by Norah Lofts
Of Tom Boleyn the King was less sure. He’d been complacent about Mary—it had paid him to be; it was possible that he realized that in Anne he had a more valuable asset; it was also possible that he was resentful over the short duration of Mary’s sway and the fact that she had been dismissed without much reward. Tom Boleyn didn’t know how Mary had behaved at the end, the tears—and he hated women to weep—the tirades, the pleadings and the refusal to take anything from him. For whatever reason, Tom always backed up his wife’s excuses for Anne, “Very poorly, your Grace, very poorly indeed, I’m sorry to say.”
Henry was deeply puzzled by his own attitude toward this heavy cold—assuming it to be genuine. He hated any kind of illness, had a morbid horror of it, and the thought of a woman with a heavy cold should have been utterly repellent; coughing, hawking, blowing the nose, wiping the eyes. Any kind of physical disorder in a woman must, by a simple law of nature, repel a man. You pitied them, you did what you could to relieve them, you pretended, but you kept away. And yet, if he could, with any decency, have been admitted to Anne’s sickroom, he felt that he would have left his fastidiousness outside the door. He’d have lent—yes, he would—his own handkerchief!
The meal was ending, the topcloth was being withdrawn, and the clattering dishes had been collected. On the stiff starched, lace-inset undercloth only the wine flagons and glasses, the dishes of fruit and nuts remained. The hall was suddenly quiet.
Into the quiet broke a voice, sexless; the voice of a boy just broken; the voice of a girl not yet fully recovered from a cold. Henry stiffened and looked toward the gallery, whence the voice came. He could see nothing; behind the heavy carving it was in darkness.
“Your Grace, ladies and gentlemen all, if it be your pleasure I will now sing for you.”
Henry looked questioningly at his hostess who gave him one of her anxious, deprecating half-smiles, and then looked at her husband. Henry glanced at him, too. Sir Thomas was busy, probing a walnut. Poor dear, he thought, this is all a sad trial to her. It hurt him to see her look so anxious. Yet if he had stepped in and said he would arrange the entertainment she would take it as a criticism of her efforts, and even for the King’s approval he would not risk hurting her feelings. And however badly this half-fledged boy in the gallery performed, it would just have to be borne.
Anne began with a merry ballad, well known to Lady Bo and to anyone else who had been near a field at harvest time, for on account of its rhythm it was very popular with reapers. It was, like most ballads, a little bawdy, not quite what a young lady should sing, but that didn’t matter this evening, because no one knew that it was Anne singing. What did matter was that the King was pleased. At its end he shouted in a voice accustomed to issuing orders in spacious places.”
“Come down, boy! And be rewarded.”
Oh dear, oh dear, Lady Bo thought. Now they would know. Tom would learn that she had entered into a plot without telling him, and the King would know that Anne’s cold had just been an excuse, and everyone would know that those saucy insinuating words had been sung by a young girl. Oh dear, oh dear.
The voice from the gallery said,
“I thank your Grace, but I am already rewarded—by your attention.”
Now would a pageboy have said that?
The music began again, and then the singing. This time a sad song.
When we two are parted, all the world is gray,
Hope and joy and comfort, go with you away.
Away, alas, with you away.
Not a flower will blossom, not a bird will sing,
Lacking that sweet summer you alone can bring.
You, alas, alone can bring.
When we two are parted, all my heart is numb.
And it will not waken, till again you come.
Alas, alas, you cannot come.
More than seas divide us, worse than death doth sever,
I am now alone, love, alone, my love, forever.
Alas, alone forever.
The lute made its plaintive, dying outcry and was silent. Lady Bo did not look at the King, or at her husband; their approval no longer mattered. She looked down to hide the tears that stung her eyes. It was more than twenty years since she had lost her Johnny, and life had mended itself, and she loved Tom; but the song affected her because it so exactly recalled how she had felt when the news came. Alone forever.
In the hall there was a perceptible silence. The song was a love song and the audience was largely composed of people to whom romantic love meant little or nothing. Possibly the most genuinely romantically minded person in the hall was the King himself, and even he had been furious when his sister Mary had made a love match with Charles Brandon and thus deprived England of a useful pawn in the diplomatic game. But to the English love songs were new; until lately there had been solemn church music, merry marching tunes to keep weary men in step, and ballads; so purely sentimental songs were making their first impact upon people who, through lack of immunity, were particularly vulnerable. Lady Bo was far from being the only person with moist eyes. Tomorrow the men who were blinking and the women who were dabbing their lower lids would unhesitatingly arrange advantageous marriages, if they could, for themselves, or for their children, and give no thought to any heartbreak involved; but for the moment they were touched, and paid the singer the compliment of silence before the outbreak of applause.
Henry shouted through the noise,
“A sweet song, well sung. Come out and show yourself.”
For answer Anne plunged straight into a ditty with which hired performers often ended.
Gentles all, within this hall, we wish you now good night,
If aught that we have here performed, hath pleased you, ’tis your right.
Our Lord the King, past everything, we wish you joy in store,
We wish you all you wish yourself. What could we wish you more?
Ladies, we hope your lovely eyes may evermore stay bright,
And never see a worser scene than they have done tonight.
Nobles and knights, to our good nights, we add a hearty greeting
And pray that all goes well with you, until our nextest meeting.
May we remind your hearts so kind, that though it gives us pleasure,
To sing for you, we like to eat, and corn is sold by measure?
So give, we pray, not charity, but what you think our due.
Thus gentles all, within this hall, we take our leave of you.
The lute twanged its final flourish; there was the sound of light footsteps, and then the slam of a door.
Henry said, “Did I not know otherwise, I’d have said that was your daughter, Tom,” and waited for Sir Thomas to laugh, reveal the trick and congratulate him upon his perspicacity. But Thomas Boleyn’s face showed nothing except surprise.
“My daughter? But as your Grace knows, she’s in bed with a cold, and hoarse as a crow.”
Henry looked at Lady Boleyn who blushed and said too quickly, too eagerly,
“It was a pageboy, your Grace. Very young, very shy. I had great difficulty in persuading him to sing at all.” The firmness with which she brought out the last words merely emphasized the flutteriness of the others.
For a second Henry hesitated. He was King. He had only to say that he’d like a closer look at this pageboy who sang so well. That’d teach them to play tricks on him! On the other hand it was rather an engaging trick, and it was hers, he’d warrant. She had a gay and lively look. Much as he longed to see her he wouldn’t spoil her little masquerade. So he said,
“I heard your daughter sing and play, once, at Greenwich; the boy’s voice and his handling of the lute reminded me. Perhaps she schooled him. And whoever he is, he went off unpaid, after singing so sweetly. Give him this, with my thanks.”
With one of the great royally generous gestures in which he so delighted he pulled from his little finger a ruby ring, the red stone the size of a thumbnail and all set around with diamonds. Lady Bo eyed it with appreh
ension; no woman could possibly look at it and not wish to wear it; so Anne would wear it and Tom would know that she had connived, behind his back!
“Your Grace, it is much too fine a gift. I will see to it that the boy is rewarded—adequately.”
Sir Thomas looked at the ring with green jealousy and fury. Typical! Throw to some scruffy little pageboy a ring worth a small fortune, grudge to a faithful servant the title he longed for, the title to which he had a right. All through this visit he had waited for the King to refer to the promise he had made at Saint Albans.
Henry said, a little too gently, “Lady Boleyn, I asked you to give this trinket to the singer.”
The girl would understand, he thought; just as he had understood the burden of her songs. The saucy ballad had informed him that she was no prude. The love song and the passion she had put into it had said—Look how I can love. The professional entertainers’ song at the end had been part of the joke, and the subtle changes in it had been meant for his ear alone. “Joy in store,” she had wished him. And he would have joy, for he was in love again. Wonderful, marvelous. She’d receive the ring and know that he understood; and he’d come back, and when he did…
He began immediately to prepare for that next visit, overwhelming his host and hostess with thanks and praise. Seldom, if ever, he said, had he received such hospitality; and nowhere in the world was there such ham as at Hever.
Lady Bo gave her husband a look which said—There you are! That was a ham that I cured myself before you became concerned about the state of my hands! And it said, in true Norfolk fashion—All these elaborate messed-about dishes, made to look like something other than what they are, and the King, the King himself singled out my ham!
But the ring weighed heavy in her hand. Before she slept she must make a clean breast of it to Tom. Never mind her promise to Anne. Husbands and wives should have no secrets from one another. In law they were regarded as one person; in the rubric they were called “one flesh,” and so they were, twice a week at least, when Tom was home, in the big tester bed.
So, in the bed, she told Tom everything, and he said, “Maybe it was as well. She isn’t pretty, but she is lively and taking and we don’t want Mary’s tale over again. I’m sick and tired of the notion that I rose to favor, not of my own merit, but on my daughter’s supine body. Untrue. Unfair. I was of sufficient importance to be one of those chosen to carry the canopy at the christening of the Princess Mary, years before our Mary caught the King’s eye. And I am still hoping for my rightful titles. I don’t want my enemies to say that I bought that with a virgin sacrifice.”
“The things you say!” said Lady Bo, so greatly relieved by the way he had taken her confession that she felt she could afford to be a little admonitory. Even now, even in the big bed…
IV
But Mary was the fairest, the most delicately featured, and the most feminine of the two.
Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England
…his cast-off mistress. Mary Boleyn.
Garrett Mattingley, The Life of Catherine of Aragon
BLICKLING HALL. JANUARY 7TH, 1524
CHRISTMAS THAT YEAR HAD BEEN spent at Blickling, to Lady Bo’s extreme delight. Ever since Anne had described the state of the house there, her housewifely fingers had itched to get busy. Also she liked the idea of spending the merriest festival of the year in her own countryside, where the voices, even of the gentry, had a homely, familiar sound.
It had promised to be, as Christmas should be, a family affair, for George was to be in Norfolk, too. His Grace had half-promised him the manor of Grimston, and he was anxious to look it over. Lady Bo, in those busy days between their own arrival and Christmas Eve when George was expected, had acted upon a piece of information which Sir Thomas had once let fall in a fit of anger, and prepared two bedchambers, one for George and one for Jane, his wife. They were unhappily married and no longer shared a bed. Lady Bo quite liked her stepdaughter-in-law, who always took pains to be civil to her, and who was so much more serious a person than George. George was frivolous and had a way of making mock of so many things and so many people that Lady Bo never felt quite at ease with him. However, Anne had cheered up considerably at the prospect of having George for company and Christmas was, in any case, a lighthearted season.
It had given everybody a surprise, almost a shock, when George arrived bringing with him, not Jane, but his sister Mary.
A daughter of the family had come home to spend Christmas and no one was pleased to see her.
Lady Bo always suffered a conflict of emotion when in Mary’s company; she found it impossible not to be censorious; and equally impossible not to feel straitlaced, countrified, old-fashioned and unkind for being censorious. There were the facts; Mary had established for herself a reputation for easy virtue even when she was in France; then she had been the King’s mistress; but the past was the past, and she was now respectably married, and she had, for all her elegance, such a sweet, almost simple way with her. Sometimes Lady Bo wondered whether Tom was not right in saying that Mary was half-witted. You couldn’t really look at her and believe that her wicked behavior had been deliberate. Lady Bo had always imagined that bad women, kept women, women who became men’s mistresses were hard-eyed, cynical, brash.
Sir Thomas regarded his elder daughter with disfavor for a number of reasons. It angered him, as it would have angered any able and ambitious man, to know that in the eyes of the world a good deal of his success was due to a pretty daughter’s frailty. It simply was not true, as he often said, with oaths. Hadn’t he, he would demand, been one of those chosen to carry the canopy over the Princess Mary when she was christened; wasn’t that a sign of high favor, and back in 1516 before the King ever looked at Mary? That he had bought his way by being complaisant was just another of the damnable lies put about by his enemies. At the same time it angered him to think that Mary had made so little of the vast opportunities she had been offered. For a little while—not long, but long enough—she had held the King’s heart in her hand; and what had she got out of it? Nothing. Not a house, not an acre of land, not a penny of money. All that shame and gossip and nothing to show for it. Lesser men’s mistresses went flaunting away with damned great manors, with monopolies in wool or wine, with pensions. Mary, after all the scandal, had got a husband, a plain Mr. Carey who was one of the gentlemen of the King’s bedchamber, and would never be anything more. It was the waste that most irked Sir Thomas’s thrifty mind. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, with a pink and white skin unflawed by the pox, and a voluptuous figure, what couldn’t she have made of herself? No spirit, that was her trouble.
Anne’s feelings toward her sister were more complicated than Lady Bo’s, more vehement than Sir Thomas’s. In the far distant past she had adored Mary, looking up to her as elder, more worldly-wise, more elegant and more beautiful; as far as possible, in her very early days she had modeled herself upon Mary, regretting equally that she lacked her looks, and that she could never match her placid good nature. And then, just when she herself had reached the most vulnerable, fastidious, idealistic and intolerant age of thirteen, she had learned the truth about Mary. And the truth was that not only had she just become the King’s mistress, but she had, while in France, gained a bad reputation, memories of which this most recent scandal revived. Mary who always looked so fresh, so clean, so pure, Mary whom she had loved.
Mary, who during her own time in France had suffered from her father’s extreme parsimony and never had any money for clothes, and now remembered, in her new prosperity, her little sister, sent across to Paris a parcel of clothing, all of rich material, hardly worn, and still smelling deliciously of the scented sachets which Mary always hung or laid amongst her clothes. The young Anne had at the sight and scent of them suffered a feeling of such revulsion that she was nauseated. A few hours of work—and she was clever with her needle—would have made them fit her more slender figure, and there was a long hooded cloak, lined with fur, and some stockings and
gloves which needed no alteration at all; but she had given everything away. And although she was as handy with a pen as with a needle she had written no letter of thanks. And when, not long after, the news had seeped through that Mary had married William Carey, she had not written to wish her well. And Mary had understood.
Back in London, during all her time in Catherine’s service Anne had dreaded coming face-to-face with her sister; it had never happened; and to Anne Mary had remained just a fallen idol and a horrid warning, a warning which had always sounded whenever Harry Percy had been a little too ardent.
Always that small, poisonous thought—Just because my sister Mary…At the same time being in love brought a new understanding and softened the fierce intolerance of the just-nubile. Having suffered the onset of temptation herself Anne began to see that Mary, with no example of a sister’s fall to warn her, had found it easy to succumb. Even that measure of understanding did not, however, make her wish to see Mary again; as adorer and adored they had come to an end, and any other relationship would be sad.
Yet, brought face-to-face with Mary, against the background of the old, loved home, it was impossible to believe that she had been anything but silly and too easily persuaded; in appearance, in manner, she had scarcely changed at all; she still looked pretty, fresh and pure; she was still gentle and softly spoken; she still had no defense against the taunts which Sir Thomas launched twenty times a day in some form or another.
He professed himself surprised that she should come visiting without her husband.
“George I can understand, his domestic ties gall him, but yours, my dear, was a love match, or so I was given to understand.”