‘IS THE QUEENmerry?’ Lord Cromwell asks me, watching her and the king play a quiet game of cards with her brothers. There is not one word of witty talk and no laughter at the table. The king seems discontent as they all frantically discard good cards in order to lose to him. The pile of coins at his elbow grows higher, but since it is money from lands and places that he gave them in the first place, he takes little pleasure in winning it.
‘She never complains. She shows us what it is to be a truly womanly queen.’
He raises dark eyebrows. ‘You admire her?’
‘She seeks no manly power,’ I say, as mincingly as a Seymour.‘No studies strain her mind. She takes no interest in theology nor reform, so the king can say anything and she never disagrees. She doesn’t advise like a counsellor; she doesn’t plot like a courtier. She’s all wife: what your friend William Tyndale called an empty vessel.’
Cromwell grunts with laughter behind his black leather gloves. ‘That vessel had better fill,’ he warns me.
I shrug. ‘She does her duty. But you can rest assured there are no sortilèges.’
Jane Seymour has neither power nor influence, nor does she want any. Her few pleas for mercy for individual religious houses are completely ignored by the men who advise the king and make their livings from ransacking the old Church. She is kind to her stepdaughters and keeps Lady Mary at court, but there is little joy in it.
Queen Jane has the royal wardrobe and treasury at her command, but she orders no masques and dances where she could wear rich jewels and fantastic clothes. The king has given up dancing, and no queen of England should ever go hand to hand down a chain of smiling handsome men again. The only time I see her animated is when she plans her coronation at York. For a few brief weeks in January she was elated, and the centre of her brothers’ attention – but it turns out to be yet another empty promise. The king used Jane’s name to pacify the rebels; now they are quiet and waiting for us to arrive at York, he need do nothing more.
‘No sign of a baby?’ Thomas Cromwell asks.
‘No sign,’ I reply.
‘Has anyone else taken his eye?’ he asks me.
I glance over at the king, who is looking idly round the room. His gaze rests on Margaret Shelton, on Anne Basset – bright girls, witty girls, pert girls. ‘Not yet.’
‘And what d’you think happens then?’
‘Most girls would rather be a mistress than a queen,’ I suggest. ‘Ambition is out of fashion since Anne Boleyn.’
IT IS THEsaving of Jane Seymour that she missed her course in January, and, on my advice, told the king that she was with child when she missed another in late February. I swear, if she had left it until March, he would have declared war on Spain or France, or reformed the Church to Jewry, or married someone else – he was so unspeakably bored.
Under cover of feeding a pregnant queen, none of us fast for Lent. We eat like princes and pile food into her thin frame as if she were laying eggs in a hive of bees. Lady Lisle sends quails from her aviary at Calais; the Poles send salmon from the River Test. Nothing is too good for the wife whose family is famously fertile, whose line runs to men – she has six brothers – three living – who has conceived in her first year of marriage. We carry her around as if we were parading a Madonna statue, and she gets fatter and fatter, with thick ankles; even her toes are swollen.
I believe this baby is truly the miracle that we call him. The king eyes every lady in the room, and his hands wander over their necks, but he beds no one, not even when Easter ends his Lenten piety. I suspect, that though his eyes still twinkle and his fingers paddle, his other parts are sleeping, and this baby is a triumph of will by his father, hand-pumped into a silently humiliated mother. Such a baby, conceived without lust, will be a godly baby in the opinion of his father: he should be born alive, he should survive.
Though unborn, this baby is serving his father already. He is the king’s excuse to stay in safe lands all the summer. The king does not want to meet the people of the north as they learn of the depth and breadth of their betrayal. He hides behind Jane and sends my uncle northwards.
That man of faith, Robert Aske, has disbanded the huge rebel army on the word of the king, and then he finds that the Christmas promises were empty air. Thomas Howard the Duke of Norfolk and an army of thousands follow him up the north road handingout meaningless general pardons for everyone, followed by orders of execution.
Robert Aske, who was so happy and handsome at court in the king’s red silk jacket, is arrested at York and begs – as a gentleman’s privilege – not to be disembowelled before his hanging. My uncle – with the charm for which he is rightly famous – promises that Robert Aske will be spared the insult of hanging. Instead, he bolts him into an iron cage and suspends it from Clifford’s Tower, until the handsome young man dies of starvation, dangling over the city that called him a hero, and the crows and buzzards pick his flesh.
Queen Jane’s brothers promptly change their tune, and she never says one other word in Robert Aske’s defence, nor breathes one whisper for pardon for the thousands of others that Thomas Howard rounds up for the king and hangs at the crossroads of their villages.
The king will not set a foot on northern soil until every rebel is dead. There is no chance of a York coronation for Jane. He does not want to see thin starved faces and hear resentful muttering when he rides by on a horse better-fed and better-housed than his people. He is sure he has conceived a son; and this proves he is blessed by God. They are dying in their hundreds, which proves that they are not. He wants to forget his fear of them, and my uncle reports there is nothing to fear, there is no one left. Satisfied his country is at peace, the king takes short hunting trips, never going far from the bloated queen and her big belly.
Her blessed condition does not make her any more interesting to him, and court is dull, as her ladies are devoted to keeping her quiet, not whipping up excitement around him. He visits us briefly and goes off with his men friends, roaring at their release, while she endures the months of aches and pains and the loneliness very sweetly, with no complaint.
Greenwich Palace, Summer
1537
IWATCH HER ASI watched the other two queens, waiting for her to double up in pain, clutch at her belly and rush to her bedroom to start the long vigil of bleeding and weeping. But Jane – calm, stoical, and uncomplaining – seems to have a womb that her betters did not. Her baby sits still and calmly in her belly, just as she sits still and calmly wherever we set her down, and her brothers visit with sweetmeats and pastries as if they were stuffing a white goose for pâté.
While she eats and sleeps and smiles – acknowledging our concern, always replying that she feels well but just a little tired – the business of the queen’s rooms goes on, and I become more and more important to the smooth running of a court, like a worker bee with a completely idle queen. I order her summer clothes from the wardrobe, and I audit her jewels with Anne Parr. I decide on the payments to charities, and I hear petitions from the poor women who come to the palace seeking justice and favour. I check with her treasurer that we are receiving the correct rents from her royal lands at Midsummer Day, and I make sure that the Court of Augmentations does not forget us when they disburse the profits from the savage fines on monasteries. When they close a rich monastery and give us gold crucifixes and jewel-encrusted church-ware, I send for goldsmiths and get them remade into jewellery. I check that new laws for the parliament do not damage the interests of the queen’s lands and rights. I agree with the Archbishop of Canterbury who shall have the queen’s patronage in the Church, and I sell her priestly livings to the highest bidder.
On the rare occasions when she makes a public appearance, I am at her side, prompting the part she must play, knowing herlines better than she does. She depends on me as a friend, and I sit with her ladies in her privy chamber or alone with her in the bedroom. God knows, she is not a demanding companion. I study as she dozes; she does not interrupt my thoughts. She rarely sews and never reads; she is content to the idle, saying nothing, with her white hands nesting on her curved belly.
Sometimes, I ask her what she is thinking, and she opens her eyes wide at such a question and says: ‘Nothing. I’m thinking of nothing.’ She is silent for a moment, and then she says, a little anxiously: ‘What should I be thinking of? Is there something I have to do?’
I have to suppress a laugh. ‘No, I have taken care of everything.’
