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By Root 1281 0

traded on his background, his good family, and his love for Catherine and honest intentions. He cherished her, he said, and his only thought was to make her his wife. He had been heartbroken when he returned from Ireland (whence he had gone only to make his fortune so that he could offer her the luxuries she so deserved) to find that she spurned and scorned him. She was no longer a simple maiden at the Duchess’s, but a girl with a court position, which had quite gone to her head. Her other suitors—particularly a certain Thomas Paston and her cousin Thomas Culpepper (Thomases again!)—did not worry him. It was the King who was his rival, the one before whom he must reluctantly give way. Nevertheless, “If the King were dead I am sure I might marry her,” he had claimed.

If the King were dead. He had imagined my death, wished it. Evil intent, malice in the heart. And then—he had requested a position in Catherine’s household. Clear proof and evidence that he had wicked intentions.

The Duchess had sponsored him in this request. She, too, had a stake in all this. She was involved.

Culpepper was less abject and co-operative than Dereham when first he was brought in. Clearly he disdained to share the floor with a commoner like Dereham. But in a flash of pride he blurted out that all along the progress they had met secretly, with the connivance of Lady Rochford, and always at Catherine’s hot insistenceivyand with the reckless nonchalance that was his trademark, he threw away his life, and Catherine’s. There could be no mercy now, no mercy for any of them. They were a nest of traitors, traitors who had crouched in the royal apartments planning and wishing my illness and incapacity: Dereham seeking a place in Catherine’s household, and Culpepper conveniently near to “serve” me. Yes, serve me poison, as he had done in March, when I was taken so ill. It was not from God that this illness had come, it was from human hands, in Satan’s service. I had been stricken, had almost died, so that he could have access to the pleasures of my wife’s body.

Die. These instruments of evil must die.

On December tenth, they were taken out of the Tower and transported to Tyburn, the place where commoners were executed.

The Privy Council had advised me that Culpepper’s offence was so “very heinous” that it warranted a notable execution, despite his petition to be permitted the kindness of decapitation.

Culpepper. The pretty, lusty boy whom I had loved, as only rogues are lovable. The serpent I had nourished in my bosom, protecting him from the penalties of his own folly and evil. He had raped a gamekeeper’s wife and then murdered one of the villagers who tried to save her. This was deserving of the death penalty, but I had been dazzled by his beauty and words, and therefore I had pardoned him. In so doing I had done wrong. He had taken it only as licence to continue his evil, not repent it. In showing misplaced mercy I had created a monster.

The traitor’s death: as excruciating a death as human ingenuity could contrive.

Culpepper had earned it. Nonetheless I wrote out on parchment, “Sentence to be commuted to simple beheading,” and sent the message straight to Tyburn to meet the executioners.

Let them call me softhearted, womanish. Could I help it if I had a tender conscience and desired to show mercy?

Christmas. There were no festivities, and Catherine was still a prisoner at Syon House, while I kept to my own apartments and read and reread her letter to Culpepper until I knew every wrinkle on the paper, every ink blot. Why did I do this, like a monk repeating a rosary? Why did I torture myself so? If I thought to make myself insensitive to the wound, it had just the opposite effect: I never allowed it to heal, and by my constant probing, I kept the wound open.

Further investigations, dreary as they were, revealed yet more treason. I was forced to imprison the Duchess because she destroyed evidence relating to Dereham. She had hastily opened his trunks and destroyed his memorabilia and burnt his incriminating letters just before my commissioners