The Favored Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII's Third Wife

by Carolly Erickson

  But amid the confusion, the air was suddenly thick with swarms of flies, rising in black clouds to infest and bite and crawl over every inch of our exposed skin. People cried out and struck at the sudden infestation. I slapped at the nasty creatures as I felt them nip and sting my face, my ears and neck, felt them crawling up beneath my garments.

  Maddened by the flies, Anne was trying to run, shuddering, tugging at her cloak, her gown, barely able to move because of the sudden turmoil in the crowd. A madness had descended, people were rushing in all directions, trying to escape the flies and each other, running into one another in confusion, crying out, lashing out.

  I thought, we will die here. We will be trampled.

  Then I felt someone gripping my arm firmly. I turned to see who it was—and looked into Will’s resolute, flinty face, his mouth set in a hard line.

  “Come,” he shouted above the hubbub, pulling me along through the unruly mob, through the swarming flies and the noise, the flailing arms and thrashing bodies. Instinctively I grabbed for Anne with my free arm, and managed to pull her after us.

  The next few moments were a blur of confusion and panic. I was aware that I was stepping on squirming bodies, and that I could not stop to help them. I heard Will’s voice, and felt his strong grip on my arm, I heard Anne sobbing and panting, I thought I heard the tramping of boots. I felt faint, but gulped as much of the rain-scented air as I could hold and lowered my head and went forward as Will was telling me to do. And finally, as the noise and confusion seemed to grow less, I felt myself pulled into a dim corridor, where burning torches were set into the stone walls and the sounds of mayhem were dimmed.

  “Stay here,” Will ordered, sitting me ungently down on a hard bench. “I must go back for the others.” I sat where he put me, dizzy and out of breath, too weak and bewildered to do anything but wait, glad to be delivered from the scene of chaos, for Will’s return.

  * * *

  The arrival at court of a new special envoy from Emperor Charles was a welcome relief. The nobleman was a hefty, strong-looking man, with something of the seasoned courtier’s subtlety of manner. His shock of white-blond hair and blue eyes were a pleasant surprise to us; they made him seem forthright, even knightly, while Ambassador Chapuys was small and dark and slippery.

  King Henry embraced the German with unaccustomed bonhomie. I knew at once that there was deviousness afoot. I glanced around the room. Ambassador Chapuys was present, and Thomas Cromwell, and a priest I did not recognize, along with several of the king’s chamber gentlemen and an array of clerks and grooms.

  Henry had asked me to be there, saying I was the favorite friend of the princess dowager Catherine who was, of course, the emperor’s aunt. When I learned that my presence would be required I was reminded of what the king often told me, that he trusted me, that I was the only person he could trust. I had never been more conscious of that trust than on this afternoon.

  “And was your crossing smooth?” King Henry was asking the envoy.

  “As smooth as my master’s grand trireme could make it,” came the German’s reply. He smiled, showing blackened teeth. “It is his newest vessel, with twenty-seven banks of oarsmen. I have never ridden in a swifter ship. It flies over the water.”

  “I myself have ordered a quadrireme, with one hundred banks of oarsmen,” Henry boasted. “The shipwrights are building her now. No ship is larger, or faster.” He beamed. “But then,” he went on, “I need no array of ships. My great fortresses at Calais and Dover are so strong no foreign army could ever cross the water to conquer England.”

  “If it pleases Your Majesty to think so,” was the German’s complacent reply. “As to the quadrireme, I believe it has often been noted that Your Majesty has a natural inclination to all things new and strange.”

  “Such as yourself,” was King Henry’s immediate rejoinder. “You are new, and strange, are you not?” He guffawed and clapped the foreigner on the back. Ambassador Chapuys and the chancellor laughed and a tight smile appeared on the German’s face.

  “New perhaps,” he said, stepping deftly out of the king’s reach. “But hardly strange. I do not, for example, possess a magic ring, or a cloak of invisibility, as Your Majesty is said to do.”

  King Henry, taken aback, looked around at the other men in the room, none of whom met his gaze. It was well known that he boasted of possessing a ring that had belonged to Cardinal Wolsey, a ring with a wonder-working stone that was a talisman of protection and a source of occult power. The Duke of Norfolk complained that the king, by turning this ring on his finger and muttering a charm, had cast a spell on him and caused a demon to haunt him.

  As to the cloak of invisibility, I myself had seen the king working on it in his Tower room. It was a sweep of buckskin which, he explained to me, would hide the wearer from view once it was treated with a special tincture of wine, horse bones and powdered glass.

  “I see I can have no secrets at this court,” Henry said gruffly. “As usual, Jane here is the only one I can really trust.”

  A collation was brought in and the men sat at a table to refresh themselves.

  “If Your Majesty pleases,” the envoy broke in, “I should like to convey His Imperial Highness’s wish that our two realms might join in a crusade against the enemies of Christendom, the heathen Turks.”

  “Ah, the emperor’s old dream, to defeat the unbelievers. It would take a great many triremes to accomplish that, I imagine. Ah well, I have quite enough difficulty trying to defeat the rebels in Ireland. I cannot join in a grand enterprise against the Turk.”

  “His Imperial Majesty will be disappointed to hear that,” the German said. “Especially since you once promised him you would send your armies to the East to fight alongside his own.”

  “I did promise that, didn’t I?” Henry mused. “It was when Charles was here in England, visiting his aunt Catherine. Years ago. He was just a boy then. An idealistic boy.”

  “A boy who had inherited half the world,” Ambassador Chapuys put in. “A very rich boy.”

  “But a boy nonetheless,” Henry snapped. “He used to kneel to me, to ask my blessing. He used to call me Bon Père, his good father.

  “‘Can we not make a joint crusade against the Turks, good father?’ he asked me. He was a clumsy boy, with a long face. He said too many prayers, as I recall, and rode awkwardly. A bad jouster.

  “Well, at any rate, he asked me if we could not ride together against the Turks, and I remember saying to him, ‘The King of France, he is the greatest Turk.’ And he was. He still is. But that was long ago, before Martin Luther arose among us. Some say he is the greatest Turk now.”

  The men ate and drank, Henry kept them amused with stories and jokes and at length called in his astrologer John Robyns.

  “My Robin here,” he said, getting to his feet, “keeps me intrigued by reading the night sky. He has studied the stars and especially the comets. We speak of them often, do we not?”

  Robyns, lanky and balding, with a broad brow and wide, bright eyes, told the others about a long-tailed comet that he had been watching.

  “It may portend the birth of a son to the queen,” he said, making King Henry smile and nod. “Or it may predict disaster. No one can say for certain.”

  The king frowned.

  “Don’t be grim, Robin. Be hopeful.”

  “The skies do not respond to our hopes, as I have often told you, sire,” Robyns said, his voice even. “The most we can do is observe, and note the changes in the heavenly bodies, and write down what we see.”

  “Robin is writing a treatise on comets,” Henry informed us. “On how long it takes them to reappear. It is of the greatest interest to me.”

  “His Imperial Majesty the Emperor also has astrologers who read the heavens,” the envoy remarked. “Perhaps they could meet.”

  Robyns bowed. “If His Majesty wishes it, I am ready to confer with others who study the skies.”

  “As above, so below,” was King Henry’s eni
gmatic response. He looked around at the others. “If we can divine what is occurring in the heavens, then we will know what to expect on earth.”

  This awkward comment met with silence. It was a time-honored truism, beloved of fortune tellers and purveyors of magic. It was out of place.

  I found my voice.

  “Speaking of what to expect on earth, does anyone here read fortunes?” I held out my palm.

  The priest who was a stranger to me, a benign smile on his elderly face, now came toward me.

  “I have that gift, Mistress Seymour,” he said.

  “Ah! Good!” the king exclaimed. “Now we shall have some fun. Tell us, what is Jane’s future to bring?”

  The man looked down into my hand, then drew back. I could tell right away that something he saw in my palm alarmed him.

  “You must forgive me,” he said, his voice faltering. “My gift fails me on this occasion. Perhaps if we wait until nightfall, and consult the stars—”

  “Foolish old man!” The king reddened. “Spare us your feeble gifts!” And waving the priest away, he called for more wine and a plate of lampreys, which he proceeded to devour noisily and greedily, biting off the heads of each as if he bore a grudge against it.

  * * *

  That summer, the summer of the year 1534, cattle in the fields and horses in their stables began to die.

  At first it was only the weakest, leanest cattle and the oldest horses, broken down, spavined nags who would not have lived to see another winter through. But then, as the first of the crops began to come in, the healthy cows began to die, along with their young calves, and the strong bulls, and the drays that pulled the heavy wagons and even the magnificent warhorses and jousting horses that could carry a man in full armor.

  The murrain struck suddenly, and killed surely—but only after the animals had suffered for days, their piteous lowing and bleating and whinnying an agony to those that tried to care for them. King Henry loved his horses, and when word of the sickness began to spread he tried to save the most precious of those in his stables by sending them upriver in his royal barges. But no place, it seemed, was safe; the royal horses reached Reading, only to die there within days; he mourned them, withdrawing into an inner chamber and refusing to see or speak to anyone. When at length he came out, he was filled with blame.

  “I should never have let that woman die,” Ned overheard King Henry say, then passed his words on to me. “I should never have listened to my wife’s demands. What more plagues are there to descend on us? Am I to suffer and die like my warhorses?”

  “Take the greatest care, little sister,” Ned cautioned me. “You have escaped calamity so far, but everyone near Queen Anne is under threat. I wish you would leave her service.”

  “If only I could. But she favors me—heaven knows why. She keeps me near her, and the king too wants me at court. He likes talking to me. He says he trusts me.”

  “You know, of course, that the people blame Queen Anne for the threat of harm to their idol, the Nun of Kent. And for these harms that have befallen us they will have their revenge.”

  Ned’s words stayed in my mind as week after week the plague continued. For with the dreaded murrain came stories, widespread among the Londoners and country people alike, that the Nun of Kent had not died, that her spirit lived on—and that the curses she had placed on the king and Anne, and on all the English, were still to be fulfilled. There were reports that her ghostly form was seen floating over the capital, hovering over the royal palaces, even haunting the nursery we had prepared for the coming birth of Anne’s child.

  Anne could not sleep for worrying. She huddled in one corner of her wide bed, alone save for little Pourquoi who lay curled against her under the mound of coverlets, whimpering and snuffling in his sleep. He refused to eat, even though Anne tempted him with plates of shrimp and sweet cream and bowls of pudding—which had always been his favorites. But the food lay untouched. Day after day he languished, while Anne fretted over him and wept and cursed the fewterers who could do nothing for him.

  In the end she went to the king, escorted by all her ladies, and told him that she needed to take Pourquoi to the country, away from the poisons of the capital.

  Henry regarded us all calmly, and heard Anne’s demand.

  “Do you imagine that you can save your dog, when I could not save my horses? Don’t you know that there is no cure for this plague?”

  “I will take him somewhere safe,” Anne insisted. “I will protect him. I will not let any other animals come near him. Or sorcerers, or seers or false visionaries in the pay of Ambassador Chapuys.”

  “It is too near your time,” the king said. “You must not go anywhere until our son is born.”

  “I cannot bear to lose little Pourquoi,” Anne said stubbornly. “Would you have me bear our child in a season of mourning, if my beloved dog were to die?”

  “He will die soon enough, even if he is not struck down with the murrain. He is an old dog. Now, I will hear no more about this.”

  But Anne, as always, was persistent. In the end the king threw up his hands and told her she could go to his hunting lodge at Lornford near Cheam, taking only a small group of servants and four of her maids of honor. She chose Bridget and me, along with Anne Cavecant and—at the king’s insistence—Bess Holland, mistress of Anne’s uncle Norfolk.

  “Foolish errand!” I heard the king mutter. “The dog will be dead within a day, and this whim will be past.”

  All the way to Lornford Anne held her little dog in her arms, beneath her cloak, talking to him soothingly. It was a mournful journey, past fields of dead and dying cattle, the stench of death thick in the air. In the towns we passed through, the markets were all but empty; a few scrawny fowls and quacking ducks were all that were to be seen.

  “Where are all the dogs?” Anne asked a town gatekeeper.

  “All dead, Your Highness,” came the reply. “You’d best guard your own beast before he falls in a faint like the rest.”

  It was raining when we arrived at Lornford, and there was a chill in the air. No fires had been laid for us in the old hunting lodge, and it was several hours before rooms could be warmed and prepared for Anne and a bed made up. What food was brought to her she tried to feed to the weak Pourquoi, who lay under silken sheets we had brought with us, shivering and whining.

  For two days, while the roof leaked ceaselessly and Pourquoi grew weaker and weaker, we awaited the end. Anne sat sleepless beside him, and insisted that prayers be said over him just as if he had been a Christian soul in the last stages of illness and not a small black dog with a fringe of grey at his muzzle. At last, on the third night, Pourquoi gave a final faint cry and fell onto the floor.

  Almost at the same instant Anne wailed and clutched her stomach.

  “The midwives!” she cried. “I need the midwives!”

  But we had brought no midwives to Lornford. The king had ordered them to stay at Whitehall, thinking our stay in the country would be brief.

  Bridget and I put Anne to bed and did what we could to soothe her. One of the grooms was sent to Whitehall to fetch the midwives, but we knew it would be many hours before we could expect them, and in the meantime it was clear to us that Anne was in increasing pain. I had attended enough births to feel certain that the seizures that gripped her were something other than the slow, progressively building pains of labor. These spasms were sudden and sharp, knifelike stabs that made her scream in terror.

  I could not help but think that her suffering was one more sign of the nun’s revenge.

  “Is she going to die?” Bess Holland asked Bridget, her eyes wide. “Are we all going to be blamed if she does?”

  But Bridget only snorted in derision and waved Bess away so that we could give Anne wine—and not the watered wine we were accustomed to drinking but wine mixed with some of the opium Anne Cavecant always carried with her to soothe her own constant pain from the tumor in her side.

  The mixture appeared to make Anne d
rowsy, yet the fearsome spasms did not subside, but rather seemed to worsen, jarring her cruelly out of her lethargy and making her tear at her blankets and shout and swear at us until we were beside ourselves with frustration.

  “It’s no good,” Bridget said to me at length. “We’ll have to try to find a midwife in Cheam.”

  A hasty search through the town, with two of the royal servants loudly announcing in the king’s name that a midwife was urgently needed, produced a frightened, disheveled dam in a dirty apron who could barely bring herself to look at us, much less attend to Anne. She was clumsy, her hands were shaking as she approached the bed, her grimy cap awry and her mouth open in disbelief.

  She looked down at Anne, and saw, not only her face, contorted in pain, but her left hand, with its long thin fingers and telltale extra nail.

  “It is the whore!” she cried out. “The king’s whore! She bears the marks of the devil!”

  And before we could try to stop her she had run out of the room, past the servants, shrieking as if a demon was after her.

  What happened then makes me cringe, even now, in the telling. For with the aid of Bridget and Anne Cavecant and one other, the cook’s assistant, a strong young girl who did not flinch though what she saw and heard were fearsome indeed, we delivered Anne of the burden that was making her suffer.

  We delivered her, though what came forth from her distended belly after she had fainted from her agony was less a babe than an unnatural thing, a gruesome prodigy like those glimpsed by the followers of the Nun of Kent and welcomed as signs of divine wrath and punishment.

  I will not dwell on its size, or its odd shape, or the way its great round bald head lolled uncontrollably and its stunted arms and legs waggled grotesquely. I will only say that we all gasped in horror when we saw it, and that it did not live. Bridget and I looked at one another, shook our heads, and wrapped the thing in a sheet. It was hurriedly placed in a wooden box and taken to one of the outbuildings. Not knowing what else to do, we left it there.