IAM TOO WISEto risk good money gambling on the unreliability of Lady Margaret’s youngest son. Sir Geoffrey is taken to the Tower for questioning in the dog days of August, while his powerful kinsmen are at their country homes, the king on progress, and all the court dispersed. No one notices that the young man has disappeared into the unbearably hot rooms, under the leads of the roof of the Tower, and Sir Geoffrey, simmering with resentment against his older brothers, heated by Lord Cromwell’s questions, melts into spiteful gossip.
When the court returns to Westminster Palace in autumn and finds Sir Geoffrey under arrest, everyone assumes that he must have been taking bribes from the Spanish ambassador or even from the French, and is to be taught a lesson by a brief imprisonment. The Pole family are glacially disapproving of one of their kinsmenfalling below their high standards, but we are all sure that his name and his debts will be cleared by the matriarch of the family: Lady Margaret Pole.
There are other portents. The eternal chantry for Queen Jane, the Pole family’s abbey at Bisham, is closed again, only months after its brief reopening. The king has changed his mind. Now, he thinks it is ridiculous to believe that souls wait patiently in purgatory to be bought into heaven by thousands of sung masses. And if there is no purgatory, then there is no need for an expensive chantry, and the Pole family’s abbey can be closed again without regret – for anyone but the Poles: they are anguished, of course.
This is not the only straw in the changing wind. The tomb of Thomas Becket, a sacred destination for the hundreds of pilgrim ways that cross and recross all Europe, is closed, too; the jewels gifted over centuries disappear into Thomas Cromwell’s Court of Augmentations, and the priceless bones of the saint are robbed from his tomb and promptly lost. The great ruby of Thomas Becket – the greatest treasure of the shrine – vanishes with the bones of saint but reappears – aresurrectionem– on the king’s fat thumb.
The heartbreak in Canterbury is completely silent. I think of the priest in my father’s village church cutting all references to the pope from his missal; now he will have to cut out St Thomas Becket as well. He might as well throw away his Latin Bible. Every church is to have a new one in English; God will no longer be addressed in Latin. The king knows that God speaks English. It is an English God for an English pope and king.
These are heavy reverses for the Papist Spanish party, but not their downfall. They believe that they are safe – their weakest link, Sir Geoffrey, has fallen silent in the Tower. They admit to nothing more than his minor indiscretion, and no one can be executed for an indiscretion.
‘I have good news for you,’ my spymaster tells me, finding me idle on the pier at the river, watching the fish rise in the still water.
‘Always welcome,’ I say.
‘I promised you a reward for keeping faith with me.’
I wait.
‘Your father-in-law sees reason at last. He’s wanting to settle his accounts and – as luck would have it – your widow’s jointure gives you a life interest in the lands that he wants to leave to his only surviving child.’
‘He’s never paid me a penny of the rents,’ I say resentfully. ‘And Mary was not so dear to him when his other daughter was queen.’
Cromwell smiles at my resentment. ‘I know. But I have put together an agreement that gives you good lands in Cambridge, in return for your jointure in Buckinghamshire. And –’ he pauses smiling – ‘you will be a tenant for life at Blickling Hall.’
‘Blickling?’ It was the Boleyn family home, before they had Hever.
He nods. ‘I could not get it for you outright, but it is yours for life, and I will have it confirmed by Act of Parliament. The king himself will agree to it.’
This man, this blacksmith’s son, has done for me what a duke of England, my uncle, would not do for me. He has turned around my fortunes, I am a woman of property once again. I can pay off my debts and my bills at court. I can buy gowns and horses and jewels that match my station in life. I can hold up my head. I am Lady Rochford with a grand house and lands to match my title. I am Jane Boleyn and I have the Boleyn family house as my home. I choose to live at court, it is a free choice, I am nobody’s dependent. I have a place of my own again.
‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ I am quite breathless with joy.
‘You don’t have to thank me,’ he says. ‘You’ve earned it. I promised that if you told me what I needed to know, you would be rewarded. And you told me – and it cost you your house and your husband. It’s only right that I give you the house back.’
‘Wait,’ I say. ‘I said nothing that led to George’s death. I gave no evidence, I signed nothing.’
He bows. ‘Then the house is payment for nothing.’
Hampton Court, Winter
1538
AS IF TOdefy the shadow over the old royal family, Lady Lisle braves the stormy Narrow Seas in November and visits us from the English fortress of Calais, to see her daughter Anne Basset, who is slowly inching her way forward to be the king’s new favourite. We hold a banquet to celebrate Lady Lisle’s arrival. She is a big-boned, handsome woman, and Thomas Culpeper, the king’s new favourite groom of the chamber, has obviously been primed to show her all sorts of little attentions. Anne Basset – who had her eye on Thomas Culpeper herself – is hugely offended by this flirtation and is heard to say that if Master Thomas Culpeper wants a hawk from Calais, he can no doubt pay for it like anyone else, and there is no need for him to make sheep eyes at a woman old enough to be his mother.
Lady Lisle stays at court for several days, hunting and hawking, walking in the gardens – friendly with everyone and wheedlingly flirtatious with the king. I never see her alone with her many kinsmen – the Poles, the Courtenays, and the Roman Catholic lords – she only meets them casually in public. She is in a position of high trust: her husband, Arthur, Lord Lisle, is of the old royal family the Plantagenets and holds the English fort of Calais for England, and the English Church in the sea of envious papistry that is Europe. He could not be in a more tactically important position; he could not be more trusted. Lady Lisle, walking into a banquet in her honour, on the king’s arm, reminds everyone that the former royal family, the Spanish party, are still riding high, and she and her husband are trusted with the keys to the gateway of the kingdom.
But after she has said her farewells and set sail for Calais, as the court prepares for Christmas, we hear extraordinary news from the Tower. Sir Geoffrey Pole has confessed to a plot against the kingand against the Church of England. He says his family supported the rebellion of the pilgrims and planned an invasion of England to be led by their exiled son, Reginald Pole, who was going to throw down king and Church, marry Lady Mary and take the throne.
No sooner has he signed his name to this death warrant for his family than he lapses into remorseful panic and stabs himself in the heart with his butter knife, after enjoying the good dinner that was his reward for betrayal. If he had used a proper knife and succeeded in killing himself, his family would have declared him insane and his words valueless: the ravings of a madman. But he did not hurt himself enough to save them. His blunt knife, his weeping survival, only proves his sanity and their guilt. An avalanche of arrests follows.
His brother, Henry Pole Lord Montague, is taken to the Tower with Sir Edward Neville. Henry Courtenay the Marquess of Exeter and his wife Gertrude are arrested for treason as well. Even the children of the family are taken with their parents: Edward Courtenay and young Henry Pole disappear into the darkness under the portcullis.
Sir Geoffrey names others: a canon from Chichester cathedral, a priest from the newly closed Bisham Abbey, a merchant who carried secret letters to the traitor Reginald Pole. Even Sir Nicholas Carew – who got George’s Order of the Garter – is arrested. One of the old lords, poor Lord De La Warr, says no more than that he cannot bear another trial of old and loyal friends, and is arrested for that – and held in the Tower along with them.
None of them confess anything. Gertrude Courtenay declares that everyone is innocent of everything, and she herself is a fool whose word cannot be trusted, and the many things she said in defence of Lady Mary, her insistence on calling her ‘Princess’, were nothing but feminine folly.
The old lady, Margaret Pole – too tough for feminine folly – is questioned, her home Bisham Palace is searched, and she is taken to Cowdray Castle in Sussex and interrogated for hours, day after day,by William Fitzwilliam, the newly appointed Earl of Southampton. The old lady is too wise and too brave to be caught by Fitzwilliam’s bullying. She does not break or even bend while her beloved son Geoffrey and his brother, his cousin Henry Courtenay, and his kinsman Sir Edward Neville, and their priests and messenger are tried for treason as the court has a merry Christmas. We do not even pause the music when we hear that Henry and Edward have been beheaded.
