The Taming of the Queen (37 page)

As soon as the king can ride we go by stages to Cowdray House at Midhurst, hoping that one of the king’s most boastful courtiers, Sir Anthony Browne, can raise his spirits and comfort him. The king sits on his horse in silence, looking around him, looking everywhere at green fields, strips of crops, flocks of sheep, herds of cows, as if he can see nothing but the heeling over of his proud ship and the terrible gurgle in the water as she sailed downward to drown. I am beside him and I know that my face is frozen like a stone angel on a tomb. The country that we ride through is quiet, the people resentful. They know that the French nearly landed, that the royal fleet cannot defend them. This is a countryside of inlets and tidal rivers, terribly exposed to an invasion. They are afraid that the French will refit and come again, and there are many people who whisper that if the French came and restored the abbeys and the churches and the holy shrines, then they would be a blessing to England.

I do not ask about Thomas Seymour. I do not dare to say his name. I think if I say so much as ‘Thomas’ that I will cry out and if I start, I will never be able to stop. I think there is a sea of tears in me as deep as the tides that sigh through the rigging of his ship.

‘The king has granted Lady Carew a great pension,’ Nan says quietly to me as she is brushing my hair before putting on my gold net and my hood.

‘Lady Carew?’ I ask indifferently.

‘Her husband went down on the ship,’ she says. Nobody says ‘
Mary Rose
’ any more. It is as if she is a ghost, another lost queen, a nameless woman missing from Henry’s court.

‘Poor lady,’ I say.

‘The king made him vice-admiral the very night before, and gave him the command,’ she says. ‘He replaced Thomas Seymour, who was furious at the slight. He always had the luck of the devil, did Tom. He had to make another ship his flagship and he came through unscathed.’

She looks up from the work of twisting my hair into ringlets and tucking them into the net and sees my face in the mirror. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asks. ‘Are you ill?’

I put my hand to my stomacher. I can feel my heart pound through the tightly laced silk. ‘I am sick,’ I whisper. ‘Nan, I am terribly sick. Let me lie down for a moment.’

They all crowd round me and I close my eyes to blot out the sight of the anxious avid faces. Then someone lifts me at my shoulders and two of them bear up my feet and I feel them put me onto my bed. Someone cuts my laces and loosens my stomacher so I can breathe more easily. Nan slips off my silk slippers and chafes my icy feet.

Someone holds a cup of warm ale to my lips and I sip, and then lean back on the pillows and open my eyes.

‘You don’t feel hot,’ one of the ladies volunteers nervously. They are all terrified of the Sweat. It can kill a man in four hours, and there is no easy way to tell if he will die. He complains of heat at dinner and he sweats to death by nightfall. It is a Tudor plague; it came in with this king’s father.

‘I am sick in my belly,’ I say. ‘Something I ate.’

Two of them exchange secret smiles. ‘Oh – do you feel sick in the mornings?’ Anne Seymour says, suggestively, hopefully.

I shake my head. I don’t want this sort of rumour starting. Even now, as I am struggling with the news that Thomas is alive, I have to watch what I say, what they say, what anyone says about me. ‘No,’ I insist, ‘and no-one is to say such a thing. It is not that, and the king would be much displeased if you gossiped about me.’

‘I was just hoping for the best for you,’ Anne defends herself.

I close my eyes. ‘I need to sleep,’ is all I say.

I hear Nan chivy everyone from my room and then the shutting of my bedroom door and the rustle of her dress as she sits beside my bed. Without opening my eyes I reach out my hand and she takes it in her comforting grasp.

‘Such a terrible day,’ I say. ‘I can’t stop seeing it.’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘Try to sleep.’

We make our way back to London in slow stages. The journey, which set out as a summer’s jaunt to see the fleet in triumph, crawls home with a king stunned by disappointment, through a fearful countryside. The fields of dark gold wheat and the springing green of the second growth in the hayfields bring us no pleasure as we look at the prosperous manor houses and the little villages and think they are impossible to defend.

We go to Greenwich, where the waves that slap at the stone pier before the palace remind us of the unforgiving waters of the Solent and the sinking of the king’s pride to its dark depths. Thomas stays at his post in Portsmouth, repairing and rebuilding the houses that were fired by the invading French, overseeing the refitting of the ships that were damaged in battle, sending down swimmers to see if they can salvage anything from the warship as she settles into her last berth. He cannot come to court; I don’t hope to see him. He writes privately to the king and Henry shows no-one the letter.

People think that the king is ill again, that perhaps his leg has opened up or the fever that shakes him four times a year has come back. But I know what is wrong: he is sick to his heart. He has seen a defeat, an undeniable defeat, and he cannot bear it.

This is a man so sharp with pride that he cannot hear contradiction. This is a man who will play both sides at once to make sure that he wins. This is a man who from a boy has never been refused. And, in addition to all of this – here is a man who cannot see himself as anything but perfect. He has to be the very best. King Francis of France was his only rival; but now Francis and all of Europe are laughing at the English navy, which was supposed to be so mighty, and at our famous flagship, which sank as soon as she set sail. They are saying that the king piled so many guns on her that she was as fat and as clumsy as he is.

‘It wasn’t that,’ he says to me shortly. ‘Don’t think that.’

‘No, of course,’ I say.

‘Of course it was not.’

He is like an animal in a trap, twisting and turning against his own pain. He grieves more for his hurt pride than for the drowned men. He has to rescue his self-regard. Nothing is more important than that; no-one is more important than that. The ship can sink into the silt of the Solent as long as the king’s pride can be salvaged.

‘There was nothing wrong with the ship,’ he says another night. ‘It was the fools of the gunners. They left the gunports open after firing.’

‘Oh, was that what happened?’

‘Probably,’ he says. ‘I should have left Thomas Seymour in command. I am glad that fool Carew paid with his life.’

I swallow a protest against this harsh judgement. ‘God save his soul,’ I say, thinking of his widow who saw her husband drown.

‘God forgive him,’ Henry says heavily. ‘For I never will.’

The king talks to me every night about his ship. He cannot sleep without persuading me that it was the fault of others, fools or villains. He can do no other work. Most of the Privy Council go back to Westminster ahead of us, and Charles Brandon, Henry’s old friend, asks permission to go quietly home with his wife, Catherine.

‘He should have warned me,’ Henry says. ‘Of all the people in the world Charles should have warned me.’

‘How could he know?’ I ask.

‘He should never have let her sail if she was overloaded with men,’ Henry bursts out in sudden anger, his face blazing, a vein in his temple bulging like a thick worm under his skin. ‘Why would he not know that she was overloaded? He must have been careless. I shall call him back to court to explain himself. He was commander on land and sea: he has to take responsibility. It was not my plans that were at fault, it was his failure to execute them. I have forgiven him everything, all my life, but I cannot forgive him this.’

But before the messenger summoning Charles back has even left the palace, we hear from the Brandon household that he is ill, and then a horseman thunders up the London road from Guildford and says that he is dead. The king’s greatest and longest-surviving friend is dead.

It is the last blow of a terrible summer. The king is inconsolable. He locks himself into his room and refuses all service. He even refuses to eat. ‘Is he sick?’ I ask Doctor Butts when they tell me that the monstrous dinner has been sent back.

He shakes his head. ‘Not in his body, God keep him. But this is a great loss to him. Charles Brandon is the last of his old friends, the only friend from his childhood. It is like losing a brother.’

That night, even though my bedroom is three rooms away from the king’s chamber, I hear a terrible noise. It is a scream like a vixen makes at night, a howl so unearthly that I forget that I despise empty ritual, and I cross myself, and kiss my thumbnail and say, ‘God bless and keep me!’ There is another and another, and I jump out of my bed, snap, ‘Stay there!’ to my companion, and run into my empty presence chamber, through the king’s presence chamber, his privy chamber, his inner chamber, to his bedroom door, where the guard stands impassive. But behind the door I can hear heartbroken sobbing.

I hesitate. I don’t know whether to go forward or back. I don’t even know if I should tell the guard to knock for me, or try the door to see if it is locked from the inside. I don’t know if it is my duty to go to him and remind him that Charles Brandon will have died in his faith and will be waiting in purgatory, certain of his ascent to heaven on the uplifting vapour of expensive Masses, or whether I should leave the king to his monstrous grief. He is sobbing like a heartbroken child, like an orphan. The sound of it is terrible.

I step forward and I try the handle. The guard, his face completely blank as if his master is not blubbering only yards away, steps to one side. The handle turns but the door does not yield. He has locked himself in. He wants to be alone in the churning ocean of his grief. I don’t know what I should do and, judging by the blank face of the yeoman of the guard, he does not know either.

I go back to my own room, close the door and pull the covers over my head, but nothing can muffle the loud wailing. The king screams out his heartbreak all night long, and none of us, not in his rooms or mine, can sleep for his grief.

In the morning I dress in a dark gown and go to chapel. I am going to pray for the soul of Charles Brandon and for wisdom to help my husband, who has broken under this last loss. I take my place on the queen’s side and look across to the royal throne. To my surprise Henry is already there, in his usual place, signing papers for business, looking over petitions. Only his strained red-rimmed eyes betray his emotional vigil. Indeed, of the two of us, I show more signs of sleeplessness, with heavy eyes and a pale face. It is as if he burned away all his grief and fear in one night. As we finish the prayers and say ‘Amen’ he beckons to me. I go round to his side with my ladies following and we leave the chapel together, walking across the courtyard towards the main hall, my hand tucked under his arm, as he leans heavily on a yeoman of the guard on his other side.