To Obey and Serve

by V L Perry

  I still remember it by heart. I heard it over and over again; we all had to take it, though that came later.

  Begotten and to be begotten. She had more work ahead of her: already she was showing a small belly, and next month her pregnancy would be announced. Act of Succession or not, the king still wanted his boy.

  About this time I was rummaging in my trunk under our bed and found that my horn-book was not as I had left it, but had been clumsily thrust between the layers of linen, as if by someone in a hurry. It was a smallish one with a chain through the handle, by which it could hang from a lady’s girdle. Kratzer had given it to me to practice between lessons. Though it was many months now since I had gone to his apartments, I had seen him a few times since at the queen’s evening game-tables. He hadn’t asked for it back.

  “Jane,” I asked later, “have you used my hornbook?”

  She did not know what I was talking about. I offered to get her an alphabet, even to help her learn. But she insisted that she had seen no hornbook, had not looked in my trunk, and had no need to waste time copying out ABCs like a schoolgirl, which probably stung more than she intended. It could have been any one of the maids of honor, or even the chamberers. I did not think about it again until much later. Too late, I suppose you could say.

  There was news from Parliament. The Act of Attainder against Elizabeth Barton and her priests was passed. They stood guilty of high treason and would suffer the full public traitors’ deaths: first drawn on a cart to Tyburn crossroads, then to be hanged by the neck and cut down alive, their insides taken out of their stomachs, their heads cut off, their bodies each to be divided into four parts, and the heads and quarters to be distributed around the kingdom, as the king should decide. The queen smiled when she heard it. It passed through my head to wonder if the child in her womb drew a taste for vengeance from his mother’s humors, whether he would be born hungering for it.

  That night a cold March rain rushed against the window of our chamber, and white bursts of light briefly outlined the forms in the rows of beds. It had rained hard last night, and the night before, but not as viciously as this.

  I watched the downpour as I lay in bed. What was it like in the Tower, where they were lodged? Not the chambers open to the public, but perhaps in a dank dungeon. Were they in chains? I tried to imagine what it would be like to lie in chains, to have your every movement anchored by cold, rusted metal, unable even to scratch a maddening itch.

  “Jane,” I whispered, “are you awake?”

  “Yes, and I’ve been listening to you thrash about for half an hour. Whatever’s the matter?”

  I couldn’t explain to her the images that had kept me awake: of how Elizabeth Barton’s head, a head which I had seen in life, would soon be rotting on London Bridge. Of Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher, still refusing the Oath even with the Holy Maid’s example before them. Or how I sometimes touched the hollows of my eye sockets, imagining the white bone beneath the skin. “I keep thinking about death.”

  “That’s what you think about on a night like this, when the devil’s abroad?” She yawned. “Say a prayer, and try to sleep.”

  “Jane, listen: if you could choose your death, would it be? I mean, when the time comes; we’ve all got to.”

  “The time is in God’s hands, not ours. It’s wicked to think of such things.”

  “Why? We pray to St. Joseph for a happy death; I’ve been trying to imagine what a happy death is, and I can’t.”

  “To die in the faith of Christ, with our sins forgiven.”

  “Oh, Jane, I know that, but that’s not what I mean.”

  She rolled onto her side, propped herself up on her elbow. “Well, I suppose I should like it to be painless.”

  “Would you want to know it beforehand, to have time to prepare, or would you rather it be sudden?”

  “It would depend: if I’m an old woman, in bed surrounded by my children and grandchildren, I’d want time to bid them farewell. If I’m to be carried off by the plague or sweating sickness, I’d want it to be quick.”

  There had to be more to death and life than simply avoiding pain. “What about you?” she asked, as though she wasn’t interested in the answer.

  I had no answer. But it seemed the most frightening thing about death was eventually being forgotten, as though you had never existed.

  “But we are remembered,” Jane protested. “In Masses, and through our children, and theirs.”

  Something about that did not satisfy. The monks might say the masses your family bought for you, or they might collect the fee and do nothing. And anyway, eventually everyone who remembered you, or knew someone who had, would be forgotten as well. Only kings and queens, and the heroes of legends, could be sure of living on after their deaths. Or those rich enough to have their portraits painted. But even a humble kitchen clerk or poor scholar could leave a paper legacy. Their writings might be read centuries hence - a kind of immortality.

  I watched the rain-shadows, and listened to my heart. How many more hours, months, years did it have remaining?

  “You were thinking of her, weren’t you?” Jane said, low. “Of them.”

  I shrugged. “She had her chance; she’s chosen her fate. Her scheming will come to naught.”

  Jane sat up. “You do not believe in her? And yet you are from the same village as she is! Surely you saw her miracles there; you saw her prophesy here at court.” Ann Saville coughed and turned over, shushing us. Jane ignored her. “They say she has received a letter from Mary Magdalene herself, written in heaven.”

  I did not know what I had seen. The priests called it a miracle; my mother called it sinful playacting; Cranmer called it blasphemy; Cromwell and the king called it treason. But suffering fits alone did not a saint make, that much I knew. And anyone could write a letter.

  “I saw the same thing you did,” I answered, a bit hotly. “And it was artifice. That’s not what a fit is like.” I had never spoken of it before, and we both were quiet a minute.

  “I’ll go to see them at Tyburn, if she’ll let us,” Jane said. She never referred to the queen except as she and her, I noticed in passing. “At least I’ll get to see her go to heaven.”

  There was nothing to say to that, so we each rolled over, backs together, and listened to the rain and distant thunder. I could not bring myself to believe, much as I wanted to. Jane’s faith was simple, uncomplicated – the most dangerous kind.

  The Act of Succession passed on March 23, two days before Annunciation. In Roman times, the new year started in March; even now, official government documents began their dates anew on the 25th, though the celebrations and gifts were moved to January. So this year, the twenty-fifth year of the reign of King Henry VIII, was to begin on an ominous note.

  There was other news in those days, of course. We did not sit talking of politics and treason trials, though they were always in the background:

  A harlot called Alice Wolff had very nearly escaped from the Tower. Her cell door, it turned out, was secured only by a chop-bone, and she climbed down a rope ladder dressed in men’s clothes which her pander (named, appropriately, John Bawd) had hidden in her cell. Now she was to be hanged, and Bawd was at Guildhall in Little Ease, a cage too small to let him stand or turn, awaiting the rack. Norfolk’s younger son, Edmund Howard, was in charge of keeping the key to both Elizabeth Barton’s and Alice Wolff’s cells—which Wolff had somehow copied or stolen. Both the king and queen held the entire Howard family responsible. She had jibed Norfolk about it, who had burst out with something incoherent about a “high-riding chit” before slamming out.

  We listened to this adventure tale with the twitter of the queen’s new pet linnet, a gift sent from Lady Lisle in Calais, singing in the background. “The governor’s wife is most generous,” the queen sighed, “but I have no places in my household at the moment.”

  For Mary Howard was among us still, even after her marriage to Richmond, for the king had ordered them not to consummate their unio
n. Whether for fear for the Duke’s delicate health (for young Prince Arthur’s death had been hastened by his newlywed sport with Katharine of Aragon), or preventing his landholdings from passing to his widow upon his death was a matter for the gossips to sort out. Most likely the king did not wish for a son by his own bastard to complicate the already-messy succession even further.

  Mary Boleyn was fey this spring, standing dreaming to herself for minutes together at times, and smiling like a simpleton whenever anyone called her out of her reverie. They teased her about her secret love, and speculated about which of the king’s gentlemen it might be. She was adroit at ignoring them. It occurred to me as I watched her languid, honey-slow movements that I wasn’t even certain what her voice sounded like.

  Lady Exeter had written the king a letter begging forgiveness for her correspondence with Dame Elizabeth Barton; she admitted that she had sent for the girl for a private consultation in Surrey, but only once, long ago, to ask whether her then-unborn child would live. She swore she’d had no secret contact with her, before the king’s marriage or since. The queen obtained a copy from Cromwell and read it in a mocking voice one afternoon when Lady Exeter was away.

  “It seems Lady Exeter has had a revelation of her own,” she finished, folding it to lay in her silver letter-casket. “Are there no prophecies that I shall bear many sons and serve my people well and justly? Are they all slanders against me?”

  “Indeed not,” Meg said. “My brother Thomas has a man in his household who declares he has had messages from an angel that Your Grace should have been queen these ten years past.”

  “Aye,” Jane spoke up suddenly. “Sorting the false prophets from the true has ever been the task of princes. Even Christ Himself had to do it.”

  The queen looked at Jane a moment, surprised. “Indeed, Mistress Seymour,” she laughed. “Tis very true.”

  She was in high spirits, for the king had arranged a meeting with the king of France to betroth little Elizabeth to one of the dauphins. And the child had quickened in her belly. Papers and acts, treaties and oaths were all well and good, but a prince would outshine them all. Pray for a prince.

  The day Elizabeth Barton, called the Holy Maid of Kent, was executed along with five of her priests, Lady Exeter did not appear in the queen’s chambers. She risked more than the queen’s wrath by doing so: she risked Cromwell’s ever-more-interested attention. His triumph would be complete when More and Fisher realized their cause was doomed and signed the Oath. There must, perforce, be examples to encourage them.

  Others from the queen’s household went to see them die that gloriously sunny April morning, Jane among them, though she never spoke about it afterwards. I knew she prayed for them later, whispering over her rosary. That day I went about laying out jars, combs, toothpicks and cloths on the queen’s dressing table, sat at dinner without eating, and stitched drearily that afternoon on a scene of the martyrdom of St. Anne.

  All the while my mind stayed fixed, as if by sorcery, on the events at Tyburn as they must be unfolding: now they were heating the cauldron, now they were oiling the ropes to ensure their flexibility, now one by one they mounted the scaffold and spoke their last words. But the smell of blood on freshly sanded wood, the screams of men as their bodies were cut apart, their privy parts stuffed into their mouths, the victims forced to behold with dying eyes their own roasting intestines, like smoking sausages…I knew of those things, but could not conjure them fully into my mind.

  It wasn’t until sunset that we heard the first reports of how they had died, the Holy Maid first, very chivalrous. She had begged forgiveness of God and the king, admitted that her prophecies and visions had all been false, the design of the priests. “And I, being puffed up with their praises, fell into a certain pride and foolish fantasy with myself, and thought I might feign what I would.” So much for God’s appointed messenger on earth.

  It was best to give such a penitent speech, whatever one’s true feelings. Otherwise you might find the executioner suddenly beset by clumsiness: three or four bungled strokes of the axe, or a rope that came untied at the key moment so that it must be done again, and again.

  They hanged her simply, cutting her down only when they were sure she was dead. Her head would adorn London Bridge with the others, though her arms and legs would not be severed and bared to further shame. But the rest suffered the full horror of a traitor’s execution. The crowd got the show they wanted. When the executioner reached into Father Rich’s chest to tear out his slippery, still-beating heart, he gasped, even in his agony: “What you are holding is consecrated to God.” Even now, boys were being paid twopence to carry sacks of legs or arms to be hung up at crossroads as a warning.

  They’d brought it on themselves. They’d been given time to recant, more time than Cromwell would have preferred. What they craved was martyrdom, and they’d died needlessly, for there would be no relics. Soon all records of them would be destroyed, forgotten.

  Yet I felt a strange kind of mourning for her: she had once been only a servant-girl in Aldington, “a poor wench without learning,” with an affliction twisted by the priests to their own political ends, and she had paid the ultimate price along with them. But for my mother’s caution, it could have been me.

  More and Fisher refused the Oath, as everyone knew they would. Both were arrested – the king’s most pious bishop and the king’s most trusted statesman and friend – and consigned to relatively comfortable cells in the Tower. More even kept his books. Fisher had beheld Elizabeth Barton’s trances and wept, convinced of her divine powers, but More had never met her. Like Katharine of Aragon, he had refused all her requests for audiences, stating that her trances were nothing more and nothing less than demon possession, which might be cured by a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Ipswich. Fisher might die for his connection with her, but More had kept himself safe. As careful of his reputation as of his conscience. Now both placed him in jeopardy; would they save him or be his undoing?

  Tom Seymour had not spent time alone with me since a few stolen moments shortly before the queen took to her chamber last September. It was no great mystery, but more puzzling was why he hadn’t eventually come back. Every stallion will return to graze on stubble after the rest of the new lushness is eaten.

  There are things we do that we know we shouldn’t, yet take a perverse pleasure in watching ourselves do them anyway. More than once I have pricked myself deliberately with my needle, as much for the sight of the red welling out as to excuse myself from the endless drudgery of sewing.

  But when I made bold to approach him once at dinner, he slammed his arm away from me so fast that some ale splashed out of his tankard. “I’ve no wish to hunt in another’s field,” he slurred at me. His eyes were small; he was drunk.

  nearly pulled back from me. That was something, Tom Seymour nervous; I had no illusion that I was the cause. But what was it? Had Jane spoken to him, warned him away? Or told him nonsense about Kratzer? Tom would not have let the thought of a rival put him off; if anything, it should have sharpened his appetite for competition.

  His meaning came clear soon enough.

  A liveried yeoman stepped forward to press a paper-wrapped parcel into my hand early one evening as I crossed the courtyard on my way to the house of easement. At most of the other royal palaces, we could use the garderobes in the queen’s privy chambers, but the king had built an imposing brick edifice at Hampton solely for this purpose. All the court who did not have private quarters shared it, women on the upper floor and men on the lower. Although one was never alone, it was the most private moment to be had at court.

  At first I thought there had been a mistake.

  “No, lady,” the fellow said. He was barely more than a boy, his voice sounding new-changed. “I was to give to you direct; the king was very particular about describing you exact, and pointed you out.”

  The king. With wooden fingers I unfolded the parchment, and nearly dropped the ruby, winking scarlet in the low-streami
ng sun. It was an oval cabochon, round on one side and flat on the other.

  The fading light shadows made the paper difficult to see. I cupped the ruby in one hand and smoothed the parchment as I read the cramped writing there.

  It was the old familiar words, the same tune I had heard sung so many times in the queen’s chambers of an afternoon, when she read his love letters aloud to us. Only not the same: the king had courted his Lady with poems, with gifts of game hunted from his estates, with portraits of himself, but never with a bribe as blatant as this.

  The man stood as though awaiting an answer. “What is this?” I asked, though I knew well enough.

  “His Grace was desirous to approach you, but he knows not how. He is reluctant, fearful of rejection.”

  Oh yes, King Henry VIII was so shy that he offered payment in advance for services he expected to be rendered. Of course he was reluctant; I spent most of my waking hours in the presence of his wife. The letter itself was a sure ticket to dismissal once her sharp eyes spotted it, or one of the others snatched it from under my mattress.

  I handed the ruby back to him and he took it, disbelieving. “What message for His Majesty?”

  “No message.” I could feel his astonished stare on my back as I continued across the courtyard.

  In the darkening shadows of the royal privy, I tore the letter to pieces and dropped it down the hole.

  I knew the king would not be put off so easily. I knew that there were no secrets at court, and that the news would grow. What I did not expect was how it would distort as it grew, like a monstrous birth.

  First there were the stares. I was accustomed to being ignored, and the feeling of so many eyes upon me made me feel quite naked as I came to Mass. Some, like Meg, were colder than before, but to my surprise many others smiled warmly at me: Bess, Mary, Madge…even Nan Cobham was civil. Perhaps the king’s favor was a mantle that I could draw about me like a protective cloak…if it did not prove too heavy.