Mayflowers for November: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (27 page)

Chapter 31

April 1536

The next day, Lady Shelton came early to my mistress’s lodgings with one of Cromwell’s servants to conduct us to his office.

‘Answer Master Secretary’s questions truthfully,’ Lady Shelton told her daughter and put her arm about her. ‘There is nothing to fear if we play to Cromwell’s tune, and everything to lose if we don’t. The Boleyns are finished. Loyalty to Anne will be the ruin of our family. Cromwell is the King’s man these days: not Anne’s.’

She led me into the bedchamber upon the pretext of inspecting how well I had made up the bed.

‘I hope I can trust you, Avis,’ she said in a whisper. ‘Master Secretary seeks only knowledge of matters concerning the Queen. My daughter’s friendships are no concern of his.’

‘No, my lady, they are not,’ I said. But he knows all about them just the same, I said to myself.

‘I see Cromwell will have a hard task getting what he wants from you,’ she said with a wry smile.

‘Yes, my lady.’

‘You would do well to try to please Master Secretary. Tell him all that you have seen in the Queen’s chambers, of her gentlemen visitors and her brother.’

‘There is nothing much to tell, my lady.’

She grabbed my arm. ‘There is everything to tell, and you must tell all if you would remain at court in my daughter’s service.’

We waited outside Master Secretary’s office, my mistress and myself, in a little hall place. A guard stood by his door; a plaster-faced, stocky fellow. He beckoned to a boy who popped his head cheekily inside Cromwell’s door. ‘Master, a lady and her maid await,’ he called cheerfully and skipped away.

We waited. There was nowhere to sit. Normally, Mistress Madge would make a great complaint at having to stand around like a page but there was no one to complain to. The servant might be a statue except that we had seen that he was able to move one of his arms. My mistress fiddled with the pomander that hung from her girdle and swung it a little. The sweet, familiar scent filled the silence.

Master Secretary’s door opened.

‘I thank you graciously, for your time, madam,’ he said to a lady who walked before him and I felt my heart begin to beat all the faster when I heard that gritty voice. The lady wore a veil over her hood to cover her face and glided out of the hall place without acknowledging Mistress Madge. Master Cromwell came to her, bowed with all courtesy and, smiling, took her arm and ushered her into his chamber just as he would if he had invited her to supper. Left alone with the guard, I paced around the small hall, treading the rushes. I dared not think what Cromwell would ask of me. I looked around the hall place wondering if there was a garderobe nearby. Suddenly, I needed one, but there was no one to ask.

I don’t know how long I waited before Master Secretary’s door opened and my mistress came to me. She took my hand and guided me through Cromwell’s door without a word, and then she was gone. Master Secretary was seated at his desk reading a paper, his quill raised in his hand.

‘Come, come,’ he bid me, as if I were a dog in training.

I approached his desk and stared at his inky cuticles. He began to write upon a paper. Oh, how speedily he wrote with his chunky hands, like a scribe, dipping his quill into his inkhorn again and again so that I thought he had forgotten me. He must have been pleased with what he had written because he smiled as he scattered sand upon his paper. Did he write of what Mistress Madge had told him? I saw that the writing was small and the paper filled.

‘Mistress Shelton has been most helpful,’ he said. ‘There is just a little more I need to ask of you.’

I had not thought Master Cromwell’s desk would have been so cluttered. There were papers scattered everywhere upon the green, fringed cloth, some in piles that looked as if they would fall if Master Secretary should sneeze.

‘I have seen you sitting with your sewing in a corner of the Queen’s privy chambers. You have also attended the Queen in her bedchamber, I am told.’

He raised his eyebrows. I knew that this was a question and he expected a reply, but I didn’t know how to answer. His office was plainer than I had expected. The oak wainscot had no carving. A simple, leafy design wove through the blue tapestry that hung behind him. Only his emerald ring and his golden chain of office glistening against his dark gown showed how important he was to the King.

First, he asked me about my sewing.

‘The Queen is pleased with Mistress Shelton for teaching me so well. She has asked Mistress Shelton to show me how to work some of the stitches that the Queen’s ladies sew upon their sleeves; just the simplest stitches, of course, perhaps a few forget-me-nots,’ I told him.

He smiled but his eyes were cold, like steel, even though they were brown. He didn’t blink, not once while he stared into my eyes. I could look down, I told myself, this will stop his staring. Why dare I not look away?

Next, he asked about music.

‘The musician, Smeaton, plays often in the Queen’s chamber?’

I told him the truth. That I had seen him once or twice playing or singing in the Queen’s apartments to entertain the Queen and her ladies.

‘The young musician is indeed very talented.’

‘My mistress sometimes finds his singing more than a little tedious,’ I said, to fill the silence. It was meant as a sort of joke but came out more as a criticism of my mistress and I hoped that Master Secretary would not tell Lady Shelton what I had said.

‘I imagine she does,’ Cromwell said. ‘Once he is in full flow, the boy does not know when to stop warbling.’ He rubbed his emerald ring. ‘The Queen likes to hear him sing, yes?’

I was unsure how Cromwell wanted me to answer this so I said nothing. He leaned forward, pushing his great hands on the green cloth so that it shifted and a paper fell to the floor. ‘I ask you again, Avis, does the Queen enjoy Smeaton’s singing?’

‘I believe many ladies enjoy his singing, I know I do, sire,’ I said.

‘He’s a pretty boy,’ Cromwell said. How strange to hear those words from a man like Cromwell. Girls talked like that about a boy. ‘Where, does he look, when he sings, this pretty boy? Does he look to the Queen while he sings his endless songs of love, these songs that wax Mistress Shelton weary?’

‘It is usual for the gentlemen to look towards a lady while they sing or read their poetry.’

‘Ah, poetry,’ Cromwell sighed, as if to imitate a lovesick bard. ‘Thomas Wyatt, there’s another one who, I dare say, bores your mistress to tedium with his lengthy verses, but not the Queen, I hear.’

He stared but I refused to answer. He left his seat, picked up the paper from the floor and came close to me.

‘There is nothing to fear, Avis,’ he said but he did not smile and his sharp, flinty tone told me that there was everything to fear although I knew not what.

‘Does she call for him when she cannot sleep?’ he snapped so sharply that I jumped and had to pull myself in quickly before my bladder let go.

‘Who, sire? Mistress Shelton?’

‘The Queen. When she cannot sleep, does she call for Smeaton in the night?’

‘How should I know?’ I stammered. ‘No, no, the Queen would not do that. She is always saying that she will not have unchaste behaviour in her apartments.’

He asked about Wyatt. ‘Everyone knows he is in love with the Queen,’ he said, matter of fact, as if it were unimportant. If everyone knows it, why ask me? I thought, and said nothing. What was there to say?

Master Secretary returned to his desk, leaned back in his chair and read his paper, the one he was writing after my mistress left his chamber. Behind him I spied a door in the corner that was ajar and I thought perhaps it was his garderobe. I wanted to ask him if I might use it while he read but I was embarrassed and he looked up before I had plucked up the courage.

‘The Queen’s brother visits her in her bedchamber?’

I shrugged my shoulders. What was wrong with that? ‘The archbishop has visited her when she is in bed,’ I said, ‘after her miscarriages. He stands behind a screen and says his prayers.’

‘And Sir Henry Norris and Sir William Brereton? Do they visit the Queen when she is abed? And what of Sir Richard Page?’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Leave him aside,’ he said almost to himself. ‘Norris and Brereton?’ he asked, ‘Why do they come so often into the Queen’s chambers?’

‘Sir Henry Norris is courting Mistress Shelton.’

‘Brereton isn’t. What does he do in the Queen’s apartments? He should be about his business in Wales.’

‘He talks. Queen Anne likes his wit. They banter together.’

I glanced desperately towards the door in the corner. Finally, I plucked up the courage to ask. ‘Please sire, give me leave to ...’

He ignored me. He left his desk again and this time he came so close I could smell his meaty dinner on his breath.

‘Sir Francis Weston is a handsome young man,’ he hissed into my ear, and my bladder burst all over my soft, court slippers and Master Secretary’s big square-toed shoes. He stared at the puddle.

‘There is a garderobe in the corner there. You should have begged leave,’ he said and the wet rushes squeaked when he stepped aside.

‘So, Weston?’

I was sobbing. What would my mistress say when I returned all wet and with my shoes spoiled, like a little child?

‘Weston?’ he repeated. ‘He is a handsome young man. He plays tennis, he plays music, he likes the ladies and the ladies like him too; you, Mistress Shelton, the Queen.’

‘I do not like him.’

The words gushed out of me amongst the tears and snot. I had to wipe my nose with my sleeve.

‘Ah, he has pulled up your skirts and you did not like it.’ He stroked the brown fur about his neck. ‘You wanted to save yourself for your rat boy.’

‘He did not have his way,’ I was quick to retort.

‘With you, no?’ He sounded surprised. ‘With your mistress and the Queen, maybe... but wait.’

He pushed aside some papers on his desk, grabbed my wrist with his big hand, the one with the emerald ring, and held my hand fast upon the black, gilded cover of his Bible. ‘Swear that Sir Francis Weston has not bedded Mistress Shelton or the Queen.’

He had caught me like a coney in a snare. If I did not swear, I would be giving away my mistress’s secrets, but he knew them already, he had more than hinted as much to me. I must swear, of course I knew that I must, because if I did not, I would accuse the Queen of adultery. She was only flirting, I wanted to tell Cromwell, just flirting to make the King jealous, and to flatter her vanity, nothing more. The Queen would never go so far; she is always talking to her maids about chastity. So, I would swear. I took a breath and saw Cromwell frown.

‘Would you lie to God, Avis,’ he said, keeping his gritty voice very low.

After he said that, all I could think was that if I lied to God I would not go to heaven and I would never see father again.

‘Sire, I cannot,’ I sobbed. He let go my hand and I ran to the door.

‘Your friend, the rat boy,’ he said, in a voice as dry and runny as sand. ‘I have sought him out. He is with Sir Nicholas Carew’s household but I imagine this you have discovered for yourself.’

Sir Nicholas Carew was no friend of the Boleyns. I had heard Lady Shelton say so.

I turned to see Cromwell still resting his hand upon his Bible.

‘Fear no more for your rat boy, Avis; he is no longer in danger,’ he said.

I wasn’t sure that I wanted Thomas for my friend anymore.

Chapter 32

Sunday 30th April 1536

For five days I felt heavy with guilt. I had betrayed the Queen and Cromwell had rewarded me with knowledge of my friend. Perhaps Cromwell had already told the King that Mistress Madge’s maid could not swear to the Queen’s chastity.

Then, on Friday, the Queen herself gave Cromwell all the evidence he needed. She took Norris aside in a window recess in her privy chamber and they had a terrible argument.

‘Why do you not go through with this marriage to Madge?’ the Queen asked Norris sweetly and one or two of the ladies tittered and looked towards my mistress who bowed her head and opened her psalter.

‘Madam, I would tarry for a time,’ Norris replied.

‘How so? You have been widowed long enough. Your three children have waited too long for a stepmother.’

There was a long silence before Norris replied in a muffled tone, so that I heard only with difficulty, ‘Pray, do not press me, madam, I would tarry awhile. I have my reasons and would keep them privy to myself.’

‘You look for dead men’s shoes,’ Queen Anne responded haughtily, ‘for if ought should come to the King but good, you would look to have me.’

Had the words that Weston had spoken in anger fed Queen Anne’s vanity? Did she really believe Norris to be in love with her?

Norris stammered a denial. ‘Madam, I pray you, do not say such things. It is treason even to contemplate the death of … let alone ... speak of it. If had any such thought, I would my head were off.’

‘I can undo you, if I would,’ the Queen said angrily.

There was sudden silence between the two of them. They must have realised everyone in that busy chamber had stopped talking and was listening to their conversation: the Queen’s ladies, their maids, the King’s gentlemen and their servants. Then Sir Henry did something that I would never have believed of the King’s gentle servant if I had not heard it for myself. He lost his temper.

‘It is you who speak of the King’s demise, not I,’ he told her under his breath, but in the quiet chamber his words carried to the shocked listeners. ‘If I have ever spoken out of turn or shown anything other than due respect for the wife of his Grace the King, I swear it was not my intent and this you know full well. I do not look to have you, madam. You do me great dishonour to feed your own vanity. These courtly games of love that you encourage in your chambers, I repeat, that you encourage, might have made fools of others but not of me. Do not mistake me for a lecherous, married gentleman who dallies overmuch with one of your maids or a lowly, lovesick musician who knows no better. Only yesterday, you had occasion to rebuke Smeaton for seeking to aspire above his station. Do not look to find the same fault in me. Of all the gentlemen at court I am closest to the King. He is my friend and I am his. I want no more. As for you being the undoing of me, madam, I would think that what I have seen in your chambers could very well undo you, if I did not know you better, and there are others who don’t.’

‘But you do know me better, Henry,’ the Queen pleaded. ‘How many times have I told my ladies that I will not have lewd behaviour in my chambers?’

‘You should have chastised the King’s gentlemen while you were about it.’

Her voice trembled when the Queen begged Norris to go to her almoner, John Skip, to swear that she was a good woman.

‘Go with all haste,’ she pleaded, ‘before I am disgraced.’

It was too late. Someone who had heard their conversation must have gone straight to Master Secretary Cromwell, telling of Anne and Norris, treason and adultery, for by evening the King knew of it. Queen Anne was seen at his open window in the courtyard holding the little Princess Elizabeth in her arms, weeping and begging her husband to hear her pleas for mercy.

*

‘So, Norris wishes to tarry awhile,’ Mistress Madge said when we were alone in her lodgings. ‘I wonder why? He was keen enough before.’

Why? It was obvious to me. Norris didn’t want used goods, knowing that the King and Weston had had her before him. He had almost said as much to the Queen. My mistress had heard their conversation. Didn’t she understand how much Norris despised Weston.

‘Well, I am in no hurry to marry, I would tarry awhile myself. I have no wish to be fat and pregnant and have to leave court.’

‘The Queen wishes you both to wed very soon,’ I reminded her.

‘What does it matter what Anne wants. Everyone knows that the King is seeking for a way to rid himself of her. The Chin is playing the same game Anne played against Katherine; returning his gifts, keeping King Henry at arm’s length and holding out for marriage. Her brothers have told her to behave thus. There is to be no more sitting upon his lap and playing with his beard until Anne is gone. My lady mother wishes me to snap Norris up before he begins to contemplate that Jane Seymour’s widowed sister needs a husband. Well, good luck to him.’

‘Will King Henry really divorce Queen Anne?’ I asked. ‘Won’t he change his mind, forget Mistress Seymour and fall in love with Queen Anne all over again?’

‘If I did not know that you cannot read I would think your head was full of tales of romance,’ my mistress said rolling her eyes. ‘This is not the court of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. King Henry has discarded one wife because she could not bear sons. He will the more readily discard another for the same reason and this time he will not take several years to do so. He is too old for that now. My lady mother expects this divorce to be speedy.’

‘What, King Henry cast the Queen aside? How so, upon what grounds?’

Mistress Madge shrugged. ‘He’s done it before, Cromwell will find a way again. Perhaps he already has. Everyone is saying that Anne is disgraced. That’s all I know. The Boleyns are wetting themselves. The Seymours are going to be the dominant faction at court and there is nothing George or Uncle Wiltshire can do about it. Norfolk doesn’t care. Anne has been too haughty with him for years. Anyway, he’s a good Catholic and despises Anne’s reformist ways.’

‘Surely Queen Anne will go to the King and talk to him sweetly and …’

‘Henry is refusing to speak to her. She knows that he has given up any hopes he had of getting a son by her, after all her miscarriages. When Katherine was around her age she stopped bleeding. What reason is there now for him to come to Anne’s bed? She has already spoken to her chaplain, Matthew Parker, who is Princess Elizabeth’s godfather, and charged him to take care of the princess if she is not around; to bring her up in the reformed religion and as a future queen.’

‘Where will Queen Anne go?’

‘Don’t look so sad, Avis. Anne will probably have a happier retirement from court than the dowager Princess of Wales. My lady mother says she may go to the Low Countries where the friends of the Gospel will welcome her and allow her read her English and her French Bibles and every other illegal volume, which King Henry hates, to her heart’s content. Or perhaps she will stay in England and retire to the Westcountry. The people liked her there on the summer progresses. So you see, she will be with friends. King Henry cannot send her to a nunnery as he wanted Katherine to do when he divorced her; there won’t be any left when Cromwell has done with them. Maybe when the Chin is queen she will allow Weston to show a little chivalry towards me. Come, a bet or two upon the dog fight will pass the time until this evening’s dancing. Did I not tell you my cousin, the Queen, has promised to send one of her own gowns for me to wear?’

*

While Sir Francis Weston held Mistress Madge around the waist and twirled her aloft in a flurry of deep blue velvet and golden brocade, while the Queen’s brother passed her from partner to smiling partner and her sister in law and her aunts drank their wine together and would not dance, King Henry met with his council.

‘Even Norris does not know what business is so urgent that they must debate it into the night,’ Constantine told me as I waited behind the arras to tend my mistress. ‘See him there so forlorn, watching the dancers.’

‘He is sorrowful to see his betrothed dancing with another,’ I said.

‘He does not look to Mistress Shelton but to the Queen,’ Constantine said.

‘Perhaps he broods about their argument earlier today. Everyone heard it.’

‘What, even you?’

My mistress was undressing the Queen in her bedchamber when a messenger from the King asked Mistress Madge to inform her Grace that the planned visit to Calais was postponed.

‘Her gowns are already packed for the journey,’ Mistress Madge told me later when I unpinned her from the Queen’s velvet gown. ‘Now they will have to be unpacked and returned to her wardrobe.’

‘Is that what all the fuss is about?’ I asked. ‘How did it take so long to postpone a journey? The King has been with his councillors for hours. Everyone has been hanging around in the courtyard wondering what is happening.’

‘Oh, I’m too tired to care. Get me out of these sleeves and let me sleep and dream of dancing.’

I draped the Queen’s gown across the coffer and stroked it from the shoulder to the hem. The velvet was so soft and beautiful that I wanted to delay snuffing the candles so that I could watch it shine in the candle-glow.

‘Mark Smeaton was not in the gallery tonight,’ I said as I slipped between the crisp sheets on my truckle bed.

‘Oh, did I not tell you,’ my mistress called sleepily from within her bed curtains. ‘He was called away to Cromwell’s house earlier today. Did you not see him rushing away with his lute when we walked to the dog fight?’

‘But Master Secretary does not like Smeaton’s singing, he told me so himself,’ I whispered into the darkness.