Charlie Fenton > Recent Status Updates

‘This time perhaps Lord James did look embarrassed. Her Majesty’s illegitimate half-brother - older than she by a decade - it had been only natural that, in the queen’s absence, he had taken a leading part in the running of the country. And this was verging on a matter of state. This ship containing her Majesty’s horses, it seemed, had been seized by the English authorities.’

‘washed up on the Scottish foreshore like pieces of flotsam. As if the whole French adventure had never been - or as if some sea monster had swallowed them up for a decade and more, then spat them out at the end of their story. Squatting in the shelter of a clump of marram grass, Seton dug her fingers into the damp sand, as if the gritty feel on her skin could make the surging in her stomach go away.’

‘The entire Stuart line of his eldest sister, Margaret of Scotland, was excluded from the succession. In the event of the death of his children without heirs, the crown was settled instead on the descendants of his younger sister, Mary Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk. At the stroke of his pen her granddaughters, Lady Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey were named the heirs to Elizabeth.’

‘The youngest of the three sisters, Mary Grey, was still only a baby at this time and it may not yet have been apparent that there was anything wrong with her. But Mary was never to grow normally. As an adult she was described as the smallest person at court, ‘crook backed’ and ‘very ugly’. It has even been conjectured that she was a dwarf.‘

‘I watch Gloucester carefully. I am confused. It is impossible to comprehend that this mild-mannered man, so obviously in love with his plain little wife, is the same fellow who sent Hastings to his death; who is not above bullying the queen for possession of her son; and who does not even attempt to disguise his hatred for the queen’s family. He is attentive and pleasant, amusing and gentle.‘

‘The queen is sickly again, and I suspect the reason. This will be her twelfth child. Since her marriage to the king barely a year had passed without her producing another. Edward, self-satisfied and growing fat with contentment, is delighted when she gives him the news. The queen may be jaded and weary, but there can never be enough royal children. Men never seem to consider the strain of regular childbirth’

‘the prompt obedience which Jewel found so surprising was certainly not born out of enthusiasm for Protestantism, and their obedience was, to begin with at least, strictly external. They neither surrendered nor destroyed their chasuble and their Mass book, as they were supposed to do. The missal was returned to Thomas Borrage who had donated it, the chasuble was entrusted to Edward Rumbelow’

‘Revival of devotion was on display again in the High Wardens’ account for that year, presented on Sunday 28 October. Mary had issued a fresh set of Royal Injunctions for the Church on 4 March, repudiating the Royal Supremacy, commanding the suppression of heresy and the deprivation of married priests, and restoring the Latin liturgy, the calendar as reformed in Henry VIII’s reign’

‘My relationship with Elizabeth perplexes me. The disdain I felt towards her when I first came to court has diminished. By living so close and witnessing her most intimate moments, I have come to know the woman beneath. Against my will, I discover similarities between us, and this endears her to me. She tries to hide her insecurities, her need to bind her husband to her but I witness it all.’

‘All processions were now forbidden, rending redundant at a stroke the banners and streamers which Morebath had been investing in since the 1538 Injunctions had halted their spending on images. The new Injunctions ordered the destruction not only of all abused statues and shrines, but even of such images in stained glass windows, an advance towards an absolute ban on imagery‘

“King Henry is old and ineffectual. In fighting for him, we are really fighting for Margaret, and do we really want her son on the throne? A boy like that would be little better than his father - others would rule through him. King Edward has at least proven by his treatment of Warwick that he will be ruled by no one. England needs a king, Margaret, a man who will rule, not a puppet who will be led.”

'I can scarcely believe all this is true. The king restored, the Yorkist exiled, Henry back in my company and set to stay in my care for at least a week or two before returning to Jasper's household. It is everything I have dreamed of, and a little more besides... The only shadow at court is Warwick; his constant presence at the king's side, his eyes ever watching, every assessing us all.'

'Herbert has been given the Earldom of Pembroke, and control over lands that rightly belong to Jasper. I glance at my son, notice that his lashes are short and sandy. I wonder if he realises that Herbert now controls the estates that once belonged to his family, people who loved and protected him. I cannot remind him, he is yet too young, but, oh, what will I do if Herbert turns Henry's head and his loyalty shifts'

‘Morebath itself was to be implicated in the folk protest known as the Prayer Book Rebellion, which would end with the butchering of thousands of the men of Devon and Cornwall by foreign mercenaries under a royal flag. At the root of it all was religion, and the social impact of rapid religious change, implicit in the advance of a Protestantism more radical than anything Morebath... had ever contemplated’

‘There was a great deal of popular support for the cause of the ‘Northern men’ throughout England, and not least in the West Country. Cromwell’s monastic visitors for Cornwall reported widespread anger there about the suppression of local feastdays, and in April 1537 alarming reports came of a banner of the Five Wounds of Jesus, like those carried by the rebels in the Pilgrimage of Grace’

‘Now, refusing to give up the fight, the queen is summoning supporters for yet another battle. Everyone is sick of war. Our men are depleted and sickening, our women have been tested to the utmost. We live on a knife’s edge, afraid that each day will bring new disasters. More than anything, England needs peace. Sometimes, I think, for the sake of peace, perhaps it might be better if York wore the crown.’

‘This is his normality; the world he has grown up in. He will be fonder of his grubby-face nurse than he is of me; he knows nothing of the raw, tearing pain that I suffer in his absence. I am glad of that, of course, but oh, how glorious it would be were he to turn and see me, his face lighting up with joy at our reunion. I long for him to rush into my arms but I know when he turns, he will show only indifference’

‘In fact the harmony established by the 1531 order lasted precisely five years, and then, 1536, spectacularly fell apart. At Michaelmas that year, once again parishioners began to cut up rough about the clerk’s wages. William Leddon ‘wolde not pay hys steche of corne’, William Scely and the (unnamed) tenant at Brockhole refused to pay the 4d in cash prescribed for householders who had no corn for the clerk.‘

Trying not to spoil too much, but I have to say that bit with the baby and wet nurse actually shocked and upset me. It is rare for me to react like that, but this book has really drawn me in already.

‘I feel better now. The future is not so impossibly bleak. Harry does not mind my barren state. He promises to welcome my son into his home, and promises his goal with be my contentment. Harry will not constrain me, he wants me to be happy. Suddenly, as Jasper and Buckingham raise their glasses and drink to our future happiness, the world somehow feels a little kinder.’

‘With a tentative finger, I stroke the curve of his cheek and my heart swells. My body is wracked and ruined and by rights I should be dead, yet here I am, alive and well and holding my son. He is small, but thriving. For the first time I have done something right, made my mark on the world. Now, I have a reason to live, something to smile about, and someone to love. I will never be lonely again.’

‘I have forgotten the monster my childish mind envisaged before we wed. He was... is... a man like many others; an ambitious man whose chief concerns are family and power, and fortune. If only the love between us had blossomed sooner; if only our son had been conceived with love. Edmund would have made a good father, a good husband, and I am grieved that our time together has been cut so short.’

‘I find my feelings toward my mother have altered. Edmund insists she was aware the marriage would be consummated, aware of his need for a son. I remember how she refused to look at me on my wedding night, or the morning after when I rode away, and the suspicion grows that Edmund is telling the truth. She lied to me, sending me blindly to my fate.’

‘Our brief meeting showed me a handsome yet distant, distracted man. His beard was rough on the back of my hand, his cursory glance dismissive, as if my opinion of him on our first meeting was immaterial. Jasper, the younger brother, was kinder; he seemed more pliant, more conscious of my tender years and finer feelings. Edmund looks to be an uncompromising man’

‘For Phelippes this was a remarkable recovery. His debt to Elizabeth’s treasury still hung over him; he never repaid it. But Sir Robert, in recognising Phelippes’s talents and expertise, had doubtless done much to heal the bruises of the Sterrell affair. Phelippes set to work straight away with energy and passion, using his old contacts abroad to discover the intentions of England’s fugitive enemies’

‘I pray, not just for myself, but also for the king to wake up from the illness that has seized him, making him as ineffectual as a babe in arms. I pray for the queen, whose attempt to govern during her husband’s sickness earns her more enemies by the day. I also pray for John de la Pole, whom I am no longer encouraged to love. I wonder what will become of him now.’

‘In July 1587 Sixtus V and Philip came at last to a formal agreement on the Enterprise of England. The Pope promised money in two instalments, the first to be paid on the landing of the Great Armada in England, the second once the kingdom was captured. Sixtus granted Philip the right to name as Elizabeth’s replacement one who would ‘stabilise and preserve the Catholic religion in those regions’’

‘Certainly a forgery, the tangle of the Babington Plot and a show trial at Fotheringhay and in Star Chamber meant that Mary Queen of Scots could be eliminated once and for all. Elizabeth Tudor was at last free of her rival. But in 1587 even the cleverest of the queen’s advisers could not properly apprehend what they had done. Mary’s death did not take the sting out of a contested Tudor succession.‘

‘Mary lay awake in his arms while he drifted off to sleep. She understood the sacrifice he’d made for his family. He would never admit how difficult it had been to accept Anne Boleyn as his queen, but now he would show her absolute loyalty.’