Boleyn Traitor, page 25
‘But she won’t know him,’ I say urgently. ‘Sir Anthony, let me go and tell her. She won’t know that she’s supposed to recognise him only after he unmasks. She doesn’t know to pretend not to know him before unmasking. She doesn’t know how it’s done …’
He laughs. I think he’s too drunk to understand that this is going to go terribly wrong; but in any case, it’s too late. The door before us opens, and we pour into the queen’s great chamber.
She’s at the window, looking down at the bull baiting below. She looks up when we come in, and her smile of welcome dies as she sees the troop of drunk men, strangely masked, with musicians coming in behind them. For a moment, she looks at bay, like the bull in the courtyard below, facing the dogs running in to torment her.
Sir Anthony has tight hold of my hand and is readying me for the dance.
‘Let me go!’ I wrench my hand from his. ‘I have to warn her—’
The king lurches at the still figure at the window, and, horrifyingly, he pulls her into his arms and plants a hearty kiss on her lips. She recoils immediately, jumping back, shoving him away from her, looking around for her guards. She shouts something at him in German. She wipes her mouth on her sleeve, and terribly, she spits on the floor. She whirls around to turn her back to him, snapping an order at her servants that they throw him and all the half-drunken minions out of her rooms.
The musicians shudder to silence; everyone is frozen with horror. The king stands alone, his mask pulled half-off; he looks completely stricken. He has kissed his bride, and she spat his kiss out of her mouth. He looks nothing like the most handsome prince in Europe – he looks like an overweight man of nearly fifty who has been knocked back hard. He looks around, as if for help. He looks around for someone to laugh it off. He looks around as if his legs are weak and he wants to sit down, to sit on a throne, so everyone knows he is king.
Nobody moves. Nobody says a word.
And then little Katheryn Howard, the newest arrival, the most junior of all the maids, trips forward. ‘The king!’ she coos. ‘So handsome! I would know him anywhere. See, my lady! It is our handsome king!’
She breaks the spell that holds us frozen. Catherine Brandon darts forward and tells the queen that this is King Henry and not – as she thought – a drunk fool with a band of mummers. Anne turns back to him, sinks into a curtsey, scarlet with mortification, and Henry laughs it off with a harsh, ragged laugh.
Everyone laughs with him, wide-mouthed, as if they were shouting. The musicians bravely strike up the gavotte again but straggle off into silence when nobody takes a partner, nobody moves. Nobody wants to dance a gavotte with its climax of a kiss, seeing how the last kiss was received.
I look at Sir Anthony. ‘You should’ve let me prepare her.’
He is beaming. ‘Better that the king sees Lord Cromwell’s choice as she truly is.’
Something is happening here that I don’t understand. ‘She was the king’s choice—’
‘From a short list of two Lutheran duchesses.’ He takes my hand and kisses it. ‘She’s Cromwell’s choice. His lordship picked her for his own good reasons. Now he’ll have to answer for them. And if the king doesn’t like her – Lord Cromwell will have to answer for that, too.’
I realise that this is not a masque that has gone wrong; this has all gone exactly right. The king’s first meeting with Cromwell’s bride is a disaster; but the Howard girl saves the day. I have just witnessed the first move in the Howards’ brilliant bid for the throne, and another Howard girl is in play.
I send a letterlocked note that night by one of Lord Cromwell’s messengers. I mark it haste, and know that the man will ride all night.
Greenwich Palace, January
1540
LORD CROMWELL’S RESPONSE is a magnificent reception for the queen at Blackheath, with all the theatrical extravagance that the king loves. The king, escorted by hundreds of noble courtiers, wearing imperial purple velvet, with a cloth of gold jacket, rides on a great horse as Anne of Cleves emerges from a tented pavilion like a princess in a tapestry, mounts a white horse, and rides forward to greet him.
Three thousand Londoners cheer their king as he welcomes his queen to her home at Greenwich, and Anne smiles and waves and then rides hand in hand with her husband up the new road that Cromwell has bored through the woods towards the riverside palace.
Lord Cromwell greets all of the queen’s ladies at the doorway as they dismount, and as he takes my hand, I pinch his fingers. I need do no more; he leaves the dinner table as they are putting out the voider course of fruit and sweetmeats, and I slip away from the ladies’ table and find him waiting for me in the gallery.
The happy buzz of the court talking, laughing, flirting in the great hall echoes through the stone arches to where we stand like lovers, half-hidden in a doorway.
‘What did she do?’ he demands tightly. He has already faced the rage of his royal master: horribly betrayed into a marriage he never wanted, with a woman too ugly for him to bear.
‘She offended him, but it was planned. I swear it,’ I say in a rush. ‘As I wrote you. Nobody prepared her, and the king strode in, greeting her like a knight errant in a masque. Unannounced – you know – unknown revellers – he could have been in Russian furs or Turkish turbans. They came in shouting; they frightened her, and he grabbed her. She pushed him off and spat out his kiss. She swore at him as if he were a common drunk. It was a disaster. The new Howard girl, Katheryn, saved the day. But it wasn’t her doing, I swear. Not her words. She’s too young and untrained to be that quick on her feet. But she jumped forward and flattered the king and smoothed it all over. She was brilliant – she was well-prepared.’
‘Howards?’ he muses. ‘A new Howard play?’
‘They wrote the script, I’d swear it. But the attack on the Cleves princess is an attack on you – the Spanish party’s revenge. I bet you that Honor Lisle wrote to her friends, the old lords, the moment that Anne of Cleves rode into Calais. I bet she told them: the duchess can’t speak English; she’s not pretty and witty and clever; she can be made to look a fool. The old lords and what’s left of the Spanish party don’t want a Lutheran queen supporting reform in the king’s ear. They don’t want an alliance with Germany against the Spanish. And they don’t want you as a successful royal marriage broker.’
He nods. ‘They want revenge on me for the deaths of the Poles.’
‘They couldn’t predict exactly, but they knew that if he burst in on her, disguised and drunk, she wouldn’t know what to do. They got hold of me so I couldn’t warn her, and now the king’s horribly shamed and he blames it all on her. The Howards knew there’d be a set-back and readied their girl to be his salvation – they’re playing their own game. The Howards and all the old lords jump forward, and the reformers of the Church – and you especially – are pushed back.’
His face, shadowed by his simple hat, is grim. His clothes, still clerkly black, are now made from silk and embroidered velvet. ‘Only a small step, I hope. If he likes her better now, after this grand reception with everyone cheering, he’ll overlook the first meeting. He’ll forget it – it’ll never have happened. If she gives him a son, all this will be forgotten. And whatever the old lords think, there is no future for England but an alliance with other Protestant countries. Charles of Spain is meeting Francis of France right now and swearing alliance against us.’
‘He’ll never desire her,’ I warn urgently. ‘Believe me, my lord. She cut him to the bone.’
He grimaces. ‘And she? Does she still find him disagreeable, now that she knows he’s king?’
I shrug. ‘She doesn’t confide in me, not even in her German ladies in her own language.’
‘You listen?’
‘Of course. She says nothing. Not even in her prayers.’
‘She’s discreet,’ he approves. ‘If I can get the two of them wedded and bedded, I’ll trust to that sturdy German nature to do the rest.’
‘She’s a duchess, not a Groningen cow,’ I say acidly.
He smiles again. ‘Don’t mince words like a Seymour. All we need from her is that she gets into calf.’
‘You won’t get him into the field – you won’t get him through the gate,’ I say, and he laughs at my bawdiness, kisses my hand, and goes back to the great hall, where the king sits scowling beside his blandly smiling bride.
FOUR DAYS LATER, I am standing behind the bride in the queen’s rooms at Greenwich Palace, straightening the train of her gown. I keep my expression as pleasant and smiling as those of the other ladies, who tighten the gold chains at her slim waist and comb her hair over her shoulders. Her round face is pretty and flushed; she wears a jewelled coronet on her beautiful golden-brown hair. Her wedding gown is made from cloth of gold encrusted with flowers made from huge pearls, as if she were turning to stone before our eyes. She carries a little posy of rosemary for love and fertility, and I see it tremble until she grips both hands before her and sets her jaw square. She is determined to show no weakness to this court of unfriendly strangers.
She knows – we all know – that the king has demanded the wedding is delayed until her earlier contract of marriage is shown to be properly cancelled. As a little girl of eleven years old, she was promised in marriage to a neighbouring duke. The contract was revoked, the duke married someone else, and the cancelled contract was tossed into some vault at Cleves – who cares?
But now the King of England cares, and he is saying that his marriage cannot go ahead until the cancelled contract is in his hand. She knows he is hoping to get out of marrying her on this slender excuse. Of course, this is nonsense. Not even Henry can bring a royal duchess across Europe in the worst weather for a midwinter wedding and then cancel the ceremony for a piece of paper that he never wanted before.
Meanwhile, France and Spain have sworn to a ten-year alliance not to make war without the other’s agreement – so our enemies are united against us; we must find new friends. If Paris or Toledo want war, our only safety is the German bride: she is our defence, as essential as the castles that the king is building at all the southern ports. The wedding has to go ahead for the safety of England.
It must take every ounce of courage for her to hold up her head, to smooth back the fall of beautiful hair over her shoulders and greet Henry Bourchier Earl of Essex, late as usual, who leads her down the long gallery to the king. His Majesty is magnificently dressed in a crimson satin coat with diamond buttons and a gown of cloth of gold. He manages a sulky little bow in reply to her three deep curtseys. She looks magnificent, gowned and crowned, gleaming with pearls matching her pearly skin. Beside her, the king looks old and sulky, his dazzling clothes contrasting with his pouting mouth and his strawberry moon face.
Count Overstein from Cleves steps forward and takes the duchess by the hand to lead her into the queen’s close for a private ceremony with our old friend, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, officiating, his smiling round face showing no glimmer of self-doubt.
As we wait outside in a reverent silence, one maid is not standing still, eyes downcast as she should be. Katheryn Howard, new maid-of-honour and evening star of the dreadful night in Rochester, is lifting the hem of her sage-green gown to examine the rosettes on her satin shoes. She is expensively dressed for a poor relation: someone is betting good money that Kitty will take the eye. She looks like a little doll beside the older women; she is so small and dainty. Her hair is a wonderful bronze, her eyes hazel, as green as her gown in the candlelight. Trained by the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, she is as graceful as a dancer; she walks as if to music. Her manners are beautiful, her education completely neglected. She senses me watching her, and when I frown at her to stand still, she gives me an apologetic smile and continues to fidget.
Once again, I put a queen to bed and wait at her side as the great double doors are thrown open and her husband the king and his drunken friends enter. Once again, Henry passes me in the royal bedchamber, his gaze on the bed. This time, he doesn’t smile at me, nor at anyone. He limps towards the bed like an unwilling old man on his way to an arduous chore.
She looks up at him as he stands by her bed. She says carefully: ‘Goot evening!’ Her smile does not waver at his dark scowl; her expression of courteous welcome does not alter, not even when he sits down heavily on the side of the bed and his grooms of the chamber heave his bandaged leg up and bodily push him in beside her.
The queen’s ladies trail out of the wedding chamber and take a glass of wedding ale in the presence chamber with a pretence of goodwill, before I send them to their beds. Kitty Howard, her face bright with mischief, says: ‘Goot evening!’ as she leaves, and the younger maids snigger.
The noblemen leave in a hurry to drink in their own rooms, as if there is nothing here to celebrate. My uncle gives me a satisfied nod; he knows the king’s vanity will never allow him to forgive his bride her first, fatal misstep. ‘Going well,’ he remarks to me with a sly smile.
‘Very well,’ I reply instantly and curtsey as he leaves.
Lord Cromwell says goodnight to the ladies and pauses, bowing over my hand. ‘She looked pretty enough,’ he says. ‘You turned her out well. A pretty face.’
‘She has a pretty face,’ I say simply. ‘But it’s not a false face. And he’s seen nothing but false faces and painted smiles for all his life. D’you think he wants an honest woman now? Does any man want an honest woman as his wife? Don’t you all prefer liars?’
She is no fool. She doesn’t understand half that we say, but she doesn’t need to be told that he doesn’t desire her. The king leaves her bed after a few hours the first night, and there is not a mark on the sheets and her hair is still in the fat blonde plait, tidy under her nightcap in the morning.
Kitty Howard, a noble-born maid who should have no knowledge of such signs, gives me a knowing look as the queen sits before her mirror and we unpin her nightcap and brush her hair.
Anne, the new queen, sees the exchanged glances and says nothing.
‘EARLY DAYS,’ THOMAS Cromwell says to me stoutly, as the king and queen process to mass and breakfast and sit side by side, smiling, like gold icons of marital bliss.
‘Not through the gate, not into the field,’ I say crudely.
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
He scowls. ‘He told me that he knew by certain signs that she is no maid.’
I fold my lips over a sharp retort. There’s no point arguing with the king’s certainties.
‘But you would say she’s a maid?’ Cromwell asks me carefully.
‘A beautiful and clever maid. Fully fitting to be a young queen.’
‘That’s what I think,’ my spymaster says firmly. ‘It’s early days.’
I get hold of the serving girls and tell them that if anyone breathes a word about clean sheets and a tidy bed, I will see them hung up by their thumbs amid the hams in the meat larder. The gossips learn nothing from the queen’s attendants – though I don’t doubt Kitty Howard reports to our uncle the duke, Thomas Howard; Catherine Carey to her mother, my sister-in-law, Mary Boleyn, and from her to the supporters of reform; Anne Basset reports to her mother Lady Lisle and she to the old lords. The Spanish spies – whoever they are – report to Don Chapuys and to Lady Mary; the French spy earns his pension with information to the French ambassador. But the king and queen go through the celebrations of January in perfect public accord, and the wider court does not know that at night they sleep side by side, like statues on a tomb, never touching.
Every day, the Howards send Kitty Howard out in a prettier gown and a smaller hood, and their spies and placemen remark in the king’s hearing that it is a pity that the new queen is taking so long to learn to dance or sing or play an instrument or write a poem – and how strictly raised these Lutheran duchesses must be, that they take it as a holy duty not to delight the eye or entertain the mind! Every day, the Seymours loudly remark how charming the new queen is and what a worthy heir to their girl. The Seymours don’t care if the marriage is a mariage blanc – one for public show. They prefer it. The last thing they want is a little half-brother to their prince; they want all the attention on him and on them.
Every day, Lord Cromwell looks across at me at prayers in the morning and just raises an eyebrow as if to say: and has the bull got through the gate into the field? Every day I minutely shake my head. The king spends most nights in her bed, but I think he has lost the power to do it.
‘She’s got to please him,’ Cromwell says bluntly, catching me as I am waiting for the grooms to bring my horse for me to ride out with the queen. She looks wonderful on horseback, when she’s not afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing. She’s at ease with her big Holsteiner horse, and she rides as fast as any of the young men. They whoop and holloa as she keeps up with them, and scramble to help her down from the saddle when we come home.
‘She has to invite him,’ Cromwell urges me. ‘She has to incite him to happiness. She has to encourage him. She has to inspire desire. Do I have to tell her chamberlain to tell her? Or will you speak to her?’
‘Sortilèges?’ I ask, blank-faced. ‘You want sortilèges now?’
He narrows his eyes. ‘Don’t,’ he says shortly. ‘Don’t be amusing with me. It’s no joking matter. She has to do something. Anything. Anything to attract him. If he’s not encouraged, he won’t get a boy. If he doesn’t get a boy, he’ll say it proves the marriage isn’t blessed by God. And if God is against the marriage, he’ll want to get out of it – and I tell you, Jane, neither God nor I can get him out of it. Not without upsetting all the German princes and leaving us open to attack from Spain and France. Not without setting back the cause of reform. Not without the king needing another bride so his pride isn’t humbled – and where do I find her? Who would be a fifth wife?’
