Heartstone (94 page)

‘You will go, then?'

‘Yes.' Emma rose from the bench and extended a long-fingered hand.

I said, ‘Emma, there is one thing I have never asked. Do you still wear the heartstone?'

She looked at me, a warmth in her eyes I had never seen, then shook her head. ‘No,' she answered quietly. ‘I cast it in the Thames. It was part of my old life with the Hobbeys. I wear the cross my mother gave me now, that you took from Hoyland and gave me in August.'

I smiled. ‘Good.'

‘I wish I could have thanked that good old lady for what she and poor Michael did, but I could not-'her voice tailed away.

‘Practise the deception with her? No. But I have sent word to her that Hugh is safe.'

She said, ‘I thank you for everything, Master Shardlake. But I am on my own path now; let it lead where it will.'

I took her hand. The rough calluses formed by the years of archery practice were fading. I watched as Emma Curteys walked back down the path, to all appearances a young gentleman with a firm tread, a fine coat, short brown hair under a black cap. The dead yellow leaves swirled around her feet.

HISTORICAL NOTE

HENRY VIII'S French war of 1544-6 was probably the most disastrous policy decision that even he ever made. Henry has sometimes been portrayed as a ‘modernizing' monarch, but his attitude to war harked back to medieval times. From the beginning of his reign he wanted the glory of the conquests in France that had garlanded his medieval predecessors. France, however, was now a united and prosperous state, with a far larger population than England's.

Learning nothing from the failure of two previous attempts, in 1544 Henry invaded northern France in a shaky alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The objective was for Henry's and Charles's forces to converge on Paris, but Henry diverted his army to attack Boulogne, which he hoped to link to England's remaining French possession of Calais to form an enlarged English territory. But when, after a long and bloody siege, Henry took Boulogne, his own forces were besieged there by the French army. Charles and the French King, Francis I, made a separate peace and the English forces were to remain bottled up in Boulogne for the next eighteen months, supplied with difficulty from England. Henry now faced the weight of France alone; and in addition France sent troops to its ally Scotland, against which Henry was already waging war.

The war was extraordinarily, ruinously expensive - to pay for it Henry sold off much of the monastic land he had taken from the Church in the 1530s, bled England white with taxation, and even debased the coinage through reducing its silver content, starting an unprecedented spiral of inflation. All sections of society were affected, but it was the poor, who had no power to raise the price of their labour, who suffered most.

In the summer of 1545 the French decided to dispose of the problem by invading England. This was a real and very serious threat; the French gathered a fleet with perhaps three times the number of warships England could command, carrying around 30,000 soldiers. The Pope contributed a ship. The enterprise was larger in scale than the Spanish Armada of forty years later. To meet the threat Henry ordered a massive levy of soldiers from the civilian population. Including militia and naval forces, over 100,000 men were put under arms - as a proportion of the population the equivalent of well over a million men today; a proportion of the male population comparable to that mobilized to resist Hitler's threatened invasion in 1940.

Fortunately for England the French were poorly led by their commander, Admiral d'Annebault - like the English, the French always had aristocrats rather than professionals to lead their forces. If d'Annebault had concentrated his resources, it is possible the French could have gained control of the Isle of Wight, or, had they managed to land on Portsea Island, besieged Portsmouth as the English had besieged Boulogne. Large-scale amphibious landings are notoriously difficult, but there would have been, at the very least, serious fighting in southern England.

In the end, however, after the inconclusive Battle of the Solent described in the book, the war simply petered out and most of those levied went home to the harvest - though some were sent to the continuing siege of Boulogne. At the peace treaty of 1546 England was allowed to hold Boulogne - which by then had been reduced to a heap of rubble - for ten years. Henry was also awarded an indemnity that was a drop in the ocean of the vast sums he had wasted.

The war achieved absolutely nothing save the loss of the lives of thousands of soldiers and sailors; English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, French, and men from other European nations. To that number must be added many French and Scottish civilians.

Six months after the peace treaty Henry VIII died. He left his children a legacy of isolation in Europe, continuing war with Scotland, religious conflict, inflation, national penury, and incipient social revolt. In the 1550s Boulogne was handed back to France and in 1558 Calais, England's last possession on the continent, was lost.

THE SINKING of the
Mary Rose
as it sailed into battle on 19 July 1545 has attracted many different explanations. It seems certain that the gun ports on the starboard side were not closed when a sudden gust of wind, common in the Solent, caught the sails and caused the turning ship to heel over, allowing water to flood in through them. The ship may also have been seriously overloaded with cannon and soldiers, and top-heavy with men in the high castles. It is also possible she was hit a glancing blow by gunfire from the French galleys and may have been taking in water. Whatever the cause, or combination of causes, the
Mary Rose
sank in minutes, with the vast majority of those aboard trapped under the anti-boarding netting. Their screams were audible from the shore. Around thirty-five people survived out of, it is now estimated, 500.

Henry had dined the previous day on his flagship, the
Great Harry
, and left the ship suddenly when the French fleet was sighted off the eastern end of the Isle of Wight. I have invented his plan to visit the
Mary Rose
afterwards. It is not known where Henry stayed during his 1545 visit to Portsmouth, but the most likely candidates are Portchester Castle and the royal tents erected on Southsea Common. It is also not known where Catherine Parr was in the summer of 1545, but one piece of evidence leads me to think she travelled to Portsmouth with the King. In his dispatch reporting the battle of the Solent, Charles V's ambassador Francis Van der Delft refers to being shown the ships by the Queen's chancellor. Given the structure of the royal household, the only reason her chancellor would have been at Portsmouth is surely if Catherine were there too.

I have invented the presence at Portsmouth of Richard Rich. The records show that he was not among the members of the Privy Council who accompanied Henry there. But his role in the financial organization of the invasion of France in 1544 is accurate, as are his loss of the post and the suspicion that he had been lining his pockets a little too heavily. However he remained on the Privy Council and his career was not affected.

Robert Warner was Queen Catherine Parr's solicitor, and was used by her to defend a relative of one of the Queen's servants accused of heresy in 1544.

IN 1526 Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon did go on a summer Progress which took them to Petworth. Henry was by then in correspondence with Anne Boleyn; it was also probably in 1526 that he decided to divorce Catherine and marry Anne. However, the intercepted letter is fictional. It is true, though, that the Pope did later suggest that Catherine of Aragon resolve the problems raised by Henry's desire for a divorce by going into a nunnery, and that she refused because she believed God's wish was for her to stay married to Henry. If she had agreed, paradoxically, Henry's split from Rome would probably never have happened.

THE ABUSE of the Court of Wards as a source of revenue, at great financial (to say nothing of emotional) cost to many of the children involved, was yet another scheme for extracting money from the populace devised by Henry VIII. The abuse of the court continued under Elizabeth I and James I and reached epic proportions under Charles I. Curbing its exploitation of minors was a major demand of Parliament in the years before the Civil War, and its abolition is one of the forgotten achievements of the English Republic of 1649-60.

Such was public feeling that even the corrupt regime of the restored Charles II dared not bring it back.

WHILE THE STORY of Emma Curteys is entirely imaginary, there are numerous accounts stretching back through history of women who impersonated men and fought as soldiers, sometimes for years. For example there were several hundred documented cases on both sides in the American Civil War, where often the women were known as fighters of particular courage.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to the many people who have helped and advised me on this book. It took me into areas - particularly on the military and naval side - where my knowledge was sparse. I hope the finished product does at least some justice to the expertise of those who advised me; any errors are, of course, mine.

My agent Antony Topping first came up with the idea of a book set around the war of 1544-6. I am very grateful to him, once again, for his encouragement, and for reading and commenting on the manuscript. Thanks also to Maria Rejt for another marvellously skilled job of editing, to Liz Cowen for her painstaking copy-editing, and to Becky Smith for her typing. Michael Holmes advised me on naval aspects from the beginning, chauffeured me on visits to Portsmouth, and also read the first draft of the book, as did Roz Brody, Jan King and William Shaw. Once again, I am so grateful for all their shrewd insights. James Willoughby kindly translated the Court of Wards motto for me. Glennan Carnie of the English Warbow Society (
www.englishwarbowsociey.com
) was very helpful on everything connected with archery - again, any mistakes are mine. Robyn Young kindly commented on the chapter dealing with the hunt at Hoyland Priory.