In the Shadow of the Crown - By Jean Plaidy Page 0,97

what had happened to his first two wives.

He was restive and angry; he flew into rages. On one hand fate had sent him his longed-for son and on the other it had turned life sour for him.

He wanted to be young again; he wanted to be in love, as he had been with Anne and Jane—and perhaps in the early days with my mother.

There was a spate of killings. Anyone who spoke against the King's supremacy in the Church was found guilty of treason. Many monks were butchered in the most barbarous way. Hanging was not enough. They were submitted to the most horrifying of all deaths, cut down from the gallows while they still lived, their bodies slit open and their intestines burned before their eyes; the object being to keep them alive as long as possible so that they might suffer the greater pain.

The more opposition there was to my father's rule, the more despotic he became.

He was reaping great wealth from the monasteries, and for some time he had had his eyes on that shrine which was perhaps the most splendid of them all. He must have known that to touch it would arouse great indignation, for the whole country revered Thomas à Becket. Ever since the death of the martyr, people had brought precious jewels to lay on his shrine while they prayed for him to intercede for them in Heaven. My father asked why there should be such worship for a man who had been the enemy of his king? He did not care for traitors, and that was what Becket had been. There should be an end to this idolatry. Becket had been a traitor. He should have been despised rather than idolized.

Becket's bones were burned and, as the belongings of traitors were forfeit to the King, my father took all that was in the shrine at Canterbury. He even wore Becket's ring on his own finger as a gesture of defiance to all those who questioned his behavior.

A tremor of horror seemed to run through the country. I was sure many were waiting for the wrath of Heaven to strike the King dead. For three years the threat of excommunication had hung over him. Not that he took any notice of it. Now the Pope signed the sentence. My father laughed. Who was the Bishop of Rome to tell him what to do? Foreign bishops had nothing to do with the Church of England over which the King was now Supreme Head.

But I think he must have been a little shaken and perhaps in his secret thoughts had a few qualms about his bold actions. He would not fear the wrath of God. My father always made his own peace with God, who was a part of his conscience; he would have already given God his very good reasons for acting as he did. The Church of Rome was corrupt. It extorted bribes. He was a religious man and would see that his subjects were too. God could have no quarrel with him.

But there were other forces. For instance there were signs of growing friendship between Charles and François; and what if they, with the Pope, looked for someone to replace him?

The Tudors' hold on the throne had not existed for very long, and there were still those who boasted of their Plantagenet blood. I knew that he often thought of Reginald, who had done the King's cause no good from the moment he had left the country.

It was on the Poles that my father turned his anger.

The Poles were troublemakers, he said. He could not touch Reginald because he kept out of his way, and he was the real enemy. However, there were other members of the family, and they were within range of his displeasure.

I was horrified when I heard that Sir Geoffry Pole had been arrested and sent to the Tower. Geoffry was the youngest of the Pole brothers and the most vulnerable. He was accused of being in correspondence with his brother the Cardinal, and he had been heard to make remarks in which he showed his disapproval of the King.

I was extremely anxious. My friendship with the family was well known. The Countess of Salisbury, mother of Geoffry, had been my dearest friend. As she and my mother had often talked of the desirability of a marriage between Reginald and myself, she might still be hoping for it. It was strange that that ardent churchman, the Cardinal, had