Justice for the Cardinal Read online

  JUSTICE FOR THE CARDINAL

  Tudor Saga Series

  Book Three

  David Field

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE: 1483

  PART I

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  PART II

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  MORE BOOKS BY DAVID FIELD

  PROLOGUE: 1483

  The crescent of the new moon slid from behind a cloud, casting a pale orange glow onto Tower Green. A furtive shadow slid to the cover of the nearest wall, and slowly crept towards the door behind which a guard was waiting with a pounding heart. The clink of coins in a bag was followed by the muted creaking of the opening woodwork, and Tyrrell slipped inside, commanding the guard to follow him as they took the stairs cautiously one at a time.

  Inside the chamber, the two boys were snuffling and muttering in their uneasy slumber, each on a separate cot. Tyrrell tiptoed to the sleeping form of the older boy, who was lying face down, and forced his full body weight down on the unsuspecting head; there were a few choking noises, and it was done. The guard — a man named Dighton — found the younger boy lying on his side, his golden fair hair across his face. Dighton placed his mailed fist over the boy’s mouth, and when his eyes opened in terror he gestured with his free hand for the nine-year-old to remain silent, then lifted him onto his shoulder.

  Down the stairs, and through the shadows along the wall of the Inner Ward, the two men carried their bundles to the already opened gate and portcullis that gave access to the oily river, in which a waiting wherry was moored alongside. They stepped round the inert form of the gate guard, who had opened up to Tyrrell when shown the written authority under the seal of the Lord High Constable of England, and had then slid silently to the ground when a dagger had been inserted firmly and accurately between his ribs and into his heart. The two men lowered their bundles into the bottom of the boat, and the wherryman was ordered away from the landing steps.

  Downstream an hour later, Tyrrell had completed the essential task of securing rocks around the body of the youth he had been carrying, and with a grunt he heaved it over the side and consigned it to the crabs. Then he ordered the wherryman to steer to the north bank, where he stepped over the gunnel and waded, thigh deep, to the grassy shore after delivering one last encouragement to his companion.

  ‘Downstream to Gravesend, to the Beau Marie. She will take you to Calais, where you will receive more gold. Go now, without delay.’

  The next morning it was discovered that the guard had abandoned his post, and that the royal prisoners were missing. In fear for his life, the constable, Sir Robert Brackenbury, remained silent, and an enduring mystery was born.

  PART I

  I

  1536

  As Thomas Cromwell approached Fyfield Manor down a long lane framed by two elderly oaks, he saw a young man throwing stones at the waterfowl that flapped and fussed in a large ornate pond.

  Cromwell dismounted and waded through the long grass towards the pond, and the young man looked up to meet his stare.

  ‘You must be Richard Gordon,’ Cromwell announced.

  ‘Depends who you ask,’ Richard replied. ‘My grandmother would have me addressed as such, but my step-grandfather insists that I answer to Richard Ashton, else I will be beaten. By his sons, no less.’

  ‘But your grandmother is Lady Catherine Gordon?’

  ‘She was once. Now she is merely Catherine Ashton. Before that she was Catherine Craddock, and before that who knows? Another question might be who cares.’

  ‘If I follow this track, I will reach the manor house?’ Cromwell asked.

  ‘You will, and much luck may it bring you. It has brought me little enough. Who are you?’

  ‘Master Thomas Cromwell, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Recorder of Bristol, Steward of the Abbey of Westminster, Master of the Rolls, Secretary to His Majesty and Visitor-General of the Monasteries, in which last capacity I am likely to be welcomed at the manor house. I go to bring your step-grandfather the good news that he will shortly be allowed to purchase the twelve hides of Abingdon Abbey that he has long coveted.’

  ‘Many titles. You must in truth be very wealthy.’

  ‘So it is rumoured by my enemies, of which I have many. But not as wealthy as your grandfather should have been.’

  ‘My grandfather?’

  ‘Yes. There is much to discuss, but first I must first seek confirmation of some further details from your grandmother.’

  ‘She was put to bed some days ago. They say it is but an ague, but at her age who can tell?’

  ‘Clearly I must delay no longer. Until the morrow, then.’

  Cromwell remounted his gelding and nudged him up the track to the manor house, leaving Richard Ashton to re-engage the waterfowl.

  Had Cromwell been the King himself, he could not have been treated with more deference, with excessive bowing and scraping once his identity and his business were announced. The Ashton sons were sharing the fireplace with their wives and offspring, and the old man himself was summoned from his aviary by a menial who came back armed with wine and wafers.

  ‘You will stay for supper, and perhaps bide overnight?’ Christopher Ashton enquired hopefully.

  Cromwell nodded. ‘You are one day’s ride from Westminster, hidden away here in the Berkshire countryside, and not even Master Secretary would be safe from footpads on the night lanes around Windsor, so I thank you for your hospitality. I’m informed that your good wife has taken to her bed?’

  ‘You obviously spoke with the manor idiot on your way in,’ one of the Ashton sons observed, and his brother sniggered. ‘His concern for our stepmother’s health would be touching, were it genuine. He seeks only to be assured that he is rid of his duty to her, then he will no doubt ride away to seek his fortune in the town.’

  ‘I must speak with your step-mother,’ Cromwell told them.

  ‘She was sleeping, when I was last up there,’ one of the brother’s wives replied. ‘She took a draught not an hour ago, to ease the pain, and she would not thank you to wake her.’

  ‘Not an ague, then?’ Cromwell asked.

  ‘A canker,’ came the reply from one of the men in front of the fire.

  An hour later, shortly before supper, Cromwell crept up the narrow staircase and eased his head round the half open door. There was a rustling movement in the bedding, then a sharp cry of pain, followed by the raising of a skeletal head from the bolster.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Catherine Gordon called out.

  Cromwell moved to the bed, sat down on the end of it and smiled reassuringly. ‘Master Cromwell, Secretary to King Henry.’

  ‘You bring me news of the Princess Mary?’

  ‘The “Lady” Mary, as we are bidden to call her. But no, no news.’

  ‘She must be mourning her mother’s passing, the poor mite. What age will she be now?’

  ‘She had her twentieth birthday just a few weeks past. A grown woman now, and much changed from wh
en you were in command of her Privy Chamber.’

  ‘She was but fourteen when I last saw her, but virtuous and beautiful in her own way,’ Catherine reminisced sleepily. ‘The King still intends to have her declared bastard?’

  ‘The Queen, madam, not the King.’

  Catherine made a noise in her throat as if expelling unwanted mucus. ‘That whore belongs on a pyre.’

  ‘With your assistance, she may shortly complete her reign on the scaffold.’

  ‘Gladly. What may I do? Be brief, for I feel the pains returning.’

  ‘Your first husband — the one they hanged as a traitor.’

  ‘My only true love? Perkin of blessed memory?’

  ‘He indeed. What became of his son? I believe you had a son and a daughter before Perkin was detained at the whim of the old Henry, and you went into the service of Queen Elizabeth of York?’

  ‘Indeed. My daughter married a cloth merchant, and is now in Antwerp, no doubt scolding her own grandchildren.’

  ‘Antwerp?’ Cromwell repeated, looking up sharply. ‘Has she made herself known to those who raised your first husband?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge. And it would not be safe, with another Tudor on the throne.’

  ‘Probably not. But your son?’

  ‘Jamie died some years past. He fell from his horse. He had no children. My daughter had one son — Richard.’

  ‘So Richard is truly Perkin’s grandson?’

  ‘Yes. I left England after Perkin was hanged as a traitor, and after the death of the Queen Elizabeth, whose lady-in-waiting I had become. I was sent as a lady in attendance on the Princess Margaret upon her marriage to the King of Scotland, but after his war with King Henry that led to his death, my lady came back south to London, with me still in her train. A Gentleman Usher of the King’s Chamber, James Strangeways, paid me court, and we were married. I took letters of denization to make me officially English, and was granted these estates in Fyfield in my own right, with a condition that I may never again return to Scotland. My Huntly entitlements have by this means eluded me, but my status as a comfortable widow has yielded me two more husbands since then.’

  Her head fell back on the pillow after all the effort of speaking, and even more colour left her bony cheeks. Gazing down at her pure white hair and haggard face, it was difficult for Cromwell to recreate, even in the imagination, the beauty that had once been the talk of two nations, although her ocean-pure deep blue eyes had lost none of their lustre.

  ‘I must take Richard back with me,’ Cromwell told her gently.

  ‘That he may be used like his grandfather?’ Catherine wheezed back.

  ‘No-one must know his true identity. Does he know if it himself?’

  ‘He knows who he is, but he has never been told who, or what, he might have been.’

  ‘It might be a kindness not to tell him, but I must if I am to give him the lust for revenge that will spur him on to greatness.’

  ‘He is all I have left,’ Catherine reminded Cromwell weakly. ‘I would plead with you to let him remain here in ignorance, were I not marked for death within days.’

  ‘Did you believe what your first husband claimed?’

  ‘Why would I not? He was my husband, and I loved him dearly. Do you believe it?’

  ‘I had occasion, during my time in the service of Cardinal Wolsey, to learn from him certain facts revealed in the confessional many years ago. If those facts be true, then there can be no doubt of who your late husband truly was. And they say that facts revealed in the final confession must be the truth, else the gates of Hell will open for the sinner.’

  ‘You will take Richard to Court, say you? To what purpose will you put him?’

  ‘He will be my eyes and ears. The presence of Master Secretary in any assembly, but most notably that of the Queen, closes mouths these days, I observe. But nothing is more likely than the presence of a handsome young courtier, such as I will make Richard, to open the mouths of the Queen and her ladies. They grow indiscreet in their belief that they can do and say anything and Henry will pardon it.’

  ‘So Richard is to become your spy? But what is likely to be his fate, if he be discovered?’

  ‘You speak as if I meant harm to the throne. I am no foreign assassin, madam.’

  ‘But you mean the whore no good, as you said before?’

  ‘I said that I mean no harm to the throne. Anne Boleyn’s days, however, are only a little less limited than yours, madam. Henry grows tired of her tongue, and the bridle that she places on his pleasures.’

  ‘I grow tired again,’ Catherine all but whispered. ‘When I am gone, please give my loving regards to the Princess Mary, and say that I hope she will remember me fondly.’

  ‘I will certainly undertake that pleasant duty, but you should know that few are allowed to attend upon her these days. She currently abides in her father’s house at Hunsdon, where she grieves for her mother and studies the scriptures.’

  ‘Will you leave on the morrow? If so, please allow Richard time to say his farewells. He does not know that I am dying, and you must not tell him.’

  ‘I will not, madam, on my oath. And now I make my own farewells.’

  ‘God speed your enterprise. And so goodbye.’

  Cromwell kissed her hand, and bowed backwards towards the door. His eye lit upon a goblet on a table beside her bed, which had no doubt contained her latest draught to ease the pain. Through a mist of tears the scene changed, and lying in the bed was an elderly man at death’s door, his Cardinal’s finery put off for the last time and draped over a chair. There was a wine goblet on the table, but this time it contained the draught that Cromwell had prepared for his master, which both of them had known would be fatal if swallowed.

  It had been the Cardinal’s final sin to take his own life in that way, but Thomas Cromwell’s had been the hand that had made it possible. It had been in the Abbey at Leicester, on his way south to the Tower, where the Cardinal would doubtless have died anyway. But did that make what they had both done less of a sin? Cromwell did not believe that one could expiate sin by mumbling pater nosters and handing coins to priests; that was why he could bring himself to continue the work the Cardinal had begun, of bringing the so-called ‘holy houses’ to heel.

  But without the intervention of the clergy, how did one make one’s peace with God? Was it by direct communication, as the heretic Luther claimed? If so, then God must know how many nights Cromwell had spent on his knees, begging forgiveness for his one uncharacteristic act of weakness in helping an old man end his own bodily agony. Surely God would forgive that?

  II

  ‘Do you bring me the boy?’ the Countess of Salisbury asked eagerly.

  Cromwell nodded. ‘Why would I be here, otherwise?’

  ‘There is some truth in that, although on this occasion you are welcome.’

  Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, was now in her early sixties. The daughter of George, Duke of Clarence, niece of both the last Warwick-made Plantagenet monarch Edward IV and the man who had allegedly usurped his throne by foul means, Richard of Gloucester, she had somehow survived the Tudor whirlwind that had swept the nation following the battle of Bosworth Field. She held her title in her own right, but had taken to husband Sir Richard Pole, a staunch Lancastrian, whose mother had been the half-sister of the wily Margaret Beaufort, grandmother to the King.

  Cromwell regarded the wily old Margaret as a fox in the henhouse; an adder lying curled in the long grass, ready to strike. Behind what should have been her gratitude and loyalty to the King lay two burning reasons for desiring revenge, one of them as old as history, and the other more recent.

  Margaret had watched with sad disbelief when the Infanta Katherine of Aragon had been cast aside in favour of ‘La Prostituta’, as the Spanish called Anne. Margaret had defiantly worn mourning weeds for a fortnight when Katherine’s death had been proclaimed throughout the nation. But her seething resentment of the newly installed Tudor dynasty went much
deeper than that.

  Margaret had seen Henry VII of Richmond as a usurper — stealing the throne from the Houses of York and spreading false rumours against her late uncle, Richard. The first was that Richard had ordered the murder of her own father George, Duke of Clarence. The second, and equally foul, had been that Richard had murdered the two heirs apparent to his dead brother Edward. They had been Edward, Prince of Wales and Richard, Duke of York.

  ‘You call him a boy, my lady, but in truth he is a grown man, and a handsome one to boot.’

  ‘Who does he resemble?’

  ‘Forgive me, madam, but I never saw anyone with whom to compare him. All I have seen is a sketch of his grandfather, but I can confirm, from the mouth of the Lady Catherine Gordon, as was, that he is his true grandson. You must judge for yourself, although it will not suit my immediate purpose should he too closely resemble your long-lost kin. It is not my intention to reveal his true identity to anyone at Court. He would not survive long, were King Henry to hear of it. And, as I have already intimated in my conversations with your husband, he is to play a crucial role in the downfall of she whose ruination we all desire, albeit for different reasons.’

  ‘There are new rumours at court about George Rochford, the Queen’s brother. The tittle-tattle of the kitchens at Beaulieu is that George prefers boys. Or horses. Or dogs. Or anything with a hole other than Jane Parker, as was.’

  ‘Forgive me if I blush, my lady. I spent some years in the service of a Cardinal of Rome.’

  ‘A Cardinal with a mistress and two children? How did that serve to sharpen your sensitivities, Master Secretary?’

  Cromwell’s face darkened in the way that many under his interrogation had learned to fear as he glared back at the Countess. ‘Madam, if we are to continue in civil discourse, you would do well not to besmirch the memory of the man whose memory I most revere.’

  ‘The man who made you what you are today, you mean?’

  ‘The man who raised me to such eminence as I currently enjoy with King Henry. But it was the Cardinal who placed me in such a position that my talents might be noted, and employed in the royal service.’