by Byrd, Sandra
Often Anne passed along a good tiding to the king on the gift giver’s behalf, but most often her favors were granted to reformer priests or simple gentry families, countless of whom had nothing with which to earn her pleasure. In spite of this, many of the king’s men grumbled that she was too politic for a woman. I suspect they nursed injured egos after a bout with her tongue. But she used her skills well, to the advantage of those whom she loved, and one could hardly fault her for this. ’Twas the way of all at court.
We ladies were caring for her gowns, observing the throng in her apartments seeking to curry her favor. As we did, Lady Zouche noted with pride, “Those who thought Anne Boleyn would be a passing fancy were woefully wrong.” As I tended one of Anne’s hundred or so dresses I had to agree, but my spirit was nervously discomfited.
One day in March, as the rain wept down the high leaded windows, Thomas Cromwell escorted a small assembly of men toward the king, enthroned in his presence chamber, wearied by one request after another from obsequious courtiers. Except for Anne, who remained near the king, we ladies mingled toward the edge of the room with our chatter and our spaniels. When the king spied Cromwell, who had been a lawyer under Wolsey till the latter’s death, he motioned him forward.
“Come forward, my good man,” the king called out. “Have you a report for me?”
The court grew quiet then. Many loiterers looked about them for a quick escape route should the king unloose the stays that contained his temper if the report should ill serve him. I looked at Cromwell, who broke into a smile, and Cranmer’s happy countenance, and knew all was well. The king summoned them forward. As we had not been dismissed to take our leave we stood fast and pretended to go about our business though every ear tilted forward.
“We’ve completed the final copy of the Collectanea satis copiosa, sire,” Cromwell stated. His voice, usually calm and hard to hear, fairly boomed through the chamber. My mind translated the Latin as the “sufficiently abundant collections.”
“Your findings?” Henry said. I watched his face, and Anne’s. Neither showed surprise. I looked about the chamber. Nearly every courtier of import was present as the king planned a dinner that evening to which everyone of consequence had been invited—nay, commanded.
I glanced at Lady Zouche and saw that she had drawn the same conclusion. This announcement was not a surprise. It was staged, as one of Henry’s great masques, for dramatic effect.
“Our findings, Your Majesty, have been reached after several years of studies by the finest minds here in England and also on the Continent. Learned men, dedicated to the truth and to Your Highness and to our Lord. We studied religious texts, primarily Holy Writ, and Latin texts, and Anglo-Saxon documents from the time of the establishment of our great land.”
Cromwell undid a scroll with unusual flourish. His habit was to be as dour a picture in muted black as Wolsey had been a preening red bird. But not today. As the king gave him leave he undid the ribbon wound round the scroll and read aloud.
We have conclusively established through an unbroken chain of documents and scriptures that the Church in England is autonomous. This matter has been examined many times over the years, including by your noble forebear and namesake, King Henry the Second, who also sought to assert ultimate control over his realm. For over which land, sire, did Saint Peter, the first to be claimed as pope, ever have say? Which sovereign did he overrule? None, sire. In Holy Writ he claimed for himself only the titles of servus et apostolus Jesu Christi, slave and apostle. Therefore, we are fully convinced that the king has both secular imperium and spiritual supremacy in England.
There was an audible gasp in the room, and several of the queen’s supporters, and also the religious conservatives, edged toward the door, slipping away, for certes, to strategize separately and apart.
“Therefore,” Cranmer elucidated for the sake of the gathered listeners, “it is Your Majesty who exercises jurisdiction within your realm on all matters of state and religion.”
Lady Zouche reached over and squeezed my hand. This was a victory for Anne, certainly, and also for reformists, of which Cromwell was perhaps the highest placed. Cromwell took nearly an hour to read out a number of the supporting documents and admittedly, they were legion, and credible, and not twisted to purpose. One had to believe that they had been lying comatose waiting to be summoned forth again to life. Cromwell’s smugness, however, endeared him to me not at all.
“We thank you,” the king said. “You’ve served king and country well.”
By the end of February Henry demanded that the Church of Rome recognize him as the sole protector and supreme head of the English Church and clergy.
John Fisher, Katherine of Aragon’s confessor and defender at her long-cooled Blackfriars trial, refused to accept this Act of Supremacy. For his honest opinion he was imprisoned in the Tower. The king’s surrogate father, Sir Thomas More, offered to resign his chancellorship rather than acknowledge that anyone other than the pope was the supreme head in England. It was refused.
Meanwhile, Thomas Cromwell was made one of the king’s most highly placed advisors.
Anne looked exultant, radiant, victorious. She had been passing along reformist books, not only to her ladies but to the king.
It was, as my lady mother might have said, too merry to persist.
In May Anne came down with a minor flux and kept to her bed. As her closest friend and confidante, as well as mistress of her robes, I visited each day, carrying tidbits of court news and lady chatter with me as well as broths and meals of plain oats I’d ordered from the kitchens to entice her to eat.
“I cannot take any food yet,” she said weakly. “My innards will not tolerate it.” I looked upon the desk in her reception chamber. There were boxes and baskets of gifts, all sent from those seeking her favor and, by the by, the king’s. I opened one box to find a fine brush with a carved handle and took it in to her.
“Let me brush your hair. ’Twill make you feel better.” She sat a bit and sipped the broth I brought to her as I did her hair and talked. I soon noticed a sickly sweet scent wending throughout the room and commented on it.
“Oh, ’tis George’s wife Jane’s perfume; she had been receiving guests and gifts for me earlier on. Her father, Lord Morley, purchased some from the Saracens present at Calais so many years ago and she’s used it ever since. ’Tis jasmine or some such thing. But she applies it too strongly.”
I rose and went to the servant in the outer chamber. “Please change the rushes in Mistress Boleyn’s rooms. And add some rosemary and lavender.”
She curtseyed to me and went to obey.
Soon Anne looked tired again. “I shan’t keep you any longer,” I said. “I will be back tomorrow to see if you’re well.” She nodded sleepily and sank back into her bed. “What shall I do with those?” I nodded toward the foodstuffs in the gift baskets.
“Remove them, please,” she said. “The smell nauseates me.”
On my way out I pressed the baskets into the hand of her lady maid. “Please, take these to your family,” I said. “There are dates and nuts and oranges and some fine cheeses.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” she said. “May our Lord reward your kindness and generosity.”
I had caught the flux as well and had been unable to visit Anne for a week. When I did, I found her to be fully recovered physically but sick at heart.
“What is it?” I asked.
She nodded for me to sit down next to her. “I have ill tidings.”
Edmund? Thomas? My father? Mayhap things had gone awry with the king. “Go on,” I urged her.
“One of my lady maids—and her daughter—has perished.”
“Perished? Who—and whatever do you mean?”
“Your charge, little Jessica, and her mother. One of my ladies came to tell me. Apparently they had eaten of some oranges which had spoilt and took sick till they vomited blood. Talk in the servants’ quarters was that the deaths were warranted as just rewards for stea
ling fruit. The fruit, they reason, must have been stolen, for where else would a plain maid get oranges?”
I ran from the room, down the hall to the close chamber, and was sick. Sweet Jessica and her mother dead of oranges I had given them. After I finished heaving into the open hole, which exhaled stench back upon me, I wiped my mouth with my linen and returned to Anne. It would have been unseemly for her to have chased after me, and she hadn’t.
“Those oranges were not stolen,” I said, my shoulders wracked with repressed sobs. “I gave them to the mother. Seville oranges,” I said, “Spanish oranges. Sent to you by a well-wisher whilst you were ill. And they were not spoilt. I handled them myself.”
She looked at me quietly. “Poison?”
I nodded. “Poison. From now on you mayn’t eat anything except that which comes by the king.” He, after all, had a taster to ensure that his food was untainted.
I took my leave of her as soon as I could. She hugged me tightly and wished me well and after I returned to my rooms I dismissed Edithe and took to my bed in the middle of the day. Later, after I’d recovered some sensibilities, I recalled that the year before the Duchess of Norfolk, Anne’s double-minded aunt, had smuggled a note of support to the queen in a basket of oranges. I was sick again at the thought that Anne could have been poisoned, I could have been poisoned, as sweet little Jessica was.
Summer came and the king was restless, pacing on progress from property to property like a great beast on the prowl. In July he sent Anne, and a hunting party, ahead of him to a neighboring estate and then snuck out of Windsor Castle himself, leaving instructions that, upon his return, the queen was to have been removed to a smaller, dank estate. When he rejoined us he seemed merrier than I’d seen him in a long while, relieved of the burden of his sinful relationship with Katherine, he said, and content to leave the running of the realm in Thomas Cromwell’s competent hands, as he’d done for years with Wolsey. Cromwell had handed him the thing he most wanted—an airtight legal and religious rationale for his divorce. Anne promised to give him what he needed most—a legitimate son.
“Is this wise?” I asked her one day whilst we strolled. “Offering something that only God Himself can ensure?”
She nodded, confident of her own abilities, I suspected.
“Have a care what you promise him,” I said. “He always ensures his promises are collected upon.”
I myself had believed that the king and Anne shared not only intellectual agreement on the sovereignty arguments that the reformers made, but also a religious understanding. Just a few days earlier Anne and Henry, both ignoring the priest, had passed her book of hours back and forth in chapel whilst the priest said Mass. Like children in church, Henry wrote in the book and then passed the book to Anne, who seemed to write a response afore passing it back to him. He grinned at her and came very close, I believe, to kissing her in the middle of the service, which would have been shocking indeed.
It would not have been fanciful, then, to believe that Henry would look kindly on reformers even as he set his jaw against religious conservatives.
But it would have been wrong.
In August George had his gentleman deliver a note to me asking to meet in my quarters later that night. I sent a note back agreeing. At the appointed hour he arrived, as did Anne. I showed them in and we three sat round the fire.
“Thank you, Meg, for allowing us to meet here,” George said. “Anne’s quarters, as you know, are the center of all things these days and mayhap not as private—or safe—as I’d like.”
I nodded.
“And my own, well, my wife hangs round me listening, waiting, wanting, and nearly all hours of the day. She is scarce company at night, though, when a wife might be expected to be present. Who knows whom she might whisper to, and what.”
I looked at him, alarmed. Was he suggesting that his own wife would betray him?
“In any case,” he continued, “I trust you’ve not heard.”
“Heard what?” Anne asked.
“About Thomas Bilney. He was dragged from his pulpit today, midsentence. Taken to Lollard pit and burned alive.”
“Dear Lord,” Anne said. “For…?”
“Lutheran sympathies.” George unrolled a small scroll that he withdrew from his sleeve. “He said, ‘Scripture is more pleasant to me than the honey or the honeycomb; wherein I learnt that all my labors, my fasting and watching, all the redemption of masses and pardons, being done without truth in Christ, who alone saveth his people from their sins; these I say, I learnt to be nothing else but even, as St. Augustine saith, a hasty and swift running out of the right way.’ He was a very good priest.”
“Does the king know?” she asked.
George shrugged. “But I cannot believe this would be carried out if it were known that the king would strongly disagree.”
Anne looked truly troubled. “But….” She looked to be hard-pressed to place her thoughts into words. “I thought we were of a mind.”
“Mayhap he is being advised from two opposite quarters,” George said.
Later, Anne came to my chambers, cuddling her little dog Pourquoi, a gift from Lady Lisle, in her arms. “I have heard that there are secret meetings going on within the court. I need to know who attends—who is honest and true, who may be plants and spies. Since the king sent Katherine away all know that our marriage is nigh and it becomes dangerous to me…. as you may imagine.”
I nodded, thinking of Jessica, of the duchess, of Bilney.
“As your sister is a known reformer, no one will think it strange if you attend a meeting should you be found out. Especially as you are not known to be…. devout. Will you cloak yourself and attend after the Christmas celebrations?”
“Will it help you?”
“’Twill, or I wouldn’t ask it of you,” she said. She held my gaze. “But ere you agree I must confess. I have heard from George, who heard from Latimer and Parker, that Will Ogilvy is back from Antwerp and may be in attendance.”
THIRTEEN
Year of Our Lord 1531
York Place
Richmond Castle Greenwich Palace
My sister, Alice, was present at court and the day after my discussion I drew her aside in Anne’s chambers. “I’d like to speak with you.” I gave her a meaningful look. “Will you be at your rooms after dinner?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “I will wait for you.”
Later that evening I made my way through the ravenish shadows of the ladies’ courtyard chambers where my sister was quartered. She was not nobility, as I was as the widow of a baron, nor even as tightly connected with Anne, so her rooms were comfortable but meager. She served willingly in spite of that fact. I knocked sharply on her door and she opened it and let me in. “My dearest,” she said, taking my shawl from me and patting the chair closest to the fire. “How fare you?”
I hugged her tightly before sitting down, the scent of her lightly perfumed hair evoking memories of my running into her arms when I’d been hurt or harrowed as a child. I wondered if I would ever outgrow the need for her comfort or have a child of my own to offer it to. “I have a favor to ask,” I began.
“Anything.” She drew near to me and offered a small platter of comfits.
After taking a bite of one as a courtesy I said, “I understand there are some reformer meetings going on at court. I’d like to attend one. Or more.”
She cocked her head warily. “For yourself?”
These times, perhaps, would bring much good and yet could still make a beloved sister question another. “For Anne.” I explained the situation briefly. She had, of course, heard about Bilney. “And mayhap for myself.” I did not mention that it was a man I sought and not his God.
She nodded. “Of course.” She let me know that the meetings were often held in rooms and chambers furthest out from the circle of courtiers, though not always; directed me to a few; and gave me a password to use if I should be questioned. “Romans eight,” she said. “Do not forget that
.”
I had no idea what might be found at Romans 8, but of course I would remember it as if my life depended upon it, as well it might.
Nighttime at court was quiet. The halls echoed and amplified the softest of steps because most were safely behind doors. Some closed doors sheltered right and honest activities, sleep or reading; sewing; discussion or pleasant discourse of intimate sorts between husbands and wives. Some doors hid corrupt activities, thieving and plotting and horrors upon which one didn’t like to let the mind dwell. Some doors, like the one I crept toward, hid activities that were just but might not always be perceived thusly. I pulled my cape around me, left the hood up, and knocked lightly on the door. A young courtier I did not recognize opened it to me. “Romans eight,” I whispered, and he nodded and let me in.
I admit to it. I immediately scanned the room looking for Will and was unsure if I was disappointed or relieved not to find him present. A priest whose name I did not know but recognized as a friend of Matthew Parker, whom Anne had helped install as a chaplain at court, was speaking from the front. I did not listen to him at first but continued to look about me. Most people were courtiers I recognized but had few dealings with. Few held copies of what seemed to be Holy Writ. I leaned over and glanced at the copy of the woman next to me. I could just see that it was written in English before she glanced at my hooded form. She closed the book and slipped away. After all, it had been just the year before that Henry had decreed an injunction against anyone owning an English Bible and Bilney’s ashes were not yet cooled. Though there were a hundred or more people packed in the chamber, I only recognized one woman whom I knew to be a lady in the service of the Duchess of Norfolk, Anne’s highly placed aunt and sworn enemy.