Harry has made him Earl of Ormond, not only that, but also Earl of Wiltshire, which is no honor to Wiltshire I am sure. His son is to be called Viscount Rochford.
I rest the pages so that I can think. Is this to be her price? Is Harry ennobling the father to buy his daughter’s honor? If this is so, then we may be at the end of our ordeal. Her father straps on the order of a double earldom, her mother becomes a bawd and a countess in the same moment, and the brother a viscount and a pimp. Why not? If Anne Boleyn will accept these honors in return for her own much-vaunted maidenhead then we can all be happy again.
Harry gave them a great dinner to celebrate their ennoblement. Of course the queen could not attend so I took her place and led in the ladies and the Duchess of Norfolk came behind me, and we were all about to go to our usual seats when I saw that the queen’s chair was behind the table, beside Harry’s, and while I paused, the master of ceremonies led me to a table beside Harry’s, and Anne Boleyn (Lady Anne as she is now) walked past me, walked up the steps to the dais and sat beside Harry on his right hand, as if she were queen crowned.
The old Duchess of Norfolk and I looked at each other agape like peasants seeing a two-headed pig at a fair. I didn’t know what to do or say. Maggie, I have never been so unhappy. I have never been so insulted. I looked across at Charles and he gestured to me to sit and eat and pretend to notice nothing. And so I sat, and SHE SENT OUT A DISH TO ME! She did. She favored me as if I should be grateful. Harry was watching, he said nothing: neither to stop her, nor to encourage her. She taunted me. I served myself and pretended to eat. I thought that I should be sick of shame. Harry must be mad to treat me so, his own sister. He has put his whore ahead of his wife, he has put her ahead of me—she was my own maid-in-waiting. I think I will die of the dishonor.
I wish you a happier Christmas than we will have. Katherine says that she thinks that Anne Boleyn is determined to convert Harry to the reformed religion and then he will not need to consult the Pope or the laws of the Church but only what his conscience tells him. That’s all they believe in, these Lutherans. But what conscience can he have?
PITLOCHRY, SCOTLAND, SUMMER 1530
Just as my brother is waiting for the Vatican to rule on his application for an annulment, the Holy Father chooses this very moment to send a papal ambassador to visit us. This can be no coincidence I tell James, as we ride through the wild country north of Scone, the ambassador’s big horse laboring behind us, as his excellency admires scenery that is, he tells us, as wild as the Apennine Mountains that shield Rome. The Holy Father must be wanting reassurance that whatever heretical books my brother is consulting, whatever challenges he makes to the rule of Rome, that I am, at least, the true child of our sainted grandmother Lady Margaret Beaufort, remaining obedient to papal authority. James, my son, is genuinely devout and opposes the heresies of Luther and even the milder questioning of the German and Swiss reformers. Like many children raised in difficult circumstances, he clings to the certainties of the old world. Having lost an earthly father in infancy and defied a stepfather, he’s not going to deny the Pope.
We love these summers, when we ride into the Northern lands that become more rugged and more and more empty the farther we travel. Sometimes at sunset the skies are filled with strange rainbows in wild colors, it does not get dark till late, and dawn comes very early. In midsummer there is hardly any nighttime at all; the Northern lands are the realms of the white nights and the people revel in summertime and drink and dance and hardly sleep at all for joy in the sunshine.
James—just like his father—takes justice with him wherever we go and holds summary courts and tries and sentences offenders. He is emphatic that the king’s peace must run from the lawless Lowland borders to the lawless Highlands. He brings a dream to the Northern clans of a king whose justice will go from the rough Northern seas, where a gale is always blowing, to the troubled countries of the Tyne and the Eden. The papal ambassador admires him and says he had no idea of the richness and power of these Northern lands. I have to admit that until I came to Scotland I too knew little of the men and women of these remote places, but I have learned to love and respect them.
“I did not know, for instance,” the ambassador begins in his careful French—then he breaks off for we have come out of a forest and into a meadow beside a wide, deep river and before us is a complete palace of wood, planted in the meadow like a dream house. It is an extraordinary sight, three stories high with a great turret at each corner, flags flying at each one, and even a gatehouse and a drawbridge that is a tree trunk. As we rein in our horses to exclaim, the drawbridge is lowered over the moat—a diversion of the river which runs, sparkling, all around the castle—and John Stewart, the Earl of Atholl, comes riding out and, on her palfrey beside him, his lady Grizel Rattray wearing a crown of flowers.
“What is this?” the ambassador asks me in bewilderment.
“This,” says James, grandly, hiding his own surprise, “this is a summer palace that my loyal friend John Stewart has prepared for us. Please come this way.”
He greets John and the two men laugh together. James slaps him on the back and praises the extraordinary building as her ladyship greets me, and I congratulate her on the creation of such a treasure.
We dismount before the tree-trunk drawbridge, the horses are taken away to the fields and the earl and his countess show us into their pleasure house.
Inside it is more dreamlike than ever, for the ground floors are nothing but the meadow, richly planted with flowers. Upstairs there are bedrooms in each of the four corners of the palace, and each bed is built into the wall and planted with chamomile, like a scented bower, and thrown with furs. The great hall for dining is heated in the old way with a fire in the center, and the floor is beaten mud swept to perfect cleanness and polished with the passage of many feet. The high table is on a platform, a few carved wooden steps leading up to it, and the interior glows green with the light of the best wax candles.
I look around me with delight. “Come and see your room,” the countess says and guides me up the wooden stairs to the chamber that overlooks the river and the hills beyond. Every wall is hung with a tapestry of silk, and every tapestry is a woodland or meadow or riverside scene so it is as if every wall is a window to the countryside beyond. The windows themselves are wooden-framed and made of perfectly clear Venetian glass so that I can look out at the river and see my horse grazing in the water meadows, or close the shutters for warmth.
“This is a wonder!” I say to the countess.
She laughs with pleasure and tosses her head with the crown of flowers and says: “My lord and I were so honored that you should come to stay with us that we wanted you to have a palace as good as Holyroodhouse.”
We go down to dine. The fire is lit and the smell of woodsmoke mingles with the scent of roasted meat. They are cooking every sort of bird and three kinds of venison. As we enter the room the household stand to salute us and they raise their shining pewter cups. I sit with James on one side and the ambassador on the other, the Earl of Atholl is on James’s far side and his countess at the head of the table of ladies. “This is truly very fine,” the ambassador says to me in an undertone. “Very unexpected. What a treasure house in the middle of nowhere. This Earl of Atholl must be very, very wealthy?”
“Yes,” I say. “But he has not built this palace from wood to prevent James stealing it from him. We are not as they are in England. A great subject may keep his wealth and lands, however grandly he builds.”