Boleyn Traitor, page 29
‘They’re dancing in the streets for joy.’
‘Might there be a pardon? Or some mistake?’
‘The king’s archers have collected sacks of gold plate from Austin Friars, chests of money, and Cromwell’s debt book. D’you think he’s going to give it back?’
‘His lordship is to face a trial?’ I ask.
He shakes his head. ‘As he says himself, trials take too long, with too many opinions. Quicker and easier for us all if I put the evidence before the Houses of Parliament and they issue a writ of attainder, and he is executed.’
‘That’s not justice,’ I say simply. ‘Nobody can think he has been treasonous to the king.’
‘As I say, I don’t need opinions. Clearly, he forced the king into a marriage which was against the king’s best interests. Clearly, she’s a Lutheran bride and he’s a Lutheran spy. The marriage will be annulled, and the man who treasonously forced this marriage on the king will die for it. The king’s true friends, the old lords of the realm, the true nobility will be restored as his only advisors. We’ve all had enough of new men. We won’t be ruled by merchants and mayors. The king will be free to marry whoever he chooses. As it happens, he will choose my niece.’
‘Kitty?’
‘Mistress Katheryn Howard. So she’s not going with you to Richmond. You can make up some excuse to tell the duchess.’
‘The duchess?’
‘The Duchess of Cleves.’ He sees my face. ‘Oh, all right: the queen. But anyway, Kitty Howard won’t serve her any more. She’s going home to her grandmother. The king can court her there without scandal.’
I am completely silent. Of course, the king, nearly fifty, in the first months of his fourth marriage, cannot court a girl of sixteen, his wife’s maid-of-honour, without scandal – not at Lambeth nor anywhere else.
But my first thought is for my own safety: ‘Thomas Cromwell’s servants will be fearful – many people inform for him: the investigators of the monasteries, the network of mayors and sheriffs and merchants …’
‘You mean you, I suppose? For Christ’s sake, Jane, don’t waste my time pretending you care about Cromwell’s slaveys. Your name needn’t come into it – if you’re prepared to be helpful now.’
‘What can I do to help you, Uncle?’
‘Did Cromwell have a plan to release the king from this false marriage? He says that he did? He says that he can set it in motion in return for his freedom. D’you know what it is?’
I don’t hesitate. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘What is it?’
‘He can tell you it himself? In return for his freedom?’
My uncle looks at me, hawklike. ‘Or you can tell me now?’
I have no choice. ‘The queen is to have Richmond Palace and 8,000 nobles a year,’ I tell him. ‘In return, she has to agree to an annulment – that she was precontracted.’
‘Precontract again?’ he says incredulously, just as I did.
‘Yes,’ I say firmly. ‘He thought it the only solution.’
Thomas Howard takes my chin in his hand and turns my face towards the light. I don’t waver under his eagle-eyed inspection. ‘Not the only solution, I think. Wasn’t there some discussion of a witch overlooking the king’s marriage bed? Some enchantment cast on the king’s potency? D’you know why Lord Hungerford is in the Tower?’
Something about the way his thumbnail digs into my chin reminds me that he is strong and I am only a woman, but I know that my woman’s frailty has taught me to be quicker-witted, more cunning. I can fool him. I can fool him now.
I gasp and cross myself. ‘God save us all. I know nothing about Lord Hungerford but what everyone knows: that he was cruel to his wife and perverse.’
‘So – no queen witch this time around?’ he asks. ‘Not like t’other one.’
‘There’s no need for accusations of witchcraft, it’s all done by agreement,’ I urge him.
‘Then why is Lord Hungerford condemned to die?’ he asks.
I turn a blank face to him; he will believe I know nothing. ‘For rebellion, isn’t it? And predicting the king’s death?’ I give a little start. ‘Oh yes, they say he used a witch, didn’t he? In Wiltshire, though? An old woman? Nothing to do with the queen?’
‘Quite separate?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Very well.’ He is satisfied. ‘And have you brokered this agreement with the queen? Is she ready to declare herself as good a maid as when she came into this country and that the king was inspired by God to leave her as that?’
‘She’ll consent,’ I assure him.
‘And you’ve got ladies lined up to give evidence that the king was in her bed, night after night, and chose not to consummate the wedding, for his conscience’s sake? Nothing about impotence?’
‘Nothing about impotence,’ I repeat, as if learning from him.
‘Very well,’ he says, with quiet satisfaction. ‘Cromwell is a master at this stuff; I give him that. You take the queen to Richmond Palace on the tide and bring your ladies back to swear their evidence when I tell you. And prepare the duchess to swear an oath as well.’
‘And if this is all done as Thomas Cromwell planned, does it earn him a pardon?’
‘Why should you care?’ my uncle demands. ‘Unless you share his faith, his treasonous faith? Unless you have worked with him as his spy and his crony in treasonous plots? Unless you’re a traitor like him? Are you a traitor? Another Boleyn traitor?’
I am silent. My spymaster, with his dark-eyed smile and reluctant snort of a laugh, will have to fall without a word from me. He has hundreds of friends, thousands of dependents. Someone should speak for him; I cannot. ‘No, of course not. I’ll do what I ought to do, in obedience to you, Uncle.’
‘Good,’ he says shortly. ‘And if this is successful, with the queen and ladies-in-waiting, with sworn evidence and legal annulment, then we’ll never say it was Cromwell’s plan, Jane. I will take the credit and earn the favour of the king.’
‘Very well.’ I think: yes, you braggart. You take the credit, and you’ll never know that it was my plan. I am too clever to take the credit. I will see this through from the shadows, and only I will know that you are all dancing to my tune.
‘You’ll never mention Thomas Cromwell again,’ he tells me.
I know that this is the death of Thomas Cromwell, who was a friend to me when I had no friends and made me feel loved when nobody loved me. He was my tutor, my spymaster – he taught me all about treachery; it will come as no surprise to him when he learns that I have let him go to the scaffold without a word in his defence.
‘Very well.’
Richmond Palace, Summer
1540
WE TELL THE queen that we have come to Richmond to avoid the plague and the heat of the summer city and that the king will join us shortly. We embroider this lie by assuring her that the king always leaves London in summer on a progress to beautiful country houses and that she will enjoy this.
Katheryn Howard is missing: the Norfolk barge took her on the high tide to her family house at Lambeth before we embarked. She did not say goodbye to the queen, nor to any of the ladies but only to her bedfellow and cousin, Catherine Carey, who says that she cried a great deal and said that she would never be happy again. For once, I think that the foolish child is right. She has the most glorious prospect of any girl in England – but I doubt that she will find happiness.
We tell the queen that Kitty Howard’s step-grandmother, Agnes Howard the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk has been taken ill and that Kitty has gone back to Lambeth. The queen glances at me, as if to ask me if this is another lie, like all the others we are telling her now, but she can read nothing from my expressionless face. ‘But she will come back?’
‘I don’t know when.’
Nobody tells the queen that parliament is in daily session, but in early July, we hear that they have passed a new law to say that a second marriage, undertaken after one that was not consummated, is legal and not bigamous. The queen does not ask me what this law means, and I don’t volunteer that the king can marry a new wife at once; he need not wait for any annulment, all he has to do is prove his marriage to her was not consummated.
Three days later the king’s new advisors – old noblemen and favourites, not one scholar or lawyer among them – are rowed upriver in two barges, with her new ambassador Herr Harst. I stand beside the queen as her lord chamberlain tells her that the privy council has implored the king to hold an inquiry into their marriage. Her ambassador is silently furious; her receiver general is embarrassed. I am as empty of emotion as a mask laid aside.
They give long speeches in English that are translated laboriously into bad German by that established liar Richard Rich. Queen Anne gives no answer, not in English nor German. In the afternoon, they come again to explain what was completely clear to her from the day I told her in chapel: that she must pretend to believe a string of lies. They tell her that she was precontracted to the Duke of Lorraine when she married the king, that God warned the king of this on their wedding night, and that their marriage was never consummated on all the nights after.
‘You’ll have to see them again,’ I tell her. ‘You’ll have to reply that it shall be as the king wishes.’
She looks at me. ‘Whatever he wishes? Whatever it might be?’
‘It’s not the king you need fear,’ I tell her. ‘The king has new advisors, and I don’t know what they will do. They have all the power, and you have none. Your brother will not defend you; he’s in France. He’s given up on you and on England. You’ve got no choice but to accept.’ I hesitate. ‘I beg you to accept …’
‘It is not the king who does this?’ she asks me.
I shake my head. ‘He doesn’t do anything – they do everything for him, before he even says what he wants. Now, he wants a new wife.’
The king’s men come in: Charles Brandon, the king’s brother-in-law, and Thomas Audley, sailing before a new wind. William Fitzwilliam comes in with Bishop Stephen Gardiner. Sir William Kingston the constable of the Tower, who escorted my husband George to the scaffold and Anne to the block, follows them. My heart misses a beat. Has he come to arrest his queen? Like he arrested his friends, Lord Lisle and Thomas Cromwell?
She tries to stand to greet them, but when the five of them march in – so hard-faced and old, so unflinching before her young prettiness – her legs fail her, and she falls back into her chair. Charles Brandon – the most senior and the stupidest – hardly waits for her to recover before he says that they have documents to prove that she was precontracted to the Duke of Lorraine.
Ambassador Harst blusters in German and demands to see the documents; nobody pays any attention to him. It is a masque not a real consultation. They don’t even have the documents to hand, they mime, gesturing with empty hands. The king’s men are blockheads; I have seen them in a dozen masques, as Russians, as Turks: now they enter as hangmen. Queen Anne, silent on her throne, is like a woman playing Mischance seated on a painted wood wheel of fortune. Impossible to take this theatrical confrontation seriously – except that it could not be more grave. If we do not play our parts in this masque which is called Surrender, there can be no doubt that we will be dance in another called: Witch-hunt.
I lean forward and whisper to her. My part is Kind Counsellor, and I play it as well as ever. Obedient to my advice, speaking my script, the young queen raises her head and tells them that she is always content with His Majesty the king, and that of course, he must be right in whatever he says. If he says that there was a precontract and the marriage should be annulled, he cannot be mistaken.
The Lords Audley, Suffolk, and Southampton bow low and manage to restrain themselves from slapping each other on the back.
They stay overnight at Richmond Palace, and they eat well and drink deep in the great hall, while the queen and us ladies dine in her rooms. They come in after dinner to say goodnight, and William Fitzwilliam beckons me to see him out.
‘Tomorrow morning, before breakfast, please bring two ladies with you to swear that the marriage was not consummated,’ he says. ‘I take it there will be no difficulty?’
‘None.’
‘Who will you bring?’
‘I thought Katherine Edgcumbe?’ She was in service with me to Katherine of Aragon, and dropped her without remorse. ‘And Eleanor Manners the Countess of Rutland?’ I suggest. Eleanor was Anne’s lady-in-waiting and gave evidence against her and my husband. Swearing on oath that a marriage was not consummated is nothing compared to what she will have said then.
‘And they know what they have to do?’
I could almost laugh at him telling me of my own plan. ‘Yes, my lord. We all know very well what we have to do.’
WE PREPARE OUR statement like three Judases on the first Spy Wednesday, sitting in the back of the barge, wrapped up warmly in our capes, hoods together like three witches, rewriting the past so the future will read as we want. We devise an unlikely account of a conversation, ignoring that Katherine and Eleanor have no German and the queen knows no English words for intimacy. Never mind that the queen would never have spoken to anyone about her marriage bed and her husband. Never mind that nobody could seriously believe one word of the conversation that I scribble in the back of the barge, that springs forward so powerfully as the rowers pull and reset, that we look as if we are in a masque, miming the rocking of a pretend boat on the painted waves of a silk sea.
‘We could say that we asked her if she thought she might be with child?’ I start, as the oars creak and the barge heaves.
‘She’d never have discussed that with us,’ Eleanor objects, letting likelihood get in the way of a good story.
‘Doesn’t matter. She’s not going to deny it,’ I remind her. ‘She wants this over as much as the king does. She knows we have to say this. We all know this is not truth but an escape for them both.’ I look from the cold determined face of one career courtier to another and I think: Christ! Do I look like this?
‘All right,’ Eleanor says. ‘I’ll say I asked her what he does when he comes to bed.’
‘And she can answer that he kisses her and takes her by the hand and lies down and sleeps the night beside her,’ Katherine agrees. The two of them snigger like whoremongers.
‘We have to say that she knows nothing,’ I remind them. ‘We have to say that she is innocent.’
‘Oh, we can say I asked her what he says in the morning, and that she told me he says: “Farewell, darling, until mass!”’
The two of them collapse at this high wit. Really, I should have hired Will the fool to write a merry masque.
‘D’you think it likely that one of us would have asked her for more details?’ I enquire, writing to their gleeful dictation.
‘I shall say that I said: “Madam, there must be more than this, or it will be long ere we have a Duke of York, which all this realm most desireth”,’ Eleanor says grandly. ‘I don’t mind swearing to that.’
I make a note of the superbly unlikely dialogue. ‘And we stick to this,’ I urge them. ‘We’re swearing on oath. We can never betray our word; we can never betray each other, nor the queen.’
‘The king wants this?’ Katherine asks, as if it is the only question. ‘He wants rid of Anne and to marry Kitty?’
‘This is what he wants,’ I say. ‘And this is the only way to get the duchess out of this snare that the men have put her in.’
‘Oh! The men!’ Eleanor says, throwing her hands up as if she has one scrap of fellow feeling for another woman. ‘Yes, yes, Jane. We have our script, we know our parts, we’ll never let you down. And there will be a reward?’
‘There will be a reward,’ I confirm.
I am satisfied with the words I have noted. There’s nothing about witch-given impotence blighting the royal bed. There is nothing to suggest the king is impotent now or was earlier – essential if everyone is to believe Prince Edward is his son, essential if he is to be credited with fathering any future son. The king and his line must be free of any suspicion of lack of vigour. He will tell everyone that God warned him not to bed his bride; all we have to do is to confirm that he did not. The completely ridiculous dialogue, all in English, invading royal privacy, makes it clear that Anne of Cleves is a maid – even more virginal than her predecessor Anne Boleyn, who once told me that she was as virginal as the Virgin Mary.
The barge slows, and the oarsmen spin it round so that it will face upriver, ready to take us home on the flowing tide when our work is done. Charles Brandon steps on board to help us down the gangplank and along the quay. The other two lords fall in behind him. It is a guard of honour, although it feels for a moment unpleasantly like arrest. I suddenly think: is this a double-cross, and am I leading the way to my confession, and am I not the spider here but a stupidly buzzing fly?
Brandon leads the way through the maze of courts and gardens to the heart of the palace, to the room I know well: my spymaster’s room. It is clean and bare – just as he always has it – his big chair one side of the table and two smaller ones set opposite, convenient for conversation or confession. I can’t think how many times I have sat here and seen his slowly dawning smile or heard the quiet click of a letter falling through the slit behind me and known that the sluice gate of the Cromwell information mill is open, and it is grinding grist. But today it is my dark chamber; I am the spymaster.
IT TAKES US about an hour to finish, and the clocks are striking the half hour when Charles Brandon’s young wife Catherine knocks on the door and enters the room, followed by a clerk carrying a great wooden box.
‘My lord requires me to invite you ladies to breakfast,’ she says with studied indifference. I know she is sulky at having to obey him and meet with us. She is a reformer, a secret supporter of Lord Cromwell; she welcomed the Lutheran queen. ‘And here is my lord’s steward.’
Silently, the man opens the wooden box like a gaping jaw for me to drop our signed pages inside. There are papers at the bottom of the box already. I recognise the regular clerkish hand of Thomas Cromwell, the half-moon loop of the C of his signature like a smile. He has signed his statement, and here it is in the box, sitting neat and orderly below mine. I cannot see what he has written, but I trust him, as I always did. I know it will be an accurate account of the coming of the queen to England and the king’s immediate rejection of her – inspired by God – and how her precontract means the marriage must be annulled with no blame to her but a handsome pension.
