Her device, the white falcon, was embroidered on cushions and borne by the king’s guardsmen on their helms and even molded into spun sugar and served with sweet wine. She was accorded every honor, and addressed as a noblewoman (for she was, after all, Marquess of Pembroke). No one mentioned the name Catherine of Aragon; it was as if Catherine had never existed.
Between the many courses of the banquet, poets read verses composed for Anne, and musicians played dances and songs dedicated to her. We heard her merits praised and admired again and again; her beautiful black eyes, deep and dark as onyx, her swanlike neck, her long slender tapering fingers, her smooth skin, the perfect oval of her face.
I had to smile at the contrast between this courteous formal praise and the jokes and jibes I continually overheard. But then, everything about our reception by King Francis was artificial, part of a calculated show of cordiality between the English and French designed to thwart the designs of Emperor Charles.
“Nobody takes any of this to be sincere,” Ned remarked to me during the banquet. “It is all for show. But the alliance is very serious indeed—and King Francis’s acceptance of what our king has done in putting aside his wife is vital.”
“Anne is a pawn on a very large chessboard,” I said.
Ned looked at me appraisingly. “Very astute, for a girl,” he said. “I could not have put it better. Mind you never say anything like that when the king can hear you.”
During the banquet I noticed that Anne was looking at me—really looking, and not just glancing past me as she usually did, taking in my appearance as she did the furnishings of the room, the number of attendants nearby, the wrinkles or lack of wrinkles in her counterpane. She was looking at my gown.
I was wearing the beautiful pale blue and cream satin gown Mr. Skut had made for my wedding, the sleeves and bodice somewhat altered to match the cut and style currently favored at the French court. The glittering silver mesh trim that had been the king’s gift to me drew attention to the gown, I saw the French queen’s ladies admiring it and commenting to one another.
Anne’s own gown was very grand, and quite becoming—a sweep of russet velvet with black lambs’ fur at the neck and on the full sleeves. Yet as the evening went on she seemed more and more preoccupied with my gown, staring at it and frowning. Eventually she beckoned to me. I went to stand before her as she sat, surrounded by golden plates and goblets, the king sitting beside her, engaged in conversation with one of the French noblemen.
“Jane,” Anne said evenly, in a tone of voice I knew well. It was a tone she used when she was about to make an accusation.
“Yes, Milady Marquess?”
“The trimming on your gown. Where did it come from?”
“From Peru, if I’m not mistaken.”
“And have you been in Peru recently?”
“No, milady.”
“Then how did you come by it? Did you steal it?”
“Of course not.”
“I’m waiting for an answer.”
I glanced at the king, but he did not appear to be listening to what we were saying. The musicians were playing, there was a buzz of talk and laughter in the vast room, the chink of cutlery and the clatter of serving plates and goblets made it difficult to overhear what others were saying.
“It was a gift, milady.”
“A very costly gift.”
“The giver is wealthy.” I did not want to reveal that the trimming came from the king. Anne was very jealous. I hoped that King Henry would come to my rescue with some gallant comment that would satisfy Anne. But he took no notice.
“And just who was this mysterious gift-giver? A suitor perhaps? At last, someone who hopes to marry you?”
The jibe stung, especially since Anne was not yet married herself and was older than I was. And besides, Will and I had been promised for more years than I could remember.
“No, milady. Not a suitor.”
“Then who?” Her voice rose in exasperation, and conversation near us died down. The musicians stopped playing. King Henry turned to look at Anne.
“What is it, puffball?”
Anne took a drink of her wine.
“This girl will not tell me where she got the trimming for her gown. I think she stole it.”
“Aha! A thief in our midst!” He winked at me, stood and strode slowly toward where I was standing. He towered over me.
“We shall have to bring her to justice,” he boomed out. “Councilor Cromwell!” he shouted, “come into court!” Every eye in the room turned to Thomas Cromwell, who, playing along with the charade, got up from the banquet table and joined us.
“Lord Councilor, what is the punishment for theft?”
“To be stripped naked and whipped without mercy, Your Majesty.”
“Well then—”
“But my crime is unproven, sire,” I interrupted, taking the risk that my participation would be welcomed. “There must be witnesses against me.”
“Who will bear witness that this girl is a thief?” The king looked around the room. Silence, broken only by a ripple of laughter.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Anne, looking annoyed, fidgeting in her chair.
“There, you see?” said Henry, turning to Anne. “She is innocent. Pure as the driven snow.”
More laughter greeted this pronouncement.
“What’s that? You scoff at the idea that a pretty young unsullied girl, a girl who has been at court—how many years has it been, Jane?” I held up seven fingers. “A girl who has been at court for seven years, might not be innocent?” He looked shocked.
“I will not be mocked in this way!” Anne said, standing up and preparing to leave the room.
“Stay where you are, wench!” Henry said sternly, then quickly resumed his pantomime, so quickly that his flash of anger passed without breaking the ribald mood. “Besides,” he said to the banqueters in a light tone, “I know how the girl got the trimming! I myself am the gift-giver, and no one else.” He reached over and hugged me lightly, reassuringly, and then gave the disgruntled Anne a kiss on the cheek. He waved his hand at the musicians and they resumed playing. Anne sat down heavily, scowling, and I took the opportunity to scurry across the room, out of the way, and take my place among Anne’s other attendants. It was a long time before I caught my breath.
Dozens of servants brought in steaming platters and laid them before the banqueters. Hardly had I glanced down at the food on the platter before me when I heard a loud shriek.
It was Anne. Another terrified shriek followed, then she cried out, “Frogs! It is the plague of frogs!”
Sure enough, on the silver dish in front of me were arrayed hundreds of frogs, steaming hot and covered in sauce.
Anne sprang up and ran from the room, wrenching her body past the king’s clutching hands.
FIFTEEN
“I saved her,” Catherine whispered from where she lay, a small, frail-looking figure in the wide, intricately carved canopied bed. “I saved her life. How could she turn against me so brutally? Has she no feeling?”
I had come to the remote rural palace of Buckden in Huntingdonshire where Catherine of Aragon was living, a large if somewhat dilapidated fortresslike mansion set in a modest hunting park, far from London, far from all that was going on in the court and country. King Henry had sent me to Buckden with the distasteful task of giving Catherine the latest and most important news from the court: the news that he had married Anne.
I made the journey to Buckden filled with chagrin and sorrow. It was my duty to deliver the news of the king’s marriage, but I had rarely been given a more distasteful task. Queen Catherine, my mistress for so many years, who had favored me and had always been a model of courtesy and charity, was now shunted carelessly aside, an insult to her Spanish royal blood and an even greater insult to her years of pain and sacrifice as King Henry’s consort.
She had done her part, played her thankless role with uncommon grace. Now I had to tell her that after all her strugg
les and years of dishonor, the king was going to marry the very woman who had caused all her misery.
“I ask you, Jane,” Catherine was saying, “how could the Great Enemy do to me what she has done, when she owes her very life to me?”
Catherine began to cough, and tried to raise herself up on one elbow. The effort to speak tired her and left her hoarse. Ever since she had been sent away from court and banished to Oatlands the previous year, with King Henry refusing to see or communicate with her, she had been plagued by fevers and rheums. Her Spanish doctors bled her and purged her again and again, but she did not recover. Rather she seemed to worsen, or so I heard from her long time gentleman usher Griffith Richards on his visits to the capital. Each time she received word of the king and Anne, Richards told me, she seemed to grow more frail, though she fought to retain her dignity and in particular, refused to give up her claim to the title of queen, though the king had ordered her to be addressed as “Princess Dowager.”
I sat down on a bench beside Catherine’s bed. She lay back against her pillows and reached out to me. I took her hand.
“I wish I had found Your Majesty in better health,” I said. “I will pray for your swift recovery.”
I looked over at Catherine’s familiar prie-dieu which stood near the bed, and it was then that I noticed, in the shadows of an alcove, the dark figure of Father Bartolome, sometime companion of the Nun of Kent and now Catherine’s confessor. He nodded slowly, sending a chill up my spine. I did not nod back.
I returned my gaze to Catherine.
“I’m sorry to say that I have come on an unhappy errand for the king. He wishes me to tell you that he and the Lady Anne were married recently. She is to be crowned before long.”
“And has she quickened?” was Catherine’s question.
Somewhat startled, I answered that there had been no official announcement of a pregnancy, and certainly no announcement that the child had quickened, or leapt into life, within the womb. Midwives, ever cautious, waited for this vital sign before assuring women that they would be giving birth.
The princess dowager merely shrugged. “He would never have married her unless she was bearing his child. Though from what I hear of her, the child could be anyone’s. That handsome young musician Mark Smeaton, for instance. They say he is in love with her. Or the rascal Weston. Or her old love Wyatt. Bridget Wingfield used to be full of stories of Anne’s seductions.”
“Yes, I have heard some of those stories.”
Catherine coughed again, and Father Bartolome came out of the shadows to offer her a goblet of wine. She let go of my hand and took a sip, then another. It was hard for me to believe I was hearing such words from the former queen. She seemed coarsened, embittered by her banishment from court, her rural exile. Where, I wondered, was her usual attitude of Christian forgiveness and fortitude? Why hadn’t I found her on her knees, kneeling at her prie-dieu?
“Do you know what day this is?” Catherine asked when she had soothed her throat and was able to take my hand again and resume talking. “You don’t remember, do you? It’s the anniversary of the birth of my little New Year’s Boy, the only one of my sons who lived long enough to be christened.”
“I was only a child myself when he was born, milady,” I reminded her. “That was a long time ago, before I entered your household.”
Catherine waved one thin, long-fingered hand. “No matter,” she said wearily. “The priests say God governs all. He took every one of my sons to Himself before they were out of the cradle. And my daughters too, all but my dearest jewel Mary. Perhaps He will take Anne’s sons in the same way. The Nun of Kent says He will.”
I smiled. “The nun has called down all the plagues of Egypt on Anne’s head. And Anne is terrified.”
I told Catherine about the royal banquet at King Francis’s court, how Anne had caught sight of the platters of frogs and shrieked in terror, thinking the plague of frogs called down by the nun had arrived.
“Has she quickened yet?” Catherine asked again.
“No, milady,” I assured her.
“Then there is nothing to be concerned about. And meanwhile, there are the reports from the Flemish court. But then, I’m sure you have heard those already.”
“What reports?” I asked, suddenly intrigued.
“Father Bartolome knows more than I do.”
I looked at the priest, who approached Catherine’s bed once again.
“The Great Enemy’s sins are being brought to light,” he told me solemnly. “It is said that she caused the death of Jane Popyngcort, and that she has tried to poison others who stand in her way.”
I remembered well how the Flemish Jane, always an outsider to our circle as maids of honor because of her foreign ways, had suddenly left the English court years earlier and gone home to Flanders. According to Bridget, Jane had been paid to keep secret what she knew of King Henry’s relations with Elizabeth Boleyn, Anne’s mother—relations which belonged to the distant past, when the king was a youth. Bridget had said that, had the truth about the king and Anne’s mother come to light, he could never have married Anne. The Holy Father would not have allowed their union.
I remembered well the chest full of gold Jane took with her when she left our court, the valuable new jewelry she had proudly worn, the hurried meetings and secret conversations that had gone on just at the time she left. Clearly she had been bribed to leave the court. And then, not long after she left, we received the news that she had died suddenly, the victim of robbers as she was traveling.
“The Great Enemy is much hated,” Father Bartolome was saying. “Those who know the truth about her are revealing it.”
“Is it being said that Anne is a murderess?”
The priest nodded.
“But such reports could be nothing more than slanders. Courts are cesspits of lies.”
“Those who were in Anne’s pay have come forward. There can be no doubt of her guilt.”
“And I saved her life,” Catherine murmured, letting go of my hand. “Perhaps I should have let her die. Poor girl! She has become a spider, entangled in her own treacherous web. May the Lord have pity on her.” Once again Catherine sank back into her pillows, closing her eyes and sighing deeply. Taken aback by what I had just heard, and not wanting to spend any more time with the disturbing Father Bartolome, I got up to leave, looking down, before I did so, at Catherine’s pale face and bending down to kiss her soft cheek.
* * *
Anne rode in splendor through the freshly swept London streets on the day of her coronation procession, her litter draped in shimmering cloth of gold, her mantle of royal purple furred with thick ermine, her long fall of black hair flowing down her back under a circlet of flashing rubies.
Her hands with the extra nail—the mark of the devil—were hidden under a large bouquet of lilies and gillyflowers. Her prominent belly was shrouded under her wide crimson gown and the long rope of large pearls that hung from her graceful neck drew attention to her handsome face and dark eyes—the eyes, so it was said, that had won the king’s love years earlier.
I had to admire her on that day, she was at her best. We maids of honor had spent hours dressing her, brushing out her thick rope of hair, brightening her skin with unguents and applying tinted powders to her lips and cheeks. She was excited. Her hands shook as she took her place in the litter and we smoothed out the long skirts of her gown.
This is her moment of triumph, I thought. Her ultimate victory.
But as soon as the procession set out along Fenchurch Street the jeering catcalls began, the crowds parting to allow her litter to pass but voices calling out curses and bawdy insults and laughing in mockery as the royal procession went by.
“Harlot!” we heard people cry. “Whore!” “She-devil!”
The royal marshals were quick to strike out with their batons but the cries and insults continued.
“Great Harry! Take back your wife!” “Burn the witch!” “Put her in the stocks!”
&n
bsp; Londoners had been taxed heavily to pay for Anne’s coronation and the celebrations surrounding it, and they resented having to pay for the exalting of a woman they detested. They shouted out their slanders as Anne passed in her litter. They saluted Queen Catherine and blessed her name. They predicted disaster for the realm and for the king.
And in truth we had to wonder, as we heard the protesting voices and all the slanders, whether indeed the forces of darkness had triumphed. Anne’s exaltation frightened the Londoners as much as it angered them. If good queen Catherine could be displaced and her disreputable rival Anne crowned, then surely the power of the divine was tottering. Where was the Lord, where were His angels, when the witch was borne past in all her finery?
Our progress was interrupted again and again by musicians playing lively tunes, actors reciting long speeches and spectacles staged along the route. The noise was quite overwhelming at times, and I felt my panic rising, hemmed in as I was by the press of people and the constant clamor of their jibes and outcries. By the time we reached the Strand I was quite overcome, the stench of unwashed bodies and street odors making me nauseous and the feeling of being trapped by the drunken spectators, dancing and singing and flinging themselves about with abandon, making me desperate to escape.
Bridget, sitting next to me in our litter, sensed my mounting desperation and held me back.
“Only a little farther, Jane,” she said. “Remember, this is Anne’s day. We are here to serve her. Think how hard all this must be for her, with the baby kicking and her stomach upset as it nearly always is.”
Anne’s baby had quickened, the midwives had assured the king that she was past the dangerous early months when she might miscarry. It was the last day of May in that year of 1533. The prince was expected to be born at harvest time.
Though the coronation went forward the following day without incident, with Anne crowned by the new Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, there was an abiding sense among the Londoners that the very order of nature had been shattered. Now that the royal harlot had been made queen, there were rumors of strange lights in the sky and ominous rumblings under the earth. Great fishes a hundred feet in length beached themselves in the Thames, so it was said, and in every parish, the number of people who drowned or hanged themselves in despair rose alarmingly.
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