The Boleyn Wife

by Brandy Purdy

  Smiling broadly, Henry held out his hand to clasp hers. “Let us be off, sweetheart. I want all of England to see what a lucky man I am to have you by my side!”

  As I nudged my horse forward, I looked back and saw Queen Catherine standing at the window overlooking the courtyard, gazing wistfully after the departing figure of her husband, the King. She raised a hand to her lips and blew him a farewell kiss.

  But Henry, at the head of that magnificent cavalcade thousands strong, which would accompany him on the summer progress, never once looked back. Catherine was a part of his life he was determined to put behind him; she was the past, and Anne Boleyn was the future.

  When we returned Catherine would be gone. She would spend the rest of her life being shunted from one dilapidated, crumbling castle to another, freezing in winter, surrounded by noxious, reeking marshlands in summer, her health steadily deteriorating. Henry would show her no mercy; his envoys would hound, bully, and beseech her tirelessly, in a vain attempt to make her repudiate her marriage vows. They even kept her apart from her beloved daughter, Princess Mary, as punishment, hoping to weaken her resolve, and even denied mother and child the consolation of letters. They promised her a life of quiet comfort and rest, and restoration to the King’s good graces. She could style herself the Dowager Princess of Wales and Henry would always think of her fondly as the widow of his dead brother.

  But Catherine would not be swayed; she would answer to no other title but Queen of England until the last breath left her body, and if she must wear rags and sit in the midst of a stinking swamp, then so be it; come what may, to God and her conscience, she would be true.

  Wolsey would soon join Catherine in banishment and disgrace, to live out the rest of his life deprived of the shining sun of Henry’s favor.

  When he came to join the court at Grafton, he found that there was no place, no room, no bed, for the man who for twenty years and more had been the King’s right hand.

  In the courtyard he stood alone, wounded and bewildered, pacing the cobblestones, sweating in his voluminous scarlet robes, while the courtiers kept their distance, whispering and smirking. Only one person deigned to show pity. Kind Henry Norris detached himself from his friends and crossed the cobbles to offer Wolsey his room. And so at the end of his glorious career the great Cardinal Wolsey was forced to humbly bow his head and accept charity from one of Anne Boleyn’s most ardent supporters.

  The gentle scholar Thomas More took Wolsey’s place as Chancellor, and Wolsey retreated to his long-neglected bishopric of York to hide from the King’s anger and mourn all that he had lost.

  12

  During that dull and listless summer when all were, like Anne, weary of waiting and wondering, Anne impulsively decided to visit her grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. Thus we piled into a barge and journeyed forth to Lambeth, where Agnes Tilney, that wizened old coquette, spent her days primping and painting her face, dreaming of past and future glories, planning the gowns she would wear to Anne’s coronation and the christening of the prince Anne would most assuredly bear, and turning a blind eye to the fact that her servants’ quarters were rife with debauchery. The Maids’ Chamber, the long room at the top of the house where her ladies-in-waiting slept, was practically a brothel, except its denizens gave their favors away for free or for paltry gifts of fruit, flowers, and hair ribbons.

  The Dowager Duchess arranged an impromptu picnic upon the sprawling green lawn, and while we lolled back on plump silk cushions and feasted on strawberries and cream, honey cakes, and wine, she regaled us with gossip. Though she was now well into her sixth decade, she flirted like a girl—a very wanton girl—goading Norris that he had been a widower far too long and if he did not find himself another wife soon she would lead him to the altar herself.

  “Flaxen, raven, and scarlet,” she sighed wistfully, ruffling the hair of Norris, Brereton, and Weston, seated in a cluster round her feet. “I don’t know which of you boys I like best! Were I but ten years younger, I would give in to temptation and find out!”

  “Methinks someone is not so indecisive,” Anne said slyly, indicating the tiny girl staring in wide-eyed fascination at the dazzling figure of Francis Weston. Like one entranced, the auburn-haired tot was creeping forward and reaching out a tentative hand to touch one of the fine, shapely legs encased in lime green hose with ruby-encrusted garters twinkling above his knees.

  “Katherine Howard!”

  Upon hearing her name screeched so shrilly, the child started and snatched her hand away. In her guilty confusion, she tripped over her skirts and fell sprawling flat on her back at Weston’s feet.

  “Oh!” The Dowager threw up her hands. “Get up, you clumsy chit, get up! You’re five years old, and it’s high time you were learning some grace! Go and make your curtsy; greet your cousin Anne!”

  “Is this my little cousin Katherine, then?” Anne asked.

  “Aye, one of that hapless wastrel Edmund’s passel of brats,” the Dowager affirmed glumly. “Couldn’t feed ’em all or keep ’em in shoes, so he sent this one to me! Out of the goodness of my heart I’m to rear her up to be a lady and see her properly wed. She’s a Howard, even if she springs from a poor branch, and the Howards breed fine women, like your mother, Anne. Elizabeth Howard, now she was a rare beauty; it was fortunate your father was to snare her!”

  But Anne was not listening to the tale of her parents’ courtship. Lying back against a heap of cushions in her white silk gown and black damask kirtle, lazily plying her fan of white ostrich plumes and letting George feed her strawberries, she was studying the shy little figure in the patched and faded moss green frock bobbing a hasty curtsy before her.

  She was so tiny it was hard to credit that she was five; I myself had judged her to be no more than three.

  “Come here, Little Kat,” Anne beckoned, drawing Katherine down to sit beside her. “Do not mind Grandmother overmuch; her bark is worse than her bite.” Her fingers played gently with the long auburn curls, twisting them into smooth ringlets. “Attend well to your lessons, Little Kat, and learn the proper graces, and when you are older I shall send for you to be one of my ladies.”

  “R-Really?” The child’s face lit up with the most radiant and hopeful of smiles.

  Anne nodded and smiled as Katherine impulsively threw her arms around her neck, ignoring the Dowager’s appalled exclamations that this was no way to behave, that a well-brought-up girl mustn’t be so free with her embraces.

  “You are going to be a great beauty someday, Katherine Howard,” Anne prophesied. “It is fortunate that I shall be an old woman by the time you come to court, else I should fear you as a rival. See now”—she tilted her head towards the bevy of men teasing Francis Weston about his latest conquest—“already you have set the men’s tongues wagging; they can talk of nothing else but you, and I”—she sighed in mock melancholy—“am all forgotten!”

  “Never!” the men shouted as they rushed to surround Anne and reassure her of devotion deep as the ocean and high as the sky.

  “Aye, the sly little minx already has quite an eye for the men,” the Dowager acknowledged sourly, her rouged lips taut with disapproval.

  “Do not fault her for being drawn to Francis,” Anne coaxed smilingly. “He is quite the peacock, and when he struts about in his finery few are the eyes that are not dazzled.”

  “It is true.” George nodded. “When he wanders into the palace gardens the peacocks sulk and hide their heads beneath their wings because they cannot compete with his glory.”

  “Hush, now!” Weston cried, making a great show of tweaking and puffing the scarlet satin peeping through the slashed, lime green sleeves of his doublet. “You will give the child the impression that I am vain!”

  “Oh surely not!” George scoffed as they all burst into laughter.

  Only I sat silent and apart. I was never included in their jests unless I was the butt. In their eyes I was like the grass beneath their feet, born to be stepped upon. I knew full w
ell that I had only been invited to accompany them because it was not seemly for Anne to gad about in exclusively male company.

  “Come, Jane!” My husband called me like a dog. They were ready to depart. “Come, Jane!” he repeated as he gave his arm to Anne. And I was left to shift for myself, to rise to my feet unaided and make my own way back to the barge.

  “Poor George!” I heard that wrinkled white prune, with her gaudy rouged cheeks and garish red gown, sigh dolefully. “What a sour countenance your wife has; one would think she was sucking upon a lemon!”

  And once again I became their joke—“Sourpuss Jane!”

  Flustered and furious, I dropped my fan.

  With a timid smile, little Kat Howard retrieved it. And when she looked up at me, there was such open, earnest kindness in her little face, and in those beautiful amber-flecked green eyes, that my heart felt as if it had been plunged into a warm bath.

  There was no mockery in her gaze; no pity, condescension, or scorn in that angel face.

  Separated from her father and nine siblings, her mother dead of too many children and woes, lodged with her sharp-tongued grandmother and wanton, lust-mad maids, Katherine Howard just wanted someone to love her.

  “Thank you, Katherine,” I whispered fervently; then, as tears welled in my eyes, I turned and ran back to the barge; George and the others were getting impatient.

  “Don’t dawdle, Jane! Do hurry up, Jane!”

  Ten years would pass before I would see Katherine Howard again and learn what an angel will do for love.

  13

  The decisions of the universities began to slowly trickle in as the year neared its end.

  The English colleges, Oxford and Cambridge, were, as was to be expected, in support of the King, Spain was vehemently opposed, and Italy undecided. The German Lutherans were eager to strike a blow against Catholicism and lent their support, though most personally disapproved. And the French gave their support only because their king emphasized the need to have England as an ally.

  A petition was drawn up, signed by all who supported the divorce, and sent to the Pope. But still Pope Clement dithered, unwilling to commit to a decision.

  And soon a new treachery was revealed. Wolsey had been in secret communication with the Pope, urging him to issue an ultimatum threatening the King with excommunication if he did not abandon Anne Boleyn. Thus Wolsey sealed his doom and signed his own death warrant.

  Upon a frigid November day at Cawood Castle, near his diocese of York, Wolsey was just sitting down to dine when his chamberlain announced a most unexpected guest. Harry Percy, now the Earl of Northumberland in his own right, had come to arrest the Cardinal.

  Poor Percy, I heard, trembled and spoke so faintly that Wolsey had to lean forward with a hand cupped round his ear and ask thrice for him to repeat the stumbling, stammering words: “In th-the n-n-name of th-the K-K-King, I…I…I a-r-r-rest y-you f-for h-high tr-tr-treason.”

  Percy was so overcome by the enormity of his task that he nearly fainted and had to snatch Wolsey’s wine goblet off the table and gulp down its contents.

  They took to the road early the next morning, the horses’ hooves slipping precariously upon the ice and slush, shivering in the freezing drizzle and blasts of icy wind. And through it all, Wolsey was forced to endure the supreme indignity of having his legs bound beneath his horse like a common felon’s.

  They stopped to dine at Sheffield Park, the home of Percy’s father-in-law. And there, after partaking of a dish of baked pears, Wolsey was overcome by a violent attack of colic and diarrhea. An apothecary was summoned and by the next morning Wolsey had recovered enough to resume the journey. He made it as far as Leicester Abbey, where he collapsed in the arms of the Abbot and died proclaiming, “If I had served God half as well as I served the King, He would not have forsaken me in my gray hairs!”

  The nature of his death occasioned much speculation. Many believed a dose of poison had killed him. But Percy had taken great care to have all the Cardinal’s meals tasted. Even the apothecary was forced to wait while his remedy was tested before a drop was allowed to pass Wolsey’s lips. Some thought that Wolsey himself, determined to outwit Anne and cheat the headsman’s axe, had carried a few grains of a most potent poison secreted inside the hollow of a ring or hidden in the hem of his scarlet robes. I suppose we will never really know.

  At court, Anne and her coterie celebrated his demise with a special masque called “Cardinal Wolsey Goes To Hell,” wherein they donned garish costumes equipped with red devil horns and tails, painted their skins red, and danced the Cardinal off to the fiery pit of Hell, even as he cowered fearfully and begged and pleaded for God’s mercy. Francis Weston had a grand time playing Wolsey, swirling his voluminous scarlet robes about at every opportunity to display his handsome legs sheathed in scarlet hose and the rubies winking on his garters. Myself—though I had no great liking for the late Cardinal—I found the whole spectacle in very poor taste.

  Anne now occupied the Queen’s rooms and lived as if she were Queen already. She was given precedence over every other lady at court, including the King’s sister.

  The Duchess of Suffolk quit the court in protest, and her husband loudly proclaimed within the King’s hearing that, though Anne could be called many things, “The Night Crow,” “The Goggle-Eyed Whore,” and “The Concubine,” to name but a few, “Virgo Intacta” was not one of them; it was common knowledge that she had carnally known both the poet Wyatt and Harry Percy.

  The King was outraged; he had long been convinced that Anne was a true maid, bound and determined to preserve her precious chastity until their wedding night.

  And oh, I was jubilant! My face was wreathed in smiles, and I wanted to sing and jig round the room. Now George’s “darling Nan” would surely get her comeuppance! It was not meet to deceive the King about one’s maidenhead! I knew full well that virgin she was not; with my own eyes I had witnessed the surrender.

  This time it was Weston who rushed to warn her. Perhaps he was not just playing the court gallant when he said to her, “Lady, I would swim through seas of fire to save you!”

  Again, Anne did not hesitate. She stormed through the crowded antechamber, head held high, insolent and proud, and came to a halt before Henry.

  “You may summon a midwife to examine me and prove that I am as true a maid as any woman who graces this court,” she announced, “but—if you do—then know that I shall lose all the respect I have for you. I could never love a man who doubts me!”

  Then she was gone in the same manner she had come.

  It was a bold gamble and a brazen lie, though genuine virtue was a rare commodity in any royal court, despite maidenly protestations to the contrary. Anne staked all on the hope that Henry would not send for a midwife and prove her false, and once again she triumphed.

  With all my heart, I wanted to rush at Francis Weston like a screaming harpy and claw out his remaining eye, I hated him so much. Even more than that I wanted to hurt Anne; I wanted to see her brought low and suffer as much as she had made me. She had stolen what was rightfully mine—George’s love—and somehow, someday, I swore to God and all his saints, and Satan and all his imps, I would make her pay for it.

  The crisp morning of September 1, 1532, found me wearing a new red damask gown and standing behind Anne, brushing her hair into a lustrous black gloss, while the peers of the realm assembled downstairs in the Great Hall at Windsor Castle to witness an unprecedented ceremony.

  Anne was to be created the Marquess of Pembroke in her own right, independent of any man; she was to bear a man’s title and take precedence over all the peers of the realm. And, most significantly, the title would pass to any male child born of her body, lawfully begotten or not.

  This last sparked rumors that Anne was with child, while others speculated that this honor was a parting gift to recompense Anne for all her wasted years.

  “Nay, Jane,” Anne explained as I drew the brush through her hair, “I mean to safegua
rd my future. I am sure you have noticed that the King is a large and determined man, endowed with an ardent nature and powerful physique; should he force his will upon me, his kingship bars me from defending myself as I would against any other man who dared the same. By tempting him I play with fire, and one cannot play with fire without risking burns, so, come what may, I mean to be prepared; I must protect myself.”

  Regally gowned in crimson velvet trimmed with ermine, Anne knelt before the King as a private gentlewoman and stood up a marquess.

  But things were changing. Though Henry continued to profess his undying love and shower her with gifts, there hung about him the brooding air of a man who has grown tired of waiting and is beginning to wonder whether it is really worthwhile….

  14

  Anne’s sweetness towards the King was souring fast. Her temper grew increasingly tart and shrill as she began to nag, berate, and rage at him until they quarreled more than they kissed. And odds were being laid that the end was near.

  A visit to Calais to meet the King of France was being planned. Anne was to accompany the King and it was being wagered that though she might travel across the Channel in queenly fashion, she would return as a discarded mistress.

  As Anne reclined upon a couch, blatantly reading one of her forbidden books, her father came in.

  Thomas Boleyn was not a man to mince words.

  “Your hold on him is slipping.”

  “Is it?” Anne arched her brows, stretched her arms above her head, and yawned in feigned disinterest.