Boleyn Traitor, page 17
I open my mouth to say that if the king is supreme, then he can give himself a dispensation and continue married to Anne. I close it again.
‘Quite,’ says Thomas Cromwell. ‘The Supreme Head of the Church has received a new vision. Anne is not in it.’
It takes me a moment to realise that this is the end of Anne as queen. She will have to withdraw to the country, perhaps even go abroad. George and I will have to keep out of the way until this scandal is succeeded by another and all forgotten, or until the king’s new vision requires our services. This is going to be a difficult time. We cannot repay all our loans and return our gifts; our court debts alone are far beyond our income. And if we’re not at court, we’ll get none of the riches from the abbey fines, or any fees or bribes. God knows how we will manage; God knows what we will do. We’ve lived all our lives at court, George as a diplomat and me as a spy. We have lost our fortune, our life and our work.
But this is a blindingly brilliant victory for the Spanish party, who have rid themselves of an enemy queen and all her supporters. When Anne is gone, they can return Lady Mary to favour; they will make her an heir to the throne; she will supersede our Princess Elizabeth. The king will be free to marry again, and, of course, he has already chosen his bride, who is completely under their control and living at Sir Nicholas Carew’s house.
The king can marry Jane Seymour tomorrow; he can marry her in a Roman Catholic church if he wants; the damned pope can marry him in the damned Sistine Chapel if he likes, and Lady Mary will carry her new stepmother’s wedding train with a happy heart. This is her triumph over Anne and the final revenge of her dead mother. They have won, and we have lost, and it was all over in four days in May.
‘What a turn against us,’ I say, thinking of the debts and packing our goods and vacating our rooms. ‘What a change of season. And are they coming back here?’ I ask. ‘Anne and George? Or do we have to leave court at once?’
‘I had planned they would come back here, sign all the contracts and then retire,’ Master Cromwell takes his time, speaking lawyer-like, slow, so that I understand. ‘That is what I thought would be the conclusion of the inquiry. But then there was a development – not of my making. My inquiry was complete. And successful. But then – to my surprise – new evidence was volunteered.’
‘What new evidence?’ I am barely interested. George’s falcons alone cost us more than we earn in rents.
‘Evidence of adultery, of infidelity.’
Now he has my full attention. ‘Whose adultery?’
‘Adultery by the queen,’ Cromwell repeats. ‘Out of thin air, they produced evidence of adultery by the queen.’
I scrape my knuckles against the bricks behind my back, as if to wake myself up from a nightmare. ‘That is antinomic.’ I grasp at scholarship. ‘If they proved her marriage was invalid, then she is a single woman. Any love affair of hers is no adultery. She is free to be promiscuous, as free as any single lady-in-waiting.’
‘I agree with you. And that is why they are not stopping at adultery; they accuse of worse. They say there was perversity, even magical entrapment …’
‘But this is ridiculous!’ I catch a breath. ‘Master Cromwell, I know you would never bring a case to court with faulty accusation and hearsay evidence. My father says you’re the greatest lawyer in England. You’d never allow such gross gossip as evidence.’
He smiles. ‘Your father is generous.’
‘But you never would.’
‘Indeed. I would prefer not. But my opinion is now irrelevant. They have taken my little inquiry and whipped it into a panic.’
‘Panic?’ My voice is too sharp, as if I am infected with groundless fear. I take a breath before I speak again. ‘Adultery is no cause for panic?’
‘But treason is,’ he says. ‘A huge treason plot in the heart of court. Sexual perversion, a ring of corruption and witchcraft.’
I burst out laughing at the story as wild as the oldest Romance. ‘No, no, this can’t happen!’ I exclaim. ‘Anne wrote the laws of treason! She can’t be prosecuted by the laws she invented. Master Cromwell! You cannot allow the Spanish party to whip up a story like a spinning top. They can’t invent accusations and take it into a trial! Where will it stop?’
‘That’s the very point,’ he says, as if glad that someone agrees with him. ‘They won’t stop – and I will let them go to the utter extent of folly. They will overreach and destroy themselves. They are planning on naming dozens of men, citing incidents that could never have happened – accusing her of meeting a man when she was miles away that night and in bed with the king. Accusing her of grossness, of perversions, even witchcraft. Their accusations against the queen are so wildly exaggerated, it will become obvious to everyone that they are lies. I am giving them the rope to hang themselves. They think they are trapping her; but they are trapping themselves.’
‘So, what happens when the trial collapses, for going ad absurdum longitudines?’
‘Then the king will round on them for failing to give him what he wants, and he will destroy them.’
‘And you rescue the whole thing! Anne retires, and the king can marry Jane Seymour.’
‘It’s not going to be easy,’ he concedes. ‘But think of it! The Spanish party ruined forever and exposed as madmen and -women, Anne’s marriage annulled as the king wishes, but nothing against her as a woman or queen, the Boleyns without shame, and you and George can keep your places at court. You can keep Beaulieu Palace and your fortune. Anne can even visit you if she wishes.’
The fear leaves me in a gust of giggles. ‘I don’t think anyone would want that! She’ll be safe, but she won’t thank you!’
His laughs with me. ‘No, you’re probably right.’
ANOTHER NIGHT ALONE in my bed as Henry Norris’ big horse backs through my dreams, forever refusing to go forward. When I wake, I am so haunted by the memory of the charger’s hooves tearing up the tiltyard that I go down to the stables to see his big head nodding over the door. I thought for a moment that the king might have had him beheaded for disobedience, just as he executed his own horse for falling. I reach out a hand, and he sniffs at me with his sweet oaty breath; then he backs off again, away from the door, as if he can smell bad luck on my fingers.
A messenger in the livery of the Archbishop of Canterbury, our old friend Thomas Cranmer, rides into the yard. I open the door of the stable and slip inside with the restless horse to hear Cranmer’s man say to the groom: ‘Give him hay and water. I have a message for the Master Secretary, and I’ll wait for a reply.’
‘Don’t tell me the archbishop is locked up in the Tower as well!’ is the lame attempt at a joke.
‘No – His Grace is safe in Lambeth Palace. But anxious. Praying. Weeping. He says over and over: “How can it be? How can such a woman be?”’
‘He’s the only one’ll weep for her,’ the groom replies truculently. ‘She were a false wife to the king and no good queen to us. Not like good Queen Katherine.’
‘False?’ the messenger asks.
‘A dozen times over with a dozen men,’ the groom says with certainty. ‘In two places at once, on a witch-wind, to have her will.’
They go their separate ways – the messenger to the Cromwell’s rooms; the groom leads the horse to an empty stall, and I creep out. I wish I had not listened. I wish I had not heard that. It is a sample of what we are going to have to endure as we let the Spanish party exaggerate and overreach themselves.
In the afternoon, I sit in the queen’s half-empty privy chamber with a handful of ladies: all Boleyns. Everyone else has melted away. Someone says that Francis Weston, the king’s favourite, was missing from his place at dinner and that the king, who was drunk, told someone – who immediately repeats it to everyone – that Anne bedded up to a hundred men. I think: this is good news, this is ad absurdio – a claim so extreme that it makes the point ridiculous. Our enemies are overreaching themselves as Master Cromwell said they would, and we are entrapping them. All we have to do is wait.
THE NEXT DAY Thomas Cromwell’s clerks come to the queen’s rooms and take every book from her shelves and every piece of paper, even scraps of poems and riddles and letters. I watch them pack every note from her writing table into the green sacks that lawyers use – as if any of this will be used as evidence in court! The books are dangerously Lutheran; but Anne has read every single one of them to the king himself, and Thomas Cromwell has his own copies of most of them. The safest man to hold them is Thomas Cromwell, who will defend her and George against a charge of heresy, which the Spanish party are certain to bring along with other mad exaggerations.
After the clerks, come the grooms of the royal wardrobe, who take all her clothes: gowns, capes and hoods and sleeves. The grooms of the treasury collect the jewels, even the pieces that are her own; they don’t listen to me when I say that I know that this bracelet or these pearls are Boleyn family treasures. It’s all to be stored for safekeeping in the treasure house at the Tower and I make sure everything is properly labelled. When this is over, she will want her personal treasures back.
I finish tidying and clearing the queen’s rooms and then, while I am waiting for a groom of the household to lock the great double doors behind me, Elizabeth Somerset comes past with a wooden ribbon box in her hand. ‘It’s my own things!’ she says quickly. ‘Things that I lent her.’
I take her word for it, though I think her a thief.
She drops her voice to a whisper. ‘What did you say to the inquiry?’
‘They haven’t called me yet.’
‘I said nothing about my brother-in-law William Brereton.’ She is anguished. ‘William would never do anything. Why would they arrest him? And I said nothing about Anne but what is common knowledge …’
‘What did you say?’ I demand.
‘Nothing to the inquiry, just – earlier – to my brother Anthony. He was shouting at me – you know how strict he is. He was reviling me – you know how we quarrel! I said I had done nothing worse than the queen herself. And he took me up on it – you know how he is – and next thing I know he and Thomas Wriothesley – as if he has any right to question me! – are asking me what I mean! And saying that they will have to take it further.’ She breaks off as she sees my face. ‘I said nothing. I meant nothing. I told him it was nothing. It’s all just courtly love.’ She gestures at her growing belly. ‘What more can I do than talk? All Anne and I ever did was talk!’
I try to smile and agree with her, but my whole face feels quite frozen. ‘If she gave you that hundred pounds for you to keep silent, then she got a bad deal,’ I say nastily.
She turns without a word and hurries away, down the gallery, away from the locked doors of the queen’s rooms where nothing happened.
The court is buzzing with gossip like a troubled beehive, a low angry murmur that falls silent when I walk past. There’s no doubt that my family and I are the centre of the scandal. But I know courtiers, and I know that when Anne is cleared, they will all be my greatest friends again. The Spanish party will overreach themselves, and the inquiry will be led into ridiculous claims. But then I think: my father will never be led into ridicule. I should warn him that this is a conspiracy by the Spanish party and that they should be encouraged to hang themselves. I send an urgent message to him for permission to visit him at Westminster – I have something that I want to tell him.
He replies at once:
Daughter,
Information from ladies has already been submitted in writing, and nothing more is needed. Since you know nothing, you need not visit. Say nothing to anyone – especially not to the king, who is rightly much offended. The inquiry has arrested Thom Wyatt and Richard Page and summoned Sir Francis Bryan.
Morley
My father never signs his letters to me with his title, and from this I know that he is writing a letter to be read by any spy. Even so, he manages to give me much information. That I am to say nothing, and especially that I know nothing. That Sir Thomas Wyatt is arrested, who has loved Anne since she was a girl and is certain to defend her. Richard Page has no enemies and must be here as a strolling player to swell the scene. Sir Francis Bryan is Jane Seymour’s host and sponsor, a blatant friend to the Spanish and enemy to us: his spite against Anne will tempt him into telling a cartload of lies, winking at them behind his eye patch. He will betray their conspiracy – just as Master Cromwell promised. A conspiracy against the queen is treason, punishable by death. They will regret starting this hare which will circle as hares always do.
I go quite cheerfully to dinner in the great hall; the royal table is weighted with silverware and the servers will bring twenty courses out of respect to the absent king, who is still at Whitehall but said to be dining out in London in the happiest of moods. We all enter in order of precedence and bow to the throne. Half a dozen ladies sit with me at the ladies’ table, and we eat in silence. There is no music, and nobody wants to dance when half the court has a kinsman in the Tower tonight.
After dinner, some of the gentlemen sit over their wine, but the ladies disappear to their own rooms. I am at the doorway to the Boleyn rooms when Thomas Howard appears. He steps inside with me, without asking permission, and waves away the servant.
‘Has Cromwell promised you safety?’ he asks without preamble. ‘You and George? I know you’ve not been called to give evidence – and he’s going to get Thom Wyatt off – has he promised to release George too?’
‘He’s made me no promise,’ I say, which is true: he has not. ‘I need none. No inquiry can find anything against me or George. It is a plot by the Spanish party against Anne, with imaginary accusations. It will blow up in their faces.’
His sharp face is more hawklike than ever. ‘Of course it’s a plot,’ he says grimly. ‘But it’s a good one. They’ll prove their accusations. They’ll drag her down. Question is: will they take you and George, too?’
‘If the marriage was invalid, then she is no wife,’ I explain patiently. The duke is deadly at the head of his men, but not the sharpest blade when faced with ideas. ‘If she is no wife, there is no adultery. As her uncle, as the head of our house, your task is to wait for them to make fools of themselves, and then take Anne away.’
His laugh is like the sharp bark of a dog. ‘You’re behind the times, Jane – it’s gone far beyond validity; it’s gone far beyond adultery! If she’s not his wife, then adultery doesn’t matter – suppose Anne kissed Henry Norris? Even if she swived him? The archbishop will rule that she’s adulterous and send her to a nunnery. A modern Guinevere. That’s not enough for them – now they want her dead! Some fool told them that Anne said it was her or Lady Mary. So they’re all out for the death sentence on Anne. They’re throwing every filth they can. They say she was plotting with her own brother for the king’s death, in an enseamed bed? They’ll both have to die for it.’
‘Treason? With George? It’s ridiculous!’
‘Worse! They say they bedded. Brother-and-sister lovers! Incestuous lovers!’
He has knocked the breath out of me.
‘You think you’re so clever,’ he says, with lightning malice. ‘The three of you. So clever and young and sinful. Were you in the bed, too?’
‘Nobody can say it! Nobody will have witnessed it! There’s no evidence for it!’
‘Everyone’s given evidence of it,’ he jeers. ‘Everyone witnessed it.’
‘Lies! And such a thing to say? Such a wicked …’ I break off. Actually, it’s clever; everyone knows their intimacy. I, myself, said to Cromwell that George is always with his sister. Impossible to deny what happens behind a closed door. But it is the worst of accusations, made by the worst of imaginations. And why attack George? And why add incest to the accusations of adultery?
I can feel my uncle’s hard scrutiny of my white face, and I look up, hoping for help. ‘But – why?’ I ask simply. ‘If this is an attack on Anne by her enemies – the Poles, and the Seymours and the rest of the Spanish party, all working together – why so gross an accusation? Why incest as well as witchcraft?’
‘Something so ungodly that it drives the king mad,’ he tells me. ‘Nobody’s going to ask “but was she married before?” when they hear about this. Nobody will care. It’s such a vile sin that everyone will call for her death. The king loudest of all. They’ll frighten him half to death about the lust he felt for her. By the time they’ve finished, he’ll think of her as a witch who tempted him and destroyed his life, made him impotent, dropped a horse on him, killed his first wife and sickened his daughter. Nothing will satisfy him but her death.’
‘Wait!’ I say. ‘I can vouch for George. At least I can save him. There was no treason. There was no incest. There was no plotting the death of the king. I was there at every meeting.’
He grips me by the arm and draws me close. ‘If you were at every meeting, then you are a traitor and part of the queen’s adulterous murderous witchcraft,’ he growls in my ear. ‘If you were there at every meeting, then you were in bed with the two of them, hanging on each other, kissing with tongues, hiding dead babies, cursing the king into impotence, taking potions. You choose! Go to your spymaster Cromwell: his book is open at the page for confessions.’
His grip is tight, but I hardly feel it; I sway with sickness. He pauses and looks into my ashen face. ‘D’you want to die? D’you want to die as an incestuous witch-traitor with George and Anne?’
‘They’re not going to die.’
‘D’you want to die with them?’
I know that I don’t. ‘No.’
‘Then do as I do: condemn them.’
‘You can’t condemn them – your own niece and nephew. You can’t send them to their deaths without a word?’
He grins, showing his yellow teeth. ‘Oh, I’m going to speak a word,’ he says mirthlessly. ‘I’ll speak a word all right. I’m going to say: “Guilty”.’
NO ONE TELLS the ladies to leave; but there is nothing for us to do here without a queen. Those of us who have families in rooms at court can go to them, and the others – like Anne Basset whose mother is in Calais – stays with friends in London. Sir Nicholas Carew does not open his grand house at Croydon for any other maid-of-honour but Jane Seymour, who does not reappear to help as we pack up our things.
