Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (45 page)

“She will not need her gewgaws there—only a warm cloak against the damp and cold,” he laughed, with his odd, perverted sense of humour.

“Then we will come at once,” said Margaret, with a new quiet dignity.

But even that, it seemed, was to be denied them, and this was indeed a blow for which they had not been prepared.

“But how can I dress and who will serve me at table?” demanded Anne, as Katherine of Aragon had done before her.

“Women will be provided for you,” said the man who hated them all. “Your aunt, Lady Boleyn, and a Mistress Cosyns.”

“Both of them my mortal enemies who spy on all I do!” cried Anne, on the point of swooning. But when they were come to the watergate Margaret and Arabella stepped into the barge, defying him, so that it swayed perilously as his men pushed off. “Unless you carry us ashore or throw us into the water, Mistress Savile and I will lodge in the Tower, too,” vowed Margaret, remembering how Queen Katherine had defied the Duke of Suffolk.

“Come if you will,” he allowed grudgingly, in the face of the grinning crowd that had collected. “But I warn you the world is a sweeter place outside. And these women the King has chosen have their orders. They will not let you speak with her alone.”

Up river towards London they went as Anne had gone three short years ago, with so much pomp, to her Coronation. “If only I could see the King! If only I could speak to him! I pray you, good uncle, have me put ashore!” cried Anne, as the gracious roofs of Westminster came into view.

But the easy, rhythmic dip of oars bore her inexorably past the familiar rooms and gardens where Henry Tudor moved in pitiless self-righteousness. Never, surely, had barge skimmed so swiftly or tide flowed so fast. Never, it seemed to Anne, had any journey been accomplished in so short a time. Bearing her from all laughter and gaiety and dancing, and from the heady stimulant of admiration which she, of all beings, had so fiercely loved! Bearing her away from her family and her child.

Perhaps she had not really believed that they would take her further than Westminster. Beyond control or care, she threw herself upon her knees on the floor boards. “Then it is true—true that his Grace, whose child I bore with so great agony, will let me go to that terrible place!” she moaned, with tears streaming down her face. And then, as the thought of Mark Smeaton’s torture came to her, she screamed aloud, “Uncle Thomas! Uncle Thomas! What will they do to me there?”

“Madame, I cannot say,” answered Norfolk, turning away his eyes for very shame.

“Do I go into a dungeon?” Anne asked, as the turgid tide bore I her through Traitors’ Gate and the iron-toothed portcullis clanged behind her.

Kingston, the Governor of the Tower, took her by the arm to help her up the slippery steps and, after her uncle’s rough contemptuousness, his voice sounded comparatively kind. “No, Madame, to your lodgings, where you lay at your Coronation,” he assured her. And, weeping and recalling with hysterical laughter how differently she had been received that other May three years ago, she had suffered him to lead her there.

The torture of her imprisonment was slow and subtle. Although no one laid a hand upon her, within two weeks Anne had drunk to the dregs the cup of grief and fear and indignity. She knew now, past hope, that the King himself had ordered this savagery. At times she was able to rally herself to a kind of gay defiance, but at others, with no privacy or chance to speak to anyone she loved, this half-life stabbed with stark terror became a jumble of emotions in her mind.

Sleeping or waking, she knew herself to be spied upon. Margaret and Arabella were lodged in some distant apartment. At night, when from very weariness she might have snatched relief in sleep, she lay moaning and tossing rather than risk babbling in her hideous dreams; because she knew that, beyond her curtains, her jealous aunt and Mistress Cosyns took turns at listening. And during the dragging hours of daylight they would ply her with impertinent questioning, dragging in the name of every man she knew; over and over again until her resistance broke and she would blurt out some foolishness which their hatred could twist and turn against her. And yet, in her anxiety for her friends, she could not keep her tongue from begging news of them.

“Smeaton is in irons,” Cosyns had said with relish.

“All five of them are here in the Tower. They are to be taken for trial by state prosecution in Westminster Hall,” her aunt had told her. “And that is as good as to be found guilty.”

“Guilty of what?”

“Guilty of treason. Treason against the King’s person.”

Treason. That meant they would be executed; all except Smeaton, who, because he was not of noble lineage, would be hanged, drawn and quartered. For the others there would be a block and axe. Every night in her vivid imagination, Anne saw the flashing blade come down through the darkness; and Norreys’ handsome head rolling, the strong column of Brereton’s neck gushing blood. One after the other, in the darkness of the night, she died the death of each, shuddering and moaning. Until she came to Thomas—and then she would scream aloud. Scream, and stifle it too late; and they would be at her again with their questions. “It is only that I was thinking my cousin Wyatt will make no more ballads about me,” she would He, crouching there, muttering about things that mattered nothing, like a mad woman.

And then, in the morning, for the twentieth time, she would ask the question that she could not hold back. “Where is my father?”

“Trying to keep himself safe,” they would scoff.

And always, the insistent enquiry. “Where is my sweet brother? Master Kingston, has no one seen milord Rochford?”

“Do not distress yourself, Madame,” Kingston’s wife would he kindly before Cosyns could open those thin, cruel lips of hers. “I do assure you my servant saw him a while since in the garden at Westminster.”

And in the midst of this nightmare of grief there had been one moment of unexpected joy. Margaret had contrived to meet her alone and give her the good news. “Thomas is safe! We saw the others taking the air by the Lantern Tower, and he was not with them. He has never been here at all, Nan. Almost as soon as he was arrested the King ordered his release.” In the darkness of the passage to the privy she and Margaret had clung to each other, thanking God that at least some part of their prayers had been answered.

Strengthened, uplifted, Anne had called for lute and pen that she might pass the time composing songs. Kingston seemed to fear that she would bedevil some of his men into smuggling notes to her friends. That they would even make some attempt at escape. But Anne, in high spirits again, laughed, and teased him for his caution, pointing to the thickness of the walls. “People who come in by Traitors’ Gate do not get out again—unless it be by the King’s pleasure!” she said.

By the King’s pleasure.

She herself, her wit, her voice, her body, had been all the King’s pleasure once. Would he not for the sake of past pleasure given, forgive her now? What if she wrote him a letter? At least it was worth trying. Cromwell was coming that very day. Would he dare to seem her friend by delivering it?

Sitting in the Governor’s garden, under pretence of making a roundelay, Anne wrote it hurriedly while Cosyns, somnolent with so much eavesdropping, nodded in the afternoon warmth. Because she had no time to finesse with phrases, the words came straight and fearless from her heart. “Your Grace’s displeasure and my imprisonment are things so strange to me that what to write, or what to excuse, I am altogether ignorant. If, as has been hinted to me, by confessing my grievous faults of artifice and pride, I may obtain my safety; then with all willingness and duty I will obey your command. But let not your Grace ever imagine your poor wife will be brought to acknowledge a fault of which no thought existed. Never a prince had a wife more loyal in duty and in true affection than Anne Boleyn, with which name and place I would willingly have contented myself had your Grace been so pleased.” One by one, between cadences plucked on the lute, the impassioned sentences were added. “Good your Grace, let not any light fancy urge you to this infamous slander.” And finally, “If ever I have found favour in your sight, if ever the name of Nan Boleyn has been pleasing in your ears, grant me this request—that myself only may bear the burden of your Grace’s displeasure, and that it may not touch the souls of those poor gentlemen who are in imprisonment here for my sake. Try me, good King, let me but have a lawful trial, and let not my sworn enemies sit as my accusers and judges.”

Whether the King had received her letter or whether Cromwell hid it away among his other papers, Anne never knew. Any more than she would ever know for certain how the King’s stolen love letters had come into the hands of the Pope. All she knew was that there had been no royal mercy for her friends.

Hope rose again when Archbishop Cranmer came to visit her. Cranmer, who owed her gratitude and who would have helped her if he dared. He talked with her as a friend, but Anne soon found out that the King had sent him to worm from her some reason for proclaiming their marriage invalid from the first, so as to make Elizabeth a bastard in favour of any children Jane might bear him. Perhaps if she would do this, Cranmer hinted, even were she found guilty of the charges now being brought against her, she would be allowed to live peacefully abroad.

“His Grace will always acknowledge the Lady Elizabeth as his natural daughter,” he assured her, as if it were some magnanimity on Henry’s part.

“Because she will be a useful marriage pawn,” scoffed Anne, who had often heard her husband bargaining with foreign powers about Mary.

But Cranmer had not come to bandy words and dared not go back empty-handed to his royal master. “If only your Grace will suggest some means to make your marriage void,” he almost pleaded.

“The marriage which you took such pains to make,” mocked Anne. “Well, Thomas Cranmer, what is to prevent you from unmaking it again? The King’s conscience could always veer round like one of those little gold weather vanes at Hampton, and make him feel that after all Katherine of Aragon really had been his lawful wife.”

“That would only leave the lady Mary Heir Apparent instead of Elizabeth,” pointed out Cranmer, too worried even to rebuke her treasonable levity.

“The same objection about marriage within prohibited degree might serve again,” she suggested. “For as you must surely have heard, my sister Mary was once his mistress.”

But, being the very argument they had used to get rid of Katherine, it would make the King look faintly ridiculous, and he must always come out of everything with righteousness.

So Anne laid down the last remnants of her pride, prepared to appeal to a man whose love for her had languished. “There is milord Northumberland,” she reminded the Archbishop.

Again Cranmer only shook his head reluctantly. “I have approached him more than once, for your sake. Proof of a pre-contract might save you. But he would not acknowledge it. And now he is a very sick man.”

“You have seen him?” asked Anne pitifully, diverted for a moment from her own desperate plight.

“Yes, I have seen him. And it may well be that he thinks to serve you best by his silence, like all the rest,” probed Cranmer.

Anne returned his searching look unwaveringly, making no attempt to deny his suspicions. Since he was the King’s confessor, it was even possible that he already knew the truth. “You know as well as I, milord, that his Grace would never allow such a thought to be made public,” she murmured.

But Cranmer was scarcely listening. He had got what he came for, and rose with a profound sigh, thankful that his hateful task was done. “I have only to swear before God that you have confessed to me some secret matter which is sufficiently grave to have made your marriage void from the first.”

“And once it is annulled?” interrupted Anne eagerly.

“It will make no difference, my child, if that is what you have been hoping,” he told her, as gently as he could.

“Make no difference?” Anne withdrew her pleading hand from his sleeve as if such duplicity scorched her. “No wonder he sends you crawling to me secretly! Is there no justice left in England?” Panting, furious, superb, with hands and skirts pressed back against the wall as though his very presence contaminated her, she flung each indignant word at him. “In any impartial court of law you would be confounded. And you both know it! For if my marriage never was legal, then how can I be convicted of adultery?”

“It would make no matter,” muttered Cranmer. “To come to the King unchaste can be accounted treason.”

“It would make no matter!” Anne flamed at him. “Though honest men lose their lives! When I alone might have borne the burden of my iniquities!”

Cranmer’s face was white as parchment. He tried in vain to calm her. But Anne was past caring now. “Go tell the King from me that I thank him for the way he has raised me up from a plain knight’s daughter, happy in her home at Hever,” she cried. “Raising me first to be a Marchioness, and then a Queen, and now—God’s truth —a martyr!”

She swept the silenced Archbishop from her presence with a scornful curtsy, then burst into jangling laughter. “And tell the Tudor, too, that whatever fate befalls me, I have already half-forgotten him,” she called after. “But that though he should kill me and take a score of wives, I wager he will never fully enjoy one of them for remembering the pleasure he had with Nan Boleyn!”

And now, in the Tower Keep, they were trying her on a charge of adultery and treason; trying her for her life. Her own uncle was presiding, with Suffolk, Fitzroy and twenty-four other lords to support him, and the great hall packed to the doors with their henchmen and the chief citizens of London summoned to witness her humiliation. Anne knew that most of the nobles had been chosen for their undisguised animosity; all but her young cousin Surrey and her onetime lover, Northumberland, whose faces showed that they had been forced to attend against their will.

Only her father, it seemed, had been spared the ordeal. Or was it that, fearful for his own neck, he had deliberately stayed away sooner than speak a word in her defence? Yet once he had loved her. “Wily Wiltshire, still hunting the King’s deer at Windsor, whilst his curs hunt me here!” thought Anne bitterly, looking round upon a sea of hostile faces.