Mayflowers for November

by Malyn Bromfield

  This is true. He has never asked about my rag package. The one he hid when the searchers came.

  ‘Maybe a little storytelling will lift your mistress’s spirits,’ he tells White Boy.

  The house is strangely quiet; only the crackling of the fire mingles with our voices.

  ‘We will have no stories without the accompaniment of the harp,’ I say. ‘When you are well, White Boy, I will tell you a sad tale of two queens.’

  Chapter 28

  Winter and Early Spring 1535 - 1536

  Queen Anne was miserable. Behind their sleeves her ladies whispered that the King had a new lady to serve and no one dared to tell the Queen who she was.

  ‘There is no need to tell her,’ Mistress Madge said. ‘Surely the King will tire of this wilting flower while there are younger, more beautiful ladies at court. It is no secret why at twenty-seven she is yet unwed. She is not pretty enough. It is only surprising that the King has noticed her at all.’

  Now that she was not feeling so sick, the Queen busied herself with the reform of the religious houses. She had long meetings with Master Secretary Cromwell. The King and Cromwell sent the Bishop of London and many other agents to Syon, a nunnery near Richmond. Before they made a full report to King Henry, Queen Anne herself paid the nuns a visit and gave them a good scolding.

  ‘She should be sitting in her chamber, sewing baby bonnets and resting,’ Mistress Madge said. ‘Why does she always have to poke her nose into the King’s business? Katherine didn’t. If the religious houses are corrupt let the King and the bishops deal with them There is more to this bitterness between the King and Queen than a little flirting on the King’s part. Everyone at court knows that Anne has Cromwell’s ear and the King has begun to resent this.’

  Throughout Christmastide of 1535 King Henry and Queen Anne barely spoke together. If the Queen left her chamber, the ladies-in-waiting would put away their playing cards or their sewing, move their stools closer together and gossip. They whispered about the King’s new mistress and about Queen Anne’s health, how thin and sick she was during this latest pregnancy, and they shook their heads and sighed. They spoke in even quieter whispers of the serious illness of that other queen, the divorced Katherine; of cancerous, painful growths, of the King’s refusal to allow Lady Mary to go to her mother’s bedside, of the visit of the emperor’s envoy, Chapuys, to Katherine at Kimbolton Castle, which King Henry did allow.

  At the end of December, Chapuys visited the court at Greenwich and told King Henry that Katherine was dying. And still the King would not allow the Lady Mary to go to her mother.

  ‘How can he be so cruel?’ I asked Mother.

  ‘The whore has bewitched him,’ she said and stabbed her meat knife into her mutton as if she were putting a pin in an effigy of Queen Anne.

  On January the eighth the court knew that Katherine was dead. She had died just before 2pm on the previous day. I remembered how Aunt Bess had spoken with sorrow of the former queen’s dead babes and how she had been cast aside by the King like a worn out clout.

  Norris told Mistress Madge that the King wept when he read Chapuy’s letter telling him of Katherine’s death. He cheered up very quickly. I watched King Henry and Queen Anne parade to Mass at the Chapel Royal dressed all in yellow. The King sported a white feather in his bonnet. They both smiled a lot and looked happy and the King seemed so very proud of his young daughter and his pregnant wife.

  It is a dangerous thing to disrespect the dead, I thought, for I had been brought up to fear unhappy spirits from the grave.

  Everyone at court appeared to me to be very much merrier than they had been during the twelve days of Christmas. There was a banquet with tables full of sweet delights that Mother and the pudding wife had made, followed by dancing and jousting.

  I peeped between the arras and saw Queen Anne watching her husband dancing with Mistress Seymour. She placed her hands protectively around her belly, turned away and talked with Brereton and Weston. She smiled at Mistress Madge and Norris amongst the dancers and pointed them out to Weston, who had to watch and smile. He seemed to do so with great ease. He neither blushed nor frowned nor appeared confused, as I thought a lover should.

  ‘I think there will be a wedding before the summer comes,’ Constantine said while we watched Norris lifting Mistress Madge and twirling her around.

  ‘Maybe, or maybe not. My mistress is in no great hurry.’

  ‘I’ll wager my master and your mistress will marry before the month of May is out.’

  ‘I’ll wager they will not be wed before Michaelmas.’

  ‘This is the wager, and you must take it seriously,’ Constantine said. ‘If they marry before the end of May, I will dance with you at their wedding.’

  ‘If they marry after Michaelmas what shall I give to you?’

  ‘You will dance with me, of course, and should they marry between May and Michaelmas we will dance together.’

  ‘That is no wager.’

  ‘It is the best of wagers. One of us will surely win and we will each lose nothing.’

  I thanked him for his kindness. I hoped that he knew I meant everything he had done to cheer me since my bereavement. He had sought me out many times to amuse me: he had taught me to play backgammon, told me again of the King and the great gun that had ruined the roof of Norris’s house so that the story seemed even funnier than before. At Christmas he had sent tasty morsels to my place at table. I knew he did all this as much for my father as myself and it comforted me to know that Father’s friend remembered him with kind deeds, especially so, knowing that they did not share the same religious beliefs.

  I tried to visit Mother and the pudding wife for a few minutes each day. Mother was always busy but her shoulders drooped while she beat a sheet of gold leaf and her eyes were dull when Mistress Pudding talked of a magnificent jelly she planned for the King. I had thought that the death of Queen Katherine would add to mother’s grief and told her of it gently but it touched her not at all. I suppose there is only so much grief a soul can take.

  Mistress Pudding always asked after Queen Anne’s health.

  ‘I fear Queen Anne has few childbearing years left, she is well into her thirties,’ she said. ‘Maybe this time the King will get his boy. Now that Katherine is dead no one can doubt that Anne Boleyn is King Henry’s true wife and the boy’s legitimacy will not be questioned in England or abroad.’

  ‘If she miscarries again the King will know for sure that he has been bewitched by the whore and will seek himself another wife whom God will bless with a son,’ Mother said. ‘There’s nothing to stop the King from getting rid of her as he did Katherine of Aragon. He couldn’t rid himself of her while Katherine lived. He couldn’t have two divorced wives and expect a third to marry him.’

  Mistress Pudding shook her head and sighed. ‘You must not say these things, Joan, not here in my confectionary.’

  ‘Everyone says that the King has plans to name Henry Fitzroy as his heir if he has no legitimate son,’ I told them.

  ‘Princess Mary is King Henry’s true heir,’ Mother said defiantly.

  Mistress Pudding sighed again and turned the conversation to talk of ladies’ fashions at court.

  ‘Do the ladies wear taffeta sleeves of a single colour or the warp and the weft of divers colours as I have heard is the latest fashion?’ she asked.

  ‘Both,’ I replied, ‘and they are stiff as parchment and the gentlemen’s doublets also. Sir Henry Norris sports a little slash in his sleeves to show off his best linen shirt and at his wrist there is a ruffle of lawn so fine you can see his hand through it, even through the embroidery.’

  ‘I would like to see these gentlemen in the candlelight with their taffeta shining,’ said Mistress Pudding as she tucked her curl into her cap and asked me to hold a mould steady while she poured a bucket of jelly into it. ‘This is to be one of His Majesty’s warships. It will sail upon a sea of blue and white waves all fashioned from marchpane. The sails will be of gol
d leaf and if King Henry or Queen Anne blow upon them just a little they will billow and glister in the candlelight.’

  Mother put down her mallet to rest her arm. ‘I hear her favourite is dressed like everyone else these days,’ she said. ‘How a common musician has found the means to keep a horse and servants can only be surmised.’

  ‘Now, now, Joan, everyone knows that King Henry takes great pleasure in music and is very generous to those who please him, as I myself, have found.’ The stray curl found its way out of Mistress Pudding’s cap and around her finger again.

  ‘They say it is Anne Boleyn who pays for Smeaton’s doublet, hose and horse meat and that at night she hides him in a cupboard with her sweetmeats,’ Mother said. ‘And when she cannot sleep, she calls for him.’

  ‘Joan, be silent. You must not repeat these rumours in my confectionary,’ Mistress Pudding said, most severely.

  ‘The Queen does not eat sweetmeats,’ I told Mother crossly. ‘When she is pregnant all she asks for is quails.’

  *

  I never did get used to the bitter smell of sea coal that burned in the privy chambers of Henry VIII’s palaces. I love the musty smell of wood smoke. It is homely with an outdoor hue about it. The Queen and her ladies were so delighted each year when the Christmastide yule log was brought into the hearth that I wondered why they didn’t choose to have a log fire in every season.

  ‘Ungrateful wench,’ Mistress Madge chided, ‘to protest that the king’s sea coal is rank and chokes you. Never forget, Avis, what a privileged position it is for a maid like yourself to tarry within the Queen’s chambers. The Queen would give you a set of bells and take you for her fool if she knew you would exchange her costly coal for twigs any beggar could garner in the forest.’

  The Queen’s chambers reeked of smoke and burning. I could not bear it. A few days earlier a fire had started in an inner chamber. The Queen and her ladies escaped unharmed although she was badly shaken and weeping. A chain of boys with buckets had swiftly scotched the fire. New hangings and carpets were brought and within days the Queen was sitting again in her apartments playing cards with the Little Duchess while the King jousted with his friends.

  ‘The smell of fire will not leave my nose,’ I complained to Mistress Madge.

  ‘I cannot smell burning. Either leave the chamber or cease to complain,’ she scolded.

  I would have left the chamber but for the Duke of Norfolk’s page who stood at the door announcing his coming.

  ‘I bring terrible news,’ Norfolk said while he made his obeisance to the Queen. His expression was even graver than usual and his hands were shaking. ‘The King has been unhorsed in the lists and is feared … is feared ... to be dead.’

  Mistress Madge and the other ladies rushed to the Queen. They gave her wine and water and held her hands.

  ‘My lord, you know she is with child and should have spoken more gently to Her Grace,’ little Duchess Richmond told the duke.

  ‘I have come with haste to convey what has happened. It is my duty to do so to my niece, the Queen. I cannot speak more kindly unless I lie.’

  He stumbled to a nearby coffer and sat with his head in his hands.

  ‘Pray, bring my lord some wine,’ the Little Duchess cried and ran to her father’s side.

  ‘You say it is feared that the King is dead, my lord. Can you say for certain that this is so?’ Lady Rochford asked in a surprisingly calm tone.

  ‘The King fell heavily. His great armoured steed collapsed on top of him.’

  Norfolk waved away his daughter’s maid. His hands were shaking too much to hold the goblet.

  ‘Which rash knight charged at the King and thus unseated him?’

  Norfolk waggled his hand at Lady Rochford as if she were a servant. ‘There is no need for you to set yourself up as judge and jury, madam. The King was running at a quintain and the sand bag swung and unhorsed him.’

  ‘Does the King breathe, uncle?’ the Queen asked weakly.

  ‘How can it be known whether he breathes or no beneath his armour and his padded surcoat? There is no movement, nothing, not even his eyes.’

  ‘You should not have come to the Queen in haste with such dreadful news unless the outcome be certain, her unborn child might be harmed from such a shock,’ Lady Rochford said harshly. ‘Madge, take Anne to rest upon her bed while we await further news,’

  ‘Come Anne, take heart, the King is a strong man and his armour may well have saved him from serious injury,’ Mistress Madge said gently to the Queen who had shrunk into her chair with her arms around her belly.

  ‘Pray, return to the lists, if you please, my lord; see how the King fares and what his physicians say,’ Lady Rochford told the duke in a tone that made it very clear that she was taking charge of the situation whether he liked it or not.

  ‘If it be the worst, let Norris tell the Queen,’ the Little Duchess whispered to her father.

  ‘Let us all pray that God has spared the King’s life,’ the Queen moaned as her ladies helped her to her bed.

  For what seemed like hours we watched the elaborate, golden clock that King Henry had given to Anne Boleyn when he courted her. The hands moved so slowly we thought the clock had stopped. The Queen lay weeping and shaking surrounded by her ladies who knelt in prayer by her bedside until Norris’s kindly, smiling face reassured her that the King lived even before he made his obeisance or spoke of the King’s miraculous escape from death.

  ‘His armour has saved him from serious injury but I doubt he will ever joust again,’ he said.

  *

  Five days later, Katherine of Aragon was buried in Peterborough Abbey. At Greenwich, the King wore black and went to the chapel for a Requiem Mass to show respect for his first wife. Later in the day, he discovered Mistress Seymour sitting alone, weeping for Katherine. She sobbed that she had been Katherine’s maid when first she came to court and had loved her dearly. King Henry, so Norris told Mistress Madge, was moved to tears himself and sat her upon his knee to comfort her. When the Queen happened upon them sitting thus together, so cosily, she knew for certain that her husband loved Mistress Seymour and that it was no mere game of chivalry.

  ‘He has not held me in his arms so lovingly for a long time,’ she bemoaned to Mistress Madge.

  ‘Maybe this is the difference between being a man’s a wife and being his lover,’ Mistress Madge told her, ‘and you must accept that this is so.’

  ‘Then I would the sooner have remained his mistress and given him a dozen bastards than a wife carrying his legitimate son in my belly.’

  ‘You do not mean that, Anne.’

  ‘Indeed I do. See how sorrowful I was when I feared that he was dead. If I die in child-bed bringing forth his son will he weep for me? No, he will not. He will go at once to that wanton woman’s bed for comfort.’

  While Henry’s first queen was lowered into her grave, his second queen clutched her belly and moaned. She retired to her bedchamber and called for her friend, Lady Lee, and her cousins, Mistress Madge and the Little Duchess.

  ‘It is merely a stomach ache caused by something I have eaten that was too rich for me,’ the Queen told them.

  Soon the ache became a pain that waxed and waned into the afternoon. The Queen would not have her physicians called nor the King told of her condition.

  ‘The pain will soon pass and I will be well again,’ she said.

  Before evening a midwife was called to do what I had done before. The Queen had again miscarried of her prince.

  Mistress Madge was with the Queen when the King visited her bedchamber. He was pale and walked with difficulty after his accident.

  ‘I see that God will not give me male children,’ he told the Queen. There were no words of comfort for his wife. Theirs was not a sorrow shared. The King blamed God for their loss but the Queen blamed her husband.

  ‘Do not come to me bewailing and complaining of the loss of your boy,’ she said between her sobs. ‘You knew that I was badly shaken by the fir
e in my apartments even before Norfolk burst into my chamber and told me you were dead. You should have comforted me and dealt me kindness, if not for me, for the sake of the child in my womb. Instead, I discovered you with that wanton Seymour wench upon your knee and you know full well that the miscarriage followed hard upon.’

  The King did not reply to the Queen’s accusations. He just walked away. At the doorway he turned to her and said unkindly, ‘when you are up I will speak with you.’

  I do not remember seeing Anne Boleyn smile ever again: not a real smile that showed in her eyes, the way she had smiled before her coronation.

  *

  The Queen lay abed, recovering. Her ladies huddled together on a settle in the big bay window. They looked out on to the King’s new pleasure gardens where the square hedges wore a heavy mantle of snow. They tittle-tattled, giggled and sewed. Their silken stitches meandered across a taffeta sleeve or a soft linen cap in symmetrical, lazy patterns of tiny forget-me-not flowers flowing backwards and forwards like the Thames, like the tides: like the tide that would take the Queen to the Tower.

  When the Queen was up, chilly, sunny days vouchsafed the coming of spring.

  ‘My cousin, the Queen, has asked me to bring you to her privy garden,’ Mistress Madge told me. ‘Goodness knows why. Quickly, put on your mantle and come with me.’

  We found the Queen walking alone amongst the rose beds, wrapped in a black mantle edged with ermine and I was struck by how much she resembled her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, with her dark eyes peeping out of the white fur, her skin so pale following her confinement, and all the worries of the world heavy upon her face. She strolled through the rose garden touching the bare stems with her gloved fingers.

  ‘Within a few weeks the buds will appear and we will be all the happier for the coming of summer,’ she said.

  Yes, I thought, the weeding girls will be glad to be busy again after their long winter break.