Six of One

by Joann Spears

  “When you do,” I said, “please give her a kiss from me—and my special love. They tell me that I look a lot like Cathy, the daughter she named after you. I don’t want to leave this place without sending your Maria my special regards.”

  “That is something else I cannot wait to do. I promise to deliver the message, the kiss, and the love.”

  The words “cannot wait” reminded me that I, too, could not wait if I didn’t want to be late for my date with the preacher. Realizing that I was not even fully halfway through the six wives yet, I gave Katharine a not-so-subtle prod. “If you will pardon my mentioning it, aren’t we supposed to be discussing deception?”

  “So we are, and back to the question I have for you, Dolly. Let me begin with this: I deceived history into believing I loved a king, but I really loved my own lady-in-waiting. I wonder, Dolly, if there is someone that you have deceived about your heart’s true love.”

  “Wait one minute!” I interjected, taking up my own defense. “I am marrying Harry tomorrow in good faith and till ‘death do us part.’ I am not deceiving anyone!”

  “I did not hear the word love mentioned, Dolly,” said Katharine gently. “Could it be that you are deceiving yourself?”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Dolly Learns a Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

  From the wife with the longest run, it was on to the wife with one of the shortest ones. Jane Seymour was wed, impregnated, delivered, and dead all in a scant year and a half. Short runs running in the family, the golden child she delivered, Edward VI—Henry VIII’s only legitimate son—reigned a brief six years and died, childless, at age sixteen. Contemporary sources describe him at the end as hairless, sore-covered, reeking, and emaciated, possibly from tuberculosis, but probably from the remedies used to treat his final illness. I had always found it difficult to reconcile the deathbed Edward with Hans Holbein’s portrait of the blond, round-faced, pink-cheeked, rattle-bearing toddler in red garb and feather—Henry VIII’s “Mini-Me.”

  Meeting Jane Seymour, I could see that the rosy Holbein toddler had inherited nothing—in the looks department, anyway—from his mama. Jane Seymour looked a lot like, well, to be perfectly honest, Jane Seymour, the eponymous actress. She was unthreateningly pretty but too posh to be just the girl next door. I could see why Henry VIII had been attracted to her.

  “Dolly,” Jane said, “I know the others so far have set you at guessing games. Quite frankly, you’re acuteness amazes me.”

  “I’ve never been called ‘acute’ before, Jane. Thank you.”

  “You are quite welcome, Dolly. I’ve always wished that someone would call me ‘acute,’ but no one ever has,” she said petulantly. “That being the case, it’s probably best that I not try to wax clever and just tell you flat out what my secret is. I will try to be very quick about it.”

  The “quick” idea was definitely worth encouraging.

  “That will make a refreshing change,” I said. “You go ahead and cut right to the quick—I mean, right to the chase, Jane.”

  The ‘cutting’ reference did not go undetected; however, it affected the proceedings less this time than it usually did. I thought at first that the wives were finally getting immune to my comments, for Catherine Howard and Katherine Parr did not even break a saunter en route to the bedpost; and they knocked so faintly when they got there that I could barely hear it. I realized later that they had adjusted the perceived speed and volume so that I could clearly hear Jane Seymour’s soft and measured voice.

  “My son Prince Edward,” Jane said evenly, “was not Henry VIII’s child.”

  It was the first time I had seen someone transformed from broodmare to dark horse in an instant. All bets were now off in this horse race.

  “Whose child was he, Jane?” I asked, dumbfounded. My professional expertise gave me no clue at all as to who the real prince daddy might be.

  Jane’s response was instantaneous. “My Edward was Tom Cromwell’s son.”

  I was genuinely shocked and did not think at first that it could possibly be true.

  “No way,” I said. “That can’t be! The baby in Hans Holbein’s portrait of your son is the living spit of Henry VIII, if you will pardon the expression. That child could not conceivably be anyone’s other than Henry VIII’s!”

  Anne of Cleves interjected. “When I came to England from Germany, I saw that same Holbein portrait, and I saw the little Prince Edward himself. The two faces were not at all alike. I was shocked at so bad a likeness from my talented Hans, and I told him so! That’s when Hans told me what he said was obvious to his trained eye, but what almost everyone else at court had missed altogether: the boy’s true parentage.”

  It seemed to me that Holbein was jumping to conclusions, but Anne assured me that it was not so. “No, Dolly, Hans was absolutely certain. His knowledge of facial features was downright encyclopedic. In Hans’s mind’s eye, every feature he had ever painted was carefully preserved and accurately catalogued. Having painted portraits of the king previously, Hans knew immediately upon sketching the little Prince Edward that he was no child of Henry VIII’s. Having also painted Tom Cromwell’s portrait several years earlier, Hans knew from little Edward’s features which man at court really was the child’s father. He said there could be no doubt about it. He said that Tom Cromwell—Henry VIII’s trusted chancellor—had been Henry’s right-hand man in more ways than one.”

  “That’s big,” I mused. “Really big. Unseasonably big.”

  “Treasonably big,” Anne added, “and don’t think that Hans didn’t know it.”

  Poor Hans, I thought. Something that big sticking in his mind’s eye had to have been uncomfortable as well as dangerous.

  “So,” Anne resumed, “Hans purposely painted the portrait of the baby Prince Edward as you’ve seen it, the very—as you would have it, Dolly—spit of Henry VIII. It was the expedient thing to do. Hans and I, of course, kept what we knew about the boy’s true parentage strictly entre nous, and that kept us both on Henry VIII’s good side.”

  If anyone would have known which side was Henry’s good side, I reasoned, it would be the portraitist Holbein. Still, I was not entirely convinced.

  “With all due respect to Holbein’s weather eye, surely if the resemblance between Prince Edward and Tom Cromwell was that obvious, others would have noticed, as well.”

  “Jane Seymour’s circumspection was such that none of Henry VIII’s courtiers thought to question the parentage of Jane’s son,” Anne of Cleves said. “Besides, there was someone else who saw what my Hans saw.”

  “Who was it?” I asked.

  “Scrots,” Anne replied.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Scrots.”

  The word sounded to me like one of those audacious Old English exclamations, like the ones Shakespeare made up. I hazarded a guess that it was a variation on the Latin for “balls,” and asked Anne if I had said anything to offend her.

  “Really, Dolly!” Anne scolded. “I meant Scrots the artist. William Scrots.”

  I remembered now who William Scrots was. He had replaced Hans Holbein as Henry VIII’s court painter after Holbein died. Scrots also painted a standard portrait of Prince Edward, completed when the boy was nine years of age. The overall impression of Scrots’ portrait of Edward, like Holbein’s, is undeniably Henrician. It shows Edward in exactly the same stance that Henry VIII assumed in his own prototype portrait: chest out, feet wide apart, right hand on hip, left hand on codpiece, kind of like a modern-day baseball player. I told Anne that I was familiar with the portrait.

  “You may be ‘familiar with’ Scrots’s portrait of Edward, but how closely have you ever really looked at it, Dolly? You mentioned the boy’s Henrician stance. That it all you noticed about it. That’s all anyone notices.”

  I chalked up the propensity to focus on the codpiece to human nature. “We look at Henry’s portrait, we look at Edward’s portrait, and we say, ‘chip off the old block.’ What we’re rea
lly thinking, though, is, ‘chip off the old…’—you know.”

  Anne smiled. “If any of you raised your eyes to the faces in the portraits,” she said dryly, “you would see that there is nothing of Henry VIII’s face in Prince Edward’s.”

  “So, there are no true likenesses of Prince Edward in existence.”

  “Not exactly,” Anne said. “Scrots painted a second portrait of the boy, one that is much less well-known to history. It was a novelty. Scrots called it an ‘anamorphic’ portrait. It had to be viewed from an angle, squinting, to be seen correctly.”

  “Like an optical illusion.”

  “That about sums it up, Dolly. The portrait was considered amazing in its time, almost magical. Those who appreciated its technical aspects could not see past them. Those who were unable to figure out how to view the thing properly were too embarrassed to admit it. If, however, you look at the portrait the way Scrots meant for you to look at it, the Cromwellian resemblance is unmistakable. That is why Scrots had to obscure the resemblance with a…what did you call it?”

  “Optical illusion.”

  “Thank you. Prince Edward, when he became King Edward in the fullness of time, had a similar portrait of himself done by Scrots to send to France as a gift for the French king, Henri II. I always suspected that Henri, wily as he was, noticed how much Edward resembled Cromwell.” Anne said.

  I guessed that Anne was probably right. Scrots very mysteriously disappeared from the pages of history after painting that gift portrait.

  Chapter Thirty

  “Two Heads Are Better Than One,” as Told

  by Jane Seymour

  Even in the face of the pictorial evidence, I was having a hard time buying Tom Cromwell as the father of Jane Seymour’s son, King Edward VI.

  As the Reformation dynamo who supplanted Cardinal Wolsey, it’s hard to believe he was able to find the time to impregnate Jane. It must have been quite a job fitting it in somewhere between turning monks and nuns out of their homes, liquidating reliquaries to the benefit of the English Exchequer, and overturning the “old blood” ruling class to make room for an abilities-based civil service.

  However Tom Cromwell managed it, it was a good thing he did it when he did: a scant three years later, he was dead. Like historians in general, I had always believed that his execution was an upshot of Henry VIII’s emerging paranoia. But maybe that was not it at all; maybe Henry had just taken a good, close look at all those pictures—above codpiece level.

  “Henry executed Cromwell in 1540,” I recalled. “Maybe as Prince Edward grew up, the likeness between the boy and Tom Cromwell became obvious to Henry.”

  “The wives who succeeded me tell me that Henry VIII never for a moment suspected that the boy wasn’t his,” Jane said.

  I had the comfort of knowing that my history books were correct on this one at least, and that Cromwell was set up for execution by his political enemy the Duke of Norfolk, playing on Henry VIII’s increasingly bizarre emotions. They say that almost immediately after Cromwell’s execution, Henry started regretting the decision. I could see why: losing Cromwell within a few years of losing Sir Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey left Henry at quite a loss for their like as statesmen.

  “So, down went Cromwell, right on the heels of More and Wolsey,” I recapped. “They were three of the greatest statesmen of the time—and all dead within a matter of years. Talk about brain drain!”

  Judging by Anne of Cleves’s bedpost tattoo and the way Ann Boleyn was shrieking, the six wives were still not altogether immune to my faux pas.

  “I can’t believe I goofed again! Can you find it in your hearts to forgive me one more time?” I beseeched playfully.

  “It is not your careless blunder that she is screaming about!” shouted Anne of Cleves from the bedpost. “It’s about More, Wolsey, and Cromwell. Ann Boleyn had reason to hate each of them. The mention of a single one of them is enough to set her off screaming, but the names of all three in one breath—ach mein Gott!”

  “History is not correct about Cromwell!” bellowed Ann Boleyn. “Let me tell you—”

  Katharine of Aragon cut Ann’s revelation short by going into Mistress of Ceremonies mode. “Ann, the time to tell your tale is coming, but it is not your turn just yet,” she said politely. “You will kindly let Jane Seymour continue.”

  Ann Boleyn, hands on hips and exhaling slowly through pursed lips, acquiesced to Katharine of Aragon’s request with amazing graciousness.

  “Alright, I will let Jane continue—and kindly at that. It is a pleasure to defer to a woman who was acute enough to have made a fool of Henry VIII, even if she did make use of a rapscallion like Tom Cromwell to do it.”

  A two-minute silence followed this triumph of diplomacy. Jane Seymour finally broke it rather prosaically by making an unattractive snuffling sound and then blowing her nose into the gilt-edged handkerchief obligingly subleased to her by Katharine of Aragon.

  “Who would have guessed that the tribute I’ve always wanted would come from you, Ann Boleyn! Imagine—me called ‘acute’ by the likes of you, a woman who knows all the angles!”

  Misty eyed, Ann Boleyn motioned for the golden hankie with one hand and for the proceedings to continue with the other.

  During the two-minute silence, I had been thinking about Holbein’s portrait of Tom Cromwell. It showed a man without a handsome face or a manly physique; in fact, it showed one butt-ugly man. I had to assume that Jane Seymour’s attraction to him had not been visceral. Given the store she seemed to set by cleverness, I conjectured that Cromwell’s prodigious intelligence was what had ignited her passion. I asked her if this was so.

  Jane assured me that I was quite wrong. “There was no passion about it, Dolly. It was expediency on my part—and vainglory on Tom’s.”

  “You were the apple of Henry VIII’s eye, Jane! I cannot imagine what made expedience necessary. Whatever it was, it must have given you enormous courage. After all, your husband executed his second wife for adultery the day before he proposed to you! You were one gutsy lady to take that kind of chance.”

  “My act of expedience was not born of courage, Dolly,” Jane explained. “It was born of fear. The fate of my predecessors haunted me night and day. All I could think about was Ann Boleyn and Katharine of Aragon, both vilified and both dying horribly because they could not produce living sons. Even with that, they had both at least succeeded in conceiving very quickly; each of them was pregnant within weeks of first sleeping with Henry VIII. Six months into my marriage with him, I had yet to conceive. With every barren day that went by, my fear grew greater. I did not want to die horribly, as each of them had.”

  The moment seemed to call for a sympathetic utterance, so I offered one.

  “If I’d been you, Jane, the worry would have made me lose my mind.”

  Anne of Cleves, at the ready at the bedpost, rolled her eyes good-naturedly and carried on knocking. Jane Seymour put her hand to her throat for a moment, squared her shoulders, and continued.

  “Well, as I was saying, there I was at six months in, afraid for my very life. I swore that the fates of my predecessors would not be mine. I was ready to take action to save myself, with the right man to help me. Of course, it had to be Tom Cromwell.”

  I was not sure what the “of course” meant. I wondered if there was a backstory with Jane and Tom Cromwell. “Don’t tell me you were dipping the wick with Tom Cromwell before your marriage to Henry VIII!”

  “Good God, no!” cried Jane. “Ours was strictly an ad hoc arrangement. The game of dipping the wick for its own sake is hardly worth the candle.”

  “Pun intended?” I asked.

  “What pun?” asked Jane.

  “Never mind,” I said, suppressing a smile. “Let’s move on.”

  “Well, then, as I was saying, Dolly: Tom Cromwell was clearly the only man for the job I had in mind.”

  “You thought no one else could hold a candle to him.”

  “Quite. Or do I mean q
uite not? Or not quite? Oh, I don’t know what I mean now, I am quite lost!” said Jane Seymour, like a candle in the wind.

  “Let me help,” I offered. “Tom Cromwell: the man for the job.”

  “Yes, that’s it,” she said gratefully. “That is where I want to pick up. Thank you, Dolly.”

  “It was nothing. You know what they say: a candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.”

  “How funny! That is exactly what Tom said when we consummated our plan.”

  I considered that along the lines of “too much information” but did not want to break Jane’s stride.

  “The stakes in the game Tom and I played were high, Dolly, very high. My life hung in the balance if I did not reverse my infertility. I knew I needed the smartest man in England to advise me on what to do, and the smartest man in England at the time was Tom Cromwell. He had been an ally in maneuvering my marriage to Henry, so it was in his interest, as well, for me to produce. I trusted to his discretion, and one day, while Henry was away in the country hunting, I sought Tom’s advice.”

  “Better to light a candle than curse the darkness,” I commented.

  “I think Tom mentioned that, as well! He considered that the fertility problem might be with Henry and not with me, and that the right man could correct the problem forthwith. Henry was away for an entire week; the court was quite deserted. My impeccable reputation and Tom’s—well—lack of attractions would protect us from any suspicions of intrigue. We stole away every day, sometimes twice a day, whenever and wherever we could, to do the deed.”

  “You burned the candle at both ends.”

  “Well, yes. Tom thought it would increase my chances of conceiving if he did not limit himself to taking me from the front.”

  “Way too much information, Jane!”

  “Pardon my waxing nostalgic.”

  “Pun intended?”

  “What pun?”

  “Never mind.”