The Baker's Daughter Volume 1

by Bonny G Smith

  She turned and said in her guttural, broken English, “Vill…shall you drink, hussbant?” She had been working very hard on her English. Without waiting for an answer, she ambled back across the room to his bedside. As she walked, her stomach jiggled as if it were made of jelly. Her navel was hooded by fat. He took the cup of wine from her and downed it in one gulp.

  And then a strange thing happened. He suddenly recalled the look of repugnance he had seen cross her features when he had first approached her at Rochester. She had mistaken him for a brigand, which was his own fault; but her look was not one of fear so much as one of revulsion. All this time he had harped on her shortcomings; he had never given a thought to his own. The truth washed over him in an epiphany both unwelcome and shocking. No more was he the handsome, fine-looking man he had been in his youth. He suddenly realized exactly how he must appear to her. Old, bald, fat and ugly; in a word, gross. Only tolerated because he was king.

  As he grasped fully this unexpected insight, his loathing for her increased tenfold. Who was she to find him disgusting, as he was now certain that she did? That this fat, ugly, smelly cow might feel about him the same way he felt about her was unbearable. It held a mirror up to himself that transcended any earthly device.

  She was standing there looking at him with a perplexed expression. In that moment he absorbed the true meaning of what Brandon had said, and what he had not comprehended fully at the time. She was blameless. She was, except for her physical shortcomings, an amiable, likable person. And she was now his wife. On this woman, if he were to have any more, he had to get sons.

  At that moment he knew without a shadow of a doubt three things; he would never be able to touch her; it was not her fault; and he would, if it cost him his kingdom, find a way out of this marriage. But he would have to do it without any blame or harm being visited on this poor, innocent girl. With that he lay down, covered himself, and left Anne standing by his beside, a bewildered look on her face.

  Westminster Abbey, London, January 1540

  It had snowed the night before and, although the day was sunny, the storm having spent itself during the night, the world was encased in a thin blanket of white. Everywhere the snow and ice sparkled like diamonds. Mary sat on the little marble bench, from which she had cleared the snow with a gloved hand. The wind had picked up; it was that which had blown the storm out to sea.

  There was a willow tree on the banks of the river, and although its feet were planted firmly on the ground, its long tendrils searched perpetually for the water. Every delicate strand was encased in its own thin covering of ice. Just like my heart, she thought sadly. The clicking sound that the frost-covered branches made as they swirled in the breeze filled the air. Mary drew her cloak close about her and nestled her chin it its fur collar.

  Looking back on her life, it seemed as if she had always been dogged by ill fortune. She had had a classical education, and she recalled reading about the ancient gods of the Greeks; they would do the cruelest things to men just to watch them struggle. Theirs was not a loving God; they would do things that were mean, vicious, and spiteful, all for their own amusement. Now it seemed as if her own life mirrored the miserable lives of those ancient Greeks. God had caused her to be born a royal princess, only to turn her into a royal bastard; God had given her a tender, loving mother, only to snatch her away and leave her to die alone with a broken heart. God had brought her Philip, only to send him to her as a heretic whom it would compromise her faith to love and marry. God had tested her and she had failed the test; she had declared herself willing to lose her religion, or at least to compromise her beliefs, in order to fulfill the desires of her flesh. God had bestowed upon her agonized mind and aching heart a solution to this dilemma, only to remove the problem so entirely that it need not be solved at all. For she had learned only the day before that she was not to be allowed to marry Philip. It seemed that the God of Abraham had every bit as much of a sense of humor, or a desire to inflict pain, as did the brutal gods of the Greeks.

  It was an open secret at this point that her father was not pleased with his bride. The court was abuzz with speculation as to what the king planned to do about it. His disappointment would have been bad enough, but it had manifested itself in the face of such gleeful anticipation, an avid keenness that he had taken no pains to conceal, that he now felt foolish, silly, and embarrassed on top being both frustrated and upset. The only person not aware of the storm raging about her was the subject of it: Anne herself.

  Mary felt very sorry for Anne, whose own path seemed to be mimicking Mary’s misfortunes; but the full measure of her sorrow was yet to come when she was finally informed of her predicament. Mary was already a casualty of the whole sorry affair, for she had been informed the night before by a very disappointed and frantic Cromwell that she was not to be allowed to marry Philip. The king was adamant about getting out of his marriage, the Cleves alliance be damned, and if the king was going to rid himself of the Germans, that included the Duke of Bavaria. He had been made a Knight of the Garter and given a gift of two thousand marks, sops to the king’s conscience, and was to be sent on his way. Philip was a nobleman and a diplomat and he knew what was expected of him; etiquette and protocol precluded any possibility of argument or negotiation. No was no, and that was that.

  The tears welled in her eyes, but she fought them back; she did not want to distress Philip further by weeping. She tried to think about something else, but she simply could not muster any positive subject to mind. When she was not fretting over Philip, her thoughts would wing their way to Mother Pole, who was still in the Tower after all this time, and who was not even being treated as her rank demanded. And she, Mary, was powerless to help her, lest she anger her father.

  Thoughts of Lady Margaret always brought her cousins to mind. Reginald had been stranded by the failure of the rebellion for which Lord Montague and the others had lost their heads, and had been called back to Rome, his uprising an utter failure; Sir Geoffrey, now attainted and landless, roamed England, a self-loathing pariah ashamed of the cowardly betrayal of his kinsmen and his beloved mother.

  Nothing ever goes right for me, she thought. Everything I touch, everything I try, goes awry. The tears threatened once again, and this time they fell unheeded from her eyes, flowing down her cheeks as the river flowed towards the sea; unstoppable.

  She had been so happy on the day of her father’s wedding. Greenwich had a peculiarity that none of the other royal palaces had; a house made of glass panes where an enterprising royal gardener experimented with ways to cause flowers to bloom untimely. The Chapel Royal had been bedecked with garlands of flowers and beautiful arrangements lined the altar.

  To the clarion call of the royal trumpets Anne had processed down the aisle to where her bridegroom stood. Banners depicting the arms of England alternated with the black lion of Cleves, sewn in ebony-colored thread onto cloth of gold. The lions seemed to move, and looking closely, Mary realized that they were each composed of hundreds of tiny jet beads that shimmered with the reverberation of the shrill call of the horns.

  Anne had worn an exquisite gown of gold taffeta trimmed with black fur and sewn stiff with pearls. Her fair hair streamed down her back and on her head had been a simple coronet of tiny white flowers. Her father had looked regal indeed in his cloth of gold tunic, pulled with white lawn and sewn with rubies and pearls. His black velvet bonnet had been sewn with diamonds, his collar was set with a rainbow of gems, and his sword had answered his bonnet, glittering with diamonds. Kneeling together at the altar they had resembled characters from a fairy tale.

  As the nuptial mass was sung, Mary shyly raised her eyes to where Philip stood with the members of the court’s foreign delegations. Philip was looking at her, too, and although neither made even the slightest gesture, each knew what the other was thinking. Our turn next. She could have wept for joy.

  For the rest of her life the jingling of spurs would always bring to mind the days when she would meet Phili
p in the abbot’s little garden at Westminster. She turned now at the sound to see him walking towards her.

  From his vantage point, he saw a beautiful princess sitting on a white marble bench in a white fur cape against a glittering white tree. The delicate tendrils of the weeping willow waved in the sunlight, showering the scene with reflected rainbows of color. The only other colors in the scene were the pale blue of the sky and the red of Mary’s hair.

  As she turned he saw the light reflect the tracks of the tears on her face. Wordlessly, he approached, and she arose. Once again they melted into the warm embrace that each now knew so well, and that seemed for just these few moments on the knife edge of time, to make them as one.

  “Ah,” he whispered. “Do not weep, my heart. It cuts my own heart to ribbons to see tears on your face.”

  “I-I had not meant to,” she replied softly. “I could not help myself.”

  Still encircling her with his left arm, he tucked his right hand under her chin and raised her face to his. His startling blue eyes bore into hers. “Listen to me, Mary. I will not let them part us. I will come back for you; this I swear on my life. Will you wait for me?”

  Smiling through her tears, Mary replied, “Oh, yes! A thousand times yes.” The tears spilled unheeded and he kissed each of them away.

  “Mary, this is not an idle promise, I assure you. No, look at me.” Mary had shrugged and turned her face away. “Heed my words, my heart. The alliance between the French and your cousin, the emperor, began to crumble almost as soon as it was made, and now it is well and truly falling apart. This may seem to make England’s alliance with Cleves and Bavaria less important, perhaps not needed. But politics being what they are, things will change. They always do, And when they do, I will come back and try again.”

  Mary considered this and then said, “Yes, your words ring true. I have been betrothed many times, and always something happened.”

  The breeze stirred and the ice-encased willow sounded almost like chimes; the sound blended into the bells of the abbey. It was the hour of Nones, the hour when he had first come to her.

  “Mary, I must go. My ship awaits, and sails on the evening tide.” He took her face into both his hands and kissed her again, this time long and lovingly. “Remember my promise,” he said earnestly. “And yours.”

  With that he turned and walked swiftly away, lest she be distressed by the tears on his own face.

  [Bring up the evidence of the signed paper; Mary’s signature on it, Norfolk’s too. Ridolfi signed for Norfolk; say it was a copy found in her rooms]

  Chapter 17

  “Item – Given unto my ladye Elizabeth’s grace to play with all, x shillings.”*

  – Frederic March, “Privy Purse Expenses of the Princess Mary”

  *That is, spending money in the amount of ten shillings

  Whitehall Palace, April 1540

  “Sire,” said Bishop Gardiner, “is there no remedy, then?” He flicked a quick glance at Norfolk. In their view, the die was cast. The king had taken the bait. They had rolled the dice and they had won. All that remained was to let the situation play itself out. The end was inevitable, and would be sweet indeed.

  The king cast a gimlet eye over his Privy Council. He had done his part; it was their turn now. “There is not. I have tried. The thing cannot be done. If England is to have more heirs, there must be an end to this sham marriage.”

  Alarmed now, Cromwell, the new Earl of Essex, shook his head. “But the Cleves alliance, Your Grace. What of that?”

  “What of it, man, what of it?” Henry snarled. “It does England no earthly good. The emperor and the king of France are at loggerheads once more. Charles has once again made overtures to England, as has François. We are where we were before. Except that now I am tied to this unacceptable woman, against my will and better judgment!” He fixed his icy glare onto Cromwell.

  “But Your Grace,” pleaded Cromwell in desperation, “like you not the queen any better at all?”

  “Any better? Any better?” sputtered Henry. “Surely, my lord, I liked her not well before, and now I like her much worse! There is nothing fair about her, nothing at all! She has very evil odors about her. I have neither the will nor the courage to prove the rest!” He scanned the entire council table; no one dared to look him in the eye. “I tell you, I have left her after four months as good a maid as I found her! I can have no appetite for her. This whole debacle has been a waste of time!” At this he looked squarely at Cromwell again. “Time I can ill afford, sirs! I tell you, I have not been well handled throughout this whole affair! I will hear no more talk of marriages of state and royal obligation! By the Rood, the thing touches me too near! I want this marriage dissolved!” He had been standing, leaning heavily on his stick, and with these words he slammed the stick to the floor and sat down.

  Certainly all the men of the council knew the king’s mind on the matter of his marriage to Anne of Cleves; it was no surprise. But the pressing need for heirs was dubious; the prince was in good fettle, and thrived. It mattered not who England allied with as long as she had an ally; the shifting sands of European politics would always point to one or the other of France or the Holy Roman Empire. The foray into an alliance with Cleves had been an interesting experiment, but in the end, was at odds with the king’s insistence on orthodoxy. England was Catholic without the tremendous financial burden of ties to Rome, and Catholic she would remain. It was the king and all his council against Cromwell and Cranmer, who were known reformers. Cranmer, after all a man of the church, might be spared, but Cromwell, in their estimation another jumped-up base commoner, had to go. And he had handed the Catholic faction the perfect weapon of his own destruction in the form of the hapless Anne of Cleves.

  But the king must have a queen, must needs be in love. He had said as much, and his actions did not belie him. And so Norfolk, for the second time in his career, had played a pawn in the form of an entrancing niece, and had once again caught himself a king.

  Katherine was the daughter of his younger brother Edmund, and was a beauty. In the scramble to attain employment in the New Queen’s household, his candidates had been certain of a place; who could refuse the nieces of the premier peer of the realm? His father, the second duke, had married twice and fathered eighteen legitimate children; Norfolk had dozens of comely nieces from which to choose his quarry.

  He had settled on Katherine. She was very young and beautiful, but in a more traditional sense than his sister’s daughter, Anne Boleyn. Katherine was tiny, but with womanly curves, and she had fair skin. Her hair was red, a color the king mightily favored, and she had eyes of gray, almond-shaped and tip-tilted, with long, black lashes. He had counseled her as to subtle ways to attract the king’s attention, and she had not failed him. She knew which side her bread was buttered on; she was the daughter of a younger son who had been steeped in debt when he died. Katherine had lost her mother when she was very young and had hardly known her father; he had left her as a young child in the care of her step-grandmother, the redoubtable Dowager Duchess of Norfolk.

  But she was not clever at all; beyond an ability to recognize that her prospects were uncertain at best, she had little in the way of brains, and this suited her uncle well. Anne Boleyn had been too clever by half, and she had almost landed them all on the scaffold. Katherine was a pleasant but dim non-entity, a plaything; she would be easy to control. And through her, Norfolk would control the king.

  As Norfolk perceived his own power rising, Cromwell felt his waning. For all his wit and cunning, he felt all at sea these days. He had been much relieved by the enthusiastic reception that had been accorded Anne by the English people. But Cromwell had staked his political future on the Cleves alliance; it had never occurred to him that the marriage might be a failure, and the whole venture would turn into a blunder of such proportions. He had never looked beyond just getting it accomplished. He felt his blood run cold in his veins at the king’s words. Then once again he remembered that he was
no longer just Master Cromwell, or even Baron Wimbledon; he was now the Earl of Essex. Had he been born into this position instead of having earned it through his own hard work and cleverness, what would he be doing, saying? He squared his shoulders.

  “Your Grace,” he said. “May I remind you again that this is a political match? Many a king has been delivered of an unsatisfactory bride, for reasons beyond his control. Any ploughboy may choose his wife, but alas, a king marries where he must for the good of his realm. Is that not true? Even the king of France was married to a hunchback, was he not?”

  The angry beacon of Henry’s glare fixed itself on Cromwell once again. His minister’s words brought back to him a warm, sunny day in June of 1520, on the fields of France. At the parleys between France and England known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, he and François had dined, as part of the attendant ceremonies, with each other’s wives. He had expected to feel nothing but repugnance for Queen Claude; sickness or infirmity always revolted him, and deformity of any sort he could not abide. And he was expected to take a meal with her! But instead of the craven, misshapen cripple he had expected to meet, he was presented to a beautiful, tiny queen, so small and dainty that she was almost childlike. He had fallen instantly in love with her; but not as one would love a wife or a lover. It was his first true experience of courtly love, that admiring from afar of a fair lady, of the desire only to do good deeds so that one would look valiant and heroic in her eyes. There was nothing of lust or fleshly desire about it. And this he had felt for the virtuous little queen, so ill-treated by her own husband, but so regal in her bearing that she never gave even a hint of her heartbreak. For Claude he would have slain dragons, climbed mountains, sailed uncharted seas, just to earn nothing more from her than her approval. And this base, common oaf had dared to call her a hunchback! There was just a practically unnoticeable curvature of her spine, that was all, and that well-hidden by her costly, queenly robes.