Mayflowers for November: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (32 page)

Chapter 37

1519 - 1530

I was a foundling boy, as you know. I was brought up in Ipswich by good people in great kindness, a butcher and his wife who had no children of their own. And thus it was to be that I would make my way in the world apprenticed to this gentleman and would have become a butcher by trade, and never seen London town in all my life, until one day a stranger came into the shop all dressed in costly black attire. He bought no meat only told my master that Cardinal Wolsey was sending me to Felaw’s House, in Ipswich, a school free to poor boys who had aptitude to learn; only rich parents had to pay fees. Why ever Cardinal Wolsey took an interest in me and my education I shall never know for I never met His Grace and so had no opportunity to ask.

I worked hard at my lessons and excelled above all other boys, rich and poor. I was proud that I could read and write, too proud. I developed a great list to get on in the world. The cardinal meanwhile was building a new College of St Mary in Ipswich and it was my ambition to study there, for students at the new college were expected to go on to Cardinal’s College at Oxford University. I was just a boy, but I had big dreams and forgot that once I had been content to be a butcher boy hoping to be master myself of that butcher’s shop in time. All this happened while Cardinal Wolsey was trying to solve King Henry’s “great matter” - his divorce from Katherine of Aragon and remarriage to Anne Boleyn. Wolsey failed the King and by the end of 1530 he had lost the King’s favour and died in misery. His college was never finished. Without the patronage of the cardinal I lost all hope of studying at Oxford University.

That year, grave misfortune befell the good people who had fostered me. The butcher had a dreadful accident. He cut off three fingers with his mighty cleaver. I’d never seen so much blood.

He died even before his wounds had time to fester. The butcher’s wife was now a pauper having no means to feed and clothe me. I was eleven years old and knew nothing of the harsh ways of the world. I thought that there must be many opportunities for a boy like me who could read and write and I resolved to travel to London town. My teacher suggested that I write to Thomas Cromwell. He had been a servant of the cardinal and had written to my masters at the school on the cardinal’s behalf, once or twice, to see how I fared. I thought he might help a poor boy whom Wolsey had patronised. So, with my letter tucked inside my doublet, I set off to walk to London to find the King’s court and Master Thomas Cromwell who, my masters told me, was newly appointed counsellor to the King.

White Boy’s features glow white and dark in the flickering shadows of the firelight. Beneath his clout I know his eyes are wide with concern. He remembers too well how it was to be a beggar boy chased from parish to parish. All day, every day, all that you pray for is a crust of bread and place of safety, away from scoundrels who would steal the rags from your back and leave you naked at the roadside.

Never fear, my schoolboy’s clothes stayed on my body and my stockings on my legs. It happened that a farmer was bringing his swine to market. I made myself a strong stick from a branch by the wayside and helped him catch his runaway pigs and thus we made a bargain. I was well fed with dried pig meat and fresh bread too, when we could get it along the way, and not one of his pigs went astray. Even my bonnet was still on my head when I entered London by Bishopsgate with a full belly.

‘Why do you smile, Avis?’ my husband asks.

‘It is so like you to see an opportunity and seize upon it, and you were only a little boy.’

‘What was I supposed to do, sit at the roadside and weep? Much good that would have done. I did not find the King in London. He was away hunting with his mistress Anne Boleyn. And now we come to the beginning of my tale proper, for you have said, White Boy, that all our stories must begin at Greenwich and there I went, at Christmastide to the court, to seek the King, and Cromwell his chancellor.

‘And now, to bed. You shall hear more another day. So now you know, my wife, how I might have earned my living,’ he says while he pulls off his stockings and puts on his night shift. ‘I might have lived out my life in a butcher’s shop in Ipswich, or mayhap farming swine, for the farmer offered me work if I would return to Suffolk with him. I never thought my destiny to be catching rats.’

White Boy is swift about his chores on the morrow. He listens eagerly for the lifting of the latch when the master returns early for his supper. He chides me for making pigeon pies, for all the scalding and plucking that must be done to the birds and the mixing of new pastry coffins, and the time the pies must cook in the oven.

‘Supper will be late tonight,’ he complains and for once I do not scold. He cannot wait to hear the master’s tale from Greenwich. All day long he has murmured to himself: ‘I never thought that the master would have been a beggar boy like me; yet he made good of it. How it cheers me to know that he made good of it.’

Chapter 38

1530 - 1536

And so I made my way to Greenwich Palace to find the King and Master Cromwell, his chancellor. First I found beggars, many of them. I do not need to tell you how it was for me, a butcher boy, used to eating good meat and plenty of it, shivering outside the King’s gate with an empty belly. We huddled together to keep warm, excepting those who were diseased, of course. Anyone with spots or sores was pushed away. I was young and strong and small enough to squeeze my way through the throngs of beggars to grab tasty morsels from the court’s leftovers. I am ashamed to tell you that I thought only of my own belly and only once gave meat to a poor beggar woman who sat always in the same place beside the wall for she had no legs, only stumps.

For days I waited and worried that I would not know Cromwell when he rode into the palace gates with his servants.

‘You’ll know him well enough, when he comes,’ I was told, ‘by the throng of folks with petitions running behind him and his servants.’

The first time he rode into the palace I could not get near to him so I resolved to give my letter to one of his servants; and this I did after many more days when Cromwell rode out of the palace gates and through to Greenwich Park. I thrust my letter into the hand of a surly man who halted his horse and stared down at me with eyes as black as a raven’s wing.

Many freezing days passed and nothing happened. The weeks ahead held no hope for me and I thought that if I had no answer from my letter within another week I would return from whence I came and take my chance in Suffolk with the pig farmer.

The surly, black eyed man came with another. They grabbed me from behind when I was pissing against a wall and dragged me past the sentry at the gate into the outer courtyard.

‘Master Cromwell has a gift for you,’ the surly man said holding me by the scruff of my neck. He gave me a set of bells, two sacks and a whip. I had a mind to use the whip there and then upon those two rogues, but thought better of it.

‘Does he want me for his jester?’ I asked.

‘You’re the King’s new rat boy,’ the other man said, grinning. It was an ugly, evil grin, such as you might see upon a gargoyle on a church porch. There were great gaps where his teeth had fallen out. ‘The bells are to scare ‘em away. One of the sacks is for dead rats and the other for quick rats. Always keep two living rats ready for when we call for ‘em.’

‘Get you to the great kitchen with haste boy, and earn your bread,’ the surly man said, ‘and when my mate here comes to say, “get you to the chandlery, for there are two big rats eating the tallow” you give him the sack with the two living rats and get there afore he’s finished telling you.’

White Boy stops playing.

‘It was you, master, all along in the mistress’s story, Tom, the boy who chased the rats. It was you,’ he exclaims.

Aye, but I had other, secret work in the palace. The chandler was Cromwell’s man, you see. He it was who told me where to go and what to do, for I was Cromwell’s spy. No one expected that a rat boy could read. When the chandler told me that mistress so-and-so or my lord of such-and-such had seen rats in their chamber, I knew that the rats were those I’d given in the sack to the grinning man. My lords and ladies fled their infested chambers and I had full opportunity to read whatever papers were lying about. The rats came quickly to my empty sack for they were used to finding food there and I had time aplenty to search the chamber. If there was an inkhorn, pen and paper handy, I made a fair copy of any dispatches I found. If not, I told the chandler of what I had read.

The chandler was a quiet man. ‘Thank you, my boy, Master Cromwell will be well pleased,’ was all he said to me and handed me a coin, sometimes a penny, sometimes a farthing, sometimes a shilling.

The chandler was paying me more money than I needed. A rat catcher wants nothing but old clouts and a full belly. No one would have guessed that a heavy purse hung beneath my shirt. I thought my money bag would someday make me a gentleman. I was only a child, but I knew what I did was wrong. I told no one except the chandler of what I read in those missives, and never will. Master Cromwell wanted to know everyone’s secrets: letters between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, letters of love, as well as writings of a religious or political nature.

One day the chandler weighed my purse in his big white hand. He reached inside with his fat fingers, counted out ten shilling pieces and dropped a golden coin into my purse. It was an angel noble.

‘Surely worth around seven or eight shillings in those days. The chandler gave you short change,’ I say.

My husband shrugs, says he was just a boy and was grateful for what he was given.

Everything changed one day when I was about fourteen years old. I happened to chance upon Master Cromwell talking with Anne Boleyn in the garden. They were so close that his black hat touched her jewelled hood. It sickened me to see he who was my master smiling and bowing with the King’s concubine who had displaced Queen Katherine. I resolved again to return to Ipswich and would have done so promptly but for a pretty girl who weeded the king’s gardens, even though she was not kind to me. Her father was a baker and a true Roman Catholic like me. We often talked in secret together bemoaning the loss of the Pope and the sorrow of poor Queen Kate.

The baker wanted to have me for his apprentice but the clerk would not allow it. The surly man and the grinning man came to me one night and taunted me.

‘You’ll never be a baker boy,’ they said. ‘Master Cromwell wants you to take care of his rats.’

I lay in a corner of the great kitchen and let the rats crawl all over me.

One day the chandler sent me by water to York Place, King Henry’s palace at Westminster that used to be Cardinal Wolsey’s house.

‘A gentleman has found rats in his lodgings,’ he said.

That was when I met Master Lydgate in his wherry on the Thames. It was shortly before Anne Boleyn’s river pageant and I asked Lydgate to bring his wherry to the friars’ landing stage on Thursday afternoon to let the little weeding maid and her aunt see the pageant. It cost me all the money that was in my purse, except the angel noble, of course. I had plans for that. You know the rest. Master Lydgate took me for his apprentice and I left Greenwich, Cromwell and the weeding maid to earn my living as a waterman.

‘Not before you made promises of marriage and of angels,’ I say.

‘Master Cromwell was a powerful man, surely you were in danger, master. Surely, the black-eyed man and the grinning man were seeking you,’ White Boy says.

‘The watermen look after their own. I was safe with Lydgate.’ He sighs. ‘Too safe.’

‘Cromwell was still seeking you in 1536, three years after you ran away. He tried to find your whereabouts from me but, of course, I knew nothing,’ I say.

‘He knew what I was doing, but he could never catch me,’ my husband says. ‘Only three men knew of my whereabouts in those days.’

‘Master Lydgate was one of them,’ White Boy declares.

‘Another was my father?’

My voice trembles.

‘Nay, Avis, your father knew nothing. When I left Greenwich so suddenly after the water pageant I told no one where I was going. I never saw your good father again. As for Lydgate, yes, he knew what I did with him upon the river, but nought else.’

‘What else did you do?’ White Boy asks urgently.

‘Have patience, and let me tell my tale in my own time.’

*

There came the day when Lydgate let me take the wherry out alone. My first passenger was a big man with his face hidden by a hood. He gave me a golden angel and told me to take no more passengers until he had alighted at Whitefriars. I’d have recognised those big white hands whatever the disguise. It was the chandler, and now he was talking. He was asking questions:

‘What think you of a king who banishes his wife and marries his concubine?’

‘What think you of that concubine who persuades our king to keep the Princess Mary from her mother?’

His third question bled all my youthful pride in my education out of me in one stab.

‘What think you of Cromwell, the King’s new chancellor, who persuaded His Grace, Cardinal Wolsey, to dissolve the little monasteries and churches of Suffolk to pay for his great new college?’

During that short journey I made my decision. Under cover of my apprenticeship with Lydgate I would do what I could to pass letters between Queen Katherine and Princess Mary. The chandler assured me that I would be well paid; better by far than when I worked for Cromwell.

I only asked one thing. I had to know the name of my master.

‘Sir Nicholas Carew,’ I interrupt, ‘Lady Bryan’s son-in-law. You were his spy.’

‘Never a spy, only a courier.’

‘A courier of treasonous dispatches,’ I say, remembering Lady Shelton’s horror when the missive was discovered in the Lady Mary’s orange.

‘Were you not afraid?’ White Boy whispers, but my husband does not answer, only continues with his story.

And thus I lived with two masters. I told Lydgate as little as I needed about my work for Carew; just that a gentleman might need my services occasionally. Lydgate asked no questions.

Watermen never do.

‘You must make your way in this world as best you can, lad,’ was all he ever said.

So it was that I came and went as I was bidden by the chandler upon Sir Nicholas Carew’s instructions and served my poor Queen Kate and her daughter, the Princess Mary, as best I could until Queen Katherine and Anne Boleyn were both dead. By that time, Cromwell was in Carew’s camp too, so I could cease hiding. Thus my tale is told.

‘The rest is for your ears only,’ he whispers to me.