The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  ‘He will not,’ said the Bailly.

  The Bishop was nettled. ‘How do you know?’ he inquired tartly. ‘If he does, they will rise for the old Queen and the Princess, but especially for the Princess. Be very sure you make our master understand how they still, notwithstanding all the laws made in their Parliament, count her as Princess. And especially tell him of those citizens’ wives that came about her when she was brought last from that palace down the river, weeping and crying out that she was still Princess, whatever laws the men might make.’

  The Bailly, during the pause in which the Bishop took another sip of wine, turned his head to listen. There was now no sound of rain on the windows. He stood up.

  ‘Tell him also,’ said the Bishop, ‘how all, even gentlemen at Court, at first believed that we came to pronounce excommunication against the King, and that they prayed for us.’

  The Bailly had taken up the written instructions, folded them, and slipped them into the breast-pocket of his doublet. Now as he buttoned himself again he said, ‘It is written here,’ and he tapped his breast.

  Yet the Bishop followed him to the door, and held him there with a hand on his shoulder, still telling him how all England, and the Princess Mary herself, thought of nothing but that marriage of the Princess to the Dauphin should at last be made, and so save the Princess her rights.

  When the Bailly had twitched his shoulder free and gone, the Bishop came back to the table. He burnt all the half-written sheets that lay there, and then settled himself comfortably with a book and his wine. But now and again his mind would go back to the small house and its garden, and the vineyards round about, and above the vineyards little woods of pines, where, when the singing of the vintagers ceased, you heard the warm, dry note of the cicadas.

  November 20

  M. Chapuys’ servant was shaving him, when his discreet Burgundian secretary knocked and came in. He remained near the door, but Chapuys could see who it was in the wall mirror, and said, ‘Another ten minutes, Philippe,’ and gave his face again to the razor.

  But the secretary did not go away, and the Ambassador, waving the servant off, turned to look at him. Then he saw that the sober and correct M. Philippe had his cap in his hands, and the cap was full of brown eggs.

  ‘And have you been robbing a farm-yard?’ asked M. Chapuys pleasantly, but the secretary told him ‘No,’ and came nearer so that he stood between his master and the man who was shaving him. ‘A country woman is below, who brought these eggs,’ he said; but unseen by the servant his finger pointed at a little posy of late flowers that lay among the eggs. There were a few marigolds, tied up with some pansy leaves.

  ‘Ah!’ said the Ambassador, ‘I’ll buy them. Go and bring her in.’ And to the servant, ‘Make haste.’

  ‘She is within,’ Philippe said, and went and sat down by the door with the cap full of eggs, and the posy, in which were marigolds for Mary and pansies for Pole, between his respectable black knees.

  The servant found his master hurried and fidgety that morning. ‘That’ll do. That’ll do,’ he said, and caught up the towel to wipe off the last of the lather from his face. ‘Come, truss up these points. Now, the sanguine gown. No. I’ll not stay for a doublet.’

  Then the Ambassador and his secretary passed out into the big room that looked over Cheapside, M. Chapuys in shirt and hosen and loose gown, though he was used to dress early and always with the most exact care.

  ‘Is she from the Marchioness?’ he asked as soon as the door was shut behind them. A fortnight ago the Marchioness of Exeter had sent her Chaplain to tell the Ambassador that the King threatened to have done at last with Queen Katherine and Princess Mary.

  ‘She does not speak.’

  ‘Dumb?’

  The secretary allowed himself the slightest smile and shake of the head.

  ‘You said a country woman?’

  ‘She has a basket, and garments convenable.’

  ‘But—?’

  ‘Her hands are not such as brew, bake, and milk kine.’

  ‘Bring her here.’

  When she came in, following the secretary, Chapuys saw a small plump woman with a big white veil flapping on each side of her face, a grey home-spun petticoat, a brown kirtle hitched up on one side over a stout leather belt, and strong shoes. The shoes were too big for her, and when he looked at her hands he saw that Philippe was right. She carried a basket, but even as he looked at her she held it out to him, and, from that instinctive gesture of one used to be served, he knew who she was.

  ‘My Lady!’ he said, and led her to a chair, and poured out wine, and served her himself. The Burgundian secretary had gone out softly, and Chapuys knew that now he would be keeping the door.

  The Marchioness drank, and set the cup down, and he noted that her hand shook.

  ‘My Lord Marquess would have come,’ she said, ‘but I said he must not, for he might be known.’

  Chapuys nodded. The Marquess with his great height and long sad face was hard to disguise.

  ‘Therefore I came myself – so that I may make you believe the danger – the danger – the danger I sent word of a fortnight ago.’

  ‘Madame, I do believe it. I promise you on God’s Passion.’

  ‘I thought that perhaps when I sent that message you did not believe.’ She looked hard at him. ‘But you must make the Emperor believe.’

  He said, ‘Tell me, Madame, what I shall tell him from you and my Lord Marquess.’

  She gripped her hands together at her breast and told him. The King was determined, when Parliament met again (and but for the Sickness it would have been sitting now), that the Queen Katherine and her daughter should follow where Fisher and More had gone; and on the same charge, for neither had they sworn the oath.

  ‘And he will do it. I heard him swear by God’s Majesty that he’d do it, if he lost his crown in the doing. Sir,’ the Marchioness looked up into Chapuys’ attentive, serious face, ‘sometimes I think he is mad – or all the world is mad – or I myself.’

  Chapuys shook his head.

  ‘The Queen—’ he began, meaning Queen Katherine, but the Marchioness mistook him, since at Court ‘the Queen’ had for so long meant Queen Anne.

  ‘Jesu! yes!’ she said. ‘It is Anne Boleyn that has done all this. And now works against the Princess. She hates her the more because she fears her.’

  ‘Fears her?’

  ‘She has heard a prophecy of which she told us all, openly. There were her maids, and other ladies, not a few gentlemen, and that pretty singing fellow Smeton sitting at her feet. I did not hear how they came to talk of it, but I heard her say, “No, by the Mass, I do not love my step-daughter Mary. And,” says she, “I know well that she is my death and I am hers; for so it is by the stars.” Then she laid her hand on Mark Smeton’s head, toying and tugging at his curls. “Therefore,” quod she, “I will take good care that she shall not laugh at me when I am dead.” And she began to laugh.’

  The Marchioness shivered. ‘She would laugh indeed if the Prin-cess died.’

  ‘Madame,’ Chapuys tried to comfort himself and her, ‘God will preserve from harm those two good ladies.’

  ‘God,’ the Marchioness said with bitterness, ‘is very patient. He did not preserve neither the Bishop of Rochester nor Sir Thomas More, nor yet the brethren of the Charterhouse. It is the Emperor who must—’

  ‘I will write,’ he told her eagerly, yet when she had gone he wondered whether the Emperor’s patience might not exceed even that of God. The doubt did not however prevent him writing a letter which was most urgent and energetic in asking help for Queen Katherine and the Princess.

  1536

  January 7

  At Kimbolton Castle the Groom of the Chamber and the Candlemaker heard the clock strike eleven as they finished the worst part of their work, and washed their hands, letting the water run over their forearms, till the basin looked as if it was full of raspberry juice. Then, having tidied up the mess, and set aside the earthern j
ar in which were enclosed the heart and entrails, they kicked the bloody cloths out of the way of their feet, and set to work to cere the body, wrapping it in fold after fold of waxed linen cloth, with handfuls of spices laid on, till the sickly smell of blood was overlaid by the sharp scents of cinnamon and myrrh. By the time they were done it was close on midnight, and all at Kimbolton asleep except those who waited to watch beside the bier till day. The Groom of the Chamber unlocked the door, and he and the other went out, leaving alone the body of Katherine who had been Queen. It lay now stiff as wood, and bulked out to unnatural rotundity by the folds of the cerecloth; only the face showed, wax white and sharp in the light of the candle flames which shivered when the wind whined through the shutters.

  Outside on the dark stair the Groom of the Chamber let out a great sigh, and said that, ‘By Cock! I have a sore thirst.’ As the Chandler had the same they went off together to shake up one of the buttery lads. When he had found ale and bread for them, they blew up the cinders of the fire in the almoner’s room, and sat down to warm their feet and drink their ale. A big tabby cat, dislodged from the cushion of the settle, stretched and yawned, showing teeth curved and sharp as thorns, but milk white; then it leapt, light as a leaf, on the lap of the Chandler and at once fell asleep again.

  Not till their cans were half empty did either of the two men speak, and even then the Groom of the Chamber was sparing of words. But the Chandler became garrulous. He said it was a pity to see the good Queen lie dead, and no harm now to call her Queen, for that Queen she had been and now was no more, nor was anything any more, God have mercy on her soul. ‘And,’ said he, ‘all her ladies saying that since the Emperor’s Ambassador came to see her on New Year’s Day, that she fared the better for it, and would recover. Aye and surely it must have given the poor soul comfort to speak to one of the Emperor’s people once more.’

  The Groom of the Chamber grunted. He was a lean, sharp, worried man, never talkative, and now he would not raise his eyes from the fire. The Chandler went on:

  ‘That fat man of the Imperial Ambassador, the one that spoke English, told me the poor lady took heart so from his master coming, that he heard her, when they were talking, laugh, and more than once.’

  ‘Did she laugh?’ the Groom muttered, but it was less a question than a sort of sour comment.

  ‘Aye that she did. And asked for the fat man – you know what a merry talker he was – to make her sport that evening.’

  After a silence the Chandler shifted a little on the seat to look at the Groom of the Chamber.

  ‘Even last night the women were saying that she was so much better that she called for a comb and dressed and tied her hair for herself.’

  The Groom of the Chamber twitched his thin nose, frowned, squinted into the can that he held on his knee, and said nothing.

  ‘And to-night,’ said the Chandler, fondling the cat with one hand, but keeping his eyes on the Groom, ‘to-night, – there she lies, dead.’ As he lifted his chin towards the painted beams of the ceiling they both thought of the little close room above, of the reek of the blood, and of the dismal work they had accomplished on the shrunken body of the grey-haired woman that had come to England nearly thirty years before, a young girl, plump and merry, afraid a little, yet hoping more than fearing, because of the ignorance and potency of youth.

  ‘Why—,’ the Chandler leaned along the settle and spoke softly, ‘why did you cut through the heart when it was forth of the body?’

  The Groom’s eyes came quickly to his in a sharp look. But all he said was, ‘Because so it should be done.’

  ‘Perdy, I never saw it so done before.’

  The Groom of the Chamber got up. He said he was for bed, and went away. But before he went to bed he found the dead woman’s Chaplain, the Bishop of Llandaff, who, with others, was watching about the body, and told him, very secretly, a dreadful thing – how that the heart of Dame Katherine, Princess Dowager, was black and hideous all through, and to the surface of it clung a small black globule. The Groom of the Chamber knew just so much of surgery as to be very positive. He told the Bishop, who was a Spaniard, that from the state of the heart he knew that the Princess Dowager had been poisoned. The Bishop wrote a letter that night to Master Chapuys, telling him what the Groom had said. ‘And if it is poison,’ he wrote, ‘surely none other but the Concubine hath devised it.’

  January 8

  Not only the Queen Anne but the King himself joined in the dancing this night, and both showed very good cheer. Many remarked it, and thought, if they did not whisper, of the messenger who had come that morning from Kimbolton, announcing the Princess Dowager’s death. At last, quite late, the King clapped his hands to quiet the musicians and bring the galliard to an end. Then he called for wine and candles, and for his gentlemen to put him to bed. The Queen and her ladies, having curtseyed to the King, withdrew to her apartments.

  In the King’s bed-chamber the gentlemen on duty took off the King’s rings, and chain, the dagger in a crimson velvet sheath the hilt of which was frosty with small diamonds. One of them laid by his yellow satin cap with a white feather, and a sapphire brooch to hold the feather. Two others helped him to take off the yellow satin doublet. The King whistled softly a tune that they had danced to just now; he yawned, whistled again, and smiled privately to himself.

  They had put on him by now his night-shirt, and the gold embroidered night-cap; when he had slipped his arms into a green and white velvet nightgown he spread them out in a great luxurious stretch, yawning again, wide as a cat, so that all his fine teeth showed, and his pink tongue.

  He kept Norris behind when the others had gone, talking with him of the buck hounds, and of a new goldsmith out of Germany, a very skilful craftsman; but at last he got into bed and lay there with his eyes shut, and his face, with the fine sharp beaked nose, turned up to the ceilour of the bed, while Norris drew the curtains softly, and thought, with a sort of start in his mind, how the King would one day – one day – lie just so, with face composed and eyes shut; but on that day the eyes would not open again.

  They opened now and met Norris’s, and Norris felt his heart quicken, as though the King could read his thought.

  ‘How,’ the King asked, ‘goes this business of your marriage?’

  ‘But lamely,’ said Norris, and asked himself, ‘Can one have told him that I wait to stand in his shoes?’

  ‘You should make haste,’ said the King, closing his eyes again, yet smiling with his mouth. ‘And how think you,’ he asked, ‘should a man choose a wife? For wit, or for beauty, or for what other quality in her?’

  Norris, because he had been for a moment afraid, now became pert. He said that himself he favoured a plump dower.

  But the King, frowning a little, went on, as if he had not spoken. ‘Of all things,’ said he, ‘let her be meek,’ adding hastily, ‘given virtue, of course, given virtue.’

  Norris agreed, ‘Of course.’ And then, since Katherine, Queen or Princess Dowager, was to-night, though un-named, in the minds of all, he began to say that though Her Highness had been virtuous, meek she had not been. But he stopped short, having remembered the awkward fact that it was not for him to consider her as the King’s wife at all.

  Yet the King only smiled at Norris’s stumbling. ‘No matter – no matter. She is dead.’ He crossed his breast under the sheet and murmured, ‘Deus misereatur...’

  ‘God be praised,’ he said aloud. ‘Now am I free from any threat of war with the Emperor. Now I shall have peace.’

  After Norris had left him the King humped himself more comfortably into the warmth of the bed, drowsily watching where a dimly luminous glow in the curtains showed that the great candle burned outside. ‘Peace with the Emperor,’ he thought, ‘peace at home.’

  ‘My little fair sweetheart,’ he murmured, and thought – ‘Meek as a dove, and as a lamb innocent.’

  January 18

  It was Dame Margery Conyers who was the first to see the King’s Visitors. S
he was up in the Vine Chamber in the dorter which she shared with Dame Joan Barningham and Dame Eleanor Maxwell; it was called the Vine Chamber because a long time ago the beams of the ceiling had been painted with a pattern of vine leaves and grape bunches; the paint was faded now and dark, but on a sunshiny morning you could now and then catch a gleam of gold among the leaves.

  The gleam was there to-day, because of the brightness outside, where a white frost lay on the ground and on the roofs, and the sun shone over all, yellow and clear. The servants had lit the fire and redded up the room while the Ladies had been in Church, and now the flames were climbing merrily up the chimney; beside the hearth, between the settle and a stool, a table was laid for Mixtum with a white fresh cloth.

  The day was so fair that for mere pleasure of the sunlight Dame Margery went over to the window, which fronted the sun across the Dale. The little panes were all patterned by the frost with pictures of marvellous things. Crusted upon the glass there were woods, sharp hills, lakes still and frozen, fountaining shapes or unknown leaves, all frost-white, yet lit through by the yellow sun with a warm glow of rose.

  Dame Margery opened the window, and met the sunshine that came swimming into the room on a faint lit mist and with the clean smell of rime. Across the frozen grass the trees laid lavender-blue shadows. Just as she drew a deep breath of the sparkling morning she caught sight of the dozen or so riders who were crossing the ford; they were almost in the sun’s eye for her, but she could see one, tall and thin, who wore a big red felt riding hat; another bulky man rode a little askew in his saddle, and as she looked he raised a hand and pointed as if he had seen her at the window.

  And as if he had seen her she slammed the casement to. She knew who these were. The Nuns’ miller had heard from one of the Stainton hinds, who had it from a lead miner, who was told by the Leyburn shepherd, that the King’s Visitors were come to Coverham Abbey; the shepherd had heard the Monks’ carter say so at the alehouse in Leyburn.