The Boleyn Bride (20 page)

10

I
was surprised the earth didn’t shift beneath all our feet then and there.
Nothing
would
ever
be the same again. Did Anne know or even suspect that her words would change the world?

Thomas thought she was just being mule stubborn, contrary, frivolous, and flighty, to quote a few of the words he used when railing and raging against Anne for refusing to succumb and become the King’s mistress, and to get all she could now rather than end up with nothing in the end like her sister.

But I think it was more than mere stubbornness or mule-headed contrariness. And I think I deserve some share of the blame for what happened. I was not a good mother; I always favored one daughter above the other, banishing Anne to live in Mary’s shadow, dreaming great, big wonderful dreams for my golden girl and, on the rare occasions when I even mentioned her future, sighing about the bleak and doleful existence that awaited Anne in the nunnery. I never paid much attention to Anne until she returned from France and suddenly became interesting. But by then it was too late, the damage was done, and she didn’t need a mother to give her advice or to confide in—she had George and didn’t want, or need, me. The gulf between us was just too great; too much damage had been done, and pain inflicted, for us to ever be a true mother and daughter to each other, much less friends. To me, Anne would always be aloof, cordial yet distant, like a wary cat that would never come close enough for me to pet.

In the days and years to come, when the people cursed and reviled Anne, calling her such names as “the she-devil” and “witch,” Remi, who like me, remained loyal in his heart to Queen Catherine, said Anne was more to be pitied than despised.

“I do not see a she-devil when I look at her,” he said. “I see instead a sad, frightened, and angry little girl, one who grew up believing that she was ugly, inferior to the so-called golden girls of our world, and is now determined to prove her worth to everyone who ever doubted or discounted her. And how better to do that than by doing what they dare not, by saying no when they would be so quick to say yes, by disdaining what they deem an honor, and snaring the ultimate prize—the Crown—exchanging inferiority for superiority, so that all who have ever been mean to her or made her feel shunned and unworthy must bow to her.”

I think in those days of hysteria, bias, hatred, and heated discord, Remi was one of the few who remained calm and saw everything clearly from all sides and angles.

So I lay in my lover’s arms and let the world bicker and go mad and fall to pieces all around us. Remi said that politics and religion caused enough discord in the world, and we did not need it to intrude and try to leave its mark upon us and our time together. If I wished to argue, there were people aplenty I could do that with at court, and if he was of such a mind, all he had to do was step out into the street or walk into the nearest tavern. Sometimes all it took to get one’s nose bloodied was to mention the name of Anne Boleyn. So we let it all fall away from us with our clothes and just enjoyed each other in every way a man and a woman could.

I saw the court, and people I had known my whole life—family, lovers, acquaintances, and friends—divide into factions, like the biblical separation of the sheep from the goats. They were either for the Boleyns or against them, giving their support either to the daughter I had given bloody birth to or the kind and devout woman I had faithfully served for so many years.

Everyone was taking sides, and everyone assumed because I was a Boleyn by marriage and Anne was my daughter that I was on her side. I was forced to withdraw from Queen Catherine’s service. My husband said it was not seemly for me to continue to serve my daughter’s rival. Yet I did not transfer my allegiance to my daughter, though Thomas did demand I be on hand whenever she needed me to fill the role of chaperone.

Though I did nothing to outwardly oppose Anne’s grand scheme, I could not embrace and support her either. I kept silent and did not embarrass either of us by trying, at this late date, to play “the good mother” and give my daughter the benefit of a worldly mother’s advice; Anne would have only laughed if I had tried, just as I had once laughed at her girlish dreams. The truth was, by the time my children grew up and became interesting to me, it was too late for me to play any real role in their lives; my attempts at mothering or befriending them were often awkward at best and disappointing, for all of us, at worst. They had grown accustomed to me not being there for them; they had learned not to need or depend on me, and to live without me, and were not inclined to fling the door wide in welcome now when I had been the one who had kept it closed all during their childhoods.

I lived in a sort of twilight world, of the court, yet not of the court, there, but not there. I sat and ate in the Great Hall and dutifully attended hunting parties, picnics, banquets, balls, and masques, knelt and prayed in the royal chapel, partnered all who asked me to dance, and obediently slept beside my husband at night. As I had always done, I played the role that was required of me to the utmost perfection. When Anne had need of me, I was there to act as chaperone; the rest of the time, as far as my husband and youngest daughter were concerned, I could go hang myself for aught that they cared, as long as I did not create a scandal. I’m not complaining, make no mistake about that—that was
exactly
the way I liked it. And I was used to it—I had never really known any other life; neither the Howards nor the Boleyns, with the exception of Anne and George, were ever a close-knit family. When they had no need of me, my time was my own, and I liked being free to spend it with Remi.

I was, in truth, still reeling at the enormity of what my daughter had done. I was astounded and appalled. I
never
believed she would succeed, that a day would come when my ugly dark duckling daughter turned black swan would be crowned and anointed England’s Queen. I was certain it was but a tempest that would soon blow past and all would, in time, return to normal, and Queen Catherine would be on her throne beside her husband again, and he would no doubt continue to dally with any pretty girl who caught his fancy. But that was the way of the world. King Henry was a man with a temper, not renowned for his patience, and he would of a surety soon tire of the way Anne treated him, the veiled or openly barbed insults, sharp retorts, bored indifference alternating with temper tantrums, and her refusal to grant him any intimacy greater than the occasional kiss. The court was filled to the rafters with obliging women, all of them eager to give him anything he pleased. They would readily spread their legs wide or open their lips to that monumental member, and devote themselves wholeheartedly to fulfilling the King’s Pleasure.
I live only to please you!
they would scream in the throes of ecstasy.

Anne was a woman of ice, cold and frigid, in comparison. Some who, like me, saw this obvious truth opined that it was only by witchcraft that she could hold a man like King Henry. Mayhap there was some truth in such speculations? Who can say? I am not a superstitious woman, like my mother-in-law, and yet . . . kings did not risk their kingdoms, throw their wife of some twenty years away, or boot the Pope out of England because he refused to grant a divorce, and assume command of the Church like snatching the wheel of a ship from the hands of a drunken, insane, or mutinous captain, all for the sake of a black-haired Boleyn girl. Things like that just didn’t happen! In heathenish lands like Turkey perhaps, where sultans kept harems filled with beautiful and conniving women who would not hesitate to resort to poison or murder a rival in order to reign supreme in their sovereign’s favor, but
not
in England. We were a staid and proper people, creatures of habit, who cherished our traditions and turned our backs and turned up our noses at change like a leper or a parvenu arriving at our court with trumped-up pretensions to nobility, like when the medieval King Edward II bestowed upon his catamite lover, the Gascon son of a witch boy-whore Piers Gaveston, the royal title of Duke of Cornwall. The King’s passion for Anne was a momentary madness, an obsession that would run its course and, in its own sweet time, pass, it just
had
to; it could be
nothing
else!

 

What was at first known as “the King’s Secret Matter” did not remain a secret for long. When it became common knowledge at court, Anne, accompanied by George and their friends, all clad in fiery shades of red, orange, and yellow, walked brazenly into the Great Hall that night in a black gown embroidered with flames and boldly declared a verse of scripture: “Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth!”

Thus it became official—not just speculation and wild rumor—the King meant to put aside Queen Catherine and marry Anne Boleyn.

 

When that dreaded plague known as “the Sweat” came in the sweltering summer of 1528, many saw it as God’s judgment crashing down upon us like a great fist.

It was a strange affliction that killed the young and vital but spared the aged and infirm as well as those newly born. It began with a trifling headache, the sort of thing one might shrug off or chew a little willow bark to remedy, then think no more of, then all of a sudden the sweat began, pouring hot and prickly, accompanied by a fast burning fever, shivering fits, and pain in all the limbs. A doctor was useless. As the saying went, “Merry at dinner, dead by supper.” Survival was accounted a matter of luck, for there was no certain remedy; all potions and pills were apparently in vain. You lived or you died; it was God’s will or the luck of the draw.

When first Anne, followed by George, then my husband and son-in-law, all in short order succumbed to “the Sweat,” those still enjoying the bloom of health nodded knowingly and were quick to declare that this affliction was certain proof that God’s wrath had descended upon the Boleyns.

Cardinal Wolsey himself went on bended knees like a penitent before the King in the tower where he had secluded himself at Hunsdon House, a dozen miles from London, with his physician and but a single servant, the loyal Henry Norris, surrounded by vinegar-slicked walls and roaring fires in the belief that heat would keep the disease at bay, and begged him to renounce Anne and abandon all thought of divorcing Queen Catherine. That this plague had fallen upon the land and stricken Anne and her kinsmen down, he said, was certain proof of God’s displeasure, and he feared the King would be the next to fall.

But Henry rose up from his chair, glared down at the pool of rotund silver-haired redness at his feet, and thundered, “No other than God shall take her from me!” and even dared to kick the Cardinal and order him from his sight. Henry Norris, Henry’s most trusted and intimate body servant, and a good friend of Anne and George, was there and saw it with his own eyes.

The King immediately dispatched one of his own physicians, a Dr. William Butts, to Hever Castle, and gave his own favorite great sapphire, nigh big as a man’s fist, to be pulverized into an exotic potion to be mixed with humble beer, treacle, various herbs, crushed pearls, and Pills of Rhazis, a popular concoction created by an Arab physician, to dose Anne and her beloved George with, and, of course, his “much esteemed and valued servant, Thomas Boleyn.”

While my husband’s life and those of two of my children hung in the balance, I sought solace with my beloved in my red rose bower, pillowing my head upon his chest and letting my fingers toy with the coils of black hair that grew there and the little red coral horn and tiny crucifix resting in the hollow of his throat. Sometimes we ate cherries and, wistfully, I reminisced about those happy cherry fair days I had spent with Mary, both of us whirling in red gowns, and the days when, barefoot and green-gowned like Queen Guinevere, we had gone a-Maying and gathered flowers and danced around the beribboned Maypole with handsome gallants. Days that could never come again.

I had resigned myself to the sad and bitter truth that my disgraced eldest daughter and I could never be friends. In those happy, long-ago days of fun and frolic, I realized now, I had used my golden girl as just another pretty ornament, rather like those ladies who carried little dogs with jeweled collars, but now that she was old enough to speak her mind and assert her personality, I saw just how different we really were.

I had persuaded Remi to forsake London in this time of pestilence and come with me to Hever. Thomas was too ill to know he was hosting my lover beneath his roof, and I was always discreet, and the servants, who liked me far better than they did my husband, were well accustomed to such dalliances and knew how to keep their mouths shut. Mayhap it seems callous and shows a want of feeling, my dallying with Remi while the lives of my husband and children hung in the balance. But what else could I do? They had the attention of one of England’s best physicians, sent by the King himself, though everyone knew all remedies were useless and only time, luck, and God cured “the Sweat.” We could only wait, hope, and pray, which of course I did, albeit with Remi. Though in the secret heart of me I knew what all England said was true—if Anne succumbed, it would make a quick end to this scandalous “Great Matter”—I did not desire my daughter’s death. I prayed fervently that she and George would be spared, and, of course, I prayed for my husband and Will Carey. One might say I resigned myself to “what will be, will be,” and left it all in God’s hands.

Soon Dr. Butts was writing to King Henry that Anne and her kinsmen—with the exception of poor Will Carey, who had sadly perished—were “past all danger” and well on the way to making “a perfect recovery.” Soon the jubilant and grateful King was sending gifts galore to the invalids and showering Dr. Butts with accolades and golden coins. He even deeded him a manor, but stipulated most sternly that the doctor was not to stray too far from London as the Crown would ever have need of his skill in any medical crisis.