by David Field
‘I am advised that you are Master Secretary Cromwell,’ the Steward stuttered.
‘So am I,’ Cromwell replied kindly. ‘I was not among the King’s party when he was here on the progress last year, but he speaks highly of your hospitality. Is Sir John at home?’
‘He is in the Long Gallery, sir, with the Mistress and Master Edward. If you would care to follow me, I will announce your attendance.’
‘We are not a monastery, Cromwell, so piss off and close somewhere else down,’ Sir John Seymour grinned as he rose from his chair at the table by the window and grasped Cromwell warmly in a handshake. ‘It’s been many years, by my reckoning. I have a memory of you as a fresh-faced boy in the service of the Cardinal at “the Field of the Cloth of Gold”, as it was called.’
‘And I have a memory of you being carried, puking, from the banqueting hall into the fresh air,’ Cromwell smiled.
‘Blame Harry Tudor for that — he was the one who ordered the fountains to run with mulled claret.’
‘And he has changed little,’ came a pleasant cultured voice from another seat at the table from which Sir John had risen.
Sir John smiled amiably, and indicated the source of the voice with an almost regal gesture. ‘My wife, Lady Margery. The third member of our family group is my oldest son, Edward. Our second son, Thomas, is out somewhere, getting up to the sort of mischief that is the birthright of every second son. I was a first-born, let it be noted. Ah, here comes Ralph with more wine.’
‘So to what do we owe the honour, Master Secretary?’ Edward enquired as the wine was served, and Cromwell took the seat indicated.
‘Before that, I must advise the cook and the housekeeper if you intend to stay overnight,’ Lady Margery interceded.
‘So I had hoped,’ Cromwell replied with a smile, ‘and I thank you for your generosity. But the nature of my business must remain undisclosed until your return, since it concerns something which only the mother of a daughter would know.’
‘Is Jane in the Queen’s black books?’ Margery asked, a hand to her mouth. ‘I hear that Anne can take skittish moods against some of her Ladies, and dear Jane confides in me that she much preferred her time of service with the old Queen.’
‘I think that she shares that preference with all those who also attended on Queen Katherine,’ Cromwell replied with an encouraging smile. ‘Do not fret that I come with sad intelligence — quite the reverse, in fact. What I have to tell you is in the strictest confidence, but I come with King Henry’s blessing, seeking further information.’
‘We are not hiding any emissaries of the Pope,’ Sir John joked, but his wife tutted.
‘It is not safe even to joke of such matters in these uncertain times, John,’ she reminded him.
‘Sir John may rest assured that I will not report him to Henry for his wit,’ Cromwell said. ‘But he does wish me to report back to him on a matter close to his heart.’
‘Which is?’ Lady Margery enquired, still with a look of concern.
‘Your daughter Jane. Is she spoken for, or does she have any understanding with any young man? Or any old man, for that matter?’
Edward Seymour burst out laughing. ‘What, “Plain Jane?” The only understanding she has with men is that she does not care for their coarse ways. She cares for her horse, and her dogs, and perhaps her family at a push, but men? If you had left us any convents, Master Secretary, I doubt not that she would run, head bowed and hair neatly shorn, to one of those ere she would contemplate having to do with any man.’
‘A simple “no” would have sufficed, Edward,’ his father chided him, ‘for it is the plain truth, and plain truth should never be hidden inside a parcel of words.’
‘Unless one is an envoy in the royal service,’ Cromwell replied. ‘But that simple “no” completes my mission, unless there are any words such as “unless” or “perhaps” that you might wish to add?’
‘You have surely not ridden this distance for that simple answer?’ Sir John asked suspiciously, while his wife’s face lit up like a brushwood beacon on a dry night.
‘The King has some husband in mind for her, does he not? Do please tell further, Master Cromwell, for my heart already beats faster at the prospect of a good match for such an awkward daughter. “Awkward” in the sense that she is almost nun-like in her manner, and no man has ever before admired her gentle, docile, loving, tender, generous, kind nature. She is now approaching thirty, and well past the age when we could reasonably have hoped to marry her off. We are not blessed with great wealth, as you must know, and...’
Sir John reached out and patted her hand, before smiling back at Cromwell. ‘You will perhaps have surmised that my wife is excited at the prospect that our oldest daughter might even yet become a wife and mother. But I will suspend my excitement until you advise me who Henry has in mind. Not some reprobate like Sir Francis Bryan, I hope?’
‘The Vicar of Hell?’ Cromwell laughed out loud. ‘Trust me, Sir John, I would not have dared travel in person with such dire tidings, had that been the case.’
‘Who, then?’
‘I realise that I am in company that values the blunt truth, but it would come as too great a shock were I to tell you outright. Let us first consider the state of the nation.’
‘We may consider the state of the weather, if you insist,’ Sir John replied with a piercing stare into Cromwell’s eyes, ‘but you will tell me who the King has in mind for Jane before you will be allowed to rise from that chair.’
‘Very well,’ Cromwell continued, undeterred. ‘You will have heard that Queen Anne is again with child?’
‘Yes, so what?’ Sir John continued as the family spokesman.
‘It may not be a boy.’
‘There will be an even chance, surely?’
‘The previous child was the Princess Elizabeth. Before that the Lady Mary. Both girls. Henry wants a boy. The nation needs a boy. And — please regard this as being in the strictest confidence — the King and Queen Anne are not at present as close as they once were.’
‘Only appropriate,’ Lady Margery pointed out. ‘During pregnancy there should be no congress, and the best way of preventing that is for the couple to sleep separately.’
‘I’m afraid it goes much deeper than that, Lady Margery,’ Cromwell explained. ‘The Queen grows shrill and critical of Henry, and he expresses to me his discomfort at being so closely confined by Anne’s tongue regarding those things he is allowed to do, and those things he is forbidden from doing, in which he once took such delight.’
‘Whoring?’ Lady Margery snorted.
‘As I have, I believe, indicated, the royal marriage seems destined for the midden, and with only a less than average chance that the royal child will be a boy. If so, then all might be preserved, but if not ... well, not to put too fine a point on it, the King is looking elsewhere.’
‘God’s tits, not Jane?’ Sir John thundered, as his wife and son settled for dropped jaws.
Cromwell nodded, relieved that he had got the point over without anyone either running him through or having a seizure, although Sir John gave the appearance of someone working up to one.
‘This is not something we can decide on immediately,’ Sir John finally stuttered.
‘But surely,’ Lady Margery urged him, ‘it is the greatest advancement any young woman could wish for!’
‘No doubt someone once said the same thing to Katherine and Anne,’ Edward reminded her.
The Steward appeared to announce that the trestle had been laid for supper, and Cromwell took his opportunity. ‘Since I am kindly invited to bide the night here, why don’t we postpone discussion of this until the morning?’
‘I think we require more than one night before deciding whether or not to commit our oldest, and gentlest, daughter to that fat old whoremaster,’ Sir John muttered, and nobody argued with him.
VII
The following morning Cromwell stood alone at the edge of the lawn that led to a much neglected
and reed-strewn fishpond, watching the early smoke rising from the cottage chimneys of the local land labourers and trying to put himself inside the heads of the Seymours. They were impoverished gentry who had seen better days, with two sons who had no prospects of advancement in public life without either a great influx of money or better connections at Court. Their sister was no great beauty, and not given to the sort of flirtatious harlotry that might normally be employed as a substitute for comeliness. One could forgive any family in such circumstances for throwing up their hands in joy upon being advised that ‘Plain Jane’ had caught the King’s eye.
But it was obvious from what Cromwell had carefully observed the previous evening that they deeply loved their oldest daughter, and Sir John had been around royal circles for long enough to know what sort of fate might befall a young woman as open and trusting as Jane.
If Henry did have his heart set upon Jane, she would not have to simulate shy virginity, as Anne had done under the guidance of ‘Uncle Norfolk’, her father George, and her worldly sister Mary, who had opened her legs to Henry when they had barely been introduced. No, the task this time would be persuading Jane — if that was the proper course to pursue — that Henry was not as bad as he was sometimes decried, would make a loving and supportive husband, and would not treat her like a brood mare at the mercy of an over-eager stallion.
It was unlikely that being Queen of England would be a sufficient attraction to poor simple Jane, as it had been for Anne. Jane wanted a gentle loving husband, and if Cromwell was to complete the humiliating downfall of ‘the concubine’ by slipping one of her ladies into the King’s bed as her successor, he would need to do so by somehow converting Henry into the sort of man that would appeal to Jane even if stripped of all his royal rank. There would, of course, be a delicious irony in the fact that Anne herself had made the same transition from Queen’s Lady to Queen. But she had played her cards wrongly thereafter, and the marriage that Anne had obtained over the disgraced and exhausted corpse of the Cardinal would, if circumstances played into Cromwell’s devious hands, be brought to an end by the man who the Cardinal had inspired to be his avenger.
Cromwell heard a footfall behind him, and turned quickly, reaching instinctively for the dagger at his belt, then smiling apologetically when his supposed assassin proved to be Sir John.
‘You spent too long in Italy, Thomas,’ Sir John grinned at him. ‘There is bread and cold meat in the buttery, should you be hungry. For myself I cannot eat, any more than I could sleep last night.’
‘I must speak frankly and openly with you, Sir John,’ Cromwell replied. ‘I am certain in my mind that Queen Anne will be shown the whore’s exit from the Palace ere long, and I have reasons of my own to rejoice when that happens. But happen it will — it is only a matter of time, even if she gives Henry a boy.’
‘How say you?’ Sir John queried. ‘From your words before supper yesterday, I took the case to rest upon the lack of a male heir.’
‘That is indeed part of the matter,’ Cromwell conceded, ‘and it may be that if Anne can whelp a boy, and it looks like Henry, she may survive on the throne for another year or two.’
‘Why might it not look like the King?’ Sir John demanded, aghast. ‘Say you that the Queen has entertained others in her bed?’
‘Almost certainly she has,’ Cromwell assured him, ‘and it becomes a matter of who, how often, and how energetically. It is a matter I am currently investigating with some dedication, although Henry does not know of it. But the rot has set in far more deeply than that. Anne grows haughty and arrogant in her belief that she can snap her fingers and bring any man to their knees. While she may retain the power and influence to secure sycophantic sighs from boys of no consequence such as her musician Smeaton, and old lechers in search of younger flesh such as Norris or Weston, her dominant and strident nature of late has robbed Henry of his self-respect, and shamed him in his manhood. One does not do that to a Tudor and expect to retain one’s head.’
‘Think you that Henry will take her head?’
‘With a little encouragement from me, that is precisely what he will do. But being Henry, and being ashamed to admit that the woman he put his previous wife aside for, and who has caused us such difficulty with the Emperor, has diminished his prowess between the sheets, and treats him like an errant schoolboy, he will be seeking other grounds than adultery. Since he fears that the woman merely scorned and put aside will employ heralds to proclaim all over Europe that the King of England has a cloth cock, he must have her head. However, he has not yet reached the point at which he knows that to be his only course. To make him see that must be my loyal task.’
‘Your gleeful task, as I judge,’ Sir John replied.
‘There are times when being in the royal service allows one to see justice done. In my case, justice for the old Cardinal.’
‘You loved him so deeply?’
‘I respected him for his wisdom, his grace, his charity and his loyalty. To be a friend of Thomas Wolsey was to be blessed in this life; to be his enemy meant certain damnation in the next.’
‘A pretty speech that you have rehearsed?’ Sir John asked.
‘In my head, every day since the Cardinal was taken from us.’
‘But how does all this sit for our dear Jane?’
Cromwell chose his words carefully. ‘When we spoke yesterday, I may have inadvertently given the impression that I had been sent down here to seek Jane’s hand for the King. I did not have that intention, and I do not have that authority. Furthermore, should Henry seek Jane’s hand, he will do so for himself. I merely intended to alert you to the fact that Anne is on her way out, and that Jane has caught Henry’s eye, mainly for all the virtues that Anne lacks.’
‘How can one man have passion for such strongly contrasting women?’
‘If you are hungry, do you not eat? If thirsty, do you not crave water, or perhaps wine?’
‘You have also been a lawyer for too long, Thomas. Speak more plainly.’
‘When Henry was first attracted to Anne, it was not simply for her looks. Had he simply wanted a comely whore, there are many to be had with the jingle of a coin bag in and around the Palaces. And one has to own that Anne has not gained beauty at the same pace that she has passed into motherhood and almost matronly maturity. She is now even more angular, and her duckies, having swollen to suckle the Princess Elizabeth, fell back inside her chest as if embarrassed to be there. So it was not for her beauty then, and even less so is it now.’
‘What, then?’
‘She made Henry feel comfortable, loved, cherished, respected, even adored. She rarely questioned his judgment or opposed his will. Those days have passed. She now tells him that he may not joust, she chooses with whom he may dance, and she reminds him that he has put on so much weight since his accident took him from daily exercise that there is now a substantial portion of him to which she was never lawfully married.’
‘The Lady Margery is similarly humoured,’ Sir John grinned. ‘Must I therefore put her aside?’
‘That depends where lies your determination, not only to be seen to be the master in your own household, but also to feel within yourself that you are. Much more the case if you are in command, not simply of a modest estate in Wiltshire, but an entire nation.’
‘And Jane attracts the King because she is meek, submissive, dutiful and largely silent?’
‘Basically, yes. But should matters progress between she and Henry, she must not lose those attributes in the excitement and reflected glow of being Queen of England, as Anne has done.’
‘So how lies the matter at present?’
‘She has caught Henry’s eye, that is all. Knowing this, I regarded it as my duty to alert you to that fact, and ensure that there were no emotional encumbrances or distractions of the heart that might prevent matters progressing from there.’
‘And think you that they will?’
‘The King will be without a wife in the very near future, Si
r John, on that you may rely. Beyond that it depends upon the inclination of Jane’s heart, the depth of Henry’s desire for a wife who treats him as a husband should be treated, and the speed with which the whore currently in the Palace is transferred to the Tower.’
‘God help anyone who falls foul of Thomas Cromwell,’ Sir John muttered.
‘Or who drove the Cardinal to his death,’ Cromwell added. ‘And now, I think I could summon up an appetite before I return to Court.’
VIII
The news reached Cromwell by a fast messenger who intercepted him in Reading during his return to London. Queen Anne had, two afternoons previously, withdrawn unexpectedly from the company in her Audience Chamber and hastened to her bed, accompanied only by Lady Rochford. Physicians had been summoned, along with priests and women skilled in childbirth, and it had been one of those who had confided in Lady Rochford that Anne had miscarried, and that the child had appeared to have most resembled a boy.
It had been left to Henry’s old childhood companion, and former brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, to break the news. Henry had immediately asked for Cromwell to attend him, but had been advised that Cromwell was believed to have journeyed to Wiltshire. Henry had demanded that Cromwell be located and ordered to return immediately.
Cromwell had barely dismounted outside the royal stables when he was all but bowled over by a bustling mountain whose every nerve and sinew, including his unkempt and unbarbered long black beard, seemed to quiver in the midday sun.
‘Thank God you are returned, Thomas!’ Suffolk proclaimed. ‘Harry calls for you at every hour of the day. He will see no-one else, not even his jester Sommers, who can usually be relied upon to lift his spirits. The only one allowed into the presence is myself, and the urge to bat his ear when he bombards me with endless self-pity is such that I fear the axe if I have to go in there again. For mercy’s sake, lose no more time.’
