Boleyn Traitor, page 19
We bow our heads in silence for Grace, and we eat in an unbroken silence, like Benedictine nuns. After dinner, I walk down to the river to watch the water flowing out to sea, as if it, too, is leaving without a word. I walk back through the weary gardens, the leaves crumpled by the summer heat. The sun beats down on the winding paths of the privy gardens, the white stone paths too bright to bear; but I am not hot.
The king stays away from court, the remaining noblemen go to their estates in the country, and the servants clean their rooms. I have to pick my way over wet floors in the galleries, and there are buckets and brooms in the open doorways to the great rooms.
The weather turns suddenly cold and rainy, and the Boleyn groom and I draw coals and candles from the royal household stores and light the fire in the Boleyn hall in the evenings. I am not cold.
I am neither cold nor hot. I think of God saying: For thou art lukewarm, and neither cold, neither hot, I shall begin to cast thee out of my mouth. Thou knowest not, that thou art a wretch, and wretchful.
I think Revelation 3; but I don’t pray. I think if I am a wretch and wretchful, then I have nothing to pray for. The souls of George and Anne, and the souls of our friends, beheaded with them, will go to hell, I suppose, for their terrible sins. Unless they were all innocent and go, headless, to purgatory. It will depend on whether particular judgement is under the control of the Spanish party or of the Boleyns? Whether the old faith is right and they are waiting in purgatory for masses to be sung to release them to heaven; or they have gone at once to bliss or hell as we reformers believe.
I suppose I shall have to go to the living purgatory of my home at Morley Hallingbury. I have nowhere else to go. There is no place for me at the palaces and castles of my bridal days and I cannot afford to run Beaulieu Palace, or pay the servants. I have been dropped again; but this time, no one will summon me back to court, and my father will never forgive my disgrace. I suppose I shall live and die there and be buried in the parish church under a modest stone, fitting for a widowed daughter of no importance.
I cannot bring myself to write to my father to ask him to send his grooms to fetch me home. My paper and my pens are in one of the boxes with my books. I cannot be troubled to look for them. For the first time in my life, I have no interest in study.
Days pass. A week passes. Then I come back to the rooms after dinner, and the groom of the chamber is waiting for me. ‘You’ve got a letter,’ he says. ‘Special seal.’
I take it without interest, and I stare blankly at him until he ducks his head in a bow and leaves. I take my seat on the stool by the mean fire and look at the letter – the first I have had, since George’s final note.
I feel a stir of interest like the rising of temptation. This is no ordinary letter – it is letterlocked: the tongue of the page intersects itself and is pasted down. Who would writing something to me, which is to be read only by me?
I look at the wax seal. It is Thomas Cromwell’s crest.
I have obtained for you the place of chief lady-in-waiting to Queen Jane.You can draw gowns, etc., from the royal wardrobe, and your fee from the treasury. Other ladies will come to Greenwich Palace shortly. Please ensure they are housed in the queen’s rooms, as they should be, and that the rooms are ready for Her Grace, who will come within the week.
I look at the stroke of the T and the half-moon of the C, and I think: good God, I am not going to die wretchful; I am not a wretch and wretchful. I am going to survive this. Good God, my life is going to begin again.
Thomas Cromwell has not packed his bags and gone to his country house while the king dallies with a new bride, like the old lords. Thomas Cromwell does not hide from failure like the Howards and the Boleyns. Thomas Cromwell continues, as always. Probably, he never stopped, not even for the trials. The dark chamber is still taking in the king’s letters – probably everyone’s letters – reading them, resealing them, and sending them out again, apparently untouched. The Cromwell men are still in post: sheriffs, mayor, justices of the peace, middling men, and wealthy merchants. The Cromwell machine of government rumbles on, unstoppable. The Cromwell Court of Augmentations takes in and redistributes the wealth of the monasteries; the Cromwell inspectors travel the land to find corruption in the rich monasteries. Amazingly, in all this work, Cromwell still thinks of me.
He is not thinking of me – I, myself, Jane Boleyn, pauper widow. He is thinking of how he can use me. He needs a spy in the court of the new queen; he needs someone to watch the Seymours, someone to watch the Spanish party, someone to predict the king’s next idea, someone to create the king’s new idea and slide it into his wishes. I will be more use than ever before, now that the Spanish party think I am their friend; warning them of the danger to Lady Mary. They think I gave evidence against Anne and brought her and George to their deaths. Thomas Cromwell has written a part for me in this masque, as the traitor-sister to a queen, whose star was falling, and as a friend to the rising star, the new queen, and the Spanish party that has put her in place.
Jane Seymour will be so glad to have a lady-in-waiting familiar with the private rituals of the queen that she will overlook the froideur natural between a man’s new wife and his former sister-in-law. Her brothers will disregard me, thinking all women as dull as their sister. The king himself sees me more as palace furniture than Boleyn – I have been here for nearly twenty years, single and married and widowed.
I shout for the groom. He is so startled by my raised voice after days of silence in the empty rooms that I hear him scramble up and fling open his door. He comes at the run.
‘What is it? What did the letter say?’
‘You can move my boxes,’ I tell him.
‘Where to?’ His eyes are wide and frightened. ‘The Tower? You too?’
‘To the queen’s rooms,’ I say triumphantly. ‘To the rooms for the chief lady-in-waiting.’
IT TAKES ONLY a few days and everything is restored. Everything is as it was for the last queen – and for the one before that. The maids-of-honour return; I greet the familiar ladies-in-waiting. Even the king’s friends, coming and going with compliments and invitations, are the same. Why should there be any difference? It’s only been two short weeks between the death of one queen and the arrival of another.
Jane Seymour sails downriver from Chelsea in Anne’s barge, wearing Anne’s clothes, and sleeps in Anne’s bed, in Anne’s sheets. The monograms on the sheets and towels and linen are picked out, and the A under the coronet is replaced with a newly embroidered J. In the evenings, we light the candles that Anne ordered; they have not even burned down. Everything is the same; only the queen is different, and the newly joyous mood of the court.
We are merrier than in April, happier than we were at May Day, at the May Day joust that nobody ever mentions. The king is in a most boisterous mood: pleased with everything. The same entertainments and games planned by the same master of revels now bring him delight, as if before he was pretending happiness – as false as any courtier. He comes into the queen’s rooms with his face wreathed in smiles, his limp hardly noticeable. His fool, Will Somer, gambols like a lamb at the heels of a well-fed lion, as if none of us need fear anything.
There are a few faces missing: the lute music is bright, but it is not the ripple that only Mark Smeaton could play. The king’s friends still come running with messages that the king is on his way and we had better be looking our best, but we miss Francis Weston’s boyish laughter. There is no Henry Norris, lounging through the door, flirting with Margaret Shelton and winking at me; no William Brereton frowning at Elizabeth Somerset, and she is still away from court in the confinement that she and Anne thought they would share. Now, Anne’s baby is long gone and forgotten, and Anne is dead, too.
And – of course – there is no George. My husband’s body is buried with his decapitated head in the chapel in the Tower. His sister Anne lies beside him, in an old arrow box, her head pushed under her feet – they forgot to order a coffin for her. They are as inseparable in death as they were in life – and I am very far from them both.
I cannot make myself understand that everything is the same – except that six of us are missing. I cannot make myself understand that I am in my accustomed place, on the right hand of the queen’s chair, ready with a smile or a prompt to cover an awkward silence – but those six are absent. I cannot believe that when I glance to my left, there is the queen on her heavy carved chair – but it is not Anne; it is not even Katherine of Aragon. They are both dead. It is little Jane Seymour, with her ugly English hood crammed down over her pale hair and her white face shining with astonishment at finding herself in Anne’s chair, with Anne’s friends, at the summit of Anne’s court.
There are new ladies, of course; the Spanish party has won and are taking the prizes. They appoint Poles, Courtenays, Greys, Darcys, and Husseys, and of course Seymours. Almost none of the new ladies have been chosen by the new queen – Mary Brandon, the daughter of Charles Brandon’s first marriage, has been foisted on her, and she cannot possibly have wanted Margaret Douglas, whose heated flirtation with Lord Thom – the boyish half-brother of our uncle Thomas Howard – is going to blow up like a purse of serpentine now that we have a queen who notices nothing and commands no one. Eleanor Manners, Mary Zouch, and Anne Parr have returned, even though Anne Parr is red-hot for the reform of the Church and sits uneasily in this court which is going to bring back the old religion as soon as it can.
How can any of us treat Jane Seymour with respect, when she was our despised junior and we laughed when Anne slapped her face for perching her arse on the king’s one good knee? The newly made queen appoints ladies who are not worthy of their place: Margaret Dymoke, who was a hard-hearted spy on Anne in the Tower, and some vulgar Seymour countrywomen: Anne Seymour is the worst of them, now that her sister-in-law is queen.
They look at me with disdain and suspicion, wondering how I have clung to my place, despite all that has happened, and I smile my courtier’s smile. I may no longer be kinswoman to the queen – as they now are. I may not be of the royal family – as they now are. I may not be rising upwards on the skirts of my sister-in-law as once I did – as Anne Seymour does now – but I have survived, though my fortune, my friends, my husband, and my queen have been taken, in a great auto-da-fé by the Spanish party, who are now triumphant.
And here – as if to prove their ascendancy – comes Lady Margaret Pole, visiting the new queen to arrange for the return of Lady Mary to her proper place at court. Her ladyship strolls into the royal rooms as if she owns them once again. Two sons and her cousins are in the king’s favour; she and her kinswoman, Gertrude Courtenay, are welcomed in the queen’s rooms and honoured at every great occasion. Her cousin, Arthur Plantagenet, Lord Lisle, commands the key fort of Calais; her scholar son, Reginald, is high in the favour of the pope at Rome, and now his great book is going to offer a brilliant compromise between reform and the old church: a way for our king to return to Rome. This is the end of Anne’s reform, the triumph of the Spanish party and the restoration of Rome.
They have thought of everything – except they forgot, or perhaps they never knew, the quiet power of Thomas Cromwell. The only thing that gives me any pleasure this summer is watching their realisation dawn, like a pearly summer morning when the birds are loud at four o’clock and the sun is hot by eight, that Thomas Cromwell is a great power, and – now that Anne is gone – there is no power to rival him.
The Spanish party are welcome at court and showered with honours, but they do not take control of government. They pray fervently with the king in the chapel night and morning, but he still signs his name during mass to the orders of examination of one religious house after another and levies great fines on the church. Thomas Cromwell puts the papers before him, and takes them away to execute. The Spanish party speak fondly of Lady Mary and the king smiles and nods, but she will not be excused the oath: she has to swear that she is a bastard if she wants to come to court.
The reform queen is dead; but reform still goes on. How can this be? Thomas Cromwell is a greater threat to them and to their faith than Anne ever was. Thomas Cromwell, the quiet commoner, is more than a mere clerk doing the king’s will. Slowly, they understand that they have done Cromwell a great favour by destroying his only rival. Now, there is no advisor to the king but him. He keeps his place at the king’s ear; his wooden chest holds the royal orders that he translates into laws. It is his administration that enforces them.
The Seymour brothers can bob about, babbling suggestions, but they don’t have royal business at their fingertips like Cromwell. The Pole family are of the old royal house, and Sir Geoffrey Pole can tell everyone that he knows great secrets; but they have no network of foreign agents and spies.
The king comes to Jane Seymour’s bed every night and passes me in the queen’s bedroom with a warm smile and familiar greeting for a beloved friend, his eyes on the big golden bed and the fair head in the prim white nightcap where Anne used to be lazily smiling. Being shamed as a cuckold has cheered him; being publicly named as impotent has stimulated his ardour. A new wife with absolutely no allure has achieved what the most desirable woman in England could not do: incite his lust. Jane’s pallid lack of enthusiasm reassures him that bedding her is holy work without sin – clearly without pleasure for her. The mockery of his poetry inspires him to write – he has completed a three-act tragedy based on the events of his life, and he reads it to anyone who he thinks learned enough to understand it. To me: he reads it to me.
I freeze my face into an expression of polite interest as he goes on and on, through three acts of clanking pentameters about his seduction with French practices and sortilèges, his betrayal by a witch-wife with hundreds of men, and the final act of his righteous wrath when he strikes her head from her body as you would behead a serpent. Surely, the king must be mad to read a play about a man’s incest with his sister and their bloody execution to the man’s widow?
‘You are the only one who understands what I have been through, Jane,’ he says to me, his voice choked with tears.
‘I share your grief,’ I say.
He takes my hand and kisses it.
The king is the only one to speak of Anne and George; but he makes up for everyone else’s silence, for he speaks of them all the time, as terrible events in his distant past, a time near the creation of the world – the Fall, and Anne and George as a mythological monster like a double-headed serpent. No one else speaks of the absent six at all.
We call Jane ‘Queen’ from the day she is proclaimed, a little more than two weeks after the swordsman took off Anne’s head. Nobody remarks that Anne’s beautiful gowns must be cut down to fit Jane’s bony frame. Nobody says that Jane’s English hood is like a nun’s wimple; she looks like the king’s grandmother. Nobody asks why the queen’s ladies are now famous for modesty when – only two weeks ago – we were famous for wit? Nobody remembers that last summer, the royal progress went to Jane’s home, the Seymour home, Wulfhall, and it was a little house, badly placed, not big enough to house the court. The drains overflowed, and her family were an embarrassment – how can a young woman from there now sit on the throne of England?
I remember us Boleyns as a unified three: a troika, going like the wind, inseparable all day, and every night I slept with either one or the other of them. Now, I am a third of the being that I once was. Now I am alone, the only point left from an erased triangle.
I cannot see how to be myself, for I don’t know what I am, now that I am not beside George or one step behind Anne.
The lords of the inquiry hold a great dinner at Greenwich to celebrate their work, before they disperse to their country houses. I find my father in a guest room, ready to leave. ‘I can’t live without them,’ I say simply. ‘I can’t live here without them.’
‘You’ve no choice in the matter,’ he says irritably. ‘If you leave now, we’ll never get you back to court again. And, without your salary as a lady-in-waiting, you’ll have no money. George has left a heap of debts; the king has confiscated all his goods as a traitor, and the Boleyns aren’t going to be generous with your jointure – not to a childless widow to a traitor son. You have no expectations, Jane. You’d have to marry again, and who would have you, looking at what you did to your last husband?’
‘I didn’t give evidence against him,’ I say wearily. ‘You were judge on the inquiry; you, of all people, know that.’
‘Well, you didn’t try to save him, as Francis Weston’s wife tried to save him.’
‘You told me not to!’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That’s true. But anyway, you can’t come home; you’ll have to stay at court.’
‘I don’t mean that I can’t live at court without them. I mean that I can’t live without them at all! I mean that I cannot be myself without them! I am a third of a person without them. I am two-thirds dead!’
For a moment, he looks interested. ‘Are you really? Do you imagine yourself two-thirds gone? How do you imagine your absence?’
I think for a moment. ‘No,’ I say. ‘You’re right. I can’t imagine my absence, but I do feel a void. But, Father, I didn’t mean philosophy. I just mean I am in despair. Such despair.’
‘Despair at court is an appropriate emotion,’ he tells me. ‘The courtier’s disease is despair.’
‘I want to go to Beaulieu! I want to live as a widow.’
‘It’s been returned to the king.’
I look at him blankly. ‘But it is ours for life.’
‘George’s life is over.’
‘Mine isn’t!’
