To Obey and Serve

by V L Perry

  The king is not here. He’s at Esher, where he hopes the unwelcome visitor will not follow. He cannot bear to look upon a dead wife. He’s never yet seen one.

  Queen Jane’s corpse lies in state in her presence chamber here at Hampton. I have been here my whole life; there has never been anything but this room. Two-foot tapers of white wax burn day and night around her coffin, casting ghostly reflections on the polished wood, the drippings sizzling the silk wrapped round their bases. She looks asleep, though not peacefully; as though she listens for her newborn’s hungry cries in an adjacent chamber. Her milk never came in; toward the end she complained her breasts were aching and hot, before she lapsed into delirium. Motherhood was never her destiny.

  The late afternoon daylight will fade from the chamber in another half hour, and the priests will come to keep the night watch. Watching by night is a holy experience. I remember our midnight chapel visit on St. Agnes’s Eve so long ago; if God exists, and is merciful, she did not see a vision of this then. But even if she had, it might not have stopped her.

  The others ladies are almost always here—no privacy, even in death--though now they are at Mass, praying for the queen’s soul as ordered. I have stayed to keep vigil. They think it a selfless act of devotion.

  Her breast and fingers are also weighted with jewelry, so much that she would find it difficult to sit up or lift her hands. This is all I can think as I look at her, noting the sharp outline of her nose, the waxiness of her neck. She’s starting to look sunken, old, a relic. Saint Jane, patron of ambition. Prince Edward may not know what a saint is by the time he reaches manhood. I could take a remembrance, but will not.

  Of course there are ceremonies, eulogies. They call her selfless, devoted, good, sweet, temperate, patient, gentle, kind. These are from people who knew her not at all. None of them tell the truth, of course, but that’s probably best.

  Here is a ballad about her death. There are several versions, but I like this one most:

  Queen Janie, Queen Janie, labor’d six weeks and more,

  Till women and midwives had quite gi’en her o’er:

  “O if ye were women as women should be,

  Ye would send for a doctor, a doctor to me.”

  The doctor was called for and set by her bedside:

  'What ails thee, my lady, thine eyes seem so red?'

  “O doctor, O doctor, will ye do this for me,

  To rip up my two sides and save my baby?”

  “Queen Janie, Queen Jeanie, that's the thing I'll ne’er do,

  To rip up your two sides to save your baby.”

  Queen Janie, Queen Janie, travail’d six weeks and more,

  Till women and midwives had quite gi’en her oer.

  “O if you were doctors as doctors should be,

  Ye would send for King Henry, King Henry to me.”

  King Henry was called for and sat by her bedside,

  “What aileth thee, Janie? what aileth my bride?”

  “King Henry, King Henry, will you do this for me,

  To rip up my two sides, and save my baby?”

  “Queen Janie, Queen Janie, that's what I'll never do,

  To rip up your two sides to save your baby.”

  But with sighing and sobbing she's fallen in a swoon,

  Her side it was rip’t up, and her baby was found;

  At this bonnie babe's christ’ning was great joy and mirth,

  But bonnie Queen Janie lies cold in the earth.

  Six and six coaches, and six and six more,

  And royal King Henry went mourning before;

  O two and two gentlemen carried her away,

  But royal King Henry went weeping away.

  O black were their stockings, and black were their bands,

  And black were the weapons they held in their hands;

  O black were their mufflers, and black were their greaves,

  And black were the chevrons they drew on their sleeves.

  They mourned in the kitchen, and they mourned in the hall,

  But royal King Henry mourned longest of all:

  “Farewell to fair England, farewell evermore!

  For the fair flower of England will never shine more.”

  There is one that says we would “fain give her o’er,” which is nonsense as well as treasonous slander. But not as bad as the one where she calls for her “dear father” and he kneels pitiably by her bedside. I laughed when I heard it, in front of others, too. They probably thought I’d gone mad.

  The one thing it gets right is the king’s reaction: he mourns grievously, as he did not for either of his other wives. For him this is his first widowerhood, his first denial from God of the thing he wants. Already the privy council urges him to remarry, proposing several foreign matches. Though where they’ll manage to find them, God knows. The king of England is a prize few princesses will strive for now. Perhaps that is why he mourns so.

  It’s begun already: my uncle has brought his wife and her family to Hampton for the funeral service. They include her youngest half-sister, who is yet another Howard; no good crop can spring from that seed. The girl is beautiful, and hides her eyes shyly behind a handkerchief soaked (I suspect) with perfume rather than tears. No doubt she’s been told that the modesty attracts the king. He does not notice her yet; she will doubtless grow bolder. They all will.

  Here is the single letter I found in the silver casket in her closet:

  My Dear friend and mistress,

  The bearer of these few lines from thy entirely devoted servant will deliver into thy fair hands a token of my true affection for thee, hoping you will keep it for ever in your sincere love for me. Advertising you that there is a ballad made lately of great derision against us, which if it go abroad and is seen by you; I pray you to pay no manner of regard to it. I am not at present informed who is the setter forth of this malignant writing; but if he is found out, he shall be straitly punished for it.

  For the things ye lacked, I have minded my lord to supply them to you as soon as he could buy them. Thus hoping, shortly to receive you in these arms, I end for the present,

  Your own loving servant and sovereign,

  HR

  Note how the salutation is simply switched round from the first letter he wrote to Anne Boleyn; by this time his creativity must have been giving out.

  Here is the ballad the king refers to, the one that made him so angry. I did not hear it until later; you may be sure no one was singing it around Greenwich Palace at the time. I got Nicholas’s pageboy to recite the only part he could remember:

  From one to another, the king’s old refrain:

  “The Lady’s no lover; I’ll court Mistress Jane.

  And when the Lady’s no longer, I’ll marry again.”

  I paid him a penny for it. Then I warned him that if I ever heard him sing it again, I’d have him thrashed within an inch of his life.

  Her story is over. This is how the histories will finish it:

  And God smiled upon this marriage, for Jane bore the king his boy-child after all. Then she died.

  Did she see Anne Boleyn waiting there for her at the gate of hell, her early-born prince in her arms?

  SUMMER 1536

  All during those terrible days in May, I waited. While my body went through the outward motions of holding to life, inwardly I was numb. It was if a winter storm had swept over spring, leaving me a frozen block.

  As with the Holy Maid of Kent, Cromwell attempted to destroy all records of the queen’s trial. I know not whether any survive; I doubt it. He was a thorough man. Would future generations remember her as an adulteress and traitor? Or would they remember her at all?

  As for the others, they fared as carrion crows usually do. Lady Rochford left court for a time, supposedly in mourning for her husband. Normally the estates of those executed for treasons were forfeited to the crown, but Lady Rochford enjoyed her temporary exile at Newhall in Essex. Wyatt, her cousin-lover who the king had once banished from court for
describing in detail all he had known of the queen as a girl, both “above” and “down below,” now wrote from the Tower to remind the king that he had warned him not to marry her in the first place. Amazingly, this worked; not only did the king Wyatt free, but appointed him ambassador to Spain. So much for losing “blind desire of estate.”

  Carew and Bryan, and the rest of the conspirators…I will come to them again. Treason becomes a habit, and they could not keep from plotting any more than a fish can stop swimming.

  And Jane? Well, of course you know. Or rather, you know the official version. Too often her reign is seen merely as a gloss in the king’s long reign, like a note written in the margin of a book. Too brief to have effected much change, too goodly to be worth gossiping about. It is time the true details were set down.

  Their betrothal was announced the day after the guns boomed out the queen’s death. There was much work: my uncle, reappointed vice-chamberlain to her new household, had the task of sorting out who would stay and who would go. Bess Harvey was dismissed to her family’s estates, with no explanation and no severance. Meg Wyatt was gone too, to her husband’s estates in Buckinghamshire where she died later that year giving birth to their second son. She had been the queen’s friend, perhaps her only true friend, and had walked with her to the scaffold. She would probably not have wanted to continue in a world where her most godly queen and friend had been replaced by a chit of a girl with no honor left to speak of.

  “You will remain,” my uncle said without looking up from writing out his list. I had come back to the queen’s apartments intending to collect my trunk and return to Kent, for surely there would be no place for me in this new household.

  “But what of…” I did not know what to call her.

  “It is her express wish that you keep your place here. I have her letter,’ and he rested his large square hand on a folded paper.

  One of the workmen at the far end of the chamber fumbled his chisel and cursed, startling me. The glaziers and carvers were paid double to remove the letter A from every window and screen—some put there just before May Day—and replace them with a stately Latin I in time for the wedding: I for Jane, by the Grace of God Queen of England. He ducked his head apologetically as I looked at him, poor fellow. Of course, he was better off than I; he got to leave when his work was done.

  The smell of warm spices filled the lower corridors near the kitchens, from the cakes baking for the honeymoon reception at Greenwich. Cakes and sweetmeats take long to prepare; perhaps the paste for these had been started while Queen Anne was still in the Tower. The flowers gathered by the cartload to decorate the great hall must have been unfurling their first leaves as she counted her last hours.

  Such thoughts held a morbid, perverse allure. I let my mind drift to them whenever the moment before me became too much to bear.

  . The Wednesday before Whitsun, Dr. Barnes invoked a prayer for Queen Jane in his sermon at Mass. So it was done, then. And they would come here tomorrow, to spend the holiday and arrange her household.

  June arrived with its usual orgy of color and fragrance, the thin green stubble in the royal parks transforming to deep lushness almost overnight. The heralds proclaimed that the king and queen were on their way. I started when I heard the word queen, then remembered.

  She was gone. I had never said goodbye; I was not among those she sent remembrances to, or even turned to look at before she left. She had been erased, her badges and initials sanded off, painted over, chiseled out of the public spaces in churches and colleges and manor halls. The ideas she had supported, the reform she had worked for… gone. Yet it was too much to take in; she would not truly be dead to me until I saw the woman who had stepped into her place as queen.

  The city of Greenwich was decorated as if for some great festival: banners and ribbons hung out of every window and over every wall, the people gathered on the riverbank to watch the flashing gold and purple barge as it slid smoothly into the dock. The palace was aired, scrubbed, hung with garlands, as if to cleanse away the last of the taint from her predecessor. The entire company awaited them in the great hall, where we would commence the feast.

  Beside me Nicholas touched my arm with his. It was enough, that small reminder of his presence, to steady me.

  The king entered and walked the length of the hall to the dais, a broad-shouldered green-and-silver marvel. Had he always walked so slowly? He held his hand high in the clasp of a woman in a crimson velvet gown worked with gold and silver. But even from this distance I could tell it was not the slender, dark-haired form who had glided beside him so many times in this very place; it was merely Jane Seymour, the girl I’d known and served with for years. I could not understand why there should be such fuss and ceremony over her.

  Then one of the heralds called out: “May God save their majesties, Henry the Eighth, by the grace of God king of England, and his lawful wife, Queen Jane!”

  They were nodding slowly to those on each side, as if they had both done it all their lives. Jane was on the side nearest me, and as she drew close, her eyes touched on mine but looked straight through me. The small white fingers clasped in the king’s larger, redder hand were smooth and perfect, the nails buffed to a high sheen.

  They skirted the firepit and took their seats at the high table, where Lady Exeter and her husband waited to serve them. The cloth of estate had been reworked with Queen Jane’s badge and motto: Reus obtempero quod Servo. Bound to obey and serve.

  I had worried that I might have no appetite. But as it turned out, I ate and drank as heartily as a soldier. Funeral feasts always make one hungry.

  The swearing-in ceremony lasted much of the next day, for there were more than two hundred members of the new queen’s household, and each of them must proclaim their loyalty to her with their words and signature. I was among the last, being not among the great families or peers’ wives, and also being in no great hurry. A few words, some ink on paper, and I was bound to her by an oath stronger than blood, to serve her faithfully until her death or mine. I knew exactly how much those words were worth.

  There were more elevations: Edward Seymour to Viscount Beauchamp, Chancellor of North Wales, and Lord Chamberlain; Tom was now a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber. You’d have thought someone had handed him a dog turd, so stretched was his grimace of thanks. He had set his sights higher than tending to the king’s combs and towels, however much other courtiers might covet such a position. With time and judgment, he could certainly rise high, but never out of his brother’s shadow. And he had little of either.

  Toward the end of June, Parliament passed the bill of nullity which dissolved the king’s marriage to his second wife. Their union had never existed. Words undid other words; flesh is as fragile as paper.

  Each time I heard the crier in the great hall announce Queen Jane, each time Nicholas collapsed on top of me, each time I looked for a leopard or falcon badge and saw instead a panther or a phoenix (or worse, an empty space), I knew I should feel something. Yet nothing, nothing came close to touching my soul. That was always the worst part of death, the most painful and obscene thing: life went on.

  You want to know about Nicholas, of course. I never spoke of him to anyone else. He was gentle. He never pressed, or asked too many questions. He was as patient a lover as he’d been a schoolmaster, perhaps even more so. For him my past was nothing to overlook or forgive; it was part of me, and he loved every part of me, favoring none above another. The weariness of my body and soul he saw as beautiful

  As for details: he liked the same things other men like. No more, no less. It was the only thing he shared in common with them.

  Nor did he ever seem concerned, one way or another, about the continued silence from my womb. He did not insist on precautions—linen sheaths soaked in saltwater, fennel in my wine—or ask after my courses. My courses had come but a handful of times since Jane had last changed the soaked linens under me. Perhaps my womb had not forgotten the trauma it had suffered; perhaps i
t might never recover. Surely, if there was a God, he had more urgent business these days than punishing such little sins.

  In the queen’s household, things had altered, and not just the hangings and furnishings: the new queen’s first order to her women was that we were all to “attire yourselves properly, as befitting English ladies serving an English queen.” What she meant was that she did not want to see any more of the former queen’s handed-down gowns in her chambers.

  But also she meant to make us feel her power over us. Far too many still remembered her as Jane Seymour, and she meant to drive the point home. Gone were the light silk hoods and low-cut gowns, replaced by the old gable headdresses. —as gone as the mocking, laughing initials HA that had adorned every screen, table, and chest. We had to stand in her presence. No one could leave the apartments without her permission, and Lady Exeter even kept time even of our trips to the privy. Anyone willing to report someone’s oversleeping or missing a pin in her gown could count on a supply of extra coins.

  Gone were the games, the dicing, dancing, music, card-playing, poetry, and masques. And the Scripture-readings, of course. She’d as soon throw a wild bacchanalia as open the cover of a Bible. The Bishop of Exeter had hastily changed the dedication page of his new Bible in both Latin and English, from Queen Anne to Queen Jane. One final crossing out, one last rewriting. I believe he even presented her with a copy, though I never saw it.

  All the fittings from the monasteries that had decorated the former queen’s rooms had vanished as well. I never asked, but gathered through bits of conversation that my uncle had removed them to one of his houses in Wiltshire. The bare dark paneling was relieved only by some tapestries of Biblical scenes from the king’s own stores; I noted that she never once chose Bathsheba.