Now that I no longer have a husband in the king’s service, I have no rooms on the king’s side. The Parr family shield is hammered onto the door of my old rooms, and William Parr lives there alone, his wife never comes to court. His mother and his younger sister, Kateryn Parr, stay with him when they visit. Instead, I have a suite of rooms on the queen’s side: a bedroom, a tiny chapel for my private prayers, and a small stool room. My maidservant sleeps with the other maids, and the royal servants clean my rooms and make up my fire. The royal grooms care for my horse in the stables. I have sold all George’s falcons; they fly to another man’s whistle. All our wealth is gone; it is as if we were never man and wife. I thought I would feel ashamed to lose my great house and servants, our new furniture and our treasures; but instead, I feel strangely free. All I have to guard now are my own interests and myself.
Without plotting, without effort, I rise in importance at court as I do the work that others skimp, the work that the queen avoids. I am a woman in my prime; my girlish prettiness has refined into confident beauty. My ambition is satisfied. I am a widow without grief. Nobody ever mentions George or Anne, and they would not recognise what remains of their court. I don’t think they would recognise me either. I am not the girl that George married; I am not the wife that he dropped. I have become a great courtier in my own right, the greatest courtier in the queen’s rooms.
Hampton Court, Autumn
1537
IN THE AUTUMN,we all go to Hampton Court for Jane to give birth in the newly renovated queen’s rooms – beautifully designed by Anne, who made the rooms into a glamorous shell to house a dazzling queen. Jane is overawed by the gold leaf on the wooden carvings, the heraldic beasts, the massive wood shutters, the heavy wood furniture. She looks like a country cousin on a visit and perches uncomfortably on the edge of her throne.
It is a small court – only a few ladies are admitted. There is plague in London, and the king, always terrified of illness, insists that Jane is locked into the empty palace, as he hides from illness at Esher. He does not even say a proper goodbye in his haste to get away.
I have seen two queens miscarry. All through the birth, which lasts a day and a night, I expect something to go wrong; but Jane labours with the trappings of her old-fashioned faith all around her: the unrolled manuscript which she calls the girdle of the Virgin around her straining belly, the communion wafer in a huge crystal monstrance in her sight, holy water on one side of the cradle, blessed wine on the other, holy oil in a jar, a piece of the true cross on her table, some saints’ bones enclosed in a crystal, half a dozen things – mostly fakes – and the prayers of a hooded priest muttering through the grille of a closed door. In the early hours of the second morning, she gives birth to a boy.
The messengers in the presence chamber, who kept their horses saddled and ready all night, race to be first with the news to the king, to the lords, to London. I don’t need to tell my spymaster; his pigeon master frees his fastest bird from one of the towers at Hampton Court. He will have the news before anyone.
There is a huge service of thanksgiving in St Paul’s and in every church in the country, and at once, the machinery of the court grinds into motion. The builders make the last touches to the royal chapel, and the palace fills up with nobles for the christening. The king greets the guests but will not attend the royal christening. He prefers to conform to tradition and stay away than risk being upstaged by a baby.
My father is honoured to walk four-year-old Lady Elizabeth up the aisle of the royal chapel, carrying the vial of oil for anointing her baby half-brother, Edward Seymour, on her other side. Known Papists, and Anne’s enemies are honoured with prominent roles. Gertrude Courtenay of the Spanish party carries the precious baby, her husband beside her, Lady Mary is godmother. The final insult to Anne is that the wife of her jailor at the Tower, Lady Kingston, carries Lady Mary’s train. The men who gave fatal evidence against Anne – Sir Francis Bryan, Sir Nicholas Carew, and Sir Anthony Browne – are the guardians of the font. Anne’s judges: my uncle Thomas Howard, and Charles Brandon, and her confessor Archbishop Cranmer, are godfathers.
The king does not see Jane alone, he will not meet her privately, until she has been churched and emerged from her confinement rooms. Loving husbands break these rules, but the king, equally horrified by illness and female mysteries, keeps his distance. So he does not see Jane’s quiet pride when we bring the baby back to her room and tell her that he has been christened Prince Edward for the saint’s day of his birth, like a good Roman Catholic baby.
Indeed, the king never sees Jane again, as she dies of a fever a little more than a week later. He is not missed – Jane would have been horrified by a deathbed visit, and how could we have welcomed and flirted with him, when we were distracted by her dying? Without him, she makes a good death – better than her two predecessors: in comfort, fully shriven, drenched in the oil of extreme unction, revelling in the only moment of triumph of her entire selfless life.
Greenwich Palace, Winter
1537
THE KING DECLARESthat he will never marry again, that he has lost the love of his life. The part of heartbroken widower is new to him, though this is his third dead wife, and he takes to it as his greatest role. He orders her buried at Windsor and swears that he will lie beside her; they must enter heaven together. He likes her far better dead than he ever did alive. Her final service, is to restore his sense of eternal youth. She was a young woman, and yet she died before him: in his mind, that makes him her junior. He is elated to be alive though she is dead, to be healthy and strong, while she is in her grave, to have his whole life before him, while her life is over. And now he has his own baby, a son and heir, and no woman can claim the credit of having birthed him; he feels divine: likeZeushe can produce a child from his forehead.
Once again, a queen is dead, and once again, the queen’s ladies are not dismissed. The queen’s chambers are closed, but the king cannot live without women admirers. We have to stay at court. Married ladies live with their husbands, young women return to their fathers. My uncle invites me to an elegant suite of rooms in the Howard chambers. This is not for love nor family loyalty; my uncle knows that my patron is on the rise: Lord Cromwell has taken the post of lord privy seal from Thomas Boleyn and has been awarded the Order of the Garter that George wanted so much.
The king’s daughter, Lady Mary, has outlived two stepmothers and is now the first lady of the court. Lord Cromwell is negotiating foreign marriages; but with a boy in the royal cradle, the king can spare no thought for either of his daughters and cannot be brought to say whether Lady Mary is a legitimate princess or a bastard by-blow. Not even the Howards dare to ask about LadyElizabeth, whose servants are transferred to serve a true, legitimate baby prince.
Margaret Douglas, also displaced by this baby boy, is released from the Tower, desperately ill, and sent to Syon Abbey to recover. Her husband, poor Lord Thom, has died of fever, so she is a widow who was, so briefly, a secret wife. If she recovers from gaol fever and heartbreak, she will return to court to join this strange half-life that we all now live: ladies-in-waiting with no one to wait on, princesses without titles, heiresses with no inheritance, the queen’s ladies without queen’s rooms to attend or a queen to serve.
It is a sign of how little the king truly values the ladies that he keeps us on with nothing to do, except for the evenings when he wants company, or dancing or singing. The grooms would not leave his horses standing idle; the huntsmen would not leave his hounds cooped up; but the ladies of his court are picked up and dropped.
‘He has no special favourite?’ Lord Cromwell asks me again, as the tables are put away after dinner in the king’s presence chamber and the musicians tune up for the ladies to dance. We go through our paces like mares in a market as the king watches and taps his one sound leg. ‘I don’t want to arrange a marriage for him with a foreign princess if another Jane is going to pop up from the countryside and overturn everything.’
‘He’s attentive to Anne Basset,’ I warn, looking towards the dancers where the king is taking his place in a circle dance which will take him around every lady. ‘Daughter of Lady Lisle of Calais, the Spanish party put her forward. And Mary Shelton as well as her sister. But he likes an audience more than a partner. He likes us in a flock.’
‘Bedding any?’ he asks me.
It is treason to say that the king is impotent. ‘Not that I’ve noticed,’ I say discreetly. ‘Not noticeably at all.’ I am rewarded with his little grunt of amusement.
‘I understand you. Tell me if there is a rising star. Or if anything is rising at all...’ He lets the sentence trail away, and I incline myhead with a hidden smile. I know what he means, but Jane taught her ladies to ignore bawdy jokes.
‘Won’t your cousin Mary Howard have a try at the king?’ he suggests. ‘She’s pretty enough, and clever enough? I can’t believe her father hasn’t suggested it? He’s always pushing a Howard into a royal bed. He wouldn’t wink at her marrying her father-in-law.’
I shake my head. ‘She’s a young woman of principle; she’s adopted the reformed religion, and she’s sincere about it.’
He crinkles his dark eyes in a smile. ‘And what about you, my dear Lady Rochford? You don’t deploy your charms – you don’t try sortilèges?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I am no longer mad, Lord Cromwell. I am sane and cold and dry. I live my own life, and I want neither court nor love nor courtly love.’
He gives me a sympathetic, crooked smile. ‘I am a widower myself,’ he says. ‘There is a lot to be said for sane and cold and dry.’
Greenwich Palace, Spring
