Anne Boleyn: A Novel (15 page)

“It’s a twisted tangle,” Guildford said, “and I think I’m right when I say that all of us wish it hadn’t grown as snagged as it is. Do you really believe there’s a chance of Clement’s bending even yet?”

The Duke shrugged. “He’s taken his stand with the Emperor, but he’s temporizing still, hoping the King will see reason and cast off my niece. That’s what we’ll all be hoping for now, rather than see England torn asunder. My Lord Suffolk had the right method, but he used it at the wrong time. All we can do is obey the King, and wait.”

Henry was very tender with her that summer; he was a man of many moods as she discovered while their relationship dragged on. Sometimes he was courteous and considerate with her, as he had been in the early days when he was trying to win her, at others ill-tempered and overbearing, or rough and unspeakably coarse. Intimacy was wearing away the facade of his manners; she saw him petty and vain as a woman at times, drunken and belching at table after an afternoon spent at his lute, composing.

He had great qualities; he was morally brave, he was kingly and politically astute. He was utterly ruthless in action, once he had persuaded himself that he was in the right, and he was finding it easier than ever to reach that conclusion about everything he did or said.

But whatever the circumstances, she could still win him back by a few words of affection, and by the tricks which she had perfected to arouse his eager sensuality. His tastes were as coarse as his needs, and of all his actions, they were the most honest, because he neither excused them nor considered them unseemly. They were the King’s wants, and that raised them above criticism. The attitude was typical and now that the tactful hand of Wolsey had ceased to guide him, it was pervading the court and the Council Chamber.

A new expression came into use; the King’s will. The King’s will is this or that, and it was quickly understood that whatever that will was, it was safest to obey it blindly and at high speed. Anne watched and encouraged him, reminding him constantly that he was the King and above all authority. Primed by her father and some of the Protestant-inclined clergy who attended her, she seriously suggested to him that the authority of the monarch was an extension of the authority of the Almighty. Whoever disobeyed the King was breaking a Divine law. Whoever refused to acknowledge the King’s commands as binding above all others, denied the special position of a sovereign as the representative of God to his people.

It was a doctrine that appealed to him at once; his ego was large enough to agree with it, and his will and self-confidence shouldered the responsibility without a qualm. He was the King; God had made him so, and therefore he must be right. Nothing pointed out the enormity of Catherine’s resistance more than this premise; and nothing placed the lives and properties of everyone surrounding him in greater danger. Even with Henry the process was gradual, for he was still sane, and his mind needed time to adjust itself to the height of this new pinnacle.

The adjustment was quickened by his new ease of conscience. The Queen, living in semi-retirement at court, neglected and humiliated and still clinging to her rights, was no longer a reproach to him; nor was his daughter Mary. Catherine refused to acknowledge that she owed him obedience in the matter of the marriage, and Mary supported her mother’s claims and her own against his wishes. They were both in the wrong at last, and Anne and her adherents made sure that they had to be, by driving him to further unkindness against them.

The summer passed; the court moved from Greenwich to Anne’s new house at York Palace, and the Queen was left behind because there were no apartments for her. There were balls and masques and hunting parties, and Anne and the King were the orbit around which everything moved, like satellites around the sun. In spite of the gaieties, there were disappointments. Anne’s father had returned early that year from an interview with the Emperor Charles V, for the war was ended at the Peace of Cambrai, and Wiltshire had to face the furious King and confess that diplomacy and bribes of alliances and concessions had failed to move that cold young man from his championship of his aunt.

If the English could convince the Consistory of Cardinals that the divorce was just, would the Emperor cease to resist King Henry’s wishes? The Emperor answered Wiltshire’s proposal by asking whether the King of England would accept the verdict of the Consistory if it pronounced him truly Catherine’s husband? Wiltshire dared not give the guarantee, and he returned to London, where Henry shouted that his feeble handling of the mission was responsible for its failure.

As a final debacle, the writ summoning the King to appear by proxy or in person before the Court of the Rota in Rome had been served on his Ambassador. Wiltshire quailed under the temper of the King, watched by Anne, who knew better than to interfere at that point. Later the breach was healed, but Wiltshire bought his forgiveness by an attitude of crawling subservience. The pattern of the future was already emerging.

The summer was over, and one day when the King was dining in the fine banqueting hall at York Palace, with Anne seated on his right hand, he heard the news that his old Minister Thomas Wolsey had been communicating with the Pope, and urging that a strong measure should be taken to bring the King to his senses, and necessitate his own recall.

The Lords of the Council and the woman whose hopes of advancement depended on the Cardinal never regaining his power forgot their differences. The King had been too merciful to his servant. The servant had rewarded him with treason. Henry signed the order for the Cardinal’s arrest and committal to the Tower.

She was by his elbow as he wrote, and she noticed the angry glitter in his eyes, and the vein throbbing in the side of his neck. This time Wolsey would die. His was the power of life and death, and his was the divine right to punish disobedience as he thought fit. He had changed, since the day he sent Wolsey from court, ruined and despoiled of his possessions, but still free. They had tried to get him convicted of treason then, but Henry sent the Cardinal’s former Secretary Thomas Cromwell to Parliament to plead the Minister’s case, and he was acquitted. He had abandoned Wolsey for failing, but he had still relented a little when the man fell sick, thinking he was going to die, and sent him a token of friendship and made Anne do the same. There was still a softness in him that could be touched by servility, and might forgive. Now that had gone. She touched his arm and he grunted and turned round to her, his sandy eyebrows raised irritably at the interruption. She suggested that the Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, should go with the escort to arrest the Cardinal at York. He would make sure the wretch did not escape.

Northumberland went, and his muddled mind cleared long enough to avenge the ruin of his happiness with Anne by tying the dying Cardinal to his horse like a common felon, and forcing him through the cold, wet countryside toward London and his death, till he collapsed at Leicester Abbey and could go no further.

The King had Anne with him in his apartments at York Palace when he sent for the Earl and Sir Henry Kingston at the beginning of December.

The room was half-paneled, like the Cardinal’s study at Hampton Court, and the upper part of the walls were frescoed.

The shield over the great stone fireplace had been scraped clean of Wolsey’s cypher and replaced by the initials of Henry and Anne.

In spite of the cold and damp outside, where torrents of rain had raised the level of the Thames and turned the streets into a sea of mud, the room was warm, the polished floor spread with fine Persian rugs, and a magnificent Flemish tapestry hung over the door to keep out draughts. Candles were lighted, standing in candelabra of solid gold, and an oak sideboard stood the length of one wall, displaying plates and goblets and dishes, crested by the Cardinal’s hat and arms of their late owner, part of his fabulous collection of gold and silver plate. The King stood by the roaring fire. He wore a doublet of dark green velvet, the slashed puffed sleeves showing inner sleeves of cloth of gold; the neck was open, revealing a narrow edging of miniver fur, and a great chain, encrusted with rubies and diamonds and emeralds, hung down over his chest. The little dagger at his belt was also set with the same stones. He looked gigantic in the flickering light of the fire and the soft candle glow.

Anne sat in a low chair by the chimney corner; her dress was dark blue brocade, with a paler velvet underskirt, and the long elegant sleeves hung over the arms of her chair and swept the floor. She sat very still and upright, her face outlined by a jeweled cap and a soft veil.

Percy came forward first, stooping as usual, and knelt to the King. He glanced quickly at Anne but his eyes were empty and they flickered away, back to Henry. Then Kingston presented himself; he was a gruff, thickset man, and Anne’s lips tightened as she remembered that he and his wife were devoted friends of Catherine.

The King hooked his hands in his belt.

“I’ve sent for you to hear your account of the happenings at Leicester Abbey.”

It was the Earl’s privilege to answer.

“The Cardinal is dead, Sire.”

He paused; he was nervous, and he found speech difficult without stammering.

“So your messenger told me,” Henry answered shortly.

“His Grace wishes to know how he managed to escape his just punishment.” It was Anne who spoke, and she addressed Kingston, who had taken Wolsey under his custody at the last stages of his journey.

“My Lord Northumberland can answer for that, Madame,” Kingston returned. “The Cardinal was sick when he was delivered to me.”

“Well?”

Again she spoke, anticipating the King, and the man who had loved her and completed her revenge on Thomas Wolsey, moved a step nearer and spoke directly to her for the first time in nearly a year.

“I forced him on as fast as I could,” he mumbled. “I hoped to deliver him to the King’s justice alive, but he was failing when I gave him into Kingston’s care.”

“We had to stop at Leicester,” Kingston explained; he had turned deliberately so that he faced Henry, and avoided the figure, sitting, tapping her foot with impatience. She had destroyed the Cardinal, as she was trying to destroy the gentle Queen. He knew that Percy had been sent to make the arrest on her instigation, and, hardened to suffering as he was, he was shocked at the condition of the prisoner the Earl handed over to him. The proud, brilliant Prince of the Church was a trembling old man, soaked to the skin by hours of exposure in the fiercest weather, so stiff and cramped from his bonds that two troopers had to lift him from his horse. Wolsey was to die, but the unnecessary cruelty of his treatment was Anne’s doing; she knew the temper of that stuttering lunatic Northumberland and what he would inflict on his fallen enemy.

“The Cardinal was dying when the monks at the abbey took us in,” he continued. “If I’d proceeded, all I’d have been able to deliver to you was his corpse. He was tended, and everything was done to fit him to travel, but his strength failed completely; he confessed and received the Sacraments. He died a better Christian than he lived.”

“Did he acknowledge his guilt or mention his treason in communicating with the Pope?” the King asked roughly, Kingston shook his head.

“No, Sire. He only said as he died that if he’d served his God as faithfully as he had served his King, He wouldn’t have abandoned him in his gray hairs...They were his last words.”

Northumberland said nothing; he was looking at Anne, watching the play of the firelight on her face, remembering the Queen’s young maid of honor who had guided his clumsy movements through a dance at Greenwich, and enchanted him with her gaiety and her grace and her gentleness till he fell hopelessly in love for the only time in his life.

The features were still there, and the slender, voluptuous figure, but his body was dead to desire, and his heart was empty. He felt ill, and his hands were beginning to tremble. The hard expression in her eyes reminded him suddenly of his wife, that violent shrew whose tongue had driven him over the edge of sanity. They were separated now, but the harm was done, A harsh note in a woman’s voice was enough to remind him, and a wild antagonism filled him for Anne because she had lost her sweetness. His pledged sweetheart sat in front of him, brazen and hard, and living in this great house as the King’s mistress, powerful enough to destroy Wolsey and have the Duke of Suffolk sent to cool away from court for daring to speak against her. This was not the loving creature of his imagination, treasured like the Virgin, warped out of reality by the years; this was an ambitious harlot, who had crawled into the hay at Hever with her own Cousin Wyatt before she came to court and snared the King.

Everything he had ever heard against her and refuted, came to his mind and immediately found credence. He lowered his head and gripped his hands behind his back, fighting the images of her lying in other men’s beds, when he had been fool enough to ask to marry her to get her into his. Wolsey had been good to him while he was attached to his household; he had had excellent prospects of remaining at court in the King’s favor until he ruined himself for the sake of a clever adventuress who wasted no time in replacing him. His head ached violently.

Wolsey had been good to him once. He could remember instances of kindness which the memory of that one awful wrong had obliterated for so many years. And he had bound and harassed him when he was dying, and lashed on his horse through the mud-clogged roads to get him to London and the block for the sake of the woman sitting a few feet away from him.

Henry was still talking to Kingston; he could hear their voices.

“You did your duty well, my Lord.”

They were dismissed, and she was speaking to him, approving the cruelty he was already bitterly regretting. He didn’t answer her; he dared not trust himself, in case he brought the fate of Suffolk on his head by shouting at the King to get rid of her before it was too late, before he blackened his conscience on her behalf and lived to see her for what she really was...

The tapestry parted, and the door closed behind them, leaving Anne and the King alone. She got up and went to him, linking her arm through his. Wolsey was dead. She shut her mind to Northumberland, now a stranger, sick and prematurely old, and the last whisper of nostalgia left her as he went out of the room.