Secrets of the Tudor Court by D.L. Bogdan Read Free Book Online Page A

with sympathy of poor fat Wolsey, dying on a muddy road.
    "It's a good thing he passed," Anne herself chimes in from where she sits at the window seat of her grand apartments. She had been tuning her lute, but we should have known she didn't care a fig whether it was in tune; she was too attuned to our conversation. "That man was after the pope's tiara and nothing more. He would have tried to hold us back as long as he lived."
    I shudder at the venom in her tone.
    "And as far as Henry Percy is concerned, I'd prefer if you did not mention his name again!" she cries. "Let him rot in misery up in Northumberland with his pasty-faced wife." She tosses back her head and laughs, that chilling, immoderate laughter that causes me to avert my head as though I am witnessing someone's private insanity. She glares at Madge and me with wild eyes. "I am assured he is miserable," she says, breathless. "Which serves him well. He was weak and God curse weak men!"
    That curse must not be entirely sincere, I think to myself. She must prefer her current Henry to be weak, else she wouldn't have been able to manipulate him into authorizing the execution of Wolsey. Wisely, I do not give voice to this theory.

    Time, that raging river, keeps surging. Thomas More, another close friend of the king and a man quite unyielding in his convictions, becomes lord chancellor. My gut immediately lurches with fear for the quiet man; friends this close to the king do not seem to fare well.
    In 1531 Parliament makes King Henry supreme head of the Church of England; now we are an island in more ways than geography. We are like a separate entity. We are accused of Lutheranism, but that is not the king's intent. He wishes to uphold Catholic ideology: he just does not want to acknowledge papal authority. He truly believes it is his divine right to rule over Church and state. I wonder if this is so. All my life I have been told that the king's authority is second to God, but there is something about His Majesty...something that does not seem altogether godlike to me. I dare think that neither he nor the pope is fit to assume such a heady role. But I never say so; the consequences of such opinions are grave.
    That year two people are banished from court. The first is my mother, a figure I saw so rarely she may as well have not been there to begin with. Her crime was offending Anne by playing go-between for Queen Catherine and her ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, hiding messages in baskets of oranges. The king, displeased that Mother caused such a ruckus, sends her home to Kenninghall.
    She does not say good-bye to me. Though I did not see but glimpses of her at most, the thought of being left completely alone, with none but my father as the guiding force in my life, is a daunting one. And Mother's crime...could it really have deserved expulsion from the life she so loved? Now what would become of her? She is as devoted to Queen Catherine as I am to Anne. To be deprived of the one person she believes in more than anything would be the worst kind of punishment--and Mother knows enough of that simply by being wed to Norfolk.
    I find to my surprise that I will miss her. Or, at least, the idea of her.
    The second person to be banished is Queen Catherine herself. In July she is exiled to the North. The Anne faction celebrates and the palace is aswarm with youth and vigor.
    "No more do we have to see her haunting the halls with her rosary and hair shirt!" Anne says in triumph. We are assembled in Norfolk's privy chamber. Gathered about are Mary Carey, George Boleyn, and their parents, my uncle Thomas, and aunt Elizabeth.
    "We are so close!" Anne cries out. "Almost five years I've been waiting..."
    "Do you listen, Anne?" Norfolk hisses from across the table. "The pope has granted nothing--we are but a tiny step toward getting what we want. Dowager Princess Catherine has a great deal of support in the North; she could still win. As far as the king is concerned--" He folds his hands