by Jean Plaidy
Louise looked on with admiration at her Caesar; Marguerite of Alencon said of her stupid husband: “Oh, why is he not like my brother!” And the court of France, tired of the niggardly Louis and the influence of the Queen whom they had called “the vestal,” awaited eagerly that day when Francois should ascend the throne.
And now the old King had married a young wife who looked as if she could bear many children; Louise of Savoy raged against the Kings of France and England. Marguerite grew pale, fearing that her beloved brother would be cheated of his inheritance. Francois said: “Oh, but how she is charming, this little Mary Tudor!” and he looked with distaste on his affianced bride, the little limping Claude.
Anne Boleyn was very sorry for Claude. How sad it was to be ill-favored, to look on while he who was to be your husband flitted from one beautiful lady to another like a gorgeous dragonfly in a garden of flowers! How important it was to be beautiful! She went on learning, by listening, her eyes wide to miss nothing.
Mary, the new French Queen, was wild as a young colt, and much more beautiful. Indiscreetly she talked to her attendants, mostly French now, for almost her entire retinue of English ladies had been sent home. The King had dismissed them; they made a fence about her, he said, and if she wanted advice, to whom should she go but to her husband? She had kept little Anne Boleyn, though. The King had turned his sallow face, on which death was already beginning to set its cold fingers, towards the little girl and shrugged his shoulders. A little girl of such tender years could not worry him. So Anne had stayed.
“He is old,” Mary murmured, “and he is all impatience for me. Oh, it can be amusing…he can scarcely wait…” And she went off into peals of laughter, reconstructing with actions her own coy reluctance and the King’s impatience.
“Look at the little Boleyn! What long ears she has! Wait till you are grown up, my child…then you will not have to learn by listening when you think you are not observed. I trow those beautiful black eyes will gain for you an opportunity to experience the strange ways of men for yourself.”
And Anne asked herself: “Will it happen so? Shall I be affianced and married?” And she was a little afraid, and then glad to be only seven, for when you are seven marriage is a long way off.
“Monsieur mon beau-fils, he is very handsome, is he not?” demanded Mary. And she laughed, with secrets in her eyes.
Yes, indeed, thought Anne, Francois was handsome. He was elegant and charming, and he quoted poetry to the ladies as he walked in the gardens of the palace. Once he met Anne herself in the gardens, and he stopped her and she was afraid; and he, besides being elegant and charming, was very clever, so that he understood her fear which, she was wise enough to see, amused him vastly. He picked her up and held her close to him, so that she could see the dark, coarse hair on his face and the bags already visible beneath his dark, flashing eyes; and she trembled for fear he should do to her that which it was whispered he would do to any who pleased him for a passing moment.
He laughed his deep and tender laugh, and as he laughed the young Queen came along the path, and Francois put Anne down that he might bow to the Queen.
“Monsieur mon beau-fils…” she said, laughing.
“Madame…la reine…”
Their eyes flashed sparks of merriment one to the other; and little Anne Boleyn, having no part in this sport that amused them so deeply, could slip away.
I am indeed fortunate to learn so much, thought Anne. She had grown a long way from that child who had played at Hever and stitched at a piece of tapestry with Simonette. She knew much; she learned to interpret the smiles of people, to understand what they meant, not so much from the words they used as from their inflection. She knew that Mary was trying to force Francois into a love affair with her, and that Francois, realizing the folly of this, was yet unable to resist it. Mary was a particularly enticing flower full of golden pollen, but around her was a great spider’s web, and he hovered, longing for her, yet fearing to be caught. Louise and her daughter watched Mary for the dreaded signs of pregnancy, which for them would mean the death of hope for Caesar.
“Ah, little Boleyn,” said Mary, “if I could but have a child! If I could come to you and say ‘I am enceinte,’ I would dance for joy; I would snap my fingers at that grim old Louise, I would laugh in the face of that clever Marguerite. But what is the good! That old man, what can he do for me! He tries though…he tries very hard…and so do I!”
She laughed at the thought of their efforts. There was always laughter round Mary Tudor. All around the court those words were whispered—“Enceinte! Is the Queen enceinte? If only…the Queen is enceinte!”
Louise questioned the ladies around the Queen; she even questioned little Anne. The angry, frustrated woman buried her head in her hands and raged; she visited her astrologer; she studied her charts. “The stars have said my son will sit on the throne of France. That old man…he is too old, and too cold…”
“He behaves like a young and hot one,” said Marguerite.
“He is a dying fire…”
“A dying fire has its last flicker of warmth, my mother!”
Mary loved to tease them, feigning sickness. “I declare I cannot get up this morning. I do not know what it can be, except that I may have eaten too heartily last evening…” Her wicked eyes sparkling; her sensuous lips pouting.
“The Queen is sick this morning…she looked blooming last night. Can it be…?”
Mary threw off her clothes and pranced before her mirror.
“Anne, tell me, am I not fattening? Here…and here. Anne, I shall slap you unless you say I am!” And she would laugh hysterically and then cry a little. “Anne Boleyn, did you never see my Lord of Suffolk? How my body yearns for that man!” Ambition was strong in Mary. “I would be mother to a king of France, Anne. Ah, if only my beautiful beau-fils were King of France! Do you doubt, little Boleyn, that he would have had me with child ere this? What do I want from life? I do not know, Anne…. Now, if I had never known Charles…” And she grew soft, thinking of Charles Brandon, and the King would come and see her softness, and it would amuse her maliciously to pretend the softness was for him. The poor old King was completely infatuated by the giddy creature; he would give her presents, beautiful jewels one at a time, so that she could express her gratitude for each one. The court tittered, laughing at the old man. “That one will have his money’s worth!” It was a situation to set a French court, coming faster and faster under the influence of Francois, rocking with laughter.
Wildly, Mary coquetted with the willing Francois. If she cannot get a child from the King, whispered the court, why not from Francois? She would not lose from such a bargain; only poor Francois would do that. What satisfaction could there be in seeing yourself robbed of a throne by your own offspring? Very little, for the child could not be acknowledged as his. Oh, it was very amusing, and the French were fond of those who amused them. And that it should be Mary Tudor from that gloomy island across the Channel, made it more amusing still. Ah, these English, they were unaccountable. Imagine it! An English princess to give them the best farce in history! Francois was cautious; Francois was reckless. His ardor cooled; his passion flared. There was none, he was sure, whom he could enjoy as heartily as the saucy, hot-blooded little Tudor. There were those who felt it their duty to warn him. “Do you not see the web stretched out to catch you?” Francois saw, and reluctantly gave up the chase.
On the first day of January, as Anne was coming from the Queen’s apartment, she met Louise—a distraught Louise, her black hair disordered, her eyes wild.
Anne hesitated, and was roughly thrust aside.
“Out of my way, child! Have you not heard the news? The King is dead.”
Now the excitement of the court was tuned to a lower key, though it had increased rather than abated. Louise and her daughter were overjoyed at the death of the King, but their happiness in the event was overshadowed by their fear. What of the Queen’s condition? They could scarcely wait to know;
they trembled; they were suspicious. What did this one know? What had that one overheard? Intrigue…and, at the heart of it, mischievous Mary Tudor.
The period of mourning set in, and the Queen’s young body was seen to broaden with the passing of the days. Louise endured agonies; Francois lost his gaiety. Only the Queen, demure and seductive, enjoyed herself. In her apartments Louise pored over charts; more and more men, learned in the study of the stars, came to her. Is the Queen enceinte? She begged, she implored to be told this was not so, for how could she bear it if it were! During those days of suspense she brooded on the past; her brief married life, her widowhood; the birth of her clever Marguerite, and then that day at Cognac nearly twenty-one years ago when she had come straight from the agony of childbirth to find her Caesar in her arms. She thought of her husband, the profligate philanderer who had died when Francois was not quite two years old, and whom she had mourned wholeheartedly and then had given over her life to her children, superintending the education of both of them herself, delighting in their capacity for learning, their intellectual powers which surely set them apart from all others; they were both of them so worthy of greatness—a brilliant pair, her world, or at least Caesar was; and where that king of men was concerned, was not Marguerite in complete accord with her mother? He should be King of France, for he was meant to be King of France since there was never one who deserved the honor more than he, the most handsome, the most courteous, the most virile, the most learned Francois. And now this fear! This cheating of her beautiful son by a baggage from England! A Tudor! Who were the Tudors? They did not care to look far back into their history, one supposed!
“My Caesar shall be King!” determined Louise. And, unable to bear the suspense any longer, she went along to the Queen’s apartments and, making many artful enquiries as to her health, she perceived that Her Majesty was not quite as large about the middle as she had been yesterday. So she—for, after all, she was Louise of Savoy, a power in France even in the days of her old enemy and rival, Anne of Brittany—shook the naughty Queen until the padding fell from the creature’s clothes. And…oh, joy! Oh, blessed astrologers who had assured her that her son would have the throne! There was the wicked girl as straight and slender as a virgin.
So Mary left the court of France, and in Paris, secretly and in great haste, she married her Charles Brandon; and the court of France tittered indulgently until it began to laugh immoderately, for it was whispered that Brandon, not daring to tell his King of his unsanctioned marriage with the Queen of France and the sister of the King of England, had written his apologia to Wolsey, begging the great Cardinal to break the news gently to the King.
Francois triumphantly mounted the throne and married Claude, while Louise basked in the exquisite pleasure of ambition fulfilled; she was now Madame of the French court.
Little Anne stayed on to serve with Claude. The Duchesse d’Alencon had taken quite a fancy to the child, for her beauty and grace and for her intelligence; she was not yet eight years old, but she had much worldly wisdom; she knew that crippled Claude was submissive, ignored by her husband, and that it was the King’s sister who was virtually Queen of France. Anne would see brother and sister wandering in the palace grounds, their arms about each other, talking of affairs of state; for Marguerite was outstanding in a court where intellect was given the respect it deserved, and she could advise and help her brother; or Marguerite would read her latest writing to the King, and the King would show a poem he had written; he called her his pet, his darling, ma mignonne. She wanted nothing but to be his slave; she had declared she would be willing to follow her brother as his washer-woman, and for him she would cast to the wind her ashes and her bones.
The shadow of Anne of Brittany was banished from the court, and the King amused himself, and the court grew truly Gallic, and gayer than any in Europe. It was elegant; it was distinctive; its gallantry was of the highest order; its wit flowed readily. It was the most scintillating of courts, the most intellectual of courts, and Marguerite of Alencon, the passionately devoted slave and sister to the King, was queen of it.
It was in this court that Anne Boleyn cast off her childishness and came to premature womanhood, and with the passing of the years and the nourishing of that friendship which she enjoyed with the strange and fascinating Marguerite, she herself became one of the brightest of its brilliant lights.
Between the towns of Guisnes and Ardres was laid a brilliant pageant. A warm June sun showed the palace of Guisnes in all its glittering glory. A fairy-tale castle this, though a temporary one; and one on which many men had worked since February, to the great expense of the English people. It was meant to symbolize the power and riches of Henry of England. At its gates and windows had been set up sham men-at-arms, their faces made formidable enough to terrify those who looked too close; they represented the armed might of the little island across the Channel, not perhaps particularly significant in the eyes of Europe until the crafty statesman, that wily Wolsey, had got his hands on the helm of its ship of state. The hangings of cloth of gold, the gold images, the chairs decorated with pommels of gold, all the furnishings and hangings ornamented wherever possible with the crimson Tudor rose—these represented the wealth of England. The great fountain in the courtyard, from which flowed wine—claret, white wine, red wine—and over which presided the great stone Bacchus round whose head was written in Tudor gold, “Faietes bonne chere qui vouldra”—this was to signify Tudor hospitality.
The people of England, who would never see this lavish display and who had contributed quite a large amount of money towards it, might murmur; those lords who had been commanded by their King to set out on this most opulent and most expensive expedition in history might think uneasily of return to their estates, impoverished by the need to pay for their participation in it; but the King thought of none of these things. He was going to meet his rival, Francis; he was going to prove to Francis that he was the better king, which was a matter of opinion; he was going to show himself to be a better man, which some might think doubtful; he was going to show he was a richer king, which, thanks to his cautious father, was a fact; and that he was a power in Europe, of which there could no longer be a doubt. He could smile expansively at this glittering palace which he had erected as fitting to be the temporary resting place of his august self; he could smile complacently because in spite of its size it could not accommodate his entire retinue, so that all around the palace were the brightly colored tents of his less noble followers. He could congratulate himself that Francis’s lodging at Ardres was less magnificent than his; and these matters filled the King of England with a satisfaction which was immense.
In the pavilion which was the French King’s lodging, Queen Claude prepared herself for her meeting with Queen Katharine. Her ladies, too, prepared themselves; and among these was one whose beauty set her aside from all others. She was now in her fourteenth year, a lovely, slender girl who wore her dark hair in silken ringlets, and on whose head was an aureole made of plaited gauze, the color of gold. The blue of her garments was wonderfully becoming to her dark beauty; her vest was of blue velvet spattered with silver stars; her surcoat of watered silk was lined with miniver and the sleeves of the surcoat were of her own designing; they were wide and long, and hung below her hands, hiding them, for she was more sensitive about her hands than she had been at Blickling and Hever. Over this costume she wore a blue velvet cape trimmed with points, and from the end of each of these points hung little golden bells; her shoes were covered in the same blue velvet as her vest, and diamond stars twinkled on her insteps. She was one of the very fashionable ladies in the smart court of France, and even now the ladies of the court were striving to copy those long hanging sleeves, so that what had been a ruse to hide a deformity was becoming a fashion. She was the gayest of the young ladies. Who would not be gay, sought after as she was? She was quick of speech, ready of wit; in the dance she excelled all others; her voice was a delight; she played the virginals competently; she
composed a little. She was worldly wise, and yet there was about her a certain youthful innocence.
Francois himself had cast covetous eyes upon her, but Anne was no fool. She laughed scornfully at those women who were content to hold the King’s attention for a day. Marguerite was her friend, and Marguerite had imbued her with a new, advanced way of thinking, the kernel of which was equality of the sexes. “We are equal with men,” Marguerite had said, “when we allow ourselves to be.” And Anne determined to allow herself to be. So cleverly and with astonishing diplomacy she held off Francois, and he, amused and without a trace of malice, gracefully accepted defeat.
Now Anne was in her element; there was nothing she enjoyed more than a round of gaiety, and here was gaiety such as even she had never encountered before. She was proud of her English birth, and eagerly she drank in the news of English splendor. “My lord Cardinal seemed as a king,” she heard, and there followed an account of his retinue, the gorgeousness of his apparel, the display of his wealth. “And he is but the servant of his master! The splendor of the King of England it would be difficult to describe.” Anne saw him now and then—the great red King; he had changed a good deal since she had last seen him, at Dover. He was more corpulent, coarser; perhaps without his dazzling garments he would not be such a handsome man. His face was ruddier, his cheeks more pouchy; his voice, though, bellowed as before. What a contrast he presented with the dark and subtle Francois! And Anne was not the only one who guessed that these two had little love for each other in spite of the gushing outward displays of affection.
