Amenable Women

by Mavis Cheek

  The more Flora read, the more she admired this endangered young woman who faced heaven knew what fate and survived. Not that Edward was a tyrant – but he had elements of Henry in his complete lack of respect for her or anyone else who did not entirely agree with him. Visionless, was one of his favourite words of derision. ‘Edward – could you not plant quite so many trees around our boundaries . . .’ ‘. . . Visionless, Flora, visionless.’ Which is, of course, what she was once the saplings began to grow. Flora must have been the only homeowner in the whole of Hurcott Ducis who thanked Fate for sending a freak storm in 1990. Edward had not set the trees in deep enough, or staked them, and happily most of them were blown clean away. Visionaries, it seemed, need not be practical but they did need to be insensitive to the wiser suggestions of the world around them. If you were a king, of course, all the more so.

  In Edward’s notes on the ex-Queen and her ownership of Hurcott Ducis Manor he enjoyed using the term ‘Flanders Mare’ as often as he could. How enjoyable Flora found it to strike it out of the manuscript on every single occasion. She could hear him spitting out the words ‘Politically Correct’ which made the editing process even more enchanting. He ended the section about Anna and Hurcott Manor by stating, ‘And thus Anne of Cleves, Flemish Mare, found her ill looks had served her well in the gaining of such rich estates as Richmond, Bletchingly, Hever, many manors such as Hurcott, Halifax and Dedham which must have been a great comfort to this otherwise despised and wretched woman.’ Flora had pinned the postcard of Anna above her desk and looked at it now. Ill looks and wretchedness did not spring to mind. Nor, after the divorce, could she find anyone saying such things. Quite the reverse.

  Then as now, Anna, like most women thrown into post-divorce circumstances, made it her first task to set up her new home and have her own front door. That it was Richmond Palace and one of the finest front doors in the whole of England made it all the more pleasing, obviously. Now that she was to be known as the King’s Sister – a clever bit of legal chicanery to mollify Duke William of Cleves – her Palace door was open to her new family. Her stepdaughters, Mary and Elizabeth, of course, but also the King and his new wife. But if her door was kept open and all welcome, it was still her door and nobody else’s. She could close it, whenever she liked, and be protected from all the gossip. Flora knew well enough how that felt.

  Over the next week or so there was quite a lot of closing of Lodge Cottage’s front door. The atmosphere surrounding her in the village changed from cool to being sticky sweet with unction. It felt as if she lived life outside of her home in a sugar bowl. Sweetness all around, ersatz as cyclamates, and little puckered looks and anxious mutterings and murmurings as people hurried on their way. Perhaps that was the only way her neighbours could deal with whatever they felt they had to deal with. But it was very odd behaviour and made Flora feel quite nervous so that she was grateful to stay indoors as much as possible and to have something to take her mind off all the unctuousness. Some biographers, she knew, fell in love with their subjects. She was not in love but she was nicely experiencing Anna as if she was real and it reminded her of the way she felt so close to her breathing presence in the Louvre. It was what she needed, to be in Anna’s skin, and to truly understand her.

  9

  The Phantom of the Louvre

  The last attendant has left the building. The London Gallery’s storerooms, below ground, are in darkness now, and they are silent. The waiting portraits are all of women except for one portrait of a child. The exhibition for which they are assembled will reflect the one abiding interest Henry VIII holds for the world. His peregrinations around the nubile young women of Europe, his wives, his desire for progeny, the outcome of all his hopes. These carefully selected portraits of sixteenth-century women, including Anna of Cleves, wait to be hung and viewed by eager eyes. For all he threw a Pope over his shoulder and defied an Emperor, it is Henry’s love life, his sex life that holds an endless fascination. Several of the exhibits might sniff at this continuing public prurience. And one in particular has every reason to consider that the Tudors were not all they were cracked up to be . . .

  Anna, waiting quietly in her frame, thinks it is about time she took her place in Henry’s misbegotten pantheon. She has never before been included in an exhibition surrounding her ex-husband though now, with Holbein’s star so high, her worth as a portrait, if not yet as a wife, has been recognised.

  The room is hushed. It is the hour of the spirit rather than the flesh, the hour for portraits to breathe again. Out from her frame, into this silent dimness, steps Anna of Cleves. All the way here, wrapped as she was, softly muffled as she was, coming across the sea again, she has been suffering a quiet rage. There are straws and there are the backs of camels, she thinks, having absorbed many useful colloquialisms during the five hundred years of her existence. Enough is more than enough. I have been voiceless in my frame for too long. As she wanders along the line of racked or propped or crated pictures she considers her companions.

  Anna smiles to see one portrait in particular and for the moment her crossness abates. It is the magnificent Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I. What a fine painting. Anna searches the face for a sign of the young Elizabeth she knew, a child of seven when she arrived in England and a young woman of twenty-four in the year she died. But the face is a mask and about as far removed from Holbein’s human truth as stone is from flesh. The ageing Queen stands upon England, her feet firmly in Oxfordshire and pointing towards Southampton. Anna knows the gossip. If the Tudor Court practised complicated etiquette in Henry’s day, how much more idiosyncratic was it in Elizabeth’s. Down the years Anna was surprised to hear reports of Elizabeth’s vanity with her male courtiers and the silly, indulgent behaviour she encouraged and with which she ended her days. In Anna’s time Elizabeth grew from a watchful, precocious, neglected little girl into a young woman who was clever, shrewd and open to advice about maintaining her dignity and her position. She – like Anna – spent much of her time living on her wits and keeping her own counsel, a situation that Anna knew well and understood. Yet this Ditchley portrait is an example of the other Elizabeth, the latterday selfindulgent Queen who could dismiss her courtiers at whim. Sir Henry Lee who commissioned the portrait was banished for openly taking his mistress to court when his sovereign was the only spiritual mistress allowed. The portrait was commissioned, so the curators said, when Elizabeth was in her sixtieth year, as a gift from Henry Lee to thank the Queen for allowing him back. To Anna this petty behaviour was irreconcilable with the Elizabeth she knew, both as child and young woman one who, like Anna, in her early years showed the mettle of a great survivor. Such foolish behaviour, in the end, surely made her vulnerable?

  At her own wedding celebrations, when she became Queen Anna for that brief time, she made it her duty and her pleasure to be kind and affectionate to both Mary and Elizabeth, Henry’s motherless daughters. And after the divorce, when all three of them led uneasy lives, the girls remained close to their Aunt Anna. Richmond Palace was a favourite Tudor residence and Anna made them welcome there. Henry, newly in love with his Catherine, allowed it.

  Anna smiles and nods at the portrait – she has no quarrel with Elizabeth, though, had she lived and still had the Princess’s ear, she might have suggested caution in her pursuit of beautiful, destructive young men. To remain unmarried was one thing, Anna knew the value of that, but royal indiscretion on a grand scale was quite another. Shades of her father in Elizabeth. Mary’s coronation was the last occasion at which the three women were together in public. Anna remembers affectionately how, with Mary newly enthroned and happy, Anna and Elizabeth laughed and danced together and revelled in their grandest clothes and jewels. Elizabeth suppressed her love of them for the quiet, studious, fearful years of Mary’s reign, but looking up at the Ditchley now, Anna smiles to see that her love of finery never really went away. As soon as Elizabeth was Queen off went the simple and the plain, on went the grand and gorgeous. Perhaps fine dress
ing, as it did for Anna, symbolised liberation, pride in survival and the celebration of pleasing herself.

  Elizabeth’s white, bony, high-cheeked face with its penetrating dark eyes and aquiline nose is surrounded by a ruff of winged gossamer making a silvery glow and a pearly diamond light. She is every bit Gloriana. No prettier than me, thinks Anna, but how she made herself shine. She smiles up at her. Elizabeth’s haughty portrait face smiles and softens. Women are not her usual friends of choice but Anna of Cleves was kind.

  ‘You are dazzling, Elizabeth,’ she says admiringly.

  Elizabeth acknowledges this. ‘Why yes. I made myself into a fairytale Queen. But in you, Anna, Hans Holbein saw no reason to hide your human qualities. He caught you right.’ The soft smile continues, the eyes are lit with warmth. ‘I wish,’ says Elizabeth, ‘that you had lived longer, and into my reign, for you were always kind to me and I would have done you honour.’ Anna nods. There is no reason to doubt the statement.

  ‘But Mary was kind and honoured me. Because she was plain and rejected and lonely, she understood me from the beginning, in those first bad months she showed me great affection. We were regarded as two of a kind. Plain women. Rejects both. It was a good friendship.’

  Elizabeth nods. ‘We did love you. You behaved so warmly and with such dignity. And later, when it was done and you were our aunt and settled upon with money and property with your own little court and our father’s beloved Richmond Palace was England a place to be happy in? Did you want to remain in England?’ Elizabeth shifts her foot slightly to show a little more of the England sitting beneath her dainty heel. Anna knows that Elizabeth’s happiness, by contrast, was a shifting one.

  ‘I was – in the end – very happy. And – you must forgive me I achieved it all without being obliged to live with and more to the point – to bed – the King your father – who disgusted me. I had his generous settlement and none of the duties. Life after the divorce was a delight.’

  Elizabeth returns her face to its mask-like state and replaces her impossibly small feet in the position Marcus Gheeraerts painted them – back neatly together and standing on the heart of England. It is a dismissal. Anna ignores it.

  ‘He was a great King,’ says the daughter.

  Suddenly Anna has had quite enough of diplomacy and a little bubble of rage returns. ‘He was cruel, egotistical, sentimental and perverse – and he smelled,’ she says firmly.

  ‘I loved and revered him,’ says Elizabeth tersely.

  What the Murdoch has begun in her Anna will continue – and have done with quiet humility. Anna owes the world nothing and certainly not a well-behaved silence. ‘Oh, Elizabeth, that is your prerogative. But he was unworthy of those feelings. None of us dared say these things then but I shall say them now. He was cruel to me, to you, to everyone who crossed him. He was a tyrant and –’

  ‘And desperate for a son,’ says Elizabeth, with amusement. ‘A son who would be a great Tudor monarch. After all,’ she smiles into her step-aunt’s eyes, ‘after all, only a son could ever be that.’ The irony is not lost now, nor ever was lost on subsequent generations and certainly not on Anna, who smiles back. ‘I would have borne him a son – or two – three maybe. Despite my repugnance. I’m certain of it.’

  ‘So was my mother,’ says Elizabeth frostily. The words hang there in the silence with the ghost of Anne Boleyn slipping between them.

  ‘But,’ says Anna, ‘I was of a build for it, and not likely to miscarry being of a placid nature. Your fool father bemoaned the wideness of my belly – nature’s gateway – and said he liked his women dainty and small. He dismissed my body when it could have saved him.’ Her eyes, unusually, flash. ‘And left me such a legacy of insults, too. He was no true prince.’

  The face in the glittering picture colours beneath its mask of whiteness. ‘Saved him from what?’

  Anna calms a little and says, ‘Cuckoldry and self-harm and the terrible blackness of his last years. And you, Elizabeth, might have had a kinder life. If I had borne sons, then you would have been free to marry where you chose. Perhaps.’

  But even as she says it, Anna knows that it would not have been like that. If she had produced several sons it would not have made her stepdaughters’ lives better or freer. If anything it would have made them more tightly bound, more necessary for marriage alliances. ‘Or almost to marry where you chose . . .’ she adds, less comfortably. But the eyes in the picture have returned to their unmoving glaze, the hands to their impossibly structured elegance; it is not a subject to be continued.

  Propped alongside Elizabeth is the almost informal, slightly flirtatious portrait of a youthful Marie of Guise, the woman who married Henry’s nephew James V, King of the hated rival Scotland. Marie became the mother to Mary Queen of Scots. The portrait, by Corneille de Lyon, is lively too. Both women, Elizabeth in her splendour, Marie in her sober black velvet, ignore each other and continue to look outwards. They have nothing good to say – not now nor ever will have. Marie’s portrait was most likely made at the same time that Henry VIII was seeking a new wife from abroad and was contemporary with the Cleves portrait. It is high irony for Anna to be in the same place as this woman whom she often wished Henry had married instead of her. Best, particularly now, not to dwell on what might have been . . .

  Anna turns away and would have followed Elizabeth and ignored the French woman who was not known for her sweet nature. Anna finds those dark, passionate vengeful Frenchwomen frightening. She always preferred the quiet life. After all, it is the way she has lived for nearly five hundred years – within the frame, hearing all, saying nothing – but Marie of Guise, sharp-eyed, swift and silent as a shadow, is by her side. The Dowager Scottish Queen places her back very firmly towards Elizabeth while she speaks directly to Anna. ‘Between you both,’ she seems to spit the words and the black velvet of her French hood jerks towards the pearly figure behind her, ‘With your new religion and your denial of the blessed Pope, you took my daughter’s, your cousin’s, rightful place on the throne of England, as you took her life.’ Her voice is cold, not hot. She looks at Anna but she addresses Elizabeth.

  Throughout her existence in England Anna managed to avoid such religious confrontations – she went about her business in neutral fashion. What good would it do to stir up old hatreds? Now she holds up a calming hand, but Marie of Guise brushes it aside. ‘As for you – the Cleves Princess who did not please – you came from the sinful heart of Lutheranism, the so-called new religion against the old and proper and only true faith. Your arrival gave Henry the alliance he needed to continue outside the True Church. You, Anna, should be ashamed for not standing up to him – for your honour if for nothing else. And you, Elizabeth –’ The head jerks again but still she does not turn to look at the whitefaced Queen. Elizabeth is immobile as before. ‘You, the bastard usurper, went on with it all and continued the pattern. You – a bastard – ruled excommunicate rather than let the lawful heir, my daughter, my beloved Mary of Scotland, ascend the English throne. You may have reigned long but never happily – you and your young men and your cults. Forcing love. Essex made a fool of you at the end – an old woman nearly shuffled off her throne for the love of a peacock of a man thirty years her junior . . .’

  Anna dares not look up at Elizabeth but she can see that those little feet are twitching, just twitching to –

  ‘It was –’ Marie snaps her fingers – ‘that close to your losing your kingdom to the young dandy, Elizabeth. For your whole reign, from the very beginning, you never slept sound in your bed. You feared proper Catholic claim. And then you had my daughter murdered. And still you did not sleep easy. You could never see beyond a boy’s pretty face and a well-turned leg. That schemer Essex was the miserable reward you got for your heretical troubles, your playacting at love. You ended your life with nothing but fear and the nightmares of a cousin’s blood on your hands.’

  Even now, with all the iniquities Anna has seen and heard over the centuries, such an accusation to suc
h a great figure is very shocking. The Elizabeth she knew was not one who would easily kill a cousin. In the Ditchley Elizabeth’s face does not change, nor does her stance, her feet, though twitching, still remain firmly, securely upon England.

  Marie of Guise – her face returned to its hint of a smile – silent as she came – slides back towards her frame. As she moves she turns back towards Anna. ‘That man,’ she says, ‘that so-called Gracious Prince, Henry, made a mockery of every woman he encountered – wife, Queen, daughter, sister by law and sister in blood. And had you kept the true faith, your life would have been spared the humiliation of going to uncivilised England and being made a fool of. You might have stayed at home, or married well, you might have been happy . . . You might not have remained a virgin like her – you are still a virgin, are you not, despite your wedding night?’

  Anna shakes her head. ‘I have no wish to speak of that.’

  Marie of Guise, perhaps disappointed at Anna’s discretion, gives her head an irritated little shake. And then she is gone, stepping into the frame, looking out with sightless, half-smiling eyes, dead to Anna’s remonstrance.

  Anna sighs. She thinks – or perhaps hopes – that there is the glitter of a tear in Elizabeth’s eye – but she cannot be sure. What, after all, is there to say? It is true enough that this brilliant Tudor killed her cousin, killed a queen . . . Another thing that would never have happened if Henry had stayed married to Anna. Even so, to be included in a regicide by a French woman – whom she had never met before – no – bad enough to be remembered as ugly and unwanted and to have your virginity discussed – but to be considered a supporter of regicide ... ‘I become very weary of that misapprehension, Marie,’ says Anna loftily. ‘I was a Catholic always. But I did believe in reform. Only someone with the brain of a gull could think that the Catholic Church did not need it!’