The Concubine (26 page)

“Now you are Queen. On the last day of this month you will be crowned. There is nothing wrong, Your Grace.”

Except, of course, the unfortunate timing. The ceremonies, the wedding and the Coronation, should rightly have been safely over before the pregnancy began. That was the root of the trouble. But it couldn’t be helped, and there were people with worse troubles.

“If only it can be a boy,” Anne said, placing her palms upon her just perceptibly thickening waist. “It must, it must be a boy.”

“I pray to God it may be,” Emma said.

I
T WAS A GIRL
.

Anne never knew whose voice it was that broke through the half-swoon and said, “Your Grace has borne a fair lady,” but she heard the words, she knew she had failed, and willed herself away, welcoming the enveloping darkness.

Emma Arnett said to herself, “It is the will of God,” and then suffered the mental confusion of all sensible, rational people brought face-to-face with an act of God which seems senseless and without reason. God surely understood the situation in England; He was omnipotent; He made everything; couldn’t He just as easily have made a prince? Another girl was such a triumph for the Papists who in a few minutes’ time, as soon as the news was out, would be saying that this was God’s judgment on the King’s new marriage. But, hard as it was to accept, it must be accepted; it was the mysterious will of God.

All through the palace; a girl! What a pity! Out into the streets: a princess! But we wanted a prince! The birth of the baby who was to grow into the woman who was to be the greatest ruler England ever knew, the woman of whom the Pope, hating her, was to say, “She is a great woman, and were she but Catholic, without peer,” was regarded as regrettable by all but the very staunchest of the supporters of Catherine and Mary. The majority of the ordinary people, still Catholic at heart, had been reassured by the slowness and superficiality of Henry’s reforms; his break with Rome had merely trimmed away some old and not particularly desirable customs, like the paying of Peter’s Pence or the appointment of foreign clerics to English bishoprics; the core of ritual and belief had remained intact; and a prince who could be looked to to carry on his father’s policy would have been welcomed by almost everyone in England.

So the little female creature was taken sadly and washed and swaddled and given to her nurse. And the one person who had a good word for her was her father, the person with the most right to be disappointed. When he first saw her she was squalling; she was red in face, her eyes were screwed up, and she had a frizzle of orange-colored hair on her scalp. He touched it with a gentle finger.

“My hair,” he said, “and my voice. She is indeed my daughter and she seems a lusty wench. I pray God will send her a brother in the same good shape.”

He was disappointed, but less than he had expected to be, less than anyone would have foretold. He loved all his children; he loved Mary and was grieved that she had so decidedly taken Catherine’s part; naturally in the circumstances he could not pamper or favor her, but he had always stopped just short of the positive persecution that common sense suggested; he loved his bastard son and had done everything in his power to compensate him for his state; and now he was prepared to love Elizabeth, the first of his children to be born in wedlock. He intended her christening to give evidence of how highly he regarded her. Ambassador’s might write home to their masters that the King was grievously disappointed, but anyone who ventured in his presence to imply sympathy, however tactful, met with a glower and gruffness. Henry Tudor had had his way and there was nothing wrong with his marriage, nothing wrong with his child.

Anne was slow to recover and he visited her often, taking presents and making heartening, bracing little speeches. The visits were a trial to him because her disappointment and resentment were so plain to be seen. Unwillingly he found himself remembering how often Catherine had faced a worse situation, a dead baby or a baby dead soon after birth. “It is God’s will,” she had said, every time, and her resignation had irked him. Now he was irked by Anne’s lack of resignation. He chose to put that down to her state of health.

“When you feel stronger, you’ll see things differently,” he said; and he had his recipes for the rapid regaining of strength; she should eat well; stop fretting and look forward to being able to take advantage of the fine autumn weather and walk in the garden.

Emma gave much the same advice; she had known a black moment of doubt, thrown it aside, and was now sternly looking forward again. Henry’s attitude had impressed her and increased her good opinion of him; if he could be so cheerful, why should the Queen remain fretful? Since no one else seemed disposed to be frank, she was obliged to be.

“Your Grace, it is not the end of the world. The Princess is a baby to be proud of, a promise for the future. If you would be cheerful and make an effort, you could be up and about in a fortnight, and by this time next year, God willing, the mother of a prince.”

But Anne’s disappointment was the more crushing because it had followed upon—and ended—the happiest period of her life. June, July, and August had been three wonderful months.

The Coronation had been—as Henry had promised—the most magnificent ever seen; and her secret dread, an unfavorable reception by the London crowds, had proved to be entirely without foundation. The ordinary people loved a pageant, loved any excuse to make merry, and from the time when she made her progress, in the disputed barge, to the Tower, until twelve days later when she rode in a litter to St. Paul’s, and thence to Westminster Hall, it had been one long pageant, one long merrymaking. There’d been no need for the pro-Anne patty to whip the crowds to enthusiasm, Heartened by the wine, red and white, which flowed in every conduit and fountain, they had stood and roared out their cheers and blessed her; and if there were some little silences it was because the people were momentarily struck speechless by the sight of her, clad in silver tissue, with her wonderful hair flowing free, so long that she could sit on it, and held back from her face by a circlet of rubies.

Ambassadors wrote letters which implied that the Coronation had been lackluster, knowing that such news would be welcome; but Anne who was at the center of it knew differently and felt that she had at last been accepted. She was married, she was crowned, and she was going to give the English people what they longed for. Her inner fear of having lost the King’s favor eased; Henry, like everybody else, respected success, and she would be a successful Queen.

The time which Emma had hoped for arrived, the peaceful ripening time of gestation. Even the weather and the season seemed propitious, the slow, warm days moving toward the inevitable harvest. The frantic anxiety as to the child’s sex had ceased to nag; the physicians said it would be a boy, and so did all the soothsayers whom Henry insisted upon consulting. There was one wise woman living in the Welsh Marches who claimed to be a collateral descendant of Merlin, and who was said to be able to tell the sex of an unborn child from the mere handling of some garment worn by the expectant mother. She was too old to make the journey to London, or Henry would have had her fetched; as it was he sent a trusted messenger, with one of Anne’s petticoats to be tested. The verdict was favorable; the messenger thought it unnecessary and inadvisable to report that the old woman, more than half-blind, had hesitated a long time, fingering the silk, shaking her head and mumbling. Finally she had said,

“Trying to trick me, are you? Bringing me something two women has worn?” He had assured that this was not so.

“Then why does my right hand say boy and my left, girl? In all my days such a thing never happened before. Queer, very queer.”

She evidently took her odd calling very seriously; she held the petticoat in one hand, in the other, in both, and finally, folding it lengthways, hung it about her neck.

“A boy,” she said then, but uncertainly. She was distressed, muttered that she was growing old, losing her skill; she’d never been confused before. But yes, it would be a boy.

So the assurances had poured in, and the good wishes; and Henry—if he had ever turned against her, as she had suspected last autumn—had dissembled so well, that Anne had faced the ordeal of childbirth happily and confidently.

And then—Elizabeth.

With more justification than ever she could now think—Nothing ever goes right for me; all the trappings, all the
possibilities
of success but nothing real and solid. And as she listened to Henry’s, and to Emma’s, exhortations to be cheerful and lively, to eat and be hopeful, to look to the future, she could only think, more waiting!

On the fourth day after her confinement she was at least spared the exhortations, for she fell victim to the complaint, possibly after childbed fever the most dreaded of post-child birth ailments; the one most unreasonably known as “white-leg.” Your legs were no whiter than they had been before, but they swelled and swelled; and they ached with a dull grinding pain, as though they were between two millstones. There was no remedy; you lay and waited—waiting again—and you lived or you died.

Among her ladies some were sympathetic, some indifferent. Apart from the christening there were no festivities, and when the weather broke there was nothing to do but to huddle in little groups and exchange stories of cases similar to the Queen’s which had ended happily or otherwise; or to express their amazement at the daring Catherine who had refused to lend the christening robe which she had brought from Spain and which had been worn by Mary, for the christening of the new princess. That, they said, had truly angered the King. They talked a good deal, too, about Elizabeth Barton, whom some people called The Mad Nun, and others The Holy Maid of Kent, like Joan of Arc a peasant born, and like her given to the hearing of angelic voices. Elizabeth’s voices were all strongly pro-Catherine and had predicted woe to the country and death to the King should he marry again. Cromwell had recently had her arrested and examined by Archbishop Cranmer, not because he paid much heed to her prophecies, but because he hoped to find out who had. But whatever the talk it always came back in the end to the Queen’s state of health; and hovering meekly, as became a newcomer, on the fringe of each group, there was a young lady who, as she listened, wondered whether it would be so very wrong to wish that the Queen would die. Wouldn’t it be the kindest thing that could happen to her?

Mistress Jane Seymour, because of her round face and flawless skin and demure manner, looked a great deal younger than she was; she was fresh to the English Court but she had served her apprenticeship in France and from under downcast lids had observed the world with some shrewdness. During the summer she had felt Henry’s eye upon her, assessingly, and had blushed. When he had first made some excuse to speak to her she had blushed again and confined her replies to “Yes, Your Grace,” and “No, Your Grace.” He had not withdrawn his interest, however. What notice he had taken of her in public had been of a jesting, paternal nature, as when coming across her and some other ladies laughing at some joke, he had stopped and said that he hoped the joke, whatever it was, was fit for such young ears.

“Whose young ears, Your Grace?” one of them had asked, pertly vivacious.

“This child’s,” he had said, and lightly touched her sleeve.

To them it had been something else to laugh about, knowing her age; but to her it had been a sign.

And now Queen Anne had borne a daughter; and was ailing; she might never fully recover; and the King’s eye had wandered. Would it be so very wrong to wish that she would die?

“I
SHALL SIT BY THE WINDOW
for a while. You go to bed, Maria. God keep you.”

“Your Grace should go to bed. It has been a full day.”

“Yes. A day to remember. I shall sit by the window and remember it all.”

They spoke in Spanish, Catherine and this, the favorite of her women; and they smiled at one another, sharing a joke which never grew stale. Maria, like Catherine, had lived in England for thirty-three years and had thoroughly mastered the language; but when, while they were living at Buckden, in the March of this year, a deputation had come from the King demanding that everyone take the oath that recognized Anne as Queen and Elizabeth as the only legitimate princess, Maria had suddenly become ignorant of any but her own tongue. She had waved her hands, and smiled and smiled, shaking her head and gabbling Spanish until they had decided not to bother about her. Others of the household had taken the oath, making the mental reservation which was permissible in such circumstances; some had refused outright. They had been hauled off. Catherine had also refused and it had looked as though she might be hauled off, too; but in the end she had been sent, this time definitely in the role of prisoner, to Kimbolton, which was a much more strongly fortified place than Buckden. The window by which she sat on this evening of lingering summer warmth was set in a wall four feet thick and it overlooked a wide moat.

The moat had, that day, been the setting for a curious scene.

It had, as Maria said, been a full day.

Catherine sat and remembered it, hour by hour.

The first intimation that this was to be different from any other interminable day had come just before noon, when Maria was making the fire over which she was to cook dinner. Catherine had always feared that she might be poisoned, and that fear had increased when, in March, Clement had finally given his verdict on her case. He had declared the dispensation allowing the marriage between her and Henry to be without fault, and that therefore the marriage was good and valid. After that she had not dared to content herself with the old rule which she had written to Mary, to cut only where others cut, and to drink only where others had drunk; she had had her meager meals prepared by Maria in her own room.

So the place smelt like a peasant’s hut when Sir Edmund Bedingfield, her new jailer, came in saying that there was a messenger from the King.

He was young and raw, obviously chosen for his ability to ride fast, tiring out one swift horse after another; but for all that he was tired, and short of breath. He’d gulped out his message,

“Madam, the Imperial Ambassador is on his way to see you. His Grace has not given permission for this visit. He heard of it and sent me to overtake the Ambassador’s train and turn it back. They took no notice of me, but are pressing on. I rode hard to tell you, Madam, that if you receive Messire Chapuys it will be against His Grace’s express command.”

“Which in all matters not concerning my conscience I am always ready to obey,” Catherine said. She turned to Bedingfield and asked him to oblige her by sending a messenger to meet Messire Chapuys and tell him that she was forbidden to see him and that he should waste no time in riding on.

She longed to see and talk to Chapuys, always a most loyal friend; but just at this time she was not unwilling to proffer a good excuse for not receiving him. In the last two months—ever since Clement had decided that she
was
Queen of England—Chapuys had redoubled his efforts to rouse some of the old nobility to support her cause with armed force. He’d met with considerable success, especially in the North and West where the old ideas were strongly entrenched, and where the threatened dissolution of the religious houses was causing great alarm in a class from which Abbots and Abbesses were largely drawn. The Emperor, Chapuys argued, could not now fail to come to the aid of a rising aimed at giving his wronged aunt and cousin their indisputable legal rights. All that was needed was that Catherine herself should agree to lead the insurrection. It was to urge her to do so that Chapuys had attempted to make this visit. Of that she was certain; and since her devotion to Henry and her rooted objection to being the cause of any bloodshed forbade her to make any move, she was relieved to have an excuse for not meeting Chapuys face-to-face and arguing about it.

She had eaten her modest dinner just after the drawbridge had been raised again behind the speeding messenger Bedingfield had despatched. Within an hour there was a commotion on the far side of the moat, and Catherine, going to the window, saw a group of riders whose clothes, and the harnessing of their horses, proclaimed them to be Spanish. The Ambassador was not among them. Chapuys was far too skilled a diplomat to risk Henry’s displeasure by disobeying a direct order, but he had continued toward Kimbolton until he received Catherine’s message; there he had halted, being now near enough to make it easy to hint that some young men should ride on to see the place where Catherine was imprisoned. There was no order against looking, he said; and if a Spanish-speaking servant should chance to look out and call to them, there could be no harm in sending the Queen a heartening message.

The young Spaniards did nothing to which Bedingfield could take exception. On the far side of the moat they gave a display of horsemanship in the Spanish style, making their horses dance and leap. Soon every member of Catherine’s small
ménage
and all the Kimbolton servants were crowded at the windows or on the walls. Then the horsemen drew a little aside and rested while a professional fool took up the business of entertainment. He played all the traditional tricks, while under cover of the laughter and the applause a rapid exchange, in Spanish, took place between the horsemen and Catherine’s servants. When the clown stood on his hands and walked backward, or turned six somersaults in succession it was all the more entertaining because he did it on the very edge of the moat and was in momentary danger of tumbling in. In the end he did tumble in and appeared to lose his sense of direction, for he plunged away from the outer bank and ended in the middle of the moat, screaming that he was drowning, though everyone could see that he was as skilled in the water as out of it. He cried, “Lighten ship!” and began tossing things in all directions; his sodden clown’s cap, his pouch, his belt, his shoes. Some articles he flung toward the outer bank, some toward the inner wall and the watchers yelled as the water-heavy, slimy, stinking things struck or passed near them. All but Maria whose eye the clown had caught and to whom he had said, in Spanish, “I have something for you,” and to whom he had thrown a small locked casket. She had caught and hidden it, but held to her place, laughing and shouting, until the clown, plunging like a porpoise, had gone toward the bank and scrambled into safety.

The casket, which had to be broken open, having no key with it, contained a letter which to Catherine meant a great deal, but, if intercepted, would only have informed the reader of what was already known, that the Spanish Ambassador was Catherine’s friend and urged her not to lose heart, since God was just and would see justice done; and that Messire Chapuys considered the English an arrogant and boastful race. Only lately one English lord had told him to his face that he could at any moment put 8,000 men into the field, all his tenants and friends. “I said to him, Your Grace, “That may well be, my lord, but you must not expect me to be impressed by such numbers, serving as I do a master whose resources can hardly be numbered.” Nor is this old lord the only boaster I have lately had to do with. To me the English are an intolerable race, with one virtue only, they are sympathetic to anyone oppressed.” The letter ran on in that way, garrulous, ambiguous, meaningful. Catherine burnt it on the fire which Maria made in order to cook supper.

The spoken exchanges across the moat were mainly concerned with lighter matters, in which Catherine would be interested and about which, probably, she had had no firsthand information.

First and foremost, Mary. Attached to the household of her half-sister Elizabeth, Mary was contriving without too greatly affronting the King to hold her own. Whenever it was possible for her to do so she took precedence. She had refused to take the oath, but had said that she was willing to call Elizabeth “sister,” just as she had called the Duke of Richmond “brother.”

There was news of the Concubine, too. She had given proof of her Lutheran leanings by writing a letter to Secretary Cromwell asking him to be lenient to an Antwerp merchant accused of bringing in and distributing copies of the New Testament in English. She had made overtures to Mary, which the Princess, rightly suspicious of their motive, had rejected. When Anne visited her baby daughter, Mary invariably retired to her own room in order to avoid meeting her; but some of Anne’s ladies, noticeably Lady Rochfort, had always made a point of going to Mary’s room and talking with her. Surprisingly, the Concubine had never rebuked them for doing so, or seemed to bear any resentment because of it. There were, so far as anyone knew, no signs of a further pregnancy and around the Court there were rumors that His Majesty’s passion was on the wane, though he still gave her his attention.

In Cambridge, a serving man named Kylbie had been arrested for calling the King a heretic. Kylbie had been grooming his master’s horse and got into an argument with an ostler who had said there was no Pope, only a Bishop of Rome, the King’s Grace had said so. Kylbie had retorted, “You are a heretic, and the King another. And none of this business would ever have happened if His Grace had not lusted after Anne Boleyn.”

“And then, Your Grace,” Maria said, recounting this piece of gossip, “they set about one another with sticks and the man Kylbie was arrested. But he said the truth. She is to blame for all.” She threw out her hands to indicate the cheerless room, the humble pan on the smoky fire, the loneliness of the flat countryside. “I pray God to curse her and bring her low with madness in her head and the gnawing sickness in her body.”

“Oh no,” Catherine said. “Don’t curse her. Pity her rather. Her bad time is yet to come.”

She spoke sincerely. She knew what happened when Henry’s passion waned. It had waned for her, but she had been upheld by her rights, by her religion, by her connections. What would Anne have to support her? Nothing. Nothing at all.