Anne Boleyn: A Novel (32 page)

It was a temptation straight from hell for it was two years since Mary had seen her father and nearly as long since she had last visited her mother; she had been isolated and stripped of her rank and birthright as brutally as if she had committed treason. Lastly, they had sent her to live in the household of the bastard who had supplanted her; whenever she heard from her father it was a threat delivered secondhand, and her mother had been finally taken to Kimbolton Castle, where she was reported to be ill and in fear of being poisoned.

If Mary did as this woman said, it could all be over. It sounded so easy. Come to court and curtsy to me. Come to court; live in the luxurious apartments she remembered, move freely among gay young companions instead of semi-jailers, attend a banquet and dance again. Ride out and hunt in the free air, without someone to turn back the horse’s head at a certain point. And see the King, her father.

At the longing to see him again and hear him welcome her, the tears welled up into her eyes and ran down her face before she could stop them. And he would welcome her if she did what he wanted. He would love her as much as ever, and now this creature had promised her precedence and freedom from humiliation as well...She found a handkerchief in her sleeve and wiped her eyes. She had only to break her promise to her mother and she could be riding to London within twenty-four hours.

“I know no Queen to whom I can make a curtsy, Madame, but my mother. Queen Catherine. However, if you would do me the favor of interceding with my father for me, I should be always grateful.”

Then she slowly turned her back.

She heard the chair crash back as Anne sprang out of it, but she didn’t move. She preferred to think of her sitting down, scented and painted, the King’s concubine, as she’d heard Anne called, in her elegant clothes and jewels. Also, she was crying openly again because her choice was made, and her human weakness trembled at the consequences.

“You little fool! God’s blood, you’ll be sorry you threw away this chance. Haven’t you learned what the King can do by now?

He’ll put you in the Tower as he put your mother into Kimbolton! He may even have you killed! For the last time, think again, and give me your answer in an hour or so, if you want time.”

“You have my answer, Lady Anne.”

She shrank because Anne had reached her and she was forced to look up. The desperation in that white face and blazing eyes startled her; the creature was afraid. In spite of her rich clothes and her self-assurance, Mary had lived with fear long enough to sense it at close quarters. Anne was very much afraid of something.

“If you want me to beg you,” Anne continued her voice shaking, “I will. And not just for yourself this time, but for others. Since Rome affirmed your mother’s marriage, an Act of Succession has been passed by Parliament, to which everyone in England has got to swear; do you understand? It gives the succession to my daughter Elizabeth or the male heirs of my body, and those who refuse to acknowledge that and admit the King as Supreme Head of the Church in England will be charged with high treason! It’s no longer you and your mother and your rights, it’s the lives of hundreds of Englishmen, men like Sir Thomas More, and your champion. Bishop Fisher. They’re in the Tower already, and others with them. And there’ll be more joining them even while I speak! Think of it; think how much blood is going to flow, and how one act from you could save so many lives!”

“God forgive my father,” Mary answered her slowly. “And you, Madame, because his love for you began all this. The lives aren’t mine to spare, even if I could. If others have the courage to die for their Faith, I hope I have too. I shall prove that when they ask me to swear to the Act!”

“And they will,” Anne promised her. “By God, I’ll see to that. You’d cut off every head in England rather than give way one inch...I would have been your friend,” she shouted. “Now as God lives, I’ll be your enemy, Shelton!”

The governess opened the door so quickly it was obvious she had been listening. Anne brushed past her without another word and pulled the door shut behind her with a bang that was heard all over the house.

“Your Grace, I hope...” the woman began stammering.

“You’ve been cossetting her!” Anne accused. She was so angry that Lady Shelton shrank back against the wall.

“Now listen to me, Shelton. I’ve given her every chance to win back the King’s good will and she refused me. You heard well enough, you were skulking by the door and I know it! But these are my instructions to you now: If she dares to call herself the Princess Mary, or pretend to any rights in the house, you’re to box her ears for the cursed bastard that she is!”

The same day the Queen’s litter started back to London, and hidden inside it with the curtains drawn, Anne’s anger and despair found a release in tears. They were as copious and as wretched as the ones shed by Mary, who was locked in her room at Hatfield.

Clement VII lay dying in his bed at the Vatican, Rome in the month of September was cool; he knew that the city would be at its most beautiful, and already the ruins of burned churches and buildings were either cleared away or covered over with plants and flowers, as if Nature was as anxious to heal Rome’s scars as he was. The memorial to the imperial sacking of the city was a strong wild flower which grew and flourished in the ruins, where so many had died and so much had been destroyed.

It was the way of God, the Pope thought hazily. The ways of God were strange indeed; he wondered whether He had forgiven Charles for the terrible crime of pillage and slaughter. Clement never had; for he hated the Emperor in his heart from that moment and he hated him still as he lay there, preparing for death.

Forgive if you want to be forgiven. It was a hard dictum, and he couldn’t follow it. He had failed to follow many like it; he did not die a good man. He had been weak and unscrupulous and worldly. He hated his ally Charles and he would die with that personal hatred on his soul. But he had made his enemy his ally, and he knew now in the last hours of his life, that the choice had saved his Church. The Church would survive. He would die, and the Roman mob, who had never liked him, were howling and hooting outside his window, but the Church would live. Her domains had shrunk. Germany was the home of the Reformers, and the King of England, whose refutation of Luther’s heresy had won him the title of Defender of the Faith, had begun the great schism of his country from Rome, and was enforcing it with the dungeon and the ax. The Kingdom of Christ was smaller, Clement muttered in his delirium...but the Church was safe.

Spain and the Empire would remain in the Faith now, and so would France and Italy. He had won where nothing seemed possible but defeat, and he opened his eyes suddenly, staring up at the purple velvet canopy over his head. The physicians at the bedside were bending over him.

His mind cleared quickly and for a moment death receded.

The gates of hell shall not prevail...Out of the indecision and the fear, the bribes and the baseness, good had come. In spite of his weakness and the venality of some of his methods, in spite of the wickedness of Charles, who now protected what he had so nearly destroyed, in spite of the Kings of France and England, the folly and unworthiness of the human beings concerned, he had made the right decision. The promise had been kept.

A few moments later he died.

The French emissary Chabot arrived in London that November. Rumors of the rift between Anne and Henry were spreading everywhere, and the French King decided to make a bold proposal designed to avert complete rupture with Rome even now, and to conclude a brilliant alliance with England. Chabot came to London to suggest that the Dauphin of France marry Mary Tudor.

If Henry wanted an excuse to get rid of Anne and heal the quarrel with the new Pope Paul, this was his opportunity. The Dauphin could not marry a bastard, so the Act illegitimatizing Mary would have to be repealed; the moment that was done, Anne and her child Elizabeth were doomed, and reconciliation with the Pope would follow.

And, as Francis dryly pointed out, his grandson would one day inherit the throne of England and join it to France.

Chabot received instructions to treat Queen Anne as coldly as he dared, making the official French attitude toward her clear, for the right eyes to notice it.

The right eyes did notice it; they were a muddy brown and the lids drooped over them, hiding what expression there was. They noticed the French emissary’s curt bow when he was presented to the Queen, and they noticed the Queen’s color change. They noticed her sitting beside him at the court ball given in his honor at Greenwich and saw the King get up and leave them with an excuse. The eyes left Anne sitting on her chair under the canopy, her fingers tapping nervously to the music, with the Frenchman sitting stiff and hostile at her side, while the King’s massive figure moved through the press of courtiers round the wall and passed out of sight behind the great carved wood screen at the end of the hall.

With a murmured apology, Thomas Cromwell pushed quietly after him and slipped behind the screen into the cool gloom of the corridor. Ahead of him he saw Henry walking quickly as if in pursuit, and then Cromwell’s sharp ears heard the light tapping of a woman’s heels further up. They stopped, and a murmur of voices came to him. He moved forward till he saw them, standing together in an angle of the wall, and then he drew back, flattening himself out of sight.

Whoever the woman was, she was very small; he could see the shadowy figure topped head and shoulders by the King, and the King was bending down toward her. Cromwell thought he had her hand in his, and they were whispering. He began to edge forward, trying to hear, and then froze; his dagger had clinked against the wall. He waited, but neither the man nor the woman had heard anything; they were too engrossed. Especially the King. In a minute, Cromwell thought, he’ll take her on his knee as he does with the others and start fondling. That was the King’s habit, and Cromwell’s spies, already posted all over the palace, had reported it. He never indulged in more than maulings, and this puzzled the Secretary.

But the identity of this new favorite was what was puzzling him now. Whoever she was, she had caught the King’s interest enough to bring him hurrying after her in the middle of a ball, leaving the French King’s emissary and his own Queen sitting in awkward silence. Also she had his respect, Cromwell thought, frowning. He had not touched her; beware the woman who played the game as Anne had played it in the beginning.

Cromwell edged backward carefully and saw a doorway, covered by tapestry. Gently he eased into it, letting the arras fall into place, so that he was hidden. And he waited there while the minutes dragged on until nearly an hour passed while the King stood in the draughty passage, talking to the unknown woman.

At last Cromwell heard the sound of footsteps. They were heavy and soft. He drew back the edge of the tapestry a few inches and saw the King pass alone. Still he waited. Then the light footsteps came, and her shadow preceded her. She was close to the wall, and the edge of her dress swept the tapestry. In spite of the dim light, Cromwell saw her face clearly, outlined by the three-cornered headdress and soft veil. He bit back a deep intake of breath and stood hidden till the small steps had turned the comer of the corridor and faced away.

Of all the women at court. Of all the beautiful women, the gay women, the women likely to attract a man who had fallen in love with the Anne Boleyn that Cromwell remembered...God’s blood and death! He swore with amazement. The plainest and dullest little girl in the Queen’s retinue. Then he remembered she was not a girl, in spite of her smallness and paleness. She was twenty-five. So she was the one; she was the reason why that dark proud woman sitting on her shaking throne in the great hall often reminded Cromwell of a tortured animal when he looked into her eyes.

“Jane Seymour,” he said the name aloud. He remembered the others since the birth of Elizabeth; the statuesque beauty who tried to influence the King in favor of Catherine and the Princess Mary and lost his favor through her efforts; and Mistress Shelton, Anne’s friend; he had made a parade of the girl who didn’t appear to relish her position...one or two others who caught his eye for a day or two and were forgotten. And now this one. All had been watched. Wolsey had lost his place with the King through underestimating a woman’s power, Cromwell didn’t intend to make the same mistake. His spies should be set on Mistress Seymour, in case she amounted to anything serious.

It was the loveliest spring England had known for many years. Early in the year the weather became unusually mild; the fierce winter winds died down, and the trees and shrubs burst into early flower. In the first week of May the small villages held their traditional celebrations, half pagan, half religious, which had always been associated with the month dedicated to the honor of the Virgin Mary. May queens were crowned and the May pole erected on the green; there were processions and torchlight, and flowers in the churches where the rigor of the new doctrines had not penetrated, and on a scaffold at Tyburn the first English monks were put to death by the order of the King.

At the foot lay the bloodstained hurdles on which they had been dragged through the filth of the London streets, all the way from the Tower, and the spectators on raised stands saw them die by mutilation, watched by a great silent crowd.

These monks came from the Priory at Charterhouse, and some were old and feeble enough to be semiconscious after the hurdles; these died very quickly after being disemboweled. When it was over, and the heads and members were distributed to be hung on the City gates, the nobles who had watched left their seats and rode away. They were all safe; Norfolk, the Earl of Wiltshire, the Queen’s brother Rochford, Sir Henry Norreys and the rest. They had sworn to the Act of Supremacy.

The Carthusian monks had refused.

So had two of the most famous men in England, Sir Thomas More, once Lord Chancellor of England and personal friend of the King, and the intractable Bishop of Rochester, John Fisher. He had entered the Tower as a bishop, but he left it less than two months after the Carthusians died, and he went to his death on Tower Hill as a Cardinal Prince of the Roman Church. In an effort to save his life, Pope Paul had conferred the red hat on him. Henry’s answer was an offer to send Fisher’s head to Rome, where head and hat could more easily be united. When the ax fell on Fisher it severed the last threads of pretense that the King either desired a just sentence from Rome or was willing to be reconciled under any conditions.