‘Not every palace: Hampton Court, Windsor and Greenwich, of course, some others. It was so long ago. The court travelled. We never stayed anywhere for longer than a few weeks. Sometimes when I awoke I couldn’t remember where I was. I was a maid in my mistress’s lodgings and some days that was where I stayed while I sewed or tidied her chambers, or did nothing at all while I longed to be outside. There was so much to see, White Boy, I could not see it all. I was only a servant.’
‘Begin at Greenwich. Remember, mistress, all our stories must begin at Greenwich. When I heard the King’s musicians I knew that his barge was approaching. Let me see King Henry VIII as he arrives by water at Greenwich Palace.’
‘The King’s barge is canopied, gilded and brightly painted. It is strewn with sweet herbs to disguise evil smells from the river and to ward off disease.’
‘As is the master’s wherry.’
‘Quite so, but the King also has his perfumed pomanders. His barge will smell sweet, not foul like a waterman’s vessel, which carries all kinds of rogues and wayfarers. The King sits upon velvet cushions listening to his musicians. Across the water the people marvel at the beautiful music, as you did. Along the Thames, Greenwich Palace stretches wide and colourful with its bright red bricks, and the tall donjon, and the tilt-yard towers flying Tudor flags of green high amongst the clouds. So many windows glint in the sunshine; too many to count.
‘The King steps out of his barge at the great watergate. He climbs the privy steps which are guarded by giant heraldic beasts.’
‘And the King’s guards also?’
‘Everywhere King Henry goes, his route is lined by his Yeomen of the Guard in their bright red and gold uniforms with their shining halberds ready to defend him. He climbs the stairs to his privy apartments on the first floor. Only the King uses these stairs. And the Queen, of course. She has her own apartments near the King’s.’
I tell White Boy of other stairs, those that lead to the King and Queen’s apartments from the pages’ chambers, the wardrobes and the privy kitchens.
‘And of course there are the secret stairs,’ he says, ‘those stairs the musician made you climb in darkness when he took you to Queen Anne Boleyn.’
White Boy puts his harp aside. He counts out three warm loaves from the peel, wraps them in a cloth and puts them in his basket.
‘How many chambers between the beggar outside the palace wall and the King within his privy chamber?’ he asks.
‘Far too many to count,’ I say. ‘There are the outward chambers, many of them, and all guarded by yeomen ushers ready to purge the palace of all manner of servants and rascals who have no right to be there. Then there is the great hall where food is served, but not to the King and Queen who usually eat in their privy chambers. After this comes the great watching chamber full to bursting with red liveried guards and this leads into the great presence chamber, all hung with silken arras. Here, the ladies and gentlemen courtiers linger, and if they look up to the ceiling they will see how the gold leaf glisters. King Henry sits upon his throne in all his magnificence underneath his golden cloth of estate. No one but the King is allowed to go beneath it. His surcoat hangs from his wide shoulders all gleaming with gold. The gossamer linen ruffles at his wrists are decorated with costly black-work and golden embroidery that maybe his queen has wrought. Here the King receives ambassadors and sometimes they will dine here. In the gallery, feather capped musicians play their sackbuts, brightly bannered trumpets and lutes while courtiers dance.’
‘Take me further into the palace,’ White Boy pleads. ‘Take me to the King’s most secret rooms.’
‘He has a big bed of state where he might recline in comfort while he talks to important visitors, and a cosier bedchamber which is where he really sleeps, and he has the most wonderful bathroom, with water pumped right into it, so I have been told, although, of course, I have never seen it, and he has a little place where he can kneel and say his prayers and read his Bible, and beyond this, there is his jewel house.’
‘Here is a thought to keep the people awake in their beds. You have told me, mistress, that between the beggar and the King there are so many doors, stairs and chambers all guarded so that the beggar will never reach the King in his secret chambers. Here is King Henry VIII kneeling at his prayers with his jewels beside him and only God above him. No pope to mediate. Just God and the King juggling questions and answers.
‘Just God and the King … the King and God ...’ White Boy sits awhile, pondering. ‘Just God and the King you say, mistress?’ He tightens the cloth around his eyes and takes his basket from the trestle and his tapping stick from its place by the settle ready for his daily round to our neighbours.
At the door he turns and says with surprise, as if the thought has just come to him, ‘King Henry VIII created a new kind of majesty.’
Chapter 16
April to October 1534
Everything that happened at court in the spring and summer of 1534 was about the expected prince. Mistress Madge told me that this time, all the King’s astrologers and physicians foresaw a boy, even the one who had correctly foretold of a girl last time. That the Queen might not be brought to bed of a healthy boy was unthinkable. Miscarriages and stillbirths were a sad reality for midwives like Aunt Bess, yet at court that spring the memory of Queen Katherine and her many lost pregnancies belonged to another time when God had not blessed her incestuous marriage to Henry. This time, God would show that Henry had pleased him. This time, after more than twenty years, Henry would finally get his boy. I was afraid to see the Queen, glad to stay in my mistress’s lodgings or to run errands to the silk woman or the wardrobe. I didn’t want Queen Anne to ask the question again. I didn’t want to have to lie a second time. Then, three things happened.
First, Queen Anne began to withdraw more often from the ladies and gentlemen of her privy chamber to rest on her bed. Sometimes she was not seen at court for two or three days at a time. This second pregnancy was becoming difficult.
‘My cousin, the Queen, was not so tired last time,’ Mistress Madge tittle-tattled while I combed her hair. ‘She endured four days of festivities for her coronation. Everyone said there had never been more pastime and dancing in the Queen’s chamber. And she was often debating religious matters with ambassadors and the King late into the night. She has four more months to go and I fear that if she does not get herself out and about a little more amongst ladies and gentlemen of good company she will become melancholy. As I am her cousin, and her nearest relative, I dare say I shall take the brunt of her ill humour.
‘She has already chastised me for writing idle poesies for a certain gentleman in my prayer book,’ she softly purred whilst fluttering her lashes, ‘which surely she should not have done, for I have seen for myself the words of love for Henry, which she inscribed with her own hand in her book of prayers when she was but the lady mistress whom the King served.’
A melancholy humour is harmful for a woman with child, I knew this even then for my aunt had told me so. I didn’t want to think of the stillborn boy that I had foreseen when the Queen sought my prediction. Perhaps, if someone would help the Queen to be more cheerful, she might hang on to the pregnancy. Perhaps, this time, I would be proved wrong.
‘Does not the King sit with the Queen to cheer her when she is weary?’
‘Take more care, Avis you are pulling my hair.’ Mistress Madge delivered a sharp slap to the back of my hand. Then she told me, in her careless, gossipy way, of the second terrible thing that had happened that spring. King Henry had taken a mistress.
‘She is very beautiful, everyone says so.’ Mistress Madge laughed and let her dimples show. ‘Now, comb more gently, if you please.’
‘I’m sorry, Mistress Shelton. Louse eggs are sticking to the comb and getting stuck in your curls,’ I said in a small voice, feeling my eyes sting with tears. I was only doing what she had asked. It wasn’t my fault that the comb was too fine for her tangled hair.
‘Stop sulki
ng, Avis, and tell me why you have poured this foul smelling ointment all over my head. You will make me smell like a pig,’ she grumbled.
‘It’s only a mixture of quicksilver and swine’s grease that my aunt has made for you. It kills the lice and makes the eggs slip easily from your scalp on to the comb. And no one will smell your hair if you tuck it all under your hood.’
‘Oh when will summer come? I want to lie in the King’s garden and have you spread my tresses out for the sun to bleach. You will lie with me and see what the sun will do to your mousey brown locks. How I hate my dull winter hair.’
I wondered why she bothered about her hair when most of it was hidden beneath her hood and veil. Who would see it?
It was Father who told me of the third terrible happening. Pope Clement had insulted the King. And Queen Anne. He had finally judged Henry’s first marriage to Katherine to be true. This meant that Roman Catholics believed that the Lady Mary was still Princess Mary and Henry’s only lawful and legitimate heir. Anne Boleyn was King Henry’s concubine. Her coronation meant nothing. And Princess Elizabeth was as much a bastard as Henry Fitzroy, the King’s son by Bessie Blount, one of his mistresses. It followed, of course, that the expected baby prince would also be a bastard.
King Henry responded to the Pope’s insult with a new Act of Succession which declared King Henry and Queen Anne’s issue to be the only legitimate heirs to his throne. Princess Elizabeth was moved nearer to Greenwich, to Eltham Palace where King Henry had lived with his sisters when he was a boy. The nursery suite had already been redecorated in ochre yellow against the coming of the prince.
‘It is a grander establishment than Hatfield and is the King and Queen’s way of showing off to everyone Princess Elizabeth’s status as King Henry’s only heir until the prince is born,’ Mistress Madge told me.
‘What of the Lady Mary?’
‘That stubborn girl refused, yet again, to accompany my mother in the litter behind Princess Elizabeth and had to be lifted up against her will.’
‘So, Lady Mary remains in Princess Elizabeth’s household?’
‘Of course. Where else could she go? The King and Queen will not have her at court and she is not allowed to have an establishment of her own.’
I wanted to ask my mistress if Lady Shelton had discovered who had sent the letter in the orange to the Lady Mary but did not trust myself to keep my voice calm. Better not to speak of it.
‘My lady mother complains constantly in her letters,’ Mistress Madge said. ‘She grumbles that she should be living quietly at home in Norfolk but my father says she must do her duty, as he does, and take charge of Princess Elizabeth’s household because she is the Queen’s aunt. And my cousin Anne, the Queen, is so angered by the Lady Mary’s stubbornness that Mother and I are quite afraid of her when she has one of her tempers. But, of course, you must not tell anyone of this, Avis.’
The Queen’s pregnancy was at the same stage as she was a year ago when the musician took me to her secretly. Sooner or later she would send for me again and she would want the answer I did not want to give.
‘Does Mark Smeaton play for the Queen in her chambers?’ I asked.
‘Oh, so you have noticed the pretty boy in the minstrel’s gallery.’ Mistress Madge smiled. ‘Well, why should you not. You are a pretty enough girl yourself.’
‘I have heard that his singing and his playing upon the lute and keyboard is very much admired,’ I replied, feeling myself blush, ‘especially by the Queen.’
I was able to see a lot more of Mother and Father now that I was in Mistress Madge’s household. I travelled with the court as it moved from palace to palace and so did father and mother because they were part of the small riding household. Aunt Bess always remained at Greenwich where she and Anthony were part of the abiding household, as I had been when I was a gardening maid. There were times during the following two years when I sorely missed my aunt but I did not confess this to mother although she knew how pleased I was when the court returned to Greenwich. Everyone said that it was King Henry’s favourite palace. To me, it was home.
Wherever the court settled, hardly a day would go by without Mistress Madge giving me leave to visit the bakery or the confectionary again. ‘Just you slip away for an hour or so, Avis, after you have worked a little upon your embroidery, no one will notice your absence.’
‘It would seem that Mistress Shelton spends more time upon your education, trying to make you into a lady, than you do serving as her maid. What use is embroidery to you when you can’t even sew a straight hem on a shirt,’ Mother said, while she ground nuts into a mortar.
‘I am learning how to brush her gowns, and to fold them without creasing, and to lay them into her chest between layers of linen and powdered dried orange peel to deter the moths, and sometimes I have to run errands for her. She doesn’t make me do dirty jobs, like making up the fire or heavy work, like putting up my truckle bed at nights, she has a boy to do that.’
‘I have not seen Mistress Shelton myself,’ Mistress Pudding said, ‘but I hear she is fair and comely and that the gentlemen at court are quite taken with her dimpled cheeks and her little curls which escape from her hood.’ She began to giggle and fidgeted inside her cap, twisting a wisp of brown hair around her finger. ‘Is it not amazing how a glimpse of a curl or two will turn a man’s head? Especially the King’s. There is more than one gentlemen who serves your mistress in the courtly games they play in Queen Anne’s chambers, I believe.’
‘My mistress reads her Bible and her book of hours. She does her embroidery and walks with the Queen and her dogs in the gardens when it is fine. I have seen no gentleman paying court to her.’
‘You won’t do while you’re here in the outer courtyard every other afternoon,’ Mother said dryly.
‘Oh, Joan,’ Mistress Pudding said with a little giggle, ‘in truth, you are quite shocking. Do you mean to say that Mistress Shelton is dallying with a young gentleman at court while her maid is got rid of for an hour or so?’
Mother continued with her pounding, tight-lipped while the pudding wife bobbed her head and chortled in her woodpecker way.
I would never have dared to confess to Mother or Mistress Pudding something else that Mistress Madge had taught me. They would have been so shocked.
She had taken me into the privy garden while she walked the Queen’s spaniel, Purkoy; the one that Lady Bryan’s son had brought to her. Letting the puppy off the lead Mistress Madge told me to sit with her on a bench, for she had something to show me. She reached inside her pocket that hung beneath her mantle and produced my pomander.
‘Do not tell a soul that I have returned this to you, for if you do my lady mother will surely find out and chastise us both.’
I told her that I had hardly expected to see it again and thanked her.
‘Pray, do not thank me, for it is yours. Your sweetheart will wish you to keep it close to your person.’
‘I should like to keep the angel noble, I said, ‘but the pomander with the orange shell and the herbs may be discarded.’
‘Discard the orange halves.’ Mistress Madge laughed. ‘What an innocent you are. Your sweetheart means you to put them to good use when next you meet.’
‘I suppose I could put fresh herbs inside them and keep them in my casket with my linen to keep my shifts fresh as you do, mistress,’ I said.
She laughed again. ‘So you have noticed that I have one or two of these little orange cups stored away with my clothes. Really, I am surprised that your aunt, who is a midwife, has not spoken to you privily of how you might clean and scrape the flesh from an orange to make little cups.’
‘What is so funny about orange peel?’
‘You are a raw, ignorant girl. I see it is not only needlework that I need to teach you. Hasn’t your mother or your aunt told you that you can use these little orange cups to prevent the conception of a child when your sweetheart makes love to you. When the court returns to Greenwich you should ask your mother or
your aunt to show you how to use them.’
‘Mother says it is a sin against God to try to prevent a baby from starting,’ I told her, horrified. ‘Anyway, I do not have a sweetheart. Why is it that everyone believes it to be so when it is not?’
‘You are not a child and the sooner you realise it the better, especially while you are at court.’
I wondered how it could be that my mistress knew so much of my aunt’s business for I had never spoken to Mistress Madge about Aunt Bess, either concerning her laundry work or her midwifery.
‘Your aunt’s reputation for discretion is well known in the outer and the inner courtyards,’ Mistress Madge said in a serious tone. ‘I assume that you will go about your duties as my maid with similar delicacy. My cousin, the Queen, has confided to me that she believes this to be so.’
And she gave me a sideways look as if to say, how come the Queen knows so much about a common little wench from the outer courtyard?
*
Father was shaking with anger when he told me told me that Sir Thomas More, the King’s old friend and former chancellor, was in danger because he stayed true to the Catholic Church and the Pope. He had hoped to be able to live quietly with his family at Chelsea but in April he was taken to Lambeth Palace where he was questioned by commissioners. There was an oath attached to the new Act of Succession and it was treason to refuse to swear to the oath. Sir Thomas refused. Four days later he was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. A week later, the Nun of Kent was executed at Tyburn for high treason. Everyone was talking about Elizabeth Barton, the Nun of Kent. She used to have fits where she became as stiff as a dead body and saw visions of the future. In the old days, Cardinal Wolsey had visited her and sought her predictions. Now, she named Anne Boleyn, ‘Jezebel’. Even worse, she said she had seen a vision of King Henry in hell.
‘She deserves her punishment,’ I told Father. ‘She should not have said such terrible things about the King and Queen.’
‘It seems that there will be many lives ruined or lost for the sake of Anne Boleyn and her new faith,’ Father said. ‘Why has God let it come to this? My own daughter living daily amongst the evils of King Henry’s court.’
Mayflowers for November: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn Page 13
