Page 31 of Boleyn Traitor
‘It made sense to the Boleyns who ordered the trial,’ my father says, smiling.
‘It was terribly sad.’
‘Any fool can feel sad – look at Master Somer the fool, who is grave now that the king has forgotten how to laugh. I must ask him if he can imagine not being? Perhaps a fool – who has so little will but so much imagination – can imagine his death.’
THE QUEEN ISburied with the scant honour of a dowager princess in faraway Peterborough Cathedral and not as a queen in Westminster Abbey. We pretend she was never married to King Henry, never a wife and queen of twenty-four years, never bore him child after child, never raised a beautiful princess. Her burial is done with respect and ceremony, but none of us attend. Nobody of any importance attends.
Even those who genuinely grieve for her as their dear friend are banned. Charles Brandon’s new young wife, Catherine, and his daughter, Eleanor, are allowed to go as a favour to him. Spies go to watch, of course. My uncle Thomas Howard sends hisdaughter-in-law Frances, and Anne sends her friend Elizabeth Somerset to tell her who was there and to eavesdrop on the few mourners who dared to follow the coffin.
The death of the old queen should signal Anne’s complete victory, but we cannot celebrate. Katherine’s death makes Anne’s great lie completely true: she said that the king’s marriage was invalid and he had no wife but her – and now he does. She said there was only one queen – and now there is. She said the king had no legitimate child but Elizabeth – the other two are bastards – and now everyone in the country has sworn this is true. Anne’s wildest claims become fact; reality itself surrenders to her. But though she is in the ascendant, Anne feels more uncertain than ever. She has the place of queen but not the favour of the king. He keeps to his rooms, his face still marked, the wound on his leg still open. Anne has won everything but it feels strangely like defeat.
SINCE WE AREall agreed that the king was never Katherine of Aragon’s husband, her few remaining treasures left behind at Baynard’s Castle when she was exiled from court, are inherited by her daughter, Lady Mary. The king has no right to anything – except that he wants them, and claims them as her widower. Anne orders the old queen to be buried as a sister-in-law; but picks over her goods as her heiress.
Elizabeth Somerset, Jane Seymour, and I take the queen’s barge with Anne upriver from Greenwich to Baynard’s Castle like pretty buzzards circling a dead hare. Elizabeth Somerset is pregnant like Anne, and there is much talk of aches and pains and cravings for strange foods as we row inland on the flat tide. Jane, who is more insistently virginal every day, and I, a childless wife, sit stiffly in the prow and try not to hear these secrets.
They whisper that the midwife can bring on a slow birth by caressing the mother into pleasure until she dies away, and Elizabeth says: ‘Not just a midwife – anyone could do it, I suppose? In caseof need?’ And Anne mouths: ‘Mark Smeaton?’ and Elizabeth says: ‘How great is your need?’ And they go off into gales of laughter.
Jane looks as if she is about to faint from excess of modesty, and I speak loudly to her about the likelihood of rain.
At the old castle, there is little value in the goods left behind by the old queen, but Anne picks out a horn cup with a cover, a chest covered in crimson velvet, a set of wooden trenchers, and an ivory chess set for the king. Jane finds a modest little box for her small pieces of jewellery, and Elizabeth chooses a table inlaid with dark wood for her rooms.
I take nothing. Our private rooms in the palaces are richly furnished; George and I pride ourselves on buying anything we want, and our home, the palace at Beaulieu, was furnished by the king himself before he gave it to us. I don’t need the poor queen’s little scraps of things: the king will give them at Christmas to people he dislikes.
Anne has a happy morning of triumph, disdainfully turning over tapestries, declaring them old-fashioned and hopelessly Spanish, opening chests and dropping the lids with a bang. But as she is bending over a box of books, she suddenly says: ‘No, oh no.’
‘What is it?’ Jane Seymour asks eagerly, thinking there is an exciting find of a treasure; but when she sees Anne’s snarl, she falls back, and I say: ‘Is it the baby?’
Anne melts against me, like a woman of wax. ‘Get me home,’ she whispers. ‘I have such a pain, such a pain!’
Thank God that the barge is waiting at the pier and the tide on the ebb. Elizabeth and I help her to it, ignoring the guard of honour of rowers, and order them to go as fast as they can to Greenwich Palace.
Even rowing hard with the tide, it feels like long hours on the water before we can sweep her through the chambers and straight into her bedroom. People fall back before our silent rush; it is like the king coming home on a table top, all over again. No one dares ask. Perhaps everything will be all right, as it was for the king. Perhaps Anne will rise up in triumph, like him.
In her rooms, we strip off her kirtle, her sleeves, her stomacher, her skirt. Our fingers tremble as we untie gold-tipped aglets on laces of silk. Off comes her outer linen, and then I see the spreading red stain on her underlinen. Jane Seymour flees the room; but has the sense to fetch Anne’s sister Mary and their mother. Elizabeth Boleyn sends for the midwife, and we are as we were at that first time, gathered around the bed, doing nothing but telling each other lies: that this is not a miscarry, that it will all be all right, that it is a little bleed but only to be expected; and then finally – at the end of the long day, when the midwife has come and done her dirty work – that this is death, undeniable death.
We cannot bluster it out. Everyone saw us come home, everyone saw us dash into the queen’s bedroom. Jane Seymour ran out and told them all that since she was a maid – such an innocent maid – she could not wait on the queen who was losing her baby. Everyone knows.
IT TAKES Aday and a night until it is all over, and when Anne is in a state of grim despair, they tell us that the king is coming to visit.
Elizabeth Somerset has the sense to make herself scarce. Mary Boleyn, a former fertile mistress, goes out of the room. Nobody wants to see a pregnant woman today; nobody wants to see a former mistress.
We sweep every disagreeable sight out of the room. No food, no drink, no linen, no water bowl for washing. We dress the room as if it were to be the background to a portrait, a masque version of a queen’s bedroom. We make her bed into a bower, as if the king might be coming to make love. She is scented with oil of flowers and rosy-cheeked with rouge, her eyes darkly inviting with drops of belladonna, her hair a perfumed dark heap of curls on the top of her head, her nightgown demurely fastened to the neck, with ribbons that only need one touch to fall open.
They knock on the door and throw it open, and the moment he comes in, the moment I see how he is dragging his sore leg, his face crumpled, his mouth petulant, I know that Anne is lost. Henry has learned to imagine death – as my father thought he could not. Now, everyone else will have to think of it; Henry cannot keep a fear to himself. He is our head, and we are thecorps– when he is in pain, we all hurt; when he is afraid, we are all sick with terror. Now he can imagine death, we will have to fear it all the time.
Anne’s eyes fill with real tears – she holds out a trembling hand to him. ‘My lord husband,’ she says, and her voice quavers with genuine grief. ‘An accident. We will have other children. For sure. For sure, we will. And the next will be better, stronger. Better made.’
His friends and companions do not come into the room but stand like a wall of hostile witnesses on the threshold. I see the hard faces of the old lords – among them, Queen Katherine’s friends come to gloat at this new misfortune. Anne ignores them, whispering so that they cannot hear. But she should have said nothing, because the king has come with a speech prepared, and he is not a good company player who can say his lines off a wrong cue. He hates anyone else standing centre-stage. He draws himself up. I see him wince as he puts weight on his bad leg. He holds up his hand to silence her, so he can deliver his speech without interruption.
‘I cannot understand such a thing,’ he says. He knows he has struck the wrong tone, he sounds peevish rather than lordly. He clears his throat and starts again. ‘I cannot understand such a thing. I am so healthy, so full of life. I cannot understand your difficulty.’
‘It was my uncle the Duke of Norfolk,’ Anne says quickly. ‘He came to me in such a rush on the day of your accident! I thought you might have been dead! I feared you were dead!’ Her voice quavers; but still his face does not soften.
Our uncle is among the king’s companions listening in the doorway. He will step forward and contradict her if she tries to throw the blame on him again; but I cannot warn her of his darkening expression.
‘And you’ve been attentive, to others...’ Anne says reproachfully. She lowers her voice. ‘You made me doubt your love...’ She shoots a quick look at him under her lowered eyelashes. ‘You have neglected me. You have hurt me. I have been bereft. You have pursued her and set her up as a rival to me – after all you promised...’
This would have worked when Anne was in her prime; but since the king has learned to fear death, he does not care for other people’s fears, not even hers. Now, intent on his own speech, he does not even hear her. He has a question to test her: the worst question.
