Dear Heart, How Like You This (36 page)

Already it was obvious that there were gigantic cracks in Anne’s marriage to the King. It was common knowledge that he had, uncaring for Anna’s feelings, taken a mistress during the last months of Anne’s pregnancy, even though Anne was sick and ailing. It was the main reason that George had chosen to remain at court with Anne. When Anne had discovered this affair she had gone straight to the King to confront him. This was when she was more than seven months with child—six months after her marriage in January. I think it says much about their relationship at this time that the King had told her to shut her eyes, do as her betters had done, and endure. And Anne, being Anne, refused to talk to the King for days.

George’s messenger told me that the baby was to be called Elizabeth, named after the King’s mother, Elizabeth of York. It was also the name of Anne’s own mother, but that was of lesser importance. Nonetheless, despite the obvious and great disappointment felt by the new parents, a magnificent christening was put under way to baptise England’s Princess Elizabeth, with the baby’s own godfather, Cardinal Cranmer, baptising her. King Henry put on his brave face that day; he carried his new daughter around as if she was the most precious thing in the world. I suppose it may not have all been pretence. It had been a long time since he had held a baby of his born in wedlock. For certes, a healthy and living baby—even if only a girl.

If September had been the month that the King had been promised his much-wanted son, September was also the month that the King faced the prospect of a very dreaded excommunication. If he was less than delighted with the birth of a daughter, I am sure it pleased the King that the Pope had somewhat relented and postponed the excommunication until November.

Stephen Gardiner, who had only recently been an ambassador at the French court, had stayed behind at Lyons when the rest of the party had been recalled. Now he was joined by another diplomat, Edmund Bonner, who had in his hand a document prepared months before in anticipation of these events—a document calling for an appeal to the General Council.

The Pope (accompanied by his two mistresses) was now with the French King in Marseilles, so it was to here that the two Englishmen went to meet with him. The meeting was a failure from start to finish. Pope Clement refused to give King Harry his appeal and refused to back away from the threat of excommunication. In all of this, our own King felt badly let down by the French King.
François
had promised to support King Henry but, on this occasion, had appeared to the English diplomats to be more interested in pandering to the Pope’s desires; thus, gaining a better settlement for the marriage of his second son,
Henri
,
to the Pope’s niece
Catherine Medici
. When King Harry heard of this, he went into one of his more violent rages, verbally abusing the French King in the presence of his entire court. The King’s rage was also witnessed by visiting French officials.

These officials lost no time in informing their King about what the English King had said, and the mood in which he had said it.
François’
usual even temper was shaken by these outbursts, and he replied angrily that Henry had done just about everything the wrong way. Rather than handle the matter delicately, as
François
would have done, King Henry had angered Rome with one transgression after another.

“As I study to win the Pope, ye study to lose him. Yea, ye have marred all,”
François
angrily said to Gardiner.

It frightened many people in England that such things had come to pass. My poor ailing father muttered that an excommunicated King virtually meant an excommunicated kingdom, and he thanked God that He had seen fit to take my mother into His eternal care before this day. My mother, my father believed, would have had a broken heart over all that was happening and was bound yet to happen. In the worst scenario imaginable, we could all be plunged into a civil war or have another Christian king attempt to battle England’s king to the death, bringing all our country to bloody war.

Thus, Parliament moved swiftly to prepare itself for all possibilities; stating that if the Pope made any move to denounce the kingdom, then all monies to Rome would immediately cease and be given over to the King for defence of his realm.

’Twas not only events over the seas that caused us great concerns. Not long after the baby Princess’s birth, the situation with a woman who called herself “The Nun of Kent” reached crisis point, resulting in this woman’s arrest and trial. Elizabeth Barton claimed to be a visionary, and said she had received messages from God to condemn the actions of the King. She promised that if he married Anne, he would be dead within six months of doing so. God, she said, was very displeased with the “infidel prince” of England, and King Henry would have to be prepared to face divine vengeance if he insisted in casting aside Catherine to marry Anne.

However, at her trial the Nun confessed to being involved in a conspiracy to overthrow the monarchy of Henry Tudor. Elizabeth Barton had tried to draw powerful figures into this conspiracy. She had even sent messages to Catherine, now Dowager Princess of Wales, and her daughter Mary, but Catherine wisely decided that she would have none of this plot, and her daughter followed suit—unlike Bishop Fisher, who had believed so strongly in this woman’s visions that he had written to the Spanish Emperor encouraging him to invade England.

From what I gathered from the gossip at court, her trial ran wild with savage emotions. Many people there often cried out: “Burn her! Burn the witch!”

However, there were other people who had begun to regard the poor, misguided woman as some kind of saint; saying that she was like an English Saint Bridget or a Saint Catherine of Sienna. Thus, the King, wisely in this case, moved very carefully, though the woman was eventually burnt at the stake.

Not long after this mad woman’s arrest and execution, George and I followed Anne into her chambers after an afternoon spent at the hunt.

Coming into her rooms, we saw her standing still, looking down at an opened book placed on a small table. Anne’s usually clear brow puckered up into a frown, and it was clear that something she saw in the book worried her.

When George and I approached her, she glanced at us, and lifted up her eyebrows.

“George and Tom, look what I’ve found here.”

Anna gestured to the book. It suddenly struck me that she had no wish or desire to touch it. She laughed, lifting up her chin.

“So, I see some kind soul wishes to provide me some light reading material.”

Going to the table, I picked up the tiny manuscript, to see that it was none other than the Book of Oracles, the ramblings of the so-called Nun of Kent. It had been left open to the page predicting Anne’s eventual death by fire—the death already suffered by Elizabeth Barton not long after Anne’s marriage to the King.

“And what do you say, Tom? Should I be afraid?” Anne asked me. She stood there before me, looking down at her hands placed together, palm to palm.

“Nay. If I remember rightly, this book also predicted that the King would be dead six months after divorcing Catherine. Well, Anne, six months have come and gone, and the King is still hale and hearty.”

Anna sat on a stool with her head tilted to one side. Her dark eyes, so very pained, hinted that she wished to be somewhere, anywhere other than where she now found herself. For an instant, I remembered the young deer we had hunted down in the forest only an hour before. When it had collapsed from exhaustion, finally run to ground by the dogs, it had looked at me with the same expression I now saw in Anna’s eyes.

In a voice suggesting she but spoke the thoughts going through her own head, Anna said to no one in particular: “I wonder if the person who left this book here was the same person who left this book in my chambers before I married the King. I suppose it must be so.”

“This is not the first time you have seen this rubbish?” I asked her, holding out the book to her.

“Nay, Tom. You remember, George, when I found another book, twin to this one?” She turned to look at George.

“Yea. I remember.” George came and took the book roughly from my hands. “And as I did then, I do now.”

With a savageness so unlike him, George tossed the book into the fire. We all watched silently as the flames began to take a firm hold on it. The parchment turned brown, then black, and at last began to turn to ash before our eyes.

Anne let out a great sigh, and I glanced over to her to see she had wrapped her arms around her body, as if she suddenly had grown very cold.

George, too, had looked up at her sigh. He now moved over to her and put his arm around her thin shoulders.

“Do you remember what you said when you first saw that accursed book?”

Anne leaned on him in a kind of half embrace. It reminded me so much of when they were children, and how Anne would seek out her comfort by being as close as she could to him.

“My brave words, George?” she replied, looking up at him with a slight smile.

“Yea, your very brave words. Were they not to the effect that no matter what the future would bring, you would not turn one bit from the course set before your eyes?”

“You remember my words better than I do, George. But I was big-bellied with Elizabeth. Knowing that the near future held in store my child, thinking my daughter would be my son… it made me braver than I feel now.”

She sounded so sad that I too tried my best to comfort her.

“Take heart, Anna. That book is worthy only to feed a fire. ’Twas written only with the intention to do what it is doing now: destroy your peace of mind. Surely, you realise that is the only reason why it was placed where you would see it?”

Anne looked at me fleetingly, and nodded.

“That I well know, Tom. ’Tis painful that I am hated so. ’Tis strange, coz, so very, very strange. The first time I saw that book, I laughed. Even more when George threw it, as he did now, into the fire. But now sometimes I find it so hard to shake off this sense of impending doom…”

And Anne began to cry. George put both his arms around her, saying quietly: “Nan, please don’t. I hate it when you weep.”

Of all the bad timing, Jane, George’s wife, chose this moment to come into the room. Jane was a stern-face young woman, with little to recommend as regards to her appearance. When she saw Anne in her husband’s arms, her face screwed up in a grimace of deep jealously.

Even so, she soon recovered herself, and curtsied.

“Madam. The Chamberlain has asked me to tell you that the King, your husband, wishes you to attend him.”

The way Jane uttered the words “your husband”
instantly made me focus more of my attention onto her. Jane’s eyes were fixed on George with a look speaking of anger and jealously—even hate. It reminded me how my wife Bess sometimes gazed at me.

“I must not let him see that I have been crying. I cry too much, he says.”

Anna quickly went over to the bowl of water placed in her room, and splashed water all over her face. “Can you please help me get ready, Jane?”

“Of course, my Grace.” Jane looked away from her husband and again curtsied, following Anne as she went into the next room, the Queen’s bedchamber.

George’s eyes followed his sister, and then looked piteously at me. I had noticed all the time I had watched Jane that George had taken not one jot of notice of his wife. I could understand that. We both had more important things to worry us than the care of Jane’s spiteful feelings.

“What can we do?” he asked.

“There is nothing much we can do, but try to be always there for her,” I replied.

And that we always tried to be.

CONTENTS

“But all is turned, thorough my gentleness,

into a strange fashion of forsaking.”

In January 1534, three months after the birth of Elizabeth, Anne was overjoyed to find herself again with child. With Elizabeth’s birth, discovering no true fulfilment in her marriage to the King, Anna realised being a mother would allow her another kind of fulfilment and one she always yearned for. Thus, the thought of another child so soon filled her with considerable delight. For certes, Anna often said to me after Elizabeth’s birth that children were the world’s greatest consolation for every grief that life could bring. Yea, that she was to have yet another child made Anna very happy.