And so, after all her strenuous defence, Anne’s moment of hope died. And Norfolk, becoming aware of the dangerously changing atmosphere, hurried on with his brutal business. “Call the accused, George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford,” he shouted to the heralds.
Anne turned in amazement to find her brother standing behind her. And suddenly, as he smiled at her, the grim building seemed full of radiance. “You are here—in the Tower!” she breathed forgetting everyone else.
“Foolish baggage,” he bantered. “Did you not know that I have been here all the time? Or remember my promise that whatever happened I would stay with you?”
And that for the moment seemed to suffice.
But Anne’s joy was short-lived. The buzz of excitement died down, and the crowd craned their necks in peculiar, expectant silence. Two tall halberdiers marched George to his place, and the charge was read.
A charge of incestuous adultery between George and Anne Boleyn, son and daughter of Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire.
This was the culminating horror. Norfolk’s trump card, played to tear the last shred of pity from the Queen and transfer it to the King. And, as he showed his hand, even hardened court officials gasped.
It was minutes before Anne could take in the purport of the appalling words, though as understanding gradually came to her, she realized that when George had come to warn her at Greenwich he must have had some inkling of what was being planned against them. Shocked to the soul, she sank back onto the chair provided for her, and sat staring down at her own shaking hands. She felt as if the two of them stood in some monstrous pillory of shame, with the libidinous curiosity of all men’s gaze burning them. As if slime had suddenly been smeared across the fairest page of life.
How, in God’s name, would he meet so foul a charge? Cautiously, Anne raised her eyes. George was standing in the centre of the hall, composed and debonair, with a long shaft of sunlight from one of the narrow Norman windows spilling light about him; gilding his fair, handsome face and tall, lithe figure, picking out the jewels on his best white brocaded doublet so that he looked the only lovely thing in a mire of drabness. In spite of the loathsome mire, Anne’s lips quivered into a smile. It was so like George to put on his finest clothes to meet a difficult occasion! To stand there nonchalantly pulling a sprig of pink may through a buttonhole of his modish velvet!
At first she was too shamed to meet his eyes. But when she did, he looked at her across the court as if they two were alone, with that faint air of mockery and one quizzically raised brow. And Anne accepted his unspoken challenge and rose again to face their slanderers as instinctively as if he had reached out a hand and pulled her to her feet. She was no longer alone. At last there was a man to defend her. A man who had promised to stand by her to the end.
George let his excited enemies talk themselves to a standstill; then, succinctly, irritatingly, he pulled their case to pieces until even to the trial lords it began to look ludicrously poor. Never once did he let them taunt him into an indiscreet word about his royal brother-in-law, and only those who knew him intimately were aware of the anger like steel beneath his easy manner. At times he had the court tittering. Yet he was no longer the George Boleyn who had laughed and quipped his way through Court, lifted high by his father’s insatiable ambition; but rather a man strengthened and sobered by a sincere searching of the Gospels, a man who had learned to hide a travesty of marriage and a disappointment in love beneath a show of badinage.
There were people present, he pointed out, who had known him from childhood, who would bear witness that he had always been on terms of the utmost affection with the Queen.
“We have it on oath that the aged Lady Wingfield testified on her deathbed that some nine or ten months ago you asked to be left alone with the Queen in her bedchamber,” began his accusers.
“So inconsiderate of her to die just before I needed her,” murmured George. “For she was my friend and always spoke the truth, in toto.”
“Mistress Druscilla Zouch was kept waiting a whole hour outside the door.”
“With another maid-of-honour who appears to have grown tired of waiting.”
“We are not here to speak of her,” snapped the King’s attorney hurriedly, as a snicker went along the barriers. “Mistress Zouch will bear witness.”
“Very unwillingly, I think. But there is no need to call her. The Queen was in distress and I stayed to cheer her.”
“Distressed about what?”
“She had been in poor health and spirits since her miscarriage.”
“That would be about nine or ten months ago, would it not?”
“Probably.”
“Lady Wingfield particularly recalled that the Queen called to you to save her. To save her from what, milord Rochford?”
“From falling in a swoon, so far as I recall.”
“Was she not distressed because of the King’s neglect?”
“Heneage would be able to answer that question better than I.”
“I put it to you, Rochford, that she was calling upon you to save her from the stigma of bearing no son?”
“And I put it to you, milords, that that is an insult to the King!”
Enraged, they pressed him harder. “Yet you said openly and lewdly among your friends that the dead child that was afterwards born to her prematurely was not the King’s.”
“Never!”
“Is it not true that before the calamitous birth you were heard to boast among your friends that you were responsible for the Queen’s being enceinte again?”
“Assuredly, it is true,” George Boleyn admitted. And then, when all his enemies were a-tiptoe and agog, he deflated their nasty triumph by adding negligently, “For did I not arrange the masque which lured the King’s wandering fancy back to her Grace? Have I not played my part in trying to provide England with an heir? And less clumsily, I flatter myself, than my illustrious uncle played his in destroying it!”
Proud Norfolk was never popular with the people, and the Boleyn charm was difficult to resist. “This rambling evidence of a dying old woman which you have used against me,” George went on thoughtfully. “Obviously it must have been culled and twisted by a third party. And delivered as a well-arranged nosegay to Secretary Cromwell. Could the third party be said to be disinterested? Ah, my own wife! Who, as your witnesses had already been at pains to point out, is so jealous of my affection for the Queen’s grace. Since milady Rochford had taken so active a part in collecting the evidence, would it not be simpler if she made her accusations face to face?”
And so the final outrage had been perpetrated which had reduced the charge to absurdity in most men’s eyes. Lady Jane Rochford giving evidence against her own husband. Lady Jane Rochford, whose marital infidelities were a byword. And in the end all that she could swear to was that he had stayed a long time in his sister’s bedroom, that he had embraced her and had been left alone with her, lying across the foot of her bed.
“Munching apples, Jane. Do not forget the apples,” George jeered at her. And some of the city merchants had had the audacity to laugh out loud. For whatever they might think about the Queen, surely no man with Rochford’s shining grace and sense of humour could be such an unnatural monster!
“Oh, what matters all the rest so that he go free,” thought Anne. And free he would be any moment now. The judges and the lords had retired to discuss their findings. All round her people were whispering that he would surely be acquitted. Would that her own life hung on this accusation alone! Or, indeed, upon any accusation.
If only Henry would send her to some convent now, how willingly she would go! Or banish her abroad. Surely, surely public opinion would not suffer a Queen to be put to death! Death was so easily spoken of in a sonnet or a song; so different when, for the first time, one came to understand what the fear of dying meant.
Norfolk was coming back, with all the others trooping aft
er him. Their lagging footsteps seemed to seal her fate. Their faces had a stunned, blank look. Norreys, Brereton, Weston, Smeaton—all of them were condemned to die for her. And now everyone was looking at her; save her accusers, who could not. Were they about to condemn a woman to death? Could it be possible that Henry would really let it happen, that it was going to happen now? That Cromwell’s hands were shaking, and that there was pity at last in Norfolk’s eyes?
She heard the sum of her foul iniquities told over in her uncle’s harsh, familiar tones; and then the fatal words, “Anne, Queen of England, to be burned or beheaded at the King’s pleasure.”
To be burned alive. The most terrible death of all, reserved for heretics and witches. And how often, in loving sport, had Henry threatened it! Even in the terrible, awe-struck silence Anne could not really believe it, As the rows of upturned faces blurred together and her world went black she was really listening to Henry’s voice, musical and persuasive against her ear, “Nan, Nan, my witch, I should have you burned for so enslaving my senses! Nan, there is no woman’s body I could ever desire after enjoying yours.”
In bare humanity Cromwell was telling them to take her back to her room. But with a supreme effort Anne waved women and ushers aside. As long as she could see and stand she must stay and hear what they did to George. Surely they had taken vengeance enough, surely they would acquit him now!
But it seemed they had not finished with him yet. Incited by the lascivious interest of the day, egged on by Norfolk who, after so much zeal on the King’s behalf, must have been anxious to know how his daughter’s slender chances stood, there was still some question they wanted to ask. But no one dared to voice it.
“Is it true that your wife sometimes repeats to you things which, in the performance of her duties and the closeness of their relationship, she might hear the Queen say?”
“As you have heard, she has a serpent’s tongue.” George, white as death, had eyes only for his sister and seemed to brush the question aside as though he scarcely heard it.
Remembering what she had said to Jane, Anne longed to call out and warn him that there are things which it is treason to know. Intimate things, which touched the King’s pride.
But Norfolk was writing something on a piece of paper. Shamefacedly, it was folded and handed to George. “Did Lady Rochford ever repeat to you the words that are written there?” The faces of the two dukes whose children stood nearest the crown were working with excitement.
Forgetful of her own fate, Anne watched her brother’s fine swordsman’s fingers unfold the thing fastidiously. Heard his contemptuous apology as he held it to the light. “Your pardon, milords, the Duke writes a villainous hand!” And then as he stood there reading, Anne watched the devilish grin dawn upon his illumined face. She could guess what was written on the paper, and through the close mental link which bound them she could almost read his thoughts. She knew that it was almost as if someone had thrust into his hand a weapon wherewith to achieve his purpose and to avenge his family wrongs. Her life was already forfeit. His was his own to play with. He had only to say Yes or No, and burn the secret paper, and he would go free. But instead, assuming an air of bland, inane misunderstanding, he read the words aloud, before his horrified judges could stop him.
“That the King is well-nigh impotent? No, milords, I do not recollect—”
Norfolk had packed the hall with spectators so that they might hear the Queen’s shame and go home and talk about it. Now they would have something still more interesting to talk and titter about, to spread through the taverns of London. Something for which another Boleyn death warrant would be signed, but for which the King would never forgive their haughty ducal kinsman.
Chapter Forty-One
It was oddly still in the Queen’s lodgings. The crowds had been dispersed, soldiers and heralds had clattered away, and there was no need to concentrate and use one’s wits any more. No more need to hold oneself watchfully before all those staring eyes, or to swing alternatively between hope and despair.
Anne found herself standing by an open window with a tiny nosegay of pink-tipped daisies in her hand. Vaguely she remembered stooping to gather them as she crossed the green, and how her silent entourage had waited patiently while she did so. No one had attempted to stop her. Perhaps they, too, had remembered that it would be the last time she would be able to gather flowers.
Already the people who stood about her or brought her food were shadowy beings, with whose thoughts and aims she was no longer concerned. Even the two women who had spied upon her tripped over each other to offer her small, propitiating services. The dignity of death was upon her so that, condemned, she was immune from hatred.
“Queen Katherine died slowly. But is this much worse than what you urged him to do to her?” her aunt and her own conscience had asked a dozen times.
“But Katherine had her righteousness to keep her company. For my brother and those others, I would willingly suffer many deaths,” she had said bravely enough, over there in the court. How easy it had been to say it, keyed up by an audience! But when it came to dying one death—sinking to the floor, crazed with fright, faced with unknown eternity, Anne wept and screamed unrestrainedly, blind for the time to any plight but her own. In vain the women tried to quiet her, and when, fearing that she would go mad, they sent for Kingston, Anne reached up and clung to him. “Will the King really burn me?” she asked with shaking lips, letting out at last the words which had been beating at her brain all day.
Since he would have the arranging of it, Kingston devoutly hoped not. “Not that for a Queen,” he mumbled.
“Then it will be the axe?” Anne pulled down his warm hand between her two cold ones, watering it with her tears. “I have heard it said that the executioner has sometimes bungled.”
But there must be mercy somewhere; and one must not go out unprepared. She rose with what dignity she could muster, eased by the wild escape of words long leashed by pride. “Good Sir William, I pray you fetch me a priest so that I may have the Body of our Lord in my oratory,” she begged, turning spontaneously, in her extremity, to the religion of her childhood. And when he had done so, she knelt for hours before the Host, saying over and over again old familiar prayers and every now and then punctuating the familiar, soothing words with passionate personal cries that broke from her over-burdened heart.
“If my poor Jocunda, who has been more than a mother to me, could see me now!”
“Oh, that I could see Mary Tudor and ask her forgiveness before I die!”
“Dear Christ, as Thou didst bear the cross, help me, help me, to meet the axe. Oh, if it be Thy will, let the extraordinary dread of it pass from me!”
For Anne understood only too well now what had been the un-comprehended, nameless dread which had at times come upon her, blacking out her most glittering triumphs and sending her hand to her suffocating throat.
When at last she came from her oratory, she made Lady Kingston sit in her own chair. “I would have you pretend to be the Princess Mary so that I may publicly beg her pardon as I would if she were here,” Anne entreated.
In an agony of remorse, unheeding what they thought, Anne knelt humbly before the Governor’s wife and confessed with tears every petty oppression which she had devised against her stepdaughter and every cruelty towards her to which she had persuaded the King. “And I charge you, before God and as you shall answer for it at the Judgment, that you will go to the lady Mary’s grace and kneel down on your knees to her as I have to you, asking forgiveness for the wrongs I have done her. For only so will my troubled conscience know quiet.”
And as if in answer to her passionate prayers, when Anne rose from her self-imposed penance, she found Kingston standing there with news that some part of her sentence was to be alleviated. Francis of Valois, he said, was sending his executioner from Paris; the one man with a sword sharper and more expert than his own.
There was to be no clumsy, bungling axe.
Instantly, Anne’s thought flew, glad and warm, to Francis. Here was a source of succour of which through the long sleepless nights, she had not even thought. But Wyatt, perhaps, had. Since state business had frequently taken him there, he had no doubt been able to send a message through some friend. And Francis, who could neither interfere nor deflect Henry from his purpose, had remembered the masque of St. George and the Dragon in Calais Castle, and once again had offered Henry a civilized sword with which to do his butchering. It would be the Valois’ last, strange gift to her.
Francis had always admired her. He had never seen her drawn and despairing, nor struggling back to vivacity after childbirth. He would be thinking of her as he last saw her, utterly desirable, with the aura of Henry’s love about her, and the admiration of other men enhancing her elusive beauty. A dark Venus, he had called her. Even now the bare thought of him brought a little secret smile to Anne’s lips. Her eyes glinted and narrowed, as of habit. But she checked herself abruptly. Of what profit now to dwell upon things of the flesh? Now, when one’s body was about to be mutilated. One must thank God humbly, and think only of the King of France’s kindness.
“So it will not hurt much after all,” she managed to say, smiling at Kingston. “And my neck is very small. See, I can almost span it with the fingers of one hand!”
Fooling gently, she tried to draw her companions with her to a quickly changing mood of defiant gaiety. It was her flickering effort after courage.
Among the awful, dragging hours one day stood out, when the sun shone brilliantly from early dawn to tardy dusk. When the loveliest month was at her zenith and England drenched with the scent of early summer flowers. When Anne’s beauty-loving senses saw nothing of the transient pageant, nothing but the torment in her own soul.
The day when five men must die because of her. The day when her brother must die.
All day long she and Margaret knelt, hand-locked, in prayer—prayer broken only by foolish recollections and little heartbroken sentences. Though the crowds gathered as soon as it was light on Tower Hill, their own hearts and minds were often back at Allington and Hever. Until there came the solemn beat of slow marching feet across the flagstones, and the droning Latin of an intoning priest. And the unbolting of a gate. Then their lips stopped moving and their ears followed the meaning of every sound. The murmur from a mass of people awaiting the spectacle of death, a shocked murmur more awful than any shouting. The occasional crack of a sharp order, the complete silences more poignant than any sound. And then the salute of a gun, echoing from wall to wall. Five separate times a salute broke the ominous silence, and each time Anne seemed to crouch a little lower, to die a little in herself. Until at last, shrouded by a dusk more human than her enemies, a cart creaked mournfully back across the drawbridge and into the courtyard. A cart into which they dared not rise and look.
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