The Queen's Lady

by Barbara Kyle

  Honor remained near the doorway. The eyes of a hundred and more faces followed the Queen as she swept across the stone floor. Bishop Fisher, her only real champion among her fearful councilors, watched her advance, his eagle eyes blazing loyalty from his skeletal face. The Queen took her chair. All eyes turned to the King.

  The King smiled benignly at the Cardinal-judges, then leaned forward in his throne. Speaking with calmness and sincerity, he told the court of his great scruple. He said he believed that, in living with his brother’s widow, a union expressly forbidden by Holy Scripture, he had been in mortal sin. He feared for his soul’s salvation. He could bear it no longer. His conscience required judgment. Then, with a rustle of royal satin, he settled back and elegantly stretched out one shapely leg swathed in white silk and gartered with rubies.

  There was a moment of stillness as men digested their monarch’s speech, so pious, so reasonable. Bishops and lawyers turned to whisper to one another. Pages inched forward to slip documents into the hands of their masters. A recording clerk’s pen scratched over parchment.

  There was a flash of sunlight on blue velvet. The Queen had arisen, unbidden, breaking all proper procedure. With eyes fixed on the King she stepped forward, crossed around the judges, and mounted the steps to the King’s canopied throne. She dropped to her knees at his feet and bowed her head. The court sucked in its breath. The King drew back, visibly shocked by her audacity, her proximity. His hands slid down the gilt arms of his throne and grasped the lion paws at the ends.

  “My lord,” the Queen said, “I beseech you, for the love that has been between us, let me have justice and right. Take of me some pity, for I am a friendless woman, a stranger, born out of your dominion. I kneel to you, the fount of justice within this realm, for I see around me no impartial tribunal. I do not recognize the authority of this court.”

  Her steady voice rang through the dumbfounded hall.

  “I take all the world to witness that I have been a faithful, humble and obedient wife to Your Grace these twenty years, ever comfortable to your will and pleasure, being always well pleased and contented with all things wherein you took delight. And I take God to be my judge that when you had me first I was a pure maid, without touch of man. And whether this be truth or no, I put it to your conscience.”

  Not even a whisper could be heard in the stunned court. Honor, too, held her breath. The Queen had wagered all. She had confronted the King publicly with the one claim whose truth no living person but herself could swear to.

  The King sat rigid, staring out squarely over the Queen’s head. His hands still clenched the throne arms’ lion paws and his bloodless fingertips seemed to form a second set of claws.

  When he made no answer, the Queen spoke again. “My lord, I humbly beg you to spare me the extremity of this court.”

  Still, he said nothing. In the silence, the chirrups of birds fluted through the windows. “If you will not,” the Queen concluded lifelessly, “to God alone do I commit my cause.”

  She stood, made a deep curtsy to her husband, and stepped off the dais. She did not give one look to the cardinal-judges or to the bishops, but moved slowly across the hall towards the open doors. Honor saw that her walk was as sedate as ever, but the light had gone out of her face, and all strength seemed to have ebbed from her body. Beneath the Queen’s shoe an uneven flagstone tripped her and she stumbled. She quickly found her balance but stood still, as if unsure of which way to go, her hands fumbling oddly at her side. In a moment Honor was at her elbow, offering her arm and guiding her mistress away from the glaring mass of eyes. The court crier called the Queen back. But she walked on.

  “Madame,” Honor whispered as they neared the door, “you are called again.”

  “It matters not,” Catherine said hollowly. “This is no impartial court for me. I will not tarry.”

  The crier called once more as the shadows of the doorway swallowed the Queen and her lady-in-waiting.

  Weeks later the debate sputtered on all morning in Campeggio’s packed, sweltering courtroom: had the young Prince Arthur, twenty-eight years ago, used the Spanish Princess Catherine as his wife or not? For hours the Cardinals and Bishops had probed old men’s memories, dredging up their speculations about the Prince’s sexual performance on that long-vanished bridal night. The groom had been fourteen, the bride fifteen.

  Honor watched, disgusted, from the gallery. How this degrading spectacle dragged on! The judges had declared the Queen contumacious immediately after her extraordinary appeal on that first day, and the court sessions had slogged on for four more weeks without her. Now, as another ancient gentleman hobbled forward to give testimony pleasing to the King, Honor groaned. She pushed her way past the sweating bodies in the gallery and left the hall.

  Outside Blackfriars she crossed the polluted Fleet Ditch over the bridge that connected the monastery precincts with Bridewell Palace. She went directly up to the Queen’s private chamber. It lay in gloom, shrouded with heavy Flemish tapestries to shield its occupant from the noonday glare. Catherine sat alone in a corner, at work over her embroidery.

  She looked up as Honor entered, and smiled. “What news, my dear?”

  “Little to cheer you, my lady.”

  “Little cheer do I expect. Yet I must know it.”

  Honor took a chair near her. She picked up a spool of purple thread from the sewing basket and toyed with it. “Such a foolish business, Your Grace,” she began. “One ancient lordling after another stepped forward with the most idiotic babble about your wedding night.” She laughed, hoping to sound lighthearted, but the result was forced and spiritless. “Really, my lady, some told tales that stretched credulity so far, I wondered the speakers did not choke on their own nonsense.”

  “Let me hear it,” Catherine said quietly.

  Honor wound the purple thread. “First came the Marquis of Dorset. He said that following the marriage ceremony he had been among the lords and gentlemen who escorted Prince Arthur to your bedchamber, and he observed you lying in your bed under a coverlet. The Prince had a good complexion, ‘ruddy and full of fire,’ the Marquis said, and looked fit, he thought, to make any woman his wife. He finished by saying that he always supposed the Prince had used you as his wife, for—” she paused, recalling the courtroom sniggers, then went on softly—“for at the same age he had done so himself with his own bride.”

  Catherine was silent. She dipped her needle and tugged the thread.

  “Truly, my lady,” Honor urged, “the rest is all drivel to match this.”

  “Go on, my dear.”

  Honor looked down. “The Viscount Fitzwater gave testimony next. He recalled that the Prince had been wearing a nightshirt.”

  Catherine almost smiled. “Damning evidence, indeed. And to think that only last month I awarded Fitzwater’s grandson the rights of forest to a manor I hold in Lancashire.” She sighed. “Well, who was next?”

  “Sir Charles Willoughby. He added something new. The morning after your bridal night, he said, the Prince had addressed him in front of several attendants, saying, ‘Willoughby, bring me a cup of ale, for I have been all night in the midst of Spain!’”

  Catherine shook her head with weary disgust.

  “And that was all, Your Grace,” Honor said, too quickly.

  “What?” Catherine asked, amused. “No one else came forth to say he saw me actually in the same room with my husband? No more old men to swear that a worried boy’s boast of manhood is absolute proof of a maiden’s lost virginity?” Her smile faded into a look of infinite pity. “A frightened, sickly boy, who perished not five months later, too ill to withstand even the mild breezes of spring.” She crossed herself. “May God, who knows the truth of this, rest Arthur’s simple soul.”

  Honor wound her thread in silence.

  “I can see that there is more, my dear,” Catherine said, dipping the needle again. “Come, let me have it all.”

  This time, Honor could not even glance up. “Sir Andrew Tal
bot,” she murmured. “He said his wife, now dead, had talked the next morning with her maid. The maid had spoken with a laundress. The laundress assured the maid, who told the wife…that the sheets of your bed were stained with blood.”

  Catherine’s hand, poised with her needle, froze at the lie.

  “And the last witness I heard,” Honor said, rushing the words now, wanting it over and done with, “was Sir Joshua de Pencier. He testified that he saw Your Grace the next morning as you went to chapel. He said that your way of walking, your gait, was stiff. ‘Like a woman who suffers in her nether regions,’ he said, ‘from having lain long with a man.’”

  Catherine’s hand flew to her lips as if to halt a retch, or perhaps a cry.

  Impulsively, Honor bent forward to touch her mistress’s trembling knee. Catherine clasped the hand, eyes closed. They sat together for several moments, Catherine walled up behind her humiliation, and Honor reaching out in pity.

  And yet such chains hung about her own heart. Not chains of remorse. She saw the way too clearly for remorse; she did not repent what she had done. She believed, in the deepest, soundest part of herself, that she was fighting for right—that the strangling limbs of the Church must be amputated. Every day she shuddered for the unknown lives snuffed out by heretic hunters like Sir Thomas More. Bitterness shackled her heart. It was a rusty weight, and corrosive.

  But every day, too, the sight of the Queen’s private anguish forged a new link on a separate chain. Richard Thornleigh’s accusation in Spain echoed: “You betray a noble mistress who trusts you with her life’s blood.”

  The dissembling had been the worst. Apologizing on her knees to the Queen for the ‘robbery’ of the brief in Spain. Pretending to grieve at the theft, though the Queen assured her it could only have been arranged through Wolsey’s treachery. Worst of all, accepting the Queen’s tender kiss at having risked so much danger for her sake. It had been agony.

  And then, the trial had carried on as if the brief had never existed. The Queen had sent Honor daily to monitor the court sessions, and neither side had even mentioned the brief. Honor knew that the King held the original document in secret under lock and key, and the Queen’s lawyers, bullied by Wolsey into agreeing that the Queen’s unattested copy was worthless, had dropped the matter. The Queen made no complaint. She declared again that she did not recognize the authority of the court and would obey only Rome. But Honor realized that the Queen had fallen back to this position in desperation after the one piece of evidence that might have saved her had been lost.

  Trussed and loaded with these fetters, Honor could only hope that the verdict in the King’s favor would arrive swiftly to release them both from the misery of waiting.

  The afternoon crawled on.

  Just before five o’clock, as Catherine was preparing to lay aside her sewing to go to Vespers in her chapel, the door swung open. Golden evening burst into the room, and the tapestries rippled in the gust of air. Margery stood in the doorway, out of breath and grinning.

  “Madam!” she cried. “Great news! You are delivered!”

  She rushed in and dropped to her knees. “Oh, madam, it is over! My lord Wolsey has thrown up his hands, admitting a quagmire of legal difficulties. And my lord Campeggio has declared the legates’ court closed. Dismissed! Just this moment he said so. And my lord Wolsey, you know, must defer to him. Madam, Cardinal Campeggio has advoked the case to Rome! To Rome, just as you always demanded. Now, you will have justice. Is it not wonderful? You’ve won!”

  Catherine’s pale lips parted. She stared at Margery.

  Margery laughed and clapped her hands. “Oh, I almost forgot the best part. When Cardinal Campeggio stood and made his declaration there was a great commotion in the court, some men rushing out to spread the news and others rushing in to wonder at it, and all men jabbering at once like a flock of nervous starlings. And at that moment, my lord of Suffolk strode forward in a fume and clapped his hand down on a table and shouted, ‘By the Mass, I see now that the old saw is true—that there was never legate nor cardinal that did good in England!’ And at his words a great clamor went up as some men huffed in agreement with him and others puffed against him, and as I ran out to bring the news to you the Bishops and lawyers and clerks were all shouting in confusion. Oh, madam, I wish you had been there. Faith, you’ve never seen the like!”

  Catherine’s hands slowly took up the embroidery once again. The needle trembled in her fingers. “And my lord?” she said, her voice a dry whisper, a thread.

  Margery seemed unsure of what the Queen was asking. “Beg pardon, my lady?”

  Honor had hurried to the window at Margery’s first words of victory, and had ripped aside a corner of the tapestry. Now she looked out, seeing nothing. Her nails dug into the fabric as she struggled to absorb the bitter news. The case advoked to Rome. More delay. More endless wallowing in arguments by lawyers. More fires for heretics while everyone waited. Perhaps for months. And the betrayal she had committed…all for nothing!

  She turned and caught the Queen’s stricken face. Compassion flooded back, for she saw that the Queen was realizing her own fatal miscalculation. This news did not mean that she had won; it meant the King had lost. He had been slapped in the face in the very act of bending his knee to the Pope. Whatever dying embers of his love she had pitifully hoped might glow anew when all this was behind them, Cardinal Campeggio had just stamped out. With this fiat, the husband she adored was lost to her as surely as if he had been struck dead.

  Honor said to Margery, “Her Grace asks, how did the King respond?”

  “Oh, truly, madam, I know not,” Margery said blithely. “His Grace was not there to hear. He had been watching earlier, but he left the hall some two hours ago. Went to Greenwich, I understand, to arrange a masque for the Lady…” She checked herself before finishing the name.

  But Honor saw the blood that suddenly stained the embroidery below the Queen’s needle. She saw the tears escape the lowered eyelashes—the first tears she had ever seen this indomitable woman shed. The red stain bled in a widening circle, and Honor knew that the pricked finger weeping out that drop of the Queen’s blood only hinted at the gash in her heart.

  Henry, with Anne at his side, was singing lustily in the minstrels’ gallery of the great hall at Greenwich—his musicians were rehearsing one of his own compositions for the evening’s masque—when the news from Blackfriars arrived. The sheet of music fluttered from his hand.

  His voice blasted through the hall. “Will no one rid me of this barren crone!”

  The musicians’ rebecs and shalms wheezed out a decaying spiral of sound. The smiles on the faces of the gentlemen around the King evaporated.

  “Summoned as a witness to Rome?” Henry bellowed. “I’ll see hell freeze over first!”

  Thomas Cromwell, who had rowed from Blackfriars with the messenger, stood in the background, hands clasped over his stomach, waiting for the storm to spend itself.

  Anne tugged at Henry’s sleeve, trying to draw him out of the gallery. Her face was white, but she forced down her own rage. “Come, my lord,” she whispered. “This is no fit place for a king to consider such matters. Look, here is good Master Cromwell ready to offer you council. Come away, my lord!” With glaring eyes she burned a path through the gentlemen and musicians and coaxed the King out of the gallery.

  In his private chamber Henry prowled in front of the cold hearth, his wrath concentrated and ferocious. “Summoned! Like some sniveling shoemaker. To grovel before a foreign court. Me, a sovereign King anointed with holy oil!”

  Anne stood thinking, silent and grave. Cromwell, by the door, never let his eyes stray from the King. “Obviously, Your Grace,” he said, his voice deferential but calm, “it would be unwise to plead at Rome.”

  “Unwise? It would be suicide! The Pope licks Charles’s boots! We know what the outcome of that hearing would be!” His fist smashed down on the mantel. “Just as we should have known the outcome of this farcical trial. All t
hese grinding months and years, for failure! Wolsey should have known.”

  Anne’s voice reached him. “You have been poorly served by your chancellor, my lord.”

  Henry’s battered pride snatched at the suggestion. “So I have! I have been thwarted. By God’s wounds, Wolsey will pay for fouling me with this shame.”

  Cromwell waited through a moment of ominous silence. Then, quietly, he ventured to the King’s back, “Do you mean, then, to dismiss the Cardinal, Your Grace?”

  Henry whirled around. “I mean to have his heart out!”

  From the corridor beyond the closed doors came the muffled sound of a dog barking.

  “In that case,” Cromwell said evenly, “you will need a new Lord Chancellor.”

  Henry appeared to ignore him. Controlled now that he had a target for his rancor he sauntered across to Anne, though he continued to speak to Cromwell. “Why?” he asked caustically. “Do you imagine I am so fond of your council that you begin to sniff at the post for yourself? Is that it, Master Woolcarder?”

  Cromwell did not bristle at this epithet the King enjoyed insulting him with. It had once been the truth; before he had taught himself the law he had been a merchant trading in woolen cloth. “Far from it, Your Grace,” he answered. “But I am naturally concerned for the good government of your realm. Any successor to the post of Lord Chancellor must be a man of outstanding ability.”

  “Of loyalty,” Henry said, turning to him. “I’ll have no more self-serving parasites like Wolsey. All he ever looked to was his own magnificence.”

  “Indeed, Your Grace,” Cromwell murmured. His mind was casting out a net over the likely candidates, quickly evaluating their potential usefulness to himself. “Able and loyal the man must be,” he agreed, knowing that Wolsey had resoundingly been both. “My lord Bishop of Winchester is a most able man,” he said, testing the water.

  “No more priests. Must I be forever entangled with these Church puppets?”