Anne of Cleves- Unbeloved

by D Lawrence-Young

  “Yes, Anne, the archbishop went to see His Majesty at Hampton Court. He went on the king’s special day of thanksgiving, you know, when the king attended a special service to thank God for the joy his latest marriage had brought him. I heard that the archbishop had written a report about what he’d learned from John Lascelles and his sister and then he presented it to the king after the service.

  “But that’s terrible, Anne. To learn all this just after he’d been praising the Lord for giving him such a good marriage at last.” I stopped for a moment and imagined a furious Henry reading the report as his chief cleric waited in the background.

  “And what did the king say? What did he do?”

  “He just sat there, as if he’d been struck dumb. I’m telling you, milady, this report was completely unexpected. It was like a thunderbolt. A friend of mine who happened to be there at the time, but for obvious reasons I won’t tell you her name, told me that she saw the king just sit there, bent over with his head in his hands for a full five minutes without moving. He was in complete shock. Then he called the archbishop over to him and asked him why he’d written this report instead of telling him personally.”

  “What was his answer?”

  “He said that this report was so damning that he didn’t have the heart to tell it to the king in spoken words, but that he’d had to write it down instead.”

  “So what did the king do next?” I asked, even though I was afraid to hear the answer.

  “My friend said that she was very surprised at what the king did next. He told the archbishop that he didn’t really believe this report and that much of it was clearly based on hearsay. He told Cranmer to investigate these ‘nasty rumours’ as he called them, more thoroughly. His actual words were, ‘You are not to desist until you have got to the bottom of the pot.’“

  “And then?”

  “Then after the archbishop had left, the king gave orders that Her Majesty was to be confined to her rooms with Lady Rochford until he’d learned the truth. ‘For the good of the realm,’ he said, ‘I will stay apart from the queen until I know what has happened.’“

  “And what happened to the queen?” I asked, imagining the poor girl, frightened out of her mind and locked away from the bright lights and excitement of the court.

  “Oh, my dear Anne. She was in a state of shock - just like the king had been earlier. His guards came over to her rooms while she was practising some new dance steps with her ladies and they sent all the ladies away without any explanation. The captain of the guard said that this is what His Majesty had ordered and that the ladies should leave immediately. Once the queen was on her own she asked why but they would not or could not give her an answer. They just left her there and posted a guard to stand there by the door.”

  “How long was she left on her own?”

  “A few days.”

  “Oh, the poor girl,” I said. “She must’ve been so scared. Just thinking about her makes me feel so frightened for her. Poor little Catherine suddenly locked up without knowing why. Alone and without her friends. Just with that Lady Rochford who is not the best person to have with you in time of need. Oh my poor little girl,” I repeated and started to weep. In my mind I was imagining that bright young woman caged up like a small bird banging its wings on the sides of its cage, aching to find the open skies and freedom.

  Then I noticed that Alice was also quietly weeping and after dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief she continued. “Then the archbishop again questioned John Lascelles and he repeated the same story that he’d told him earlier. And then, to make matters worse, the archbishop learned that the queen had taken Dereham back again into her household after she was married to the king.”

  “But why?” I couldn’t believe that she had been so foolish.

  “It seems, milady, that Dereham and a few of the other young people she used to know at Lambeth kept pestering her for favours. They kept saying that unless she helped them gain positions at court, they’d start spreading stories about how she used to spend her days, or rather her nights, at the duchess’ house at Lambeth.”

  I listened to this explanation quietly as Alice continued.

  “Then as I said, the archbishop returned to the king and told him that his earlier report was true. The queen had betrayed him and had committed adultery.”

  This was the news that I hoped I would never hear. If I had sat there without moving earlier when Alice had first told me her news, now I sat there like a rock. I was completely stunned. Bigamy. Adultery. It was too much. I’m not sure I even blinked my eyes. I was only brought out of my shock when a twig fell from the tree above me and fell onto my face. I shook my head, brushed the twig away and faced Alice.

  “Tell me, has anything happened to her family as well? Have they been questioned or taken to the Tower?”

  “I don’t know, Anne. All I know is that most of them have abandoned her although, to my surprise, the duke - who more or less pushed her into the king’s bed - did try and comfort his niece a little when she became hysterical, but I’m sure he had reasons for that.”

  “Yes, you’re probably right. He never does anything unless he thinks he’ll gain by it,” I said. “Perhaps he was trying to calm her down so she wouldn’t say anything against him. That’s the sort of help she’d get from him.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, milady. I’m thinking of the time before you came to court of how much help the Duke of Norfolk gave his other niece, Anne Boleyn. He didn’t lift a finger to help her. In fact, he was in charge of her trial and did nothing to save her. He couldn’t get rid of her quickly enough.”

  She stopped talking for a minute as she thought back to those grim days some five years earlier.

  Alice dabbed her eyes again and continued. “So now that I’ve heard about how the queen is behaving at the moment, I am not really surprised. I heard she was crying all the time and that she was refusing to eat. My friend said that she was acting like a mad woman and she kept talking about ending up on the block.”

  “But that’s terrible, Alice. It can’t be true. She’s so young and she’s such a sweet and innocent little thing.”

  “I know that, my dear, and you know that, but will His Majesty think like that? I doubt it very much. All I know is that she and Lady Rochford both began to act hysterically: crying and calling out for the king to come so they could explain what’d happened to them.”

  “And of course he did not come.”

  “Of course not, my dear. You should know him by now. If there are any problems in the palace, especially ones involving women, he does his best to keep away and let someone else deal with them. In fact, the only time the queen did see him was just as he was at prayer at the Chapel Royal. She managed to push her way past her guards to go and plead with him but then the guards pulled her back.”

  “And did the king do anything?”

  “Yes. He just looked at her for a moment and then turned away.”

  “So what’s going to happen next?” I asked.

  Alice shrugged. “I don’t know. All I know is that Thomas Culpepper and Francis Dereham have been arrested and taken to the Tower to be questioned.”

  “You mean tortured.”

  Alice nodded and then told me that she’d heard that they were going to be put on trial soon at the Guildhall at the beginning of December.

  “So, Alice, where is the queen now? Is she still at Hampton Court?”

  “No, my dear. She’s been taken to Syon House and I heard that while she was there she admitted to a lot of the stories about her past to the duke. Perhaps she thought that if she tells the truth, things will go better with her.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, but I was not convinced as I thought of my pretty lady-in-waiting of the past, my poor little Catherine trapped and abandoned and left to the mercies of her furious husband and his scheming duke.

  Alice stood up to leave and so did I. We both had tears in our eyes, not for ourselves, but for our queen who had reigned for
only a little over a year, and now we feared she would soon be paying the highest price for her earlier sexual affairs. If the young men in her life had been taken to the Tower, then she would have no chance to save herself. Everyone who could rid themselves of her in order to save their own skins would do so.

  Alice and I hugged each other silently and then she slipped away through a side door. I hurried back to my ladies and apologized in her name saying that she had to catch the tide and return to court immediately for personal reasons.

  The next part of this story I heard from Lady Browne and Lady Rutland. The queen’s past affairs with Dereham and Culpepper were no longer secrets to be whispered in gardens or in silent chambers. It was on a grey and rainy day in mid-December 1541 when my ladies and I met in my chamber at Richmond. Originally I had invited them over for a meal and a day of female gossip, but immediately after sitting down, they told me their grim news.

  “I suppose,” Lady Browne began, “that you’ve heard about what happened to the queen’s two lovers, Dereham and Culpepepper?”

  “A little,” I said. “I heard that they were both executed yesterday.”

  “Yes, at Tyburn. Dereham was hanged, drawn and quartered but Culpepper was luckier.”

  “Luckier?”

  “Yes,” Lady Rutland added. “Because of his family’s past connections and his past service to His Majesty, he was beheaded instead.”

  I sat there quietly. To be killed, to have your life brutally taken from you just because you’d slept with a young girl whom you didn’t know at the time was destined to become the queen and wife of the most important man in England seemed to be terribly unfair. And just as I was thinking this, Lady Browne tapped me on my forearm.

  “And there’s more, milady. The queen’s aunts, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk and Lady William Howard and Lady Bridgewater have also been arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment and all their possessions have been transferred to the royal coffers.”

  “That’s right,” Lady Rutland said. “And they’ve also arrested some of the queen’s past friends who used to live with her at Lambeth as well as Lady Rochford. They’ve all been taken to the Tower and are to be questioned.”

  “And what about the queen herself?” I asked.

  They both shrugged. They did not know.

  “All I can say,” Lady Browne said, “is that His Majesty cannot or will not believe she’s guilty. But she is still a prisoner at Syon House and it’s rumoured that the king himself wants to talk to her.”

  Later I heard that there was some truth to these rumours. The king had invited his queen to attend a special session of parliament so that she could defend her good name. She refused however, and told His Majesty’s delegation that she would prefer to submit herself to the king’s mercy. I heard that she had made such a good impression on His Majesty’s ministers that they returned to Syon House and asked her, even begged her to come and defend herself in parliament. Again she refused and so the Privy Council petitioned the king that a Bill of Attainder be passed for him to sign. Henry agreed to sign it and so the Bill was prepared for him, but when the moment came for him to actually sign it, he refused and withheld his signature. Then when I heard this, I felt happier than I had for quite some days. I hoped it meant that the queen’s life would be spared after all. Unfortunately, this was not to be. The Privy Council got around this problem by attaching the Great Seal to the Bill and writing Le Roi le veut – The king wills it – on the Bill itself. Then the Bill was read out to both houses of parliament and so it became law. So with or without his signature the queen and Lady Rochford were both condemned to death.

  This happened at the beginning of February 1542. On 10 February the queen was transported in a closed barge from Syon House to the Tower. I was told that now she knew she was going to die she began to act more calmly and seemed quite resigned to her fate.

  The tragic end of this story happened three days later. Although many of the king’s courtiers were present at the Tower, I did not attend and so, as usual, I learned what had happened there though my chamberlain, the Earl of Rutland and his wife.

  “Poor Catherine,” Lady Rutland said, and started to weep as she recalled the previous day’s grim scene. “She looked so small and frail standing there next to all the lords and guards and the axeman. Sir John Gage, the Constable of the Tower, guided her to the scaffold and told her that if she wished to say anything, then this was the time to do so.”

  “And did she say anything?”

  “Yes, milady,” Lord Rutland replied. “She said that all the people should look upon her as an example of one who had led an ungodly life and that she prayed for her husband and that she deserved to die for her heinous sins.”

  “Did she really say that?” I asked. I found it hard to believe that a young lady such as Catherine had uttered such words.

  The earl and his wife both nodded. “Yes, milady,” Lady Rutland said. “Then she laid her head upon the block and that was it.”

  I had to ask the next question even though I was frightened at hearing the answer. “And did the axeman do his job well?”

  “Yes, milady,” Lady Rutland said, shuddering. “It took just one clean blow, and it was the same for Lady Rochford. Not like what happened to Thomas Cromwell.” And then she shuddered again as she remembered the bloody scene that she had witnessed some two years earlier. And before she could continue with her report I also shuddered as I too recalled how the axeman had butchered Thomas Cromwell at his execution. Catherine had been queen for less than two years and then to die like this. It was too much. And just as I was thinking of the past, the Earl of Rutland continued with his report.

  “Then they brought Lady Rochford to the scaffold and…”

  “But wait a minute, my lord,” I said, holding up my hand. “Wasn’t she declared mad and that mad people can’t be executed?”

  “She may have been declared mad,” the earl said, “but that didn’t stop His Majesty from wanting to get rid of her. At first the guards thought that she’d resist them, but she didn’t. To everyone’s surprise she was very calm, said a few words and then her head was chopped off quite cleanly, too.”

  There was nothing left to say. My friendly but misguided Catherine, who I’d always thought of as my young and chattering lady-in-waiting was now dead, cut down by an axeman by order of her husband, a disappointed and angry king. I knew that women, especially his wives had to be or to do two things for him. They had to be as perfect as possible, ‘a rose without a thorn’ as Henry had once called Catherine. They also had to give him sons, or at least one healthy son. Catherine Howard had been or done neither and so she’d paid the price for her double failure.

  She’d been a very pretty and happy young lady who had played with her life and lost. She had hurt nobody except for one person, her husband who had also happened to be the king. And it was because of this that she’d paid this terrible price for her folly. I wondered as her last days closed in on her if she’d realised that she had been used by all who had surrounded her: her admirers and her lovers, her family but mostly by her over-reaching uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. I shook my head and Lady Rutland gave me her handkerchief. It was all so sad and now she was gone I wondered what would happen next. Would His Majesty wish to marry again? Had he set his eyes on anyone else in the meantime? Would he ask me to return to court and be his wife again? Would I want to? I shivered at the thought. He’d had five wives. He had executed two of them, divorced another two, including me, while his third wife had died only one week after giving birth to his son. Was it worth considering whether I should return to his household as his wife again? I wasn’t sure. I’d have to give this question a lot of serious thought but in the meanwhile I couldn’t stop thinking about the young girl who had tried to please her royal master and had failed most fatally.

  Chapter Twenty-One - Enter Catherine Parr

  As I said earlier, I was in a strange mood following the death of Catherine Howard. Maybe this w
as due to the fact that I kept thinking that perhaps I should have been more assertive and pushed myself forward to become the king’s wife once again. I spent much time during the spring of 1542 pondering this question and as the time passed I realized that despite all that had happened, yes, I had wanted to become the sixth wife of King Henry the Eighth. However, I arrived at this conclusion in a way that was entirely unexpected.

  I found out that at the beginning of the year, that is, soon after Catherine Howard had departed this life, that John of Luxembourg, the son of the Count of Brienne, a person whom I had never met, had written a book called The Remonstrance of Anne of Cleves. In it he’d written that I’d become so sad over my divorce that I’d thought of committing suicide. He’d also written that I still loved the king and continued to honour and serve him. It seems that this book - which was written as though I had written it - had become very popular and had been read all over Europe.

  I heard that His Majesty had ordered a copy and after he and his council had read it they realised that I had not written it. Nevertheless, for a while, it gave me some hope that the king would take me back as his wife, a position which I decided would be preferable to being merely his ‘Sister’ who spent most of her time entertaining at Richmond Palace.

  It was during this period that I became seriously ill with a fever and the king sent his own physicians and servants to look after me. He himself did not come to visit me but I was flattered by his constant attention and saw this as a sign that he was still concerned about my health and general welfare. As I lay in my sick-bed looking out over the well-tended gardens I wondered whether his concern meant that he thought of me returning to him as his future wife.

  “What do you think, Lady Browne? Am I to be called back to London to be his queen again?”

  “I don’t know, milady. All I know is that the palace gossip says that His Majesty is said to have a fancy for Lord Cobham’s daughter, Elizabeth, as well as for my husband’s niece and also for Mistress Anne Basset.”