The Boleyn Bride Read online

  But Henry rose up from his chair, glared down at the pool of rotund silver-haired redness at his feet, and thundered, “No other than God shall take her from me!” and even dared to kick the Cardinal and order him from his sight. Henry Norris, Henry’s most trusted and intimate body servant, and a good friend of Anne and George, was there and saw it with his own eyes.

  The King immediately dispatched one of his own physicians, a Dr. William Butts, to Hever Castle, and gave his own favorite great sapphire, nigh big as a man’s fist, to be pulverized into an exotic potion to be mixed with humble beer, treacle, various herbs, crushed pearls, and Pills of Rhazis, a popular concoction created by an Arab physician, to dose Anne and her beloved George with, and, of course, his “much esteemed and valued servant, Thomas Boleyn.”

  While my husband’s life and those of two of my children hung in the balance, I sought solace with my beloved in my red rose bower, pillowing my head upon his chest and letting my fingers toy with the coils of black hair that grew there and the little red coral horn and tiny crucifix resting in the hollow of his throat. Sometimes we ate cherries and, wistfully, I reminisced about those happy cherry fair days I had spent with Mary, both of us whirling in red gowns, and the days when, barefoot and green-gowned like Queen Guinevere, we had gone a-Maying and gathered flowers and danced around the beribboned Maypole with handsome gallants. Days that could never come again.

  I had resigned myself to the sad and bitter truth that my disgraced eldest daughter and I could never be friends. In those happy, long-ago days of fun and frolic, I realized now, I had used my golden girl as just another pretty ornament, rather like those ladies who carried little dogs with jeweled collars, but now that she was old enough to speak her mind and assert her personality, I saw just how different we really were.

  I had persuaded Remi to forsake London in this time of pestilence and come with me to Hever. Thomas was too ill to know he was hosting my lover beneath his roof, and I was always discreet, and the servants, who liked me far better than they did my husband, were well accustomed to such dalliances and knew how to keep their mouths shut. Mayhap it seems callous and shows a want of feeling, my dallying with Remi while the lives of my husband and children hung in the balance. But what else could I do? They had the attention of one of England’s best physicians, sent by the King himself, though everyone knew all remedies were useless and only time, luck, and God cured “the Sweat.” We could only wait, hope, and pray, which of course I did, albeit with Remi. Though in the secret heart of me I knew what all England said was true—if Anne succumbed, it would make a quick end to this scandalous “Great Matter”—I did not desire my daughter’s death. I prayed fervently that she and George would be spared, and, of course, I prayed for my husband and Will Carey. One might say I resigned myself to “what will be, will be,” and left it all in God’s hands.

  Soon Dr. Butts was writing to King Henry that Anne and her kinsmen—with the exception of poor Will Carey, who had sadly perished—were “past all danger” and well on the way to making “a perfect recovery.” Soon the jubilant and grateful King was sending gifts galore to the invalids and showering Dr. Butts with accolades and golden coins. He even deeded him a manor, but stipulated most sternly that the doctor was not to stray too far from London as the Crown would ever have need of his skill in any medical crisis.

  Will Carey’s death left Mary destitute with two young children—a daughter, named Catherine, by the King, and a son, Henry, whose parentage was uncertain.

  There had been a night when the royal loins were pulsing with a lust Anne refused to satisfy—on the contrary she had once even gone so far as to “accidentally” spill a flagon of iced water on the royal codpiece, “to cool it off,” after the drunken and aroused monarch made so bold as to grab her slender wrist and forced her hand down upon it—and Henry had encountered Mary in a quiet corridor. The torchlight upon her golden curls and gold-flowered silver gown had reminded him of all he had once found so alluring and exciting about her when she was new at court and fresh from France, and, without pausing to think, to ponder that this was the sister of the woman he intended to marry, he drew Mary into the shadows and hoisted her skirts.

  Mary docilely endured the encounter without a murmur, then went back to her husband. She said nothing of it to anyone until some months later when she found herself with child and uncertain of its paternity as she had lain many times with the husband she called her “Sweet Will” both before and since that chance encounter in the corridor.

  While mourning the husband she had come to love, Mary despaired about what would become of her and her children. When Thomas was well enough to sit up in bed, he refused her even a penny or a roof to cover her head. He was adamant that he wanted her to quit Hever as soon as she was able.

  I found her in her old room, her formerly plump, round, rosy-cheeked face gaunt and pale, her eyes deep-sunken and dark-circled from days without sleep, and her gilt hair—darkened to deep burnished gold by her two pregnancies—hanging lank and lifeless, like the black gown that hung loose and limp as a shroud on her, worry having smoothed away her ample, womanly curves. She was standing before the picture of the little Lord Jesus standing on his sandaled tiptoes reaching up his hand for a bough of enticing glossy red cherries, the one she had purchased at one of the happy and carefree cherry fairs of her childhood many years ago.

  “This life I see is but a cherry fair,” she softly sighed with tears streaming from her tired amber eyes. “Poor Will!”

  “Aye, daughter,” I agreed and left her to her woes.

  A part of me knew I should have gathered her in my arms and uttered some words of comfort. I should have found something to say that would have given her heart and the hope to go on. But such a role seemed so foreign to me, and if I tried to play “the Good Mother,” I felt certain both of us would see how poorly it suited me. One of the few things Thomas and I agreed upon completely was that when one is apt to fail it really is better to not even try.

  To everyone’s surprise, it would be Anne who would cajole a yearly pension of one hundred pounds out of the King and, through him, command my husband to give Mary a home at Hever Castle.

  After all, Anne reasoned, mayhap while inwardly gloating at this chance to shove the golden girl into the ash heap, I was so often away and Lady Margaret’s wits were waning, so Hever was often bereft of a proper lady of the manor; more often than not it was left to the housekeeper to oversee all. If Mary were to take up residence there, she reasoned, their father might save a few of his precious pennies by dismissing the housekeeper and allowing Mary to don the key-hung girdle of the castle’s chatelaine.

  Confronted with the King’s command and Anne’s clever plan, my husband could do naught but agree. Thus Mary and her children found a safe haven at Hever, where she could grieve and grow strong again, and endure daily doses of Lady Margaret’s rose honey to remedy her depression, while the world as we knew it continued its furious descent into chaos with the combined threat of war, excommunication, and religious revolution hovering over our heads, while my youngest daughter, like a bewitching black-haired, black satin–gowned Circe, stood in the midst of it all, calmly twirling her pearls, like a candle burning steady at the heart of a storm.

  Lawyers, churchmen, scholars, and theologians all entered the fray as though it were a wrestling match, using words instead of muscles to strike their blows. Then the Pope’s emissary, a gouty old man, Cardinal Campeggio, arrived to try the case, in essence bringing the Pope to London by proxy, hoping to lay “the King’s Great Matter” to rest once and for all.

  Many thought the whole thing the height of hypocrisy. Henry wanted to divorce Catherine on grounds of affinity, because she had been the wife of his late brother, yet the woman he wanted to marry was the sister of his former mistress. Some, remembering that I had once briefly caught and captivated the King’s eye, even dredged up old rumors claiming that I had at one time briefly been his mistress. Some even said that I, a sophis
ticated older woman, had been the one to educate His Majesty, when he was yet a prince, in the arts of love. The gossipmongers were master embroiderers adept at adding salacious embellishments. Some even went so far as to say that Anne was Henry’s own natural daughter. And my old love, John Skelton, chose that moment to drag my name through the mud by putting his poem, comparing me to the false Cressida, back in circulation. This he did from the safety of his sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, where he had gone after running afoul of Cardinal Wolsey, whom he had attacked in a satirical ditty about the Cardinal’s palace Hampton Court being finer than any the King himself possessed. It was all nonsense of course, but it shook the King’s credibility to its very foundation.

  Though it was true that Henry desperately desired a son, an heir to rule England when he was gone, everyone knew what this was really about—lust, plain and simple lust and the aphrodisiacal effect the word no has upon some men. If Anne had said yes that day in the rose garden at Hever, smiled, and obligingly lifted her petticoats, none of this would have ever happened. Catherine would have remained England’s much beloved and uncontested Queen until God called her home to Him.

  Thousands thronged the streets and crammed inside Blackfriars Hall, the Dominican friars’ charter house in London, avid to hear every salacious, hypocritical word the King and his counsel would utter before the papal legate Campeggio.

  Anne and her court in miniature stayed away, sipping cold wine and lounging like oriental potentates in the garden of the splendid London town house the King had given her, while musicians played and fountains splashed, coins clinked, and the dice rattled and rolled. It was almost as though she did not care about the verdict. Or mayhap she was merely confident of the verdict. Cardinal Wolsey had promised the King he would be a free man anon, free to wed and bed whomever he pleased. And my bullish spouse was certain he would soon be the father-in-law of a king and was bursting with pride at the seams; he was there in the court, lapping it all up like a cat does cream, certain that by the end of the day his youngest daughter would be queen in all but name, and that would come too in but a few days’ time.

  I had planned to stay away. I did not like to brave the crowds or subject myself to hours of tedious legal and theological debate. I believed Queen Catherine when she said her marriage to the late Prince Arthur had never been consummated. And I believed the desires of the flesh rather than the sometimes contradictory words of the Lord were motivating King Henry. Anne was his Satan-sent temptress; perhaps she was a changeling after all? No ordinary woman could assert such power.

  The palace was nigh deserted. Like gluttons for scandal, the entire court had gone rushing off to Blackfriars. Something drew me back to Queen Catherine’s apartments, where I used to serve, now so sadly deserted. I found her sitting alone at her dressing table. Her hair now more silver than gold, flowing loosely over the shoulders of her black damask dressing gown, a gold-backed hairbrush lying absently in her lap as she fingered her pearl rosary.

  “Madame!” I cried impetuously as I rushed toward her, boldly meeting the sad and weary gray eyes of her reflection in the silvered looking glass. “Why are you still here? You must fight for your rights! You’ll let your case go by default! Quickly, I implore you; I will help you dress!” And I, the mother of her sworn enemy, for what would be the last time, had the honor of attending England’s one true Queen.

  I laced her stout waist into her boiled leather stays and helped her don a gown of stark black velvet.

  “I wear mourning,” she explained, “as testament to my grief, to show the English people how sorely my heart aches and grieves that I have lost my husband’s affection.”

  I hung an elaborate golden crucifix studded with sparkling black spinels and peerless white diamonds about her neck and silently pressed her pearl rosary back into her hand and whispered, “Christ be with you.”

  “He always is,” she assured me with trembling lips and tears shimmering in her gray eyes. “Our Lord Jesus Christ, unlike mortal men, never falls by the wayside; He is always constant in His affections.”

  When I draped a gold lace veil over her silvered hair, she laughed. It was such a brittle, bitter, heart-stabbing little laugh. “I first saw Henry through a veil of golden lace, through the swirls and whirls of gilded threads; his was the first open and friendly face I saw in England. I know he did not love me at first—how could he? He was just a little boy—but the love came later. This I know. And, in his heart, buried so deeply that he has lost all sight of it, it is still there.”

  There was a faraway look in her eyes as she recalled the first night she had spent on English soil, when old King Henry VII, impatient to see the Spanish princess, to see with his own eyes if she was really as beautiful as the ambassadors claimed, barged into her lodgings, dragging both his sons, her betrothed Prince Arthur and his little brother Prince Henry along behind him. They presented a sorry trio, in rain-soaked riding vestments with wilted, bedraggled feathers on their hats and hair beaten flat and plastered against their cold, pale cheeks.

  The old King ordered Catherine’s indignant duenna, Dona Elvira, to roust Her Highness out of bed or he would plunge boldly between the bedcurtains and drag her out himself all but naked in her shift if he had to. The horrified governess had hastened to rouse Catherine and, fearing the King’s impatience would cause him to kick the door down and come bursting into the room at any moment, she didn’t dare take the time to properly clothe her charge, so, thinking quickly, she draped her in a long veil of rich, dense golden lace instead and led her out to face her destiny.

  “And now”—Catherine sighed—“again—destiny calls! It is like a battle cry to my ears, and I find myself the warrior queen once more, fighting for what is right and all I hold dear.”

  At Blackfriars, I stood in the back, crammed against a wall I feared the crush of jostling bodies might cause to collapse, and watched as my queen was summoned to appear like any common litigant in a lawsuit.

  She ignored the protocol of the court and went to her husband. She knelt at his feet and spoke to him straight from her heart, entreating most earnestly to know how she had offended him. She insisted that she had done her duty as a wife; she had done it gladly and with all her heart. She had given him numerous children, though it had pleased God, for reasons we mere mortals could not know or hope to comprehend, to call them from this earth. She swore again, as she had so many times before, that when she came to him, as a bride on their wedding night, she came innocent of the touch of man, a virgin, even though a once-married and widowed one, she remained virgo intacta.

  She tried so hard to sway him, to move him; my heart ached for her. It hurt to see such a proud and dignified woman groveling before this ruddy-haired icy-eyed ogre who sat there on his throne like a statue carved out of solid ice or stone. He would not even look at her. It was as if his ears were deaf and his eyes stone blind to her. His heart must have been made out of marble, not flesh and blood. How else could he sit there glowering unmoved in the face of such eloquent and earnest love? But he never spoke or moved, betraying not the faintest flicker of emotion. He sat in silence on his gilded throne and stared straight ahead and right past her.

  I saw Remi in the crowd. Our eyes met. Though we were too far apart to even discreetly touch hands, I knew he felt the same. All his good wishes went out to Queen Catherine.

  I knew, as Queen Catherine knew, that she could not expect justice in this court peopled by King Henry’s foul creatures, men like my husband who would say or do anything to retain royal favor and reap even greater rewards.

  Heaving a great, heart-heavy sigh, she rose from where she had prostrated herself at King Henry’s feet and went to kneel before the gouty, red-robed Cardinal Campeggio and threw herself on the mercy of Rome.

  “To Rome and the Pope I commit my cause!” she cried.

  Proudly, she rose, curtsied twice, once to Cardinal Campeggio and then to her husband. With her head held high and her back straight, she turned and walked o
ut. She never looked back. Even though the court crier called after her three times, “Catherine, Queen of England, come into court!” she ignored him.

  “God grant my husband a quiet conscience,” she said softly as I rejoined her.

  Outside the good people of England waited, to warm and embrace their beloved Queen with their words. “God save Catherine, the one true Queen!” they cried. “God grant you victory over your enemies!” and “We’ll have none of Nan Bullen!”

  Even after so many years, the people’s love for her bore not one tiny speck of tarnish. Their love for her was still bright and golden and, in the court of public opinion, she was clearly the winner.

  In the end, it all came to nothing; the court recessed for the summer, as was the custom in Rome, without rendering a verdict and never reconvened.

  Pope Clement was still caught and torn between the King of England and Queen Catherine’s powerful nephew, Charles, the Holy Roman Emperor, who was likely to declare war rather than stomach seeing his aunt discarded and disgraced.

  The Pope wanted to delay making a decision as long as possible; like everyone else, I think he hoped that Henry would soon tire of the whole business and have his fill of Anne Boleyn. But he, like everyone else, discounted the dark enchantment of my daughter. Henry’s soul was possessed by the dark demon of lust; it enflamed his loins and burned all reason out of his brain, leaving him determined to move heaven and earth if he must, all for the sake of the dark-eyed girl he was hell-bent on possessing.