The Fifth Queen (17 page)

Suddenly there was a great silence in the room, and the Lady Mary raised her head. The burly figure of Throckmorton, the spy, was in the doorway. Katharine shuddered at the sight of him, for, in her Lincolnshire house, where he was accounted more hateful than Judas who betrayed the Lord, she had seen him beat the nuns when the convents had been turned out of doors, and he had brought to death his own brother, who had had a small estate near her father’s house.
The smile upon his face made her feel sick. He stroked his long, golden-brown beard, glanced swiftly round the room, and advanced to the mistress’s chair, swinging his great shoulders. He made a leg and pulled off his cap, and at that there was a rustle of astonishment, for it had been held treasonable to cap the Lady Mary. Her eyes regarded him fixedly, with a granite cold and hardness, and he seemed to have at once a grin of power and a shrinking motion of currying favour. He said that Privy Seal begged her leave that her maid Katharine Howard might go to him soon after one o’clock. The Lady Mary neither spoke nor moved, but the old knight shrank away from Katharine, and affected to be talking in the ear of Lady Rochford, who went on winding her wool. Throckmorton turned on his heels and swung away, his eyes on the floor, but with a grin on his evil face.

He left a sudden whisper behind him, and then the silence fell once more. Katharine stood, a tall figure, holding out the hands on which the wool was as if she were praying to some invisible deity or welcoming some invisible lover. Some heads were raised to look at her, but they fell again; the old knight shuffled nearer her to whisper hoarsely from his moustachioed lips:

‘Your serving man hath reported. Pray God we come safe out of this!’ Then he went out of the room. Lady Rochford sighed deeply, for no apparent reason.

After a time the Lady Mary raised her head and made a minute, cold beckoning to Katharine. Her dry finger pointed to a word in her book of Plautus.

‘Tell me what you know of this,’ she commanded.

The play was the
Menechmi
, and the phrase ran,
‘Nimis autem bene ora commetavi
.…’ It was difficult for Katharine to bring her mind down to this text, for she had been wondering if indeed her time were at an end before it had begun. She said:

‘I have never loved this play very well,’ to excuse herself.

‘Then you are out of the fashion,’ Mary said coldly, ‘for this
Menechmi
is prized here above all the rest, and shall be played at Winchester’s before his Highness.’

Katharine bowed her head submissively, and read the words again.

‘I remember me,’ she said, ‘I had this play in a manuscript where your
commetavi
read
commentavi.’

Mary kept her eyes upon the girl’s face, and said:

‘Signifying?’

‘Why, it signifies,’ Katharine said, ‘that Messenio did well mark a face. If you read
commetavi
it should mean that he scratched it with his nails so that it resembled a harrowed field; if
commentavi
, that he bethumped it with his fist so that bruises came out like the stops on a fair writing.’

‘It is true that you are a good Latinist,’ Mary said expressionlessly. ‘Bring me my inkhorn to that window. I will write down your
commentavi.’

Katharine lifted the inkhorn from its hole in the arm of the chair and gracefully followed the stiff and rigid figure into the embrasure of a distant window.

Mary bent her head over the book that she held in her hand, and writing in the margin, she uttered:

‘Pity that such an excellent Latinist should meddle in matters that nothing concern her.’

Katharine held the inkhorn carefully, as if it had been a precious vase.

‘If you will bid me do naught but serve you, I will do naught else,’ she said.

‘I will neither bid thee nor aid thee,’ Mary answered. ‘The Bishop of Winchester claims thy service. Serve him as thou wilt.’

‘I would serve my mistress in serving him,’ Katharine said. ‘He is a man I love little.’

Mary pulled suddenly from her bodice a piece of crumpled parchment that had been torn across. She thrust it into Katharine’s free hand.

‘Such letters I have had written me by my father’s men,’ she said. ‘If this bishop should come to be my father’s man I would take no service from him.’

Katharine read on the crumpled parchment such words as:

‘Be you dutiful …

I will not protect …

You shall be ruined utterly …

You had better creep underground …

Therefore humble you …’

‘It was Thomas Cromwell wrote that,’ the Lady Mary cried. ‘My father’s man!’

‘But if this brewer’s son be brought down?’ Katharine pleaded.

‘Why, I tore his letter across for it is filthy,’ Mary said, ‘and I keep the halves of his letter that I may remember. If he be brought down, who shall bring his master down that let him write so?’

Katharine said:

‘If this tempter of the Devil’s brood were brought down there should ensue so great an atonement from his sorrowful master whom he deludes.…’

Mary uttered a ‘Tush!’ of scorn and impatience. ‘This is the babbling of a child. My father is no holy innocent as you and your like feign to believe.’

‘Nevertheless I love you most well,’ Katharine pleaded.

Mary snapped her book to. Her cold tone came back over her heat as the grey clouds of a bitter day shut down again upon a dangerous flicker of lightning.

‘Do as you will,’ she said, ‘only if your head fall I will stir no finger to aid you. Or, if by these plottings my father could be got to send me his men upon their knees and bearing crowns, I would turn my back upon them and say no word.’

‘Well, my plottings are like to end full soon,’ Katharine said. ‘Privy Seal hath sent for me upon no pleasant errand.’

Mary said: ‘God help you!’ with a frigid unconcern, and walked back to her chair.

C
ROMWELL KEPT AS A RULE
his private courts either in his house at Austin Friars, or in a larger one that he had near the Rolls. But, when the King was as far away from London as Greenwich, or when such ill-wishers as the Duke of Norfolk were in the King’s neighbourhood, Cromwell never slept far out of earshot from the King’s rooms. It was said indeed that never once since he had become the King’s man had he passed a day without seeing his Highness once at least, or writing him a great letter. But he contrived continually to send the nobles that were against him upon errands at a distance—as when Bishop Gardiner was made Ambassador to Paris, or Norfolk sent to put down the North after the Pilgrimage of Grace. Such errands served a double purpose: Gardiner, acting under the pressure of the King, was in Paris forced to make enemies of many of his foreign friends; and the Duke, in his panic-stricken desire to curry favour with Henry, had done more harrying, hanging and burning among the Papists than ever Henry or his minister would have dared to command, for in those northern parts the King’s writ did not run freely. Thus, in spite of himself the Duke at York had been forced to hold the country whilst creatures of Privy Seal, men of the lowest birth and of the highest arrogance, had been made Wardens of the Marches and filled the Councils of the Borders. Such men, with others, like the judges and proctors of the Court of Augmentations, which Cromwell had invented to administer the estates of the monasteries and escheated lords’ lands, with a burgess or two from the shires in Parliament, many lawyers and some suppliants of rank, filled the anterooms of Privy
Seal. There was a matter of two hundred of them, mostly coming not upon any particular business so much as that any enemies they had who should hear of their having been there might tremble the more.

Cromwell himself was in the room that had the King’s and Queen’s heads on the ceiling and the tapestry of Diana hunting. He was speaking with a great violence to Sir Leonard Ughtred, whose sister-in-law, the widow of Sir Anthony Ughtred, and sister of the Queen Jane, his son Gregory had married two years before. It was a good match, for it made Cromwell’s son the uncle of the Prince of Wales, but there had been a trouble about their estates ever since.

‘Sir,’ Cromwell threatened the knight, ‘Gregory my son was ever a fool. If he be content that you have Hyde Farm that am not I. His wife may twist him to consent, but I will not suffer it.’

Ughtred hung his head, which was closely shaved, and fingered his jewelled belt.

‘It is plain justice,’ he muttered. ‘The farm was ceded to my brother after Hyde Monastery was torn down. It was to my brother, not to my brother’s wife, who is now your son’s.’

Cromwell turned upon the Chancellor of the Augmentations who stood in the shadow of the tall mantelpiece. He was twisting his fingers in his thin grey beard that wagged tremulously when he spoke.

‘Truly,’ he bleated piteously, ‘it stands in the register of the Augmentations as the worshipful knight says.’

Cromwell cried out, in a studied rage: ‘I made thee and I made thy office: I will unmake the one and the other if it and thou know no better law.’

‘God help me,’ the Chancellor gasped. He shrank again into the shadow of the chimney, and his blinking eyes fell upon Cromwell’s back with a look of dread and the hatred of a beast that is threatened at the end of its hole.

‘Sir,’ Cromwell frowned darkly upon Ughtred, ‘the law
stands thus if the Augmentation people know it not. This farm and others were given to your late brother upon his marriage, that the sister of the Queen might have a proper state. The Statute of Uses hath here no say. Understand me: It was the King’s to give; it is the King’s still.’ He opened his mouth so wide that he appeared to bellow. ‘That farm falleth to the survivor of those two, who is now my son’s wife. What judge shall gainsay that?’ He swayed his body round on his motionless and sturdily planted legs, veering upon the Chancellor and the knight in turn, as if he challenged them to gainsay him who had been an attorney for ten years after he had been a wool merchant.

Ughtred shrugged his shoulders heavily, and the Chancellor hastened to bleat:

‘No judge shall gainsay your lordship. Your lordship hath an excellent knowledge of the law.’

‘Why hast thou not as good a one?’ Cromwell rated him. ‘I made thee since I thought thou hadst.’ The Chancellor choked in his throat and waved his hands.

‘Thus the law is,’ Cromwell said to Ughtred. ‘And if it were not so Parliament should pass an Act so to make it. For it is a scandal that a Queen’s sister, an aunt of the Prince that shall be King, should lose her lands upon the death of her husband. It savours of treason that you should ask it. I have known men go to the Tower upon less occasion.’

‘Well, I am a broken man,’ Sir Leonard muttered.

‘Why, God help you,’ Cromwell said. ‘Get you gone. The law takes no account of whether a man be broken, but seeketh to do honour to the King’s Highness and to render justice.’

Viridus and Sadler, who was another of Cromwell’s secretaries, had come in whilst Privy Seal had been speaking, and Cromwell turned upon them laughing as the knight went out, his head hanging.

‘Here is another broken man,’ he said, and they all laughed together.

‘Well, he is another very notable swordsman,’ Viridus said. ‘We might well post him at Milan, lest Pole flee back to Rome that way.’

Cromwell turned upon the Chancellor with a bitter contempt.

‘Find thou for this knight some monk’s lands in Kent. He shall to Milan with them for a price.’

Viridus laughed.

‘Now we shall soon have these broken swordsmen in every town of Italy between France and Rome. Such a net Pole shall not easily break through.’

‘It were well he were done with soon,’ Cromwell said.

‘The King shall love us much the more; and it is time.’

‘Why, there will in two days be such a clamour of assassins in Paris that he shall soon bolt from there towards Rome,’ Viridus answered. ‘It will go hard if he escape all our Italy men. I hold it for certain that Winchester shall have reported to him in Paris that this Culpepper is on the road. Will you speak with this Howard wench?’

Cromwell knitted his brows in uncertainty.

‘It was her cousin that should clamour about this murder in Paris,’ Viridus reminded him.

‘Is she without?’ Cromwell asked. ‘Have you it for certain that she hath reported to my lord of Winchester?’

‘Winchester’s priest of the bedchamber hath shewn me a copy of the letter she wrote. I would have your lordship send some reward to that Father Michael. He hath served us in many other matters.’

Cromwell motioned with his hand that Sadler should note down this Father Michael’s name.

‘Are there many men in my antechambers?’ he asked Viridus, and hearing that there were more than one hundred and fifty: ‘Why, let this wench stay there a half-hour. It humbles a woman to be alone among so many men, and she shall come here without a sound clout to her back for the crush of them.’

He began talking with Sadler about two globes of the world that he had ordered his agent to buy in Antwerp, one for himself and the other for a present to the King. Sadler answered that the price was very high; a thousand crowns or so, he had forgotten just how many. They had been twelve years in the making, but the agent had been afraid of the greatness of the expense.

Cromwell said:

‘Tush; I must have the best of these Flemish furnishings.’

He signed to Viridus to send for Katharine Howard, and went on talking with Sadler about the furnishing of his house in the Austin Friars. He had his agents all over Flanders watching the noted masters of the crafts to see what notable pieces they might turn out; for he loved fine carvings, noble hangings, great worked chests and other signs of wealth, and the money was never thrown away, for the wood and the stuffs and the gold thread remained so long as you kept the moth and the woodlouse from them. To the King too he gave presents every day.

Katharine entered by a door from a corridor at which he had not expected her. She wore a great head-dress of net like the Queen’s and her dress was in no disarray, neither were her cheeks flushed by anything more than apprehension. She said that she had been shown that way by a large gentleman with a great beard. She would not bring herself to mention the name of Throckmorton, so much she detested him.