I heard gasps and cries from the onlookers, and saw both cardinals frown. I could tell that Cardinal Wolsey was about to rise from his chair and protest but his colleague put out a restraining hand. I went up the few steps to the throne and knelt.
“Milord husband,” I began, my head bowed, “I beg you not to let this dishonor continue. For twenty years and more I have been your wife, your one and only true wife. I have borne your children and wept with you when the Lord took them—all but one. I have suffered the shame and humiliation of your faithlessness—”
“Now then, Catherine, you are overwrought,” Henry began, doing his best to raise me to my feet.
I stayed where I was, on my knees. I could hear a disturbed murmuring in the crowd of those watching.
“I have suffered,” I repeated, “the shame and humiliation of your faithlessness, though I did not deserve it. I have kept silence when I could have cried aloud. The pain you have caused me is greater than any woman should be asked to bear.”
Once again he attempted to grip my arm, to lift me off my knees and raise me up. But my long mantilla was in the way. He fumbled with it, grunting audibly, and in the end gave up. He heaved a sigh.
“Nothing would give me more pleasure than to learn from this esteemed court that our marriage is indeed a valid one. Yet I cannot rid myself of my fears. Only my love for you, Catherine, has kept me from giving in to my conscience. Like you, I have kept silence. But I owe it to my people to end that silence and allow this court to render its judgment.”
I waited no more than the space of a breath, then got to my feet and stood facing the onlookers. I took another deep breath.
“I Catherine protest the authority of this court. I assert my privilege to appeal to the supremacy of the Holy Father in Rome.” My words rang out through the great hall.
A hush fell. No one spoke. No one called me back as I went down the few steps and began the long walk toward the entrance to the hall, the only sound the clicking of my heels on the tile floor.
I had not gone far when I heard Cardinal Campeggio’s voice ring out behind me.
“Catherine! Come back into this court, or I will hold you in contempt!
“Catherine!” he shouted a second time. “Come back into the court or I will hold you in contempt!”
But I had gone too far to turn back, and besides, I felt liberated. I had entered the hall on the arm of my faithful gentleman usher. I left it on my own, feeling stronger and full of daring. In that moment I felt as if I could take on the world.
I was in contempt—and in disgrace. Yet the proceedings collapsed without ever reaching a conclusion, and less than a month after I made my protest the Cardinal of Santa Anastasia adjourned the court and it never met again.
15
The court presided over by Cardinals Campeggio and Wolsey never met again, as I have said. But as it had reached no decision, the old strains and questions it was meant to decide remained unresolved.
As far as I was concerned, I was and would remain Henry’s one and only true wife, and Princess Mary was his heir.
But his desire for Anne, and for a son, ate away at him, and as the months passed the atmosphere at our royal court dissolved into a chaos of wrangling and rancor. Through it all, one thing remained clear: Anne did not love Henry. Of that I was certain. She did not show him any of the kindness or constancy or even simple fondness that women in love cannot help but show.
Instead she was harsh and impatient and filled with bitterness.
Hardly had the proceedings at Blackfriars ended when Anne’s loud accusations began to ring out through my household. She was still my maid of honor, living in my apartments, but she acted as though she ruled all. (And indeed I was no longer allowed the title of queen, instead I was addressed as “Mistress Catherine.”) I was Anne’s superior in rank, and certainly her superior by birth, but she expected to be made queen soon, and when Henry failed to marry her she berated him at the top of her lungs, for all to hear. She seemed not to care that in shouting like a fishwife she revealed both her inferior birth and her ignoble motives.
Henry came to seek her out, there among the women of my chamber, and they quarreled. Anne accused him of failing to keep his word and end his marriage to me, of cowardice, of forcing her to squander her precious youth and sacrifice her good repute. And all for nothing.
The more Anne shouted, the more he protested, until, weeping with rage, Anne threatened never to speak to him again, and demanded that he return the token she gave him—the golden ship with its cargo of the maiden tossed about in stormy seas.
What happened then astounded me. I never thought I would witness such a sight: the king, tall and strong as he still was, fearsome as he could still be, at the mercy of a woman such as Anne. Her threats and tears reduced him, I greatly regret to say, to fearful, whimpering dread. To helpless tears of his own. And all this within the hearing of my servants and household officers. Of even the kitchen boys, the laundresses, the poor women who brought me cherries and strawberries and songbirds in cages and newborn pet lambs in hopes of earning a coin or two.
This dishonorable spectacle went on far longer than it should have, and happened again and again. I and the others heard Anne warn Henry that she would leave him, heard him beg her not to, and then, heard him attempt to placate her by bringing her gifts. And not just any gifts, but lavish, costly ones. Lengths of Bruges satin and silk from Florence and Brescia to be sewn into splendid gowns and kirtles. Jeweled collars for her surly greyhound Grisaud. Strings of Orient pearls and rings set with rubies and sapphires. I knew that Henry had sent his groom of the stool Henry Norris to visit every goldsmith’s shop in the Strand to seek out gold hearts set with diamonds for Anne to wear in her long glossy black hair.
I saw the way my chamber women looked at Anne when she caused these shameful scenes. How they scorned her company afterward, partly out of fear—for who knew where the rude shafts of her anger might land next?—and partly, it must be said, from envy. At their most spiteful they muttered to one another, just loudly enough so that Anne could hear them, that she was not so young as she once was, and might never marry anyone, and besides, her only beauties were her thick curling hair that fell to her waist and her fine dark eyes.
They reminded one another, in Anne’s hearing, that others of the king’s favorites had surpassed Anne in loveliness. Bessie Blount had a far more pleasing face and a more bountiful figure, Madge Shelton more grace and charm, not to mention a much more pleasing disposition. In fact, they whispered, every one of my maids of honor was far more pleasant in manner than the shrew Anne. Didn’t she realize that the more she argued and accused the king, the less desirable she appeared?
Every time I heard these remarks I took more satisfaction from them. I only wished I had the courage to repeat them to Anne. Yet to descend to such rude behavior—the behavior of a lowborn woman, not a queen who was the daughter of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand—was beneath me. Or so I told myself, day after day. In truth there was another reason. Anne, it appeared, was in the process of forming a queenly household of her own.
She was about to take my place.
She was not only berating Henry, shaming him into making her his queen, she was actively preparing to take on my role in every detail.
One by one she was choosing those she wanted to serve her: her women, her butler and pantler, her almoner, her cupbearer and the master of her plate and jewels. One by one, each of them began to receive liveries in Anne’s colors and offers of wages—rather high wages—too tempting to resist. Some were lured away from my household, others brought in from outside. In the wake of the sweating plague, which had carried off so many gentlemen of substantial fortunes, many a large household had dispersed, and there was no shortage of servants in search of positions.
However, when Anne was bold enough to offer Griffith Richards twice what he earned as my gentleman usher if he would agree to abandon my service and become head of her new household, he too
k offense.
“Do you really imagine that I would leave Mistress Catherine to serve an adulteress?” was his ringing response.
Anne, nonplussed, offered him three times what he earned.
“And having served the queen from the day of her coronation, would I desert her now to earn a trollop’s coin?”
It warmed my heart that he called me queen, even though Anne’s reply galled me.
“Your wage would assuredly be the king’s coin,” she said, “and when he hears your response, you will regret having made it.”
Others in my service were less loyal, and willingly accepted the higher wages offered them to serve Anne. I could not match those wages; for some time, in fact, I had been unable to pay my servants much of anything. I was reminded of this whenever Anne displayed the jewels and other finery the king gave her. One of her lovely rings would pay all two hundred of my staff for a year. No, I must amend that. I no longer had two hundred servants to pay, as many of them had left me to serve Anne.
I tried not to feel dispirited, to maintain my outward composure amid the shifts and changes of loyalty surrounding me. But it was becoming more difficult, as the tide of royal support seemed to be turning toward Anne. I was sent away for a time to live in the country, but did not stay long. It suited Henry to have me and those who still served me remain nearby, for reasons he alone knew. He even brought Henry Fitzroy to live at court, though Anne complained stridently about this and it led to more conflict. Nearly everyone, including the servants, bickered and fought, with some supporting me and others Anne. There were broken heads and bloodied noses, wounded limbs, torn stockings and doublets slashed to ribbons. And chaos when now and then even the beggars and other low folk at the palace gates took sides.
That we all lived in such close quarters made every slight, every resentment more wounding. My nerves grew more and more frayed. Each new shaft of malice went deeper than the one before. Meanwhile the sudden, unpredictable reversals of royal favor led Anne’s father Thomas Boleyn to rise in wealth and status, even as Cardinal Wolsey plummeted. Boleyn was already rumored to be the richest man in Kent, with properties, offices and honors and even a profitable lumber mill to sustain his fortune. In the Advent season of the Year of Our Lord 1529, higher honors came to him. He was made Earl of Wiltshire—a new creation—and, soon afterward, Lord Privy Seal. Cardinal Wolsey, on the other hand, was attainted for treason, and died in disgrace.
The cardinal was gone, but his horde of gold and other valuables remained. All was now forfeit to the royal treasury. Henry was eager to survey his new possessions, and took me with him when he went downriver to Greenwich to take stock of them.
Not since I left my mother’s palace had I seen such treasures. Paintings and embroidered hangings covered every wall of the rooms where the valuables were stored. Heavy gold vessels and bowls gleamed from the cabinets, jeweled trays and flagons were arrayed on long tables of carved wood. As we passed through each of the rooms I marveled at the sheer abundance of precious things. What need did the cardinal have for a dozen canopied beds, each more splendid than the last, or for gilded chests seemingly without number?
That he possessed precious clerical vestments and gold chalices for serving mass did not surprise me, though the overall value of everything that he had left behind seemed shockingly high for one sworn to follow the austere, unselfish teachings of Jesus.
“I swear, the fellow had more than I ever did,” Henry remarked, half to himself, as we surveyed the spoils of the cardinal’s ruin. Three clerks walked along behind us, writing down each tapestry and goblet and silken bedcurtain. “I can’t imagine where he got it all.”
“Perhaps he had a gold mine no one knew about,” I remarked. Henry had been searching for gold within his kingdom for years. Though the search had not yet led to a discovery he continued to hope that it would, and even brought a wealthy miner turned banker from Augsburg, Augustus Hochstetter, to court to continue it. Herr Hochstetter claimed that he had found rich gold mines in Peru, and was confident that England held equally productive mines. He claimed he could make England very rich indeed, and Henry was as eager as a child to believe him.
This was the side of Henry that I took most pleasure in. He could be filled with excitement over some remote possibility and then dwell on it endlessly, his face alight with expectation.
“There, you see?” he said to me when we had gone through each of the rooms and the secretaries had completed their long lists of treasures. “Thomas was wealthier than I am, and now by dying he has enlarged my treasury. Just wait till the moneylenders see all this—and Anne too, of course,” he added, glancing at me. I knew better than to comment on his mention of Anne, as it seemed, just then, as though Henry’s hopes to find a way to marry Anne had stalled.
It was not merely that he was still, under church law, my husband, after all he had been offered the possibility of having more than one wife at a time. No, it was something else, a wearying sense of futility that sometimes showed itself in his expression. At times exultant, at times deeply unhappy, it was hard for him not to lose heart. And in truth it was hard for me as well, though I was heartened from time to time by unexpected support.
Anne’s aunt, Elizabeth Howard, Duchess of Norfolk, swore to me that she would always be on my side in any dispute with the king, come what may. She had been among my ladies-in-waiting for twenty years and more, and often confided in me as I did in her, though always careful not to carry our friendship beyond appropriate bounds. Her loyalty to me, and sympathy for me, was more important than her loyalty to her husband’s family. She assured me that she would declare herself for me and against her niece Anne, whom she despised.
“Anne is no better than my husband’s mistress Bess Holland,” Elizabeth told me indignantly. “The churl’s daughter who used to wash my children’s clothes.” Had she spat on the floor she could not have been more eloquent.
Elizabeth told me how she was made to suffer when she complained about her husband’s keeping company with Bess. How the duke humiliated her by shouting at her and confining her to a distant manor house, then keeping her there, a prisoner, while his guards mistreated her. I remembered her saying that her possessions had been taken from her and that she had had very little to live on, never knowing when or if she would be released.
“If you complain about Anne,” she said in low tones, “you could find yourself the king’s prisoner, without hope of ever being free again.” Her warning continued to haunt me on long prayerful nights when I could not sleep. She was right, I could be attainted of treason, just as Cardinal Wolsey had been. Or I could simply become another victim of the sweating plague, alive one morning and dead by afternoon. Many women did not live to reach the age of forty, especially if, like me, they had had many pregnancies. I was already well into my fifth decade.
I did my best to push such morbid imaginings from my mind as the Advent season approached, with its message of hope and reconciliation. However, reconciliation seemed less likely than ever. The widening breach between Henry and the Holy Father in Rome was much talked of; indeed the king was warned that he would suffer excommunication unless he sent Anne away from court. Far from sending her away, he showed by his generosity to her just how great his appetite for her had become.
Among the many gifts he gave her that New Year’s were twelve dressmakers from Brussels, brought to court to sew for her and carrying with them chests filled with lengths of wool and silk and costly hangings in cloth of gold and silver and crimson satin. A number of the late cardinal’s tapestries were also presented to Anne, along with much of his plate. Anne in turn gave the king a set of throwing spears for the hunt, and a trio of musicians—a fine lutenist, a viol player and a boy soprano with a high angelic voice and a face as sweet as a girl’s.
“They will play at our wedding,” she announced to Henry, boasting to whoever would listen that the wedding would take place very soon. For as the king himself was proud to say, there was nothing to h
inder their union. All opposition had been swept away. No matter what the Holy Father in Rome might say or think, I, Catherine, was not his true wife.
Legal scholars by the score had declared it so. Many cardinals had agreed; after all, he paid them well to agree. And the English clergy, in solemn convocation, had given the king the new title “Supreme Head of the Church and Clergy of England.” As head of the church he answered to no one—except, of course, Anne.
And Anne was more determined than ever to take my place.
* * *
The mirthless Advent and New Year’s celebrations had passed when Anne dealt me her most daring blow. She brought the Countess de Cabra back to England, to bear witness to what she knew—or claimed to know—of my marriage to Arthur.
My first thought, when I saw my half-sister Maria Juana, Countess de Cabra, was that she looked much older than when she had left our court to marry the count and live in Spain. Thin and irritable, her face lined and her mouth turned down, she was impatient with the younger women in my household and snapped at them in a hoarse voice. No doubt she envied them their youth and high spirits, I thought at first. She was a widow, the Count de Cabra having died valiantly in battle leading his knights against the army of Suleiman the Magnificent, but I did not think her aging or bad temper came from sorrow or grief. Rather, I suspected, she felt wronged, and wanted satisfaction.
Each time I saw her I was reminded of our father Ferdinand—a much older Ferdinand. Her fleshy cheeks were sunken, her close-set eyes underhung with sagging pouches. Her curling hair was still abundant, but much of it was gray, and—this was most striking of all—she seemed not to care any longer whether she was thought handsome or seductive. The occasional flashes of fire in her dull brown eyes were not sparked by lust, or the desire for conquest. They were sparked by revenge.
“Your sister the countess has been telling me about your marriage to Prince Arthur,” Anne said to me when, at the king’s command, the three of us sat together in Anne’s spacious bedchamber, adding, “Her memory is keen.”
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