First thing when I wake in the morning and last thing after my bedtime prayers at night, I am back in the stable-yard, my hands cold on the reins, George beside the mounting block, looking up at me with Anne’s dark eyes in the long lean Howard face as he says:We’re too finely balanced. We can’t carry the weight of the king’s dislike. The Spanish party have got Agnes in his bed. She whispers their words in his ear; she’s turned him against us. And we’re blaming all that on you. If the king doesn’t want you here, then you’re no use to us. We’ve dropped you. And then again, I see him smile so regretfully and say:We’ve dropped you.
I talk to George as if he is beside me on my long daily walks, and I see him again in my dreams. I am racked with shameful one-sided desire for him who does not desire me now, and perhaps never did. In my dreams, his touch is light, insubstantial, and I wake up feeling dry and cold, and I know it is a sinful dream, and there is no getting a baby alone in dry dreams, any more than there is getting a baby alone in a marital bed. I am an untouched field; I am an empty nest; I am a barren bitch. Neither George nor Anne, nor my uncle the duke, nor anyone in the queen’s rooms, nor anyone in the whole court, loves me for my true self. And then I think: nobody knows my true self. Not even me.
It gets colder, and the thick greyness of the countryside in November closes on the folded valleys and bare trees around Morley Hall. I have not been in the countryside in winter for nearly twenty years; I had forgotten how dreary it is. I don’t know how my mother can endure months of lighting candles in the mornings to writeup her rent books, huddling over a fire in her private rooms in the evening. Winter at court is a blaze of feasts and entertainments, all lit by sconces of beeswax candles and warmed by roaring fires in every room. I miss the light and the warmth as much as the music and the chatter. I miss the sense of importance, of knowing everything at the heart of the kingdom – life is passing me by here, and I am doing nothing.
My father goes to London, summoned to his seat in the House of Lords to pass two new laws composed by Anne. I am sure they are her work – I can almost see her handwriting, I hear her voice in the words. Everyone in the country is ordered to swear a public oath that Anne is queen and her children royal heirs, and that Katherine of Aragon and Lady Mary are neither queen nor princess. The second law is that the king is the Supreme Head of the Church in England – not the pope. Anne has already won court, king, parliament, and country, and now she stamps her seal on the next king, who will be her son, and the Church, which will be his treasury. I long to see her revelling in her triumph; but I know she will not send for me – she does not need me in this moment of victory. She has defeated the Spanish party and her other enemies with nothing but her own quick wits and the sword-like thrust of her will.
My father comes home in December, riding on frozen roads in a mood as dark as the afternoon. He has done his duty to the king and sworn his oath; but he fears that the old queen and Princess Mary will never be brought to swear that one is a whore and the other a whore’s bastard daughter. And the old queen’s confessor, John Fisher, and the old Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, will never swear that the king is Head of the Church. How can they? They bound themselves to a Church founded by a pope chosen by God, and confirmed by his cardinals, based on the rock of St Peter – how can they suddenly say that the papal crown can be picked up by a Tudor from a hawthorn hedge?
‘And then I suppose I shall have to sit on their trial,’ my father says heavily as he dismounts in the stable-yard.
I am wrapped up against the cold, waiting for him, hoping that he will pour out what is happening in London in the first moments of his relief at returning home. ‘Could you refuse to judge? If it comes to trial? Could you not say your conscience...?’
He scowls at me, pulls off his thick riding gauntlets and rubs his cold hands together. ‘This is no season for a man to have a conscience. I am loyal to your sister-in-law, Queen Anne, as is any man who wants to rise. And anyway – she’s made it a treason to deny her.’
‘Anne was fighting for the king’s favour when I left court,’ I whisper. ‘The Spanish party had put a new mistress in his bed and she was speaking for Lady Mary.’
‘Well, she must have beaten the girl and beaten the Spanish party. Here you see the fruits of her victory. She’s going to have the monasteries and convents and abbeys valued and all their riches and lands assessed for tax, to be paid to the king. She’s persuaded the king that there can be no other ruler in England but himself, she his queen and chief advisor, and Cromwell his tax master to bank the profits for him. Here,’ my father remembers. ‘I saw him – Master Secretary. He spoke of you.’
‘Of me?’ I cannot imagine that Thomas Cromwell has remembered me when my own husband has dropped me, and they have won all the power they need without me.
‘Aye. He thinks of everything that man, forgets nothing. He gave me a note for you.’ My father plunges his hand into his inner pocket and hands me a folded sealed note. ‘You can open it,’ he says. ‘Go in. I’m coming out of the cold as soon as I’ve seen the horses into their stables.’
I take the letter to the kitchen, the only room in the Hall where the fire is always kept in, and I sit beside the warm belly-curve of the bread oven and ignore the irritated bustle of the cook. The letter is intricately folded to prevent it being opened and resealed. The single page is turned back, pushed through a slit at the bottom of the page, and sealed with a wax seal. It can only be opened by breaking the seal and slicing open the letterlock, which cuts off the bottomcorner of the page. Nobody can open and read it without cutting off the corner, betraying themselves. I have seen such letters but never received one of my own.
I borrow a knife from the cook, slice it open and break the seal, and there is Cromwell’s signature: the C like a half-moon rising over the slit in the page. He hopes I am well and asks if I have many visitors? He reminds me to send a new year gift to the king and queen, and to the Princess Elizabeth, and to Lady Mary. The court will be at Greenwich for Christmas, and he regrets that I am not the only face missing. My sister-in-law Mary Boleyn has married in secret, and the Boleyns have cast her off, too. She will have to live in some country farmhouse with her farmer husband. She has asked Thomas Cromwell for help, and he will get her husband posted to Calais Castle.
I rest the single page with the sliced corner in my lap. I have no idea why he is sharing these family secrets with me; but then I understand:
Mary Boleyn – Mrs Stafford (as she now is) – cannot return to court, and this will leave Her Grace the queen without a sister in her rooms. I can invite you back to court, if that would be your wish.
An invitation to serve at court is an incredible favour, usually bought by half a dozen begging letters accompanied by rich gifts. Nobody ever gets a place without a long campaign and calling-in of favours. An invitation from Thomas Cromwell is like a comet, blazing across a dark sky: extraordinary in its own self, and a portent of something else.
I take a lot of care with my reply, and I write in Latin:
Dear Master Secretary,
I greet you well and thank you for your enquiry after the health of my father and mother who are (praise God) both well this Christmas season.
I am grateful for the invitation to return to court. If there be any service that I may do you, I shall not fail you.
Jane Boleyn
I fold and double-fold the page, and I spend an hour on making a letterlock and sealing it with wax. It does not hurt to show him that my father has taught me Italian spy-craft as well as Italian courtier skills. Whatever Thomas Cromwell wants from me, he will not be offering me a rescue for nothing in return. No one in Thomas Cromwell’s service is idle.
Morley Hallingbury, Norfolk, Spring
1535
THE SNOWDROPS COMEout like little fingernails of green and white, pushing through the dead leaves as if they will never grow tall and droop their pretty heads like bells. I think the winter has been long for them, but still they rise. The people in the cottages at Hallingbury have eaten up all their winter stores, and Mother says they must go to the abbeys for charity: the king’s new church must take care of the king’s poor as the old one did. Someone breaches the wall of the park and kills a deer; my father says that he will hang him. The game in our park is for sport – the king might want to come and kill our stags one day – it is not meat for stew pots of hungry people.
It has been a long cold winter for the traitors in the Tower, too: four monks, a priest, and Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher have gone all season without fires or hot food. I suppose that the king is leaving them there to die of cold and hunger, but Father says no: Master Secretary Cromwell is wrestling with them.
‘Wrestling?’ I ask, as if they have a booth on Tower Green.
‘Entrapping them,’ he says. ‘But I don’t think even Thomas Cromwell will trick Thomas More. He’s a learned man, and he loves his family. He’s not going to make a slip of the tongue that could cost him his head. He’s going to want to get home to that funny little wife of his and his great library in that beautiful house by the river.’
‘But who wants the house by the river?’ my mother asks, coming in at the end of the conversation and getting the wrong idea, as usual. ‘Who gets the library?’
