The Concubine

by Norah Lofts

  Cromwell knew that when Henry addressed him as Mr. Secretary there was no escape.

  “But Your Grace, on what grounds? It was a legal marriage; the Dunstable Court…”

  “Damn the Dunstable Court. I can’t tell you what grounds. I can tell you the means. She’ll be tried and she’ll be condemned. The sentence is burning or beheading, according to my pleasure. Give her a little time to think over what burning means, and then offer her the merciful alternative, one clean stroke of the sword of a skilled headsman brought over from Calais, in return for her admission that she was never my wife. She can plead a precontract or any other obstacle she cares to name. Anything so long as our marriage is declared invalid and the way to the throne left clear for my next child, even supposing that to be another girl. You understand me?”

  Cromwell pondered. Then, pressing his fingertips together he said,

  “That, Your Grace, brings up an interesting point. If she were never your wife she cannot be an adulteress, nor a traitor. At worst she’s guilty of fornication, which is not a capital offence.”

  Henry said, “By God’s Holy Name, you are a shrewd fellow!” And having said that he had a feeling of horror, as though he had suddenly found himself on the very verge of a steep cliff. He’d always been the one with the keen mind, the quick perception. That had been his one advantage over Wolsey’s subtler brain; on hundreds of official documents his scribbled, pithy comments testified to his ability to see into the very heart of things at a glance. And he’d missed this. Worry and illness between them were destroying his mind.

  “What small wit I have is always at Your Grace’s service,” Cromwell said, flattered by the compliment. “And the point, though interesting, is not of importance. As Queen she will be tried, as Queen she will be condemned. Afterward, in a private session with some reliable authority, she admits a precontract. It may well be that one or two of these street-corner lawyers in which London abounds may fasten upon the point which we have recognized,” he tactfully gave Henry more than his due. “But there remains the charge of incest; that is a thing from which the mind of the ordinary man shrinks. It runs counter to every decent instinct. The rabble-rousers, even if they fasten on the No Queen, no adultery cry, as they might well do, would stop short at siding with an…Your Grace, I think there is no name for it…a partner in an incestuous relationship. If only,” he said a little plaintively, “that can be proved. What little evidence I have been able to collect in so short a time has no bearing on that aspect at all.”

  “Have you tried his wife?”

  “No, Your Grace. Surely the wife would be the last person…”

  “Ah,” Henry said. And he felt as though, playing tennis, he had missed one ball—the point about no Queen, no adultery—but was now given the chance of slamming one home. “Lady Rochfort, if I remember rightly, was one of those ardent supporters of the late Princess Dowager, who, when the French emissaries insisted upon visiting the Lady Mary, stood in the streets and cheered. It sent a whole gaggle of them to the Tower. She certainly has no fondness for her husband’s sister. She may be the last one to know, but she’ll be the first one to squawk, if you handle her rightly. And I’ll tell you how to handle her. Tell her the Tower is still there and that there are within it several less comfortable apartments than the one she occupied on her last visit. Then ask her a few questions; the answers may be…enlightening.”

  “I will do that immediately, Your Grace.”

  He could have withdrawn then. He’d got his orders. Run away little errand boy and do your master’s will. Handle filth, outwit the law, forestall any fair-minded Londoner who might stand up and say in the voice which, off and on had rung through England for a thousand years, “Look ’ere, this ain’t fair!” Yes, he was prepared to do this. It paid him to please the King.

  But now and then little boys, hardly borne down upon by their master, will place a tack, point upward on his chair.

  Cromwell, hard borne down upon, hating his master, had a little tack ready.

  He said, “With the trial so soon upon us, and much evidence still to gather, I am likely to be much occupied, Your Grace, until the end of the month. So I wonder…Do you feel well enough to consider another matter?”

  “I told you,” Henry said, “I feel better. What is this other matter?”

  “The dissolution of certain of the larger religious houses. All the subjects of very unfavorable reports from the commissioners. Setting other considerations aside, Your Grace’s exchequer could well do with their revenues.”

  The argument there was as nice an adjustment as the knotted rope around Smeaton’s head.

  Henry hated the dissolution of the religious houses; it smacked of Lutheranism; yet to leave them alone in the state in which some of them were, was to encourage precisely the kind of scandal that bred Lutheranism. They were also, and this must never be overlooked, places where loyalty to the Papacy still flourished. And, as Cromwell said, the money was extremely useful.

  Still, so far, he had dissolved only a few, the smallest, the uneconomic units, or those with the most scandalous reputation, and he’d dealt fairly, kindly even, with such of the monks and nuns as had been willing to acknowledge him as Head of the Church; they’d been given generous pensions, or, if qualified, installed in secular livings, one or two were now bishops.

  “I have a list here,” Cromwell said, drawing a roll from inside his robe. “Most of the incomes stated could, I think be multiplied twice, or even three times. They most consistently underestimate their revenues.” He unrolled a list and held it toward the King who knocked it aside with a sweep of his hand.

  “Five doddering old men or women in a crumbling house, a lame horse and four sheep with foot rot! Am I to be bothered with such nonsense now. Do as you like about them!”

  “The houses such as Your Grace so exactly describes have all been done away with,” Cromwell pointed out. “These are larger, and rich…”

  “I said do as you like. Does hay fever make you hard of hearing?”

  The tack had been well placed, and the prick administered. Cromwell retrieved the list, rolled and replaced it.

  “I shall set to work on Lady Rochfort immediately,” he said. “I trust that Your Grace’s health continues to improve.”

  Outside the room Cromwell breathed deeply of the uncontaminated air. And he deliberately removed his mind from all thought of the Queen and her coming trial and all the nasty business in connection with it. On the list in his breast there was the name of one enormously wealthy Abbey, the Benedictine house at Bury St. Edmunds. Abbot Reeve who ruled it, had just offered Cromwell a gift of ten pounds a year and a fine house at Harlow. He was trying to buy immunity for himself and his Abbey.

  I’ve just been told to do as I like. Cromwell reflected; I shall take the bribe, and give Abbot Reeve a respite, two or three years for being so obliging. The word will spread; others will follow his example. And God knows I need some reward for all the dirty work I am required to do.

  XL

  The Earl of Northumberland, Anne’s first lover, was named on the commission for her trial.

  Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England

  Another curious fact emerges concerning Cromwell’s activities…On May 13th he sent to the Earl of Northumberland, then residing at Newington Green, Sir Reynold Carnaby, who was known as a friend of his, to try to extract from him an admission that Anne had been pre-contracted to him.

  Philip Sergeant, The Life of Anne Boleyn

  NEWINGTON GREEN. MAY 13TH, 1536

  HARRY PERCY, EARL OF NORTHUMBERLAND, was having one of his bad days. Of late they had come more frequently, sometimes three or four of them in succession. At such times he was unable to eat without nausea and the pain in his body, ordinarily a dull gnawing, became so sharp that nothing but pride prevented him from crying out.

  Nobody knew what ailed him. He had suffered many things at the hands of various doctors; he had consulted wise women, especially in t
he North country where doctors were rare, and drunk their mixtures, tried their ointments, applied their plasters. Nothing eased him, and that, he perversely chose to believe, proved that there was nothing much the matter with him. Fussing about made the thing seem important; and there was nothing important about a bellyache.

  On this particular day, however, he was behaving like a sick man; yesterday he had sent for his doctor, and today rising at noon, he had not bothered to dress. Wrapped in a robe he sat in a chair by the window, just above a little knot garden whose colors shone in the sunshine; he had his feet on a stool and a folded rug over his thin knees.

  He was husbanding his strength; he must be well by Monday.

  On the previous day he had received the information that he had been one of the twenty-six peers chosen to act as “lord triers” in the trial of the Queen.

  He was only thirty-three, but women no longer meant anything to him—a fact which, had he examined it frankly, might have hinted to him that he was more seriously ill than he chose to admit. He could not have been said, with any truth, to be in love with Anne any longer; there was too great a gulf between the girl who had kissed him in the Greenwich garden and the woman who had married Henry Tudor. But the girl still lived in his heart; he felt sentimental about her and the news that she was to stand trial for her life had been a sickening shock. He was sure that the charge was a rigged one. At sixteen she had been prudish, when by being not prudish she had nothing to lose and much to gain; and a girl like that didn’t suddenly turn madly wanton at twenty-nine, when she was in a position where wantonness could gain her nothing and could lead to certain disaster.

  As soon as he had received the message and absorbed its meaning he had begun to feel ill. He had noticed in the past that his worst attacks often followed upon a fit of anger or any kind of excitement. He had felt vilely ill when he had gone to arrest Wolsey. On this occasion he almost welcomed the pain and the nausea. I’m a sick man, he thought. I can’t go and sit through a trial. There are fifty-three peers in England, let them choose another.

  So he had sent for his doctor, who had clystered him, and he had fully intended to stay in his bed and to write a letter, in shaky, infirm hand, pleading disability.

  He’d slept very little until it was almost dawn. The window was pale, and the birds were beginning to make tentative little calls. Then he fell asleep and dreamed that he was riding in a wild and desolate place in his native Northumberland; riding his favorite sorrel horse. Suddenly the fog had come down. He thought, I’m a long way from home still, but no matter. Rufus can pick his way. He’d let the rein go slack and the horse, as though responding to this gesture of trust, trotted briskly and confidently into the murk. And then it had stopped, so abruptly that he had jerked forward. Some obstacle in the road, he thought; and speaking soothingly, he had leaned forward and tried to peer ahead. And there she was. Anne, just as she had been years ago except that above the black waterfall of hair she wore the ruby coronet in which she had gone to her Coronation. She looked at him and held out her hands, appealingly. He thought—She’s lost in this fog; how lucky we came along. He leaned and reached for her hands to lift her, but a swirling cloud of fog came between them. He cried, ‘Anne!’” And woke.

  The window was yellow with sunlight and all the birds were shouting.

  He lay there and thought—There will be twenty-six lords there and some must be honest. The King has made himself greatly feared, but even he could not contemplate a mass beheading of half the peers in England.

  He thought—She isn’t guilty. If they’d named one man I could have believed that after all these years she had found another love; she never loved Henry, of that I am sure. But she might, perhaps, have found one love. Not five, one her own brother, and one her musician, once a plowboy. That is ridiculous. And whoever framed this charge knew nothing about her, nothing at all.

  He thought—She was always quick-witted and words came to her easily. She could confound the witnesses, hostile, bribed, scared that they’ll bring against her.

  He thought—All the lord triers are men; she’ll charm them.

  He thought—I must be there, to give my vote in her favor and to give a lead to the waverers.

  So he must be well by Monday.

  Bent on getting well, full of buttermilk which he detested but which seemed the only thing his disordered stomach would tolerate, he was sitting in the reclining position his doctor advised, breathing the fresh air from the open window when his friend Sir Reynold Carnaby arrived.

  It was three months since they had last met and the Earl was furious to be caught in this invalid guise.

  “A trifling indisposition,” he said. “I overate and am paying for it. But it gives me great pleasure to see you. Sit down. What happy chance brought you this way?”

  “An old cousin of mine, a woman, somewhat infirm, lives nearby, and I visit her from time to time and try to order her affairs. She was at odds with her cowman. Having settled that I thought I might look in on you and beg a proper meal. Old women, I find, fall into two sorts, those who delight in food, those who despise it. My cousin, alas, is one of the latter kind. My dinner this day was a soused herring, a small one, a slice of black bread, a month old, and a glass of homemade wine that tasted like horse piddle.”

  “You recognized the taste?”

  Well, Carnaby thought, thank God Percy could still crack one of his unsmiling jokes. His friend’s appearance had been a shock to him; the eyes fallen back into dark hollows, the skin stretched so tight over the face bones that the skull seemed to be about to break through.

  “You shall have a meal,” the Earl said, and rang his bell. “My cooks cook whether I eat or not. You shall have a good, if belated dinner. I only wish I could join you; but I must get the better of this attack by tomorrow, so that I can take my place on Monday.”

  “Oh, have you been chosen?” He thought of the question which he had been sent here to ask. (“You’re a friend of the Earl’s,” Fitzwilliam, one of the commissioners, had said, “and he’s more likely to speak frankly to you than to anyone sent expressly for the purpose of asking.” Carnaby, no fool, had asked some apparently artless questions designed to discover why the inquiry was being made at all. Fitzwilliam had said that the answer might have some bearing on the procedure, and added that Carnaby need not worry; whatever the answer, the Earl would not be affected. The commissioners merely wanted to know what truth there was in the rumor. “Put the question as casually as you can,” he said.)

  Now he waited till the table was set up and several choice dishes set before him. Then he said, casually,

  “I suppose you know that among the rumors this affair has revived is one which holds that you and the Queen were once betrothed. Is it true?”

  “No. It’s a tale my wife invented when she had a notion to divorce me. She and her damned father put their heads together and thought of getting rid of me on a plea of precontract. I denied it, naturally.”

  “Why?” Carnaby’s voice held nothing but friendly interest. “It would have made you a free man.”

  “It happened not to be true,” the Earl said. “We never were betrothed. How could we be? Mary and I were pledged from childhood. And I saw no reason to tell a lie in order to let Mary have her headstrong way. Would you?”

  “I might have, in your place. I’m afraid I should have thought a lie a small price to pay for freedom. You could have married again.”

  “I’d had my bellyful of marriage by that time. And frankly, given the choice between the truth and a lie I choose the truth, which is why I never made much success at Court. I claim no credit for it,” he said, looking at Carnaby who was young and ambitious and had his way to make, and possibly many lies to tell in the process. “It’s as personal a foible as a taste for oysters.”

  Carnaby was convinced; he could go back and tell Fitzwilliam confidently that there was no truth in the rumor. But his own interest was aroused; and having cut himself a slice of brawn an
d peppered it, he said,

  “You knew her well?”

  “The Queen? Yes, thirteen years ago. She came from France and joined Catherine’s ladies. I was attached to the Cardinal’s household. Comings and goings to and fro. You know how it is.”

  “What was she like, then?”

  “Oh, it’s hard to say. Young. Gay. And she never had any money. Her father—well, you know him, avaricious and mean, he never could realize that a girl at Court needed clothes. So she used to contrive things; she could do marvels with a yard of ribbon…and never sorry for herself about it; she’d laugh, particularly when other women copied her tricks.”

  He had never spoken about her in that way to anyone and was astounded at himself. Carnaby listening thought—You may not have been betrothed to her, but you were in love. And hearing of her plight made you ill. How horrible it must be to be chosen to sit in judgment, in such a case, when the accused was someone you have loved. And when only one verdict was possible…

  He was tactful; he finished his meal, expressed his thanks, sat for ten minutes giving a vivacious account of his old cousin’s dispute with her cowman, and then rose and said he must be getting back. Then, as he took his leave he said,

  “If I were you I’d excuse myself from the trial. A…a bilious attack lasts three days, the place will be crowded and very hot. I’ll carry a message for you and explain. It’d be no trouble at all.”

  “That’s kindly. But I shall be well. And I shall be there.”

  When he was alone again he sat by the window, thinking of this and that, and among other things about courage. Once, not so long ago, either, it had been a very simple thing. A matter of risking hurt to your body. You dealt blows and accepted them. Now that kind of courage was not enough; you had to face disapproval, possible disgrace, obloquy. Knights rode into the lists proudly displaying their chosen lady’s favor, a glove, a sleeve, a flower. He faced a combat of a different kind. On Monday he would give proof of his belief in Anne’s innocence. When he had said, “I shall be there,” he had spoken as the heir to a long line of fighting Percys, formidable men, each in his generation.