The Last Wífe of Henry VIII

by Carolly Erickson

  The sight of Anne smiling slightly told me the answer.

  “You are good to come for me, Cat. I always made fun of you for being so good. Now I’m grateful.

  “Forgive me for what I’m about to do,” she said a moment later, lifting her skirts over the dirty straw on the floor. I turned my head while she relieved herself. The sickening smell made my already queasy stomach lurch and before I knew it I was throwing up. I couldn’t help it. I wiped my mouth with my handkerchief, and saw, by the light of the lantern, the crown embroidered on it in shining gold and silver threads. If only I could get word to the king, I thought. I don’t belong here, and neither does Anne.

  “Before they come back, there is something I need to tell you, Cat. No one knows. I want you to know.”

  She was interrupted by the return of Wriothesley. He had Bishop Gardiner, a priest and several other men with him.

  “Bring her.”

  Over my protests two burly men took Anne to a large room, lit by smoking torches. I was held back from aiding her as she was stripped of her dirty gown and laid on a coffin-shaped plank of wood hollowed out in the middle. She screamed and struggled uselessly while her wrists were tied with ropes attached to a wheel, and the same was done to her ankles.

  “Heretic!” Bishop Gardiner called out in his high voice. “Before you are subjected to the pain of your due punishment, will you tell us who instructed you in the vile beliefs you hold?”

  Anne cursed. One of her captors slapped her, making her moan.

  “Will you describe the disloyalty of the queen?”

  “I am not disloyal!” I shouted, but the man who stood behind me, restraining me, only tightened his grip on my arms, pinning them behind my back.

  The bishop ignored my outburst. “One last time, I ask you. Will you tell me the names of your teachers in heresy and of the queen’s partners in disloyalty?”

  Feebly Anne spat, her thin spittle falling harmlessly on the stone floor.

  The torturers—for that is what they were, inhuman-looking muscular creatures with leather hoods masking their faces—positioned themselves at the head and foot of the long plank on which Anne lay. At Gardiner’s nod they began slowly turning the wheels to which her wrists and ankles were tied, and I saw her arms and legs grow longer until they were stretched to their full length.

  She grimaced at first, then swore.

  “Stop! Stop in the king’s name!” I yelled again and again, as Anne, yielding to the increasing pain, began to scream.

  Gardiner raised his hand and the wheels stopped turning.

  “Will you tell us now?”

  I prayed, let her tell them something. Anything, just to make them stop.

  “Go to hell,” she said faintly, trying to catch her breath, gearing herself up for another onslaught of pain. “Or to purgatory, if you prefer.”

  Once again Gardiner nodded to the torturers who resumed their turning of the wheels, faster this time.

  A long thin wail of agony came forth from Anne’s throat, and her eyes rolled back in their sockets. Then the wailing stopped, and she lay still, her eyes closed.

  “Oh my God! She’s dead! You’ve killed her!”

  A bucket was brought and a strong-smelling liquid ladled from it over Anne’s face. It was vinegar. She choked, her eyes flew open and once again the cruel wheels were turned. Now her screams were hoarse, desperate. Animal cries. Her agony went on, minute after minute, until I felt I could no longer stand to watch.

  “No! It is too much! It is all too much! Can’t you see she knows nothing!”

  I tried with all my strength to free my pinioned arms and kicked out at the man holding me. He immobilized my legs by locking them between his. I could smell his sour breath. I thought I could hear him chuckling to himself.

  Now Anne, in her extremity of pain, was no longer cursing her captors but repeating the names of her children again and again.

  I heard a dull crack, and then another and another. Her bones were breaking.

  “Deliver her, O Lord, from her enemies,” I prayed. “Send your angels to stand between her and the pain.” My cheeks were wet with tears.

  Anne fainted again, and again was revived with vinegar. The sounds she made were inhuman. Then one clear sentence stood out from the rest.

  “For the love of Christ,” she sobbed, “kill me.”

  “Speak, heretic, and you will be spared. Tell us what you know.”

  But she had drifted away into unconsciousness again, and this time the vinegar seemed to have no effect. She was unfastened from the rack and carried back to her cell. I was released. I turned and slapped the man who had restrained me.

  “Little hellcat!” he muttered as I passed him, following Anne’s limp body being carried along the corridor.

  We were left in the putrid cell, where I did my best to ease Anne’s pain with my herbs.

  She slept, and I lay down beside her, exhausted and wretched. I laid my cloak over her shivering body and offered her the only comfort I could: the comfort of my presence.

  In one terrible moment I thought, I could ease her pain permanently. I could give her enough of a sleeping draught to release her from life. She had begged for death. Shouldn’t I be merciful to her and relieve her of more hours of agony? For I had no doubt, after what I had seen, that the torturers and those who commanded them would never relent.

  But we are taught that it is a sin to take life, and so I tried to put the dark thought out of my mind. I closed my eyes and eventually went to sleep.

  When I awoke I was immediately aware that Anne was whispering to me.

  “Cat.”

  “Yes.”

  “I need—to tell—you—” Every word was a painful effort.

  “I am—carrying—”

  “A child? Are you carrying another child?”

  She nodded slightly. Her eyes were clouded, unfocused. I thought, I can’t possibly imagine her suffering. It must be far beyond anything I have ever known. Once again my cheeks were wet with tears.

  “Will you—look after—the—others?”

  “Yes, dear. Of course I will. But you will recover from this. Your strength will come back.”

  I took her hand in mine and gripped it as hard as I could.

  She shook her head.

  “Care—for my—little ones—”

  She appeared to faint once more, only this time, in the dim lantern-light, I saw her lined brow grow smooth and her taut mouth relax. There was a look of peace on her face, and I thought I felt her fingers tighten ever so slightly around mine. Then she was gone.

  40

  IT WAS SCARCELY A MONTH AFTER ANNE’S DEATH AND I WAS STILL defiantly wearing mourning for her, despite the king’s warning that to mourn a heretic was practically to be one oneself. I was going down the privy stairs from my apartments, using the back staircase in an effort to avoid Bishop Gardiner, who seemed to be everywhere in the palace at all hours, looking for suspects to bring before the Heresy Commission.

  I paused on the landing and heard the high-pitched, excited voices of boys, young pages, gambling with dice.

  “Six it’s the widow Brandon, four it’s the widow Fitzroy!”

  I heard the clattering of the dice along the stones, then a cheer. I started to go into the corridor—for I always discouraged the pages from gambling—but then I stopped. I listened.

  “Four again! It’s the widow Fitzroy for sure.”

  “Brandon’s the one I’d want, if I were king. Such big titties! Six! Six!”

  The clattering and shouting went on, with more boys joining in. They were betting, I realized, on who would be the king’s next wife.

  I had known for weeks that a plot against me was taking shape, and that Bishop Gardiner was behind it. Or was he? The king’s behavior toward me had changed, and in my most anxious hours I thought he might be the one moving against me after all, with Gardiner as his cat’s-paw.

  What I knew for certain was that my servants had begun deserti
ng me, leaving their posts because of illness, or the promise (so they said) of a better position in the king’s household or for some other invented reason. The exodus was alarming, for it could only have one cause: the servants believed that soon I would no longer be queen.

  The defections were spreading. Ladies who had formerly been glad to join me in my apartments for devotional reading or games of backgammon or to sew garments for the poor began shunning me, and whispering behind my back what a shame it was that I had no son.

  Kate Brandon, long my friend, now became my rival for Henry’s affection. Lively, blond, full-figured Kate, quick-witted and sarcastic, her clear blue eyes filled with a saucy, almost wanton joyousness. Kate who named her spaniel “Gardiner” and her parrot “Wriothesley.” Kate who had two young sons and, it was said, would be ripe to give King Henry the heir he needed once I was out of the way.

  Even Kate, who I knew wanted to be loyal to me, was caught up helplessly in the wide net of royal intrigue. She did not dare refuse the king’s attentions, and now that she was a widow—for her husband Charles Brandon had died not long after returning from the French campaign—she was available to marry again.

  I did not distrust Kate, only the capricious king and his ruthlessness in going after what he wanted and needed. He had been married to me for several years, and I was not pregnant. I was thirty-three, nearly thirty-four. Soon I would be too old to have a child. While Kate was young, in her twenties, and had already proven herself as the mother of sons.

  One day the king’s servant Thomas Heneage came to my apartments and asked, on the king’s behalf, for my necklace of table diamonds.

  Right away I felt a flicker of worry. The necklace he was asking for was the one that had come to me when Henry was courting me. It had belonged to the ill-fated Catherine Howard, and because of that I rarely wore it.

  “Why does the king ask for this necklace, Thomas?”

  “He does not confide in me, your highness.”

  “But you know all that is going on with him, don’t deny it.”

  “If your highness says so.” He did not meet my gaze.

  “I want to know, Thomas. Is this necklace going to be presented to the Duchess of Suffolk?” I demanded, giving Kate her title.

  Heneage hesitated. He dared not be disloyal to his master, yet I knew that he had always had a particular regard for me.

  “It would not surprise me if it were, your highness.”

  “So he has been giving her other gifts.”

  Heneage looked uncomfortable.

  “Other jewels. Gowns. Gold plate. Perfumes.” I paused between each thing I named, long enough to allow Heneage to frown slightly and look troubled. I knew that I was right.

  “And the rose bushes,” he said.

  “What about the rose bushes?”

  “She loves roses. He has ordered four thousand rose bushes to be planted in the privy garden at Westminster, so that fresh roses can be brought to her each day.”

  I sighed. “So it is true. He plans to do away with me and marry wife number seven.”

  “She may not have him.”

  “How can she refuse?”

  Heneage lowered his voice to a whisper, and bent down so that his head was near mine. “I have heard that she keeps a trunk packed and ready to go and always has a Spanish ship waiting at the docks, to take her to Porto. From there she will go to her mother’s family in Tordesillas.”

  “I see.”

  I decided to confront Kate and, as I hoped, I found her completely open about the very awkward situation in which she was placed, and about her plans to extricate herself from it should the need arise.

  “I haven’t told you before because I keep hoping nothing will happen,” she confided to me with a rueful smile. “Yes, it is true that the king is paying a great deal of attention to me, and giving me things—just as he did to you right before he married you. Yet I am convinced that he retains a high regard for you. I keep hoping that you will be spared. In any case, whatever happens between you and King Henry I will not become his wife. I am prepared to leave on an hour’s notice should he propose marriage to me. And I assure you, I will do just that. Leave.”

  It was a chaotic time at court, with everyone waiting for the king to die and trying to position himself or herself to benefit—or at least, not to be harmed. Henry himself was at a loss, physically declining, given to fits of violent anger, occupying himself with hunting yet unable to ride any more, so he had to content himself with watching others hunt. He spent hours soaking his legs in thick oatmeal baths. Fevers and colds laid him low, and his face, once fat but now flabby and woebegone, had turned a sickly pale yellow color.

  He clung to life, but had to be carted from room to room in a wheeled chair upholstered in velvet. His accustomed vigor had left him—for good.

  His only enduring pleasures, apart from paying court to Kate Brandon, were eating green artichokes (which upset his stomach), playing with his caged ferrets and toying with people’s lives.

  He had sent Anne Daintry to her death, and others in the royal household as well—a singer from the palace chapel, a tailor from Greenwich, a printer suspected of printing heretical books. He even signed an arrest warrant to be issued against the the mild, inoffensive Archbishop Cranmer. But before the arrest could be made he gave the archbishop a ring which, he assured him, would protect him if the chancellor and his soldiers came for him. And when it turned out just as Henry had predicted, when Chancellor Wriothesley tried to arrest the archbishop and he held up his royal ring, saving his life, Henry laughed so heartily that he choked, and turned purple before Dr. Wendy could revive him.

  I tried to talk to him about Anne Daintry’s death, but realized very quickly that I was making a mistake. All he said was, “Blood must flow! Flesh must burn!” and then reminded me that the true faith was in peril.

  “Are you aware, madame,” he asked me, “that a proclamation has been issued prohibiting the possession of heretical books? And on that subject, what of your new book? Is it heretical?” He smiled a sly smile.

  “I am assured that it is not.”

  “Has it never troubled your conscience that in publishing this book you may be inflaming erroneous views in others?”

  “No, sire. What I write comes from the Scriptures, and from my own private meditations.”

  “I must read this book of yours. I’m told everyone else is reading it. I will decide whether it is full of error or not. Or perhaps”—he showed his decayed teeth in another sly smile—“I should command Bishop Gardiner to read it.”

  The bishop and I were at odds over many things, especially Prince Edward’s education. I favored the learned Richard Cox as the prince’s tutor, but the bishop thought Cox was too close in his thinking to the reformed faith. When I added a second tutor for Edward, the Cambridge scholar John Cheke, Gardiner was incensed.

  “The man doesn’t even speak Greek properly,” Gardiner cried out.

  “His is the authentic pronunciation,” I said. “The clerical pronunciation is distorted, a product of centuries of ignorance.”

  “Are you calling me ignorant?”

  “I am saying that Dr. Cheke and his colleagues have resurrected the true sound of ancient Greek. We can all learn from them, and benefit.”

  “A woman! Teaching me Greek!” Gardiner sputtered, making Henry laugh.

  “If she can teach me theology, she can teach you Greek,” Henry said, adding in a darker tone, “though I don’t like it much when she wins our arguments. And I do mean to read that book of yours, Cat, to see just how much it has in it of reform doctrine.”

  To add to all the executions, all the gossip over the king and Kate Brandon (or the king and Mary Howard, Henry Fitzroy’s widow, who some said would be the next queen), all the excited commotion over what posts were likely to be the most valuable ones in the coming reign, we woke up one morning to find that there was a madman among us.

  A wild-eyed man in the brown robe and hood o
f a monk began running through the palace corridors proclaiming that I would not be queen much longer.

  “The queen is not long to reign! The queen is not long to reign!” he shouted over and over, darting here and there, opening doors, peering into closets, interrupting ambassadorial receptions and romantic tete-a-tetes in small rooms.

  “The fellow’s insane!” Tom cried out when the mad monk accosted him as he was playing hazard with Prince Edward and me in the prince’s apartments. “A new queen is coming in! And not one of yours!” said the stranger, coming up to Tom and lifting the flap of his dirty hood so that he could look right into Tom’s disgusted face.

  “Get away from me you filthy lunatic!” Tom pushed the man so roughly that he fell against a table of inlaid wood and hit his head. He got up, dizzy but apparently unhurt, and began cackling to himself.

  “Guard your lady, guard your lady,” he repeated, parrotlike, as he half-jogged, half-leaped around the room, stumbling again and again.

  “You,” he shouted then, pointing at me, “you shall not reign long. Soon it will be all over for you!”

  Tom rose and drew his sword, which he wore in spite of the strict prohibitions against bringing weapons into the palace. He slashed at the air and the madman turned and ran out.

  The king, annoyed when the mad monk interrupted one of his oatmeal baths, ordered him caught and expelled. But it took days for the guards to hunt him down and capture him, and by then his message had been spread to every room in the palace. The gossip and the betting reached new levels of excitement, until everyone was speculating on who would be the next queen.

  41

  TOM WAS COMING INTO HIS OWN. KING HENRY HAD APPOINTED HIM Lord High Admiral, and his first duty was to preside over a grand spectacle on the Thames.

  Two barges floated on the river at Westminster, one the king’s barge, red banners and pendants flying bravely in the afternoon breeze, the gilded roses carved into the prow agleam in the sunshine, the other painted to look like a papal barge (though no vessel belonging to the pope had appeared in English waters in many years).