The King's Pleasure, page 26
Chapuys never mentioned the comfort, indeed the luxury, in which she was housed; he never told her that she looked well. He reported what he thought was relevant and withheld what he thought might disturb, and always managed somehow to convey his belief that her cause was right and that her sojourn at The More would not be long. She had found his visits very heartening.
Chapuys was well aware that Thomas Cromwell who had taken over many of Thomas Wolsey’s functions—but not all, and certainly not Wolsey’s place in the King’s heart—had taken on and even elaborated the Cardinal’s spy system, and riding out to The More for the second time within a week, he knew that he should be ready with some excuse that could be offered, not extracted. Katharine handed him that excuse; two letters, folded but not sealed; one to the Emperor, one to the Pope.
“To be despatched in all haste, Messire. That is why I troubled you. My own impatience for a settlement, great as it is, is as nothing beside the need for some positive action before the see of Canterbury changes hands.”
He wondered, on the fringe of his mind, who had told her that Warham was ailing, Cranmer almost certain to follow him. He himself had refrained from mentioning such matters. But he was not surprised that she knew. The King might say that if he thought that his cap knew his mind he would throw it on the fire, but there were those about him who, unlike the cap, had eyes, ears, tongues. They might not know his mind, but they could observe his attitudes.
“They shall be sent,” Chapuys said, taking the two letters, “and if I can arrange it, make better speed than usual.”
“Once,” she said, “but before your time, Messire, I sent not a letter, but a message which reached Valladolid, from London in fourteen days.”
Impossible. And quite impossible to believe, Chapuys thought. And again he was reminded of his mother. Women, looking back to circumstances happier than their present ones, tended to exaggerate; his mother had often said, “And when your father was alive we had meat every day, sometimes twice.”
“I cannot promise such swift delivery, Your Grace,” he said. But he looked at the unsealed letters and had a thought, just a little thought. “I will do what I can,” he said.
He went straight to Henry and said, “Your Grace I was last week at The More on a routine visit—my master being interested in his aunt’s health and well-being. Today I was there again. Summoned to take charge of these letters. I ask Your Grace’s permission to send them on.”
Henry eyed the two packets, unsealed, addressed in Katharine’s unmistakable hand, bold, flourishing, rather unfeminine. He had a faint sickish feeling, remembering how that writing had come to him, with faithful regularity, almost twenty years ago, when he was in France, at war; the news of Flodden…
He said, more petulantly than he had ever yet spoken to Chapuys, “Send them on, Messire, send them on. Do not flap them at me. I am not in the habit of reading letters addressed to other persons.”
“I have read them both,” Chapuys said. “They are harmless. Both urge the desirability of a speedy decision. Both refer to Your Grace in terms of respect and affection.”
And that, Henry thought, is the very devil of it. The woman I no longer care for, in that way, the woman who failed me, regards me with respect and affection; the one I crave for, who might bear my son…No, even to himself would not admit it. Anne was prudish, cautious, she would not admit that she loved him…but he was sure that if only she could be sure, that once their union was sanctioned, once he was made free of her bed, the fires of passion, so long banked, would blaze into an unimaginable glory.
“I agree with the need for haste,” he said, “I reciprocate the respect and affection. Despatch the letters, Messire. But do not hope for a speedy answer. Clement’s indecisiveness is hereditary. His father could never make up his mind to marry his mother and give the boy a name.”
Chapuys was old enough, schooled enough not to wince, but he was shocked by this irreverence. It was true that Clement was illegitimate, but it was not a fact that a faithful son of the Church would mention in that tone of voice. More than anything yet—more than the calling of the newly assembled Parliament, the Reform Parliament, more than the intention to appoint Cranmer, such a remark showed what was in the King’s mind. Unless the Pope decided soon the English church would be lost to Rome. Perhaps it was already too late…
Chapuys said dispassionately, “Delay is always exasperating. Your Grace, it would speed communication to some degree if my post-bag were not delayed at Dover.”
“Has it ever been?” Henry’s surprise was genuine. Neither Wolsey who had instituted the spy system, nor Cromwell who had inherited it, had felt it necessary to inform their master of every squalid little trick they practiced.
“I can think of no other reason for some tardiness, Sire.”
“I shall personally give orders that in future your bag is to be taken straight from the horse to the ship readiest to sail.”
“I shall be grateful,” Chapuys said, giving no sign of jubilation. In future he would be able to express himself freely, to issue definite warnings instead of conveying hints. He had no doubt that Henry would honor his promise. The King of England—especially where his marriage tangle was concerned—was capable of acting the humbug; though even there he probably deceived himself as well as others: but he was not the man to deal in petty lies or shabby tricks. Indeed, Chapuys reflected, this whole sorry business was the result of a kind of clumsy candor on his part. There were many men in positions of power, known to Chapuys, who would never have breathed a word about the doubt as to the legality of the marriage. An unwanted wife was easily got rid of. One had only to impregnate a pair of gloves with arsenic, exclaim over the resultant rash and offer ointment containing the same poison. Death was then certain, suspicion unlikely. The vanity of women led them to try almost any concoction, however vile, in order to whiten and soften their hands. The dead woman, poor lady, had tried something which produced unhealable sores; and presently the widower married again.
Compared with what he might have done, Henry’s actions had been honest and straightforward; and in Chapuys’ eyes it was greatly in his favor that in a material sense he had not dealt harshly with Katharine; she was comfortably housed, properly attended, surrounded by her personal belongings, still wearing the sapphires, the rubies, diamonds and pearls of the Queen of England. Many an autocrat, opposed as Henry had been, would have brought some physical pressure to bear on a helpless woman who had so obstructed and defied him.
With his lawyer’s habit of looking at every aspect, Chapuys considered the possibility that Henry was anxious not to do, or even to say, anything that would leave unexpungeable bitterness should Clement declare the marriage good, and order Henry back to his wife. This was still possible. Until the break was made, the King of England was a Catholic; it was within the Pope’s power to order him to send Mistress Boleyn from Court. But time was running out. “The Lady is all powerful here,” Chapuys wrote; Pope and Emperor would know what that meant, Lutheranism, thinly disguised. “The Queen,” Chapuys wrote, “is the most virtuous woman I have ever known, and the highest hearted.” He urged, with increasing insistence as the year 1532 added week to week, the necessity of a decision before the situation had deteriorated beyond repair.
In May, Sir Thomas More, who had become Chancellor of England after Wolsey’s fall, resigned from his office. He pleaded failing health and even Henry, accepting the resignation most unwillingly, could not be blind to the fact that little more than two years in office had taken the flesh from More’s bones, lined his face, greyed his hair, made his step heavier. They had not enriched him; he had never taken a bribe, and of the vast sums he had handled not a penny had stuck to his fingers. Henry was concerned for him and knowing that More would never accept an outright gift, moved, secretly and tactfully, so that More was voted by a Convocation of Clergy, a gift of £5000. More said, “Throw it into the Thames,” a thing he had said of lesser bribes, and went into private life to live on £100 a year, and that none too certain. “My poor women folk,” he said, “must learn to perform the miracle of the five loaves and two fishes. Thousands of other women have.”
Every day some women who had failed to perform such miracles, and men who had no woman to do it for them, gathered about the kitchen door at The More. The good Queen was known to be charitable. The stream of visitors might dwindle, but the beggars came, together with pedlars, hoping to find, in a household of ladies, customers for needles, thread and other feminine gear. And there were entertainers, contortionists, men with dancing dogs and bears, minstrels, strolling players, mixed with the beggars with nothing to offer but their rags and their sores.
Among them were many who, in any age, in any form of society, would have been paupers, but there were others, good workmen now unemployed because the land they had tilled had been turned into sheep-runs. One man could tend the sheep that grazed on land that would have needed twenty to plough and sow and reap. Years earlier More had written, in his fantasy Utopia, against the enclosure of plough for sheep. “Your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.” Katharine had read the book, and though More had, about this and other subjects, an exaggerated, poetic way of putting things, there was enough truth in it for her to give orders that so long as there was food in the house nobody was to be sent away unfed.
So in the yard there was always some coming and going. It was beneath Maria de Moreto’s dignity to go down and listen and gossip, but Francisco Filipez was usually about, and he would pass on to Maria what he had heard, leaving her to be the best judge of what was, or was not, suitable for the Queen’s ears. On a sunburnt August day there was news, highly unsuitable, but necessary to relay.
“The Archbishop of Canterbury died,” Maria said.
“God rest him,” Katharine said. He had been no friend to her, weak, yielding man, accepting the appointment as one of her advisers before Blackfriars, but conniving with Wolsey, wishful to bring about a decision favorable to the King. Dead now and gone to his judgment. God rest him.
“There was more to it,” Maria de Moreto said, half-turning away, picking up some lace, just washed and ironed by Concepcion, a girl who needed strict supervision. It was a horrible thing to be obliged to say. But if I do not say it, Maria thought, somebody else surely will and maybe with malice. “It is said that with him dead and Cranmer sure of the office, she gave in and took the King to her bed.” So tactfully as to seem sly, Maria looked up from the lace, saw Katharine’s face and quickly looked away again—as she had looked away when, as a child, she had been taken to see an unrepentant heretic burned in Toledo.
Feeling the searing flame of jealousy, momentarily consumed by it, Katharine wondered at herself: tried to reason. Henry had slept with Elizabeth Taillebois, and with Mary Boleyn. But that had been different; they had received the falling crumbs from a rich table; they had not been wooed, or waited for. Anne had been wooed, Anne had been waited for and when the consummation came…Oh God, God! Deliver me from carnal thoughts…
She said, “And who, in our yard, was so well-informed?”
“A button-vendor,” Maria said. “He has a cousin, a server at Hampton Court. They were there, to watch some entertainment on the river. They left together; the King went to her apartment and did not leave until morning. And that has never happened before.” Maria put down the lace, with which no fault could be found and put her hands to her face. She did not cry easily; tears were an appeal for help and she had learned, long ago, that when no help was available tears were useless and merely made your head ache. But now a few scalding drops squeezed their way out and fell over her hands. She shed them partly from sympathy, partly from rage at the injustice of life.
Katharine did not weep at all. Once the fury of jealousy had passed she tried to think coolly over what this news meant and what it implied. Anne had held Henry all this time by saying “No”; to have yielded now must indicate that she was either very sure of herself, or very desperate. Which? And having gained the thing he craved would Henry become more, or less, infatuated? She considered the possibility of their coupling producing a child; a son. Another bastard, she told herself firmly; no different from the Duke of Richmond. I am Henry’s wife and Queen of England—until the Pope says otherwise. And Mary is heir.
An answer to her speculation as to the effect of the yielding upon Henry, came quite soon—again through backdoor gossip. The King was going to give Nan Bullen a rank of her own, something no woman had ever had before. She was going to be a Duke or some other thing, very grand. It was going to be a great occasion with free food and wine in the London streets. Maria de Moreto, reporting this, said:
“Did I not say from the first that she was a witch?”
Katharine, with the wry humor which was sometimes her last standby, said, “If so, she must be very powerful, Maria. To become a Duke she must change her sex; and then where would they be?” But the news—even garbled as it was—was a blow to the small, secret hope that she had cherished; which was that once between the sheets Henry might have found Anne no different, nothing special, just another woman in a bed. That he planned to ennoble her suggested that she had lost no ground by yielding; and it held a darker implication—that he seriously intended to marry her and was providing against the accusation that he had married a commoner. And that would be bigamy; a graver sin than mere adultery.
If those about her knew when this ceremony took place they did not mention it; but she knew; there were several days when the beggars, the dancing dogs and bears and their masters deserted the courtyard at The More and went to the richer pastures of the city streets. Eagerly as Katharine had awaited Chapuys’ visits, she had never been more impatient than during that September. He came, disheartened because he had no news for her and because he saw, as clearly as anyone what the recent ceremony might imply, and because here he was, lively, active and committed but chained down to the service of a master with feet of lead. If the Emperor had only moved the Pope would have moved too. The wish to be powerful, in order to help and the realization of his impotence, took Eustache Chapuys back over the years to when he was eight years old, longing to be a man, to earn, to provide and able only to gather driftwood. He intended not to talk about the ceremony at Windsor, but Katharine herself began to question him about it almost as soon as he was in her presence. Woman enough to ask, “And how did she look?”
“Not beautiful—though there were some who said so, of course. Not beautiful; but impressive.”
“I can imagine it. As though she were honoring the occasion, rather than being honored by it.”
“Exactly so, Your Grace.”
“And what is her rank now? One hears such foolish things. I was told that she was to be a Duke.”
“That I never heard. Marquis, yes; the title has been mentioned since no woman has ever before been created a peer in her own right. But the patent read Marchioness of Pembroke. And there was one interesting omission which has caused some speculation. Ordinarily such a patent of nobility, providing for the title to be passed on to the heir, says legally begotten. In this instance the words were omitted. I have thought about that omission…and it seems to me just possible that the King is providing, beforehand, for the birth of another illegitimate child.”
“I had thought that the ennoblement could be a prelude to marriage. But the omission is certainly significant,” Katharine said thoughtfully.
“His Grace must know that any form of marriage he goes through in the present circumstance would be bigamous.” He paused for a second and then put into words something he had never actually said before. “Your Grace knows that in this matter I am wholly on your side. Your cause is just and I would stop at nothing to prosper it. Yet there are times when even I feel sorry for the King. Seven years ago he asked a simple question, and still awaits an answer. And at the moment his position is exceptionally difficult.”
“How so, Messire?”
“He is about to make a visit to France and he has been informed that even if he takes the Marchioness of Pembroke with him, she will not be received or acknowledged in any way. He was obliged to inform her of this and she felt much insulted. Her reception of the snub is, of course, hearsay, but my sources of information are usually reliable.”
“So much unhappiness! And it could all have been avoided had the King only resigned himself and accepted his daughter as his heir.”
True, up to a point, Chapuys reflected, but an oversimplification. The Concubine—as he now called Anne in his mind and in his letters—plainly had some extraordinary hold over the King. The cynics who had said that once she abandoned virtue she would be abandoned, had plainly been wrong and in London bets were in favor of a marriage as soon as she proved herself capable of child-bearing. Even Clement, while still hesitating to declare that Henry was lawfully married to Katharine, had openly said that should he marry Anne Boleyn he would be excommunicated. What a muddle!
Before the end of September the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk came to The More with a request which showed Katharine how far Henry was prepared to go in the effort to soothe Anne’s injured feelings. They had come, they said, by the King’s order, to take away the Queen’s jewels.
Considering what she had already lost, Henry’s love and companionship, her place at Court, the society of her daughter, the removal of a few colored stones, however valuable and pretty, might seem a trivial thing; but she had always taken a pleasure—almost sensuous—in jewels, and these ornaments held symbolism. They had always belonged to and been worn by the woman who was Queen of England and by nobody else. And Henry himself had poured them into her lap in those first days of love. She did not intend to part with them without a struggle and taking advantage of the fact that the Dukes carried no written order, she sent them empty-handed away.
