The Boleyn Bride (19 page)

Thomas was livid when he found out that she had dared spurn His Majesty, his whole body quaking and his face so red I felt sure he would keel over dead of an apoplexy; he threatened her by turns with the convent and beatings. But as George most approvingly said, doubling over with laughter and slapping his thigh, when he heard about the intended romance in the rose garden their father had staged but his sister had turned into a farce instead, “God broke the mold after He made Anne!”

9

I
watched, an incredulous and increasingly horrified spectator, alongside everyone else, powerless to change anything or interfere, as the world we knew changed entirely over the course of the next seven years.

I saw my daughter assailed with ardent love letters from the King, which she perused with the most casual glance and refused to reply to. She never acknowledged, much less tendered her thanks for, the costly gifts that accompanied them. He sent her jewels; lengths of costly materials to fashion new gowns; sumptuous soft furs; fine gloves; rare perfumes made of rosewater, musk, and ambergris; fine-tooled leather saddles for her horses with gilt embellishments or silken fringe; and ornate leather bindings for her books replete with her initials worked in gold. Many of these she never even bothered to wear or use, setting them all aside without a second glance. More than once, His Majesty sent her his own likeness painted in miniature and ringed by diamonds set into bracelets, necklaces, lockets, and rings. Yet not once, as far as I know, did these trinkets ever grace my daughter’s person.

He sent her an ornate brooch of a little gold gem-encrusted lady with long black enameled hair holding a ruby heart and wearing a golden crown in her hands while Venus and Cupid coyly peeped over her shoulders.

Anne laughed and called in the goldsmith to set this little lady in a storm-tossed boat in a wild whitecapped blue and green enameled sea and sent it back to His Majesty.

“Let him think what he will about that!” she laughed. “I hope he stays awake all night trying to figure out what it means!”

And what did it mean? I asked George, who had acted as Anne’s messenger and delivered it to the King, while Anne chose to remain at Hever, tantalizingly elusive, and out of reach, to further taunt His Majesty with her absence. But George merely shrugged his shoulders and laughed. “Not a damn thing! Anne got the idea when we were out walking and saw some men scraping the bottom of their boat.”

 

Anne treated the King’s palace like her own private residence from which she might come and go as she pleased, regardless of her duties as one of the Queen’s ladies. She would return, stay a day or three weeks, and then depart upon a moment’s whim, leaving the King to drop everything and go running after her. Even then there was no guarantee that she would deign to see him. She might play the gracious hostess and welcome him with a smile and a basin of orange water with white blossoms bobbing on top to wash his sweaty fingers in or bar her door and plead a megrim or the sudden onset of a summer fever and leave him to sulk and cool his heels until he gave up and rode back to court again to take his disappointment out on his poor servants and sit petulant and scowling in the Great Hall every night, glaring at every woman, making her squirm and regret that she was not Anne Boleyn.

One could never tell what Anne might do. I think that was part of what made her so exciting. The King, accustomed from birth to being surrounded by those ready and eager to please, to flatter and fawn, and do anything to obtain, or retain, his favor, had never known anyone like Anne before. She just didn’t care. She treated him like a lackey, and he was ready to lick her boots and dance to her tune.

Soon it was being said of King Henry that “he sees nothing, and thinks of nothing but Anne Boleyn; he cannot do without her for an hour.” And it was true. He was a man caught fast in the mighty, powerful grip of blind and mad obsession. He was even willing to risk his kingdom and own immortal soul to have her.

What did Anne have to say of all this? I heard her remark to her brother one day, “He’s so obsessed; he’s becoming a bore.”

To which George cocked a brow and countered, “Only
just
becoming?”

“Touché!”
Anne laughed, and they danced along the corridor together, laughing as though they had just shared the most amusing jest.

Sometimes I thought it was all a joke to her. When King Henry bade the royal confectioner construct an ornate sugar and marzipan subtlety of himself in the guise of Saint George slaying the dragon, Anne smiled at him and snapped off his sugar candy lance and sucked on it boldly as His Majesty watched and drooled, no doubt imagining that that candy lance was his own member. Then she sank her sharp little white teeth in and bit it clean in half, smiling as King Henry shuddered and winced as though he were actually in pain. She left the rest of it for George and their friends to feast upon while they danced and gambled the night away in Anne’s apartments, disdaining to join the King in the Great Hall, preferring to keep their own merry company instead.

 

I saw Anne rouse the King’s jealousy to the boiling point as she continued her gallant and, unbeknownst to all but her closest friends, entirely innocent, flirtation with the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt. Until, fearing the King’s wrath, after the two nigh came to blows on the bowling green when each man gloatingly displayed a trinket he had taken from Anne—each stealing the love token he thought he deserved—Wyatt did what he did best and composed a poem in which he renounced his pursuit of my daughter. But he did more than just pen a popular poem; with his words he also made Anne immortal.

Aided by George and their closest friends, Anne set Wyatt’s poem to music and staged a masque for the entertainment of the court.

With her knee-length hair plaited into myriad tiny black braids embellished with beads hewn from precious gems, pearls, and textured gold, and crowned with a rearing regal ruby-eyed golden cobra, Anne dressed herself in pleated cloth-of-gold overlaid with a full-skirted and flowing sleeved diaphanous robe of pleated white gossamer, belted in gold beneath her breasts, with a wide golden collar inlaid with lapis lazuli, turquoise, and carnelian, and bracelets and necklaces and rings of scarabs carved from these same stones, as well as green and white agates and black onyx, and danced the part of Cleopatra.

George’s flamboyant friend Francis Weston, who loved playacting more than any man I ever met, and would have surely been a strolling player if he had not been born a nobleman, set a wreath of gilded laurel leaves upon his rambunctious red curls and donned a gilt-bordered toga of white linen and a royal purple robe and stepped into the golden sandals of the mighty conqueror Julius Caesar.

George, Will Brereton, Henry Norris, and a few of their other friends oiled and bared their chests, draped their loins in leopard skins and vibrant silks, and hid their hair beneath striped linen headdresses or jeweled and feathered satin turbans. They layered their wrists with gold bangles, donned gilt sandals or bared their feet and gilded their toenails, lined their painted eyes with black kohl, hung their necks with heavy gold chains or beaded collars, and had a high good time playing the Serpent of the Nile’s devoted courtiers, fawning at her feet, kissing her hems, and competing shamelessly for her favors as they showed off their fine sweat-slick physiques in a display of vigorous and athletic dancing.

Wyatt, opting for a simple and much more modest, white tunic and sandals, struck a pose with a golden harp and, to music composed by Anne and George, recited what would become his most famous poem.

King Henry applauded wildly. He ripped gold medallions from his purple velvet doublet and flung them at Anne’s feet as he cried, “More! More! More! Let us see that dance again!”

Anne stood straight before him, with only the banquet table between them, and, hands on hips, defiantly tossed back her braids, thrust her chin high, and proudly pronounced one emphatic word:
“Beg!”

Like her most faithful and devoted servant, King Henry obeyed, applauding until his palms were sore and smarting pink, tearing more gold from his coat, and roaring, “More! More! Please, let us see it again!” imploring an encore of that wild, sensual performance.

But Anne gave an insolent toss of her head, sending black braids flying like whips with jeweled and gold barbs at the ends. With a wild and wicked laugh, she caught George and Francis Weston each by the hand. As they, standing on each side of her, bowed, she sank into a deep curtsy; then, giggling like a trio of mischievous children, they fled the Great Hall as Norris, Brereton, and the others quickly followed, sweating from their exertions and wiping the kohl and green, blue, and gold paint from their eyes. Only Wyatt diplomatically lingered to regale the court with another recitation of his poem.

More smitten than ever before, King Henry sent for Anne, begging her to return to the Great Hall, but she refused. From the safe haven of her chamber, where she and her friends laughed over their wine cups and lounged like languid cats upon well-padded velvet couches and cushions strewn about the floor, Anne pled a headache.

Back in the Great Hall, King Henry sulkily resigned himself to the fact that he must wait until morning to see his beloved once more. But before first light, Anne was already gone, having waited until our sovereign lord had retired for the night, then she galloped off in gales of laughter, riding back to Hever with George by moonlight. When King Henry awoke the next morning and, even before he had availed himself of the chamber pot, sent an invitation to Anne, requesting her to breakfast with him in his chamber, and some brave servant informed him that she was gone, he threw a mighty tantrum. He boxed the bearer of bad news’s ears, flung his heavily laden tray across the room, scattering food, gilt dishes, and breakfast ale everywhere, then kicked over the table and his chair, and bellowed for his riding clothes and his fastest horse even as Thomas shoved me into the saddle and the two of us raced on ahead—so frantic was he to have all in readiness to receive the King, ignoring me when I tartly, yet truthfully, informed him that His Majesty was so smitten with Anne that he was hardly likely to notice if the servants had been lazy and lax and had neglected to beat the dust from the tapestries or clean the cobwebs from the corners.

“All he will see is Anne,” I said, but Thomas was too busy babbling of gilt bowls and oranges to listen to a wife’s pearls of wisdom.

When Henry arrived at Hever, sweat sodden and caked with road dust, and went like a supplicant, head bowed, his feathered and pearl weeping cap clutched humbly in his hands, to the rose garden, my crimson-clad daughter cocked a finely arched black eyebrow over the beribboned lute she had been strumming as the King of England knelt at her feet and confided that his marriage was barren and cursed in the sight of God and cited a verse from Leviticus as proof.

To Henry, a king in desperate need of a male heir to inherit his throne when he departed the world, having only one living daughter was tantamount to being childless.

While her quick mind countered with a verse from Deuteronomy enjoining a man to marry his dead brother’s widow—
“If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: her husband’s brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband’s brother unto her”
—the gambler in Anne counseled her tongue to keep a golden silence.

It was then that my daughter took the second greatest gamble of her life. She had already dared say no to a king; now she went further.
All or nothing!
In my mind’s eye, I could see Anne and George standing, black heads close together over the card table, eyes sparkling, chests heaving, as Anne decided to risk all on the turn of a single card.

Anne calmly plucked a vibrant coral rose, one that exquisitely married orange and pink within its fragrant petals, and, with a steady hand, held it out to King Henry, thus symbolically dangling the proverbial carrot before the royal ass’s nose.

“I am young and fertile, and I will give the man who marries me a houseful of strong and lusty sons who will live and thrive to a ripe old age! But
all
offspring born of my body shall be legitimate and lawfully begotten,” she added, emphasizing the point in case it had eluded the smitten monarch. “I would rather remain barren than give birth to a
bastard,
even a
royal
one!” she said heatedly, tossing a black wave of hair back over her shoulder.

Henry, of course, driven mad by lust, instantly agreed. He wanted to cement their bargain then and there with a binding of their bodies, but Anne witheringly refused, reminding him that
only
upon her wedding night would she part with the precious gift of her virginity. Though chaste, my daughter knew only too well that “say anything to get her into bed” is the creed most men live by; keen observation and her years in France had served her well, leaving her not only elegant but wise beyond her years.