The Last Wífe of Henry VIII

by Carolly Erickson

  “I covet nothing from the king, other than his continued good opinion. I cannot help it if he seeks my counsel. We have known each other quite a long time now.”

  She sniffed. “He doesn’t ask me to rub his putrid leg.”

  “Perhaps if you offered—”

  “Don’t try to tell me how to be a good wife. You have no idea what it is like, being married to that—that monstrous thing.”

  “No, of course I don’t. What goes on between husband and wife is beyond the understanding of any outsider no matter how sympathetic.”

  “Sympathetic! You think anyone is sympathetic to me! Never! They despise me. They want to destroy me, to bring me down, as they brought down my cousin Anne.”

  “I don’t despise you, Catherine. I pity you.”

  She bristled. I had dared to call her, the queen, by her Christian name. Yet even as she stiffened with indignation, her eyes filled with tears. She turned away.

  “Oh, if only you knew what I have endured from that horrible, twisted old man.” Her voice shook.

  “I am truly sorry. And I assure you, I am not among those who seek, as you believe, to destroy you. In fact, I am here to try to save you.”

  She turned toward me once again. “To save me?” I saw panic in her eyes. Swiftly she went to the closed doors of the chamber, flung them open, and peered out into the adjoining room. Lady Rochford and another of the ladies-in-waiting hovered near the door. Two pages scuttled away and another liveried servant, who had obviously been listening at the keyhole, muttered “Your highness” and backed off.

  “You see how they hound me, pursue me. They drive me to earth like some wounded beast, so that they can finish me off! Now tell me, how do you intend to save me?”

  I led her to the window, at the far side of the small room, as far as possible from the door and the listeners outside it. I whispered to her.

  “I know you have a lover. Don’t bother to deny it! But I don’t believe you let him into your bed because you are wanton or lustful. I believe you know that if you do not give the king a son, he will put you aside. You hope to bear your lover’s child, and say it is the king’s.”

  The queen jumped and cried out as a knock on the door interrupted us.

  “Yes?” she called out.

  “Your highness, the king summons you.”

  “Tell him I am in my bath, making myself fresh and sweet-smelling for his pleasure.”

  “Very well, your highness.”

  She looked at me, willing me to go on. Her face was very pale, her eyes bright with fear.

  “I have come to tell you that you stand in greater peril than you know. Your adultery is discovered. Master Culpepper has been seen in your bedchamber. There is evidence of your trysts. Your washerwomen have found it.”

  Catherine’s hand flew to her mouth. “I never thought—I never suspected—”

  “You have been foolish.”

  Her eyes were wide with terror. “Does the king know?” she whispered.

  “No one dares to tell the king, he would refuse to believe it of you—and he would probably order the bearer of such horrible tidings to be killed or tortured or thrown into a dungeon. No, the king does not know.”

  Again there was a knock on the door.

  “What is it?”

  “The king is impatient to receive you.”

  “I am coming. Tell the king I am perfuming my body for him.”

  She turned to me.

  “I am caught, like a rat in a trap. If I am a faithful wife, I will never have a child. The king is capable of making love to me, but there is no result. I think he is simply too old. I don’t know for certain. None of the doctors will listen to me when I ask them. But if I am an unfaithful wife, I will eventually have a child—and the truth about who the child’s father is will destroy me.”

  “And those around you. All your ladies are in peril. All your relatives too.”

  “What am I to do, Cat?” All her hardness, all her hauteur was gone. Only her guileless, thoughtless innocence remained—an innocence that was still appealing.

  Flee, I thought. Flee while you can. Take your necklace of table diamonds, sell it, and go in disguise to France or Rome or Spain—any place where the long reach of the king cannot snatch you—and hide there until he dies.

  I thought this, but I did not say it. What I said was, “I don’t know. But I do know this. You can pray for a child. You can be a faithful and loving wife. You can send Master Culpepper away.”

  She lowered her eyes. “I cannot do that. Without his love, I would throw myself into the river.”

  I saw then that Catherine’s lover meant more to her than I had imagined. Not only could he give her the child she desperately needed, her love for him gave her the strength to go on from day to day. Her love for him was her salvation—and her ruin. I knew what it meant to love that deeply I realized that she would never give her lover up.

  I took her hands. “Catherine, be careful!! If you care nothing for your own life, at least spare those of us who know your secret, and may be brought to die for it!”

  27

  IT WAS A COLD, DREARY FEBRUARY DAY, THE DAY OF QUEEN CATHERINE’S execution. I stood shivering as an icy wind off the river swept through the Tower courtyard where the scaffold had been erected, hugging myself and wrapping my felt cloak around me as tightly as I could. I was shivering with cold, but also with fear, for King Henry’s wrath had fallen not only upon Catherine, but upon all the women who served her, and one of them was to die with her this day.

  As I watched, a company of tall guardsmen wearing somber black livery marched in and took up their positions around the scaffold, each man carrying a long pike with a sharp point at one end. Three burly laborers carried in the thick flat block of wood on which the queen would lay her head, and placed it at the center of the scaffold where all of us in the waiting crowd could see it. Another man, walking slowly and solemnly, brought in the heavy axe, its razor-sharp blade gleaming, and placed it beside the block.

  A murmuring ran through the crowd at the sight of the axe, and I overheard some of those around me whispering that a queen, even an adulterous one, deserved a more merciful death by a sword. Anne Boleyn had been killed swiftly and efficiently by one blow from a heavy sword. Everyone knew that to die by the blows of an axe was bloodier, and far more painful. The first stroke did not always fall squarely upon the neck, and the victim suffered horribly before dying.

  Soon the murmurs ceased. It would not be long now before the queen appeared, to meet her fate.

  Poor Catherine! I had tried to warn her, but she had not heeded my warning. She had gone on progress with the king, the journey a difficult one, plagued with delays. She had gotten sick while on the journey, and when those of us who served Lady Anne of Cleves heard that, we all hoped and prayed that she was pregnant at last, though I worried that the child, if there was a child, would be the son or daughter of Thomas Culpepper, and not the king. But after a few weeks she improved, and we heard no announcement of a pregnancy. When the king and queen returned to London at the end of their long journey, there were fresh rumors, including the persistent rumor that the king was dissatisfied with Catherine and meant to take a new wife. Others said he continued to be enamored with her and had given her more costly gifts.

  Then all the contradictory rumors were stilled. We heard that the queen had been shut away at Syon House, and that the king meant to do away with her. People nodded and repeated the old truism that all King Henry’s wives were cursed, doomed to die a horrible death.

  As I feared, she had continued to sleep with her lovers, not only Thomas Culpepper but another man, Francis Dereham, who, it was said, had been her lover before she married. One of the servants betrayed the secret, and it was soon brought to the ears of the king. At first he had refused to believe it, but eventually, after many of Queen Catherine’s servants were questioned and threatened, it became evident to him that his beloved unsullied rose had sharp thorns indeed. H
e wept, and swore, and wept again, and ordered the great pearl bed to be chopped into little pieces and used for kindling. Finally he ordered that the queen be executed.

  I had not seen Catherine since the king shut her away, first at Syon House and then in the Tower. I was told that she was melancholy, filled with remorse. That she wrote to the king, pleading with him to forgive her, but he threw her letter into the fire unread. And that, knowing that she could not escape death, she rehearsed for the day of her execution, having the fatal block of wood brought to her prison room and practicing laying her head upon it, so that when the time came she would do what was necessary with dignity.

  Four black-clad drummers emerged from the nearby barrack and mounted the steps to the scaffold. They began a low muffled beat, solemn and mournful. I heard the throaty croak of a raven. From the river came the loud call of a bargeman, “Bridge, ho!”

  Then a door opened, and the queen appeared.

  She had grown terribly thin over the months of her imprisonment. Her plain black gown hung loose around her now slender torso. Her chubby cheeks and double chin were gone. Now her face was gaunt and very white, her eyes wide with fright. When she walked toward the scaffold steps her legs would not support her, and two of her ladies had to take her arms to help her climb the stairs. When the headsman joined her on the high platform, his large muscular frame covered in a close-fitting black tunic, a black hood with eyeslits covering his face, Catherine nearly fainted.

  The crowd was completely silent as she stepped forward and began to speak.

  “I am thankful—” she began, her voice too low to be heard even by those closest to her, her face completely drained of color. “I am thankful to my lord and master, our sovereign King Henry, for his gracious mercy to me, an undeserving sinner.” Her voice, still trembling, became audible. “I confess before the Lord God, my lord the king and you his good people here assembled, that I am guilty of those crimes with which I am charged and convicted. I am unworthy to stand before you. I am deserving of a worse fate.” Everyone present knew what she meant. Traitors were hanged, then cut down still living and disemboweled, their steaming intestines sometimes stuffed into their mouths to suffocate them. Catherine was guilty of treason, yet the king had not ordered a traitor’s death for her.

  “Let my punishment be an example to all who would betray our lord the king,” Catherine was saying, “and may God have mercy on me, a sinner.” She bowed her head. “Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.”

  Her voice broke on the last words, and I became aware that many of those around me were in tears, for Catherine was indeed a pitiable figure, so young and so alone, and about to be killed. I whispered a prayer for her.

  Her hands shaking, she took off her hood and knelt down, crossed herself, and laid her head on the cold wooden block. The headsman took the heavy axe, lifted it, and brought it down with a loud thwack.

  I shut my eyes. I couldn’t watch.

  When I opened them I saw a ghastly sight. Blood was spurting out from the wounded neck, flowing down over the wooden block and onto the black gown, staining it crimson. The body was heaving, the hands and arms twitching and fluttering like the wings of a dying chicken. But the head hung, limp and all but lifeless, mouth agape and eyes staring, still attached to the body.

  The headsman lifted the axe a second time, and struck, and then a third. Finally the head fell onto the planking of the scaffold with a soft thud, the queen’s beautiful long auburn hair reddened with gore.

  I turned away, I felt nauseous and dizzy. Gulping in deep draughts of the chill air, I managed not to be sick. Slowly I recovered, as two of Catherine’s ladies threw a black cloak over her body and dragged it away. The head, I noticed with a frisson of horror, was lifted by the wet hair and tossed into a bucket.

  But the headsman’s grisly work was not yet done. One by one the dead queen’s chamber servants were brought to the block and executed. Among them was the old man Anne Daintry had told me about, the one they called Ganymede, who had witnessed Thomas Culpepper with his boots off in the queen’s bedchamber. Grizzled and bent, he managed to climb the steps of the scaffold, mumbling to himself. He looked dazed, glancing out over the sea of faces in the courtyard. Then he was seized by two of the guardsmen and forced to his knees, his torso held down so that his head could be severed.

  Then came the final act in the morning’s bloody drama. Lady Rochford, who according to gossip had been the dead queen’s chief ally in arranging her adulterous meetings, was brought, screaming and weighed down with chains, to the block and turned over to the executioner. Her high-pitched screams, moans of dread and animal howls caused an uncomfortable stirring in the watching crowd. Clearly Lady Rochford had lost her reason. She belonged in a madhouse, or locked in an attic, not here on a gory killing ground amid the blood of traitors. Besides, she was only a wretched aging woman. An object of pity.

  Her chains were unlocked and she shrieked afresh, rubbing furiously at her wounded wrists where the cruel metal had bit into her flesh. Then she did such a startling thing that I almost cannot bring myself to record it. She tore at the dark, dirty rags that covered her thin body until she was nearly naked.

  So quickly did she act that those who were guarding her could not immediately cover her nakedness. For what seemed an eternity she stood before us all, her shrunken breasts, distended belly, nearly bald female parts and wrinkled thighs fully disclosed to our view, while the guardsmen scrambled to find a cloth to cover her. At length someone produced a shroud, and her nakedness was concealed beneath it.

  Yet the sudden, grotesque spectacle had had its effect. And Lady Rochford, mad though she was, knew that she had succeeded in shocking and revolting us all. Because as she stood there before us, in all her hideous bareness, she opened her toothless mouth and laughed. A high-pitched, frenzied laugh, ghoulish and unearthly.

  “Fools!” I heard her cry. “Fools, fools!”

  When the shroud was thrown over her and she was held down upon the chopping block her words were muffled and a moment later the axe put an end to her life. But as I stumbled, aghast and in tears, out of the courtyard and toward the river, desperate to get away from the stench of blood and death, I was haunted by the sound of Lady Rochford’s croaking accusation.

  “Fools, fools” rang in my ears as I walked quickly, then all but ran to the riverside in search of a wherry to take me home.

  28

  THE KING HAS SENT YOU ANOTHER GIFT,” ANNE DAINTRY ANNOUNCED, indicating a large carved rosewood box that sat on a nearby table. “How many is that now? Five?”

  It had been almost a year since Queen Catherine Howard’s execution, a lonely year for me as Tom had been kept away from court on one foreign mission after another. And a lonely year for King Henry, who had been melancholy and disillusioned ever since he discovered that his cherished young wife had been faithless.

  “Six, I think.”

  “He is courting you.”

  “I’m married.”

  “To a dying man.”

  “John may live a long time yet.”

  It was true. Feeble as he was, and largely insensible to the world around him, John lived on. I made him comfortable, heaping warm furs on his bed and making certain the hearth fire in his room was always bright and crackling. I supervised the servants to make sure his linen was changed often and that he was kept clean. When sores erupted on his legs and back I spread healing ointment on them, the same healing ointment I used on the king’s ulcers.

  Once in a while I saw John smile, especially when Margaret came into the room or the kind and skilled young German doctor, Philip von Lederer, who attended him. Philip, who had come to England in the entourage of Lady Anne of Cleves, was a gentle, soft-spoken man, cultivated and thoughtful, who in addition to caring for his patients took time out to tutor Margaret in Greek. I enjoyed him. Sometimes, when we were watching by John’s bedside, the three of us, Margaret, Philip and I, played hazard or he talked to us about life in the
duchy of Cleves.

  “Open your gift.” Anne was insistent.

  “Whatever it is, I don’t want it.” I pushed the rosewood box away. The last thing I wanted to be reminded of, today of all days, was that the king admired me and was thinking of me fondly. For Tom was coming home at last, and I wanted nothing to mar the joy of our reunion.

  I watched and waited for him, hour by hour, wondering what was keeping him and praying that his ship had not foundered in the Channel. He had been in Hungary for a long time, at the court of Emperor Ferdinand. His journey back to England was long and difficult.

  At last, late one night, he arrived. Because it was nearly midnight the outer gate was locked and most of Lady Anne’s servants were in bed. I heard the dogs barking and then there was a tap on my bedchamber window. It was Tom. With a joyful cry I flung open the window and Tom climbed nimbly in.

  “Cat! My Cat!”

  And then we were in each other’s arms.

  Our loving was all the sweeter for our long separation, and it was several days before we could bring ourselves to speak of anything other than our joy at being together. Finally, however, we managed to talk of mundane things.

  “I’ve been to see the king,” Tom told me. “He’s aged. And grown fatter and grayer.”

  “And more irritable.”

  “Someone should put him out of his misery, like an old bull.”

  “Hush! You know better than to talk of ending the king’s life! What if one of the servants were to hear you?”

  “I’ve been away so long I’ve almost forgotten the dangers of this godforsaken court. Almost, but not entirely.” He looked at me, hesitant to go on. I knew at once that something was troubling him. He smiled, a rueful smile I thought. He came up to me and brushed his hand tenderly against my cheek, stroking it as he spoke.

  “So soft, so soft,” he murmured, following the trail of his hand with kisses. “I have been dreaming of you, Cat. Dreaming of the day when you would be free to become my wife. But now—”