Fatal Throne: The Wives of Henry VIII Tell All

by M. T. Anderson

  “Your Highness…Your poor Highness.”

  “Not poor. Far from it. Even wounded, I do what other men cannot when they are whole.” Through gritted teeth, I insisted, “This leg is not a weakness, therefore, but a proof of strength. A new victory every day over pain.”

  She agreed, and thereafter, she would smile with pride at my stoical strength when she saw me lowered onto my horse with a crane—for after a certain time, I had to be lifted by an engine—a temporary measure until my health improves. (Consider instead that harridan Anne, who could not stop herself from gagging at the smell of my ulcers when they appeared.)

  That moment when she unwound the garter from my leg—a ribbon embroidered with my motto, “Evil to him who thinks evil”—that was the undressing that caused me to love her.

  She would be my refuge. The embrace of warm darkness and sweet understanding after the harsh trumpets and alarms of court. Someone I could trust, after all this time. Someone who knew how to take me into her arms, though I was so much larger than she (a bear embraced by a mouse!), and let me lie there, peacefully.

  I cannot believe that she is gone. So short a time.

  I once said that kings ran in my blood. Now her blood is on the sheets. My blood fought off its own corruption. And yet, in this beautiful boy she birthed, my blood lives on.

  I held him tight, when I was done holding her. She grew colder. He was warm.

  I admit no defeat when I say: That night, and for many nights after, I cried.

  7 JULY 1557

  Chelsea Manor

  There is a vulture in my room.

  He perches by my window.

  Is he one of Henry’s men?

  They all look like dark-winged scavengers.

  It’s the long black robes they wear, with ruffs about the neck.

  It’s their eyes, too. So bright. So shrewd. Alert to every weakness.

  It’s the way they circle their victims. Then bide their time in the safety of the high branches as the wounds leak blood.

  Wherever they lead, Death follows.

  This one waits and watches.

  Trying to lead Death to me.

  * * *

  —

  “Lady Anna, can you hear me?”

  Like a drowning woman, I struggle out of the black depths towards the surface. Gasping. Writhing. Clutching at my sheets.

  “You cried out, my lady. Are you in pain?”

  I force my eyelids up. And regret it.

  The sun’s rays, slanting in through my windows, are like shards of glass in my eyes. And the pain in my belly…God in Heaven, the pain.

  “She needs more medicine. Alice, bring the bottle.”

  I press the heels of my hands to my eyes. Take a breath. Try again. My vision clears and I see that which I thought a vulture is no such thing, only my physician, Edmonds, in his gown and cap.

  “Here is a draught to ease your suffering,” he says.

  He helps me sit up. Takes hold of my chin. Presses the cup to my lips.

  I turn away. I don’t want it. It is syrup of poppy and puts me in a deathlike sleep, one filled with ghosts.

  But then the pain comes again, and though I appeal to Our Saviour, His mother, and all the saints to release me from this agony, it only grows stronger. There is a keening in the room, a rising wail. With a shock, I realize it’s coming from me.

  “Madam, please…”

  It is Edmonds, still at the ready with his vile drink. I submit. I have no choice.

  In anything, it seems.

  Ever.

  What woman does?

  * * *

  —

  I sleep. And dream. And find myself in Rochester once again, at the Bishop’s Palace.

  Where I was doomed.

  Where I was saved.

  It is New Year’s Day, 1540, and I am twenty-four, not the old woman of forty-one I am now. I am standing in the great hall. Courtiers attend me. There is a loud, echoing boom as the doors are thrown open. Four men walk through them, ghosts all.

  The first is Cromwell, Henry’s chief minister and the one who arranged our marriage.

  His head has been severed from his neck. He holds it in his hands. The bloodless lips move. “Anna of Cleves!” they bellow. “I went to the block because of you! Every cow in the byre, every pig in the sty, knows how to make the beast with two backs. Could you not learn?”

  Gardiner joins him, dirt from the grave on his black bishop’s gown. He barks questions that would shame a bawd. “Are you a virgin? Did the King penetrate you with his privy member? Was there blood on the sheets?”

  Norfolk appears, a tattered, clacking corpse. His lips have rotted away, yet still he shouts. “A slack belly? Sagging dugs? To the block with her!”

  And lastly Henry himself. He has pig’s eyes and fingers like sausages and is as fat as three men. He wears a coat of velvet and a codpiece the size of a dinner plate. The sores on his leg ooze pus through his stocking. He smells like a midden.

  He kisses me. Just as he did when first we met. This time, though, I do not wipe the kiss off.

  “I loved, Anna! Oh, how I loved. As no man ever had,” he cries brokenly. “My love was as warm as the sun, as deep as the sea. I thought it would last forever, but you destroyed it.”

  He weeps then, heaving great, blubbering sobs. Bright tears fall from his eyes. They turn to diamonds and bounce off the floor.

  Despite the stink, I kiss him, too. More tenderly than ever I did when I was his wife.

  “You loved, Henry, yes,” I whisper. “Thank God in Heaven you never loved me.”

  * * *

  —

  I wake hours later. Or is it days?

  The pain is still with me but bearable now.

  Edmonds is with me, too. He is talking of poultices with Alice. She is the gardener’s girl, and lately my nurse. Lettie, my maid, cannot abide blood.

  Edmonds casts my horoscope. Applies leeches, black and wriggling, to my distended belly. Dips his finger in a bowl of my urine. Sniffs it. Tastes it. Frowns. Alice watches his every move.

  I suspect much of this is for show and would like to send the old fraud packing, but the cancer in my womb gnaws like a wolf and his elixirs are all that stand between me and torment.

  Edmonds pokes and prods, scribbles and frowns, then hands Alice a bottle. He instructs her how to administer it and takes his leave, promising to return on the morrow.

  I am fond of Alice. She is an honest girl with a nimble mind. Clean. A good worker. Shy, because of the large red birthmark that mars her face. The village boys taunt her about it. Her father worries no man will have her.

  One of the kitchen girls brings chamomile tea. As Alice pours me a cup, a little red beetle with black spots lands on her hand. Ladycows, the English call them.

  “They are good luck,” I say. “I make a wish when one lands on me. Did you? What was it?”

  As soon as the words leave my mouth, I regret them. A flush creeps up the girl’s neck. It reddens the parts of her face not covered by the birthmark.

  “I dare not say, my lady.”

  My heart hurts for her. “Ah, child. I know. You wish to be beautiful. What girl of sixteen does not?”

  An awkward nod, a miserable shrug—those are her answers. She walks to the window and shakes the beetle off.

  I see her downcast eyes, the sag in her shoulders, and the old anger rises in me again. I am skin over bones, as weak as water, yet I sit up in my bed, for she must hear me.

  “Do not wish for beauty, Alice. Wish for cleverness instead. Wish for a strong back and a strong will. They will do you more good than red lips and dimples.”

  She looks at me as if I am mad.

  “Beauty is naught but a commodity,” I tell her. “There is no beautiful girl in the world who does not have a father, uncle, or brother scheming to profit from her looks. The Duke of Norfolk was one such. That old whoremonger pushed three of his nieces on the King—Mary Boleyn, Anne Boleyn, and Catherine Howard.
They did not do so well out of the bargain, but he certainly did.”

  Alice’s eyes grow round. There are not many who would dare to call a duke of England, even a dead one, a whoremonger. But living in England does not make one English. I am German still, and do not make a pavane of my words.

  “Have you heard of Jeanne d’Albret?” I ask her. “She was a beauty, a French princess. At the age of twelve, she was to be married to my brother, the Duke of Cleves. She refused and was beaten and had to be carried to the altar.” I give her a conspirator’s smile. “Had you met my brother, you would not blame her.”

  Alice giggles behind her hand.

  “It goes even harder for poor girls,” I say. “You learn to outrun the village boys and dodge the busy hands of your master. Perhaps you make a marriage and think yourself lucky. Then you learn that your husband gambles or wenches. You object. He breaks your nose. The magistrate shrugs.”

  The talking makes my throat rasp. I reach for my cup. Alice helps me drink from it.

  “Be glad of your plainness, for I will tell you a secret,” I say as she takes the cup away. “Plain girls can prosper. We can make our lives our own. We can go about our business without so many lewd words. Without so many slobberings and gropings and hands up our skirts.”

  Alice shakes her head. “You are being kind, my lady. Girls such as myself can never prosper.”

  “I am not being kind, child,” I say indignantly. “I know whereof I speak. Henry the King thought me ugly. He told me so.”

  “The King said this to you?” Alice asks, aghast.

  “That, and all the other things men say when they wish to shame a woman. That I was old. Stubborn. Dull. Stupid. Fat. That I smelled. Henry said it to me, to his friends, to his courtiers. I think the whole country knew of his complaints.”

  “How did you bear it, my lady? The shame of it?”

  I know the poor girl asks not for me, but for herself.

  “I could bear it because I knew the truth, child,” I say. “There was one of us in that marriage who was old, fat, and smelly, and it wasn’t me.”

  “The King was cruel to speak thus,” Alice says, but in a low voice. As if Henry, dead these past ten years, might somehow hear her.

  “He was, yes,” I say. “But I think mostly he was afraid.”

  Alice is sceptical. “Kings are afraid of nothing,” she says.

  “This King was afraid. I know it, for I’m the one who made him so. I made a mistake, child, a grave one.”

  “What was it?”

  “I made my face a mirror when it should’ve been a mask, and what the King saw there terrified him. He hated me for it, and never, ever forgave me.”

  * * *

  —

  Alice’s curious grey eyes tell me that she wishes to know more, but the talking has exhausted me. I close my eyes and sink back into my pillows. I will rest for a moment; then I will tell her. But when I open my eyes again, hours have passed. It’s dark in my bedchamber and I am hungry.

  Moonlight, slanting in through the windows, illuminates a sleeping Alice. She lies next to my bed in a wooden trundle. She must’ve had her father bring it to my room. The thought touches me.

  It grieves me that I never had a daughter. I love Mary and Elizabeth, but they are nothing like me. Alice is. She is practical. Capable. A girl made for the country, not the court.

  I do not want to wake her. I will get my own supper. I can do it. The pain is down to a dull gnawing.

  I swing my legs out of bed, slide my feet into my slippers, and leave the room quietly. Alice will scold if she sees me up, and for a small, slight girl, she is fierce.

  I know something is not right the moment I step into the hallway. It has become wider. And longer. Like a gallery. Scores of costly portraits line the walls.

  “It is the poppy. Only the poppy,” I tell myself.

  Faces stare back at me. Henry’s. Cromwell’s. Norfolk’s. Surrey’s. They are all gone now, but so vivid and true in their frames, they look as if they will draw breath and speak.

  There is only one who could paint thus, only one who could forever fix his subject’s soul to canvas—Holbein.

  He sits in the middle of the hall, painting. Black blisters, marks of the plague that killed him, mar his broad, bearded face. It is hard to look at him.

  I walk up to his easel and peer at his canvas. It’s my betrothal portrait he’s working on. Back in 1539, Henry sent him to Cleves to take my likeness so he could see what I looked like before he offered marriage.

  “I wish I had painted you in a blue dress, Anna. Blue suits you,” Holbein says.

  “I wish you had not painted me at all. That portrait was the cause of all my trouble. You made me pretty, but I am not.”

  Holbein had posed me looking directly at the viewer in order to hide my long nose and pointed chin. He made my skin paler than it was and left out my smallpox scars.

  “Cromwell slipped a bag of coins into my hand before I left for Cleves,” Holbein explains. “ ‘The portrait must be pretty,’ he told me. ‘Whether the lady is or not.’ ”

  “You could have refused the bribe,” I venture. “You could have painted me as you saw me.”

  Holbein snorts laughter. “Only fools refused Cromwell. He wanted the marriage very much.”

  “Far more than I did,” I murmur, still staring at the girl I never was. “To Henry, how I looked was all that mattered. Not who I was.”

  After I had sat for Holbein, I’d asked my mother why Henry got to see a picture of me but I did not get to see one of him.

  “You don’t need to. It matters only that you please your husband, not that he pleases you,” she’d replied.

  “But what if I don’t love him?” I’d asked.

  She’d given me a scathing look. “Love is for milkmaids, Anna. Royal marriages are for making more royalty. The man must like the look of the woman for that to happen. Otherwise, the bread doesn’t rise.”

  “And the woman? What if she doesn’t like the look of the man?”

  “Then she can close her eyes while he does his business and do her accounts in her head.”

  I knew what business she meant. I’d seen dogs mounting bitches and rams tupping ewes. There always seemed to be a good deal of kicking and biting involved, but it would not be like that between a man and a woman. It would be like the pretty songs the troubadours sang. That is what I believed.

  Memories of my wedding night, long submerged, rise and bob on the surface of my mind now like bloated corpses. I want no part of them.

  Angrily, I turn on Holbein. “Why do you keep painting this portrait? The business is over and done!”

  His eyes meet mine. “Because time grows short, Anna. You must settle your debts.”

  I am taken aback by his presumptuousness. “I have settled my debts! Do you think I do not know that I am dying?”

  He mutely resumes his work.

  “Holbein, answer me!” I demand.

  I tug at his jacket, but still he makes no reply. Furious, I smack his easel, trying to topple it, but only manage to hurt my hand.

  The throbbing brings me back to my senses. I step back and see that I am pummelling a linen chest.

  * * *

  —

  I must eat something. Food will chase the ghosts away, I think as I shuffle to the kitchen.

  My manor’s halls are easily traversed, even in the dark, but the stairs are a different matter. The stepping motion wakes the shadow-child growing in my womb. I double over, gritting my teeth. When the spasm finally eases, I continue to the kitchen.

  Delicious scents greet me. Yeasty dough rising for tomorrow’s loaves, smoked ham, strawberries, and other things I cannot keep down. I light a candle, rummage through the larder, and emerge with a bowl of custard. The cancer has so disordered my insides, my diet is now that of a weanling’s.

  I take my meal at the wooden worktable. The custard is thick and nourishing, rich with eggs from my hens and cream from my cows.<
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  I am enjoying this simple fare when I hear something: the rustle of silk. Soft, sliding footsteps.

  And then I feel something. A cold breath on my neck.

  I was wrong about the custard. Wrong about the ghosts.

  One of them is right behind me.

  * * *

  —

  Slowly, I turn around.

  “Boo!” a woman shouts at me.

  Her face is covered with livid red pustules. She’s wearing a ragged shroud. My heart nearly bursts from fright.

  “Ha! Scared you!” she crows.

  “Go away, phantom, please,” I beg, covering my eyes.

  “Anna-Maus, don’t you know me?”

  There was only one person in the world who called me by that name.

  “Greta?” I whisper, lowering my hands.

  “Look at you! White as milk!” she says, laughing. “Ha! So funny!”

  “Yes, well, the dead do terrify the living. Especially when they look like you,” I say, still trembling, but irritated now, too. Greta always was one for stupid pranks.

  “Smallpox,” she says, grimacing. “Awful, isn’t it?”

  “I remember. My mother wrote to tell me of your death. I cried for weeks.”

  Greta was the daughter of a Cleves baron, and my close friend ever since we were tiny. She gave me my nickname, she said, because I looked like a little mouse, always peeking out from my mother’s skirts. She accompanied me to London and returned home a few months after I was married. How I missed her.

  “You still love sweets, I see,” she says, nodding at my custard. “You could never get enough apple cake. Do you remember when your mother caught us filching slices? My backside ached for a week. God in Heaven, but she was strict. I don’t think a day went by that one of you four children didn’t get a whipping. She loved you best. Sibby was vain. Mali was soft. Wilhelm was a pisspot. But you were clever, like her.”

  Greta is chattering away as if we’d never parted, as if she weren’t dead and ghastly to behold. But I cannot bear seeing my beloved friend so ravaged, and tears well in my eyes.