The Mirror and the Light

He thinks of Katherine’s miscarried children, their blind faces and their vestigial hands joined in prayer. ‘It was not I caused Warwick’s death,’ Henry says. ‘It was not even my father, it was Katherine’s people. I do not know why my father allowed the Spaniards to put a bloody hand into this realm’s affairs. How long must I suffer, to ease the conscience of Castile? And what more can I give Warwick’s family? I have promoted them. I have enriched them. Other kings would have kept them low.’

So much is true. They have worked on your shame, he thinks. ‘Who can read Margaret Pole, sir? Not I.’

Henry says, ‘Her son Montague has never liked me. To speak truthfully, I have never liked him. His brother Geoffrey is not a man to trust. But Reginald, I had hopes there – a gentle soul, one worthy to be cherished – or so I was told. I paid for his studies. I funded him to travel in Italy. I trusted him to go to the Sorbonne for me, to put my case in the matter of my annulment.’

His first annulment, he means. ‘I heard he put it very well.’

‘I would have rewarded him. I would have made him Archbishop of York. You know he is in minor orders, he is not yet a priest, but my thought was, he might quickly be ordained, and as the see was vacant after Wolsey – but he would none of it. Said he was too young. Not worthy. I should have known then, he meant to turn.’ The king thumps the folio. ‘All I asked of him was one word out of Italy – a statement, a scholar’s opinion, something I could set before the world, to show his family’s support. I told him, I do not need a book, I have books enough, I need just a word, to justify how and why I am head of my own church. And I waited. In great patience. And I was promised and promised, but nothing forthcame. Always some reason for delay. The heat, the cold, an outbreak of disease, the poor state of the roads, the untrustworthy nature of messengers, and his need to remove, to travel, consult some rare volume or some learned divine. Well, now it has come at last. It is a book after all.’ The king looks exhausted, as if he had written it himself. ‘And worth the waiting, because now the scales fall from my eyes.’

He moves to pick up the manuscript, but the king drops his hand on it. ‘I will save you the trouble. First there is a note to me, cold and insolent in tone. After that, each page more bitter than the last. I am a greater danger to Christians than the infidel Turk. He calls me a Nero, and a wild beast. He advises the Emperor Charles to invade. He claims that for the whole of my reign I have plundered my subjects and dishonoured the nobility. They are now ready to revolt, he claims, lords and commons both, and he exhorts them to do so, to rise up and murder me.’

‘It must appear to your Majesty –’

‘And I am damned,’ Henry says. ‘Hell gapes for me. Or so he says.’

‘– it must strike your Majesty that a rising, such as he advocates, cannot only be against somebody. It must also be for somebody.’

‘Of course. You see how it all works together? Pole exhorts Europe to take arms against me, and at the very same hour, my own daughter defies me. Tell me this – why is Reginald not a priest yet? When he is so fond of his prayers? I will tell you why. Because his family schemes to marry him to my daughter.’

Neat, if they could do it. Mary Tudor carries the best blood of Spain. Unite it with Plantagenet blood: that’s the thinking. The Pole family and their allies dream of a new England: which is to say, an old one, where they rule again.

‘I believe,’ he says, ‘that the Lady Mary regards your Majesty’s favour more than that of any bridegroom. Even if Heaven sent him.’

‘So you say. But then you always defend her.’

‘She is a woman, she is young. Trust me, your Majesty, she will see her duty, she will comply. These people who call themselves her supporters, they take advantage of her. I don’t believe she can penetrate their schemes.’

The king says, ‘I lived with her mother for twenty years, and I tell you, she could penetrate any scheme. You said yourself, if Katherine had been a man, she would have been a hero like Alexander.’