London - Edward Rutherfurd [288]
Susan could still remember the day – she had been five, a year before her father died – when he had taken her to court; and how, advancing across the great hall had come the most splendid figure she had ever seen. Big and broad-chested in his jewel-encrusted tunic with its huge, rolled shoulder-pads, Henry was a magnificent giant. His tightly fitting hose revealed the powerful legs of an athlete; and between them, padded to emphasize the bulk of his sexual parts, a bulging cod-piece. Her heart missed a beat when suddenly a pair of tremendous arms scooped her up, raised her high, and she found herself looking straight into a large, handsome face with a pair of wide-set, merry eyes and a square-cut, reddish-brown beard.
“So this is your little girl,” the mighty monarch had smiled, as he brought her to his face and gave her a kiss. And, even at her age, Susan knew that surely this was everything a man could be.
No prince in Europe was finer than Harry of England. England might be small – at under three million, her population was only a fifth of that of the now united kingdom of France – but Henry made up for the deficiency with lavish style. Mighty sportsman, accomplished musician, occasional scholar, tireless builder of palaces – he was everything a Renaissance man should be. At Flodden, his armies had crushed the Scots; at the gorgeous pageant of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, he had made a peace with the equally splendid King of France. And most important of all, at a time when Christendom was facing its greatest crisis in a thousand years, Harry of England was devout.
It was early in Henry’s reign that Martin Luther had begun his religious protest in Germany. Like the English Lollards before, the Lutherans’ original demands for Church reform had soon grown into a huge challenge to Catholic doctrine. Soon these Protestants were denying the miracle of the Mass and the need for bishops, and were saying priests could marry. Shockingly, some ruling princes were even sympathetic. But not good King Henry. When German merchants had infiltrated Lutheran tracts into London, he had stamped them out. A translation of the New Testament by Tyndale had been publicly burned seven years before at St Paul’s. And the scholar king had personally penned such a splendid rebuttal of the heretic Luther that the grateful Pope had given him a new title: Defender of the Faith.
As for Henry’s recent problems with the Pope over the question of his wife, like many devout people in England Susan had great sympathy for Henry. “I believe he is doing his best in a very difficult position,” she would declare. Besides, the business might still be resolved. “I’m not prepared,” she said, “to judge him yet.”
The grounds that lay before Hampton Court, known as the Great Orchard, were typical of those around such houses – an elaborate network of formal gardens, gazebos, arbours and private places which King Henry, who loved such displays, had been decorating with all manner of heraldic beasts, sundials and other ornaments in painted wood or stone.
It was chance that, as she walked by a high, green hedge enclosing one of the gardens, she should have heard the whispers. Then she thought she heard a laugh.
Daniel Dogget stood by the landing stage at Hampton Court, looked down at his squat wife and her sturdy little brother, and wondered.
It was quiet. Out in the stream, white swans glided and black moorhens bobbed, as though that summer would never cease.
Dan Dogget was a giant. Over two centuries had passed since Barnikel of Billingsgate had visited the Dogget sisters on the Bankside and left one of them with a baby. The child took on the Barnikel stature, but the sisters’ colouring and name. His children, apart from their size, were hardly distinguishable from their cousins of the old Ducket family, except by their slightly different name; but by