Fatal Throne: The Wives of Henry VIII Tell All

by M. T. Anderson

  My bully-boy Cromwell displayed the accounts and I sat on my horse above him. Servants of the Crown were burning books and fraudulent holy artifacts. The leg of a local saint that stupid peasant-women kissed to cure…in faith, whatever rot besets peasant-women…It was clearly a dog-bone in a box. Cromwell’s men threw it on the bonfire, along with the monks’ straw mattresses.

  The monks wailed as their dog-bone burned.

  Cromwell yammered on about acreage, about the yield in rents, but my mind was not on the account of demolition and dissolution.

  That May was a month of building.

  The scaffolds. Five for her lovers: timber platforms to receive their blood, their heads. One for her. I knew she sat in her rooms in the Lieutenant’s Tower, looking out the window day by day as they built her scaffold. She watched them raise the platform where she would soon take her final fall.

  Once we built a palace wing together. We lay on a bed side by side—her dark hair unbound across her dimpled back—with plans spread around us. I asked her what she wanted for her apartments. She was always quick to see the practicalities, and spoke with the architects about all she needed. She chose all the queenly adornments. It was a game we played before we were married. Once we were wed, I was good as my word, and turned our plans to stone.

  By my order, hundreds worked to build Anne’s apartments. The walls would glitter with silver and gold, hung with Persian tapestries; her ceilings were mirrored. Her beds were draped with sarcenet and costly satins. The gates announced our love with her initial intertwined with mine, “A” and “H” in a lovers’ knot. The masons and carpenters could not finish their work quickly enough for my Queen. I demanded that they work by night as well as day, by candle-light, however dim the chambers and half-built paths might be.

  Once we stole there at the darkest hour to stand in the half-constructed courtyard. Our arms around each other, we listened to that black space building itself with chisel taps and the scrape of trowels.

  She asked me in a whisper, the kitten, “Will it be beautiful?”

  “It will, because it is yours. It is arriving out of the night like our future; like our heirs.”

  Outside her windows, I laid out a garden for her in the French manner with hedges that would grow into marvellous shapes as the years passed.

  The French manner—she did everything in the French manner. Her hair, her gowns. Everything. With anyone.

  Idiocy—idiocy! To think that slut could be a queen—I was so deceived—so fond—so foolish. How were my eyes not wrenched open by her sister, Mary, called in jest by King Francis the English Mare because so many men had ridden her—as he had, sidesaddle—as I did, too, for many months before I spied crafty Anne—Anne, who was taught Christ knows what lessons in the turrets and spires of Paris by the Devil knows what horde of men and snuffling boys. She was a master with me, and now I think of those gardens outside her windows and wonder whether she met the musician Smeaton there—Smeaton, a beggar dressed so poorly I once threw him some shirts—warbling to my wife, to the Queen of England, and then her whore’s simper, ending with them rutting behind a topiary sphere.

  I should have known better when I took her to the shores of France shortly before our marriage. I took her there so that King Francis would recognize Anne as my Queen—but then none of the women of his court would agree to receive her. Francis’s own sister said she would not meet with “the King of England’s whore.” It was suggested by the French ambassador that the most appropriate lady to greet Anne would be Francis’s own mistress, the Duchess of Vendôme.

  I would not subject Anne to that indignity. She stayed at Calais; I went ahead to visit Francis, and when my work was done, I returned to Anne, and we dallied during the long rains. She wanted the Queen’s jewels—the jewels of my ancestors, of my dear Katharine—Anne wanted them all for herself, for her perquisite.

  And I—misled!—wanted what Anne had denied me for so many years. Duped by her cunning, I felt sorry for her—my poor beloved (as I thought), rejected by the royalty of France. I wanted to shield her from knowing the disgrace she caused me.

  So while we idled there in Calais and the rains fell, one day I hid a strand of black pearls in my sleeve. I drew Anne out into a stable, which was the only place we could find that was solitary. It was so cold, in faith, that I chafed her hands to keep them warm, and then her feet. On touching the intimacy of her toes, I couldn’t wait any longer. I said to her that it was time….I took out the strand of pearls, which she must have known were Katharine’s before her. She eyed them with hunger like a chick squawking for the worm.

  Deluded, I didn’t see that hunger, then. I saw only her joy. It is only in memory that I have realized how quickly she grasped the strand, how desperate she was for it to be latched around her neck.

  And then—I groan to think of that first dalliance, the pleasure and destruction.

  It thundered overhead. God Himself gave me ample warning.

  When the King of France finally visited our lodgings for a feast (without any women in his train), I concocted a plan to force him to recognize my future Queen. I held a disguising, and arranged for Francis to dance with Anne, who was masked as a woodland spirit. He did not know her from her step. When she finally drew off the mask and tossed its oak leaves aside, teasing him, he was angry, but could not show it before the crowd. Then Anne tamed the King of France, asking questions about her old friends there, retelling rank gossip from when she was a girl. An hour later, he was laughing at her jests.

  I should have known that nothing good would come of a woman the French themselves would not deign to greet.

  They were laughing at me. I am sure they were laughing because I had invited a common whore into my bed. I paid her with a strand of pearls.

  She was a brazen one: laughing openly at my clothes, laughing at the poems I wrote her, laughing at me with the others she bedded. Screeching at me like a Cheapside fishwife about my women, and all the while casting her eyes at other men.

  When we were first in love, I was charmed by her bravery in speaking her mind to me—her frankness, as I thought it—her boldness. But as the year passed, I could hear only insult to me, a lack of the respect due a king. Hideous squawking from one who should bow to me always.

  Then there was Thomas Cromwell, coming to me murmuring about her crimes. When he told me for the first time, Anne was out watching a dogfight in Greenwich Park. While she watched cur rip bitch, heard the baying and the jeers, I sat in silence, reading the depositions of her lovers. I hoped that it was not true.

  Reading of all the abominations—with her brother—Christ have mercy. To curl side by side as babes in the cradle, and then squirm together on the bed of fornication…Unspeakable.

  And Cromwell, who pried all this information out of her gallants through close questioning and the use of curious devices and instruments of pain—he now wishes to talk to me of acreage and rents.

  “Quite profitable, as you can see, Your Majesty,” he finished, and I was still seated on my horse by the pyre where books and a sainted leg bone burned.

  She and I built a palace wing together; we decorated it for pleasure and the future; and now, she sits watching the scaffold being constructed; and at another palace, the limbs of disobedient heretics have been nailed above the gate. The whole world shall know the fury of a king, and what I build in my anger.

  Cromwell tapped the list of items requisitioned from the monastery. “Good thing we didn’t let Anne throw all this away—giving to beggars and poor widows who’d spend it all on drink.”

  I watched him crow about his Queen’s defeat. He said, “The most absurd idea that whore ever had.”

  And then I began to pummel him. I was above, on my horse, so after the first few blows hit him, he bent down below the reach of my arm. Not, however, my boot—and I kicked him full in the side of the face. He fell to the ground, begging me for mercy.

  “Don’t speak of her,” I warned him. “She will be dead
soon enough.”

  “As you wish—as you wish, Your Majesty.”

  So he said. But he was unrepentant.

  I took in his face, the bitter cleverness of it, and I growled, “If I ever found that someone—anyone—even you—had given me false information about her…false evidence…By God! By God! If I ever discovered that…”

  I could not put the finish on my threat.

  She must be guilty. There could be no question. I had loved her for her laughter, her impish laughter, and then she had laughed in my face, giggling in the dark while toying with paupers. In two days, she would be dead. In three, Jane, sweet Jane, would be my betrothed. Soothing Jane. Jane, who had no wiles, who had no French tricks, who wished only to help, to heal. To bear an heir. She would arrive for the first time at Hampton Court by barge, and I would take her to Anne’s apartments, which would be hers, until I could build better.

  Anne must have been guilty.

  Thomas Cromwell stared up at me from the mud. The smoke from books of monkish lore blew over us.

  He spoke apologies, mewled for mercy.

  But we glared into each other’s eyes like men who have ruined each other already, and who only wait to make the full disaster known.

  HAMPTON COURT

  24 October 1537

  There is blood. Blood everywhere. Blood on the sheets, blood between my legs. It is thick and red and sour.

  There is blood on my hands, too.

  WULFHALL

  March 1525

  They are sending me away.

  “Lady Dormer absolutely refuses the match,” Sir Francis Bryan’s voice rings out, echoing down the hallway. “I did what I could, my lady. I am sorry.”

  Dinner had been cleared nearly an hour prior, and now I hide like the frightened lamb I am behind the heavy wooden door of an empty sleeping chamber. My mother and Sir Francis have remained in the hall of my ancestral home, to confer quite dramatically. I imagine my mother’s ringed fingers turning her goblet around and around, making circles on the dark grain of the table.

  My mother is silent. In the quiet space that follows Sir Francis’s pronouncement, I swear I can hear her mind at work. “Can you find a place for Jane at court?” she finally says in response.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Sir Francis replies. “I am certain the Queen will have a spot in her household.”

  * * *

  —

  “You will go to court to serve as a maid of honour to Queen Katharine,” my mother tells me later, her command ringing in my ears like the church bell’s death knell. “Lady Dormer has succeeded in staving off the match between you and William.”

  “But, Mama—” My voice quavers as the humiliation of Lady Dormer’s rejection and alarm at my fate sets in. I hate how weak I sound. How weak I always sound. Tears are quickly welling in my eyes, spilling out onto my cheeks. I always cry. I hate that, too. “Mama…I shall be so very far from you. I don’t want to go. I’m sorry Lady Dormer did not want me for her son. But please. Don’t make me go.”

  Bess, my younger sister, squeezes my hand. I glance at her; I can feel the stricken look in my eyes. I have failed my family and, above all, myself. I did not love William, but I had hoped we might make a life together. Now, all hopes are dashed.

  Bess’s forehead wrinkles and she puts an arm around me. I am not comforted, for my mind is a chaos of hurt feelings and thoughts flying in all directions: I will never have a family of my own; I will never see my beloved sister again—how I shall miss her company. Instead, I will die alone—childless and unwed.

  “Jane, you will go. It is the only option left. And moreover, it is up to you to return honour to our family. After the shame of this rejection, and your father’s…misdeeds…” My mother’s voice trails off.

  Yes, my father’s misdeeds indeed. Carrying on an affair with the wife of my eldest brother, Edward, all those years back—I was just a child then. He sullied what had been our family’s respectability and nobility. My brothers’ hopes of ever achieving any triumph at court were dashed. Not to mention Edward’s life falling apart when he abandoned my two small nephews after he put out his wretched, disloyal wife. It was a terrible affair.

  I have learned the character of men.

  And now it seems a life of maidenhood and restoring our family’s reputation has become my burden to bear.

  “And when you are at court,” my mother continues, “you shall carry yourself in the most dignified manner any courtier or royal family member has ever seen. You will carry the Seymour name back to glory.” She leaves a brief, cool kiss on my cheek, then sweeps away.

  I don’t want to leave Wulfhall, out here in the west country, far from the drama and intrigue of court. I know what awaits me there. Lechery, secrets, and deception. I want nothing to do with it. And I certainly do not want to leave my beautiful home, the warmth of my mother’s and sisters’ company. Even my brothers’ teasing.

  I know exactly who I am: unwanted and undesirable Plain Jane, timid and meek as a mouse. How will I ever survive at court?

  * * *

  —

  I bid farewell to the dusky red roses in my Young Lady Garden. I love how they climb wildly, tangling and tousling stems and thorns, petals of bloody sunset blanketing the ground. I love that there is no discernible order to this garden, planted who knows how long ago. No one in my family seems to know who the Young Lady for whom it is named is—or, for that matter, who the Old Lady is, after whom the other “Lady” garden is named. Oh, how I shall miss wandering through here, weaving my way between the rosebushes, inspecting the leaves for the telltale marks of insects or other sickness! This is my time, when I am free from the monotonous rhythm of needlework.

  Still. It is what I know.

  Bess skips outside and takes hold of my arm as I mournfully wind my way down the path. “I shall miss you something dreadfully,” she says.

  “And I shall miss you, my darling Bess,” I say in return. “Do you think we shall see each other again?”

  “Of course, my dearest one, we will,” she says reassuringly. “And I am sure you shall be betrothed to someone far better than William Dormer in no time. A dashing knight, perhaps,” she teases.

  I smile back but feel far from confident.

  “Bess, you know I wish you every happiness. Lots of bouncing babies and all that.” I squeeze her arm and turn to embrace her. “Truly, I want you to be happy.”

  “Yes, well, we shall see what the future holds,” she says dryly. “I’m a bit apprehensive, I must admit. Sir Anthony is very old!” We giggle and link arms again. “Jane, you will be fine at court. Just keep your eyes open and your thoughts to yourself. Find one friend who is true and trust no one else,” she instructs. “Now I shall leave you to your rosebushes.” She gives me one last embrace before ducking back inside the house.

  I inhale the scent of my beautiful musk and Tudor roses one final time, gather my things, and enter the carriage to go east, to court.

  * * *

  —

  The ride is bumpy and makes my joints, my bones, my head shudder and ache. The road, if you can call it that, is rutted and thick with the mud of late-summer rains. Twice the driver has had to jump out and nudge one of the wheels out of a sopping puddle. I don’t mind the delays, though. They prolong the time till my arrival at court, and that is a good thing. Already, I miss the feel of Bess’s warm embrace. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be back in our bed, whispering and giggling by the light of the candle’s flame. But she is to be married, and I am to court. And so I have bade farewell to all that I have loved and known.

  GREENWICH PALACE

  July 1525

  This nest of snakes is as treacherous and slippery as you might imagine. The women in Queen Katharine’s court gossip and scheme without end. More than fifteen years have passed since King Henry and Queen Katharine married, and still the Queen has not born a male heir who can someday inherit the throne of England. These women whisper that she is barren now, and
that the King is growing ever more impatient. He certainly barrels around the court looking restless, angry. They say that he will be seeking drastic measures sooner rather than later. Oh, the rumours swirl. The women giggle and hiss as new girls, one after another, try to catch Henry’s attention.

  We spend our days in the Queen’s apartments, a series of chambers decorated with heavy tapestries of wool and silk, hangings of cloth of gold. It is all truly resplendent, unlike anything I have ever seen. There are about thirty of us maids of honour, but the Queen also has ladies-in-waiting, and of course the noblemen who oversee her household. All together, there are more than one hundred fifty people who come in and out.

  In the evenings, we often gather in the great hall for dining and dancing and music. There are people everywhere. It seems as if the King allows all sorts of individuals to come to court—as long as one is well dressed or professes some magnificent business. There is much waiting and hanging about.

  How the courtiers love to fight amongst themselves. They divide into ever-shifting factions that then manoeuvre against the others until the next division seems more powerful. It is a constant game of strategy, conflict, and quiet wars.

  One maid of honour leads many of the others in their serpent games: Anne Boleyn, she is called. She is newly returned to court, and already leads. She is striking, with bright, birdlike features and dark, piercing eyes. She daren’t taunt me too boldly to my face, as Queen Katharine strives to keep her household proper and genteel, but I so clearly do not fit in here. I know Anne and the other girls mock and laugh at me. My skin is too white, my chin too weak, my nose too big, my reputation too sullied after Lady Dormer refused my betrothal to William. My heritage too tarnished. Thus the scorn I bear. Plain Jane of the disgraced Seymour family.