The Unfaithful Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII's Fifth Wife (34 page)

Hearing that Uncle Thomas had been spared, while Uncle William was still suffering in the Tower, I sank into lower spirits than ever. For days it has seemed as though I could no longer eat or sleep or even find the strength to dress myself. I mourn. I can barely lift my pen. I can—

Tower Green
February 1542

My cousin Catherine having entrusted to me her written account of her life at court, I feel I must complete it. She did not ask me to—indeed the only thing she asked me to do was to feed the birds she kept by the hearth at Syon and to take care of Jonah, her beloved marmoset.

I have not her eloquence. I can only set down, while it is fresh in memory, what happened during the last days of her life, as faithfully as I can. This, then, is what I heard and saw.

It was a bitterly cold morning, the thirteenth day of February. An unlucky day. A day when the stars were aligned unfavorably, as the king’s astrologer told the captain of the guardsmen who told a halberdier who knew Joan well. Joan then told me, though in a low voice so that Catherine did not hear what she said.

It was early in the morning, the scaffold had been erected on the Green. The three of us, myself and Joan Bulmer and Mary Sidford, were being kept with Catherine in an interior room, with guardsmen present as Catherine had twice tried to escape and had struggled to get away when first brought to the Tower by barge. She had been erratic, beside herself with anguish one moment and exploding into laughter the next. I think she was half out of her mind with grief and terror.

She was wearing her high slippers, the ones that made her appear taller. They made her stumble at times. In her moods of foolishness she pranced in them, laughing at the absurdity of it all, that she should be so young, and about to die.

They had come for her three days earlier at Syon, and told her she was to be taken to the Tower. She said no! She wasn’t ready, they must come back another day. I think she truly believed, until that moment, that she would be spared. Her grandmother had told her so. She wanted to believe it. “There are signs,” she had said to me. “There are signs that I will be preserved. The king wears my mother’s pendant around his neck.”

All I knew was that when the Lord Privy Seal and members of the council came to Syon, they did not come to show mercy, but to carry out the king’s orders. They were unsparing. And so when Catherine said she wasn’t ready to be removed, there was a dreadful scene. She struggled, she refused to let them take her. They seized her and dragged her, shouting and shrieking, to her barge. The three of us were told to come as well, and we did as we were told. That was three days ago.

Ever since then she had been at times distant, lost in thought, and at times terrified. She had had a dreadful shock when we were traveling downriver on her barge, on our way to Traitor’s Gate. The barge had passed under London Bridge, as it must, and there, impaled on spikes, were the severed heads of Tom Culpeper and Francis Dereham.

She screamed when she saw them, and we could not quieten her. That night Joan had to give her a powerful drink to make her sleep—though even so, she woke up shouting, as she so often did. She had very bad dreams.

As we were waiting there in the inner room of the Tower, with the guardsmen watching us and especially watching Catherine, I could not help remembering the last time I stood on Tower Green in the early morning, on the day six years earlier when our cousin Anne Boleyn was led out to die.

I was standing next to Catherine on that day, she held my hand. All of us were near Uncle Thomas, with Grandma Agnes nearby, tall and proud. All our aunts and uncles and cousins stood together, so many of us, and I remembered hearing Uncle Thomas say “Kill the big whore!” as if to tell everyone he had no love for his niece Anne who had so dishonored our family. I had been far too timid to watch my cousin Anne die. I hid my eyes. But I remembered the sound of the executioner’s blade as it swished through the air, and the sharper sound as it bit into flesh. A sound at once soft and blunt. As of a huntsman when he strikes a wounded deer with the heavy hilt of his knife, to kill it.

As we waited in the interior room, we were told that a large crowd had gathered on the Green. There would be no Howards among them, of that I felt certain. All the Howards were in prison. All but Uncle Thomas, and myself and Joan—the two of us having been allowed our freedom so that we could serve Catherine.

She was sitting quietly, lost in thought, paying no heed to the activity around her. We had dressed her in a simple black velvet gown. We were told she was to wear no hood, and that we were to arrange her hair so that her neck was exposed. Her only ornament was the relic she always wore at her waist, a relic of a tear of the Virgin. In her plain black gown she looked pale, drained of color and vitality. Her eyes were dull. There were frown lines on her forehead. Her upswept hair was lusterless, with here and there a few strands of silver grey.

On the previous evening the Lord Privy Seal had come into her cell to tell her that she would die the next day. A chaplain was with him. She made her confession and then asked to see the block on which her head would be struck off. It was brought to her.

“Was this the block on which my cousin Anne’s head was severed?” she asked in a surprisingly calm voice.

She was reminded that Anne’s head was struck off by a sword.

She then asked to be shown how to place her head on it correctly, as she believed her cousin Anne had not got it right. Once again she was told that Anne had died by the sword, but she appeared not to hear.

She was shown how to kneel, facing the crowd, and the chaplain advised her to say her prayers as she knelt, so that she would be carried up to paradise when the blow fell.

This made her laugh. “And am I to go to paradise then?” she asked. “A sinner like me?”

But she paid attention, and practiced kneeling and laying her head down, and in a short time the block was taken away again.

We had been waiting, that morning, for at least an hour. I was tense with the waiting. My feet hurt. My mind wandered. We had been told that a number of executions were to take place. Catherine was to be the first to die. By noon, I thought to myself, it will all be over and I will be gone from this awful place. I hope I can be pardoned for having such an unworthy thought, but I believe anyone who has waited, as the three of us did that morning, for our mistress to be killed will understand. The waiting was unbearable—because the event for which we were waiting was unbearable.

Finally we were given the signal to follow the guardsmen out of the room. I picked up the cloths I was going to need, to wrap Catherine’s head and body in. How sad it makes me to write this! And how sad I was on that day, one of the worst days of my life.

I watched Catherine, to make certain she did not struggle or resist. But she was calm. The outer door was opened and a blast of chill air struck us as we stepped onto the grass with its thick layer of frost. There were the people, so many of them. A large crowd, spilling out over the Green and down toward the river. Murmuring and jostling one another uneasily. So many people! So many faces. It was as if all London had come to the Tower that morning, to watch the blood flow and the lives end.

The Lord Mayor and aldermen in their long black robes were in their places. The chaplain was already on the scaffold, his head bowed and a Bible in his hands. The executioner too was in place, a big man with powerful legs, dressed in a dark jerkin and with a hood covering his face. His heavy axe rested against the stone wall.

I saw all this at a glance, and then Catherine stepped forward, slowly, and we followed her. As she approached the crowd there were taunts and jeers.

“Kill the wench! Kill her and be done with her!”

“Whore!”

“Traitor!”

Excited voices made a hubbub of sound. Catherine did not look at the crowd, she kept her eyes on the brittle grass under her feet. When she reached the steps that led to the scaffold she began to mount them, but stumbled. I reached out to help her but two guardsmen came forward and supported her as she went up.

The strangest thing, to me, was that as she took her place beside the thick wooden block and prepared to say her last words, she had no expression. She had always been so animated and full of life. Emotion flowed out of her. Now she had no emotion left. Or she had entered some state in which emotion had no place. I would have expected her to begin to cry, as she always had at important moments. But there were no tears. The only sign that she had any feeling was that, as she began to speak, her voice shook.

Archbishop Cranmer had taught her what she had to say, which was that she deserved her punishment because she had been a sinner all her life and had broken all of God’s commandments. Her condemnation was just, because she had offended against the majesty of the king. She had put his authority and the kingdom in danger by her wanton acts.

I do not remember her words exactly, but I remember thinking that they were the archbishop’s words, not hers. Had she spoken her own mind, the mind of the girl I had known so well since we were children, she would have said, I believe, that she had acted from her heart, and that if acting from one’s heart was wrong, then she would take her punishment. But she did not think it was wrong.

Still, it matters not what I think, but only what she said.

Then the terrible moment came. I stiffened myself to endure it. I knew I must not flinch, or crumple at the sight, but I felt myself shaking. I heard Mary crying. Joan was silent, but she had turned her face away from the block. Catherine knelt in the way she had been shown, and laid her head down. I did not notice whether she prayed or not as she waited those last few seconds. I hope she did.

Then the executioner raised his axe, and grunted, and brought it down with a loud crunching sound.

A cry went up from many throats as Catherine’s head fell from the block and her life blood spurted forth from her neck, staining the block and the planking, spilling down onto the grass. The smell of the blood was overwhelming. I had to take a step back, I could not help it. I tried not to look, but the sight before me, horrible though it was, drew me. Her body began to shake and twitch. Blood stained the black velvet gown.

I remembered what we had been instructed to do. We were to lift Catherine’s head from where it fell and wrap it in the smaller of the two cloths I held. With shaking hands I unfolded the cloth and approached the block. Joan came with me but Mary, weeping uncontrollably, did not.

But almost at the same moment there were people rushing forward out of the crowd, dipping cloths of their own into the gushing blood, dipping their hands in it, thrusting forth cups and vessels to catch it. For the blood of an executed man or woman, as everyone knows, can cure sickness.

Joan’s hands were quicker and stronger than mine. She reached into the midst of the mayhem and snatched Catherine’s head by the red-brown hair, turned to crimson by her blood. I held out the cloth and Joan placed the head in it, mouth open, eyes open and staring. I have no doubt that as long as I live, I will never forget that dreadful, staring face.

Then we took the larger cloth and wrapped it around Catherine’s body. Mary helped us. Together we carried our burden past the outstretched hands and the shouting voices, our way made easier by the soldiers who walked on both sides of us, to the nearby chapel of St. Peter, as we had been instructed. Catherine, we were told, would be buried there in the chapel, where cousin Anne was buried and no doubt many others.

Ignoring the blood on my hands and my gown, doing my best to ignore all that I had seen and heard on that awful morning, I knelt there in the chapel. I knelt there for a long time, and prayed as I had never in my life prayed before. For the soul of my cousin Catherine, and her beloved Tom, and for all those who are too full of life and love to do as they ought, or to act prudently. For all those who follow their hearts, foolishly, and to the end.

Charyn Lady Morley
Written on this thirteenth day of February in the Year of Our Lord Fifteen Hundred and Forty-Two.

NOTE TO THE READER

Once again, dear reader, a caution and a reminder:
The Unfaithful Queen
is a historical entertainment, in which the authentic past and imaginative invention intertwine. Fictional events and circumstances, fictional characters and whimsical alterations of events and personalities are blended. Fresh interpretations of historical figures and their circumstances are offered, and traditional ones laid aside. I hope you have enjoyed this reimagining of the past.

Also by Carolly Erickson

HISTORICAL ENTERTAINMENTS

The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette

The Last Wife of Henry VIII

The Secret Life of Josephine

The Tsarina’s Daughter

The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots

Rival to the Queen

The Favored Queen

NONFICTION

The Records of Medieval Europe

Civilization and Society in the West

The Medieval Vision

Bloody Mary

Great Harry

The First Elizabeth

Mistress Anne

Our Tempestuous Day

Bonnie Prince Charlie

To the Scaffold

Her Little Majesty

Arc of the Arrow

Great Catherine

Josephine

Alexandra

Royal Panoply

Lilibet

The Girl from Botany Bay

ABOUT THE AUTHOR