The Taming of the Queen (68 page)

The court is to divide. The king is going to Whitehall to oversee the deaths of the Howards, father and son, and the complete destruction of their treasonous house, and the princesses and I are to go to Greenwich. The Seymours, Thomas and his brother Edward, will stay with the king, help him untangle the plot and name the guilty men. Under the king’s bright suspicious gaze the interrogations of servants, tenants, and enemies are read and reread, and then, I am certain, rewritten. All the vindictive spite that was directed at the reformers, my ladies and me, is now turned, like the mouth of a cannon, towards the Howards, and the great guns are ready to roar. The king’s sentiment, his mercy, his sense of justice, are put aside in an orgy of false evidence. The king wants to kill someone and the court wants to help him.

The Seymours are in the ascendancy, their religion is the king’s new preference, their family is kin to the royal line, their military skills are the saving of the nation and their companionship is all the king wants. All other rival houses are down in the dust.

The court comes to the outer steps of the palace for the lords to say goodbye to their ladies, and for those who are courting to exchange a look, a word, the touch of a hand. The gentlemen of the court come to say their farewells to me and then finally, Thomas Seymour makes his way towards me. We stand close together, my hand on my horse’s neck, the groom holding him steady.

‘At least you’re safe,’ he says in my ear. ‘Another year gone by, and you’re still safe.’

‘Are you going to marry Elizabeth?’ I ask him urgently.

‘He’s not spoken. Has he said anything to you?’

‘He asked me what I thought of it. I said what I could.’

He makes a little grimace, then he puts the groom aside with one gesture and he cups his hands to take my boot. Just the clasp of his warm hand on my foot reminds me how much I want him. ‘Ah God, Thomas.’

He throws me upwards and I swing my leg over the saddle and my maid comes forward and adjusts my skirts. We are silent while she does her work and then I am looking down on his dark curly head as he strokes my horse’s neck but he cannot put his hand on me. Not even on the toe of my boot.

‘Will you spend Christmas with the king?’

He shakes his head. ‘He wants me to look at Dover Castle.’

‘When will I see you again?’ I can hear the desolation in my voice.

He shakes his head, he doesn’t know. ‘At least you’re safe,’ he says as if that is all that matters. ‘Another year, who knows what will happen?’

I can’t bring myself to imagine that anything good will happen. ‘Merry Christmas, Thomas,’ I say quietly. ‘God bless you.’

He looks up, squinting a little against the brightness of the sky. This is the man that I love and he cannot come closer. He steps back and puts his hand to my horse’s head, gently strokes his nose, fingers his mouth, his sensitive snuffing nostrils. ‘Go safely’ he tells him. ‘You’re carrying a queen.’ He lowers his voice. ‘And my only love.’

I think of Queen Katherine, who celebrated Christmas at Greenwich over a divided court while the king was in London courting Anne Boleyn, ordered to behave as if nothing was wrong. This time it is not lovemaking that keeps the king in the city but killing. They tell me that the court at Whitehall is closed to everyone but the Privy Council, and that the king and his advisors are going over and over the evidence that has been gathered against the Howards, father and son.

They tell me that the king has become devoted to scholarship. He studies Henry Howard’s careless letters as if they were a text, annotating every guilty admission, questioning every word of innocence. The king has become thorough, pedantic. Spite gives him energy and he follows the interrogations as if he is determined that the young man, the beautiful foolish young man, shall die because of his own light words, spoken without thought.

One night in early January, Henry Howard climbs out of the window of his prison cell, trying to escape the king’s mercy. They seize him just as he is about to slide down the chute for waste water and fall into the icy river. This is typical Henry Howard: daring as a boy. The act should remind everyone that he is an impulsive young man, a bit of a fool, but a brave reckless innocent; but instead of laughing at him and releasing him, they send for irons and keep him in shackles.

Worse, far worse, is his father’s confession. In a desperate gamble to save his wrinkled old skin the old duke writes to the Privy Council that he is guilty of everything that they have put to him. He confesses to bearing arms that were his by right and have been used by the House of Howard for generations. Ludicrously, he confesses to sending secret messages to the pope. He swears that he has done everything they allege, he says anything as long as he can be spared. He pleads guilty as no-one has ever been guilty before and offers all his fortune and his lands as payment for his guilt if they will leave him with his life.

As if his son is nothing but an object for barter, he throws Henry Howard into the bargain along with honour and name and wealth. He casts off his son and heir to hell, he all but sends his own hurdle to drag the young man to the scaffold. He says on oath that his son and heir, the twenty-nine-year-old Henry, is a traitor to the king and to his name and to his house. The old duke sends his boy to death as the agreed price of his own freedom. His accusation is the death sentence for his son, and that night the king signs the warrant to send Henry Howard to trial. The king says that it is all the fault of Thomas Howard, and no-one can complain of him.

We all know what the outcome of the trial must be. His own father has confessed for him and named him as guilty; surely Henry Howard can say nothing in his own defence?

But he has much to say. He stands in the dock and defends himself. He argues all day until they call for candles in the evening, and the handsome young earl shines in their golden light before the jury of his neighbours and friends. Perhaps, even then, they might have refused to convict him, he was so persuasive and funny and insistent. But William Paget came from the court with a secret message from the king, went into the jury room as they considered their verdict, and when they came out, they said that they had all agreed without one dissenting voice. For who was going to argue? They said ‘guilty’.

In the middle of the cold bright month of January a messenger comes from the Privy Council to inform me that Henry Howard has been beheaded on Tower Hill. His father remains in prison awaiting his own sentence. We hear the news in silence. The king’s determination that there should be no more burnings of reformers does not extend mercy to other suspects. Nobody thinks that Henry Howard was more than a foolish braggart, a poet who was too prodigal with his words; but he died for that.

Princess Elizabeth comes to me and puts a cold hand in mine. ‘I hear terrible things of my Cousin Howard,’ she says, her dark eyes questioning me. ‘He was planning to overthrow you, and put another woman in your place. They tell me that he was going to put his sister on the throne.’

‘It was wrong of him to hope for that,’ I reply. ‘Your father and I were married in the sight of God. It would be wrong for anyone to drive us apart.’

She hesitates – she has heard enough about her own mother to know that Anne Boleyn did exactly this to Henry’s first queen, and her kinsmen were planning to do it again to his sixth. ‘Do you think it was right that he should die?’ she asks me.

Not even for Elizabeth, with Jane Grey standing so solemn and silent, listening behind her, am I going to risk expressing an opinion that is different from the king’s. I have kissed the rod. I have lost my voice. I am an obedient wife.

‘Whatever your father the king thinks best, is the right thing to do,’ I say.

She looks at me, this bright, thoughtful girl. ‘If you are a wife, can you not think for yourself?’

‘You can think for yourself,’ I say carefully. ‘But you need not speak. If you are wise you will agree with your husband. Your husband has power over you. You have to find ways to think your own thoughts and live your own life without always telling of it.’

‘Then I had better not marry,’ she says without a glimmer of a smile. ‘If to be a wife is to give up your own opinion, I had better never marry.’

I pat her cheek and I try to laugh at this thirteen-year-old girl forswearing matrimony. ‘Perhaps you are right in this world,’ I say. ‘But this world is changing. Perhaps by the time you are old enough to marry the world will hear a woman’s voice. Perhaps she will not have to swear to obey in her wedding vows. Perhaps one day a woman will be allowed to both love and think.’

The messenger comes by barge, swiftly down the river in the midnight darkness, rowed as fast as the oarsmen can go against the in-running tide, from Whitehall. It’s a cold wet journey and the guards take his dripping cape at the entrance of my presence chamber and throw open the doors. One of my ladies, wakened by the hammering on the door of the privy chamber, comes running in to me to say there is an urgent message from the Privy Council at Whitehall and will I receive it?

I am afraid at once, as everyone in this court has learned to fear the uninvited knock on the door. At once I wonder who is in danger, at once I wonder if they have come for me. I throw on my thickest winter robe and go out, my bare feet in my gold-heeled shoes, to my privy chamber where one of the Seymour men is waiting, shifting from one damp footprint to another, dripping rain on the floor. Nan comes after me and my ladies-in-waiting open their chamber doors and peer out, white-faced in the torchlight. Someone crosses herself; I see Nan grit her teeth, fearing bad news.

The messenger kneels to me and pulls off his hat. ‘Your Majesty,’ he says. Something in the appalled shock of his face, in the way he takes a breath as if to make a well-rehearsed speech, the lateness of the hour, the darkness of the night, warns me what he is going to say. I look over his shoulder to see if the yeomen of the guard have come in numbers to arrest me. I wonder if the royal barge is bobbing at the pier showing no lights. I look for the courage inside myself to face this moment. Perhaps now, tonight, they have finally come for me.