should come. He should show every obedience to His Gracious Majesty, as we all do, as he was raised to do.”
“His Majesty is not angry now with his cousin Reginald,” Cromwell says gently. “He wants to understand the arguments, he wants Reginald to talk with other scholars so that they can agree.”
“What a very good idea.” I look directly into his smiling face. “I shall tell Reginald to come at once. I will add a note to my letter.”
Cromwell, the great liar, the great heretic, the great pander to his master, bows his head as if he is impressed with my loyalty. I, as bad as he is, bow back.
L’ERBER, LONDON, OCTOBER 1536
Montague comes to see me at my home early in the morning, while the court is at Mass. He comes into my chapel and kneels beside me on the stone flags while the priest, half hidden by the rood screen, his back turned towards us, performs the mysteries of the Mass and brings the blessing of God to me and my silently kneeling household.
At the back, untouched and unread, is the Bible that the king has ordered shall be placed in every church. Everyone of my household believes that God speaks in Latin to his Church. English is the language of everyday mortals, of the market, of the midden. How can anything that is of God be written down in the language of sheep farming and money? God is the Word, he is the Pope, the priest, the bread and the wine, the mysterious Latin of the litany, the unreadable Bible. But we do not defy the king on this, we don’t defy him on anything.
“Queen Jane went down on her knees to the king and begged him to restore the abbeys and not steal them from the people.” Montague bows his head as if in prayer and mutters the news to me over his rosary. “Lincolnshire is up to defend the abbeys, there’s not a village that is not marching.”
“Is it our time?”
Montague bows his head farther so that no one can see him smile. “Soon,” he says. “The king is sending Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, to put down the commons. He thinks it will be readily done.”
“Do you?”
“I pray.” Cautiously, Montague does not even say what he prays for. “And the princess sent you her love. The king has brought her and little Lady Elizabeth to court. For a man who says that the commons will be easily put down, it’s telling that he should have his daughters brought to him for safety.”
Montague leaves as soon as the service is over, but I don’t need him to bring me news. Soon all of London is buzzing. The cook’s boy, sent to market to get some nutmeg, comes home with the claim that forty thousand men, armed and horsed, are marching in Boston.
My London steward comes to me to tell me that two lads from Lincolnshire have run away, gone home to join with the commons. “What did they think they were going to do?” I ask.
“They take an oath,” he says, his voice carefully bland. “Apparently, they swear that the church shall have its fees and funds, that the monasteries shall not be thrown down, but shall be restored, and that the fa
lse bishops and false advisors who recommended these wrongs shall be exiled from the king and from the kingdom.”
“Bold demands,” I say, keeping my face quite still.
“Bold demands in the face of danger,” he adds. “The king has sent his friend Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, to join with the Duke of Norfolk against the rebels.”
“Two dukes against a handful of fools?” I say. “God save the commons from folly and hurt.”
“The commons may save themselves. They’re not unarmed,” he says. “And there are more than a few of them. The gentry are with them and they have horse and weapons. Perhaps it is the dukes who had better look to their own safety. They say that Yorkshire is ready to rise, and Tom Darcy has sent to the king to ask what his answer must be.”
“Lord Thomas Darcy?” I think of the man who has my pansy badge in his pocket.
“The rebels have a banner,” my steward continues. “They are marching under the five wounds of Christ. They say it is like a holy war. The Church against the infidel, the commons against the king.”
“And where is Lord Hussey?” I ask, naming one of the lords of the country, the princess’s former chamberlain.
“He’s with the rebels,” my steward says, nodding at my blank-faced astonishment. “And his wife is out of the Tower and with him.”
The country is so disturbed with rumors of uprisings, even in the South, that I stay in London in early October. I take my barge downriver one cold day as the mist is lying on the water and the evening sun burning red, and the tide is up and the current strong.
“Best walk round the bridge, my lady,” says the master of my barge, and they set me down on the wet slimy stairs and row the barge out into the middle channel to shoot the stormy waters of the bridge and pick me up on the other side.
One of my granddaughters, Katherine, takes my arm and we have a liveryman before and behind us as we walk the short way around to the water stairs on the other side of the bridge. There are beggars, of course, but they clear from the path when they see us coming. I hide my flinch of dismay when I notice a nun’s habit, fouled by months of sitting and waiting, and see the strained, desperate face of a woman who had given herself to God and then found herself flung into the gutter. I nod to Katherine’s sister Winifred, who, unasked, tosses the woman a coin.
A man comes out of the darkness and stands before us. “Who’s this?” he asks one of my servants.
“I am Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury,” I say briskly, “and you had better let me pass.”
He smiles, as merry as an outlaw in the greenwood, and he bows low. “Pass, your ladyship, pass with our blessing,” he says. “For we know who our friends are. And God be with you, for you too are a pilgrim and have a pilgrimage gate to go.”
I stop short. “What did you say?”
“It’s not a rebellion,” he says very quietly. “You would know that as well as I, perhaps. It is a pilgrimage. We are calling it the Pilgrimage of Grace. And we tell each other that we have to pass through the pilgrimage gate.”
He hesitates and sees my face as I hear the words “Pilgrimage of Grace.” “We are marching under the five wounds of Christ,” he says. “And I know you, and all the good old lords of the white rose, are pilgrims just like us.”
The rebels who say they march on the Pilgrimage of Grace have captured Sir Thomas Percy, or else he has joined with them; nobody seems to know. They are under the leadership of a good man, an honest Yorkshireman, Robert Aske, and in the middle of October we learn that Aske rode into the great northern city of York without an arrow flying in its defense. They threw open the gates to him and to the force that everyone is now calling the pilgrims. They are twenty thousand strong. This is four times the force that took England at Bosworth, this is an army great enough to take all of England.
Their first act was to restore two Benedictine houses in the city, Holy Trinity and the nunnery of St. Clement. When they rang the bells at Holy Trinity, the people cried for joy as they went in to hear Mass.
My guess is that the king will do anything to avoid an open battle. The rebels in Lincolnshire have been offered a pardon if they will only go home, but why should they do so, now the massive county of Yorkshire is up in arms?
“I’m ordered to muster the tenants and to get ready to march,” Montague says to me. He has come to L’Erber as the servants are clearing away the tables after dinner. The musicians are tuning up and there is a masque to be performed. I beckon Montague to sit beside me, and I lean my head towards him so that he can speak softly against my hood.
“I am commanded to go north and put down the pilgrimage,” he says. “Geoffrey has to raise a force too.”
“What will you do?” In my pocket I touch the embroidered badge that Lord Darcy gave me, the five wounds of Christ and the white rose of York. “You can’t fire on the pilgrims.”
He shakes his head. “Never,” he says simply. “Besides, everyone says that when the king’s army sees the pilgrims, they’ll change sides and join them. It’s happening every day. Every letter that the king sends out with orders to his commanders he follows with one asking them if they are staying true to him. He trusts no one. He’s right. It turns out that no one can be trusted.”
“Who’s he got in the field?”
“Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and the king trusts him no farther than he can see him. Talbot, Lord Shrewsbury, is marching in support, but he is for the old religion and the old ways. Charles Brandon refused to go, saying that he wanted to be at home to keep his county down; he’s been ordered to Yorkshire against his will. Thomas Lord Darcy says he’s pinned down by the rebels in his castle, but since he’s been arguing against the pulling down of the monasteries since the first moment of the queen’s divorce, nobody knows if he’s just waiting for the right moment to join the pilgrims. John Hussey sent a letter to say he’s been kidnapped by them, but everyone knows he was the princess’s chamberlain and loves her dearly, and his wife is outright on her side. The king is chewing his nails to the quick; he’s in a frenzy of rage and self-pity.”
“And what . . .” I break off as a messenger in Montague’s livery comes into the hall and walks close to him and waits. Montague beckons him forward, listens intently, and then turns to me.
“Tom Darcy has surrendered his castle to the rebels,” he says. “The pilgrims have taken Pontefract and everyone under Tom Darcy’s command in the castle and in the town has sworn the pilgrim oath. The Archbishop of York is with them.”
He sees my face. “Old Tom is on his last crusade,” he says wryly. “He’ll be wearing his badge of the five wounds.”
“Tom is wearing his badge?” I ask.
“He had the crusader badges at his castle,” he says. “He issued it to the pilgrims. They are marching for God against heresy and wearing the five wounds of Christ. No Christian can fire on them under that sacred banner.”
“What should we do?” I ask him.
“You go to the country,” Montague decides. “If the South rises for the pilgrims, they’ll need leadership and money and supplies. You can lead them in Berkshire. I’ll send to you so you know what’s happening in the North. Geoffrey and I will go north with our force, and join the pilgrims when the time is right. I’ll send a message to Reginald to come right away.”
“He’ll come home?”
“At the head of a Spanish army, please God.”
BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, OCTOBER 1536
I can get no news in the country, but I hear extraordinary stories of thousands of men marching on the destroyed abbeys and rebuilding them while singing the great psalms that were always sung there. People talk of a comet in the sky over Yorkshire, and say that the rising has gone underground in Lincolnshire and King Moldwarp will have to chase through the earth to find the pilgrims but they are already in the Yorkshire hills and dales and he will never impose his muddy will on them again.
I get a letter from Gertrude who tells me that her husband, my cousin Hen
ry Courtenay, has been commanded by the king to muster an army and put himself under the command of Lord Talbot and march north as soon as possible. The king had said that he would lead his army, but the news from the North is so terrifying that he is sending my kinsmen instead.
It’s little and late. The king has not given the commanders money enough to pay the men, and they are so badly shod and there are so few on horses that they can’t get north fast enough. Anyway, they all know that when the king’s army sees the pilgrim badge they’ll desert, taking their weapons with them. And Thomas Howard is complaining that he is supposed to hold down Yorkshire with nothing, while all the money and troops go to George Talbot and the credit will go to Charles Brandon. The king does not know who his friends are, or how to keep them; how should he face his enemies?
Best of all, Norfolk has authority to treat with the rebels and he is bound to grant them the saving of the abbeys. If we can make the princess safe too in this moment, then this will be a great victory.
I’ll send you news as soon as I have it. The royal army and the pilgrims are bound to meet in battle and the pilgrims outnumber them by many thousands. And all the hosts of heaven are on our side too.
Burn this.
I am in the flesh kitchen at Bisham watching the hunt bring in the deer. They had two great buck and a hind and they dressed the meat in the field to stop it spoiling and now hang it in the cool stone-floored room to drip blood in the gutters.
“They hung our friend Legh just like that,” the Master of the Hounds remarks quietly to me.
Carefully, I don’t turn my head. It looks as if the two of us are inspecting the flayed carcass.
“Did they?” I ask. “Thomas Legh who came here, to close the priory?”
“Yes,” he said with quiet satisfaction. “On the gates of Lincoln. And the Bishop of Lincoln’s chancellor. He that gave evidence against the sainted queen. It’s like it’s all coming to rights, isn’t it, your ladyship?”