The Queen of Subtleties

by Suzannah Dunn

  But Henry came to the rescue: he practically moved in with me. Within days, my new rooms had become our rooms. And we found that we were tending to keep to just a few of them, shutting the doors on most of the staff. Suddenly, for the first time, we had a home. Henry was busy—very busy, with Tom, on legalities—but he chose to work at home, in those rooms of mine, spreading his papers across tables and floors. Tom wasn’t fussed, he could work anywhere. For Tom, it was the work that mattered: getting it done. What they were doing was drawing up legislation to further hamper the Church’s relationship with Rome: no more taxes from new bishops to the Pope. Henry was learning fast from Tom: he began turning up at Westminster, that February, and kept doing so until he’d forced the legislation through.

  The first time he returned—early—he walked in on me being fitted for a dress. I’d taken the opportunity to call in Mr Matte, to catch up on the business of preparing to be queen. So, in came Henry, troubled by crucial matters of state, to be faced by the ultimate frivolity: me being pinned into gold-embroidered velvet. There was nothing for it: I mock-sighed, mock-complained, ‘A woman’s work is never done.’

  He liked that; laughed. And complimented the dress. And my figure inside the dress.

  ‘Anyway, anyway,’ I said: how was Westminster?

  ‘Uproar.’

  On his third trip to Westminster, though, he tried a new tactic, insisting everyone stand up to be counted: if a yes, walk to one end of the chamber; if a no, to the other. And hey presto…

  Which was good news, because Tom was already busy with something else, something much bigger: could the Church be trusted, he was asking, to give fair trials in heresy cases? The answer, as any sane person knew, was no. The Church was probably the very last institution to be trusted with its supposed dissenters. Only the previous year, a man’s will had been judged heretical because it didn’t tow the line in favouring money-grabbing priests, and his body was dug up for burning. That was how the Church was going about recapturing the hearts of the disenchanted English people. The man, William Tracy, had left a bewildered, frightened son, Richard, whom I invited to Greenwich and for whom I did what I could. My taking an interest in Richard was more than that, though, of course; more than a comforting pat on the head and the handing over of a purse. It was also a clear warning to the Church: No more barbarism. And how had the Church responded? By turning a deaf ear. Even while Tom was raising the question about its courts—perhaps because Tom was raising the question—the man who had married Simon Fish’s widow was burned at Smithfield. People were being burned, now, it seemed, not only for asking questions and reading books, but for whom they knew.

  And then, that Easter, the chaos came into the heart of our home, our own chapel at Greenwich. Peto, head of Catherine’s adored Observants, dared to preach to us that if Henry persisted with his plans, his fate would be Ahab’s, his blood licked up by dogs. We sat through it. What else could we do? It was a sermon. We sat through it, carefully expressionless. Me, staring at Peto, daring him to meet my eyes. Of course, he never did. Pathetic little churchman, with his warped ideas about women. Puffed up in his pulpit. As soon as he was down from there, I comforted myself, we’d have him. Oh, how we’d have him.

  But we didn’t. It was nothing much, was Henry’s wishful thinking; nothing but a melodramatic old friar. Take no notice, Henry urged me; give it no credence. And, unusually, I allowed myself to be swayed. Maybe it was the absurdity of it: being called Jezebel to my face in church by everyone’s favourite man of God. Maybe, too, the way that Henry phrased the small sanction he’d decided on: ‘He can damn well stay at Lambeth Palace until I say otherwise.’ It reminded me of my father, when we Boleyn children were small: Stay there and think about what you’ve done!

  Suddenly it seemed funny.

  And if I was going to look at it in that light, then the following Sunday was no less amusing. One of Peto’s friars tried in his sermon to pour oil on troubled waters, but was interrupted—actually interrupted—with a rebuke from one of the others, who had the cheek to make it sound as if he was doing Henry a favour. Succession, he lectured the friar, can’t follow from adultery; if you agree to it, you’re betraying the king.

  ‘Yes!’ came from the pews. We all swivelled to see Essex, stupid Essex. ‘You should be sewn into a sack,’ spittle spraying in the direction of the friar, ‘and lobbed into the Thames!’

  The friar, though, didn’t appreciate Essex’s support. ‘No doubt you can frighten your fellow courtiers with threats like that,’ he said, ‘but may I remind you that we friars will get to Heaven just as easily from a waterlogged sack.’

  Behind the scenes, that Easter, Thomas More was trying to drum up support for a stand against Henry, I was informed, by doing as that friar had done: telling people that the king would thank them at a later date. As if Henry didn’t know his own mind. More was a snob: his attitude was, Who were we? Who were we, against a thousand years of papacy? He was irrational, too: did he really think that because of me, the way would be paved for the infidel? That civilization would end? He was so immersed in his anti-heretical writings—you should see it, said my informant; he never stops, never sleeps—that he was no longer making much sense.

  I passed none of this on to Henry. Confident that there was no need. Thomas More might have been losing his grip, but I knew which way the wind was blowing. And sure enough, when parliament came back from the Easter break, it was all over in a matter of days. Over, after all those years, in a matter of days. What Henry did first, George told me, was read aloud the oath that prelates make to the Pope. ‘See what I mean?’ he challenged parliament: ‘they’re only half ours.’ Well, everyone knows you can’t have two masters. Thomas More, sensing that he was about to lose the battle, dropped the subterfuge and voiced his main complaint: Henry simply couldn’t be allowed to prevent bishops arresting for heresy. What More really wanted, I swear, was that he should be arresting for heresy. Left, right and centre. And probably starting with me. He fancied himself the expert on heresy, to the tune of those hundreds of thousands of words he’d been scribbling at all hours in his room. And suddenly he seemed the very last person to trust to behave. If he had his way, how many bodies would he dig up?

  Henry’s quiet anger with More detracted from the victory which came only a week later, when the Church finally laid down and rolled over. From that point onwards, all ecclesiastical law required royal assent. There was one master, now; one educated, experienced master: the king, naturally enough. It was as it should be. As it should always have been. That day, More resigned. He came in person to do so. We were at Whitehall. Henry told the usher who announced the arrival that More should find him in the garden. He didn’t say a word or even look at me as he left the room. I went to a window and waited. Nothing. Rushed to the adjacent wing, and spotted him. He seemed to be concentrating on a sundial, running a finger around it. More’s approach was steady, but Henry didn’t acknowledge him until he was there and bowing. More handed him something—the Great Seal, I learned later—and bowed again before turning and walking away. Of course I couldn’t have heard any words, but I’m certain there were none.

  That wordlessness of Henry’s chilled me enough at the time, but now, sitting here in this deathly silence of Henry’s making, I look back on it as ominous. Until then, Henry had always been a talker. He’d lived for talk, from gossip and confidences—his own and other’s—to debates. There was no one with whom he couldn’t or wouldn’t talk, at length, animatedly, sympathetically; from Chapuys to the commoners who came to ask him to help with their disputes and misfortunes. He trusted talking to bring a meeting of minds. Look how he’d been, even, with Catherine: trying for years—far too long—to talk it through, to talk her round. Although his conduct towards Catherine infuriated me, I’d otherwise found it rather touching, his faith in talking. Especially considering his upbringing. His father had rarely spoken to him except to put him down or order him about. Not only did Henry survive that upbringi
ng, but he surpassed it. He tackled life, didn’t sneer at it or back away from it; and he tackled it with a burning faith in people, and a generosity to match.

  He and More had long done all the talking possible. I couldn’t see the consequences for Henry, then, as I stood there at that window, but still I felt for him. He’d grown used to doing battle with those supposedly closest to him: his ex-wife, up there on the moral high ground with her simpering daughter, his vain sister with her nose in the air, and her cold-blooded husband. But nothing could match this latest loss. More had been his mentor.

  We didn’t mention it until the evening, and then only in the vaguest terms. While we were watching others dancing, I reached for his hand, covered it with my own, and leaned close to whisper, ‘Rare are those who are strong enough to see changes through.’ I wasn’t crowing. Nor was it flattery. But nor was I quite speaking the truth. Because Henry didn’t have that kind of strength; not without Tom and me behind him, he didn’t. But he was prepared to do it, to stick at making changes, even when it cost him dear: that’s what I’d seen from the window, that day, and it had made me tender towards him. I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and touched my lips to his earlobe.

  ‘It’s worth it,’ was his quiet response.

  ‘You still think so?’ I wasn’t fishing; it was a genuine question. That sundial scene had shaken me.

  He put an arm around me and said into my hair, ‘More so than ever.’ I turned to him; our foreheads pressed together. ‘We’re so nearly there,’ he breathed. ‘Soon, we can get on with our life together as if none of this ever happened.’

  I believed it, of course. We’d talked ourselves into sharing that vision. It wasn’t so hard to believe that no one would miss a faintly Spanish, Vatican-bowed England. An England where the God-like monarch was married to a grandma-like last-in-line princess. It was only later that I wondered how we could have been so naive.

  At the time, it all seemed so simple: the quicker I became queen, the better. Everyone, then, could start accepting it. No one, surely, would stand at a roadside to yell insults at a queen. People shrieked ‘whore’ because that was what they believed: a whore was what they thought they were seeing. Because what else could I be, a commoner riding unmarried alongside Henry? The king’s whore, being paraded. They understood nothing of the politics, the reasons for the years of delay. It seemed to me that as soon as I was married to him and crowned, I’d no longer be a ‘whore’. They’d stop. As I said: naive.

  We’d marry as soon as Warham died. The last official obstacle, our old Archbishop of Canterbury, had taken to his bed, that summer, clearly for the last time. No need for poison. Just patience. Hang-dog Thomas stood ready to take his place and to rule Henry’s old marriage null and void. But until then, life, for us, was on hold. We abandoned our summer trip, turned tail, because of the trouble we’d been encountering in the villages. I’d prepared well for our annual showing-off to the nobles around the country, but now none of my marvellous dresses were to be seen. I wasn’t to be seen. And the clothes that my ladies and I had sewn for distribution to the poor were packed back into boxes. We were to spend the summer holed up. That was no hardship. My only complaint was that Henry used the time to see something of that daughter of his. I couldn’t understand why he bothered with her.

  Then, into my slow, stay-at-home summer came a crisis. One afternoon, at Hanworth, when a group of us was rather ineptly, less than soberly, playing bowls, Uncle Norfolk was suddenly at my side: ‘A word, please, Anne.’

  He’d come to tell me that Harry Percy’s wife was petitioning for divorce.

  My immediate, unvoiced response was, About time, too. Until he added: ‘Naming you.’

  ‘Me?’

  His sharp little eyes slid from side to side: Voice down, please. ‘She’s claiming pre-contract.’

  So, she was claiming that although Harry and I were never officially married, we’d promised ourselves to each other. Which made us, in law, effectively married. Only a special dispensation could break a pre-contract. A dispensation that, as everyone knew, Harry and I had never had. Wolsey had broken our relationship. His word had been enough for everyone, back then.

  My stomach shrank. First things first: ‘And Harry says?’

  Uncle Norfolk was trying to read my face; everything was happening in my stomach, but he was searching for clues on my face. ‘Percy says no.’

  My breath flew from me.

  He frowned. ‘And the truth is?’

  And the truth is known only to Harry and me. But I brazened it out. ‘You have to ask? You think I’d have gone through all this with Henry, come this close, but failed to mention that I’m married to someone else?’ I was doing well. The din from my heart could just as well have been due to indignation. Henry: ‘Henry knows about this?’

  ‘Not yet.’ He snatched at my arm. ‘Where d’you think you’re going?’

  ‘To tell him.’

  ‘Not in the state you’re in.’

  I rounded on him. ‘And what’s that? What “state” is it that I’m in?’

  He refrained from ‘rattled’ or ‘terrified’; went for, ‘Drunk.’

  ‘And you really think I’m going to sit around sobering up while some ill-informed gloater like you goes to him and breaks the news?’

  He didn’t flinch: there was too much at stake here. ‘Anne, be prudent for once in your life. You need to take some advice on this.’

  ‘No, I don’t; I don’t need advice. I need to go to him and deny it.’

  What Henry said when I told him was, ‘I wish you’d told me.’

  ‘I am telling you,’ I insisted. ‘There was nothing to tell, before. Ask Harry.’

  He blew a breath. ‘Well, we’ll have to, I’m afraid. There’ll have to be an enquiry.’

  ‘That bitch of a wife of his!’

  Henry seemed disappointed. ‘Anne, the truth of the matter has to be seen to be found.’

  ‘Oh, it will be,’ I said. Praying, Harry, don’t let me down.

  And he didn’t, even though the price he had to pay was staying married to that witch. He denied a pre-contract between us, and her bitter little petition was discarded. She was stuck with him, he was stuck with her. Both of them stuck up there in Northumberland. My brother had seen him just before his questioning. In all innocence, I asked: how was he? George seemed reluctant to answer.

  ‘George?’

  ‘Pissed.’

  ‘For his questioning?’

  ‘Don’t worry, he was making sense.’

  ‘Pissed?’

  ‘Anne.’ George sighed. ‘Percy’s always pissed.’

  I must have looked uncomprehending, because he tried to elaborate: ‘And…’ he shrugged, casting around for a word, ‘…unwashed.’

  I was struck cold. That gorgeous dandy of a man.

  ‘Crying,’ George added, gently, seeing that I was beginning to understand. ‘He’s usually crying.’

  One morning in late August, Henry turned up while I was dressing. He stopped in the middle of my room, wide-eyed, expectant, and opened, raised, his hands.

  I guessed: ‘Warham?’

  He nodded.

  I dashed at him, unlaced; but he stopped me, laughing, and held me at arms’ length to look at me. His glittering eyes were on mine and then over my face, my hair, my neck.

  ‘We can get married,’ I said, breezily.

  ‘We can get moving, certainly.’ A twitch of my eyebrows had him rushing to explain: ‘There’s something we need to do first, quickly.’

  It was instinct to glance at the maids, self-conscious.

  He laughed, ‘Not that,’ and pulled me close, whispered, ‘I’m hoping to take my time over that.’ Then came the explanation: I was to be made a peer. Then he’d be marrying the Marquess of Pembroke.

  Marquess. Not Marchioness. I was to be it, Pembroke; I was to be all of it. The title, mine alone. The income, too. Marquess. ‘Can it be done?’ I was doubtful.

  ‘Well, if I say it can,
it can.’ He laughed. ‘Can’t it?’

  Which made me laugh. ‘It’s a lovely idea, but why bother?’

  Because a marriage, a coronation, would take time, he said. Just a little, he added quickly, but time nevertheless. Even in this case. Especially in this case, when he’d waited so long. He wanted to do it properly. The peerage would set me up perfectly, with rank and riches. I’d be equal to anyone. Any man. ‘And,’ he finished, ‘you can go to France as a peer of the realm.’

  ‘France?’

  ‘Oh, didn’t I say?’ A wicked grin. ‘We’re going to France. On a state visit. I think Francis should have the chance to meet my future wife and feel very, very jealous.’

  Francis: our French ally. A show of strength to the Pope.

  I was invested on the first of September in the Presence Chamber at Windsor Castle. It’s strange to be invested by one’s lover. To kneel before him; to rise, bestowed upon. We stood there, facing each other, with everyone’s eyes on us. Me, wordless for once. We did it properly. After so many years of muddling through, making do—a king and his wife who wasn’t yet his wife, who couldn’t yet be his wife—we were going to do this properly. I didn’t so much as smile at him. Not a single knowing look. King and subject, that’s what we were. And in a way it was a relief.

  Despite everything that was to come—my marriage, my coronation—I’m not sure that those few moments in Windsor’s Presence Chamber weren’t among the very best I’ve ever had. Perhaps because of it being the first time that Henry and I could do something properly. Also perhaps because I knew I was stunning. It’s something, to know that, isn’t it. Henry’s full-length mirror had been brought in to me, that morning, while I was dressing. Onto the polished steel flashed someone running crimson. I turned to that ghostly, bloodied me, and she stared back, white-faced. Me, radiant and jewel-eyed. It was obvious, as soon as I saw it: I was made for crimson; crimson was made for me. We’d found each other, fiercest of dyes and sallow flesh. Bolt after bolt of vividness, and a tough-boned girl. We’d do brilliantly, together.