JANE BOLEYN, HAMPTON COURT,

CHRISTMAS 1540

This is to be Katherine’s Christmas, the happiest Christmas she has ever had. Her household is reformed around her, she is served by the greatest ladies of the land and befriended by the worst girls that ever romped in a dormitory. She has her lands in her own right, she has retainers by the thousand, she has jewels that would be the envy of the Moors, now she has to have the happiest Christmas of her life and we are ordered to make it so.

The king is rested and revived, excited at the thought of a dazzling celebration to show the world that he is the ardent husband of a young and pretty wife. The brief scandal of his niece’s love affair is forgotten, she is locked up in Syon Abbey and her lover is run away. Kitty Howard has blamed everybody but herself for the laxity of her rooms and all is forgiven. Nothing shall spoil this first Christmas for the newly-weds.

But straight away there is a little pout on the pretty face. Princess Mary comes to court as she is bidden, and bends the knee to her new stepmother, but does not come up smiling. Princess Mary is clearly not impressed by a girl nine years her junior, and cannot seem to form her mouth to say the word ‘Mother’ to a silly, vain child, when that beloved title once belonged to the finest queen in Europe. Princess Mary, who has always been a girl of high scholarly ability and seriousness, a child of the church, a child of Spain, cannot stomach a girl younger than her, perched on her mother’s throne like a tiny cuckoo chick and jumping down to dance the moment anyone asks her. Princess Mary first met Kitty Howard last spring when she was the vainest, silliest girl in service to the queen. How to believe that this little imp is now the queen herself? If it were the Feast of Misrule, Princess Mary would laugh. But this stunted version of royalty is not funny when it is played out every day. She does not laugh.

The court is grown merry, as some say, or wild, as others say. I say that if you put a young fool in command of her own household and bid her to please herself you will see an explosion of flirtation, adultery, posturing, misbehaviour, drunkenness, dishonesty and downright lechery. And so we see. Princess Mary walks among us like a woman of judgement through a market of fools. She sees nothing that she can like.

The little pout tells the king that his child-bride is discontented and so he takes his daughter to one side and tells her to mind her manners if she wants a place at court at all. Princess Mary, who has endured worse than this, bites her tongue and bides her time. She says nothing against the girl-queen, she merely watches her, as a thoughtful young woman would watch a dirty babbling stream. There is something about Mary’s dark gaze that makes Katherine as insubstantial as a little laughing ghost.