“Our Tudor tempers are hard to keep under tight rein. Perhaps we both have said enough on this matter, brother. I am so tired… so very tired,” Mary now said as she moved away from him to look sadly down at the dying embers in the fireplace.
“But you must understand this, Harry.” Mary turned her attentions away from her thoughts, and back to the humbled man before her. For a brief instant in time, the King had vanished, leaving a very worried, utterly human man before her.
“I love Catherine. From the time I was a little girl of five, she has been like an elder sister to me. More so, Harry, with our own mother gone, I often as a child looked to Catherine to take her place. I cannot and will not accept another woman in Catherine’s place. I simply cannot. Not while my true sister still suffers and lives. I am sick, Harry. I feel death stalking my every move. I will do nothing, I swear to you, Harry, nothing, which I feel could endanger my very soul…”
“Be it as you say, sister.” The man stirred, and straightened up his tall frame, taking back, as it were, the cloak of Kingship upon his broad shoulders once more. “I will let you keep to your conscience, Mary. All I ask of you is to keep your sentiments to yourself.”
Mary shrugged her shoulders.
“I have spoken my mind to you, Harry. That, for the moment, is enough. I can rest easier now. But, I am very weary. My brother, if you will please excuse me, I will send Suffolk back to attend you. All I want now is to go up to my chambers to rest.”
With that she deeply curtsied in her brother’s direction. The King then went quickly over to her so to help raise her visibly trembling body. He kissed twice the cheek he had bruised.
“Yea, go sweetheart; go and rest.”
Suffolk was said, by George and other reliable informers, to have shuddered with horror as this battle of royal wills was enacted before his frightened eyes, and within his very home. Later, after the King had departed from their house, the Duke begged his ailing wife to keep her feelings under strong control, otherwise all would be lost for their house. The Suffolks owed great debts to the Crown.
I sympathised immensely with the Duchess, and could understand why she did what she did. Indeed, she only did what she felt right. Like so many, Mary loved Catherine greatly; indeed, was namesake to her only living child. She grieved that things had come to such a pass as this, and also grieved for Catherine when all her sons had died. Mary too had borne sons into the world, only to see them quickly snatched, by death, out from her arms—many of them before they were weaned. The Tudor Princess and former Queen of France, though sickening with the illness that would kill her all too soon, was, nevertheless, still determined not to bend too much to the will of her brother. A brother who appeared to be so hell bent on his own destruction.
In sooth, it seemed to me, even though I heard all this second hand from George and my other sources, that the ailing Duchess had appointed herself Catherine’s avenging angel, so angry was she that Catherine had been tossed aside like a worn out shoe.
And discarded, Catherine was. On July the eleventh, 1531, Anne and the King packed all their personal belongings and left Windsor and Catherine for Anne’s favourite royal residence: Greenwich—the palace where Anne could take much pleasure in the nearby sea. Catherine of Aragon was not informed of this move, but discovered it to her immense sorrow the following day, when it became clear to all that the King planned not to return.
Catherine wasted no time in sending a courier with a letter for the King. In it she expressed her great grief that the King had not even come to say goodbye to her.
Poor Catherine! Ever since she was a frightened, lonely widow of sixteen, Henry, the new heir to the throne of England, had been like a shining beacon where all else was darkness. Even if the beacon was but the promise that one day they would be man and wife, and, thus, the eventual King and Queen of England.
Sometimes the pattern of life takes us in a complete circle. After her first husband—Prince Arthur—died, the Spanish Princess was severely pushed aside by the first Tudor monarch, and had to wait many a long year before her knight and King came to take her from the darkness and back into the light of day.
Now the fairy tale was ended. This was no tale from the pages of Le Morte D’Arthur, but the true story of people of flesh and blood, with all the despair and agony poor mortals like ourselves have inherited since the time that Eden became lost to us. For it was that same knight who now forced her back into the darkness. But this time, any hope of earthly happiness for her was utterly shattered and destroyed.
The King made this even more obvious by the stinging letter he sent her in reply to her message of regret that he had left her in such a manner. The King wrote to her in his dispatch that it was a pack of lies to claim that she came to him a virgin from her marriage to his brother Arthur, thus, Rome had no authority to disallow him his divorce. She must, from hence forth, regard herself as the Dowager Princess of Wales, and no longer as his wife. And, as she only had the relationship of that of a sister-in-law to him, Catherine was, in future, to keep her nose out of his concerns, and stop complaining to the whole world how she had been wronged. The King ended this message to his former wife by daring her to prove that she had been indeed a virgin when he had married her more than twenty long years ago. Catherine was then separated from the Princess Mary, her beloved daughter—the only child of her supposed marriage to the King to survive both birth and infancy. A daughter Catherine never saw again.
In the end, the King commanded to take her household to the royal estate of More. Thus concluded Catherine of Aragon’s union with the King.
Book Five
1532–1533
Some tyme I fled the fyre that me brent,
By sea, by land, by water and by wynd,
And now I follow the coles that be quent
From Dover to Calais against my mynde,
Lo! how desire is both strong and spent!
And he may see that whilom was so blinde;
And all his labour now he laugh to scorn
Mashed in the breers that erst was all to torne.
CONTENTS
* * *
Chapter 1
“And she also to use newfangleness.”
Late in the year 1532 we received messages in Calais from England, telling us to make preparations to ready ourselves for the arrival of the King and the Lady Marquess of Pembroke—a lady I once had simply known as my cousin: Anne Boleyn. Yea, my dark Lady…
I was commanded to return to England, so to prepare the way from that end. I did all the duties expected of me, but in the back of my mind (or did it originate from my beating heart?) there was a kind of painful pulse, constantly crying out: Anne! Anna! Anna my love! I thought my years of absence from her company would cure and heal me of this love, this passion that had done its best to torment me throughout life. I tried to tell myself that I no longer cared; the fire was dead, the passion had blazed bright but was now spent. I tried to convince myself through my poetry, that this was truth. But my heart knew otherwise.
For to love her for looks lovely
My heart was set in thought right firmly,
Trusting by truth to have had redressed.
But she hath made another promise
And hath given me leave full honestly.
Yet do I not rejoice it greatly
For on my faith I loved so surely.
But reason will that I do cease
For to love her.
Since that in love the pains been deadly,
Methinks it best that readily
I do return to my first address,
For at this time too great is the press
And perils appear too abundantly
For to love her.
Once my duties were complete I sailed back to Calais to assist with the final preparations needed for this very important royal visit. At length, the day arrived, and, with my heart in my throat, I strived desperately to ready myself for the arrival of the woman whose comple
te love was all I had ever truly wanted in this life.
Anne and the King arrived as the bells rang out the tenth hour on the morning of the eleventh of October. I was one of the party who went down to the Port of Calais to welcome the King and the woman he wished to marry. The day was one of those magical days when sun and wind unite to make one tingle with the elation of being alive. Even so, there was little I could take true joy in.
It had been obviously an excellent crossing for the King and his party, because they all disembarked in extremely high spirits.
I made my greetings to the King and his bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, before I was suddenly face to face with the new Marquess of Pembroke—Anne, my dark Lady. The woman to whom I had, so long ago, given all that I had to give of love.
I took her hand and bowed over it, saying as I did the customary greeting, and then looked her in the face. The last time I had seen Anne this close was the day after we, for that first and only time, had been lovers. During the time since, as we had done whenever separated by life, we had sent messages to each other through George, but we had kept to our bargain of seeing one another only from the safety of distance. Thus, during my brief visits to England and court, I had made no effort to seek her out. I wanted only to give myself the opportunity to heal, and come to terms with what would never be.
I felt shocked at what five years had done to Anna. It was not that she had aged so much—though she was now twenty-five—but her fragility had increased to such a point that I could not help thinking that her outer flesh was being slowly burnt away by all the battles she had fought during these last five years.
“Cousin Tom, ’tis as bad as all that?” Anne asked, laughing at me.
Obviously my face had given away some of my thoughts. I mentally shook myself, thinking as I did that her appearance of greater fragility only served to increase her semblance of loveliness.
“No, my Lady. ’Tis only when last we met you were at the close of girlhood. Now I have the pleasure to meet the lovely woman for the first time.”
“Gallant, as always, dear Tom.” And with those words she left me to continue along the line of other Calais officials come hither to welcome the royal party. Soon, I watched the King and Anne as they were both led to waiting horses for their journey to the castle, realising for the first time that one of the ladies riding alongside Anne was my cousin Mary. In recent years, Mary—who now had two children—and I rarely crossed paths. Perchance, I thought, here in Calais we might meet and speak—enjoy some moments remembering the past.
Making my own slow way back by foot, I passed the Duke of Suffolk, surrounded by his men. The Duke cast me a hawkish glance as I gave him a hurried bow. Quickening my pace back to the castle, I found myself plotting ways to avoid the Duke during his stay.
For the next few days I stayed busy attending to my various daily duties. Thus, I could only see Anne when the castle’s household sat down to dinner and, of course, the dais was too far from mine for us to be able to engage in conversation. Not that we could have sat side by side; Anna had gone far beyond the simple fare of talking in such a place with one like I. A few days after the royal party’s arrival, the King and his attendants left for Sandyfield to meet with François of France. This was the main reason for King Henry’s visit to these shores: to gain the French King’s support for the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. King Henry also hoped to gain François’ assurances that he would use his influence with the Pope to help our King achieve his desire for a new wife. While King Henry went to parley with the French King, as no French noble woman of suitable rank had agreed to accompany the French King to meet with Anne, she remained at Calais with the Duke of Richmond.
Not long after the King departed Calais, I received a young boy in my chamber, with a message from my Lady requesting the enjoyment of my music. I took my lute out from its wrappings, made a quick check to see if it was properly tuned, then followed the page to Anne’s apartments.
I was not surprised when I came near to her rooms to hear the sounds of Anne’s own music coming through the closed doors. For a few heartbeats, I stood and listened. Anne’s playing had never sounded better. There seemed to me a far greater depth in her music, a depth not apparent the last time we played together.
I entered the room to find Anne, with her little dog Purkoy curled up at her feet, attended by several ladies and, to my great surprise, also the Duke of Richmond. Why was I so surprised to see him present, and apparently in good spirits, here in Anne’s chambers? To be utterly truthful, I felt surprised because I would have thought that the young Duke could have no liking to pay court to the woman his father, the King, hoped would provide him and England with a true heir.
’Twas well known that King Henry had made moves, beginning with giving his bastard son the titles that had once belonged to his father, before becoming King of England, to have his only living son recognised as a solution to the Tudor succession. I had even heard that the Pope suggested to the King he marry his bastard son to his daughter Mary, the boy’s half sister, thus to satisfy those who saw her as the rightful heir to the English throne. Not surprisingly, Catherine of Aragon, the girl’s mother, refused to consider such a move.
As I moved into the chamber, Anne saw me and stopped her playing. She smiled brightly, and then turned to her attendants and the Duke.
“Now your Grace and good people, you will hear such music which is fit to be heard by the ears of angels.”
I kissed her hand in greeting.
“Yours or mine?” I asked her in a voice meant only for her ears.
Anna laughed.
“Both of ours,” she replied, laughing again. Yet I thought I could see a heavy sadness shadowing her eyes.
Thus, for the next hour we forgot about our audience, and played our lutes together as we had done often since our childhoods. In due course, after playing many, many songs with meaning to us, a string on my lute broke, and I halted to make repairs. Anne then ceased strumming her lute too. The Duke and all the other attendants broke out in loud applause.
Some called out “Bravo!” and asked for us to play more.
We both looked at each other in amusement and then turned to our audience, bowing slightly. Gazing at me, Anna laughed. It did my heart good to see her happier than when I had first entered the room. It did my heart good just to be thus so near.
“Enough, my good people,” Anne said to those listening. “My fingers are out of practice and they ache now from all the playing. Excuse me, your Grace, if I take this time to converse with my cousin Wyatt.” With that, she gave her lute to one of her ladies, curtsying slightly in the direction of the Duke, and stood. She then held out a hand to me.
“Come, my cousin Tom. Give your lute to Madge, and come over to the window so you can tell me what you know of home.”
I took her hand, giving my lute to the girl Anna gestured to, a girl I recognised as another of our many relations. We walked, hand in hand, closely followed by several of Anne’s attendants, and even closer by Anne’s dog, to the enormous window at the end of the room that looked down upon the port of Calais. Dropping hands, Anne and I stood, with Purkoy yawning and scratching between us, looking out at the vivid blueness of the sea and sky—there seemed to be no end or beginning to either one or the other. And while we stood there, gazing out to this vastness of the seemingly infinite, we talked of things less complicated by the power struggles affecting our daily lives within the world in which we lived.
Trying hard to ignore those attendants who, we could not avoid noticing, were trying their best to listen to what we said, Anna imparted to me, as gently as she could, sad and tragic news from home. Simonette had swiftly sickened of a fever and, just as quickly, died. Peacefully and without much pain, Anna told me, with brimming tears lighting up her dark eyes. We both were silent, sharing together the grief we felt for the loss of this genuine godsend, that truly magnificent woman who had been the real maternal force of our younger yea
rs. I took Anna’s hand in mine, though circumstances dictated that it was only for a brief moment, and looked back out at the sea.
“I wish I could have been there. I cannot believe that I will never see Simonette again. Never again in this life…”
Blinking away my own tears, I felt myself suddenly filled by the memory of a golden summer afternoon. I could see it all so clearly, aye, so very clearly… Shaded by a tree from our favourite oak grove—her skirts spread out on the ground like the outstretched petals of a daisy—Simonette cradled upon her lap Anna, fast asleep, index finger popped into mouth, while helping Mary read her hornbook. And not far from her loving care, two small boys played sword fights with one another…
By and by, we put aside our common grief and went on to talk of other things.
“Can you guess, Tom,” Anna asked, “why the King raised me to be Marquess of Pembroke in my own right?”
I grimaced. “I know, Anna. George wrote to me the reasons. The King believed it would make you secure about his efforts to wed you and increase your prestige when meeting with the French King.”
Waving her index finger at me, Anna laughed a little. “Your face tells me, Tom, that George told you all.”
Smiling wryly, I shrugged. I moved closer to Anna, speaking for her ears alone. “I cannot say anything against the wisdom of protecting any children resulting from your relationship with the King—although pray allow me a degree of doubt about what this means to the King. Anna, he has wanted you in his bed for a long time now. This just helps the day come for him.”
Dear Heart, How Like You This Page 21
