Anne Boleyn: A Novel (14 page)

“Fetch me Hal Norreys,” Henry roared.

For a second no one moved; his face was red and contorted with temper, and his huge body seemed bigger than ever as it stood in the doorway, both hands braced against the lintels as if he might tear the frame out of the wall. Then the Cardinal’s secretary made a move; he bowed to the King, and backed out of the anteroom like an agile black beetle. Henry heard his voice calling down the long gallery, the plebeian accent emphasized by the distance, “Sir Henry Norreys to the King’s Grace!”

A moment later Norreys came hurrying into the anteroom and followed the King into his private chamber.

That evening Anne waited in her own room dressed in a brilliant scarlet costume, cut low across the bosom, with trailing, fur-lined sleeves. It accentuated her coloring, and the King loved it. She swore while she dressed.

Catherine had gone to him and he’d received her—Anne’s hand was shaking as she tried to fasten a pearl earring, and she suddenly flung the jewel across the room. She leaned against the oak chest, head down, and breathed hard to steady herself. Then she looked up, and studied herself in the steel mirror. Her hair was smooth and shining, drawn back in a middle parting from her oval face; she’d traced the outline of her brows with a stick dipped in black cosmetic, a trick she had learned from the French beauties, and she bit her lips to redden them. She looked beautiful, but decided that the graceful line of her throat was spoiled by the necklace of pearls and gold filigree. She took it off, thinking of Catherine’s pearls, part of her magnificent dowry of jewels, and wondered for the hundredth time what she had said to Henry and how he had received her.

The smooth lovely face became pinched with fear. She was afraid of that dowdy old woman; afraid that if she reached the King she might weaken him, that the hold of years of happy marriage was basically stronger than his love for Anne. He had no right to listen to Catherine! Campeggio was in London, the trial for the divorce was soon to open at Black Friars Hall. That very morning he had come to her while she dressed to go hunting with him, and taken liberties and mumbled that he loved her better than life...

She glanced down at the little gold watch on her girdle. They always dined together, so that whatever Catherine had achieved she would be able to undo. Turning to the mirror again, she rubbed a little jasmine-scented oil into her temples. Then she went to the fireplace and settled down in the Spanish leather chair to wait. Her lap dog dozed in front of the blazing logs, and Anne reached down to set it on her knee. It was a fat, silky spaniel, given to her by Henry.

The time went by and Anne grew rigid with nerves as she saw the hour hand on her watch reach the time appointed by the King, and travel halfway beyond it, and still no one came to call her. At last she pushed the spaniel down and went out into the gallery where there was no one but a page, squatting on the floor by the entrance to Henry’s anteroom. She crossed to him so silently that the boy jumped when he found her standing over him.

“Get to your feet, boy!” Her voice was tremulous. The boy sprang upright, pulling off his cap.

“Where’s the King? Has he gone to dine in the great hall?”

“His Grace is in his rooms, Mistress,” he answered, nodding at the doorway behind him.

“Who’s with him?” she demanded.

“Sir Henry Norreys.”

“And who else?”

“No one, Mistress, only Sir Henry. The stewards took food and wine in to them a while ago, and they said His Grace was throwing dice.”

Throwing dice. She stepped back from the boy, her head turned toward the room leading off the little anteroom. Behind the closed door she could hear someone laughing. Henry’s laugh. He was laughing and gambling with Norreys and had forgotten all about her, or he didn’t want to see her. Catherine had said something; he was changed and hadn’t sent for her...

She put out her hand for support, feeling suddenly faint.

“Nan? Nan, what are you doing here? I was coming to find you.”

She opened her eyes and saw a flushed and smiling Norreys standing in the anteroom doorway. The dizziness receded.

“Who wants me?” she asked casually.

Norreys grinned. “Why, the King, who else?”

She smiled back at him, mocking and bitterly relieved.

“He wants you to come and play with us,” Norreys added. “He’s drunk half a gallon of wine and my head’s reeling...He’s in a high humor and calling for you.”

“If your head’s reeling, mine’s aching!” she retorted. “Make my apologies to His Grace and say I’ve gone to bed!”

She went to her room and posted her serving-woman at the door the next morning to keep the King out, saying she was ill. She punished him for that two hours’ wait by refusing to see him for twenty-four hours.

The legatine court opened the case of the king’s marriage on June eighteenth and within a matter of days it was obvious that Cardinal Campeggio’s only function was to obstruct. The case was conducted in public at the Hall of the Black Friars and both Henry and Catherine appeared to plead. Catherine defended herself with firmness and dignity, maintaining the validity of her marriage so persuasively that Wolsey thanked God when she refused to attend further or admit his right to try the case. The two Cardinals argued endlessly about the Second Bull of Dispensation, the original of which remained safely in Spain, but all Wolsey’s desperate attempts to force a decision failed.

With increasing bitterness and frustration, Anne watched the farce played out at Black Friars and, turning to the disappointed King, furiously accused the Cardinal of being in league with the Pope and secretly working to prevent their marriage.

On the twenty-ninth the Pope and the Emperor signed a treaty of alliance; France was defeated and the Imperialists were everywhere victorious! In July it was announced in Rome that the divorce commission had been revoked. The case of the English King’s marriage, with the inevitable sentence, had been referred to Rome.

Wolsey was at York Place when he heard the news. For some time he sat with his head lowered, staring at the ground as if he had not heard. Clement had made his choice once and for all. The Church had allied itself with the Emperor. In spite of Wolsey’s warnings Clement had sacrificed the Church in England. He had also sacrificed Wolsey.

The anteroom to the king’s apartments at Greenwich was very quiet; the ladies and gentlemen of the court who sat or stood about were not talking and laughing as usual. Some had excused themselves and gone away. One had certainly gone to find Anne, and that was her friend Margaret Wyatt, who waited long enough to hear the angry threats of the Duke of Suffolk and then edged to the doorway and ran down the gallery. The door of the King’s room was closed; his voice and Suffolk’s could be heard but their words were indistinguishable. The Duke of Norfolk was leaning against the paneled walls, listening as openly as he dared, but he could hear nothing beyond angry shouting.

Suffolk should have waited, he thought; Suffolk’s vile temper had got the better of him after the state banquet where Anne took the Queen of England’s place and sat above Suffolk’s wife and the Duchess of Norfolk, Wolsey had been dismissed in disgrace to York after the publication of Clement’s decree revoking the divorce commission; the mighty Cardinal had fallen overnight, reduced to buying his life by bribes to Norfolk and Anne’s relatives, and by abandoning everything he possessed to the King.

Anne had fulfilled her promise and destroyed him, but out of the wreck of his fortunes, she had received his magnificent palace of York House, with its priceless gold plate, pictures and tapestries; her father had been made Earl of Wiltshire and Ormonde and her pup of a brother Ambassador to France. The Boleyns were climbing so rapidly into favor and office that the men who had no longer any cause to envy Wolsey, transferred their jealousy to them. Suffolk was the bitterest. He hated Anne and her family, and as soon as the Cardinal was stripped of his power and dismissed, he began intriguing to get rid of the woman who had ousted him.

There was no further need of her, he insisted. Wolsey was broken, and there were times when his yoke was more acceptable than the insolence and ambitions of Norfolk’s vixenish niece. Norfolk listened, because he agreed in principle, but he was too wily to commit himself. Suffolk had some scheme in his head, he knew, and he had just found out what it was when the Duke strode into the anteroom, and loudly announced his intention of going to the King and denouncing Anne as the former mistress of Thomas Wyatt. The room stilled with terror as he said it, his thick beard quivering under his hard angry mouth; he was a big bull of a man, almost as heavy as the King, with a violent abrupt manner and furious courage. He was handsome in a ruthless way, and Henry’s gentle sister Mary Tudor had loved him all her life, risking her brother’s wrath to marry him.

Norfolk leaned against the wall, one finger rubbing his sallow cheek. Suffolk and the King were shouting at each other, and that meant that the fool had acted too soon. Norfolk knew the King; when Henry listened and was quiet, he was most dangerous. He could imagine Suffolk accusing her, his face blazing with the memory of his grievances against her, while Henry roared back at him in Anne’s defense. He had tried to dissuade Suffolk in the anteroom, telling him the King was too besotted with her to listen to anything against her yet, telling him to wait for a moment when Henry was smarting after one of their frequent quarrels and might be swayed. But Suffolk only cursed him.

“She treats you and her aunt like the dirt she treads on,” he snarled. “But the slut shan’t insult my wife and seize everything for herself and her kin while I stand idle!”

Suffolk had failed, Norfolk knew even before the door crashed open and the Duke appeared, red-faced, with one hand on his sword hilt, and stopped in front of him.

“I’m banished,” he choked. “Banished for telling the truth. The whore’s bewitched him!”

Norfolk saw Anne standing in the archway from the gallery while Suffolk’s voice still rang round the anteroom. She was dressed in white, but her gown was no paler than her face; he realized that she had heard every word. He raised his voice: “I’ll not have my niece insulted, even by you.”

When Suffolk turned away and saw her, he hesitated, and the hatred between him and the woman in the doorway passed through the atmosphere like a flash of lightning. Suffolk was walking toward her, but she stood rigid, blocking the way. The next moment he had shouldered her aside so violently that she stumbled against the door post and nearly fell. There was a gasp from the courtiers, and some of them started toward her. The Duke moved with them, but more slowly. He was glad Suffolk had pushed her; for months he had been longing to do something of the sort himself.

“I hope he didn’t hurt you,” he remarked. “His Grace has sent him from court, and I suppose his eyes were dimmed with grief.”

She glared at him, holding one bruised arm against her side.

“Don’t concern yourself for me, Uncle. I trust you as well as I trust him!”

Then she disappeared into Henry’s room. Norfolk left the anteroom and wandered down the long gallery; on the way he met Lord Guildford, newly appointed comptroller of the household after Wolsey’s exile, and suggested a visit to the archery butts behind the palace. It was a fine spring day, and as they walked through the low-hedged gardens, Guildford asked him the results of the King’s attempt to gain a favorable opinion from the universities of Europe.

“In England, the results have been as we expected. No one dared to gainsay the King,” Norfolk answered. “The royal commissioners saw to that. But there was more difficulty in France; the University of Paris refused to give an opinion on the divorce till King Francis intervened, and his intercession cost us dearly! Angers and Poitiers pronounced against it, Orleans and Bourges were in favor. We’ve poured out bribes to the faculties in Upper Italy to secure favorable opinions there, but our agents haven’t been able to work in Spain or in Spanish-dominated Italy, so the universities there have pronounced against it. It’s been a costly business, proving nothing.”

“I hear the King is bitterly disappointed in the German universities,” Guildford remarked. Norfolk laughed derisively.

“By God, that’s the greatest joke of all. Master Luther and his disciples have declared the marriage to Catherine valid and binding beyond question! We’ve been dallying with them for months now, hoping to frighten the Pope by appearing to support them, and you know how much the King hates heresy, and we’ve gotten nothing out of it but a verdict worthy of Rome!”

They turned down a path into a little herb garden where the smell of mint and marjoram and violets was very strong. The gardens provided the palace kitchens with their seasoning, but they were prettily arranged with seats and statues among the ordered square beds. Guildford sniffed and then nudged his companions.

“There’s Rochford in that place in the yew hedge, cuddling with someone.”

It was Anne’s brother, the new Viscount Rochford. As his uncle had prophesied, the King’s favor couldn’t replace experience and talent, and George had been recalled from France and the Embassy given to a more able man.

“It’s Margaret Wyatt,” Norfolk remarked, “telling the tale of Suffolk’s doings, I’ve no doubt, and opening her petticoat at the same time. I can’t say I blame him, insolent cub though he is. That wife of his reminds me of a grass snake.”

“If the King hates heresy,” Guildford interrupted, his mind returning to the main subject, “then why does he tolerate Lady Anne reading a translation of the Bible, and surrounding himself with churchmen who lean to these ideas?”

“Because he has the same interest in the new teaching as she has,” Norfolk retorted. “He thinks to use it for his own ends and that’s why he meddled with the Lutherans in Germany. He sends their disciples in England to the stake fast enough! Madame Anne cares for the heretics because they’re likely to support her against the Pope since the Pope doesn’t intend to free Henry to marry her, and the new teaching is all for disregarding the Pope. Therefore my niece and her father and brother lean to the new teaching. That’s simple enough, my dear Guildford, and it hasn’t endeared her to our Lord Chancellor More, for example. There are many of us who want the abuses of the Church removed, but we’re not out to make it Protestant, to suit my niece or anyone else. Nor is the King, be certain of that. She curbs her views before him, because she knows his religion’s as orthodox as Clement’s!”