The Unfaithful Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII's Fifth Wife

by Erickson, Carolly

  “The archbishop cannot help you now. Answer my question!”

  I hung my head. “I believe you already know the answer.”

  “The king demands your answer!” he shouted. “You must say the words. You must also confess in writing to adultery with Thomas Culpeper while married to the king. You must confess to treason!”

  The terrible words resounded in my ears. You must confess to treason. You must confess to treason. The room spun. I felt myself droop on the bench. Then I felt arms supporting me—ungently.

  “Where did you get my letter?” I whispered when I had begun to recover myself. I was not able to speak aloud.

  “From the torturer. He found it on the person of Francis Dereham. The wretch Dereham meant to bargain with it. To assure the condemnation of Culpeper, in hopes of saving his own life.”

  “But not mine,” I said softly. Then a thought struck me. “That letter does not prove anything against me.”

  “But when your sweet little fool Tom was tortured, he confessed to being your lover. His confession is more than enough to convict you. And then there is the confession of Lady Rochford.”

  Once again I felt my stomach constrict.

  “She told us much about your meetings with your lover Culpeper. She said you forced her to serve as your go-between, to seek out private places for your loathsome treasonous meetings with your lover. That you met him again and again, at Lincoln and at Pontefract, and—”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Do you confess to having met your lover at these places? Do you confess to having lain with him adulterously, to the peril of the succession?”

  “I will confess to Archbishop Cranmer.”

  My interrogator pounded on the bench I sat on with his fist, making me jump. “You will confess to me! Here! Now! Or your women will be tortured, as your lovers were!”

  “No! No!”

  “Take the women to the Tower,” he said, his voice cold. “She will not confess.”

  But I did confess, of course. I could not bear to think of my women stretched on the rack, made to suffer unbearable pangs, just because Tom and I loved each other. I confessed, and the pens scratched across the paper.

  I confessed to treason.

  My women were questioned, mercilessly and at length, but in the end they were returned to my apartments, unharmed but terrified. And in fear of being threatened again.

  I lay awake all that night, in the dimness of my bedchamber, thinking of Tom. Where was he? Had he lived through his ordeal? Was he thinking of me? Or was he undergoing such torment that he could not think at all, but only suffer, in agony, the wretchedness of despair?

  * * *

  When Archbishop Cranmer came to me again, I searched his face for any sign that might tell me my fate. I had confessed to treason. Would I be racked? Would I suffer a traitor’s death?

  But he looked as he always did, mild and unruffled.

  “Have you brought me news?” I asked anxiously.

  He composed himself further before replying. I could tell he was choosing his words with care.

  “There has been a change in the king,” he began. “He is withdrawn and melancholy. He broods. He speaks often of the fall of the tower at Nonsuch—an omen, he says. It symbolized the loss of your unborn babes, and he rants on about how they may not have been his, about how you deceived him. But in his disordered mind the tower’s fall foretells much more loss to come. He imagines that he will lose his kingdom, perhaps even his life.”

  “Yes but what of me? What of my fate?”

  “That’s what I am trying to tell you. He is confused. He talks about you, his disloyal wife, but he calls you Jocasta. He says Jocasta has betrayed him. He suffers so over this betrayal. He weeps, he threatens. He even drags out his old sword and sweeps it back and forth, as if to repel an enemy. But it is all about her, not you.

  “And another thing. He has begun to wear a chain around his neck, with quite a plain pendant hanging from it. He wears it constantly. Though it is hardly of any value, quite unlike the immense gems and pearls he is accustomed to wearing. This is a simple ornament, with three hearts entwined.”

  I cried out with delight. Uncle William had managed to deliver Jocasta’s pendant to the king! And he was wearing it, as a token of his love. That meant his heart was softening. Surely it did.

  The archbishop looked at me quizzically. Perhaps he thought me as distracted in mind as my husband. However, he went on with what he was telling me.

  “I have been sent to tell you that from now on you will be housed at Syon. You will have three chambers for yourself and four ladies in waiting. Twelve servants may accompany you, but the rest of your household will be dismissed. You may take such furnishings and hangings as befit a gentlewoman—but no cloth of estate. You have forfeited your honor. You are no longer queen.”

  He cleared his throat, then drew a paper from his robe and began to read.

  “Your wardrobe is forfeit to the crown, save for six French hoods, six pairs of sleeves, six gowns of mean stuff, six kirtles of satin damask and velvet. Six pairs of slippers, two woolen petticoats, one woolen cloak, two cloaks of velvet and damask.”

  The list went on and on. Nothing, it seemed, had been left out: not underclothes, not fans, or gloves, or trims, or lengths of lace. Even the number of carts I was to be allowed, and the number of cart horses and grooms, was prescribed.

  But all that mattered to me was that the king was showing me mercy. I was not to be sent to the Tower, but to a respectable place of reasonable comfort, with servants and a gentlewoman’s wardrobe and furnishings adequate to my needs. He still cared for my comfort. He still loved me—and forgave me. It must be true. It must.

  On the following morning, filled with this immeasurably consoling thought, I took my seat in the wagon, Joan and Mary Sidford and Charyn beside me, and set off for Syon House, my woolen cloak drawn about me and the chest that held my remaining possessions close at hand.

  SIXTEEN

  EXCEPT for my ceaseless worry about Tom, I settled in to life at Syon House with relative content. The terrible strain of the recent past had been lifted from me. I was under the protection of the king’s mercy. I was safe.

  I was no longer queen, and the life I had once dreamed of, a life in which I became the king’s widow, and then married my beloved, was gone forever. I tried not to think of that shattered dream, as I lay on my straw mattress covered with my dogswain blanket. I tried not to remember the soft comfortable bed I had enjoyed as queen, the great glowing pearl bed in which the next king was to have been conceived. All the beautiful, costly things that had so recently surrounded me had been swept away, and in some ways my state was not unlike what I had known at Horsham, when I first went to live in Grandma Agnes’s establishment to learn courtly manners and accomplishments and to be groomed for marriage.

  Those days seemed to belong, not only to a distant past, but to a different life. It was hard to realize that only a handful of years had passed since I left my father’s house for Horsham. If only I had known what life held in store for me, would I have run back to my father’s house and never left it? I would have been spared much worry, much sorrow. But I would never have known Tom, and felt love.

  I tried to wean myself from such thoughts, as the days went by quietly and November gave way to December and the Advent season. Joan taught me to weave, and I occupied myself with soft colorful yarns. I played cards with my women. I read my Bible, I played with Jonah. I fed the birds that came to the windows of my rooms, and when the December snows fell, I took in the weakest of the birds and put them in a cage near the warmth of the hearth so that they could recover.

  Small things calmed me, simple pleasures helped me to put aside the worst of my nagging thoughts. But when I dreamed, I could not suppress the ghastly images that came before me. Of Henry Manox and Francis, bleeding, their bones cracking, screaming in pain. Of Tom, lying injured and helpless and in need of me. Calling out to me. Of my father, my dea
r dead father, sitting beside me and talking—talking endlessly, constantly, and always about himself. Talking on and on so that he could not hear me when I begged for his help.

  “Better a soft bed than a hard harlot.” My husband’s old saying ran in my head, foolish and meaningless. That other saying—so recently uttered by Francis—haunted me as well: “Do what you can, take what you need, act as you must.” Had that been my motto, during my years at court? If so, I had much to repent.

  Of one thing I felt more and more certain—that my barrenness was a gift, the act of a merciful Providence. Had I borne a child—Tom’s child—the succession would have been tainted, polluted. I began to realize as never before that the succession to the throne was something sacred, to be revered. It had been entrusted to me, as queen. And I had failed to preserve it inviolate.

  I was to blame. I confessed my shortcomings, and felt better. But when I looked into my pier glass I was startled to see that, in among the rich red-brown strands of my hair, threads of silver had begun to appear. I was far too young to have an old woman’s silver hair. I knew that. Nevertheless there they were, the few telltale strands, reminders that I had lived with guilt and fear too long. My body had begun to yield up its strength and youth.

  I told Charyn to take the pier glass away, and I covered the unwelcome strands with one of my French hoods, edged in gold. I put on the best of my modest gowns and ordered my fiddler to play while I danced with Mary Sidford. For a time, I was able to banish my dark mood.

  It was not until Grandma Agnes came to see me that my mood darkened once again, and my worries rose.

  Charyn led her into the largest of my rooms. She was greatly changed. Her once proud, straight-backed figure had become the hunched form of an old woman. The look in her eyes, once so superior and defiant, had become wary and fearful. She walked with difficulty and leaned on a cane—and on Charyn, who helped her to a pillow-covered seat.

  “Grandma!” was all I could say as she seated herself, slowly and painfully. “What have they done to you!”

  I noticed that her lips twitched, she blinked quickly and often. All her arrogance was gone. When she looked up at me, it was with the tired, pleading eyes of weary old age.

  “Catherine,” she began, her voice rasping and grating, “help me.”

  I never expected to hear those words from my grandmother. It took me a moment to react.

  “What must I do?”

  “Throw yourself on the king’s mercy. Deny all, confess all, do what you must. But do not let him throw you to the wolves, or we all perish!”

  She told me, speaking slowly and somewhat haltingly, her every breath an effort, that I was the hope of the Howard family. I, the dishonored, adulterous wife of the vengeful king, held the family honor in my hands.

  “You will be spared,” she said. “Cranmer has asked me to take you back to live with me. When you leave here, you will come to Lambeth.” She shook her head. “Only it is not the Lambeth you knew. It has been stripped of its beauties, shorn of its riches. They have taken everything, Catherine. Everything in my strongboxes! My jewels, my manors.” Her indignation flared, briefly, then all at once she sank into her enfeebled state once again.

  She looked around the room warily, then beckoned me to come closer.

  “I had eight hundred pounds, Catherine. I hid it in my corselet. I thought they would never find it. I meant to give it to you. I thought you could bribe your guards. But they found it! They searched me closely, Catherine, so closely. They took the money. And then—”

  “What? What did they do to you, grandma?”

  She blinked quickly. She did not look at me, but at the rushes under her feet.

  “They showed me that dreadful device.” I knew that she meant the rack, the instrument of torture. “They lifted me up and laid me down on it. I screamed, I was in terror. I was sure they would stretch me and break me. Then they said to me, tell us which papers you burned. I told them everything. I admitted that I had burned some letters. I told them where the rest of my money was hidden. I told them all that they wanted to know, and more. They lifted me off the terrible device and I fell on my knees, begging for mercy, praying for the king’s health, saying everything I could think of. And all the time weeping such bitter tears.”

  “Brutes!” I cried out. “Cruel brutes, to treat you so.”

  “It may go worse for me,” she half-whispered. “Unless you can obtain mercy for yourself, for us all.”

  She went on to tell me, pausing often to catch her breath, that everyone in our family was being questioned, many of them tortured, many others imprisoned.

  “Your uncle William is in the Tower,” she said curtly, and at this news my tears fell freely. “My nephew the Great Chamberlain, at least nineteen of your cousins, my servants and pensioners, even John Spiershon, our tailor, and others who have supplied and provisioned our household.”

  “And Master Culpeper? What news of him?”

  She paused, pursing her lips. “Your lover is condemned.”

  I fell forward, and knew nothing more.

  * * *

  When I awoke I was on my bed, with my women around me, looking down at me.

  “Is she gone?”

  “Yes,” they each said. “She told us to tell you to beware of Lady Anna. She is your worst enemy. She sent you her footman—to be her spy. She sent him to the royal council, to tell them everything he had heard and seen while you and the king were on progress.”

  So that was why Englebert had disappeared so suddenly, I thought. I should have realized how odd it was that Anna should send her servant to me. How foolish and blind I was!

  “She hopes King Henry will make her his queen again.”

  “Yes, of course she does. How little she knows him.” It was my one satisfaction, the certain knowledge that no matter what else happened, the king would never again take Lady Anna to be his wife.

  To see Grandma Agnes in such a sorry condition, her pride broken, her strong spirit reduced to fearfulness, was a blow to me. But to know that Tom had been condemned was a hundred times worse. Each time I thought of him a shudder passed through my body, and I grew short of breath. I tried not to think of what must be, that he must suffer horribly, and be hanged. That all his sweetness must pass from the earth forever, never to be known again. That I would yearn for him, and would go on yearning for him, for as long as I lived.

  When I learned that Tom was condemned something within me gave way. I was not the same after that. I seemed to lose part of myself. I ceased to think of my future. I no longer could imagine a day, a far-off day, when all the horrors of recent weeks would be behind me and a new life would unfold.

  I grew listless—yet at the same time small irritations galled me more than ever and I was curt with my servants, treating them ill, not at all as they deserved, for they were good and faithful to me. They tried to tempt me to eat, as I was becoming thin. They did their best to bring me cheer.

  I no longer asked them to tell me what news they heard of the court, for all the news was grim. Still, some part of me wanted to know what was going on, and Joan, who always seemed to find out, brought us all word that the court was as silent and gloomy as anyone had ever seen it. There was no gaiety, no Advent celebrations were being held. Feasting and revelry were forbidden. The king shut himself away, or attempted to go walking, only to find that his leg hurt too much and he had to return to the palace. Hunting was bleak in winter, there was little sport to be had. Throughout the court, a mood of sullenness lay like a shroud. Or so Joan’s informants told her.

  Late in December a large group of lords came to Syon. I was brought before them, and was told that all my Howard relations had been found guilty of failing to disclose treasonous acts—my acts. They had all been committed to the Tower, their goods forfeit to the crown. Their lives were forfeit to the king’s judgment, whether to be condemned or to be spared. In the meantime they would languish in prison. All except Uncle Thomas, whose evidence against
his relations had been found useful, and whose pleas for royal clemency had been heard.

  Hearing that Uncle Thomas had been spared, while Uncle William was still suffering in the Tower, I sank into lower spirits than ever. For days it has seemed as though I could no longer eat or sleep or even find the strength to dress myself. I mourn. I can barely lift my pen. I can—

  Tower Green

  February 1542

  My cousin Catherine having entrusted to me her written account of her life at court, I feel I must complete it. She did not ask me to—indeed the only thing she asked me to do was to feed the birds she kept by the hearth at Syon and to take care of Jonah, her beloved marmoset.

  I have not her eloquence. I can only set down, while it is fresh in memory, what happened during the last days of her life, as faithfully as I can. This, then, is what I heard and saw.

  It was a bitterly cold morning, the thirteenth day of February. An unlucky day. A day when the stars were aligned unfavorably, as the king’s astrologer told the captain of the guardsmen who told a halberdier who knew Joan well. Joan then told me, though in a low voice so that Catherine did not hear what she said.

  It was early in the morning, the scaffold had been erected on the Green. The three of us, myself and Joan Bulmer and Mary Sidford, were being kept with Catherine in an interior room, with guardsmen present as Catherine had twice tried to escape and had struggled to get away when first brought to the Tower by barge. She had been erratic, beside herself with anguish one moment and exploding into laughter the next. I think she was half out of her mind with grief and terror.

  She was wearing her high slippers, the ones that made her appear taller. They made her stumble at times. In her moods of foolishness she pranced in them, laughing at the absurdity of it all, that she should be so young, and about to die.

  They had come for her three days earlier at Syon, and told her she was to be taken to the Tower. She said no! She wasn’t ready, they must come back another day. I think she truly believed, until that moment, that she would be spared. Her grandmother had told her so. She wanted to believe it. “There are signs,” she had said to me. “There are signs that I will be preserved. The king wears my mother’s pendant around his neck.”