My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (16 page)

We were reading Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man, I remember, when Fox and Gardiner, the King’s almoner and secretary, happened to be quartered in the same house during a royal progress. We were old college friends so you can imagine I was glad to see them.” He chuckled reminiscently, in a way that made her feel what the stimulus of such intellectual friendship must have meant to him. “We used to sit up till all hours talking and, coming from Court, they were full of the proposed Spanish divorce.”

“What had Queen Catherine done?” interrupted Anne. People had talked a lot about it in Cleves; but it had meant nothing to her at the time.

“It was rather what she hadn’t done,” explained Cranmer. “She hadn’t given England an heir.”

“But she couldn’t help that, poor woman!”

“No. But there it was. And she was getting old—”

“And I suppose Henry had met someone he liked better?” The words slipped out before Anne could stop them and Cranmer pursed his lips and didn’t reply. “On what grounds could he divorce her?” she asked, more respectfully.

“He couldn’t—for a long time,” admitted Cranmer. “They’d been married for eighteen years and there was never a breath of scandal against her. But there was the question whether their marriage were regular or not.”

“How like Henry to think of it—after eighteen years!” thought Anne, who was learning unwonted cynicism.

“She’d been married to his elder brother, Arthur, who died before he was sixteen,” explained Cranmer. “So it all turned on whether that first marriage had been consummated.”

“I see,” said Anne.

He was too preoccupied with this well-worn thesis of the past to notice that she seemed to be gravely assimilating some new idea which might affect her own future. “All the—er—evidence about it seemed to disagree,” he told her solemnly, “and as you probably know, half the eminent lawyers in Europe argued over it for months.”

“And what did Catherine herself say about it?” asked Anne, wondering how clever men could behave so much like a lot of pompous asses.

“She swore it had not. Obviously it was to her advantage to do so.”

“You don’t suggest that she—” began Anne, hot in her defense.

But the Archbishop silenced her protest with a deprecating gesture.

“It was the King’s word against hers, you understand.”

Anne understood only too well.

“And it appears Prince Arthur had said things which gave the people of their household reason to think otherwise…But, be that as it may,” he went on, shying hurriedly from the vexed subject, “the Catholics held that as dispensation had been granted at the time of the second marriage, there could be no divorce. And the Protestants took the view that if the second marriage were proved irregular, there was no need of a divorce. And as the Pope himself happened to be in custody at the time, many enlightened people felt that it was rather an anomaly for England to accept religious jurisdiction from one in secular bondage.”

All Anne could see about it was that it must have made a bitter split throughout the country, and that it was monstrous after eighteen years to get rid of a faithful wife.

“Having no particular interest in the matter—apart from one’s natural sympathy with the Queen and a scholar’s impatience with legal delay—I, for my sins, happened to suggest to my two old friends that the matter might be laid before the divines of the Universities,” went on Cranmer. “I suggested it because they seemed to me the most enlightened and disinterested people to decide. Professional prejudice, no doubt. But Fox and Gardiner must have repeated my words to the King.”

“And what did he say?” prompted Anne.

A wry humor curved Cranmer’s clever mouth. “He said, ‘Mother of God, that man has the right sow by the ear!’ And sent for me to come immediately to Greenwich. And, as I have already complained to your Grace, I’ve been living in a palace instead of a college ever since.”

“And you feel uprooted—as I do?”

“I did at first.” In the rare easement of telling someone about it, he forgot the formality due to her rank and began to speak as if they were old friends. “And since then it has been nothing but religious controversy and straightening out the King’s matrimonial affairs. I did think that when Jane Seymour—” He pulled himself up with comical dismay. Anne only smiled and finished the train of thought for him. “But she died when her baby was born. And now you’ve got me on your hands.”

He sighed, taking up the burden of the present again. “And Cromwell’s life and my own may be gravely influenced by the way you behave.”

Impulsively, Anne stretched out a hand and touched his knee.

“You’re not afraid—for yourself?” she asked, with real concern.

For a moment his fine, scholarly hand closed over hers. So many people listened attentively to what he thought—so few cared about what he felt. They always brought their troubles to him.

“No, Madam. For the present God has spared me that,” he said.

“For although I have been forced to meddle with statecraft, I have managed to keep the King’s affection. Though only, I fear, by allowing myself at times to become his tool.”

Only Anne could have drawn such a confession from him. He went on speaking.

She kept silence. She had the sense to realize that through some chance blending of mood and encouragement she was being vouchsafed a glimpse of an integral flaw that was eating the heart out of the man. Something beyond her full comprehension, but not beyond her compassion. She had been in this country barely six weeks and here was the awesome prelate who had met her with such pomp at Rochester and worn that wondrous cape at the feast of the Epiphany talking to her as if he were any tired and rather timid middle-aged man. Apparently the same thought struck him, for he straightened himself up and laughed shamefacedly.

“I came out here to rebuke you, and then I wanted to comfort you,” he admitted, almost irritably. “And now—I don’t know why I should be telling you all this!”

Anne didn’t know either, but she dismissed her incomprehension with a shrug and a smile. “People do tell me things, you know,” she said simply, as if that were all there was to it.

They had both become aware of some sort of commotion farther down the river towards Kingston. People were standing up in their boats or running to the water’s edge, and her jauntlewomen, as she still called them, had forsaken the greedy, rising fish to see what was going on. They were hurrying to the wall with little cries of excitement, their round beaded caps bobbing together like large sunflower heads in the wind. Cranmer, who knew by the cheering that it must be the King coming back from Westminster, stood up and smiled at her.

“That, too, is a gift. A very rare and precious one,” he said.

“Cultivate it, my child, along with those domestic virtues. For if it seems to heal only the teller, in time it may come to be the means of healing your own hurt.”

11

ANNE WAITED DUTIFULLY AT the top of the water gate steps, with the Archbishop beside her and her women hovering behind. She stood without fuss or fidget, as she had been trained to do, hands folded placidly before her. Because she made none of the commotion that used to herald the spectacular movements of Nan Boleyn, and could move without the formal entourage imposed by the rigid etiquette of Aragon, it was some time before the people noticed her. But when they did, the cheering was no longer all for Henry. Right from the first they had approved her quiet dignity and because her household reported that she had no exotic, temperamental ways they scarcely thought of her as a foreigner.

“Next to a public hanging, there’s nothing they enjoy staring at so much as a royal bride,” Cranmer was explaining with a quiet smile.

Anne supposed it must be just that mixture of toughness and sentiment that made them so difficult to understand. She smiled at them benignly but was far too tactful to seem to appropriate any of her husband’s ovation to herself. Instead, she turned towards the Kingston reach to share in their orgy of sightseeing.

With a new little thrill of pride she realized that the King’s homecoming was a sight to be proud of. Like so many of the everyday bits of English pageantry to which she was becoming accustomed, it had an air of unrehearsed spontaneity. It was as if the observance of it were so deeply embedded in the national life that each man, according to his degree, fitted naturally into the colorful picture, and played his part just as his forebears must have done during some earlier reign. They wore their clothes, too, as if they were unaware of them—the humblest fiddler and the most resplendent courtier looking equally at ease—so that in all the sparkling scene there was none of that solemn, ordered pomposity that often made Flemish ceremonies such dull affairs.

The great crimson-upholstered barge came smoothly over the water with a full tide slapping at her golden prow. The rippling muscles of the royal watermen and the dipping of their blades were part of one satisfying rhythm, while decoratively—with great gold roses embossed on their green uniforms—they helped to weave the background for this casual Tudor tapestry. Henry himself was hidden by the silk-fringed awning; but every now and then, between the flutterings of his proudly quartered standard, Anne could see his knee and part of the fur-wrapped lap of a lady sitting beside him. Scraps of conversation from his gentlemen were sufficient indication to the initiated that he was in a good humor.

Sharp as the snapping of a twig, the barge master gave an order.

The long oars rested motionless and, with that consummate skill that makes precision look so easy, his craft fetched up through the shallows until her side bobbed gently at the stonework of the palace landing stage. A rope whistled through the clear morning air and was effortlessly caught. In the well of the moored barge there was a graceful uprising, a doffing of velvet caps and the flurry of laughter that rounds off a well-savored joke. Henry stood up, balanced himself a moment and stepped ashore. Tom Culpepper, his favorite gentleman of the bed chamber, whom he had sent to meet Anne and transferred to her household, stooped solicitously to the lady beneath the awning, threw the fur wraps to one of the boatmen and passed her safely along the barge. The others made way for her—rather too much as if she were royalty, the watchful Archbishop thought. Even the King himself turned back to stretch her a helping hand.

It was little Katherine Howard, in a new rose pink cloak and hood.

Henry came almost running up the steps, followed by the French ambassador and the rest of the party and a grinning page or two incongruously laden with an assortment of gaily painted toys.

All eyes were focused upon the meeting. Seeing the Queen standing there, Katherine changed color and—in her inexperience—hung back with noticeable confusion until Tom Culpepper nudged her to go forward. The chatter of his companions had died down suddenly and his gay young face was set like a decorous mask to hide the sullen welter of his feelings.

Cranmer, who had often been called upon to calm the jealous paroxysms of Nan Boleyn, glanced anxiously at the new queen.

Only by a tightening of her clasped hands did she betray how thoroughly the episode had clarified his recent warning.

Of all the people present only the King seemed completely at ease.

But then he must have had more experience than most of us in carrying off such moments! thought Anne contemptuously. Swaggering forward in his short, swinging coat he bade her a pleasant, unabashed “Good morning,” and grinned defiantly at his friend.

“Look, Thomas, what we’ve brought!” he cried, beckoning breezily to a small page whose merry eyes scarcely topped the assortment of wooden animals steadied by his chubby chin. “Katherine’s bright eyes spotted them on a stall in Eastcheap and I made Culpepper buy up the lot. The stall-holder will probably retire on the proceeds! They’re for Edward, of course,” he explained, taking a fierce-looking hobby horse with improbable orange spots from the top of the pile and handing it to Anne. “Don’t you think the young rascal will love them?”

Any delight Anne would normally have taken in the quaint quadruped could be only perfunctory with such a storm of enlightened raiding her mind.

“They are very cleverly carved,” she said, trying to speak politely.

He turned from the stilted flatness of her voice to toss a toy to Katherine, who was still standing dumb and hesitant halfway up the steps. “Here, Kat, you said you wanted to keep the lamb for yourself,” he invited, with his great infectious laugh.

The little maid-of-honor caught it deftly with one of those wild fawn movements that made Anne feel mature and clumsy. She nestled her soft cheek against it, but clearly her action was the joyless reflection of some former playful mood, for she looked up miserably at her new mistress. Her hand went to her throat where the coveted rubies had gleamed so becomingly but where the King’s pearls lay now. Anne noted the instinctive gesture while she was greeting the French ambassador, and guessed at the shamed pity in the girl’s warm, undisciplined heart.

“Lady Katherine is still half a child herself!” laughed Marillac with tactful suavity.

Henry smiled blandly, made a gesture of dismissal to his barge master and bade the pages take the toys up to the palace. “Mary will take them to Havering tomorrow,” he told the company in general. “She asked leave to go again this week.”

“Judging by her care for her brother, her Grace must be a born mother,” remarked Marillac, and—lowering his voice—went on to discuss with Anne the rumor of Mary’s betrothal to Philip of Bavaria, who had come over ostensibly for the King’s wedding.

Through the Frenchman’s whispered gossip, the half-understood wit of which only confused her, Anne could hear the Archbishop prompting Henry to a simple kindness.

“Perhaps little Elizabeth would like to go to Havering, too, and participate in her brother’s pleasures?” he was suggesting.

Having served Henry for ten years, he was expert in choosing his moment. Even Anne could see that her husband was in just that expansive humor in which he had ridden into Rochester the day she first set eyes on him. Ripe for some rejuvenating romance, no doubt, though not with her this time!