My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (5 page)

“I should begin on the better looking of the two,” advised Wotton, ever bent on pleasing Henry.

“And which would you call the better looking?”

The doctor of divinity looked up in innocent surprise.

“There is no comparison, is there?” He seemed about to expatiate on the younger lady’s charms but, remembering his cloth, contented himself with a few disparaging remarks about the elder.

“The Lady Anne is by all accounts an estimable woman. Docile, charitable and an excellent needlewoman,” he declaimed in his best pulpit manner. “But as regards conversation and—er—polite accomplishments—” he smoothed down his white stock and ended on a more human and emphatic note, “I should imagine that a man like my master would find her about as entertaining as a meek cow.”

Holbein dropped the quaint blue Delft wine jug he had in his hand so that it smashed to pieces on the tiled floor. “There was nothing of the meek cow about her when I met her just now in the kitchen cloister!” he retorted, with unusual heat. “And if by having no conversation you mean she doesn’t chatter like a magpie—”

Accustomed as Wotton was to his companion’s deftness and tolerance, he was naturally taken aback. “I only meant that she has no animation,” he explained hastily.

Holbein picked up the fragments of pottery and began piecing them together with remorseful care so that the stiff little barges fitted into the right bit of canal and the bundly Dutch women walked in their proper setting beside the blue windmills.

“She could have, I suspect—were she awakened. Now if I were the prospective bridegroom—” He was bending over his task, talking almost to himself when Wotton’s scandalized remonstrance reminded him that even in Cleves such words had a treasonable sound. “Well, anyhow, when I saw her as she really is—with color in her cheeks and her hair loosened from that dreadful cap arrangement they all wear, and flaring out at me because she’d upset half my precious yellow ocher down her dress—I wanted to paint her. Really wanted to the way I used to enjoy decorating churches and books and rathauses before I became a royal lapdog paid to paint titled people!”

It was not in Wotton to understand the man’s cause for self-contempt. To him freedom in one’s work seemed relatively unimportant compared with money and the royal favor and an assured place in that pleasant hub of English life rotating between Greenwich, Westminster and Hampton Court. “I can’t understand what you see in her,” he said coldly.

“It isn’t what I see. It’s what I find myself looking for,” said Holbein. “That younger one is pretty enough—if you like all your goods in the shop window. But there’s something elusive about the Princess Anne, something to call a man back when he’s tired of the obvious in other women.” He paused to glance thoughtfully through the open window in passing. “It’s like the lights and shadows chasing each other across those immense, flat Flemish landscapes. One minute they’re dull, the next enchanting.” He turned eagerly to the unresponsive cleric, his whole face alight with enthusiasm. “She doesn’t often smile, have you noticed? But it’s worth waiting for.

Like the moment when a burst of clear sunshine lights up a mural painting on a dull day, revealing unsuspected beauty.”

The unimaginative Englishman stared at him, open-mouthed.

“What it is given to you artistic fellows to see!”

“What you place-hunting materialists miss!” snapped Holbein, coming down to earth.

“I daresay we do,” he agreed propitiatingly. “I’m only warning you not to get carried away from the plain object of our mission and paint a world’s masterpiece. Because we’re both in this and if the King doesn’t think the original comes up to sample there’ll be the devil to pay!”

When he was really angry Holbein grew quiet and white. “I have never in my life put a false detail in any portrait,” he said, very quietly indeed. “In my profession even a court painter—if he’s a good one—needs to be sincere.”

“All right. I’m sorry,” soothed Wotton wearily. “I don’t profess to know much about art. But I’ve made it my business to know all about the King’s likes and dislikes. And I can assure you he likes small, piquant women with—as you so crudely expressed it just now—all their goods in the shop window.”

Absently, Holbein began exercising the joints of those flexible fingers of his. His rare gusts of anger seldom lasted long. “Well, well, I expect you’re right,” he agreed. “Clearly the Duchess favors, or can best spare, the younger daughter. So I had better arrange to paint her first.”

It was as well for his health, perhaps, that he did so because a few days later Anne had contracted smallpox.

4

HOLBEIN FELT IRRITATED ALL the time that he was making his portrait and miniature of Amelia. He knew that he was painting woodenly. It had been so when he executed his first commission for the King, and the critics had suggested that if his portrait of Anne Boleyn didn’t match the excellence of his others it was because he was nervous. But he himself knew that he didn’t merit the excuse because once he became absorbed in his work it would have made no difference if the Archangel Gabriel had commissioned it. It was simply that he saw the woman’s grasping soul more clearly than the Circe fascination of her face.

In Amelia he saw nothing interesting at all. She hadn’t even the vibrant self-love that disquiets kingdoms and breaks up homes.

And, like most people who have learned no self-control, she was a very bad model. She fidgeted and talked incessantly. No sooner had Holbein posed her to his satisfaction than she would open the English book she carried so ostentatiously and ask him to translate words for her or begin pestering him with trivial questions about the fashions favored by ladies of the English court. She was avid, too, for snippets of scandal about Henry Tudor’s private life.

“Is it true that Christina of Milan said she would marry him if only she had two necks?” she giggled.

“I am a painter, Madam—not a diplomat,” he would snap at her, too irritated to consider her rank. And so for a little while he, who was accustomed to working in in violable silence, would achieve some peace. But at some point during each sitting he would contrive to ask after Anne.

“Oh, my sister is too healthy to die,” Amelia assured him comfortably. “But it will be too awful, won’t it, if she is badly pockmarked?”

Although his interest in the case should have been purely aesthetic, Holbein found himself less concerned about the possibility of pockmarks than about Anne herself—her serene health and her pleasure in the simple, everyday things of life. When she got up, he wondered, might her sight be affected? Would she be strong enough to superintend the breeding of her pigeons, and to go around visiting the ducal farms and all the families she was interested in?

“She must be very lonely with none of you allowed to visit her,” he remarked, knowing how much she lived in other people’s lives.

“Well, she asked for it—going into horrid little houses and picking up a spotty baby!” sniffed Amelia, who certainly had some excuse for being annoyed with Anne. For had she not been terrified lest she, too, might have contracted the disfiguring disease just when all Europe was about to gasp at the announcement of her brilliant betrothal?

Holbein, who had lived in little houses himself, knew well enough that they could shelter the same intensity of joy and sorrow as palaces. “I understand the girl Dorothea was in your service and at her wits’ end because the baby was dying and no one would help,” he said.

“She ought never to have had it,” explained Amelia primly. “And, anyway, we were all too busy just then with your unexpected arrival.”

But after only a few weeks in Cleves, Holbein guessed that most of the family obligations must have devolved upon Anne. He remembered that it was she who had found time to help him choose a work room with a north light, to give orders about a special caudle for the cold Dr. Wotton had caught on their journey and to perform a score of other homely kindnesses. During the few days before she was taken ill she had kept her promise and shown him the charming view from the great stone dovecote, and coaxed the typical old Dutchman in charge of it to sit for him. Holbein had expected to find her dallying with a few cooing turtledoves as the court ladies did in England and Milan, and was amazed to find accommodation for hundreds of ordinary-looking table birds.

“Then you don’t rear fantails for amusement, Madam?” he had observed lamely.

“No. Just runts for the kitchen pot,” she had answered, dexterously scooping a couple from their brick nesting holes to prod their plump breasts with an experienced finger. And while she discussed their food with old Jan, Holbein had looked from this domesticated princess to the formal gardens of her home, thinking how Nan Boleyn would have filled them with the scurrying and laughter of sophisticated pleasures.

“Don’t you find—all this—rather dull?” he had ventured to ask.

But this other Anne had smiled imperturbably at his impertinence and said, “You’d have found it dull, wouldn’t you, that dreadful wet night you arrived here if there hadn’t been any dinner?”

And so now when Amelia began to fidget unbearably or the light began to fade he would lay down palette and brush and look across to the particular pepper-pot turret in which he knew Anne was being nursed. And after Amelia and her ladies had gone chattering along the gallery he would go down to the dovecote, stepping painfully across the cobbled stockyard in his thin court shoes, to see if her pigeons were being properly looked after. It seemed to be the only service he could render her; but he need not have bothered because old Jan was her devoted slave.

“T’was her Grace got our roof mended when my wife lay sick,” he would mumble when the “artist from foreign parts” commended his care. He was a garrulous old man and from his unwary lips fell illuminating sidelights on the way everyone, from the Duke down-wards, depended upon Anne.

To Holbein’s amusement, the dowager Duchess was delighted with her younger daughter’s miniature and wanted to have it sent to England immediately. “So that the sewing woman can get on with her clothes,” she thought, prudently laying in a stock of fine lawn and velvets. Although Wotton shared her impatience he was a stickler for carrying out instructions, and Cromwell had told him to bring back portraits of both princesses.

So the whole court moved to the summer palace of Düren because the Duke thought the change would do Anne good; and almost as soon as she was up and about she came to sit for Holbein there. She stood before him acquiescently, her capable hands folded in unaccustomed leisure. The north light was being unkind to the listless droop of her eyelids and she looked almost sallow.

“Are you sure you are strong enough?” he asked anxiously, waving aside her women and making her sit down in the chair in which Amelia had fidgeted away so many exasperating mornings.

Anne smiled at him gratefully, surprised that anyone should be so concerned about the mere wearisomeness of convalescence. “I will pose for as long as you wish,” she said. “But I have seen your portrait of my sister and fear it will be wasting your valuable time.

Especially now,” she added regretfully, her fingers unclasping themselves to draw attention to one or two pockmarks that disfigured her chin.

Holbein considered them gravely. They were new and noticeable. “That is a terrible pity,” he agreed. “But I assure you our sitting will be anything but waste of time, if only your Grace will put on another dress.”

He was aware of shocked sounds emanating from the pursed mouth of the dowdy lady who mothered her attendants and of Anne’s own mouth opening in astonishment. He didn’t realize that part of her weariness was attributable to the time they had spent over her toilet.

“A different dress!” she exclaimed, looking down at the gorgeous, over-trimmed purple velvet for which her brother had paid considerably more than he could afford. “But this is new. My family chose it specially.”

While laying out his vellum and graphites he looked across at her with gentle amusement, guessing what a serious conclave that must have been. “Then they don’t know what becomes you,” he said.

Anne flushed with vexation. She knew that he had no right to say such things. He was merely paid to paint her. Yet there was so much real kindliness in his deep voice that she couldn’t find it in her heart to rebuff him. “My mother chose it as being suitable,” she insisted stubbornly.

But even then Holbein must have foreseen that his portraits would be numbered among the world’s treasures long after many of the people who commissioned them were forgotten dust. “Isn’t it time you chose your own clothes, Madam?” he suggested mildly.

“Even if I did these are the only garments I possess which are grand enough,” retorted Anne with spirit. She knew how the detestable English had flaunted their wealth in the face of Europe at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and she had no intention of letting her own little duchy down.

But Holbein, the cosmopolitan, ignored her spurt of anger and came and stood beside her, coolly considering her face from every angle. He was wondering how he could best draw her accurately without emphasizing the length of her nose. “I am not concerned with their grandeur,” he explained impersonally, “but with your beauty.”

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She gasped weakly and sat staring up at him. It was the first time anyone had used the word beauty in connection with herself.

Even Sybilla, whose good looks had got her Frederick of Saxony, had not been accustomed to flattery in their family circle. “If you really wish it I will send and ask my brother—” she began, with a little uncertainty.

He saw that the discussion was worrying her and suspected that, in order to precipitate Amelia’s affairs, she had been persuaded to sit for him before she was really fit; so he turned to the scandalized duenna and said curtly, “I shall be obliged, Madam, if you will send for the dull pink gown in which I first saw your mistress.”

Griselda Lowe, Countess of Waldeck, bridled like an outraged peahen. “Have it brought here?”

“Yes—here,” said Holbein. “Surely you must see that her Grace is not fit to walk down all those corridors?”