by Karen Harper
I admit I had now learned to lie, even under fear and threat of duress, even if it meant defiance of the powers in the kingdom. That skill was to serve me well later as I continued to serve the Tudors.
The king was coming. Cromwell was coming. The household was in chaos.
The queen had visited rather often, once with His Majesty, but this was a visit on his own to see his little daughter. But would he see his older daughter?
Poor Mary, despite all she’d been through, had hopes. I could understand that now. Though her father had betrayed her and her mother, she loved him yet and wanted his goodwill, not only so she would not be completely cast aside from the line of succession, but because something instinctively made daughters love their fathers, even bad ones. Yes, I knew that.
Still weak from her illness, Mary waited in her small chamber, praying she would be summoned while the king dandled Elizabeth on his knee and carried her about downstairs, remarking how she looked Tudor through and through. Still, I must admit, Elizabeth had her mother’s eyes and graceful, long-fingered hands. Though she was not yet two years old, she had inherited her mother’s love of finery and tendency to primp and preen. Oh, yes, and she had both the Tudor and the Boleyn tempers, a volatile combination.
But Cromwell was the only visitor who called on Mary that day. As I passed in the hall, I could hear him berating her for still being so stubborn toward the queen, for not knowing her place as bastard, not heir. When he left her room, I ducked into another so he would not know I was hovering. He had already scolded me for not giving him what “cannon fodder” he needed to deal with Mary Tudor once and for all. But he had urged me to stay in the little princess’s affections, for the future lay in her.
While everyone was down in the great hall with the king, I knocked on the closed door of Mary’s room. “Who?” came her distinctive low voice.
“Kat, my lady.”
“Enter.”
She sat at her table before a small mirror, with a handkerchief crumpled in her hands as if she’d collapsed there after her interview with Cromwell. Her eyes and nose were red.
“I shall tell you plain in English and not Latin, Kat,” she said. “I loathe him but love him and long to see him.”
I knew who she meant.
“But I am not to be summoned. I have not seen him for years, and he cannot even bid me good day or fare-thee-well. I wish I were dead!”
“No, no,” I said, and began to cry too. I knelt by her stool—let anyone who came upon us think I was bowing the knee to her. “My lady, you have too much to live for. Your heritage, your mother . . .”
“Yes, yes,” she said, pressing her clasped hands to her mouth. “Tell no one of my despair. I would show my father I am his indeed, strong and regal . . .” She shook her head and blew her nose.
“You could wave him farewell.”
“They will not let me near him.”
“I know a place on the rooftop from which you could wave at him in the courtyard as he mounts, but you would have to climb many stairs in the tower turret—up on the battlements.”
Her head lifted. “I could wage my own war on the battlements,” she said, nodding. “He may not see me, but I shall see him, even if from afar, but I am still so weak from my affliction. Will you help me?”
Devil take it—take them all, I fumed silently, but said, “I will, but we must go now.”
She struggled up the twisting staircase, out of breath. I dared to touch her royal person with my hands right on her waist and arm to help her climb. We emerged into a stiff breeze and startling sunlight, perhaps just in time, for we could hear horses stamping and snorting in the courtyard below amidst the murmurs of many voices.
“I must do this alone,” she told me, squeezing my hand. “They must not know of your help to me. Go down now. Be seen among them all.”
“Yes, Your Grace,” I told her, using the forbidden form of address.
“Dear Kat, I shall not forget your kindnesses. Go!” she commanded, and pushed at me feebly.
I, too, was out of breath and sweating when I ran out a side door into the courtyard and mingled with the small crowd from the household encircling the royal party. Crowded toward the back of the cobbled courtyard were clusters of manor workers, no doubt thrilled to see their king. Everyone was prepared to bid His Majesty farewell. I glanced up and saw Mary above, leaning on the crenellations, waving.
Others noticed too. Necks craned. People gasped. The king had mounted before he noticed the lifted faces and looked up.
Silence fell. Only the creak of a saddle and shifting of a horseshoe on a cobble sounded.
Mary stepped even closer to the edge. Adjusting her skirts, she knelt in obeisance to her father and king. I gasped as I recalled her words to me that she would like to die. Surely, she would not cast herself off in protest! I would be to blame, for this ploy was my idea.
Still ahorse, the king bowed to her, sweeping off his plumed velvet hat in a broad and graceful arc. “Good day and good health to you, daughter!” he called out, then turned and led his entourage from the courtyard through the cheering, waving crowd.
It was a good thing he was soon outside the walls, heading down the gravel road, or he might have noted that the commoners, if not their betters, kept cheering when he was long gone, not for their king but for their once-upon-a-time, half-Spanish Catholic Princess of Wales.
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON
November 26, 1535
Dearest Kat, I’m so happy we’re together again!”
I was thrilled to see my old friend Joan Champernowne, now a twenty-two-year-old bride, Lady Denny. She had previously been widowed, when it was often the women who died in childbirth to leave young husbands behind. Still, I was not happy to be summoned back to court by the queen. In my nearly two-year absence from public life, Lady Joan Denny had arrived with her husband, who was much in favor with the king. Sir Anthony Denny had received rich lands in the full-scale dissolution of the monasteries and had been appointed to the office of king’s remembrancer, or keeper of his personal records. And, truth be told, Sir Anthony kept accounts of who received or purchased former church lands. That royal largesse was still a powerful enticement to keep subjects in line who might balk at the king’s increasing control of church and state.
Joan’s appointment as one of the queen’s ladies swelled that number to nearly twenty. But, as delighted as I was to be reunited with her, I was torn about the reunion with Queen Anne I was awaiting as we stood in her privy chamber at Whitehall. The only relief I felt—though it pained me deeply too—was that I would not have to face John Ashley after how I had avoided him and left court without so much as a farewell. Because his father was ill, he had gone home for several months to help his half brother with their horse-breeding concerns.
I listened to Joan’s excited words about court life in a melancholy humor, for I had once felt the same as she did now. At least she had a well-placed protector in her husband. Unfortunately for me, I learned that the Seymours had continued their rise: not only had Tom’s favorite sister Jane come to court and caught the king’s eye, but Edward Seymour had been appointed a gentleman of the king’s privy chamber. Tom was soon to return from one of his glorified errands abroad, and I dreaded seeing the wretch again.
Though Joan pointed Jane Seymour out to me, I could have picked her out myself, perhaps because Tom’s face was branded in my mind forever. As different as was Mistress Jane’s coloring from that of her brothers, she had the Seymour nose and mouth, and Tom had told me she was blond with blue eyes. While Joan regaled me with stories of her own family, I cast glances at the Seymour woman, who seemed quite the opposite from her gregarious, aggressive brothers. She was also as day is to night from the bold, enticing, dark-haired and dark-eyed royal mistress she served. Anne was all for the new religion, but Joan said that Jane was still as Catholic as they come. If I had to sum up Tom’s sister from watching her for that quarter of an
hour, I would say she was sweet, shy and demure. King’s roving eye or not, she won’t last long at court, I thought.
I was also surprised to see quite a number of king’s men—including the poet, Thomas Wyatt—in this chamber immediately adjacent to the queen’s bedroom. In Anne’s early days here, the approach to that ultimate sanctuary through a series of rooms was well controlled. From the presence chamber where most courtiers were permitted, the withdrawing chamber winnowed out all but those closest to the queen before the even more limited access to the Privy Chamber and then the very private bedchamber. How things had grown lax around Anne in the years I’d been away.
Now heads turned and elbows poked ribs; we slowly hushed as raised voices sounded through the door of Anne’s inner sanctum. Quite clearly she cried, “George, I am sick to death of it all! She’s ill, so why can’t she just die?”
I mouthed my words to Joan: “The Queen Dowager or the Lady Mary?”
“She could mean either,” she whispered back.
Anne plunged recklessly on: “Catherine took the motto ‘Humble and loyal,’ so why isn’t she? She is overly proud and pompous to defy the king!”
“But to her way of thinking, she is yet ever loyal to him,” George Boleyn’s voice came to us.
“You sound as if you are on her side! And here I have the motto ‘Most happy’ on my badges, and I am miserable! Mis—”
“Keep your voice down.”
“I shall not. Do not gainsay me. I am queen here.”
Thankfully, the argument became more muted. The latch on the door rattled and people turned away. A few began idle chatter; I saw some just roll their eyes as if to say, The usual Boleyn behavior. One thing I had learned quickly upon my return to court was that, even though Anne had been queen these last years, the “climber Boleyns” still deeply rankled the nobility. I could not help but wonder if people resented Cromwell for his climb too.
Were things so dreadful between the king and queen here, and we at Hatfield had not heard? Perhaps Catherine, the former queen, was better off in exile from court, but my thoughts went to her dear daughter, Mary, ill herself with anguish and grief.
George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, looking flushed and harried, strode from Anne’s chamber, looking neither right nor left. Either he or she had mussed his hair and pulled his doublet awry. I wondered if they’d even had a tussle. Without a word, even to his wife, he stormed through the room and out. Although the queen had summoned me to await her pleasure, I was tempted to flee also, for I had no stomach for facing Anne’s choler. I would concoct some story of exhaustion or illness from my cold-weather journey yesterday.
I turned to make an excuse to Joan and found myself staring into the handsome, almost pretty face of a man holding a lute. His auburn hair was curled in ringlets, and he was finely garbed.
“Mistress Champernowne,” he said in a mellifluous voice, “Her Grace will see you now.”
“We have not met,” I told him as the chatter in the room picked up again, that sound of buzzing bees from my father’s hives.
“Mark Smeaton, the queen’s lutenist, at your service,” he said, and swept me a fancy bow with a flourish of his willow green tasseled cap.
I glanced at Joan, who nodded. Indeed, what was Anne’s court coming to, I thought, for her to have such a contretemps with her brother and for visitors to be summoned by a musician, one who seemed to dance his way back in her door and then close it behind me?
Inside Anne’s spacious bedchamber, the scent of heavy perfume almost staggered me. As I curtsied, I noted silk and satin pillows strewn on the floor rushes as if that is where people sat now instead of on chairs or stools. To my amazement, Mark Smeaton went over to sit cross-legged on the bed and began to strum a slow melody, one I did not know.
“Dear Kat,” Anne called to me, sounding as if she had not a care in the world, “what news of Elizabeth?” She gestured me over to a small parquet-topped table beneath a frost-blighted window while the wind howled outside. Such quicksilver moods, I thought, ones that seemed to match the tenor of tunes Smeaton played, for already he romped through a gay galliard. “Tell me all the latest of my sweetling, even the smallest detail!” the queen insisted as we sat close, with only a corner of the table between us.
I regaled her for nearly a half an hour with minutiae about her poppet. I was heartened to see her face brighten and a smile tilt the tips of her eyes and lips. I was appalled at how she had aged, even since her latest visit to Hatfield in October. Dark half-moons hung under her eyes, her skin was sallow and she looked gaunt. Despite her welcome, she seemed to have a hectic in the blood, for her long fingers never stopped darting here and there. So distressed was she that she forgot to cover her left hand with that strange vestige of a sixth finger. All that time, Smeaton’s skilled fingers danced from tune to tune as Anne listened avidly to my tales of Elizabeth’s antics and more new words and favorite toys.
“Well, I must buck myself up,” she said finally, downing some wine I, too, had been drinking. I never drank to excess anymore after that terrible night of Anne’s coronation, but all my talk made my throat dry. “Our little princess is coming to court for Yule,” Anne said. “I plan to have someone known as ‘the lady’ gone by then, so I shall have a happy time—time to conceive another child, a brother for my sweetling.”
I knew that Anne had suffered a miscarriage several months after Elizabeth was born, and had thought she was pregnant once when she was not. From what she said, I assumed she and the king were still bedding together, at least from time to time. I was perversely amused she referred to Jane Seymour as “the lady,” for people used to call Anne that when I first came to court. As Cromwell had said once, “There is nothing new under the sun, yet knowing King Henry, everything changes.”
Suddenly, leaning close to me across the corner of the table, she seized my wrist and said, “I brought you back to court, not Cromwell. We argued over it, and I told him I would have his head if he keeps trying to naysay me. I trust you and want you to keep a good eye on Mistress Jane Seymour for me. The king has not made a move yet, I think, but is circling her as a hunter does a doe.”
I stared speechless at her as thoughts assailed me—anyone but the Seymours. So, Anne was jealous of the lady. Jane was a danger to her just as she had been to Queen Catherine. For this task she was desperate enough to take me away from her beloved child. How fortune’s wheel had turned. But I sympathized with her hatred and fear of a Seymour. I actually yearned to put my arms around her and commiserate, but I simply nodded and said, “I will do what I can.”
Yuletide came and went, a happy time for the Tudors; true to her word, the queen was pregnant again, and the king was ecstatic with hope. I was thrilled when Lady Bryan brought Elizabeth to court for the festivities; she remembered me and put out her little arms to be lifted up and held by her Kat. I vow but that child was precocious even then, but not, thank God, as things turned out, old enough to understand or recall what came next in that new year of 1536.
On January 8, word arrived that Catherine of Aragon had died the previous day at Kimbolton Castle. I became sick to my stomach at the celebrations that went on over that. The king, in canary yellow, hardly the hue of white for mourning, carried little Elizabeth about in his arms all day, rejoicing while Anne cavorted in her chambers. Her thoughtless, oft reckless behavior seemed to say that nothing could harm her now. The more the king flattered and flirted with Mistress Seymour, the more Anne flaunted her charms with male members of his court.
“What is good for the gander is good for the goose!” I heard her twist the old saying as she held wild parties in her chambers, often with the king’s own comrades in attendance. With a new woman in favor, though one who, like Anne, was surprisingly clever at holding the king’s avid attentions at bay, he, too, was acting as if he were invincible, with masques and dances, hunts and tournaments. In mid-January, he had an accident riding in the lists at Greenwich; thrown and partly crushed by his horse, he was unc
onscious for over two hours before slowly recovering. But he had sores on one leg and limped after that.
It wasn’t until January 29 that Catherine of Aragon was buried at Peterborough Abbey, attended by professional mourners—and, we heard later, many of her former English subjects lining the road to show their respect. That was something Anne had never had from her subjects except in a few Protestant pockets and her home shire of Kent.
That was also the very day that the task to which Anne had assigned me ended with a bang. I had attached myself to Mistress Seymour without much trouble, praying Tom would not come back to court. But one day, there he was, striding toward us down the long gallery where we walked in bad weather. He still wore riding boots and a mud-speckled cape that flapped around him, he came so quickly. With a wink at me—I would have liked to punch him in that eye—he hugged his sister hard, even swinging her about, to lift her slippered feet from the floor.
“I have missed you, brother,” Jane told him as he put her down. She brushed at the smudge marks he’d made on her gold brocade gown. “Edward is a bore, and his wife criticizes all I do, but with you home, we’ll have fun now.”
I was close enough to hear their next whispered words. Though I wanted to run away, for my duty to Anne I gritted my teeth and held my ground.
“Is His Grace not fun?” Tom inquired, his mouth so close to her temple that her ear bob bounced. Curse the wretch, but it was as if I could feel that hot breath against my own ear, feel him pressing me down.
“He wants to be,” she whispered back, “but I am true to my vow of chastity.”
“You had better be!” he said before he stepped away from her and turned toward me. What a hypocrite, the blackguard, I thought.
