The Boleyn Inheritance Read online

  At once I turn to shout for the guards. This is an old man of nearly fifty, a fat man, old enough to be her father. She thinks at once that he is some drunk fool who has managed to push his way into her chamber. She has greeted a hundred men, a thousand men, with a smile and an extended hand and now this man, wearing a marbled cape and a hood pulled over his head, comes up to her and pushes his face into hers and puts his slobbery mouth on hers.

  Then I bite off my shout of alarm; I see his height, and I see the men who have come in with him in matching capes, and I know him at once for the king. At the same moment, like a miracle, at once he does not seem old and fat and distasteful. As soon as I know he is the king I see the prince that I have always seen, the one they called the handsomest prince in Christendom, the one whom I was in love with myself. This is Henry, King of England, one of the most powerful men in the entire world, the dancer, the musician, the sportsman, the courtly knight, the lover. This is the idol of the English court, as big as the bull in the yard below us, as dangerous as a bull when wounded, as likely to turn on any challenger and kill.

  I don’t curtsy because he is in disguise. I learned from Katherine of Aragon herself that one should never see through his disguises; he loves to unmask and wait for everyone to exclaim that they had no idea who the handsome stranger was, that they admired him for himself, without knowing that he was our wonderful young king.

  And so, because I cannot warn Lady Anne, the scene in our gallery becomes a baiting to equal what is going on, bloodily, in the courtyard below us. She pushes him away, two firm hands against his fat chest, and her face, sometimes so dull and stolid, is burning with color. She is a modest woman, an untouched girl, and she is horrified that this man should come and insult her. She rubs the back of her hand over her face to erase the taste of his lips. Then, terribly, she turns her head and spits his saliva from her mouth. She says something in German that needs no translation, clearly it is a curse against this commoner who has presumed to touch her, to breathe his wine-scented breath into her face.

  He stumbles back, he, the great king, almost falls back before her contempt. Never in his life has a woman pushed him away; never in his life has he ever seen any expression in any woman’s face but desire and welcome. He is stunned. In her flushed face and bright, offended gaze he sees the first honest opinion of himself that he has ever known. In a terrible, blinding flash he sees himself as he really is: an old man, long past his prime, no longer handsome, no longer desirable, a man that a young woman would push roughly away from her because she could not stand his smell, because she could not bear his touch.

  He reels back as if he has taken a mortal blow to the face, to his heart. I have never seen him like this before. I can almost see the thoughts running behind his stunned, flabby face. The sudden realization that he is not handsome, the realization that he is not desirable, the terrible realization that he is old and ill and one day he will die. He is no longer the handsomest prince in Christendom; he is a foolish old man who thought that he could put on a cape and a hood and ride out to meet a girl of twenty-four, and she would admire the handsome stranger, and fall in love with the king.

  He is shocked to his soul, and now he looks foolish and confused like a muddled grandfather. Lady Anne is magnificent. She is drawn up to her full height, and she is angry, powerful; she is standing on her dignity, and she shoots a look at him that dismisses him from her court as a man that no one would want to know. “Leave me,” she says in heavy-accented English, and she turns her shoulder on him as if she would push him away again.

  She looks around the room for a guard to arrest this intruder, and she notices for the first time that no one is springing to save her. We are all appalled; no one knows what to say or do to recover this moment: Lady Anne outraged, the king humbled in his own eyes, thrown down before us all. The truth of the king’s age and decay is suddenly, painfully, unforgiveably apparent. Lord Southampton steps forward but is lost for words; Lady Lisle looks at me, and I see my shock mirrored in her face. It is a moment of such intense embarrassment that all of us – we skilled flatterers, courtiers, liars – are lost for words. The world we have been building for thirty years, around our prince who is ageless, eternally handsome, irresistibly desirable, has been shattered about our ears – and by a woman we none of us respect.

  He turns wordlessly, he almost stumbles as he goes, his stinking leg giving way beneath him, and Katherine Howard, that clever, clever little girl, catches her breath in a gasp of absolute admiration and says to him: “Ooh! Forgive me, sir! But I am new to court myself, a stranger like you. May I ask – who are you? What is your name?”

  Katherine, Rochester,

  New Year’s Eve 1539

  I am the only person to see him come in. I don’t like bullbaiting, or bears, or cockfighting, or anything like that, I think it’s just downright nasty – and so I am standing a little back from the windows. And I am looking around, actually, I am looking at a young man whom I had seen earlier, such a handsome young man with a cheeky smile, when I see the six of them come in, old men, they must all be thirty at the least, and the big old king at the front, and they are all wearing the same sort of cape, like a masquing costume, so I guess at once that it is him, and that he has come in disguise like a knight errant, silly old fool, and that he will greet her and she will pretend not to know him, and then there will be dancing. Really, I am delighted to see him because this makes it a certainty that there will be dancing, and so I am wondering how I can encourage the handsome young man to be near me in the dance.

  When he kisses her, it all goes terribly wrong. I can see at once that she has no idea who he is; someone should have warned her. She thinks he is just some drunk old man who has staggered in to kiss her for a wager, and of course she is shocked, and of course quite repelled, because when he is in a cheap cloak and not surrounded by the greatest court in the world, he does not look at all like a king. In truth, when he is in a cheap cloak and with his companions, also dressed poorly, he looks like some common merchant, with a waddling walk and a red nose, who likes a glass of wine, and hopes to go to court and see his betters. He looks like the sort of man my uncle would not acknowledge if he called out in the street. A fat old man, a vulgar old man, like a drunk sheep farmer on market day. His face is terribly bloated, like a great round dish of dripping; his hair is thinning and gray; he is monstrously fat; and he has an old injury in his leg that makes him so lame that he rolls in his walk like a sailor. Without his crown he is not handsome; he looks like anybody’s fat old grandfather.

  He falls back, she stands on her dignity, rubbing her mouth to take the smell of his breath away, and then – it is so awful I could almost scream with shock – she turns her head and spits out the taste of him. “Leave me,” she says, and turns her back on him.

  There is utter, dreadful silence, nobody says a word, and suddenly I know, as if my own cousin Anne Boleyn is at my side telling me, what I should do. I am not even thinking of the dancing and the young man; for once I am not even thinking of myself, and that almost never happens. I just think, in a flash, that if I pretend not to know him, then he can go on not knowing himself, and the whole sorry masque of this silly old man and his gross vanity will not tumble about our ears. I just feel sorry for him, to tell the truth. I just think that I can spare him this awful embarrassment of bouncing up to a woman and having her slap him down like a smelly old hound. If anyone else had said anything then, I would have stayed silent. But nobody says anything, and the silence goes on and on, unbearably, and he stumbles back, he almost falls back into me, and his face is all crumpled and confused and I am so sorry for him, poor humbled old fool, that I say, I coo: “Ooh! Forgive me, sir! But I am new to court myself, a stranger like you. May I ask – who are you?”

  Jane Boleyn, Rochester,

  New Year’s Eve 1539

  Lady Browne is ordering the maids to their beds in a bellow as if she were a Yeoman of the Guard. They are overexcited, and Katherin
e Howard among them is the center of it all, as wild as any of them, a true Queen of the May. How she spoke to the king, how she peeped up at him from under her eyelashes, how she begged him, as a handsome stranger, new to court, to ask the Lady Anne for dancing, is being mimicked and reenacted till they are drunk with their own laughter.

  Lady Browne is not laughing; her face is like thunder, so I hustle the girls into bed and tell them that they are all very foolish and that they would do better to copy their lady, the Lady Anne, and show proper dignity, than mimic Katherine Howard’s free and forward ways. They slip into their beds two by two like pretty angels, and we blow out the candle and leave them in the darkness and lock the door. We have hardly turned away before we hear them whispering, but no power on earth can make girls behave well; and we do not even try.

  “Are you troubled, Lady Browne?” I ask considerately.

  She hesitates; she is longing to confide in someone, and I am here at her side, and known to be discreet.

  “This is a bad business,” she says heavily. “Oh, it all passed off pleasantly enough in the end, with the dancing and the singing, and Lady Anne recovered quickly enough as soon as you had explained to her; but this is a bad, bad business.”

  “The king?” I suggest.

  She nods and folds her lips over as if she would stop herself saying more.

  “I am weary,” I say. “Shall we take a glass of warm ale together before we go to our beds? Sir Anthony is staying here tonight, is he not?”

  “God knows he won’t join me in my rooms for hours,” she says unguardedly. “I doubt if any of the king’s circle will sleep tonight.”

  “Oh?” I say. I lead the way into the presence chamber. The other ladies have gone to bed, the fire is burning low, but there is a jug of ale set at the fireside and half a dozen tankards. I pour us both a drink. “Trouble?”

  She sits in her chair and leans forward to whisper. “My lord husband tells me that the king swears that he will not marry her.”

  “No!”

  “He does. He does. He swears it. He says that he cannot like her.”

  She takes a long draw on the ale and looks at me over the top of the mug.

  “Lady Browne, you must have this wrong…”

  “I have it from my husband this very night. The king seized him by the collar, almost by the throat, as soon as we retired, and said that the moment he saw Lady Anne, he had been struck with consternation, and that he saw nothing in her that he had been told.”

  “He said that?”

  “Those very words.”

  “But he seemed so happy as we left?”

  “He was as truly happy just as Katherine Howard was truly ignorant of his identity. He is as much a happy bridegroom as she is an innocent child. We are all actors here, but the king will not play the part of eager bridegroom.”

  “He has to; they are betrothed and the contract signed.”

  “He does not like her, he says. He cannot like her, he says; and he is blaming the men who made this marriage for him.”

  I have to get this news to the duke; he has to be warned before the king gets back to London.

  “Blaming the men who made the marriage?”

  “And those who brought her to him. He is furious.”

  “He will blame Thomas Cromwell,” I predict quietly.

  “Indeed.”

  “But what of the Lady Anne? Surely, he cannot refuse her?”

  “There is some talk of an impediment,” she says. “And that is why Sir Anthony and none of the others will have any sleep tonight. The Cleves lords should have brought a copy of an agreement to say that some old previous contract to marry has been withdrawn. Since they don’t have it, perhaps there may be grounds to argue that the marriage cannot go ahead, it is not valid.”

  “Not again,” I say, unguarded for a moment. “Not the same objection that he put against Queen Katherine! We will all look like fools!”

  She nods. “Yes, the same. But better for her that an impediment is declared now and she is sent safely home, than she stays and marries an enemy. You know the king; he will never forgive her for spitting out his kiss.”

  I say nothing. These are dangerous speculations.

  “Her brother must be a fool,” I say. “She has come a long way if he has not secured her safety.”

  “I would not be in her shoes tonight,” Lady Browne says. “You know I never thought she would please the king, and I told my husband so. But he knew best; the alliance with Cleves is vital, he tells me, we have to be protected from France and Spain, we have to be protected against the Papist powers. There are Papists who would march against us from every corner of Europe; there are Papists who would kill the king in his own bed, here in England. We have to strengthen the reformers. Her brother is a leader of the Protestant dukes and princes, that is where our future lies. I say: ‘Yes, my lord; but the king will not like her. Mark my words: he will not like her.’ And then the king comes in, all ready for courtship, and she pushes him away from her as if he was a drunk tradesman.”

  “He did not look kingly at that moment.” I will not say more than this cautious judgment.

  “He was not at his best,” she says, as careful as I. Between us is the unsayable fact that our handsome prince has grown into a gross, ugly man, an old, ugly man; and for the first time we have all seen it.

  “I must go to my bed,” she says, putting down her cup. She cannot bear even to think of the decay of the prince we have adored.

  “I, too.”

  I let her go to her room and I wait till I hear her door close, then I quietly go to the great hall, where, drinking heavily, and clearly nearly dead drunk, is a man in Howard livery. I crook my finger at him, and he rises up quietly and leaves the others.

  “Go to my lord duke,” I say to him quietly, my mouth to his ear. “Go at once and get to him before he sees the king.”

  He nods; he understands at once. “Tell him, and tell him only, that the king does not like the Lady Anne, that he will try to declare that the marriage contract is invalid, and that he is blaming those who made this marriage and will blame anyone who insists on it.”

  The man nods again. I think hard, in case there is anything I should add.

  “That’s all.” I need not remind one of the most skilled and unscrupulous men in England that our rival Thomas Cromwell was the architect and inspiration for this match. That this is our great chance to bring down Cromwell, as we brought down Wolsey before him. That if Cromwell is down, then the king will need an advisor, and who better than his commander in chief? Norfolk.

  “Go at once, and get to the duke before he sees the king,” I say again. “Our lord must not meet the king without warning.”

  The man bows; he leaves the room at once, without saying good-bye to his drinking companions. By his swift stride he is clearly completely sober.

  I go to my own room. My bedfellow for tonight, one of the other ladies-in-waiting, is already asleep, her arm outflung to my side of the bed. Gently, I lift it and slide in between the warm sheets. I don’t sleep at once, I lie in the silence and listen to her breathing beside me. I am thinking about the poor young woman Lady Anne and the innocence of her face and the directness of her gaze. I am wondering if Lady Browne could possibly be right and this young woman could be in danger of her life simply by being the wife that the king does not want.

  Surely not. Lady Browne is exaggerating for certain. This young woman is the daughter of a German duke; she has a powerful brother who will protect her. The king needs her alliance. But then I remember that this brother let her come to England without the one piece of paper that would secure her marriage, and I wonder that he should be so careless with her, to send her such a long way into such a bear pit with no protector.

  Anne, on the road to Dartford,

  New Year’s Day 1540

  Nothing could be worse, I feel such a fool. I am so glad to be traveling today, seated uncomfortably in the rolling litter, but at least a
lone. At least I don’t have to face any sympathetic, secretly laughing faces, all buzzing with the disaster of my first meeting with the king.

  But truly, how should I be blamed? He has a portrait of me; Hans Holbein himself humbled me to the ground with his unsmiling stare, so that the king had my portrait to scrutinize and criticize and study, he has a very good idea of who I am. But I have no picture of him except the picture in my mind that everyone has: of the young prince who came to his throne a golden youth of eighteen, the handsomest prince in the world. I knew well enough that he is all but fifty now. I knew that I was not marrying a handsome boy, not even a handsome prince. I knew I was marrying a king in his prime, even an aging man. But I did not know what he was like. I had seen no new portrait of him to consider. And I was not expecting… that.

  Not that he is so bad, perhaps. I can see the man he once was. He has broad shoulders, handsome in a man at any age. He still rides, they tell me, he still hunts except when some wound in his leg is troubling him, he is still active. He runs his country himself, he has not handed over power to more vigorous advisors; he has all his wits about him, as far as one can tell. But he has small, piggy eyes and a small, spoiled mouth, in a great ball of a moon face swelling with fat. His teeth must be very bad, for his breath is very foul. When he grabbed me and kissed me, the stink of him was truly awful. When he fell back from me, he looked like a spoiled child, ready to cry. But, I must be fair, that was a bad moment for both of us. I daresay, as I thrust him away from me, that I did not appear at my best either.