Page 28 of Boleyn Traitor
One knight withdraws a lame horse from the contest, and another joust is finished quickly in one pass, so the king is due to ride earlier than was planned. He decides to ride at once; he does not want anyone to think he needs to rest. I send a page running to the queen’s rooms to tell Anne that the king is riding now – she must come at once.
Henry strides out of his tent and waits for them to bring up his great horse. It too is carrying heavy armour, its head and shoulders burdened with forged plates: a shell of steel encloses the great warhorse of flesh and blood. One groom makes it halt; the other goes on his hands and knees on the ground beside the huge hooves. The king steps heavily on the man’s back, puts one boot into the stirrup and heaves himself into the saddle. The big charger sidles as the weight comes down, and the king gathers up his reins. He drops the visor on his helmet with a clang, and now he is a mythical being, a faceless monster of enamelled steel, high on a huge metalled creature. Hissquire mounts his own horse and rides before the king to announce him: his motto for this joust is Anne’s own, ‘The Most Happy’, as a compliment to Anne and a final jibe to his dead queen – he is the most happy, and she is not even buried yet.
He is going to tilt at the ring, a display of horsemanship and quickness of eye and hand: a crowd-pleasing show before he rides at full tilt in the final joust. There are three rings, dangling from arches, one after another on the long ground between the two viewing towers; he will gallop beneath them and catch them on his lance. The king parades around the arena; the crowd cheers him – but they are subdued: too many remember the old queen, and some point to the empty throne in the ladies’ viewing box and say that no woman will ever be fit to take her place.
The king raises his lance to encourage applause, gallops round a second time to make sure that everyone is watching him and then crams his spurs into the sides of the horse. It leaps forward and thunders down the arches where the rings hang. The king raises his lance, strikes one, and pulls it free in one smooth movement, strikes the second, and then there is a clang and a shriek as he misjudges the third and his lance gets stuck on the arch, stopping dead, striking a terrible blow, to the galloping horse.
Henry is thrown from the saddle, falling towards the ground, his weight pulls the frightened horse down with him so that it staggers and, with a terrible clatter, falls on him, armoured king beneath armoured horse, and he is crushed beneath its dreadful weight.
Everyone screams; all the grooms and squires sprint onto the tiltyard towards the horse struggling on the ground. But they cannot get to it – the huge front hooves are blindly clawing the air; its back legs are kicking out. It is blinded by the head armour and weighed down by the iron plates. While it struggles, trying to roll over and pull itself up, trapped beneath it is the armoured body of the king, terribly still, as his horse rolls up and falls back and rolls again.
One groom dares to fling himself at the horse’s head, pulls off the armoured headpiece so the creature can see, and hauls on thereins to make it rise. I hear him scream: ‘Up, Thunder! Up! For the love of God! Get off him!’
At last, it gets its front hooves squarely on the ground and raises its big head; but its body, the terrible weight of the big body and muscled haunches grind down on the unmoving rider. Then it heaves itself to all four feet. It shakes – a terrible clatter of bent and loosened armour – and steps away from the fallen man, who lies still as death.
My hands are clamped over my mouth; I am not breathing. I take a shuddering gasp and cling to the front of the balcony. The king’s physician Dr Butts comes running from the viewing tower, stumbling through the churned sand of the tiltyard. He throws himself on his knees beside the still body and, tenderly, with infinite care, lifts the visor on the helmet and puts down his ear to listen for a breath. He nods – perhaps the king is breathing? He puts his hand tenderly inside the helmet, feeling for a pulse. He nods more certainly and gets to his feet.
‘He lives,’ he says quietly to the waiting arena, and then the king’s pages come running up with a table top snatched from someone’s tent. They put it on the ground beside the king and, slowly, with Dr Butts guiding them, dig the board into the sand beneath the inert body from feet to helmet, as if they are lifting a forged iron effigy of a king.
They raise the board in one movement, straining under the weight, and shuffle cautiously out of the tiltyard. The sand pours off the board like water, as if they were carrying a drowned iron statue from the seabed. There is a long sigh, like a groan of pain, from the hundreds watching, as the King of England, our only king, our king without an heir, is carried like a shipwreck from the tiltyard to the palace.
Saying nothing, I lead the ladies in a silent procession which forms behind the pages with their terrible burden. Even at this moment of horror, we fall into the orders of precedence. Dukes first: my uncle, Thomas Howard the Duke of Norfolk, closely behindthe king’s still body; Charles Brandon the Duke of Suffolk, beside him; Robert Radcliffe the Earl of Sussex alongside. Then lords and knights. We ladies come behind them, men with lesser titles behind us. It is as if we were going to a great banquet or about to dance – we are all in order. But it is as if we were ranked ghosts, for we are completely silent, and when it is my turn to step into the great hall of the palace, I shiver in the sudden cool – blinking in the shadow after the bright sunshine. Everyone’s face is as white as if we are underwater.
They put the board carrying the king on a set of trestles, and he is as still as a wreck at the bottom of the sea. We gather round in moving schools like gulping fishes.
‘Step back – give him air,’ Dr Butts commands firmly, but I hear the tremble of fear in his voice.
George is at his side. ‘Should I take off his helmet?’
Dr Butts hesitates and I have a sudden, nightmarish vision that George will lift off the helmet and the head will come off inside it, and George will have beheaded our king.
‘Gently, very gently,’ Dr Butts advises, and he supports the bullish neck with both hands, as George takes a grip on the helmet.
It does not yield. George exchanges one aghast look with the doctor, and then he pulls, and then pulls harder. I imagine the broken bones of the neck parting, and I see my husband grit his teeth, and then the helmet yields and comes away, and the horribly shaved head, round as a bald ball, lolls back, limp as death, in the doctor’s hands. The king’s eyes are closed, his face greenish white like a drowned corpse. Dr Butts feels again for the pulse in the neck, bends again to feel the slight sour breath against his cheek.
‘Shall we take him to his rooms?’ George asks, milk-white with shock himself.
‘Yes, yes.’
Charles Brandon goes ahead, shooing people out of the way, shouting to the yeomen of the guard to fling open the double doors wide to admit the table top. The pages at the head of the boardhave to go backwards, shuffling their feet and glancing over their shoulders, desperate to be steady. The king’s men walk alongside them, a hand on each shoulder, muttering: ‘Careful, straight now, step in, you’re through the door...’
The huge presence chamber opens off the watching chamber. Nobody is going to try to take the dead weight up the stairs to his private rooms and his bed chamber. The double pairs of big doors are thrown open, to admit the procession like the maw of hell, and the gentlemen of the bedchamber rush in. The doors close on them, and we are left outside in complete silence.
I look at the other ladies-in-waiting. ‘The queen,’ I say apprehensively. ‘We have to tell the queen.’
‘You tell her,’ Gertrude Courtenay says. ‘You go in. We’ll wait outside.’
We go in our formal procession to the queen’s rooms at the rear of the palace, and there are Jane Seymour and Mary Shelton, idling in the presence chamber, gazing out of the window that overlooks the river, seeing nothing, like the fools they are.
‘What’s happening?’ Mary demands. ‘The Duke of Norfolk just came in like a charging bull, threw us out of the privy chamber, and told us to wait out here.’
‘Is he with the queen?’
They nod.
‘His Majesty has had an accident,’ I say shortly. ‘His doctor is with him.’
‘Lord! He didn’t say...’
