Maid of the King's Court

by Lucy Worsley

  One December afternoon I walked out in the abbey’s leafless orchard, huddled inside my cloak against an angry wind, but glad to be breathing in fresh air for a change.

  Our chamber inside the abbey had grown somewhat fetid. Katherine had so far refused to leave it, anxious, she said, not to miss any messenger coming from the king. This meant that it had been hard for the servants to clean it. We had been treated with great courtesy and dignity by these abbey servants. Katherine took this as no more than what was due to a queen, but I myself felt some shame. I could imagine the elderly steward and the similarly ancient cook-maid saying to themselves in the kitchens and corridors that we were just a couple of jumped-up girls who had misbehaved.

  As I pushed my way through the long wet grass under the trees, I was enjoying the feeling of life returning to my legs and entertaining myself by finding and counting the few shrivelled and spotted apples still clinging to the black branches. Then I noticed out of the corner of my eye a slight, dark female figure.

  I guessed that perhaps it was one of the nuns expelled from this place by the Lord Cromwell, come back for some reason unknown. The sight of a stranger in the abbey orchard made me uneasy. The place was so ancient and so quiet that it even crossed my mind that perhaps it was the spirit of one of the nuns of old, walking abroad. But not in full daylight, surely?

  The wind whipping my hair around my face and neck obscured my view of the woman approaching, but she was quickly coming towards me. She materialised into Anne Sweet, heavily wrapped in a black cloak, and her head muffled in a dark-coloured shawl.

  “Anne!” I said. “What are you doing here? You will be in trouble!”

  “It’s all right, Eliza,” she said, breathing a little heavily as she glanced around in all directions. “My escort is at the edge of the woods there. No one saw us arrive, and, in any case, the countess knows I am here. How are you, Eliza? You look tired. I’m sure I would look like a corpse if I was as pale as you are, but those violet stains under your eyes look rather romantic.”

  I was so pleased to see a friendly face, I could have cried. Anne, true to her nature, discerned that I was too proud to ask for a hug, so she hugged me anyway. “We are all worried about you!” she whispered into my ear. “It’s so good to see you.”

  Eventually she pulled away, and we went to sit on a stone seat in the shelter of the orchard wall, clearing it as well as we could of its heaped, rotting leaves.

  “What news of Katherine’s trial?” was my next question.

  Anne had little to tell me. “They’re keeping it from all the former members of her household,” she said. “They may yet call us back to give further testimony, you know.”

  At that I shivered.

  “Do you know what Katherine herself has admitted to the archbishop?” she asked.

  I didn’t know the answer to Anne’s question, but I suspected what it might be. To me, Katherine had stuck to the line that she had done nothing wrong. I believed that she placed such certainty in the king’s love for her that he would ultimately take her word over her accusers’. For myself, I suspected that this stiff pride in the face of so much evidence would lead to her downfall, and that she would have been better advised to confess all and hope for mercy.

  I told Anne as much. “But I cannot blame her for clinging on to this hope,” I added, “or she would have certainly lost her reason and her mind.”

  “I fear that the king will never relent,” Anne said, sighing. “They say that the fact he loved her so truly explains the betrayal he feels now.”

  There seemed little else to be discussed between us, and the wind was cold. After a final hug, Anne pattered off.

  “Just a moment!” I called.

  She turned back to me, hands busy rewrapping her head. “Who brought you here, Anne?”

  She tucked in her chin to disguise her grin. There was a hint of rose in her cheeks, I noticed, as her dimples deepened. “Master Barsby, of course!” she said lightly. “Shall I take him a message from you?”

  “Oh! … No, nothing from me, thanks.”

  But I wondered why she had not volunteered the information. And I wished I had not asked, because I now felt envious of their journey home together, back to warmth and safety and to some relief from the cares that made my head ache. Although I had felt that my duty compelled me to come here with Katherine, I had been left feeling more alone than ever in my life. When Anne’s slight figure had vanished from sight, I watched and waited for a long time, just in case someone else should appear.

  At length, shaking myself as if to wake from a daydream, I turned back to the grey abbey building.

  Some weeks later the order came that we were to travel to the Tower of London, once again by boat. By now I was so tense with waiting that it seemed almost a relief.

  There had been absolutely no personal word or message from the king, although we had been sent fine clothes for Katherine to wear. Katherine took great comfort in this. I could see that she was thinking that the gift showed that she had not been forgotten.

  On the morning of the journey, we sat silently in a room over the abbey’s gatehouse. The nuns of old must have looked out of this window for approaching travellers in need of hospitality or paupers in search of aid. But now I was watching for figures in red.

  Katherine was washed and clothed as best as I and the dressers I had drummed up from among the abbey servants could manage. It was so odd to me to see her careless about her appearance. This morning she was composed, although pale.

  “Who’s that?” Katherine asked from her place near the fire.

  “Shh, only the servants bringing logs from the forest,” I said, speaking soothingly as I might to a child. I was terrified that she would start her deranged howling once again. I could not bring myself to say that it was a column of troops.

  “But they’re coming up here!” she said, and indeed the steps were now loud on the stairs outside the room in which we waited.

  “Don’t worry, all will be well!” I said desperately. I went to stand behind her, my hand resting upon her shoulder as we both turned towards the door. Tears were already welling in my eyes.

  “Indeed,” she whispered, “I believe it. I know that my husband will forgive me, for he loves me. This will be his messenger at last.” At that she looked up at me and smiled, and placed her hand upon my own. Her faith nearly broke my heart.

  “Open up.” A stern voice accompanied a tap at the door. I crept to the door to open it. Outside was the tall figure of a guard. He had that air of invulnerability that I remembered from the yeomen guards we had seen standing outside the king’s rooms on our very first night at court.

  He gave me no chance to speak at all or to negotiate any kind of humane treatment for the queen. He thrust a paper towards me. Without delaying for me to read it, he marched across the room to where Katherine lay in a heap in her cushioned chair.

  When he took her arm, though, she suddenly became as tense and wild as a cat, clawing and spitting without words. But the room was now full of armed guards. Despite the desperate, horrible writhing of her body, they bundled her with ease down the stairs and across the gardens to the river.

  I stumbled behind as best as I could, though the tears in my eyes meant that I could hardly see my way. One of them splashed on to the parchment in my hand. I didn’t need to read it to know that it was a warrant for my cousin’s execution.

  We travelled down the River Thames and through the great city of London in bright sunlight. The weather was cold, but the glittering water made the city almost pretty, as if it were decked out in holiday clothes.

  As maids of honour, we had made this trip many times, from Westminster to Greenwich, from Whitehall to Richmond, riding in the king’s own barge, our watermen singing songs to us, and distant cheers floating across the water from crowds of watchers on the banks. Today, though, there was no one watching from the banks, and the watermen kept pace to the slow, heavy beat of a drum.

  Katheri
ne looked half dead, blindly turning her head from side to side, and I knew that she was still looking for a sign or message that the king had relented and had changed his mind about the need for her death.

  “Of course, many noble men and women have entered here and lived,” Katherine whispered to me as we arrived at the Tower. Despite their blank faces, I could tell that our guards were hoping Katherine would come quietly, and that they wouldn’t have to manhandle her again like they had done at Syon. I took her arm, talking to her, reassuring her. I, too, did not think I could bear any more violence.

  So we managed to get out of the boat and up the steps, to be received by the Governor of the Tower with a semblance of normality. He led us quickly to a fair chamber in the palace that nestled inside the Tower’s horrible walls of hard white stone.

  At the threshold, though, Katherine’s hard-won poise temporarily lapsed. “This room!” she said, clutching my arm. “This is the chamber where Queen Anne, Anne who was Anne Boleyn, that is, spent her last living night. They executed her out on the green just below.”

  “How do you know?” I asked, not because I disbelieved her, but because I thought it would be good to get her to answer questions rather than to give way to fear again.

  “Because my husband the king told me so the day he showed me the Tower and all its fine guns,” she said sadly. “And he also told me how deeply he’d been deceived by the vixen Anne Boleyn. I remember him saying, just here by the window, that he and I shared true love, not some strange enchantment as she had cast over him! He didn’t know himself in those days. He doesn’t quite know himself now.”

  The Governor of the Tower was now gesturing in servants, who brought with them ginger cordial and venison patties and some wrinkly black raisins of the east. They bowed shortly and left. I guessed that they had orders not to enter into any conversation with us. Once we were alone, we sat at the table to eat, again on my part for something to do, rather than because I was hungry.

  “Do you remember our banqueting table we prepared at Trumpton?” I asked Katherine. I had noticed that she was fingering the dried grapes. “And do you remember how beautiful it was?”

  “Oh, yes!” she said. “Those were happy days with the old duchess and Juliana and you and, of course … Francis.”

  “Katherine,” I began more earnestly. I looked her full in the face so that, with some reluctance, she was forced to raise her head and look back. “What … why … how did matters stand with you and Master Manham?”

  At this I lost her gaze, and it went back down to the table.

  “I can understand that you liked him when we were young, before we came to court.” I decided to battle on with my questions whether she would answer or not. “I liked him myself — all the girls did. But why would you run the risk of seeing him later, once you were queen?”

  I knew Katherine well enough to work out what she was thinking as she prised the raisins, one by one, from their wizened vine. She was calculating whether the release of information could harm her … and she decided that it couldn’t.

  “Well, Carrots,” she began. “You know that we were all coached and trained to get into the king’s bed.”

  “No!”

  I sat back in my seat, a little stunned by her boldness.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, almost with a smile in her voice. “You, personally, of course, did not like to believe such a thing; you thought you were too grand for it. But that was the message behind all our lessons. Think about it! How to dance, how to flirt, how to show off our bodies. Any one of us girls could have caught his eye, and our families, the Howards and the Camperdownes, did not care which of us it was.”

  “That’s not true!” I said crossly.

  “Really?” she said. “Has your own father never spoken to you about sleeping with the king?”

  Of course her arrow had struck home, and she could tell by my lowered gaze that her guess had been correct.

  “But to sleep with him is not enough,” she said, leaning forward and warming to her subject. “A subject’s duty, as the king’s wife or mistress or even his bedfellow for a single night, is to give him a son! The one thing that he needs, that England needs. The king’s son Edward is young and sick and likely to die. What the King’s Highness requires — at any cost — is a baby boy.”

  She paused to let this sink in.

  “But, Katherine,” I said, “you never found yourself in the condition of being with child, and for certain the king was with you very often. We all know how much he enjoyed your company in the bedchamber.”

  “Exactly,” Katherine hissed. She drew even closer to me, and I could smell the slight sourness of her breath. “It is treason to say it, but I believe that for all his love of frolicking, the king will never have a son. He … cannot act like a good husband should with his wife.”

  I sat still as stone, wishing that I had not heard this. It was treasonous to say something like this of the king, and if it were known by any other creature that I had heard her words, it could mean my death.

  “Which is where Master Francis came in,” she continued. I believe she was enjoying my discomfort. “You noted, of course, the colour of his hair?”

  “Indeed. It was red, like mine. Or like the king’s.” I spoke slowly.

  “Indeed it was,” Katherine said, “and his baby was likely to have red hair too. And Francis himself was well able to act as a man should towards his wife. For helping me with my great and sacred duty of trying to give the king a child, though, he was tortured, condemned, and put to death.”

  “You were planning to trick the king!” I cried. “To deceive him with Master Manham’s baby! How could you be so … so wrong and so bold?”

  Katherine looked at me — no, right through me — as if she were a hundred years old.

  “I had no choice,” she said tonelessly. “My family wanted me to catch the king. You knew that. Once I had caught him, I had to produce a baby or I would lose him. You think I took a great risk in trying to bear the baby of Master Manham …”

  I stared back at her, dismayed.

  “But if I failed to produce a baby, something I realised was impossible with the king, it would only have been a matter of time until I fell from his good graces. He would have moved on to someone else. I don’t think I could have borne that. It was a greater risk to remain a good and faithful wife.”

  And now, for the first time, I think, I felt the beginnings of true pity for her. Throughout all her wretchedness of the last few weeks, I had felt sorry, yes, for her pain, but also I had felt that her behaviour had been uncomprehendingly selfish. Now, for the first time, I saw that she had been caught in a trap not entirely of her own devising.

  We were roused by a tap at the door. Suddenly we were brought back to the present day and the horrible place in which we found ourselves.

  The Governor of the Tower was back. This time, his servants brought in with them a strange lump of wood, perhaps a footstool. They laid it on the floor before us.

  “My lady,” he said, “here is the block. I have had it brought that you might practise laying your head upon it, as you will need to on the morrow.”

  As Katherine knelt on the floor, leaning forward and sideways to the block with her neck, it was like a strange and horrible parody of the dance we had made up at Trumpton Hall, the “Dance of the Gentle Fawn.” I had hated to witness her twisting, spitting resistance to the guards earlier, but this was even worse. It was as if all the fight had gone out of her.

  I could no longer bear it, and strange stars and storm clouds seemed to whirl and wheel across my vision. I had to rush out of the room. Sinking on my heels onto the dirty floor of the passage and resting there, I closed my eyes and hoped that the fainting fit would pass.

  I’m not sure how long I spent there, squatting down on the floor, the chill of the stone seeping into my bones. It could have been minutes or hours. There was no room left in my heart for hope. It was so full of horror and despair.


  Eventually I was roused from my reverie by the tapping of little feet in leather slippers. A tiny boy stood before me in the passage. It took me a moment or two and a blink or two to recognise him as the youngest of all the pages of the royal household. He was dressed in a doublet and hose like a man, despite being only about ten years old. At the end of the corridor, I saw a couple of yeomen bobbing their heads to me. I had been so lost in my own misery that I had not heard the door opening to let him in.

  Slowly, I climbed to my feet, putting up my hands to smooth my hair. I was past caring that they had seen me on the floor.

  The young page now made a careful bow, but I could see that he was trembling a little under the pressure of performing his duties. I could also see that he was holding out in his palm a folded letter. My heart leapt. A letter! This was the reprieve!

  I grabbed it, speculated whether to take it in to Katherine or to read it first. But the boy was shaking his head, his chubby cheeks wobbling a little comically from side to side. “For you, m’m,” he mumbled, unwittingly bringing back a memory of Little Em, who was now missing an ear.

  “Thank you,” I said huskily. My throat was painfully dry. I couldn’t bear to wait until I was alone. I ripped the paper open with clumsy fingers.

  In a second I was back on the floor, doubled up in another fit of weeping. It wasn’t the reprieve, but it was the next best thing.

  The note contained just one word: Courage!

  And it was in the hand of Ned Barsby.

  The next morning, I felt that I was a century older and wiser than I had been the day before.

  I had stayed all night by Katherine’s bed, praying, talking to her in the moments when she was awake, and, at other times, simply looking at the wall and thinking. When it got too much, I lifted my head, looked out at the moon through the window, and remembered Ned’s note. Courage! Courage!

  Katherine, strange to say, did pass some hours asleep, and I think that she drew her strength from her belief that in the end her husband would still soften and commute her sentence to prison or maybe exile, like Anne of Cleves, the king’s sister.