Page 135 of Boleyn Traitor
‘I would die to keep him safe,’ she swears. ‘I must warn him. I must tell him to get away.’
‘It’s too late,’ I say. ‘The only way to keep him safe is by denying it all, completely.’
‘I will,’ she says. ‘They know nothing. They can know nothing.’
THEY COME INtheir pomp, with their staves of office and their regalia, a masque of authority in the pretty rooms. I make sure she has all her queenly trappings: seated on her great chair under the canopy, and we ladies are ranged on each side of her. In comes Archbishop Cranmer, half the House of Lords with him. My uncle the duke is there, William Fitzwilliam, Robert Radcliffe, Edward and Thomas Seymour, inscrutable, Lord Russell – who was our host at Chenies and now seems to tag on the end of everything – and Thomas Wriothesley, with four other lesser lords. They announce that they will meet the queen alone, and though she shoots me an imploring look, they do not allow me to stay with her.
Her ladies and I hover, uncertainly, in the gallery outside the door, where two yeomen of the guard stand with crossed pikes. I look out of the window at the royal pier and the barges. They are turned around against the tide, pulling on their ropes, facing downstream to the city, ready for a prompt departure. So perhaps this is to be brief and formal, certainly they have enough evidence to prove she was precontracted – whatever she says – perhaps they have come to formally tell her that the king is releasing her from their mistaken marriage.
If they agree that her intimacies and oaths with Francis Dereham amount to a marriage, then it really does not matter if she met Thomas Culpeper or not. If she was married to Dereham, she was not married to the king, so she did not betray him. If theinquiry is heading towards Culpeper, she will admit marriage to Dereham to save him. If I can explain this to her, she can confess to the lesser crime of precontract. She can confess to the marriage with Dereham, the dowager duchess can produce the letters that passed between them, I can witness to the purse of gold he gave her for her dowry, and we can all create evidence, as we did with Anne of Cleves, to prove a precontract. Then there was no royal marriage. Then there was no adultery. Then there is no wound to the king’s vanity and no treason trial.
This is not the trial of Anne Boleyn – where one accusation was loaded on another to destroy her. This is the divorce of Anne of Cleves, where the offence was kept to the minimum necessary to release the king from marriage.
I cannot hear what is going on behind the barred doors, but it is not the simple denial that I promised my uncle, as it lasts all day. This is a bad sign; either they have put new reports to her – gossip from the maids or chamberers, which she must steadily deny – or, more dangerously, she is embroidering her simple denial with assurances of how she did not meet Culpeper, barely knows him, hardly saw him, that she did not give him a cap one Easter, that she gave him a cap but it meant nothing, he was not at all grateful.
All day, from breakfast, they are behind the barred door, and at dusk, my uncle comes out, his face twisted with fury, and says shortly to me: ‘Go to the Howard rooms and wait for me there.’
I take one look at his face and I dare not ask to see the queen. A man in Howard livery is waiting to escort me, and my uncle’s lord chamberlain admits me to the Howard privy chamber and fetches me a glass of wine and some sops. The servant stands by the door, apparently to serve me – but really so that I cannot slip out to check on the horses in the stable-yard or see if any barges have caught the turning tide downstream.
The duke comes in at supper time and says that I will stay in his rooms for the time being; the queen will be served by her sister. My clothes have been brought from the queen’s side.
‘I should be with her,’ I try to say. ‘I have work to do. I have to pack for her to go to Syon.’
‘Others can pack,’ he says dourly. ‘You stay here.’
‘But her jewels?’
‘Anne Herbert has the care of them.’
‘Has someone said something against me?’ I ask, wide-eyed.
‘Not much!’ he says, with a bark of sudden harsh laughter. ‘Not much at all!’
I look at him warily. ‘Anything against me is against a Howard,’ I say. ‘Anything against the queen is against our house.’
He snarls like a dog. ‘I don’t need you to remind me of that,’ he says. ‘I have Edward Seymour to tell me that, or that hypocrite Gardiner, or that snake Wriothesley or any of the reformers, or Lady Mary’s friends, or rival lords. There are many, many men ready to tell me that if the queen falls, we all do.’
‘My reputation is as good as yours,’ I say. ‘Unsullied.’
He gets hold of both my shoulders in a hard grip, and he brings his face very close to mine. ‘I asked you did she swive Thomas Culpeper and you told me “no”.’
‘I did. I will always say so,’ I promise.
‘Her grandmother says that she was free with that dog Dereham and with another poxed fool, Manox.’
‘I don’t know anything about that. It was before—’
‘Exactly. It was before she ever met the king. So anything she did then does not hurt him.’
‘It’s better than that!’ I tell him eagerly. ‘If she was married to Dereham, then her marriage to the king is invalid and there is no adultery!’
‘Tells me everything that this is the best outcome you can think of,’ he says, his bitterness dripping from his words. ‘Our second queen, for Christ’s sake. Tells me everything that this is the best we can hope for.’ He pushes me away from him. ‘Tells me everything that you, the clever one, could not convince her,the pretty one, to admit to that one thing in time.’ He steps back and slams the door.
I face the wooden panels and hear the key turn in the lock.
IT IS LIKEthe time before, but this time, it is different, I tell myself. This time, the duke my uncle is desperate to clear our names – all of us. He cannot throw the blame on Boleyns, who were Howards only by marriage. His own stepmother, Agnes, the dowager duchess, will be examined, his brothers and sisters, his nieces, his cousins, his nephews – his entire family have ridden on Kitty’s train into places of power and sucked up great fees. All of us will be questioned as to how much we knew; all of us have to be exonerated and freed.
I spend an uncomfortable day in the Howard rooms. I cannot believe it is two weeks since we thanked God for the blessing of Kitty as queen. Now I am all but under arrest, and my uncle goes out early in the morning and comes back with Thomas Wriothesley. I am to meet them in the Howard presence chamber; Wriothesley has a paper and pen before him, as if I can be tricked into saying anything by a brute like him.
