‘I thought you said it was? So, we make progress. Your husband is dead, your sister-in-law is dead, but your life continues, ergo you will live, ergo you have to live somewhere, ergo you will stay at court. Agreed?’

  ‘Father, this is logic – but it brings me no comfort.’

  ‘Logic should always comfort a scholar. Now, I have asked Master Cromwell – y’know he’s to be Lord Cromwell? His reward for this solution to the paradox of how a man divorces a woman who is not his wife – anyway, I have asked him to consider your widow’s pension from the Boleyns, and he has promised they will make a fair settlement on you. You are fortunate in your patron. No man but Cromwell could have survived the dislike of the queen, the rivalry of the Howards, and the enmity of the old royals and the Spanish party. But he turned them on each other. And now, they will destroy themselves.’

  This is more comfort than logic. ‘How will they destroy themselves?’

  ‘You know that Lady Margaret Pole’s son Reginald has been working for years on his book of theology, commissioned by the king? To bring together the reformers and the traditionalists in the Church? Well, he’s finished it. And it’s not at all what the king commissioned. By all accounts, it denies the king’s divorce of the first queen, his reform of the Church, it says he has no right to the Church lands in England. It destroys the king’s case from the bedroom to the treasure house. Reginald Pole has shown it to the pope. The pope has adopted it as his own creed and will issue a bull of excommunication against the king.’

  I look at my father in complete horror. A man excommunicated from the Church cannot take mass, cannot enter a church. Every good Christian is obliged to disobey him or arrest him, and if he is an excommunicate king, it is a holy duty for all the faithful to make holy war on his country. The French and Spanish kings will be ordered on a new crusade, against a new infidel – against England. It is a declaration of war from Christendom on Henry’s England.

  I am stunned. ‘My God! How could he? Has he got his mother away to Rome? He cannot have done this with his mother at court! Has Lady Margaret Pole gone, and all her family with her?’

  My father looks as if he could laugh. ‘He lives for the truth, not for courtier truth. He’s not published. He’s sent a private copy to the king; he’s asked that someone read it to him. He wants to discuss it.’

  I could laugh at this unworldly scholarship if I did not know how dangerous it is to try to teach the king anything. ‘Not you?’ I demand. ‘You won’t be the reader!’

  ‘Not I! I saw only one chapter, and that was incendiary. I wouldn’t read it to the king for a fortune. I’ve no interest in arousing royal rage on my own account, and none on turning it on the Courtenays and the Poles, the kinsmen of Reginald Pole.’

  ‘Thomas Cromwell will not be so considerate. He’ll use it to destroy them.’

  He nods. ‘I expect so. You’ll see Anne and George avenged. The Courtenays and the Poles will be suspected traitors, constantly watched, and poor Lady Mary will be left without friends, without a party to support her.’

  My father pauses for a moment. ‘It’s ironic that it will be the flower of the family, the king’s scholar, Reginald Pole, a royal heir, a Plantagenet prince and scholar, who brings them down. How true it is, as Machiavelli would say: a friend is more dangerous than an enemy!’

  On Progress, Summer

  1536

  IT IS CLEAR to the Spanish party that they have not yet won Lady Mary’s return as princess, and when Henry Fitzroy, the king’s bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, opens the parliament at Westminster, they realise they have not even put her into first place in her father’s erratic affections. Fitzroy is proud as a prince. The whole ceremony is designed to honour him. He walks before his royal father, seventeen years old, carrying the cap of estate. Parliament, instructed by my spymaster, invites the king to nominate his own heir – an extraordinary idea, nodded through lords and commons as if it were not the destruction of the rights of Englishmen.

  In this one move, the monarchy of England, always hereditary and always confirmed by parliament, has become a Caesarship, the property of Henry Tudor, to be left by him like his goods, like a tapestry, like a barge, to his chosen heir. The long public discussion between God and Henry Tudor, if his marriage (first or second or third) is to be blessed with an heir, has been abruptly resolved by Henry simply taking it out of God’s hands. God is to have no say in it. Henry Tudor will decide if he is blessed with an heir, and who it shall be. He can nominate a true-born princess, Lady Mary, or he can nominate the girl he has named as his bastard, our Lady Elizabeth. Or he can nominate a true-born bastard: Henry Fitzroy. Neither their mothers, nor God, have anything to do with their claim to the throne. Our king has become a Fallen Angel; he sets up his will against God.

  I meet with Cromwell – now Lord Cromwell – in the rose garden at Greenwich, and I say: ‘I think I am going mad, Master Cromwell. I think I am going mad.’

  And he says, very soothingly: ‘Lord Cromwell. It is Lord Cromwell now. It is a new reign, and I have a new title.’

  ‘It’s not a new reign,’ I protest. ‘It is the same king but now immeasurably greater, a king so mighty that he needs a succession of queens. I am serving a third queen – the third in four years! And everyone acts as if it were normal. And now he does not need to conceive a son with her anyway! He can just name one! So what’s it all for? I think I am going mad!’

  ‘There’s no need for you to go mad,’ he says soothingly. ‘You are accused of nothing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A madman cannot be executed,’ he says, smiling. ‘Nor can a madwoman. But since you are accused of nothing, there’s no need for you to be mad, my dear Lady Rochford. You don’t need that refuge.’

  ‘I’m not pretending!’ I exclaim. ‘I feel mad! – or as if I am the only sane person in a mad world?’

  He nods sympathetically. ‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘Now I know what you mean. Yes, I feel that, too.’

  For a moment, our eyes meet: his, blackcurrant and implacable; mine, grey and blinded with tears.

  ‘You’re alive, aren’t you?’ he asks gently. ‘Alive when they’re not? You’re still in play, aren’t you? In the game that they lost? You see and speak, though they are still and cold and see nothing and hear nothing?’

  ‘Not even buried with honour!’ I gasp. ‘Not even in the family vault. I won’t lie with my husband in death!’

  ‘Unless you’re executed for treason and buried in the Tower chapel!’ he says with a weak attempt at humour. ‘Then you could end up side by side. It could be easily arranged?’

  ‘I miss them. I miss them, Lord Cromwell.’

  ‘Ah – I miss them, too,’ he says, surprising me with the emotion in his voice. ‘And that brave old fool Bishop Fisher, and Sir Thomas More – God knows what we lost when we silenced him – and the monasteries, and the nunneries, and the houses and the art and the beauty and the choirs. I miss them all. I remember Queen Katherine when I first saw her; I was a rough young fool, and she was a beautiful princess, and everyone thought that it was a new reign and a new king and new queen and a new dawn for England.

  ‘It’s not without cost for me – don’t think that it doesn’t cost me, too. I can see where it’s going; but I can’t see where it’ll end. One decision leads to another and then another, and then a host of them have to run after. I believe I’m serving God, and I know I’m serving my king, and I know I’m surviving – but for sure it’s not without cost.’

  ‘You make it sound like a via ad insanium,’ I say bleakly. For a moment, we look at each other like people in the middle of a wasteland that we have made ourselves: as if we inherited a rich green forest and burned it to blackened stumps and twigs of smutty charcoal.

  Cromwell lifts my hand comfortably into the crook of his elbow and leads me towards the courtyard. ‘Assure me that you’re not out of your wits,’ he says gently. ‘Because I want you to think about Mary Howard.’

  His question, as much as the warmth of his touch, restores me to my courtier-self. ‘Thomas Howard’s daughter? My cousin? Why?’

  ‘If the king names his own heir, he seems certain to choose Henry Fitzroy? His beloved bastard son? And Fitzroy is wedded for three long years; but has still not bedded Mary Howard. Her father must be at the end of his tether? Mary Howard married to the lad who’ll be the next king of England, and yet the marriage not confirmed by bedding?’

  I smile at my patron’s obvious pleasure. ‘My uncle has said nothing to me – does he press the king?’

  ‘Doesn’t dare. Would he put them to bed and risk it?’

  ‘Never.’ I shake my head. ‘She wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t trust her father; none of his family will ever trust the duke again …’ I break off. ‘… after all … after that.’

  Cromwell makes a little side-to-side nod as clothiers make, haggling over the value of a kersey. ‘All that. Well, I’m not going to bless the wedding bed. Henry Fitzroy ought to marry a foreign princess. Where’s the gain in ridding the king of Anne, to put another Howard girl on the throne?’

  ‘Actually, Mary Howard would make a good queen,’ I point out. ‘And she’s in favour of reform.’

  ‘But her father …’ is all my lord says, with a shrug. ‘I’d rather have a well-trained German princess, even a Lutheran, than another Howard girl. No offence.’

  ‘None taken.’

  ‘If you hear any Howard plans, let me know,’ he says, so casually that I know it is important. ‘If her father commands her home, if he throws her together with Fitzroy – anything like that. I count on you, my dear Lady Rochford. And I will reward you. I am aware – well aware – that the Boleyns will never pay your jointure, they will never take care of your debts. I am working on that, you can trust me.’

  He shakes his head to forestall my questions. ‘And now,’ he says politely, ‘are you ready for progress? The queen knows that we don’t sail to Calais? We’re just going to Dover?’

  It is part of the everyday madness that the May Day progress delayed to entrap and kill the queen, will now take place with her replacement – just as it was before: the same route and stops along the way to Dover, the same horses and clothes and attendants.

  ‘I am ready …’ I say – but I am not ready. I think I will never be ready to take my place behind Anne’s red embroidered gown and lift Anne’s heavy red embroidered train and walk behind Jane Seymour, who minces, hesitantly where Anne strode.

  Lord Cromwell bows to me and goes back to the house, and I go to the courtyard, where the ladies-in-waiting are mounting their horses and fussing about whether it will rain. Jane will not ride, not even her steady horse – God forbid that she should fall! She sits in Anne’s litter, drawn by the white mules that George brought back from France. She looks very small and pale among the rich cushions, and I tuck Anne’s sables around her; she feels the cold as much as Queen Katherine. Now both Katherine and Anne are forever cold, and Jane is in their sables. This is the new play and the new actors. I mount my own horse, my Norfolk roan, well accustomed to riding beside Anne’s litter, but he sidles sideways and turns his head to look at the billowing curtains, as if he knows that the wrong woman is inside.

  The king heaves himself into his saddle and gives the signal; the noblemen follow him through the great stone gateway. Sir Geoffrey Pole rides in the front, the young man’s face bright with self-importance.

  I am about to move off, when I notice that Lady Margaret Douglas, the king’s niece, is not where she should be, immediately behind the queen’s litter. Her expensive high-bred horse is still waiting by the mounting block – there is no sign of her. Even the daughter of the Queen of Scotland, half-sister to the King of Scotland and niece to our king, should not delay Jane, who, though only a Seymour, is queen.

  Irritably, I throw the reins to my groom, dismount and make my way up the stone steps to the door to the queen’s rooms, when my uncle the Duke of Norfolk strolls out. ‘What’s the delay?’

  ‘Lady Margaret Douglas,’

  ‘Not coming.’ He bares his yellowing teeth in a joyless smile. ‘You can set off without her. No need to make a fuss.’

  ‘Not coming?’ I ask. ‘Is she ill?’

  ‘No … no …’ he starts. He glances around furtively. ‘She’s being questioned. No need to tell the queen and the other ladies. It’ll all blow over – it’s courtly love. Nothing but courtly love. No need to cause a scandal for nothing.’

  ‘I’ve caused no scandal,’ I say instantly, to the man who sent his niece to the scaffold for scandal. I drop my voice. ‘But why is she being questioned?’

  ‘Hush, hush,’ he says. ‘No need to bring it to the attention of the queen. Will she notice that Margaret is missing?’

  Jane Seymour is so new to her part as queen that she has no idea who should be waiting on her and who is absent.

  ‘One of the ladies will tell her. I can divert her if I know what Lady Margaret has done?’

  He makes a grimace as if he is chewing on a lemon. ‘Margaret’s done nothing – it’s another attack on me, on our house. The Spanish party accuse my half-brother Thom of flirting with Lady Margaret.’

  ‘Have they told the king?’

  ‘It’ll blow over,’ he says certainly. ‘Lady Margaret’ll be in disgrace for a few days. I’ll take young Thom home. Keep it quiet.’

  I turn back to the stable-yard and smile at the queen and say: ‘No need to wait for Lady Margaret. My uncle says she’s delayed on the king’s business.’

  Jane peeps up from the sables in the litter and asks stupidly: ‘But what business can have delayed her? What business does she do?’

  Jane is easy to silence. I lean down and I whisper against her jewel- encrusted hood: ‘She’s in trouble for loving young Lord Thom Howard. Didn’t you know?’

  Jane goes as white as the curtains of the litter. ‘I don’t know anything!’ she peeps.

  I nod. ‘That’s what we’ll all say. We’ll say that we didn’t know anything, and nothing happened anyway.’

  She looks sick with fear. ‘My brother …’ she says, looking round for help.

  ‘Let’s keep this to ourselves, to us ladies,’ I advise. ‘Let’s say that you know nothing. Everyone will believe that, after all!’

  ‘But, Lady Rochford, I really do know nothing!’

  ‘I know,’ I say reassuringly. I prompt her to raise her hand, and the muleteers start, and the rest of us follow her litter on horseback, and we leave the Duke of Norfolk on the steps, waving us out of sight as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

  THE FIRST NIGHT of the progress we stop at Cobham Hall – showing royal favour to Anne, Lady Cobham. Nobody asks what she did in May that is rewarded by this royal visit in July. She is at the door of the great hall with her husband to welcome the king and Jane. I wonder if Jane remembers that Lady Cobham curtseyed as low to Queen Anne, and kissed her with just as much affection, and if Jane knows that she offered evidence that took Anne to the scaffold? I doubt Jane minds either way. Since she was dancing with Anne’s widower at the very moment that Anne died – why should she balk at her betrayer?

  Jane waits politely to hear the speech of welcome from the Cobham herald, but the king hurries into the house, with Lord Cobham scuttling after him to show him his bedroom. His leg will be aching from a long day in the saddle, and he will need to piss and eat sweetmeats.

  The next day, the court is ready to go hunting, but the king says his horse is overtired and blames his groom for not keeping it in good heart. The groom bows a contrite head and begs pardon. Will Somer the fool says that he is too tired to go another step and demands that the groom to carry him to his bed and mount him for a gallop in the morning, and the king roars with laughter, his good mood restored. I see Jane look inquiringly from her husband to the fool – either she does not understand the pun of ‘mounting’, or else she has decided – with the non exemplar of Anne before her – to hang on to her virgin innocence.

  We take a rest day, and the day after, the king complains that now his horse is too fresh and ill mannered. We all know from this that he is still tired and probably in pain; but he cheers up as his horse goes steadily down Watling Street, the broad pilgrim road from London to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. The king waves to groups of pilgrims lining either side of the road as the heralds blast on their trumpets and shout: ‘Make way for the king!’

  But something has soured in England this summer, like cream left out in sunshine. People still push back their hoods or pull off their caps as the court passes by; but there are no smiling faces turned towards us. Everyone making a pilgrimage from one religious house to another knows that the convents and monasteries are being inspected. Everyone knows that they are mostly well-run, and devout; but wrongly accused of being corrupt or wasteful or ill disciplined. They are harshly fined for imaginary misdeeds and sometimes even closed down, their treasures taken away, and their great lands given to court favourites.

  And then what will happen to the hospital? To the library? To the school? To the church where people have prayed for hundreds of years? Will Saint Thomas Becket’s own shrine be one day taken by the king and its rich treasures sucked into his treasury? Will his sacred body be kidnapped and slung into a storeroom with all the other relics, even though everyone has seen and heard of miracles they have done? An assault on Thomas Becket’s body would be a second martyrdom by a second King Henry – and everyone fears that this Henry may have even worse advisors than the other, for these have killed not one turbulent priest but a bishop of Rochester, Sir Thomas More, another priest, four monks, a queen and even the whore who took her place and half a dozen men accused with her.

  The king sets his shoulders square, and his little mouth pouts beneath his moustache. He orders the heralds to push people back – right off the highway, into the ditches and hedges. By the time we get to the Lyon Inn at Sittingbourne, we are all as quiet as Jane, who sits like a little doll behind her curtains of white silk and leans forward to draw them tightly closed when she hears someone shout defiantly: ‘God bless Bishop Fisher!’