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Chapters (56)
  1. Chapter One
  2. Chapter Two
  3. Chapter Three
  4. Chapter Four
  5. Chapter Five
  6. Chapter Six
  7. Chapter Seven
  8. Chapter Eight
  9. Chapter Nine
  10. Chapter Ten
  11. Chapter Eleven
  12. Chapter Twelve
  13. Chapter Thirteen
  14. Chapter Fourteen
  15. Chapter Fifteen
  16. Chapter Sixteen
  17. Chapter Seventeen
  18. Chapter Eighteen
  19. Chapter Nineteen
  20. Chapter Twenty
  21. Chapter Twenty-one
  22. Chapter Twenty-two
  23. Chapter Twenty-three
  24. Chapter Twenty-four
  25. Chapter Twenty-five
  26. Chapter Twenty-six
  27. Chapter Twenty-seven
  28. Chapter Twenty-eight
  29. Chapter Twenty-nine
  30. Chapter Thirty
  31. Chapter Thirty-one
  32. Chapter Thirty-two
  33. Chapter Thirty-three
  34. Chapter Thirty-four
  35. Chapter Thirty-five
  36. Chapter Thirty-six
  37. Chapter Thirty-seven
  38. Chapter Thirty-eight
  39. Chapter Thirty-nine
  40. Chapter Forty
  41. Chapter Forty-one
  42. Chapter Forty-two
  43. Chapter Forty-three
  44. Chapter Forty-four
  45. Chapter Forty-five
  46. Chapter Forty-six
  47. Chapter Forty-seven
  48. Chapter Forty-eight
  49. Chapter Forty-nine
  50. Chapter Fifty
  51. Chapter Fifty-one
  52. Chapter Fifty-two
  53. Chapter Fifty-three
  54. Epilogue
  55. A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  56. H ISTORICAL N OTE

‘It is nothing.’ I laid my hand on Timothy’s, small and thin and dirty. I thought, at least I did not lose him. Of all those whose lives had been uprooted by the trap the King and Paget had set, he was the least important – to them, though not to me, not to me.

Epilogue

Epilogue

FEBRUARY 1547, SIX MONTHS LATER

THE CROWDS STOOD SIX DEEP outside Whitehall Palace. They lined both sides of the roadway, up past Charing Cross and along Cockspur Street. Some said people were standing all the way to Windsor. Everyone was huddled in their warmest clothes; the sky was blue but there was an iron-hard frost in the air, the puddles grey and frozen, a bitter wind from the east. Some from the poorer classes, in leather jerkins or threadbare coats, were shivering and hunched in the cold. But they stayed, determined to see the spectacle.

I wore my heavily furred winter robe, but no gold chain. That had been returned to the goldsmith back at the end of August. For on this royal occasion there was no great central figure to impress. King Henry VIII was dead, and his funeral procession about to begin.

THE KING, IT WAS KNOWN, had fallen gravely ill again during the short royal Progress to Guildford in September, and never fully recovered. He worsened again in December and at the end of January he had died. The gossips at the Inns of Court had had much to chew over in recent months. It was, as ever, hard to distinguish truth from rumour, but most agreed that during the autumn the religious radicals had utterly triumphed; Bishop Gardiner had been publicly struck in the face by Lord Lisle in the Privy Council, and the King had refused to see him in the weeks before he died. It made sense to me: the conservative faction had bet everything on the Queen being found guilty of heresy, and on the success of Bertano’s mission. Both gambits had failed and the King, knowing he was dying, had turned to those who would ensure that the Royal Supremacy over the Church was preserved for his son.

In December the Duke of Norfolk and his son the Earl of Surrey had been suddenly arrested, the Earl accused of illegally quartering the royal arms with his own. Parliament had passed an Act of Attainder convicting both of treason; the young Earl had been executed in January, and Norfolk, the arch-conservative, would have followed him to the block had not the King died the night before the execution. It sounded to me like a put-up job – the King had used such methods before, to rid himself of Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell. For now the old Duke remained alive, in the Tower.