Anne Boleyn: A Novel (18 page)

On the surface the measures satisfied the clamor for reform which was a genuine expression of the people’s wish; but the objective was a lay and spiritual dictatorship, the King’s was the ultimate tribunal, and no appeal was allowed from his judgment.

Anne was only the pebble which began the landslide. But she was fierce and feminine enough to try to solve her problem by killing Catherine if she got the chance; her servants at York Place had reported violent threats, as they reported her quarrels with the King and the fluctuations in their relationship. One act of folly on her part could destroy the chance of Thomas Cromwell’s becoming the first man in England, after the King. Whatever happened, he repeated, she must go to France with Henry. He bowed to the King, and backed out of the room.

The summer of 1532 was very hot; a molten sun burned down over the English countryside, drying the crops and drinking up the streams, turning the rough roads into a desert of dust and dried potholes, and the fever broke out in London, born in the stinking refuse piled high in the gutters of the narrow streets, lurking in the dirty rushes and impure water. The King and his household prepared to leave for Hampton Court, and the long train of wagons containing beds and linen and plate and clothes started on its way out of London to prepare the red brick palace for the King’s reception.

Henry traveled by barge, with Anne and a company of ladies and gentlemen, and it was a gay journey, enlivened by music from the musicians who traveled in a boat close behind. The procession was watched by curious crowds lining the riverbanks, eager for a sight of the hated Boleyn whore who had cast a love spell over the King. The people were silent; their caps came off for Henry, but their mouths were closed and their hands still. She was dark in coloring, like a foreigner, and they hated the way she stared up at them and then leaned toward the King and laughed. “God Save Queen Catherine,” one or two muttered, and the goodwives of London leaned forward, cursing, to stare after that slim figure in the brilliant dress, and spat into the water.

Their Queen was shut up in some manor house in the country, and the Princess Mary had been sent from court. There were rumors of a war with Spain which would ruin their trade with the Netherlands and bring them all to starvation, and the new laws passed by the King and his Parliament had taken the right of sanctuary from the Church so that no one had a refuge from the punishments of their Lord or the King’s justices. It was all being done so that witch could become Queen of England.

The people turned away as the line of barges drifted out of sight down the Thames, and a ragged harlot ran down the dirty cobbled path, her skirts lifted above her knees, tossing her head and mimicking the court lady’s mincing air. She drew a shout of approval from the spectators, by giving a familiar high pitched laugh.

“The Bullen Whore!” yelled an apprentice, and immediately the cry was taken up. Someone fell on one knee before the strumpet, and then caught at her skirts. The woman kicked at him, laughing, and pushed the bedraggled hair off her face.

She saw a potential customer by the expression in his eyes. The fever had improved trade; with death so close, men drank and wenched and parted more freely with their money.

“If I’m Nan Bullen I don’t lie for nothing,” she taunted. “Come on, then, King Harry, let’s see your coin!”

The royal barge swung into the broader path of the Thames and the King leaned forward, one hand on Anne’s knee, to watch the lovely red buildings of Wolsey’s Palace come into sight, warmly glowing in the hot sun. The sight always gave him pleasure; the proportions of the house were beautiful, and the setting perfect. The country was very green, in spite of the heat; two thousand acres of park had been enclosed and stocked with game to provide the King with hunting, and a fine tilt yard laid out at the back with five towers for the spectators to watch the jousting. The gardens at Hampton were Henry’s pride. As the barge neared the landing stage, he could see them spread out; neat squares of ordered beds, crisscrossed with little flagged paths among the flowers and colorful rockeries; a white statue set in the niche of low green hedges; a delicate fountain spray cooling the paved garden, which was his favorite because it was sunken and harried by a little wrought-iron gate. He used to wander there in the long summer evenings, hand in hand with Anne, and vanished into the blossom-covered arbor with the stone love seat, overlooking the lovely stretch of the river.

Wolsey had been alive then, and Catherine still at court; the divorce was dragging on, but he could forget it and leave the anxiety to the Cardinal. In those days he had never dreamed of breaking with the Pope.

There were times when he hesitated still, when something in him paused at the enormity of the thing he and Cromwell were prepared to do; times when the thought of Catherine living in miserable exile twisted his conscience and had to be justified by the excuse that she deserved it. He was the King; his will was the expression of Divine Authority in the country God had given him to rule. His conscience was the voice of God, and it told him he was right to put his wife away; right to break the power of his bishops and subjugate his Church; right to withstand the doctrine which gave a Pope authority to excommunicate a Christian King, to refuse him the sacraments and absolve his subjects from their oath of allegiance.

A hundred years ago no monarch survived under that sentence, but the power to enforce it was gone; Henry was not afraid of revolt and assassination. He held his people and his nobles in a grip of iron, because they had lost their awe of the Church and the fear of the King’s punishment was greater than the fear of hell. Whatever Clement did, he was not afraid, and in those moments of strange conflict, he braved the abyss of spiritual damnation and looked over the edge and said once and for all that he didn’t believe the Pope had the power to topple him into it. He feared nothing else; and he gathered his will and his belief in his kingship, and refused to fear that. He thought of the place he and his small kingdom held in Europe, and his heart lifted with pride.

Beside the mighty Emperor and the powerful King of France, England had shrunk to insignificance since the days of the great Henry V; Wolsey had tried to compete with them; Wolsey had gone to war and meddled in alliances like a warrior King instead of a priest, but his ambitions had never come to fruition till the battle with the Pope reached its climax.

He, Henry, had split Christendom. He was forcing Francis to act in his interests because Francis needed him as an ally against a possible attack by the Emperor. And the Emperor held back from war because he depended on English trade with his Netherlands, and because he knew Francis would stab him in the back at the first opportunity. The Princes in Germany were looking to England to help them in their dual struggle for religious and national independence of the Emperor, and the Emperor hesitated for fear that the King of England might induce them to open revolt.

He stood in the middle, and he could do as he liked because now he knew that no one on either side would dare to move, even Clement. Clement had opened the case against him at Rome, and sent a personal message asking him to take Catherine back and send Anne away, but he still hoped for a solution, and even now showed himself ready to forgive and forget, if the King would do what he was told. And stop despoiling the Church in England...

There was nothing they could do, because the temporal Princes were guided by temporalities, and Clement knew that if he gave the sentence no one would agree to execute it for him. Clement was powerless, if one discounted the doctrine of his spiritual power, and Henry had discounted that; he had refused and rejected it and his mind spat it out violently, all the more violently because he had once accepted it so fervently that he had sent troops to the aid of another Pope, when he pronounced anathema against a rebel King of France.

The barge bumped against the parapet, and a few drops of water splashed up from the wall and sprinkled Anne’s skirts. She brushed them aside with an exclamation; it was velvet, she said crossly to Henry’s inquiry, and velvet spotted. He scowled and suddenly his pleasure was spoiled; he felt intensely irritated, and a deep flush of anger spread over his neck when he saw that Will Brereton, sitting behind them, had heard. Damn her bad temper, he thought furiously, damn her dress—Christ’s blood, she had over a hundred...damn her for answering him like that before others. She was still smoothing the material, unaware that she had done anything to annoy him, and he saw the thin line of her cheek turned away from him. She had changed; changed since the days he sat fondling her in the gardens at Hampton, reading aloud the love poems he’d written to her. Changed from a lively companion and affectionate lover into a bitter-tempered shrew who remembered her place less and less as he exalted her. Catherine would have shaken her skirts and said nothing, but Catherine was gone. Catherine had resisted him and tried to put him in the wrong, and for that he could never forgive her, but in all her life she had never humiliated him in public. He had done everything for Anne; respected her honor, loaded her family with wealth and office, and striven for six years to make her his wife.

When the barge was moored and his chief waterman stood on the landing stage, cap in hand, waiting for the King to disembark, Henry rose abruptly and stepped ashore without speaking a word to her. He called Brereton and Francis Weston to accompany him and left Anne to enter the palace with the rest of the company.

“I’ve been searching half Hampton for you!” Lord Wiltshire exclaimed. He had found his daughter standing in the Base Court, with Margaret Wyatt, watching the men at work on the great hall. The King was having it enlarged, and making extensive additions to the palace; in Wolsey’s day it accommodated five hundred persons, but the King and his court were cramped for space. Little work was done in that heat; the builders and craftsmen had been ordered to finish their task for the day and then wait till the King left before they resumed their work.

Anne turned to her father and shook her head.

“I can hardly hear with the hammering. What is it?”

“I want to talk to you,” Wiltshire shouted. “Privately, and in peace.”

Tom Wyatt’s sister heard him and curtsied and walked away.

“Come to my rooms,” Anne suggested as they moved to the center of the court, but he gestured urgently.

“No, not in the house. We might be overheard.” She looked up at him quickly and saw his narrow face pinched with anxiety.

“Come to the pavilion. We’ll be safe there.” The pavilion was a small open building, erected on top of an artificial mound, covered with flowering shrubs and rockeries; it was an acknowledged rendezvous, which the King and she had often used when it was too cold to sit by the river.

It was shady and cool inside; a withered nosegay lay on the ground under the stone seat. There Anne faced her father.

“You don’t wear that look for nothing. What’s happened?”

“A fine thing you did when you defied me and tried to marry Northumberland,” he snarled. “You’re likely to lose the King through it!” She almost caught at his doublet and shook him. “What are you babbling about...Northumberland, what about Northumberland?”

“He promised to marry you, didn’t he?” Wiltshire sneered bitterly. “Well, he told his wife so one day, and now the Queen’s friends have reminded her. She’s going to demand an annulment, alleging a pre-contract with you!”

She felt as if he’d struck her. A pre-contract, that was as binding as the marriage vow. If word of this reached the King...

They had contracted to marry, and by that token, Northumberland’s marriage was null and void, but what good would it do her now? It was years and years ago, she thought hysterically; there was nothing between her and Henry Percy now, but this old indiscretion had to be brought up to menace her marriage to the King...

“It’s a lie!” she spat out.

“It’s not, and you know it,” Wiltshire retorted. “Do you know what it is to try to marry the King when you’ve been the contracted wife of another man? Treason, Madame, high treason, and I don’t have to tell you the punishment for that.”

Her mind was darting like a snared animal, trying to see a way out; suddenly she found one.

“Treason for Northumberland too, not to have told the King when marriage was first mentioned between us! If I lose my head, Northumberland loses his!”

“That muddled loon? He’s idiot enough to put his own head on the block in order to get rid of Mary Talbot. Don’t reckon on him.”

“I do,” she said doggedly. “He loved me once; he wouldn’t harm me.”

Wiltshire laughed bitterly. “Harm you? God’s death, your vanity’ll kill you yet. Harm you? He hates the sight of you! He’s told everyone he talks to that you’re a merciless whore who trapped him and then the King, and once he saw you as you were, he’d as soon have given the Cardinal a ship for France as punish him for stopping the marriage between you! If he loved you once, he hates you now, be sure of that!”

“Not enough to die for an old promise,” she retorted.

In the midst of her fear she was hurt in a way that she had forgotten she could feel. Hurt and fool enough to be near tears, because Northumberland hated her too...Let him hate her!

Let them all hate her, and work for Catherine of Aragon. They would lose and she would win. She calmed down then, and stopped trembling.

“When a man lifts his arms to strike you, deliver your blow first,” she said. “I’ll anticipate my Lady Northumberland by going to the King and denying the story before she has time to tell it! And he’ll believe me.”

“You’re very sure of that,” Wiltshire remarked. But in spite of himself he was impressed.

It was a good motto, strike first. He began to breathe more easily; he had not forgotten that the father of such a scheming traitress would hardly remain on good terms with the King.

“Do you think you’ll be able to convince him?” he asked again.

“Sure of it.”

She sat down on the seat, both hands braced on the edge.