Anne Boleyn: A Novel (30 page)

Cromwell hesitated. Anne was delicate, and those last words betrayed a great deal. “Since I’ve no son...” He was much bitterer than he let anyone see. The disappointment rankled; at first he had been sorry for the woman because of that ghastly travail, but she was better and now he had begun to think of her health with irritation. It was just as well to make sure.

“May I ask Your Grace one question?” he said at last.

“Ask it.”

“Would anything persuade you to put Queen Anne away and take Catherine back?”

Henry waited for a moment before answering.

“Nothing, either in Heaven or hell,” he said evenly, “would persuade me to bend to the Pope against my conscience and take Catherine back.”

The Secretary bowed and some moments later he left the King and drafted letters to the two men Henry had suggested should go to France to plead his cause with Clement. They were a strange choice if he wanted a settlement—Bonner and Gardiner. The Pope knew and hated both of them; in previous missions to Rome they had distinguished themselves for their aggressiveness and impudence. Neither was likely to conciliate Clement, to whom so many affronts had been offered. But then Henry didn’t really wish him to be conciliated. He was playing for time, as Cromwell advised, but not for much time, only a few months at the most, and then he would be ready to break and declare himself independent. He would push his tyrannical laws through a picked Parliament and use them to bribe or browbeat any opposition. Then the right to rifle the monasteries would be his, to pass spiritual as well as material sentences, to live and rule entirely according to his own will.

Cromwell knew the pattern; he had largely woven it himself, but he frowned because there was something which had happened at that interview with the King which nagged at him and wouldn’t be identified.

Something had been said or done. But what, in the name of God? Something important. Nothing to do with France or the Pope...yes, wait a moment, the Pope. Would the King bend to the Pope under any circumstances?...That was it. Cromwell sat forward. He remembered now.

It was his question, asked to make sure that he hadn’t made a mistake when he threw in his lot with Anne and her faction; the King’s remarks about the child being only a girl had worried him in case he might suddenly do to him what he had done to Cardinal Wolsey once, so many years ago.

Change his mind behind his back; make peace with the Pope and reinstate Catherine and Mary, and send the woman who had failed him into retirement.

And the King had answered him. That was the matter of importance which had been gnawing at him since he left the Council Chamber. The King’s answer. Nothing in Heaven or hell would make him take Catherine back. He had left the first and most vital part of Cromwell’s question, about abandoning Queen Anne, without an answer.

Three months after her birth, Anne’s daughter was taken out of her care and placed in Hatfield House, with a large establishment. The baby bore the title of Princess of Wales, and in December Mary Tudor, having been forbidden to use the title Princess and officially designated the Lady Mary, was ordered to join the household of her small half-sister.

Disappointment, and the knowledge of Catherine’s and Mary’s satisfaction, had made Henry strike at both of them without mercy. He closed Mary’s household at Beaulieu, giving the fine house to Anne’s brother George; Catherine had already been sent to Bugden, which was primitive and distinctly unhealthy. As an added punishment, he sent Suffolk, who could always be relied upon to be harsh to excess, with orders to disband Catherine’s attendants, and if she resisted, to imprison her in worse quarters at Somersham, unless she ceased her complaints and acknowledged his second marriage.

Suffolk was prepared for resistance, but he was not prepared for the sullen crowds of country people who emerged from the fields and villages and drifted toward Bugden, when they heard rumors that hands might be laid on the Queen.

Catherine defied him; she lost her temper and her dignity, and roared at him with a spirit worthy of Henry himself, and dared him to move her by force. If he did it, she threatened, the common people would tear him and his miserable troop to pieces!

He was forced to leave her where she was, but he drove her household out into the snow when they refused to take the oath of the King’s Supremacy, and rode back to London in a fury. Nothing would move the woman, he snarled at Norfolk; if Queen Anne was agitating and getting him set on these useless missions to wrangle with a stubborn Spanish mule, he’d better tell her that! Norfolk told Henry, who looked at him and listened, saying nothing, and then he went to inform his niece. They were still on bad terms, though etiquette forced them to meet and acknowledge each other. He was as bitter and unforgiving as she, and he had never forgotten her insults during that quarrel before she went to France with the King.

He found her walking in the long gallery at Whitehall, with Margaret Wyatt and her brother, and Sir Francis Weston. She had ordered some magnificent dresses after Elizabeth’s birth; she was as slim as ever and the dress of black satin, with a surcoat of French velvet, fitted her to the waist like a skin. The neckline was very low, he noted, showing the fullness of her bosom, and the King of France’s huge ruby hung on a chain of diamonds, the stone itself resting in the hollow of her breasts. She’ looked like a fabulous whore, the Duke thought, hardly able to believe that the anguished creature whose lying-in he had witnessed was the cold, glittering woman who turned to meet him now.

The body was well enough, he thought maliciously; the gorgeous funereal dress, with sleeves lined with white ermine, and the few, breath-taking jewels; but the face was drawn and pale.

“Your Grace,” he saluted her as abruptly as he dared, and her eyes lighted angrily.

“My good uncle. What do you want?”

“I have a message from the Duke of Suffolk,” he answered. He hoped she would keep her companions with her so that they could hear of Catherine’s defiance, and spread it through the court. He hoped for anything which would discomfort her, he hated her so much. But she knew him too well to fall into that trap.

“Meg, and Francis...you may leave us. No, George, stay and hear what our dear uncle has to say. I’ll swear it’s good news, or he wouldn’t have sought us out so quickly!”

They stood side by side while he described the scene at Bugden, with the same look on both their faces. Rochford was a head taller; at one point he laid his hand on Anne’s shoulder as if to comfort her.

“Nothing will move her,” Norfolk concluded. “Nor the Lady Mary; I’m informed that she agrees to call the Princess of Wales sister, since His Grace admits he’s the father...”

“She calls Bess Blount’s son ‘brother’!” Anne burst out, and Norfolk’s sharp eyes noticed Rochford’s fingers press her shoulder gently, warning her not to be goaded.

“It’s Mary who is the bastard,” George Rochford interrupted, “in the sight of God and man!”

“I’ll give her Lady Shelton as a governess while she’s at Hatfield,” Anne said slowly. “And she’ll take her meals in the common hall with the rest of the household or she won’t eat at all. I’ll teach her to insult my daughter!” --

“Do what you can, Madame,” Norfolk sneered. “I’m all for breaking the girl’s spirit...your methods may well do it, if the King allows them!”

“It’s the King who’s proceeded against her, not I,” she answered, and it was true. He had become as harsh as her jealousy could have wished and had wished, in the days when she dared to quarrel with him and accuse him of soft-heartedness toward his daughter. There was no necessity to upbraid him now, but the fact that he was cruel to Mary was small satisfaction. It was not done for her sake; nor for the sake of the baby she had nursed and grown to love, in spite of its sex. Henry was defending his own pride; he had chosen her and she had disappointed him, but he could at least vent his feelings on those who dared to point it out. And he was persecuting and humiliating his daughter because he still hoped to give the things he had taken from her to a son.

“As for Catherine of Aragon,” she said contemptuously, “her disloyalty is just what I’d expect. It certainly won’t please His Grace. Have you any more news. Uncle? I don’t want to detain you from your business.”

Norfolk flushed at the dismissal.

“None,” he snapped.

She smiled and turned casually toward her brother.

“Then you may retire,” she said over her shoulder.

When he had gone they faced each other, and her pretense had vanished. “Oh, George, George,” she pleaded, “will I never have any peace?”

He took her elbow and guided her to her rooms.

“We can’t talk here. Nan, because we might be overheard. And we must talk. I’ve hardly seen you alone for months.”

The fire in her room had gone down, and he threw fresh logs on it himself, and kicked them alight, while she paced up and down, her long skirts swishing after her.

“Now,” he said, straightening from the fireplace. “Now, tell me the true position.”

“Which position?” she asked him slowly. “The position in Europe...you know that better than I do! Or the position at court...Norfolk’s a good example. Full of hatred and envy for me, but afraid to do anything because of the King. The legal position regarding the divorce and my marriage? Christ knows! And I swear I don’t care; I’m sick to death of all this wrangling...if I hear the words Pope or divorce again, I’ll shriek my head off!”

“Stop it, Nan,” he said harshly. “Stop it, and talk sense. You know what I’m asking.”

“Ah, yes,” she said slowly. “Of course I know. The position between the King and myself, isn’t that what you mean? That’s what everybody’s puzzling over...Within a year of the marriage he’s grown cold and behaved like a brute in public, and then cherished me so I wouldn’t lose his precious heir at the end. And what now? Now I’ve got my strength back and can inveigle him between the sheets again? Does he love me again, or is he still hoping for a boy?”

He breathed hard and smacked one hand down on the open palm of the other.

“Answer, in God’s name, and stop asking me!”

She sat down suddenly in the window seat and turned her head away to stare out at the frozen countryside. The first two months of the new year 1534 were as cold as the last months of the old.

“I can answer only one thing with certainty,” she said at last. “He no longer loves me, George. That’s finished. It was finished when he married me...I never told even you at that time, because I couldn’t believe it myself, and my pride wouldn’t let me...If there’d been no child, I wouldn’t be Queen today. It was finished and done within six months of my surrender to him.”

He came and sat beside her, and patted her hand awkwardly. It was not like her to sit there with her shoulders sagging...she had never loved the brute anyway, he thought savagely; why was she so hurt now? For she was hurt; he knew her and loved her like a second self, and he knew that she was more wretched than at any time since the end of her love match with Henry Percy.

She turned and tried to smile at him.

“You warned me,” she said, “but I wouldn’t listen. You said he’d tire but I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe a man who’d waited all those years and done so much would be sick of me after a few months. But by God, I didn’t know him as he really was! Do you know the reason, George?” she demanded. “Well, I’ll tell you this; it’s not any fault of mine. I didn’t stale on him or falter...I’d have kept the love of any normal man to the day of his death, I can promise you that!”

George stared at her, frowning.

“Nan, what do you mean? What’s wrong with him?”

She laughed shortly. “Nothing. He’s a miserable lover, and he has no stomach for it; less stomach than I have, and I’m only a woman! He sleeps better in bed than he makes love; he tired of me because I didn’t give him what those hours of fumbling promised. But Great God, no woman could! No wonder he lived amicably with Catherine for all those years when she was old and as fetching as a dry cask. He could take a mistress here and there— like my damned fool sister Mary—and then discard them when he wasn’t satisfied, and no one thought the worse of him.

“Listen to me, George, for it’s worth hearing. I’ve thought and thought of it all, lying there like a disemboweled animal, after the child, and all the months before...This talk of a marriage against his conscience...this yelping for a son! It may be true enough now, by God; he can convince himself of anything and, once it’s roused that will of his would move a mountain. But it wasn’t true when he began with me. Why didn’t he put Catherine away and marry Bess Blount, if he wanted a son so badly? Bess had a boy for him who’s walking round the court today! Bess was the obvious choice if a son was all-important. Oh, I know Wolsey wanted a French Princess, but these mutterings about annulling the marriage had been going on for years, only no one took them seriously, least of all the King.

“Then he met me, George. And he wanted to play with me like all the others, and try me out and see whether he liked it better than he had before. But I wouldn’t let him. Whatever he thought he’d feel with me it wasn’t the joy of an ordinary man when he takes the woman he loves...I realize that now. But he thought he would, and he’d waited so long and gone so far that it took six months before he would admit I meant no more to him than the rest. And then I was pregnant. So he married me, because of his pride and his obsession for a son; and I gave him a girl.”

He didn’t say anything for some moments, having no idea what to say in answer; healthy and uncomplicated himself, he could hardly grasp the mentality of such a man as his sister described. He kept seeing the King’s huge body, still showing signs of muscle and vigor in spite of his weight, and the thing seemed impossible. He was a big, lusty, athletic man, tied to an aging wife who couldn’t give him children. That was the picture which the world knew, and which everyone, the King’s closest associates included, had accepted without question. Only Anne had dared to say differently. The other women must know; Catherine must know, but she said nothing. She was probably too plain-thinking and unimaginative to appreciate the terrible subtlety like Anne. And the others wouldn’t complain. They were too proud to spoil the notoriety of being Henry’s mistress, however briefly, by damaging his reputation as a lover. And too wise, he thought, suddenly afraid.