Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (46 page)

If only George could have been there to support her! Coming into the crowded hall, her first hope had been to find him. But either he must be sick or they had prevented him.

Summoning every shred of wit and personality she possessed, Anne stood alone and faced them all. Whatever her past sins of pride and cruelty, she fought courageously for her virtue and for the lives of the four men still accused with her, casting substantiated truth in the teeth of paid false witnesses, so that again and again her accusers were proved liars and her judges discomforted. Especially for Weston she strove, because she had misjudged him. For however freely he talked, however lively his imagination, he had refused to speak one word against her. “You say that he was frequently in my apartments, bandying bawdy compliments. Then I pray you call my cousin, Mistress Skelton, to witness, that she may tell you whom he came to see,” she invited.

When chamberers, tempted by her enemies’ gold, perjured their souls by giving time and place at Hampton, Greenwich or Westminster for the adulterous acts to which they testified, her quick mind dealt effectively with at least one of them, thus laying the rest open to suspicion. “How can it be said that I was guilty of betraying my lord the King with Norreys on the sixth day of October, in the year of Grace 1533, when at that very time, as Dr. Butts will tell you, I was yet in my lying-in bed after the birth of my daughter, the Princess Elizabeth?” she cried indignantly.

And when one of the Seymours passed round the court Mark Smeaton’s written confession of adultery, she challenged Cromwell’s confidential servant, Constantine, to deny that the signature was obtained by torture and under promise of pardon. Why, she demanded, was he not brought into court that she might question him face to face?

Finding her no easy game to trap, Suffolk stood up and solemnly accused her of conspiring with Norreys to kill the King. His absurd charge was concocted on the flimsy grounds that some groom had overheard her teasing Hal about putting off his marriage so that he might step into a dead man’s shoes, and Anne laughed in his face. “Good milords, and you city merchants from whose stock I come, I appeal to your common sense!” she cried. “Where should I, Nan Boleyn, have been with Henry Tudor dead? Gather your wandering wits, if you would bring some plausible charge against me! For was it not the cruel shock of milord Norfolk there pretending that the King was killed on May Day that deprived me and all of you of England’s heir?”

And, so, carrying the attack into the enemy’s camp, Anne prevented them from entangling her. She could feel that the people pressing against the barriers, who had come to gloat over her downfall, were already sympathizing with her, and that several of the lords were beginning to think all these trumped-up charges were a travesty of justice. Their hard-won, grudging admiration warmed her to life and loveliness, lending her power to sway them. If only one among them would speak for her now, declaring honestly what he thought, the rest might dare to defy Cromwell and the King by bringing in a verdict of “Not Guilty”! Imploringly, her gaze turned upon Harry Percy. If only he would rise up courageously, vindicating her, and restoring her faith in him! But he just sat there with his head resting upon his hand, looking desperately sick and ill at ease.

And presently, sooner than put his hand to any warrant of her guilt, he stumbled from the court.

And so, after all her strenuous defence, Anne’s moment of hope died. And Norfolk, becoming aware of the dangerously changing atmosphere, hurried on with his brutal business. “Call the accused, George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford,” he shouted to the heralds.

Anne turned in amazement to find her brother standing behind her. And suddenly, as he smiled at her, the grim building seemed full of radiance. “You are here—in the Tower!” she breathed forgetting everyone else.

“Foolish baggage,” he bantered. “Did you not know that I have been here all the time? Or remember my promise that whatever happened I would stay with you?”

And that for the moment seemed to suffice.

But Anne’s joy was short-lived. The buzz of excitement died down, and the crowd craned their necks in peculiar, expectant silence. Two tall halberdiers marched George to his place, and the charge was read.

A charge of incestuous adultery between George and Anne Boleyn, son and daughter of Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire.

This was the culminating horror. Norfolk’s trump card, played to tear the last shred of pity from the Queen and transfer it to the King. And, as he showed his hand, even hardened court officials gasped.

It was minutes before Anne could take in the purport of the appalling words, though as understanding gradually came to her, she realized that when George had come to warn her at Greenwich he must have had some inkling of what was being planned against them. Shocked to the soul, she sank back onto the chair provided for her, and sat staring down at her own shaking hands. She felt as if the two of them stood in some monstrous pillory of shame, with the libidinous curiosity of all men’s gaze burning them. As if slime had suddenly been smeared across the fairest page of life.

How, in God’s name, would he meet so foul a charge? Cautiously, Anne raised her eyes. George was standing in the centre of the hall, composed and debonair, with a long shaft of sunlight from one of the narrow Norman windows spilling light about him; gilding his fair, handsome face and tall, lithe figure, picking out the jewels on his best white brocaded doublet so that he looked the only lovely thing in a mire of drabness. In spite of the loathsome mire, Anne’s lips quivered into a smile. It was so like George to put on his finest clothes to meet a difficult occasion! To stand there nonchalantly pulling a sprig of pink may through a buttonhole of his modish velvet!

At first she was too shamed to meet his eyes. But when she did, he looked at her across the court as if they two were alone, with that faint air of mockery and one quizzically raised brow. And Anne accepted his unspoken challenge and rose again to face their slanderers as instinctively as if he had reached out a hand and pulled her to her feet. She was no longer alone. At last there was a man to defend her. A man who had promised to stand by her to the end.

George let his excited enemies talk themselves to a standstill; then, succinctly, irritatingly, he pulled their case to pieces until even to the trial lords it began to look ludicrously poor. Never once did he let them taunt him into an indiscreet word about his royal brother-in-law, and only those who knew him intimately were aware of the anger like steel beneath his easy manner. At times he had the court tittering. Yet he was no longer the George Boleyn who had laughed and quipped his way through Court, lifted high by his father’s insatiable ambition; but rather a man strengthened and sobered by a sincere searching of the Gospels, a man who had learned to hide a travesty of marriage and a disappointment in love beneath a show of badinage.

There were people present, he pointed out, who had known him from childhood, who would bear witness that he had always been on terms of the utmost affection with the Queen.

“We have it on oath that the aged Lady Wingfield testified on her deathbed that some nine or ten months ago you asked to be left alone with the Queen in her bedchamber,” began his accusers.

“So inconsiderate of her to die just before I needed her,” murmured George. “For she was my friend and always spoke the truth,
in toto
.”

“Mistress Druscilla Zouch was kept waiting a whole hour outside the door.”

“With another maid-of-honour who appears to have grown tired of waiting.”

“We are not here to speak of her,” snapped the King’s attorney hurriedly, as a snicker went along the barriers. “Mistress Zouch will bear witness.”

“Very unwillingly, I think. But there is no need to call her. The Queen was in distress and I stayed to cheer her.”

“Distressed about what?”

“She had been in poor health and spirits since her miscarriage.”

“That would be about nine or ten months ago, would it not?”

“Probably.”

“Lady Wingfield particularly recalled that the Queen called to you to save her. To save her from what, milord Rochford?”

“From falling in a swoon, so far as I recall.”

“Was she not distressed because of the King’s neglect?”

“Heneage would be able to answer that question better than I.”

“I put it to you, Rochford, that she was calling upon you to save her from the stigma of bearing no son?”

“And I put it to you, milords, that that is an insult to the King!”

Enraged, they pressed him harder. “Yet you said openly and lewdly among your friends that the dead child that was afterwards born to her prematurely was not the King’s.”

“Never!”

“Is it not true that before the calamitous birth you were heard to boast among your friends that you were responsible for the Queen’s being
enceinte
again?”

“Assuredly, it is true,” George Boleyn admitted. And then, when all his enemies were a-tiptoe and agog, he deflated their nasty triumph by adding negligently, “For did I not arrange the masque which lured the King’s wandering fancy back to her Grace? Have I not played my part in trying to provide England with an heir? And less clumsily, I flatter myself, than my illustrious uncle played
his
in destroying it!”

Proud Norfolk was never popular with the people, and the Boleyn charm was difficult to resist. “This rambling evidence of a dying old woman which you have used against me,” George went on thoughtfully. “Obviously it must have been culled and twisted by a third party. And delivered as a well-arranged nosegay to Secretary Cromwell. Could the third party be said to be disinterested? Ah, my own wife! Who, as your witnesses had already been at pains to point out, is so jealous of my affection for the Queen’s grace. Since milady Rochford had taken so active a part in collecting the evidence, would it not be simpler if she made her accusations face to face?”

And so the final outrage had been perpetrated which had reduced the charge to absurdity in most men’s eyes. Lady Jane Rochford giving evidence against her own husband. Lady Jane Rochford, whose marital infidelities were a byword. And in the end all that she could swear to was that he had stayed a long time in his sister’s bedroom, that he had embraced her and had been left alone with her, lying across the foot of her bed.

“Munching apples, Jane. Do not forget the apples,” George jeered at her. And some of the city merchants had had the audacity to laugh out loud. For whatever they might think about the Queen, surely no man with Rochford’s shining grace and sense of humour could be such an unnatural monster!

“Oh, what matters all the rest so that he go free,” thought Anne. And free he would be any moment now. The judges and the lords had retired to discuss their findings. All round her people were whispering that he would surely be acquitted. Would that her own life hung on this accusation alone! Or, indeed, upon any accusation.

If only Henry would send her to some convent now, how willingly she would go! Or banish her abroad. Surely, surely public opinion would not suffer a Queen to be put to death! Death was so easily spoken of in a sonnet or a song; so different when, for the first time, one came to understand what the fear of dying meant.

Norfolk was coming back, with all the others trooping after him. Their lagging footsteps seemed to seal her fate. Their faces had a stunned, blank look. Norreys, Brereton, Weston, Smeaton—all of them were condemned to die for her. And now everyone was looking at her; save her accusers, who could not. Were they about to condemn a woman to death? Could it be possible that Henry would really let it happen, that it was going to happen now? That Cromwell’s hands were shaking, and that there was pity at last in Norfolk’s eyes?

She heard the sum of her foul iniquities told over in her uncle’s harsh, familiar tones; and then the fatal words, “Anne, Queen of England, to be burned or beheaded at the King’s pleasure.”

To be burned alive. The most terrible death of all, reserved for heretics and witches. And how often, in loving sport, had Henry threatened it! Even in the terrible, awe-struck silence Anne could not really believe it. As the rows of upturned faces blurred together and her world went black she was really listening to Henry’s voice, musical and persuasive against her ear, “Nan, Nan, my witch, I should have you burned for so enslaving my senses! Nan, there is no woman’s body I could ever desire after enjoying yours.”

In bare humanity Cromwell was telling them to take her back to her room. But with a supreme effort Anne waved women and ushers aside. As long as she could see and stand she must stay and hear what they did to George. Surely they had taken vengeance enough, surely they would acquit him now!

But it seemed they had not finished with him yet. Incited by the lascivious interest of the day, egged on by Norfolk who, after so much zeal on the King’s behalf, must have been anxious to know how his daughter’s slender chances stood, there was still some question they wanted to ask. But no one dared to voice it.

“Is it true that your wife sometimes repeats to you things which, in the performance of her duties and the closeness of their relationship, she might hear the Queen say?”

“As you have heard, she has a serpent’s tongue.” George, white as death, had eyes only for his sister and seemed to brush the question aside as though he scarcely heard it.

Remembering what she had said to Jane, Anne longed to call out and Warn him that there are things which it is treason to know. Intimate things, which touched the King’s pride.

But Norfolk was writing something on a piece of paper. Shamefacedly, it was folded and handed to George. “Did Lady Rochford ever repeat to you the Words that are written there?” The faces of the two dukes whose children stood nearest the crown were working with excitement.

Forgetful of her own fate, Anne watched her brother’s fine swordsman’s fingers unfold the thing fastidiously. Heard his contemptuous apology as he held it to the light. “Your pardon, milords, the Duke writes a villainous hand!” And then as he stood there reading, Anne watched the devilish grin dawn upon his illumined face. She could guess what was written on the paper, and through the close mental link which bound them she could almost read his thoughts. She knew that it was almost as if someone had thrust into his hand a weapon wherewith to achieve his purpose and to avenge his family wrongs. Her life was already forfeit. His was his own to play with. He had only to say Yes or No, and burn the secret paper, and he would go free. But instead, assuming an air of bland, inane misunderstanding, he read the words aloud, before his horrified judges could stop him.