We walk for a few moments in silence.
“How do you know all this anyway?” I cannot hide my irritation that she and Katherine have been sorrowfully whispering about me. I cannot stand the thought that they have been mumbling over news from Scotland, all big-eyed and anxious.
“Thomas Wolsey told Katherine, and she told me. Thomas Wolsey knows everything that goes on in Scotland. He has spies everywhere.”
“Spying on my husband,” I remark.
“Oh, I am sure not. Not specially. Just if he is—” She breaks off before saying that they suspect him of disloyalty to my country as well as to me. She hesitates. “May I tell Katherine that you are not concerned about this rumor? She will be so relieved.”
“Why, do you have to tell her everything? Is she your confessor now?”
“No, it’s just that we always tell each other everything.”
I snort. “That must please your husbands. Did you tell her that Harry was bedding her maid-in-waiting Bessie?”
She dawdles behind me, up the stairs. “Yes,” she whispers. “I tell her everything I know, even when it breaks my heart to tell her.”
“And does she tell you of your husband’s flirtations?”
She puts her hand to the stone wall as her feet fail her. “Oh! No! He has none.”
I cannot claim, even in my temper, that he does. “None that I know of,” I say disagreeably. “But he will have someone while you are like this, the size of a barn and unable to lie with him. Every man takes some slut when his wife goes into confinement.”
Once again the easy tears well up into her eyes. “Don’t say that! I am sure he does not. I am sure that he would not. He comes to my bed and sleeps beside me, he likes to hold me. I like to sleep in his arms. I really don’t think he has a lover. I really believe he would not.”
“Oh, go and cry with Katherine,” I say, irritated beyond endurance, as we reach the top of the stairs. “The two of you make a fine pair weeping over nothing. But keep your spiteful tongues off my husband and me.”
“We didn’t gossip!” she exclaims. “We were keeping it secret for fear that you should be distressed. I promised I would say nothing. It was very wrong of me to say anything.”
“You’re so stupid,” I say, falling into nursery abuse. “I look at you, and all I think is that it is as well you are pretty for God knows you are the stupidest girl I know. For Katherine, old and plain as she is, there is no hope at all.”
She turns her head away from this unkindness and hurries up the stairs to the queen’s rooms. I turn away to my own rooms. I am cured of my longing to stay here. I want to go home to Scotland. I am sick of this household of women; I am sick of these women who call themselves my sisters but gossip about me behind my back. The English queen and the French queen, I hate them both.
I am not the only one who is sick of the French and the way that they buy the favorites at court. Mary and her husband are openly French pensioners, and half the English court is taking bribes. The French merchants and craftsmen have taken bread from honest English mouths in every trade and store in the city. I warn Harry that the French won’t have to invade by coming with a fleet, they are so numerous already that you can hardly hear English spoken on a London street, it is so packed with m’sieurs and milords.
Harry laughs—nothing can penetrate his sunny mood. He spends all his day hawking, while all the work of kingship is done by Thomas Wolsey, who brings him the documents to sign when he should be listening to Mass. Harry scrawls his signature, attending neither to God nor to his duty.
But the people of London feel as I do, that there are too many foreigners stealing a living from the trusting Englishmen. Every day there are half a dozen incidents reported of foreign tradesmen cheating, of French seductions and abductions, of good Englishmen shouldered off the highway, or pushed out of jobs. When the French are summonsed they bribe the magistrates, and walk away scot-free. The people of London become more and more angry.
The apprentices take the freedoms of Easter, when ale flows freely and everyone is exuberantly liberated from the long fast of Lent. They get stormingly drunk and arm themselves against French intruders. A powerful French-baiting sermon in Spitalfields stirs them up. The masters give the lads the day off for May Day, and they are armed with the weapons that they have to carry for the defense of the City. It all turns into a potent brew for the young men who would as soon fight as drink, and find that on this day they can do both. Bigger and bigger gangs of lads come together and roam around smashing the windows of the foreign merchants, bawling abuse at the doors of foreign lords. The Portuguese ambassador has the filth from the midden thrown at his walls and tightly closed gate, the Spanish ambassador’s servants sally out for a battle, the French traders batten down their shutters and sit in darkness in the back rooms of their houses. But wherever there is a French name over a shop door, or a swinging sign in French, or anything that might be French—for the apprentice boys are not the most educated of youths—they catcall at the windows, and lever up the cobblestones, throw a hail of dirt and pebbles and bellow insults.
Even Thomas Wolsey—a man from their own class—does not escape. His beautiful new London house is ringed by a mob who shout that he shall answer to them for his attempt to distribute charity to the poor. There shall be no charity to foreigners, they warn him. They don’t like him and his clever ways. Besides, if they were paid a good wage they would need no charity. Demand succeeds demand as they chant for good times to come, for justice to be restored. The Lord Chancellor, listening behind his stout doors with his enormous household armed and ready, fears that sooner or later someone is going to call for the white rose, for the Plantagenets, for my mother’s defeated family, and those are the words that cannot be allowed. He sends for the king to turn out the yeomen of the guard, who are keeping a safe distance from the city at Richmond Palace.
“I shall ride against my own people,” Harry says grandly. It is late in the evening, the dark blue evening of a summer midnight. We have been dining and drinking late into the night. Katherine looks exhausted, but Mary’s husband Charles Brandon and Harry are flushed with exercise and with wine and look as if they would dance till dawn. Mary, exquisite in cream and pearls, with her arms linked with the two men, looks up in concern at her brother. “Oh, but you can’t!” she says.
“They can’t get out of hand,” Harry announces. He tips his head to me. “Ask the Queen of Scots: she knows,” he says. “She knows that you have to keep the people in their place with all the skill you have. But once they disobey, you have to smash them down. Don’t you? Smash them down.”
I can’t deny it, though both Mary and Katherine look to me to soothe Harry. “When they rise up they have to be put down,” I say simply. “Look at me—d’you think I would not be on my throne now, but for the people turning against me in their folly?”
“But that was because—” starts Mary and I see, though no one else does, that her husband pinches her hand, to tell her to be silent. Charles Brandon is Harry’s favorite friend, his companion for jousting and drinking, dancing and card-playing. And he has kept his place at the king’s side, month after month, year after year, by never disagreeing with his royal friend and master. Whatever Harry says, Charles agrees. He’s like one of those hinged dolls that Archibald gave to James that just nods its head: nod, nod, nod. Brandon can be nothing but agreeable to his royal master. The hinge of his neck only works one way: nod, nod, nod—“yes, yes, yes.”