My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (8 page)

Suffolk might have said that he didn’t create dreams of ephemeral perfection and then expect his wives to live up to them. But he didn’t answer immediately. It was his turn to sit and stare abstractedly.

“Two marriages,” he corrected softly. “And a brief taste of Heaven—with your sister.”

Henry sighed and the gay little ghost of the first Mary Tudor— who had joyfully laid down the crown of France to become Mary Brandon—flitted through the quiet room which she used to fill with laughter, garnishing its present stillness with a dozen well-remembered gestures for these two middle-aged men who had loved her. In order to break the spell Henry left the window seat and went back to his work table. Slumping into his wide chair, he pushed aside the score of a madrigal he had been composing and, with an air of conscious virtue, pulled towards him the inevitable pile of state papers Cromwell had left to be signed.

“If only Catherine’s sons had lived—” he muttered irrelevantly, taking up his quill. It was the weak man’s typical kind of excuse for his own muddles. But he always felt things might have been so different. She wouldn’t have grown ill and priest-ridden and old, so much older than the inextinguishable youth in him. And he might have been too occupied with the upbringing of his sons to get caught in the toils of that witch woman who had broken up his home…

He liked to picture himself the bluff, adored center of family life, as Charles now was. After all, he was essentially a family man.

Above everything, he wanted legitimate sons. He hadn’t wanted passionate interludes and all that underhand scheming, nor had he meant to be a brute to poor dead Catherine and their only daughter.

He couldn’t really afford to quarrel with Wolsey either…It was Anne—Nan Boleyn of Hever—who had involved him in cuckold ridicule and crazy defiance of the Pope. And all for a few moons’ madness—with nothing to show for it but another daughter!

Though Nan’s sleek head had rolled in the straw, he would never forgive her for having fooled him.

And here he was deciding to take another Anne! The one thing he had sworn never to do. And she not much more than half his own age. He let the heavy parchments roll back on themselves and beckoned Charles from the other side of the room. “Tell me,” he beseeched in panic. “This Anne is no harlot? She wouldn’t make a cuckold of me? I couldn’t go through all that again!”

Suffolk threw an affectionate arm about his shoulders. “Of course not, Harry! Holbein’s painted both of them, hasn’t he, and never were two women’s faces more different. All I’m worrying about is whether you’ll be able to live with her placid goodness.”

“I’m older now.”

“But you know so little about her,” reiterated Suffolk, afraid for his friend’s fastidiousness about physical details. “Why, she might have flat feet or bad breath or something.”

But Henry had already recovered from his hysterical lapse. “I know more than you think, my friend!” he said, his small, light eyes twinkling with cunning. His pudgy hands fumbled at a silk neck-cord and from somewhere between doublet and shirt he fished up a well-thumbed document. Suffolk took it with amused curiosity.

All down one side of the paper were questions, numbered and tabulated by some clerk, presumably at the King’s dictation. Opposite each, in Wotton’s scholarly hand, was the envoy’s candid answer. Its author had at least had the grace to make it “Confidential.”

“Sit down and read it?” he invited, vacating his own chair and pushing Charles into it.

Charles sat down and read, and all the time the King fidgeted round him, pleased as a child who has outwitted his tutors.

“They wouldn’t arrange for me to see any of ’em but I fancy I’ve covered everything.”

“I should think you have!” agreed the Duke ironically. He picked out one or two items at random and read them aloud. “ ‘Q. To note her height. A. Tall, but by reason of her wearing slippers and the roundness of her clothing, looks less.’ She doesn’t sound exactly modish, Harry, does she? ‘Skin—fair and clear.’ That’s better. ‘Hair—seems to be of a brown color.’ That must have been a bit of a teaser for Wotton with that chastely fitting cap!”

“There’s a bit showing in the miniature.”

“Thoughtful fellow, Holbein!”

“It’s brown all right. I like ’em brown.”

“I should have thought that after Nan…”

“That was raven—”

Suffolk slid a finger down the page. The smug audacity of the thing had begun to intrigue him. “Um—let’s see. ‘Teeth—clean and well set. Breasts—trussed somewhat high.’ What’s this? ‘To endeavor to speak with her fasting, so that they may see whether her breath be sweet—’ Really, Harry…

“So you see,” chuckled Henry, “I do know a good deal about her!”

“Yes. But I shouldn’t let the lady concerned see—ever. Nor any of Norfolk’s crowd either.” There were little commonnesses about this flamboyant Tudor which, through long usage, Charles Brandon could stomach and even find amusing. But he hated the blue-blooded Howards to catch his friend doing things which not even the worst of the Plantagenets would have thought of. “Sounds like the catalogue of a horse fair!” he commented.

“Well, anyhow, all the answers seem satisfactory,” said Henry, thrusting the inventory of Anne’s points back in his bosom.

“Yes, quite satisfactory,” agreed Suffolk, wondering how a man of such real culture could, at times, treat his women like cattle.

Henry consulted the dial of a great astronomical clock which had just arrived from France and was to be erected at Hampton Court. “If Cromwell doesn’t bungle things she ought to be here by Christmas,” he calculated. “We’ll give her a real English Twelfth Night, like we used to have when Catherine and Mary were alive. I believe I’ll write a masque for it myself.”

“Well, by all accounts the poor girl should appreciate a bit of gaiety after Cleves! And if she’s too strait-laced to enjoy it at least it’ll do you good. You’re looking years younger already, Harry.”

“Wish I’d kept my figure!” grunted Henry, watching him enviously as he rose lithely from the royal chair.

Suffolk laughed good-naturedly and suggested a gentle game of tennis, but Henry’s reddening neck warned him that he had said the wrong thing. “There usen’t to be anything gentle about it, used there?” he hastened to add. “Remember when you made poor old Wolsey wager Hampton Court against a cardinal’s hat on your winning, and how we were so evenly matched that we had to go on playing by torchlight?”

With a deep rumble of laughter Henry took up the tale. “And he felt it would be lèse majesté to get up and go and the poor devil couldn’t kneel at Mass next morning for rheumatics?” Henry loved to hark back to those far-off, colorful days. “You know, Charles, I miss Wolsey. Compared with this bull-necked Chancellor we’ve got now—”

“Still, you must admit he knows his job. Look how he’s managed to—to straighten things out on the Continent—” Even Suffolk dared not say “after you had made a mess of them.”

“Well, I’ve repaid him, haven’t I?” snapped Henry. “From being Wolsey’s secretary to a chancellorship, and now an earldom if he pulls off my marriage!”

A week ago, yesterday even—he would have spoken of it as “this cursed Lutheran alliance.” But now he was under the spell of Holbein’s genius, obsessed with the idea of rejuvenating himself for a foreign bride. Already, pulling and puffing, he was half out of his doublet and shouting for Tom Culpepper to bring his tennis shoes.

“It’s months since you played,” warned Suffolk, with an anxious eye on the thickening veins at his brother-in-law’s temples.

But Henry laughed gallantly, drawing in his stomach and squaring powerful shoulders. “A few years ago you were the only man in the country who could give me a decent game,” he boasted.

“We must begin playing before breakfast again.”

“I was going down to Westhorpe,” Suffolk reminded him. “I promised Catalina. She’s pregnant again, you know.”

“Bring her up to Suffolk House, then,” said Henry. “It’ll be far better for her than being buried in the country. She’ll have all the best attention. My own doctors. And my daughters for company. She shan’t want for anything, bless her!”

Suffolk knew that he meant it—that he would be generosity itself to this sweet, half Spanish child-wife of his. But he wanted to get away from court for a while, back to that atmosphere of homeliness of which Henry had spoken so enviously. Somehow he didn’t want to listen to all the pother and gossip of Henry trying out a new wife, to have to watch all over again the waxing and waning of a tempestuous royal love affair. Henry was telling young Culpepper, in a voice charged with emotion, to have this elder Cleves woman’s miniature placed on the tallboy beside his bed.

And Henry had said, “I can’t possibly spare you now, Charles.” So there was nothing for it but to stay.

They went out onto the terrace together, followed by a brace of pages with their gear. Henry linked an arm in Suffolk’s as they turned briskly in the direction of the tennis court. He was effervescing with plans.

“We’ll have my new queen brought here, Charles.”

“Not Hampton Court? You always say it’s your favorite palace.”

“For the honeymoon, yes. It’s more intimate and rural. But consider the possibilities of Blackheath for a state entry!” Henry stopped to wave an arm towards the park gates. “The bride’s procession arriving over there—heralds and city guilds and so forth forming an avenue all down Shooter’s Hill—and me here in scarlet—no, gold damasked purple, I think…”

Suffolk considered it and allowed his friend the palm for showmanship. “I suppose you’ll send Cranmer to meet her at the coast?”

“And some of the women, of course,” agreed Henry, passing into the tennis court. “A pity Catalina won’t be able to go. Her beautiful grave manners would give old Olsiliger such a good impression of England.”

“Except that they’re half-Spanish manners,” laughed Charles, well pleased with the compliment.

“Are they? Very probably you’re right because my daughter Mary has them too. As it is, I shall have to send Norfolk’s old termagant of a second wife, and Heaven knows, the way she hates Lutherans, she’s sure to make everything as difficult as possible for—for her.”

Suffolk couldn’t help noticing that for all his exuberance Henry still jibbed at the use of Anne’s too familiar name. “And listen, Charles,” he was burbling on all the time Culpepper was scattering the eager pages as ball-boys, “when they’ve got as far as, say, Rochester, we’ll get into some sober worsted clothes and ride down there looking like a party of merchants and take a look at her.”

Suffolk glanced up across the bent head of the page who was fastening his shoe. “What on earth for, when you’ll be receiving her here? In scarlet—or purple, was it?”

But Henry was terribly in earnest. “To foster love,” he said.

“Women love that sort of romantic gesture.”

You love dressing up, you mean! thought Suffolk. Aloud he said, “My dear Harry, won’t you ever grow up?”

Henry was too elated to take offense. “Delicious to hold a racket again!” he murmured, selecting one from an armful Culpepper offered and swinging it to feel the balance. He limbered himself lightly on the balls of his toes and when Suffolk served a “knock-up” ball he drove it well and truly back to the base line.

“You don’t seem to have lost your eye, Sir!” exclaimed one of the courtiers who had gathered to watch, and they all joined in the adulation although they must have known it wouldn’t be long before he lost his breath. Henry forgot that he was forty-eight and fat. Through a pleasant haze of applause and exhilaration he saw himself in a few weeks’ time—fit and rejuvenated—riding down through the crisp Kentish lanes to meet his bride. He would get his tailor to devise some new clothes—becoming and slenderizing— in which to play the gallant in a new drama of sex. He would enjoy strutting before another Anne. After all, he was rather glad she was unsophisticated. How much more fun it would be planning lavish entertainments to take her breath away than giving them for some bored French or Milanese beauty who had been everywhere and seen everything! He would take her about and show her how lovely and prosperous was his kingdom. She would think him the devil of a fine fellow and he would teach her—everything. It pleased him to picture her as a timid little woman. At any rate, she would be a foreigner—dependent upon him for everything. She would be like a frightened bird in his hand, and he would be very kind.

6

DOWN THROUGH ANTWERP AND Bruges came Anne and, as Henry had predicted, she was on English soil before Christ mas. But the sea still ran between them. She and her retinue had reached Calais. As she rode through the city gates she saw for the first time the proud lions and pre sumptuous lilies on his standard.

So like the English, she thought, losing nearly all their French possessions and behaving as if they hadn’t even noticed it!

But in this important one they had kept English voices sounded all about her as Henry’s subjects thronged the streets, wanting to see what their new queen looked like, and liking what they saw. And Anne, on her side, gazed at their prosperous half-timbered houses and thought how squat and comfortable they looked after tall, angular Flemish gables. She loved the red and blue uniforms of the governor’s guard and the deafening salvoes of the harbor guns.

There was a cosmopolitan flavor about the place—an aliveness— something she couldn’t put a name to.

“This is quite different from the other towns we came through,” she remarked to Olsiliger, who was riding at her elbow.

“It is a port, Madam,” he explained briefly. He had no wish to admit that these self-satisfied English had the knack of infusing all their possessions with their own virility. And as Anne had never before visited a port, the explanation sufficed.

She was quick to appreciate the more personal quality of Calais’ welcome. In the other towns there had been polite speeches and flower throwing and women watching from their windows. But here Henry’s sailors came pouring up from the quay to cheer her, making her arrival both a public holiday and a homecoming. And Henry’s men-at-arms came out to meet her, dislodging her own astonished gentlemen with good-natured roughness, and riding side by side with them through the narrow streets to bring her to her lodging.