In the Shadow of the Crown

by Jean Plaidy

I began to think how happy I could be with Reginald. I was eleven years old. He was twenty-seven or -eight. That was a big difference but we were good friends and could be more, for I, brought up on the rules of Vives, was more learned than most people of my age and there had been a rapport between myself and Reginald from the start. It was not so incongruous as it might seem. He was a royal Plantagenet, and if I were to be Queen one day he would be King. The people would like to see the two Houses joined. That was always a stabilizing factor. It would be like the alliance of the Houses of Tudor and York, when my grandfather Henry VII had married Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV, thus putting an end to the Wars of the Roses.

  It was a wonderful, comforting thought during those months.

  I was often present when the Countess and my mother talked together. I think they had come to the conclusion that now I was aware of the King's Secret Matter, it might not be harmful for me to know more of it, for, after all, I was deeply involved in it.

  Thus it was that I learned of those farcical proceedings when my father had been summoned to York Place where the Cardinal lived in sumptuous splendor.

  There the King had allowed himself to be charged with immorality because he was living with a woman who was not, in the eyes of the Church, his wife.

  The idea of my father's being summoned anywhere by his subjects was ludicrous. But meekly he had gone; humbly he had listened to their accusations—which, of course, he had ordered them to make. Archbishop Warham had presided.

  “John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was present,” said the Countess. “I have always held him to be one of the most saintly men I know.”

  “It was Doctor Wolman, I believe, who was making the case against the King,” added my mother.

  “And Doctor Bell was the King's Counsel,” said the Countess. She added scornfully, “I can imagine it. ‘Henry, King of England, you are called into this archiepiscopal court to answer a charge of living in sin with your brother's wife.'”

  “It is so false. It is so untrue!” burst out my mother. “I was never Arthur's wife in truth.”

  They seemed to have forgotten my presence, and I sat there quietly, trying to efface myself lest they should remember me and cease to talk so frankly.

  I could imagine it all… that scene with my father looking shocked and anxious. It was a grave charge which they were bringing against him. If he had not wished it to be made, those who made it would have doubtless lost their heads by now. The case for the validity of the marriage was that, on account of Arthur's health, the marriage had not been consummated. Pope Julius II had given a dispensation, and the King had innocently believed that all was in order.

  “And now the Bishop of Tarbes has said this monstrous thing …” said my mother.

  She looked at me and stopped, and the Countess abruptly changed the subect.

  But they had aroused my suspicions. I must discover what the Bishop of Tarbes had suggested.

  They were subdued after that, and their conversation was constrained. I knew I was ignorant of a great deal regarding this matter. But after a while they could not resist the temptation to talk of it, and then they seemed to forget my presence.

  The Countess said, “Archbishop Warham is an old man. Old men seek comfort. He wants to live peacefully in his old age. He will agree with all the King wishes him to.”

  “And we know what that is,” said my mother tragically.

  “Warham declares that, if the marriage with Arthur was consummated, you were truly his wife and therefore the King has married his brother's widow.”

  “It was not. It was not. I tell all it was not. I was a virgin when I married the King.”

  “John Fisher is an honest man. He declared that the Pope had given the dispensation so that the King could suppress his fears. He had no doubt that his marriage was a good one. There was a Bull from the Pope to legalize it. There was no need for the King to question the validity.” The Countess looked at my mother with the utmost sympathy and, seeking to comfort her, went on, “The King spoke so well of you. He said that through the years of your marriage he had found in you all he could hope for in a wife.”

  “Save this one thing,” said my mother, “and that of the greatest importance.”

  “It is only the suggestion of the Bishop of Tarbes …” She paused. Then she went on, “We know differently. It is not an unusual occurrence. It is just that this is the King…”

  “And his need for sons.”

  “He said that, if he had to marry again and if it were not a sin to choose you, you are the one he would marry. He would select you among all others.”

  “Words,” said my mother bitterly.

  #x201C;Words hiding the truth.”

  They were silent again. The the Countess said briskly, “Well, they have settled nothing.”

  “I believe the King is very disappointed with them. He greatly desired the matter to be settled.”

  The Countess took my mother's hand and held it firmly.

  “It cannot be,” she said. “The good men of the Church would never allow it… nor would the people.”

  “I think you underestimate the determination of the King,” said my mother sadly.

  I sat there quietly watching them. I knew this was by no means an end of the matter.

  IÑIGO DE MENDOZA, the Spanish ambassador, called to see my mother and was with her for a long time.

  The Countess was silent and withdrawn. It was no use trying to get her to talk. I wished that they would not leave me so much in the dark. They were thinking that I was too young to understand. I chafed against my youth. My future was involved. I should know. This matter concerned me. And I was determined to find out all I could.

  In time I learned what was said to have aroused the trouble. It had come about during the betrothal celebrations. The Bishop of Tarbes had said that, since the King was questioning the validity of his marriage to the Queen, did that not throw some doubts on my legitimacy? The King of France was very ready to agree to a proposed marriage between his son and me if I were Princess of Wales. But how would he feel if I were an illegitimate daughter of the King?

  Henry Fitzroy would be heir to the throne if he were legitimate—as a bastard he could never be that. And now some people—including my own father—were attempting to prove that I was in like case.

  My father lived in fear of offending God by living with a woman who was not in His eyes his wife. My father was emphatic. He could have accepted the judgement of the Bishop of Rochester but he did not.

  He had his reasons.

  It was the first time I had heard the name of Anne Boleyn.

  WHILE THIS WAS GOING on, a terrible event took place which was to shock the world for years to come.

  It was the sacking of the City of Rome. Everyone was talking about it. Tales of horror were on every lip. It was incredible that such terrible deeds could be perpetrated by man.

  Reginald talked to me about it. As a deeply religious man, he was much affected.

  “There has never been such a tragedy in the history of the world,” he said. “It was the Constable of Bourbon's men.”

  “The French…”

  “No. No. Bourbon was on the side of the Emperor. Bourbon and François had been warring together for years, and Bourbon was fighting with the Emperor.”

  “So the Emperor's allies did this terrible thing.”

  “The Emperor would never have agreed to it. Nor would Bourbon himself if he had been alive. He was killed at the beginning of the affray. Had he not been, he would have controlled the rough soldiery, I doubt not. No man of education would ever have allowed that to happen. It is a blot on Christendom. I do believe Bourbon had no wish to attack Rome, but his men were unpaid, they had marched for miles and they were hungry. There was only one way to retrieve something from the campaign: loot. And where could they find it in more abundance than in the City of Rome? They stormed the city. There was no defense. They decimated the churches, they stole rich ornaments
. They were all determined to make up for their months of hardship, lack of spoils, lack of food.”

  It was hard for a girl of eleven to understand all the horrors which took place during those fearful five days when the soldiers pillaged Rome. I heard later of the terrible happenings. The nuns, hoping their robes would protect them, were seized at the altars where they knelt in prayer and were lewdly stripped of their robes and raped in the most horrible manner. Drunken soldiers roamed the streets. There were mock processions in the churches. The fact that foul deeds were performed in holy places had lent a fillip to the disgusting behavior of these wicked men. They brought prostitutes into the churches. They mocked God, the Pope and all Rome stood for.

  Pope Clement VII had escaped to Castel Sant' Angelo with thirteen of the cardinals. There he was safe from the mob.

  But he was at the mercy of the Emperor, and my father was seeking papal help in annulling his marriage. The Emperor would never allow the Pope to help my father divorce his wife.

  So the Sack of Rome had a special significance for the King.

  WHEN I HEARD the name of Anne Boleyn, I determined to find out all I could about her.

  There was no doubt that she was the most attractive woman at Court. Before I had known what part she was going to play in our lives, I had noticed her. She dazzled. She had all the arts of seduction at her fingertips. Brought up in France, there was a foreignness about her which I suppose some men found attractive. Her magnificent dark hair and her big, luminous eyes were her great beauty, but everything about her was arresting. It was clear that she paid great attention to her dress. I heard she designed her own clothes. The outstanding feature of her elegant gowns was the hanging sleeves which hid the deformity on one of her fingers. Her enemies used to say that she had a mark on her neck which few had seen because it was always covered by a jeweled band. It marked her as a witch, they said. I was not sure about that, but there were times, when my hatred for her was at its height, when I made myself believe it.

  She had come from the Court of France whither she had gone when a child in the train of my Aunt Mary Tudor who went there to marry the ageing Louis XII. She had not returned until soon after the occasion of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, on account of the rapidly deteriorating relations between France and England. She was then to marry Piers Butler because there was some dispute in the Boleyn family about a title, and the marriage of Anne to the son of the Butlers had been arranged to settle the matter.

  My father must have been aware of her at that time, for the proposed marriage was mysteriously prevented. I could not believe that at that time he thought of marrying her. The suggestion would have been too preposterous. I was shocked to hear that Mary Boleyn, Anne's sister, had been my father's mistress for some time.

  These rumors of his philanderings upset me very much when I first heard of them. Now I know that that is the way of men. Well, Mary Boleyn was his mistress and I suppose that at the time of Anne's return to England the King became aware of her and decided to replace one sister with another.

  I heard, too, about the passionate love between Anne and young Henry Percy, the eldest son of the Earl of Northumberland, and how they planned to marry. That would have been a very good match for Mistress Anne Boleyn, for although her father had received many honors, largely because of the favor the King showed to Mary Boleyn, and Anne's mother was a Howard of the great Norfolk family, her father had his roots in trade. There was some story of an ancestor's being a merchant. True, he had acquired a title and become Lord Mayor, but still trade.

  Anne no doubt thought all was set fair. She had been so much in love with Percy, people said. As for Percy, he was besotted. People used to marvel at her devotion to him, because he was not a heroic sort of young man but rather weak. That he adored her was not surprising but her genuine love for him was amazing, for they said it was not due to the great title he would one day inherit.

  I grew to hate her so much that I could not see any good in her; but later on, when her terrible fate overtook her, my bitterness diminished a little and I often thought that, if she had been allowed to marry Percy, she could have been a happy wife and mother and much anguish spared to many.

  My father, by this time, was beginning to be deeply enamoured of her and ordered Wolsey to prevent the marriage with Percy going ahead. Young Henry Percy was humiliated by the Cardinal, and the Earl of Northumberland was sent for. He came to London and berated his son for his folly. Henry Percy was banished to Northumberland, and Anne Boleyn to Hever.

  I could imagine her grief and anger. She would be passionate in her emotion, although at the time she would not have known that the breaking up of their match had been due to the effect she was having on the King and that he was forming plans for her. She thought it was because she was not considered of noble enough breeding to mate with the mighty House of Northumberland, which had deeply wounded her dignity.

  The rest of the story is well known: her return to Court at the instigation of the King, a place in my mother's household as one of her ladies-inwaiting, where she could grace the Court with her special talents of dancing, singing and writing masques with the young poets of the Court, most of whom were her slaves.

  She was one of those women who I believe are called a femme fatale. My father was not the only one who desired her.

  I did not know—I am not sure even now after so many years have passed—whether she deliberately set out to wear the crown. She could not in the beginning have believed this possible—she, from a family associated with trade—and in any case the King already had a wife. It seemed quite preposterous. No, I think at that stage she might have been sincere.

  When he made it clear that he wished to be her lover she told him that she would not be the mistress of any man and as, by reason of her unworthiness and the fact that he was married, she could not be his wife, that must be an end of his aspirations.

  It was bold. But then, she lived by boldness. It had served her well in the beginning, but it was to be her downfall in the end.

  My father could not bear to be crossed; in any case, he was obsessed by the woman. He wanted her so desperately that he contemplated drastic steps to get her.

  We could not believe it at first—not even Wolsey, who knew the King as well as any of us. Wolsey was our enemy—my mother's and mine. He was a clever man who believed there was a need to produce a male heir, but for him there was a greater need than that, which was to placate the King. But he was an astute politician who would immediately see the folly in divorcing my mother in order to put Anne Boleyn on the throne. He had his eyes on an alliance with France. Divorce my mother, yes, but only in order to marry a princess, possibly of France.

  I did not know how much the proposed divorce was due to the lack of a son and how much to the King's desire for Anne Boleyn. My father was adept at dissembling. He had the gift of being able to deceive himself in the face of logic, and he did it so effectively that one was inclined to believe him…as he believed himself.

  He came to my mother one day and I was present. Looking back now, I think that made a turning point in our relationship.

  My mother and I were embroidering together, which was something we often did. The Countess said it had a soothing effect and calmed the nerves. It did seem to do so, for my mother would become quite interested in the stitches and we would sometimes talk of happier subjects than that one which was uppermost in our minds.

  When my father arrived, I rose and curtsied. He came toward us, smiling benignly.

  “Well, Kate,” he said to my mother, “I would speak with you.”

  He turned to me and laid a hand on my shoulders.

  “So…you are keeping your mother company? Good. Very good. And getting on with your studies so that you do not disgrace us, eh?”

  There was a faraway look in his eyes, and his mouth showed signs of tightening. They were aspects which always alarmed me as well as others because I was beginning to recognize what they meant.

&nb
sp; His hand went to my head and he patted it.

  “Growing up now. Well, well, I would speak with your mother. Go now. Go to your governess. Leave us…”

  I curtsied and went, but on the other side of the door I paused. There was a small ante-room which led into the chamber in which they now were. I slipped into that room. I was going to commit the sin of eavesdropping. I could not restrain myself. So often I had felt I was groping in the dark, and how could I comfort my mother, how could I protect myself, if I did not know fully what against?

  Shamelessly I hid myself and listened. The door was slightly ajar, and I could hear every word.

  “It is time we discussed this matter which is causing me so much grief,” he said.

  “I wish to do so with all my heart,” she replied. “Ah,” he went on. “How well I remember the time we went through the ceremony of marriage. Do you recall it? You were so desolate.”

  “Yes, neglected by all…”

  “I suffered with you…my brother's widow … unwanted in Spain and no place for you here. I shall never forget.”

  “I also have good reason to remember.”

  “Unhappy days… until I changed all that.”

  “Yes, you changed it.”

  “All seemed set fair. We were young. We were in love. I was a romantic boy. I wanted to do what was right. I wanted to help you.”

  “You were pleased with my person, I believe.”

  “Kate…I have always been pleased with your person. It is this question which they are raising. It gives me sleepless nights. I cannot rest. It is on my mind … on my conscience. I feel a great anger against these probing churchmen who have raised this question. They believe ours is no true marriage. Think what that means, Kate.”

  “I do not have to. It is untrue.”

  “They quote the scriptures. That cannot be ignored. I vow my desire is to tell them to hold their peace … to leave us … but I cannot do that, Kate. My conscience…it plagues me… night and day it asks me to stop and consider. I am committing a sin in the eyes of God.”

  “Your conscience must have been troubling you for some time,” said my mother coldly, “regarding Bessie Blount and Mary Boleyn.”