She looked at me sympathetically. I longed to confide in her, but I was wary. At length I began, uncertain how much to say.
“I am not nervous, exactly. I dread thinking about this. I haven’t talked about it to anyone, especially not Will. But the truth is, I’m no longer certain Will is the man I want to marry.”
“Oh dear.”
I looked up at Bridget, hoping to find sympathy in her eyes, her expression. I saw only a patient attentiveness.
“I’ve tried not to think about this, but I can’t help it. No matter what I do, I can’t prevent these doubts from flooding into my mind.”
“Is there someone else?”
Bridget’s words opened a wound. My eyes filled with tears—tears of guilt and shame and remorse. I did not answer her right away. But then I wiped impatiently at my eyes and said, my voice low, “Yes.”
To my surprise Bridget laughed.
“Oh, is that all!” she trilled. “I fell madly in love with an archer in the king’s guard during my engagement. But I came to my senses. I knew I was only acting out of fear. It wasn’t a real attachment at all. I was trying to find a way to avoid doing the thing that frightened me. Thank goodness I realized it and sent the archer away. He married someone else—a woman of his own sort, a butcher’s daughter from Plymouth.
“Tell me honestly, Jane, is this someone of yours a man far below you, someone your parents would never approve of?”
I nodded.
“And someone you could never bring to court, who would never be welcome as an equal among us?”
Ruefully, and with a sigh, I nodded once again.
Bridget shrugged and spread her hands.
“Then don’t you see? All you are doing is defying your family—especially your father, judging from what you have told me about him, and what I have heard from others—and defying the social rules we follow here at the royal court. Am I right?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that since I met him, I feel different. I am different. I can never go back to being the old Jane again.”
She patted my hand.
“Think about what I’ve said. I never regretted marrying Richard, and the archer never crosses my mind, or the butcher’s daughter either.”
* * *
The Christmas season approached, and the dozens of grooms and valets in Anne’s growing household all had new liveries. Embroidered on the servants’ new coats, in large letters, was the message “Grumble who will, this is how it’s going to be!”
It was a stark challenge to Queen Catherine and her supporters, and no one could mistake the meaning of the words.
Nor would anyone mistake the fact that Anne was wearing looser gowns, and complaining often of illness, and demanding quails’ eggs and pomegranates and marchpane and other delicacies as pregnant women often did. As ever, the eyes of the court were fixed on Anne’s belly, and whether her loose gowns were meant to accommodate a telltale swelling or disguise the fact that her symptoms were all a ruse, no one could say. Not even those of us who served her.
The challenge of the servants’ liveries was not lost on Queen Catherine, who immediately ordered new coats for her own grooms and valets, embroidered with the words “Queen Forever.”
Fighting broke out between the men of the two rival households, their brawling an incessant annoyance to the king, who at last, in exasperation, sent Queen Catherine away to Oatlands for the Christmas season and ordered her not to return.
Anne had won—but King Henry was put out with her.
“Why must you go out of your way to stir up conflict?” he snapped. “Why can you not be content with all I have given you, all I have done for you? Is it not enough that you demand your own household, your own army of guardsmen? Must you use them to provoke quarrels?”
“The guardsmen protect me against that damnable Nun of Kent!” was Anne’s retort. “And against the Spaniards, the supporters of that woman who calls herself your queen!”
Back and forth the accusations flew, until the king limped out of the room—only to return, not long afterward, his mood contrite.
“Pardon me, sweeting, puffball,” he began, taking Anne’s hand and kissing it. (I could not help but notice that he never took the hand with the extra nail, always the normal hand. I never spoke of this to anyone, but I often wondered, had anyone else noticed?) He spoke and acted as if unaware of those of us in the room, he did not care who heard him.
“It was only my leg,” he went on, his tone pleading. “My painful leg. You know how it rouses me to fury.”
Anne nodded her forgiveness, but there was a smile of triumph on her lips.
The king had reached the age of forty, and it was evident he was feeling the weight of his years. He had grown heavy and fleshy, his handsome face rounder, his chins multiplying. (I counted three.) He walked with a golden walking stick and when in his worst pain, leaned on Charles Brandon’s strong arm. Ever fearful of a return of the sweating sickness, he continued to wear a pouch of live spiders at his throat, which made Anne laugh and tease him.
The nullity suit languished, its outcome uncertain and with no final resolution in sight. The king’s impatience deepened, and gave him headaches—or so we heard him tell Anne. We did not look forward to Christmas, and as the wintry days grew shorter and darker, the pageantry and foolery of the Christmas season, the gift-giving and solemn worship, held none of their usual joyful appeal.
Besides, with the rains and frosts of December, work on Anne’s apartments ceased, and my opportunities to spend precious hours with Galyon grew fewer.
“Grumble who will, this is how it’s going to be!” I told myself, echoing Anne’s new motto. It was no good lamenting how things were, or complaining. For now, things were as they were: with Galyon, with Will, with the conflicts and the unhappy Christmas to come.
The days passed, and I did not see Galyon, or receive a message from him. Always before, when something had happened to keep us apart, one of Anne’s grooms would send me a message.
I grew worried. Had something happened to Galyon? Was it possible that Will had found out about us, and attacked him? Will was generally a peaceable man, but I had never given him any reason to be jealous. I could not be sure of what he might do if he discovered that another man had become my lover.
I waited, anxiously, then just before Christmas I went to the groom who relayed Galyon’s messages to me in the past.
“He has gone back to France, mistress,” was the groom’s response when I asked after Galyon. “He has gone to spend the Noel with his wife.”
* * *
Our traveling party strung itself out in a long dusty line of carts, wagons, mounted guardsmen and footsoldiers, winding slowly along the sun-swept Dover road. It was September of the year 1532, I was twenty-six years old and still unmarried (a disgrace, for a gentleman’s daughter), and was preparing to embark with the rest of the royal party for France.
The months had gone by quickly since our last troubled, quarrel-blighted Christmas season, a season I was eager to forget, and events were moving rapidly toward a long-awaited conclusion. King Henry and Anne were living as though they were already married, as though the failed nullity suit was no more than a minor inconvenience and the king’s decision to cast aside the pope’s authority over his marital life was the inevitable outcome of a long and unjust struggle.
For the king had, at last, freed himself from the burden (or blessing, however one might see it) of submission to the church of Rome. He had taken the radical—many said heretical—step of declaring himself to be the head of the church in England. He had joined the rebels who, like Martin Luther, renounced the primacy of the Holy See and severed the time-honored unity of Christendom.
And for this he was condemned, bitterly and unceasingly, by those loyal to the pope.
Anne, however, was overjoyed. She had triumphed over Catherine at last. She was on her way to the French court, as King Henry’s chosen companion, and her forty-eight trunks were fille
d with silken nightgowns embroidered with miniver, kirtles of purple and blue and green damask, gowns of russet and crimson velvet trimmed in cloth of gold. The king had indulged her every whim in preparing for the journey to the French court, for he would not have it said that his bride-to-be was anything but magnificent in her dress, a worthy future consort and the future mother of a line of kings.
Anne had begun to boast about her own mother’s descent from King Edward I (ignoring her father, who, as everyone knew, was a mere commoner). She held herself with a newfound authority, looked at others with a condescending stare, and affected an air of superiority and command that I found hard to endure.
“Jane!” she would call out to me, “take little Pourquoi for his walk! Bring me my satin sleeves! The ones with the diamonds! Jane! Where is my cloak of Bruges satin? Find it!”
We were kept busy fetching and carrying, bringing pillows for her back and footstools for her feet, ever mindful that she might possibly be carrying the king’s child and so we might in fact be serving not only Thomas Boleyn’s haughty daughter but the next king of England.
Certainly Henry was lavishing more costly gifts on Anne than ever, from fur-trimmed gowns to gold-trimmed headdresses to delicate damask slippers to velvet and satin cloaks in numbers too high to count. A dozen dressmakers and countless assistant seamstresses were kept busy cutting and fitting and sewing Anne’s beautiful garments; precious stuffs were brought to the palace in quantity to be turned into much admired gowns and petticoats. And beyond the clothing were the jewels the king showered on Anne. He ordered his jewelers to remove the largest rubies and diamonds from his own bracelets and rings and make them into sparkling necklaces for Anne. Catherine was ordered to turn over her gems to the royal treasury as well, and they found their way (much to Catherine’s anger) into Anne’s treasure hoard of valued stones.
And to complete Anne’s honors, she was elevated, amid grand ceremony, to the rank of Marquess of Pembroke.
Clad in a mantle and gown of crimson velvet trimmed with ermine, while all the prominent nobles and officers of the court looked on, she knelt before the king as her patent of nobility was read out and the gleaming golden coronet was placed atop her dark flowing curls. Trumpets sounded and the choir sang a Te Deum of thanksgiving before the court celebrated the event with feasting and pageantry.
Once she was made a marquess, Anne’s hauteur rose to new heights. Her demands grew, the punishments she imposed became more harsh. She dismissed a royal valet for allowing little Pourquoi to relieve himself on a pair of her satin slippers lying on her bed. And not only was the unfortunate valet dismissed, but all the valets were deprived of their usual special privileges (their right to keep candle ends, the heels of manchet loaves, discarded points and laces) for an entire month—and a winter month at that.
She was very particular about the embroidered counterpane on her bed, with its elaborate border of cloth of gold and its heraldic white falcons. At the least sign of a wrinkle in this bedcovering she would give a shout of dismay, call for one of the grooms and insist that the counterpane be pressed and straightened—on pain of immediate dismissal.
Worst of all, Anne became not only imperious but vengeful. When a tearful mother came to her to beg her to intervene to prevent her son from being hanged, Anne’s response was cold.
“He has gone wrong,” she said. “He has been found guilty. Let him be hanged!”
“But all he did was to steal a small coin—and not for himself, but for our neighbors, who do not have enough to eat! He is only sixteen years old, he is a kind boy—”
“Laws are made to be obeyed—and enforced,” was all Anne said, turning aside from the sorrowing woman. “He must pay the price for his misdeed.”
I thought of Anne’s pitiless words as we rode along on our way to Dover, Anne in her litter, the king mounted on Coeurdelion (though riding pained him), the rest of the members of the royal household in carts or on horseback, the soldiers on foot. We had to stop often when carts lost wheels or horses went lame or wagons overturned, spilling their contents into a ditch. The slow speed was wearing, I wondered whether we would reach our destination before nightfall. I saw Ned ride past, trying to clear the road of obstacles, shouting to the outriders up ahead and calling out when he spied hazards.
Ned had become indispensable to the king as the most capable of the esquires of the body. He was efficient and always managed to get things done, often things others found impossible. Any time he saw a task, no matter how menial, being badly performed, he asked for permission to take charge of it, and usually succeeded. He seemed tireless, his determination and strength of will carried him through.
So it was on this ripe fall afternoon, with the slow progress of the long royal traveling party. Ned had taken over, and was making headway when, as we rounded a turning in the narrow rutted road, we found ourselves facing a startling, unexpected sight.
Atop a hill, looming above the roadway, stood a high wooden cross, at least three times higher, I judged, than the tallest man in the procession—the king. Beneath this stark wooden symbol stood a small woman in nun’s garb and nine attendants in long white tunics.
It was the Nun of Kent and her acolytes, including my sister-in-law Cat. Arrayed before the cross, they could not fail to capture the attention of everyone in the royal procession, and I heard gasps of alarm and awe and cries of “The holy nun!” “The Nun of Kent!” before the long line of horses and vehicles came to an abrupt halt, the horses pawing the ground and whinnying nervously.
For the nun, her voice strong and far-reaching, was addressing us all, and the sound of her words was chilling.
“For your sins, I shall send down plagues upon you, saith the Lord,” she was saying. “Adulterers! Fornicators! O thou guilty of wickedness in high places!”
“May the demon of lust be cast out, and the angels of mercy restore godliness to the throne of England! May she who bears the devil’s sign know the wrath of the Lord!”
I saw that the king was sending guardsmen to climb the hill. All around me I heard murmuring among the royal attendants.
“They say she casts out demons—she heals—she can even raise the dead—”
“The woman is mad!” the king was shouting. “She speaks blasphemy! She babbles!”
But the nun had more to say.
“For your sins, O king, and the sins of your Jezebel mistress, the Lord will send plagues upon England. First will come a plague of frogs!” I heard gasps from those around me. “Then will come a plague of lice, and of flies. Then the Lord will send a great sickness, and many cattle will die, and horses too, and the sickness will endure without ceasing, until boils cover all human flesh, and the entire earth is afflicted past endurance.” Moans arose from many throats at these words.
“Silence that woman!” the king was shouting to the guardsmen, who were scrambling up the hill toward the nun. As they approached the immense cross I saw the nine women who attended the nun scatter, and I wondered whether Ned had recognized Cat among them. I didn’t dare look at him, not wanting to quicken his suspicions. He believed Cat to be locked in a cell at the convent of St. Agnes’s. He would have no reason to think Cat might have been liberated in order to serve the Nun of Kent. Unless—
But I did not give this more thought, for the nun had reached her final prediction.
“Finally the Lord will raise his hand and smite the evildoers with one last plague,” she thundered. “The firstborn son of the adulterer and his Jezebel mistress shall die!”
Hearing this Anne shrieked, Henry swore, many of those around me crossed themselves—as I did—our lips moving in prayer. And the guardsmen, reaching the nun at last, silenced her with savage blows and tied her limp body with ropes and took her away. In less time than it had taken her to announce the coming plagues the hill was bare and there was no more sign of the stunning sight we had witnessed. Only the stark high wooden cross, rising above the road, lonely and silent.
FOURTEEN
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“She’s not at all what I expected.”
“The clothes are good, but her body—well—hardly any bosom, and that nose! The mouth too big, she looks as though she could devour a horse—”
“And those hands! Well, I know what they say in England, the hands of the devil, or the fingers of the devil—”
“Good, thick hair. Straight, but good.”
My French, however flawed, was quite fluent enough to understand the comments I overheard the French courtiers make about Anne. They speculated endlessly on her looks, her clothes, her dancing (this, they agreed, was above reproach), her height (not tall enough), her belly (was she or wasn’t she?).
They snickered, they called her every foul name, every name applied to the women of the streets. They made fun of her walk, the way she gestured with her hands, her favorite posture when irritated (one hand on her hip, a scowl on her face). They drew six-fingered hands on the palace walls, alongside stout phalluses.
We had not been at the palace of Chambord more than a few days before I began hearing these unflattering remarks and observing the mockery. The French had never liked the English, that much I knew; King Francis and King Henry were meeting to carry out a pretense of friendliness and bonhomie that neither of them truly felt. We were instructed to be gracious to the ladies of the French court but we felt no real friendship or courtesy toward them, and we heard their smothered laughter and their whispers whenever we left the rooms in which we met.
There was much sniggering about Anne’s illicit relations with the king, her haughty manner, her lack of graciousness. I heard King Francis’s valets betting with each other how quickly King Henry would discard Anne, and who his new love would be.
But at the lavish banquet held in honor of Henry and Anne in the immense grand salon with its tapestries in glowing tones of blue and deep red, green and gold and ochre, its brilliant painted ceiling, its long tables covered in gold and silver plate, Anne was treated as though she was already queen.
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