The Queen of Subtleties

by Suzannah Dunn

  Yesterday, Thomas was allowed to visit me. As my confessor. To hear my last confession. ‘I’ve been trying and trying to get to see you,’ he said, and I believed him: that small, earnest face of his. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Much better since they sent my minders away.’ After my trial, they’d gone, the four of them; their task—spying—done. I wouldn’t mind being here for the rest of my days, I told him: it’s quite cosy. There are worse ways to end one’s days. And then I asked him, I said, ‘Tell me, straight: is there any hope?’ I meant a nunnery, abroad.

  He knew what I meant. But he looked downcast.

  ‘There was talk of a nunnery for her,’ I protested: Catherine. Even as I said it, I knew it was unlikely to be considered suitable for me. But still I argued, ‘I’ve more sense than she ever had. I’m no martyr, I’m a pragmatist. I’d go quietly.’ He looked up, and I read his mind: I’ve never done anything quietly. I gave him a rueful smile. ‘There’s always a first time. I’m a fast learner.’

  How come Catherine was banished to various draughty castles to live out her remaining years, but I’m held fast here in the heart of London under sentence of death? Am I really more dangerous than she was? Catherine, with her twenty years of having been on the throne; the loyalty that that inspired. Catherine, whose unthroning risked war with Spain, and civil war. Whereas me: with the exception of godly Thomas, there’s no one on my side.

  Thomas told me: it was Tom who’d given permission for this final visit. Get her reconciled, was what he’d said. To her end, he’d meant.

  Yes, I wanted to say, but that’s Tom. Where’s my husband, in all this? But I knew, didn’t I; I knew where he was. I’d gleaned it, from others’ asides and silences: Henry was spending all his time with the dim spinster. He had no time to think of me.

  I changed tack, asked after the boys; Thomas had been allowed to see the boys, too. ‘Are their rooms all right?’ I asked. ‘Is someone making their beds for them?’

  He laughed, in disbelief.

  ‘No, really,’ I said, although I was laughing, too, ‘you’ve no idea. They’re hopeless.’

  The beds looked fine, he reassured me: the boys looked fine, and their beds looked fine. ‘To be honest, though,’ he added, and my heart stilled in readiness, ‘your brother seems very worried about his debts.’

  I said I knew.

  ‘The debts he’s leaving,’ he reiterated, and I felt that he looked particularly firmly at me when he said ‘leaving’.

  Get her reconciled.

  I didn’t flinch.

  ‘And I don’t know if he’s being over-anxious…’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. He’s always enjoyed the high-life, hasn’t he. Way above our means.’

  ‘Well,’ Thomas said, ‘Mr Kingston’s talking to Henry, to see if the debts can’t be honoured. And it seems that he’s having some success.’

  ‘Oh. Good.’ Magnanimous Henry, all of a sudden. Or, more likely, when it comes to money, there can’t be any loose ends; no grudges against Henry, who’s the cause of all this.

  Thomas was looking pensive. So, I probed, and he admitted, ‘That chap Mark isn’t doing so well.’

  ‘Mark? Why not? What’s happened to him?’ I realized I hadn’t been thinking much about Mark. Hardly surprising: I hardly knew him.

  ‘They have him in irons.’

  Now I did flinch. ‘That seems a little unnecessary.’

  Thomas raised his eyebrows in agreement. ‘No privileges.’

  And it struck me what a privileged lot we were, the rest of us, sitting out our last days by firesides, with pies and the kindly attentions of Mr Kingston. But even Mark, thank God, had been granted one privilege along with rest of the boys, or so I’d heard: no Tyburn, no gallows; but the block at Tower Hill, instead.

  And me, ex-queen, one better: not an axe, even, but a sword; a super-sharp sword, wielded by an expert executioner from Calais. Apparently, I won’t feel a thing.

  Magnanimous Henry.

  Thomas was saying of Mark, ‘He’s not helping his case. He’s saying he’s guilty.’

  ‘Still?’ I knew he had, but I’d assumed he’d been promised something; his freedom in exile, perhaps. A promise that’d obviously been gone back on. ‘But why is he saying it? He’s not guilty! And—let’s face it—I’d know.’

  Thomas looked embarrassed, but recovered himself: ‘All I can think is that he feels guilty. About something.’

  About his ‘feelings’ for me. As if anyone gives a damn. ‘He’s not helping any of us.’

  Thomas nodded, vacantly.

  ‘Oh, I know, I know: nothing—no one—would, could. But still.’ Impatience flared. ‘I mean, what did he say? To you. What did he actually say?’

  ‘Just that. That he’s guilty.’

  ‘Of what, though? Did you ask him? Did you say, Of sleeping with the queen?’

  Thomas winced. ‘No.’

  ‘Well, you should’ve,’ I grumbled. We sat in silence for a moment, and then, in much the same tone, I said, ‘Meg’s never going to marry Harry, now.’

  Thomas nodded.

  ‘And he has a lovely little boy, Harry does. A really lovely little boy.’ Thomas opened his mouth to speak but I said, ‘Billy. Billy has a wife, you know.’ But of course he knew.

  He said, ‘You have a daughter.’ Said it softly, a gentle reminder of why he’d come here. I swallowed hard, looked away, gathering myself for what I knew I had to do: talk.

  Not long after Thomas had gone, my brother and the other boys were executed. George, Harry, Billy, Franky and Mark. Mark last, kneeling in all that blood. No fuss from any of them, or so Mr Kingston told me. No admissions of guilt, either; although otherwise, it seems, they said all the right things to keep Henry sweet for their families’ sake. There’s quite an art to it, seeming contrite without actually confessing.

  Oh, except Mark; I forgot Mark. He said he was going to the death he deserved. Liars go to Hell, don’t they. That poor boy doesn’t stand a chance.

  Tomorrow, my turn. I’ve chosen a crimson gown. The Calais man is a day late, the weather in the Channel very bad. I hope it reaches England, that weather, and I hope it’s worse by then and that it never gets any better. I hope it drenches this miserable country. Drowns it.

  I have a day longer for people to rally to my cause. You never know. The bishops, say; the bishops I supported, whose jobs I got for them. Whose Church I changed for them. My own father, even, perhaps. That’d be nice. No word, though, so far. Or my husband. Yet tomorrow, I’m told, when I’m stripped of my gown and the two pieces of me are stuffed beneath the floor of St Peter’s Chapel, here, unmarked, my husband will announce his forthcoming engagement.

  Out with the old, in with the new. Not very old, in my case.

  I seem to have been a stepping stone, that’s all. For him to step from his stale, useless marriage with an ageing Spaniard to a marriage with a docile English spinster. No one will remember me, a brief three years in the middle of those marriages. Me, who did all the work.

  What Henry thinks, what he really thinks, I’ll never know. I suspect he doesn’t; doesn’t think. I suspect he’s stopped thinking.

  And you, Elizabeth? At best, you’ll be pensioned off. That’s what I’m hoping. A life in obscurity. Perhaps you’ll be passed off as someone else’s daughter; because you’re young enough, still, not to know. Except that you will know, won’t you. As long as Marg manages to smuggle this away from here, you will know.

  I should take this opportunity to pass down some motherly wisdom, shouldn’t I. I know what I should say: if you want to keep your head, keep it down. But my guess is that you—Tudor, Boleyn—will run the risk of losing it anyway, one day, so I say this: be your mother’s daughter and hold it high.

  Epilogue

  Anne Boleyn’s remains were buried beneath the altar pavement in the chapel royal of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower on 19 May 1536. The cloak she was wearing at the time of her death is rumoured to be in the priv
ate collection of one of the families who had been so opposed to her.

  Henry married Jane Seymour on 30 May 1536; their son, Edward, was born in October 1537, but Jane died twelve days later. Henry famously married a further three times. His fifth wife, the teenaged Catherine Howard, was Anne Boleyn’s cousin and the only other of his wives to be put to death by him (after a marriage lasting less than two years). Her remains, like her cousin’s, were buried beneath the altar pavement in the chapel royal of St Peter ad Vincula within the Tower.

  Henry outlived Anne by just over a decade, dying in 1547. His nine-year-old son succeeded him. Following Edward’s death in 1553, his half-sister Mary (‘Bloody Mary’) succeeded to the throne; and upon her death in 1558, Anne Boleyn’s daughter began her long reign. Elizabeth was recorded as only ever having mentioned her mother three times during her life, but she clearly favoured courtiers whose families had links to the old Boleyn family.

  Henry had Thomas Cromwell executed in 1540. Thomas Cranmer survived into old age but was then burned at the stake for his religious beliefs during Mary’s reign.

  Anne Boleyn’s parents lived quietly after their children’s executions, but only survived them by a couple of years. Her father’s tomb, in the parish church at Hever in Kent, has an impressive brass. The longest-lived of Anne’s immediate family was her sister, Mary, who lived for another decade; and both her children were long-lived.

  Anne’s sister-in-law, Jane Parker, was executed for her alleged role in facilitating Catherine Howard’s adulteries.

  Anne’s uncle, the third Duke of Norfolk, was condemned to death but Henry died the day before the scheduled execution and he was reprieved. He lived into old age.

  Henry Fitzroy, Henry’s illegitimate son, died within a year of Anne. He is buried at the Norfolk family’s mausoleum in St Michael’s Church at Framlingham in Suffolk. His wife, Lady Mary Howard, who survived him by twenty-one years, is buried beside him. Mary’s brother, Henry, Earl of Surrey, was executed in Henry’s final year, 1547. A tomb was later built at St Michael’s for his remains.

  Sir Henry Percy died less than a year after Anne. Sir Francis Bryan lived until 1550.

  Notes

  A ‘Mrs Cornwallis’ is recorded as having been Henry VIII’s confectioner, and the only woman in the household’s two hundred kitchen staff. All that is known of her, apart from her surname and job, is that the king eventually gave her a fine house in Aldgate in recognition of her services. All other aspects of the Lucy Cornwallis character and her story in this novel are fictional, as are those of her close colleagues. Names and job titles of other household staff aim to be historically accurate, as is the itinerary for the summer ‘progress’ (royal tour) of 1535.

  All events recorded or referred to in the ‘Anne Boleyn’ sections of the novel aim to be historically accurate, with three small exceptions: the motto embroidered on the king’s jousting costume for Shrove Tuesday, 1526, was not in fact ‘No Comment’ but ‘Declare je nos’ (‘Declare I dare not’); Anne’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, not Sir Henry Norris, broke the news to her of Henry’s serious fall in the spring of 1536; and the aunt with Anne in the Tower was not the Elizabeth who had been Duchess of Norfolk, but another one.

  Diminutives of names have been used to avoid confusion (between, for example, the many Henrys and Francises, Marys and Elizabeths) or to avoid a dated version (Meg Shelton was in fact known as Madge, and Betsy Blount as Bessie). Anne Boleyn’s dog was in fact named ‘Purkoy’ (believed to be from the French ‘pourqois’, because of his enquiring expression) and not, as here, ‘Pixie’.

  Select Bibliography

  Ackroyd, Peter The Life of Thomas More (Chatto and Windus, 1998)

  Brears, Peter All the King’s Cooks, The Tudor Kitchens of King Henry VIII at Hampton Court (Souvenir Press, 1999)

  Fraser, Antonia The Six Wives of Henry VIII (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992)

  Ives, Eric Anne Boleyn (Basil Blackwell, 1986)

  Sim, Alison Food and Feast in Tudor England (Sutton Publishing, 1997)

  Thurley, Simon J The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life, 1460–1547 (Yale University Press, 1993)

  Weir, Alison The Six Wives of Henry VIII (The Bodley Head, 1991)

  Weir, Alison Henry VIII, King and Court (Jonathan Cape, 2001)

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks—profuse, and first and foremost—to Martyn Bedford for covering my sabbatical and then my maternity leave with—as ever—stunning efficiency and endless good cheer.

  To Gale Owen-Crocker and Jackie Pearson at Manchester University, too, for allowing me the sabbatical, and David Denison before them for re-organising my job so that writing became possible again; and to Ian McGuire and Bill Broady for covering some of my teaching there.

  Thanks so much to my parents for the lend of the apartment in Spain where most of this novel was written.

  Thanks—more than I can say—to Antony Topping, my agent, for the work that he’s done on my behalf, and for all the time, advice, encouragement, reassurance and laughs he’s given me.

  Thanks to Philip Gwyn Jones at Flamingo for his faith in the novel and his work on it, to Jon Butler for all his patient editorial help at what was a dificult time for me, and to Mandy Kirkby for volunteering to read the manuscript in her last week at Flamingo.

  Thanks to David Supple for such thorough ante-natal care whilst the novel was being written.

  And to David Kendall for all kinds of reasons.

  Also by Suzannah Dunn

  DARKER DAYS THAN USUAL

  BLOOD SUGAR

  QUITE CONTRARY

  PAST CARING

  VENUS FLARING

  TENTERHOOKS

  COMMENCING OUR DESCENT

  Copyright

  Flamingo

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  Published by Flamingo 2004

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  Copyright © Suzannah Dunn 2004

  Suzannah Dunn asserts the moral right to

  be identified as the author of this work

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

  The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are

  the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to

  actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is

  entirely coincidental.

  A catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

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  EPub Edition © MARCH 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-37343-7

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