The Boleyn Bride (24 page)

13

B
y the time my daughter was crowned, storm clouds were already gathering over the supposedly happily married couple’s heads.

That humid May day I rode in a gilded coach through streets lined with silent, sour, and surly people who refused to take off their caps, bow their heads, or bend a knee to Queen Anne as she was carried past, resplendent in her golden litter, her six months’ belly round as the golden orb that would soon be placed in her hand at Westminster Abbey. I sat crushed and sweating in ermine-bordered scarlet velvet between my daughter Mary and my daughter-in-law Jane, listening worriedly as the first with sweet-natured sisterly concern and the other with relish and mean-spirited glee discussed the signs and scenes of matrimonial discord they had seen themselves or heard tale of.

Only Anne’s pregnancy—the precious son she and King Henry believed she carried within her belly—kept a fragile peace between them . . . but only just barely.

True to form, as pregnancy transfigured my daughter’s sleek and slender body, and raised her already hot temper, King Henry turned away from her in disgust. I knew he would.
Everyone
knew, except my bold and confident daughter; Anne thought she could succeed where all other women had failed and hold him even when the changes Mother Nature wrought dampened his desire. For once, she overestimated her powers. But she could not concede defeat gracefully and just sit and wait and hope for the best once she regained her figure.

Anne was not one to feign ignorance and turn a blind eye. She would not suffer in dignified silence as Queen Catherine had done. She would not pretend and make excuses. She confronted him boldly, flinging his infidelities right in his face. When King Henry told her to shut her eyes and endure as her betters had done before her, and reminded her that it was within his power to lower her as much as he had raised her, Anne flew at him, claws bared, and only fear that she would harm the child inside her kept his rage from boiling over into violence. Rather than strike her down, King Henry subdued his wrath and tried to smother it under sweet and soothing words that rang false to both their ears.
“Liar!”
Anne spat and stalked away from him.

The love affair was over. It had survived seven years of wooing but hadn’t even withstood a single year of wedlock.

Henry expected my mercurial and fascinating black swan daughter to transform as soon as the ring was on her finger, to cease her frank and outspoken ways, to curb her brashness, bridle her tongue, doff her bold, brazen acts, and put them away like a wedding gown tucked in a chest with lavender sachets, and become instead a meek, mild, little hen with no spice or pepper, no pluck or verve.

“Well, more fool, Henry!” Anne declared. “I am not about to sit at his feet like a dog;
his little pet!
” She sneered and tossed her head contemptuously, though she knew better than any that she had already fallen from the pedestal upon which the King had placed her. She didn’t need her father to tell her, as he was ever wont to do, “It is easier to fall than to rise.” She already knew.

In truth, such words didn’t matter. They were only rubbing salt into wounds; this marriage was already doomed, and I think it had been from the start. It was a colossal mistake born of ambition and thwarted lust, and once both were sated, they found there was nothing else to hold them together, except for the child, the expected prince, in Anne’s womb.

Henry wanted a submissive, demure, docile, and sweet-tempered little wife who never contradicted or challenged him. Suddenly, he had had enough of spice and wanted blandness.

But the kind of woman he now wanted simply was not who Anne Boleyn was. She didn’t have it within her to douse her fiery spirit and become that humble creature or even make the attempt. There was no pretense or artifice about her; she was simply, from the cradle to the grave, Anne Boleyn and no other. The only roles she ever played were in masques, and even these, she infused with her own unique and indomitable personality. “I cannot be other than myself,” she always said when others counseled her to tread a safer path. Her spirit was too proud to be broken or bow beneath the yoke or the angry lash of the whip.

Why,
I could never understand, did Henry suddenly expect her to become someone else? After all, it was that special, mercurial, and fascinating self that he had fallen in love with. Yet, perhaps, it was as simple as this—what men want in a mistress, they despise in a wife.

Anne wasn’t like me; she couldn’t go through life pretending. She could never be that exaggeratedly docile paragon of wifely virtue and perfection that men encouraged their sisters, daughters, and wives to mold themselves after, the eternally amiable, smiling, subservient Patient Griselda, always agreeing, always obedient, ready to live or lay down her life if her husband’s will decreed it, whether he decided to slay her children one day or turn her out of his kingdom naked but for her shift the next. No, that was not Anne; it never could be. Anne argued with, challenged, contradicted, denied, and defied him as her mood and convictions dictated, never thinking that it might place her very life in peril. She simply was not the “nod and smile,” good and obedient Christian wife like I had been reared up to be by governesses and etiquette books.

I rarely talked to my husband. I didn’t want to. Nothing he had to say was of the slightest interest to me; court gossip I could get from my maid. As for arguing with him, it really wasn’t worth it; I could live the life I wanted without resorting to open defiance. All I had to do was be discreet. But then
I
was not the Queen of England like my daughter. I wasn’t fighting to prove myself, or to hold on, to keep my grip from slipping from a scepter or a man’s cock. I had already established myself. I was secure. I, the proud pedigreed bride, was the best bargain the Bullen merchants ever made, and Thomas knew it. So why dither about the details? The garment looked good on the outside—every eye that beheld it admired and praised it—so what mattered if inside the seams and stitches were flawed and imperfect? None but a privileged few, who knew how to be discreet, would ever see the inner truth.

 

On the seventh morning of September 1533, I was shaken from a sound sleep by my anxious husband, shoved hastily into my clothes as I had been on that hole-in-a-corner wedding morn, and sent to Anne’s lying-in chamber, where she gave birth, after a long and grueling labor, to a little red-headed girl who came bawling, with fists balled, into the world.

How heavily the silence hung after the midwife had announced the child’s sex. Anne knew better than any that she had failed. She had promised Henry a son, the first of
many
sons to ensure the continuation of the Tudor dynasty, and with this daughter, she was off to a sorry start. He was certain to be angry and disappointed and moved to question everything he had ever done for Anne Boleyn. Henry had had enough of failure. He hadn’t gone to hell and back, and changed the world, to wed and bed Anne Boleyn for a girl-child to be the result. Henry wanted, and needed, a son. And with that fluid and susceptible conscience of his that seemed to change the way the wind blows, he just might see this as God’s judgment being visited upon him; a neat and tidy excuse to set Anne aside, just as his conscience had decreed that he discard Queen Catherine. The time was ripe for another brave woman, if she dared, to enter the field.

Anne tried to brazen it out. She dried her tears and bade the maids change the linens and hangings on the bed to the most regal ones of royal purple velvet, fringed and tasseled with Venice gold and embroidered with golden crowns above the lovers’ knot entwined initials
H & A
. Her ladies obediently combed the sweaty tangles from her hair, crowned it with a circlet of gleaming bright gold and ruby-set roses, perfumed her person with her favorite musky rose scent, clothed her in a clean, fresh white linen shift edged with blackwork embroidery, and hung her pearls with her favorite golden
B
pendant weeping a trio of teardrop pearls about her throat. Only then, reclining regally against a mound of plump pillows, with the newborn princess swathed in purple velvet and ermine in her arms, did she allow them to open the doors and let her royal husband enter, followed by a throng of curious courtiers, avid to see if Anne could overcome her disgrace.

Imperious as ever, Anne did not even defer to him in the matter of the child’s name, but boldly announced that she had borne him a daughter and named her Elizabeth, to honor his mother as well as her own—luckily we both had the same name—and that she would give her little girl a brother, hopefully as loyal and loving as her own—she smiled up at George hovering protectively at her bedside—the next year.

She didn’t let a crack show in her confidence, and not a drop of vulnerability or fear seeped out. Rather than wait for the royal bull to attack her, she plunged ahead boldly and grasped him by the horns. I thought the scene very well played, and even Thomas, glowering and frowning beside me, had to concede that Anne deserved some minor congratulations on how she had so neatly averted a potentially ugly situation.

“Mayhap motherhood will be good for her,” Thomas pronounced dourly, “and subdue her inner harpy.”

I nodded and smiled, but inwardly I doubted it. Anne might be a good mother, but I doubted anything would ever change her. And, at times, I rather liked and admired and even envied that “inner harpy,” as my husband dubbed our daughter’s tempestuous and rebellious nature.

King Henry glowered but chose to restrain his temper and not make a scene that would be reported, with great relish, by the gloating naysayers, to the foreign ambassadors. How the whole world would laugh! All this supposedly for a son and now . . . what was left? Dead lust and another useless daughter! Henry knew it was in his best interests to plaster a smile upon his face and brazen it out just like Anne was doing. Still in his hunting clothes and reeking of sweat, he bent and planted a chaste kiss, a grudgingly given peck, upon Anne’s cheek, then took his leave, calling for roast meat, wine, a warm bath, and a change of clothes.

All the celebrations planned in honor of the expected prince were canceled. For the newborn Princess Elizabeth there would be no bonfires or tournaments, grand balls, banquets, free-flowing wine in the city conduits, or dancing in the street for the common people. An extra
s
was hastily appended, by secretaries supervised by my husband, to the birth announcements that had been written in advance, announcing the joyous news that a prince had been born to the King and Queen of England. And while Anne and her baby slept, her royal husband sat glum and moody over his wine in the Great Hall that night and not even the court beauties parading before him with beckoning eyes and enticing smiles could arouse him. He was too worried about the future.

 

After my daughter and newborn granddaughter were asleep, cocooned, however uneasily, in regal splendor, I threw a dark hooded cloak over me and went to Remi.

He had rubbed a chicken with garlic and herbs and roasted it, and we shared it with red wine, a small round of cheese, and a loaf of fresh bread by candlelight in the little kitchen at the back of his shop.

How out of place my court finery—my gold and silver vine- and flower-embroidered pomegranate Flemish velvet; silver-threaded blue-gray damask; deep, wide, silver fox-fur cuffs; gold and silver chains; brooches, rings, and ropes of pearls; and jeweled gable hood—always seemed there, at least on a grown woman, not a doll fashioned to fit a child’s arms, and yet . . . I felt right at home there, more than I had ever felt in any manor or palace. I was a diamond who had forsaken her precious setting and mayhap, I sometimes thought, in doing so I had found something better.

But could I have made that change permanently, given up being a noblewoman for love? I very much doubt it. As much as I loved Remi, I doubt it. The love of the finer things, the feelings of superiority and entitlement, and pride in my pedigree, were too deeply ingrained in me. I could never forsake velvet for homespun.

We sat and talked long into the night, pondering Anne’s, and her little princess’s, fates, and Remi, with a piece of charcoal and light scrap of wood, drew the newborn Elizabeth as I described her. “Ah, here is the proud grandmother, after all!” He smiled as a hint of pride crept into my voice. Though I knew it was only the fortunate coincidence of names that had led Anne to name her daughter as she did, I was nonetheless proud to be the grandmother of a princess and have her named after me.

Later, from that sketch, he would make a little red-haired doll of her that would ever remind me of a fierce little lion cub, gowned in gold-braided spice orange velvet and tawny damask with pearls and beads the color of honey golden topazes. It never failed to amaze me how perfectly he captured her zesty little spirit and fine features, even the hue of her hair, without ever having laid eyes upon her.

And then we went to bed, and it was love, love, love until dawn’s first light.

I hardly ever slept when I was with him in London. That was the one sad note that crept into our beautiful love song; I could rarely curl up and enjoy the sweet pleasure of slumbering in my beloved’s embrace, feeling the warmth of his breath upon my bare skin, and his soft and ample flesh warming, cushioning, and comforting mine all night long.

When I knew I must return to court, that my husband, and others, would be expecting me, I didn’t dare sleep lest I—lulled into such sweet contentment by the feel of Remi’s arms holding me and his sleeping body pressed close against mine—overslept and returned late to court to face suspicious and inquiring glances and outright questions about my whereabouts and what had happened to delay me.

With the morning light, feeling that same accustomed sadness, the tiredness mingling with the regret that I must soon depart, I wrapped his threadbare white linen sheet about my nakedness—he was too proud to accept a set of fine silk from me—and sat and watched the first trickle of sunlight trace over his plump bearded cheeks and thick-lashed, dark-browed eyes beneath which his warm brown eyes, veiled by delicately veined lids, danced in a dream.