The Unfaithful Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII's Fifth Wife

by Erickson, Carolly

  But the duchess only pursed her lips, then turned back toward the door and was gone.

  * * *

  “Guess who they made Controller of Calais!” my father said in wry tones. “You cannot imagine.”

  “I cannot.”

  “John Parker! Yeoman of the Wardrobe! A servant! Barely a gentleman’s son!”

  That his own cherished but forfeited position should pass to a servant of much lower birth was irksome in the extreme to my father. He felt he had been unjustly deprived of the post, and dishonored by the loss of the revenues that went with it. But to be replaced by such a man, a Howard replaced by a nobody—ah, that was a cruel humiliation.

  “Was there no compensation for you, father? No other post offered you?”

  “Thomas spoke to Lord Cromwell and arranged a loan,” father mumbled. “And I will be appointed commissioner of the sewers for Surrey.”

  “Well, that is something,” I said as father sat down, slowly and carefully, on a cushioned bench. I sat nearby.

  “Oh, and I am to receive licenses to import Gascon wine and Toulouse wood.”

  “Trade in Gascon wine must be quite profitable.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “But the wine trade, Catherine, is for men of low birth. Not for a Howard, whose brother Thomas is Duke of Norfolk, the highest nobleman in the realm.”

  He shook his head. “At least they did not send me to Sark, or Orkney, or to live among the wild Irish—”

  “Father, I must speak to you—”

  “But then, the best appointments are sure to be those in the new queen’s household.” He nodded sagely. “If only she would make me her chancellor, or her emissary to foreign courts, or—”

  “Who is to be the new queen, father? I have not heard her name spoken.”

  “And you will not, until the marriage contracts have been drawn up.”

  He made a wry face. I knew at once that he was in pain from the stone.

  “If you please, father, I have need—”

  He raised his hand. “Not now, Catherine. I have too much else on my mind.”

  But whatever was on his mind, did not find its way to his lips. Not for many minutes. He was lost in his musings. Finally he spoke again.

  “Lord Cromwell is dealing with the Clevans, Catherine. Yes. The Clevans. Of all people!”

  He paused again. “There is a Clevan woman, Lady Anna. Lord Cromwell wants her to be our next queen.”

  He looked over at me. “There will be many appointments to her new household. Highborn young women. Good-looking, godfearing, chaste young women. Not young women who disgrace themselves with their music masters—”

  “Father, I—”

  “Oh yes, mother told me. I know all.”

  “She forgave me. She understood.”

  But father merely gave a low chuckle. “You are your mother’s daughter,” he said quietly. “And besides, the man has a poor history. He has been sent away. We will say no more about it.”

  “I need clothing, father,” I burst out. “My gowns are too small for me. They cannot be let out or patched or re-hemmed any more. Please let me share some of your new loan to pay a dressmaker.”

  He slapped his knee. “Ask your uncle William, Catherine. He always has coins in his treasure chests. Don’t come to me. I am left to go a-begging while others flourish. Don’t come to me!”

  * * *

  My need for money was great, and growing greater. I had been borrowing small sums from Alice and Joan, from my cousins Malyn and Catherine Tylney, even from Henry and Edward Waldegrave ever since I first arrived at Horsham, for my father gave me no pocket money and my stepmother Margaret, who I never saw, scarcely acknowledged that I was alive.

  I was a poor relation. That needed to end.

  In the Horsham household, I noticed, people acted not according to the moral laws in the Bible but according to what chance and opportunity offered. Do what you can, take what you need, act as you must: this was the guiding rule. I was not slow to learn it.

  I knew that Grandma Agnes, who was very very rich, had small chests of coins scattered here and there throughout the household. She was forever taking handfuls of coins from these chests to give in alms, or to pay tradesmen or servants, or to give out to the steward or chamberer to buy provisions. The chests were kept locked, to be sure, but she kept the keys in the pockets of her gowns and I had seen them fall out more than once. I had also noticed that she sometimes forgot to fasten the locks securely.

  I began paying closer attention to her goings and comings and taking careful note when she took money from one of her chests. My opportunity came when a commotion arose in the courtyard just as Grandma Agnes was handing a pouch of coins to her head ostler. Two of the grooms were brawling. Others were threatening to join in.

  “Stop that at once!” she shouted, and stalked out among the men, heedless of the mud and dirt that was staining her hem and equally heedless of the unlocked chest she had left behind.

  I quickly rushed to the table, reached into the chest, snatched a pouch—a rather heavy pouch—of coins and hurriedly put it in my pocket. Then I went outside and joined the others.

  Not until after supper did I allow myself to open the pouch and count the money I had taken. It was nearly eight pounds! A fortune!

  My first thought was an unkind one: I must not let my father know that I had this money, for he would be sure to try to convince me that he needed it far more than I did and that it was my duty to give it to him. I hid the gleaming coins in a little closet next to the chamber of easement, under a bundle of rags. Each time I visited the chamber I extracted a few coins. Gradually I paid my debts. And I paid the duchess’s dressmaker, Master Spiershon, to make me five day gowns and two court gowns, suitable to wear in the presence of the king. For I had decided that I had had enough of Horsham, and was determined to travel to the capital at my earliest opportunity.

  * * *

  I had been hearing about Grandma Agnes’s great house at Lambeth for a long time. It was said to be far larger and more grand than Horsham, with three times as many servants and far more elegant grounds. Most important, Lambeth was just across the Thames and a little ways upstream from the royal court of King Henry and the great capital, London.

  The hub of the realm, Henry Manox had called London. The center of the universe. He had often spoken to me of the splendor of the royal court and how he regretted the shortness of his stay there.

  Imagine my delight when I heard from Joan that the duchess was going to Lambeth and we were all going with her!

  “She wants to place as many Howards as possible in the household of the new queen,” Joan announced. “In order to do that, she must be as near the royal court as possible. Lambeth it is.”

  Everything was packed up and moved—and when we arrived, I glimpsed, for the first time, an immense ducal household with (so my father told me) some seven hundred servants and three hundred horses in the stables and a great hall larger than all the upper chambers at Horsham combined.

  Lambeth Great House was an establishment fit for the wealthiest duchess in England—my grandmother Agnes—and for England’s premier duke, my uncle Thomas, who was often present in its spacious halls.

  I was only too glad to move in to my new and much larger quarters, which I shared with only a dozen other girls. My bed was larger and the mattress much more comfortable, the blankets thicker and warmer, the hearth larger and with more wood kept piled at the side so that we almost never ran out and suffered from cold on chill nights. I had not only a trunk at the foot of my bed to hold my possessions but a wardrobe as well, though I had to share the wardrobe with two other girls. In my new gowns and kirtles, sleeves and petticoats I no longer looked like a poor relation but a privileged, highborn young woman. A true Howard. I was proud in them—even though I could never forget that they had been bought with stolen coins.

  Soon after we moved into the large residence Uncle Thomas gave a banquet for the Clevan amb
assador in the great hall, with its high ceiling painted in bright blues and reds and greens, its tall gilded columns, its magnificent parquet floor and its wide high doors that opened onto the vast fragrant gardens. Long tables were laid with cream-colored napery and gleaming silver candlesticks, bowls of greenery and fresh flowers, silver and gold plate in abundance.

  I had never seen the like, and I marveled at the sight.

  But then, I too was in fresh array, and when I entered the great hall in company with some half dozen of my cousins, I was aware that I was much admired.

  The new wardrobe made for me by Spiershon the tailor was proving to be of great benefit to me. Master Spiershon had been only too glad to create a wardrobe for a niece of the great Duke of Norfolk, and his gowns were sumptuous: gowns of silk and velvet and Venetian brocade, in flattering colors of ash and lady blush and bear’s ear, carnation and dove grey and violet blue. There were light silk petticoats to match (for the season was warm), and full sleeves embroidered in silk ribbon, and stomachers and headdresses and fine woven silk for garters.

  “Not too large in the bodice!” Master Spiershon had barked to his assistants as the gowns were being fitted. “She is young. She must appear shapely but maidenly!”

  I hoped I did appear maidenly, and youthful, not coarsened by my experience in the duchess’s household. When I looked in the pier glass as I was being dressed on the night of my first banquet at Lambeth I saw a fresh-faced, happy, cheerful young woman. Not a knowing, shrewd one like Joan, or a timid, fretful one like Alice, or a superior, self-satisfied one like Charyn. I saw a face lit with anticipation, the eyes filled with jollity and the hope of amusement. The face of a girl who might be chosen to join the household of the new queen.

  “Is she going to be here tonight, the king’s new wife?” Alice asked me as we took our places at the long banqueting table.

  “Hush! No one knows for certain who his wife will be. The king’s men of business are merely talking to the ambassador from Cleves.”

  I felt very superior, knowing what little I did about the talks between the king’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, and the Clevans. The household was abuzz with rumor; I did not have to listen very long or very hard to gather what was going on. My uncle William Cotton had come to stay at Lambeth and he was well informed. He was fond of me and was usually willing to answer my questions, provided I did not pester him.

  I knew that the king needed a new wife, to give him more sons in case the young Prince Edward died. She had to be royal, or from the highest nobility. She could not belong to the Romish church, or owe obedience to the pope; that had been decided when the king married my cousin Anne. No more papists!

  The Clevans, it seemed, were not papists. So it was possible our king might marry one of them. But nothing was determined yet.

  I noticed Uncle Thomas and Grandma Agnes talking together and looking toward me and my cousins. Grandma Agnes glittered in a gown of gold bawdkin, while Uncle Thomas, his slight upper body covered in an elaborate doublet of quilted green velvet, a cap with a jaunty grey feather on his small dark head, stood out boldly from the handsome younger men around him.

  In another moment Uncle Thomas beckoned to us. Obediently my cousins and I rose at once and went to where he was sitting with the duchess. We dipped our knees in reverence. He scrutinized us, taking his time, scanning our bodies, then our faces.

  “Which of you is Jocasta’s daughter?” he asked.

  “I am Lord Edmund’s daughter,” I answered, speaking up and holding my head high. “My mother was the Lady Jocasta.”

  “Proud,” the duke said. “But fetching.” He looked more carefully at my lovely gown, his gaze lingering on the full yet maidenly bodice. He raised one eyebrow critically, then turned to his mother. He was about to speak when she silenced him.

  “No,” she said. “Not this one.”

  With a look of sudden anger he turned his face away. He was an ugly man, my uncle Thomas, with small piglike eyes and a nose that curved downward and thin, tightly pursed lips. Yet in that moment he looked uglier than ever. With another wave of his hand he dismissed us and we went back to our places at the long table.

  I had never before seen so many good-looking, charming, clever young men as at the banquet that night. Many wore the livery of Uncle Thomas’s household or Grandma Agnes’s, others the livery of the royal court. Lord Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal, had at least two dozen retainers to escort him, along with a large number of tall, muscular guardsmen. Archbishop Cranmer, Bishop Tunstal and Bishop Gardiner were well attended, as were the many lords and high officials who swept into the great hall with their richly garbed retainers at their heels.

  It was as if each great man (and one great lady, my grandmother) was in competition with every other, each vying with the others for the prize of most important, most honored, most wealthy, most powerful. Who would win? The king, I supposed. Surely the king was above every subject. And yet—I had heard Uncle Thomas mutter that the Howards were an older and more distinguished family than the Tudors, and that the Tudors were an upstart dynasty that did not deserve first rank.

  He was a haughty man, my uncle Thomas! Disdainful of others. Scornful of their claims to rank and privilege. In his own eyes he was above everyone—even God, the servants joked. And his eye had rested on me. Fortunately Grandma Agnes had said no to him. Though exactly what she had meant, what he might have intended doing or saying had she not interrupted him, I had no idea.

  As we dined I watched the table of honor where the dignitaries of highest rank were served. There sat the Clevan ambassador, between Lord Cromwell and Uncle Thomas. He did not look like a man of rank, but more like a stolid villager driving his oxen behind a plough. The expression on his broad, flat face was blank, he paid no attention to those around him or to the beauties of the great hall. He sat impassive, eating plateful after plateful of the delicacies set before him and emptying his goblet again and again. His manners were coarse, he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, on the back of his hand, even, I noticed, on the fine linen tablecloth. He did not make conversation but stared straight ahead, though those around him spoke to him and were clearly attempting to draw him out.

  I watched, fascinated. And as I watched, I could not help but notice that behind the ambassador, seated at a table of their own, were a group of women dressed in unattractive foreign garb. Their headdresses did not frame their faces like the headdresses we wore, but spread out to the side like spaniels’ ears. The bodices of their gowns were overly full and ill-fitting, the gowns themselves more like capes or mantles, with heavy low-hanging sleeves and drooping skirts. Were there no clever dressmakers in Cleves? For surely, I surmised, these were Clevan ladies. They had the same stolid look about them as the ambassador, the same blank expressions on their broad white faces, the same lack of animation.

  Joan would know. I leaned across the table and asked her who the women were, whether they came from Cleves.

  She nodded, and made a face.

  “The godmother, the sister, the aunts of Anna of Cleves.”

  Anna, I knew, was the woman who was being considered as a bride for King Henry.

  “Of course Anna herself remains at home. It would hardly be seemly for her to show herself here, like a prize mount being put up for auction.”

  The other girls who were within earshot at our table, overhearing Joan’s words, began to laugh.

  “I would not bid on any of those mounts, if I were the king,” I said, making the girls laugh once again. “They have stuffed themselves with too many oats!”

  “Such pockmarked skin,” I heard another of the girls say. “Do all the women of Cleves have the pox?”

  “Perhaps Anna is the beauty of the family,” Charyn put in. “Perhaps she puts these others to shame.”

  We left it at that, for as Charyn was finishing her thought a young man came up to the table where the Clevan women were sitting, and as soon as they saw him they began to smile and gesture and speak animatedly,
giggling like young girls and holding their hands before their mouths coquettishly.

  He was a very handsome young man indeed, slender, graceful, light on his feet, and with a most charming smile on his pleasing features. The musicians had begun to play and he led one of the older Clevan ladies in a dance. She was clumsy, her long heavy skirts weighed her down. But the young man adroitly kept her balanced, and I could tell that she was enjoying herself. Soon other partners came forward for the rest of the Clevan ladies, and then for Joan and Alice and the others of my cousins, and for me.

  I jumped and twirled and hopped with abandon, enjoying the music and the movement. But I could not wait until the dancing was over, so that I could find out who the handsome young man was, and how I might manage to see him again.

  * * *

  We were taken to London for the first time on the Feast of St. Sylvanus the Martyr and I could not sleep at all the night before, I was so excited.

  We rode in covered coaches, Charyn and I and Malyn and another girl I hardly knew, a very pretty girl named Mary Sidford, all together in one coach and the rest of my numerous cousinage in others. Twenty heralds rode before us, all wearing the brilliantly colored Howard livery, and announced our coming with a loud blare of trumpets and an even louder beating of drums. Dogs barked, horses whinnied in terror, and the people in the crowded streets scattered before us as we passed—or rather, as we attempted to pass, for time and again the narrow roadways were blocked by flocks of sheep and cattle being driven to the markets at Smithfield.

  From across the river I had seen the soaring tall spire of St. Paul’s, but once we entered the tangled warren of streets and alleyways all I could see were the old wooden buildings on either side of us, many leaning at angles over the street, whose blackened timbers made it plain that fire was an everpresent danger to Londoners.

  A great and nauseous stench arose to assault me, growing stronger the deeper into the city we went. We all took out our scented pomanders and held them under our noses, yet the stink was far stronger than their spicy scent. Wide streams of filth ran down the centers of the streets we passed through, I saw people empty waste buckets out of second-story windows onto the heads of passers-by beneath. Mounds of rotting food, dead animals, refuse of all kinds were heaped at street corners, covered with flies and running with sickly-looking liquids. I shuddered at the sight of rats scurrying down the alleys—fat, well-fed rats—in large numbers.