Brief Gaudy Hour

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  And although the appointed musicians played and the conduits ran good wine, the people themselves were silent. With covered heads, close packed and sweating behind the barriers and the halberdiers, they watched her go by. True, there was a certain amount of organized shouting, the open admiration of French merchants, the fervent zeal of followers of the new religion. But Anne was no fool. She noticed how in places the citizens of London had mocked her, fixing the eagle of Imperial Spain unobtrusively somewhere above her own white falcon.

  “’Tis the Boleyns’ merchant blood,” she heard some old crones shrill when, uncertain what to do, she kept a purse of gold presented to her at Cheapside. “Our good Queen Katherine weren’t so niggard mean at her crowning.”

  Anne was not sorry when it was all over. She was overtired. Emotionally and physically, the day for which she had striven so long had proved an ordeal to a pregnant woman.

  In Whitehall, Henry’s arms were open to receive her. “Well, how liked you the look of our city?” he asked inevitably, just as he had asked her about his splendid water pageant. But this time, for all his eagerness, Anne did not cling with gratitude. “The city was well enough, sir,” she answered tartly, jerking the gemmed cloak from her shoulders so that it lay like a thing of no account upon the rushes. “But I saw far too many caps on heads and heard far too few tongues!”

  Something savage within her seemed to say it, caring not how much, after all his self-effacing effort, he was hurt. She was not to know how he had had to bully Peacock and his aldermen into spending so much money, nor by what obstinate insistence he had kept his nobler subjects fawning in their places. All she knew was that she had bowed her head graciously until it ached, and that none of those hateful Londoners had cried, “God save your Grace!” as she had heard them do a score of times for Katherine.

  When the courtiers had withdrawn and Henry had tried to soothe her, she beat with her fists upon his mighty chest, demanding between hysterical sobs, “Why do you not make them cheer me?”

  He had ceased to humour her then. “That is something which even I cannot do. The Londoners are a law unto themselves. And you do not always help, Nan, with your haughty ways,” he had told her coldly, and sighed and gone his way.

  And in the morning, on Whitsunday, Archbishop Cranmer had crowned her in the age-old Abbey. With striped cloths laid all the way from Palace to High Altar, with her aunt the Duchess of Norfolk bearing her train, and the freemen of the Cinque Ports holding the canopy of state above her. With all the monks and choristers of Westminster and their incense, and all the abbots and bishops in their richly embroidered copes. In a tall chair between choir and altar Anne sat, and the Archbishop anointed her and crowned her Queen of England. And, like an incredible dream come true, the glorious Te Deum was sung and all the nobility put on their coronets.

  But the precious crown of St. Edward was too heavy for her head, just as the inner consecration of the ceremony escaped her sentiency. For her a coronation was something to be grasped at for personal aggrandizement rather than a transmuting acceptance of responsibility. Although she was quicker-witted than Henry, she remained unaware of that deeper obligation which he, with all his faults, accepted. Of that division of personality which made him daily more uneasy because he had produced but a daughter. No woman had ever worn that golden symbol in her own right, and to be really Queen of England a woman must be great enough to lose herself in part. To identify herself not only with all that glittering, symbolic ceremony but with the very earth of England. No matter what her personal loves, to be England. Pulsing to England’s pride and vulnerable to her wounds. Transfused, dualized to part divinity, by solemn anointing.

  When they had taken the weight of gold from Anne and set a lighter crown about her brow, she went, holily resolving, to Mass. And afterwards—a richly dressed maumet, a graceful puppet Queen—was led by her proud father, to the feasting in Westminster Hall.

  Such was the grandeur of ceremony in that exquisite and traditional place that even Anne was awed. The most powerful earls in the land were her carver, her steward, her pantler, and her cupbearer. The Mayor of Oxford kept the buttery bar. While right into the hall through shafts of sunlight rode Suffolk and the Lord William Howard, her younger uncle, their chargers caparisoned to their fetlocks in crimson and purple. Anne knew that the King was watching from the cloisters, showing off his woman and his wealth to some of the foreign ambassadors and, deeply as she had delighted in the long-awaited triumph over her enemies, she wished with all her heart that Henry were at table beside her, to ease the ceremonial pomp with his experienced geniality.

  And then, while silver trumpets heralded the first dishes, someone knelt before her holding a golden bowl of scented water between fine, strong hands; and, turning to freshen her fingers, she found herself looking into Thomas Wyatt’s eyes. For a brief, swooning moment all the pomp and ceremony swung away and the birds were singing again at Hever. Instead of some exotic fragrance, in nostalgic memory she smelled the aromatic scent of freshly clipped yew, the lingering sweetness of gilly flowers. “Tom!” she breathed, with eyes closed against giddiness.

  “For your Grace’s fingers,” he said formally, reminding her that the Tudor’s small keen eyes were watching.

  Anne dabbled her ringed fingers, seeing his handsome, down-bent head through a sudden haze of tears. “Thank you, good cousin,” she said, as formally.

  Gracefully, Wyatt rose. “Forget not yet,” he whispered daringly, as he bowed himself backwards from her side. And Anne knew that, married or single, he loved her still.

  And so, at last, the long day ended. The day of which she had dreamed for years. Tomorrow there would be tilting and a wealth of festivities in her honour. But this night she must sleep—and think no more of Hever nor of Wyatt’s poet’s eyes.

  “At last I am Queen of England,” she said, stretching her limbs between the sheets of the great four-poster, and longing for the time when her body would be her own again.

  She watched Henry shed his furred bedrobe and stand for a moment or two in pink, muscular nudity; and noted the serious contentment on his face, as he leaned to snuff a candle. “And what should be still more important to both of us is that, after me, our son will be king,” he said sententiously.

  In spite of her weariness, Anne began to giggle in the darkness.

  “What cause is that for mirth?” he asked, clambering into the great bed beside her.

  “None, God be praised,” smiled Anne, turning to his hungry embrace. “Only, my great zany, you always seem so certain that the child will be a boy.”

  “But of course it will be,” he assured her, and fell to twining her dark hair about her little, pointed breasts. “All that is over, hinney, about my sons dying. It was a curse because Arthur had her first.”

  “Please God you be right!” prayed Anne, knowing that he really believed it. Knowing that so much depended upon it.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Will that obstinate old woman never give in? Can she not see how obscene it is to keep clutching at a man who had been tired of her for years?” groaned Anne, staring out at the dispiriting rain. She was living at Hampton in apartments that had been Queen Katherine’s, for she and Henry had taken possession of the Manor they had always coveted; and since their return from France, workmen were busy making improvements everywhere.

  “This new Spanish ambassador, Chapus, puts fresh heart into her, I think,” observed Will Brereton, who had come to Anne’s rooms to while away an idle hour with his lute.

  “The King is very agreeable to Chapus,” sighed Anne.

  “He cannot afford to be otherwise,” George reminded her, glancing up from the sheets of music he had been looking over for his friend. “After all, have we not been living in fear of a Spanish war for years?”

  “All the same, I overheard Chapus complaining bitterly that when he went to Buckden he found the King had
sent secret instructions before him that he and his Spanish party were not to be admitted,” volunteered little, dapper Francis Weston, who always managed to overhear everything.

  “My new stepson by Blount was telling me something about Katherine and her women appearing on the battlements like a lot of sex-starved harpies to be serenaded in their native tongue with a romantic flourish of feathered hats,” said Anne maliciously.

  “Young Fitzroy was so doubled up with laughter when they were talking about it at supper that for once he forgot to ogle our haughty Howard cousin, Mary,” confirmed George.

  “But the Queen won the next trick,” said Brereton.

  Anne stamped her foot at him and would have turned them all out of her room, so uncertain was her temper these days. “Must you go on calling her ‘the Queen’?” she cried.

  Big, broad-shouldered Brereton caught George’s eye and sighed resignedly. But before he could gather up his lute and music, Anne had swirled round and kissed him to make amends. “Oh, Will, forgive me! My nerves are all shred to ribbons these days,” she apologized immediately. “What with the people reviling me in the streets and those self-righteous Grey girls telling everyone that none of those hateful women would meet me in France.”

  “But, Nan, you never stood so secure. Our father, Uncle Thomas, everyone belonging to our party, says so,” remonstrated George. “It is only because these other women envy you.” He glanced around at the sober, magnificent furnishings of the apartments which Wolsey had always set aside for the use of Queen Katherine. “We thought your having ‘the Lady Anne’s apartments’ wonderful once, do you remember? And then your very own house at Westminster. And look at you here, in the Palace you always wanted. Cardinal Wolsey’s Palace. And his Grace almost rebuilding it for you!”

  Anne joined him at the window above the King’s privy staircase, and together they looked down at the new gilded fountain in the inner courtyard, at the masons working beneath sodden sacks upon the scaffolding within which the new Great Hall was rising, and the labourers who took it in turns to work at double wages all night so that the tiled floor might be laid and the slender pinnacles bear aloft proud little gilded weather vanes, and so that her initials and Henry’s might be graven, entwined, on the fan vaulting of the great doorway. What other woman in England could have such solid tokens of a man’s enduring devotion? The sight of them restored Anne’s confidence and painted a proud smile upon her petulant lips.

  “I must be overtired, I think,” she yawned, turning from the rainswept window. “If the King gluts me with palaces, he starves me of sleep.” She treated them to a comically lewd grimace which set them all laughing, and went to join Margaret, who sat quietly sewing beside the hearth. “Well, then, let us hear about the Queen, Francis Weston,” she invited, spreading out her full stiff skirt with exaggerated matronly effect.

  Like most rather vain men, Weston loved to hold the floor, once he had the chance. And he told a story well.

  “I had it from Suffolk himself who is but now returned from Buckden,” he began, anxious to impress upon them upon what favourable terms he stood. “What with his wife’s sickness and the reception he got in Huntingdonshire, the poor Duke looked quite worn out, and Norfolk and milord of Wiltshire were reviving him with some good strong Malvoisie.”

  “And they bade you stay,” interpolated George impatiently. For was it not common knowledge how high the Westons stood in the King’s good graces, since he had prudently bought from them the ground lease of Hampton before spending money on the place?

  “The King sent Charles Brandon there to dismiss the woman’s household and bring her to reason. How long can he be expected to keep three royal establishments?” flared Anne, not choosing to remember that it was she who urged him to keep mother and daughter apart, or to compare the lavishness of Hampton with the meagre households at Hatfield and Buckden.

  “Like me, Charles has always had to earn his status. A brother-in-law is a useful sort of relation,” observed George, who had missed a couple of good tournaments through having to go to France.

  “I happened to see them start out from London. The King sent five hundred men with Suffolk to intimidate one woman,” remarked Brereton, bending to admire Margaret’s embroidery.

  “And much comfort he had of it!” scoffed Weston.

  “You mean she still defied him?” asked Margaret, looking up with poised needle.

  “Even though he called out all the local gentry, armed with weapons of Bosworth vintage, to give him countenance.”

  “Tell me just what happened!” cried Anne, feeling that she must know the least detail about her rival, though the hearing of it might give her no particular pleasure.

  Weston was well into his stride, perched on a table, telling his secondhand tale with so much vigour that they forgot he had not actually been there. “It appears that the Duke of Suffolk saw the—the lady and told her in his blunt way that she must submit to Archbishop Cranmer’s decision, and abandon her everlasting appeals to Rome; and that she and all her household must take the new oath of allegiance to the King.”

  “Which was as good as to acknowledge me his lawful wife,” put in Anne, gleefully.

  “And himself as head of the church,” added George.

  “Or else, he told her, she must lose all those devoted servants of hers and go to Fotheringay or some other pestilential place,” went on Weston. “I had had to look out all the most unhealthy fenland manors on the map before he set out.”

  “Well?” demanded Anne, lifting her chin proudly lest any of them should think she had suggested it.

  “The Duke is not, as you know, the type of man to stand any nonsense from underlings. He made short work of the English members of her household, dismissing them all in floods of tears. Though in actual fact it was their mistress bade them leave her sooner than take the oath.”

  “One would think that out of pity for them she would capitulate,” began Margaret.

  “I suppose Suffolk must have counted upon that, too. And considered his odious task half done. But the lady knew what she was about; for there and then, before his eyes, the wives of the local gentry came out into the driving snow with pack horses and cloaks and took her people into their houses.”

  “And what about the Spaniards?” asked Brereton.

  “There the poor Duke had yet more trouble, for they pretended not to understand English and protested that without a trusty interpreter it was against their consciences to subscribe to any oath which might perjure their immortal souls. And when, hating himself for it, he gave orders for her frightened women to be dragged from her, Katherine of Aragon only stood on the damp staircase, pulling her furs closer about her, and swore that it would make no difference. That if her husband chose to treat her so, she would neither eat nor undress, but stay alone in her room until it pleased the Almighty to take her. So that in very pity Suffolk let the women and her aged priest and apothecary stay.”

  In the face of such epic defiance even the well-favoured, well-fed young men and women gathered around the new Queen’s fire had no word to say. It was as if the stark loneliness of Buckden penetrated their happiness, giving their unwilling eyes a glimpse into the torment of the forsaken woman’s soul.

  “After that,” Weston’s voice went on, “she retired to her room and would talk only through a draughty arrow slit, so that Suffolk had perforce to shout up to her, which he must have hated because he is precious of his dignity and could hear some of the locals and soldiery tittering behind his back. ‘Think upon all his Grace’s past kindnesses which you and I well remember from our youth,’ he besought her, being reduced to try persuasion. ‘And consider how deeply you have worried him all these past months, putting him to endless expense and setting him at enmity with all his neighbours both at home and abroad.’”

  “It must have been like spreading a bright tapestry of bygone days before her,” m
urmured Brereton, who was older than the rest of them and could remember her sharing in the laughter and glamour of life with the King and Brandon and her sister-in-law, Mary Tudor. “How did she answer, Francis?”

  “By setting her mouth rigidly in the way she does, and telling Suffolk that if the King suffered from the enmity of his neighbours it must be the outcome of their sense of justice. Because, for her own part, although she was a foreigner, her neighbours had always loved her.”

  “It is as if she cannot keep her tongue from saying the thing which most annoys him,” commented Anne.

  “But she has more courage than us all,” said George Boleyn, wondering if his own licenced tongue would ever dare to wag one half so defiantly in self-defence against the King.

  “Then the Duke, torn between exasperation and admiration, it seems, tried another approach, speaking, I think, in genuine concern for her safety,” said Weston. “‘If I return without your submission, his Grace will but send again someone, perchance, who has no love for you, Madame,’ he reminded her. ‘You have many a time complained of this place, but Fotheringay or any of the other houses that have been mentioned are slow death.’”

  “Surely that moved her?” said Anne, in a low, shamed voice. She had so fervently hoped that it would because, for all the cruel things she said in her anxiety, she did not want death again upon her conscience, even indirectly, as in the case of Wolsey. If only the woman would give in and allow herself to be hounded quietly into a convent!

  “Not by a hair’s breadth!” declared Weston, leaning across the table to pour himself some wine. They waited, all of them with lifted faces, while he swallowed the drink he must have needed. “Prompted, perhaps, by the allusion to neighbours,” he went on, patting his lips fastidiously with a napkin lying near, “the Princess of Wales, as the King would have her called, came down the castle stairs again, leaning upon the arm of De la So, or whatever her apothecary’s name is. Beckoning Suffolk and the Captain of the Guard to follow her, she walked with difficulty to the great open doorway of the Manor. From where she stood she must have seen the tall shining pikes of the King’s soldiers surrounding the moat; but her eyes and heart went to the little groups of Huntingdonshiremen, standing around their little bivouac fires within the courtyard. Homely little groups of country squires and farmers, in furbished-up breastplates, and even the humblest cowman armed with a riphook or a bullprong. As everyone knew, they had been called out to augment the royal pikemen, or at least to lend countenance to the proceedings; but at sight of her a great shout went up, and everyone among them doffed his cap in passionate loyalty. That must have been what Queen Katherine had counted on. She turned to her husband’s brother-in-law then and smiled. ‘Take me now,’ she challenged. ‘But I warn you that before these honest men, you will have to carry me over the threshold by force!’”