The Boleyn Bride Page 27

  I laughed through my tears when I heard that Anne had left the Lieutenant of the Tower with a message for the King that he was too timid and terrified to deliver.

  “Master Kingston,” she had said graciously and fearlessly, raising her voice so it would be sure to carry and reach the ears of the crowd standing clustered avidly around the scaffold she was even then in the act of mounting, “please commend me to His Majesty, and tell him that he has ever been constant in advancing me; from a private gentlewoman he made me a queen, and now that he has no greater honor to bestow upon me, he gives my innocent head the crown of a martyr.”

  Poor Master Kingston! I could well imagine him quaking in his boots at those words he had been entrusted with. Sorry to break a solemn promise to a dying woman, yet too afraid for his own head to dare deliver the message. The King was certain not to receive it graciously. Yet I, if I had been there, if she had trusted this final message to the mother who had so many times failed and disappointed and even scorned her, I would have taken it to him. When you’ve already lost everything that matters, sometimes you lose your fears too; I was no longer afraid of the King. And what was left of his favor I would, unlike my desperately clinging husband, gladly lose.

  I could see her standing there, midway up the thirteen steps, posed to show herself to best advantage, before she strode boldly up the last few steps, onto the stage of the scaffold itself for the final act of her life. She wore a cloak of regal ermine, which she let fall with a contemptuous, disdainful shrug onto the straw that would soon be soaked through with her blood, as though she was happy to be rid of this royal regalia. As she deftly delivered her innocuously worded but slyly sardonic speech, every eye drank in the sight of her elegant black velvet gown and underskirt of bloodred damask.

  As she spoke both her full skirt and hanging sleeves moved with a graceful, bell-like sway and her fingers toyed nervously with her pearls and the golden B pendant George had given her so long ago when she was a frightened little girl about to set sail for Brussels, afraid that she was doomed to always be an ugly duckling, to dwell forever in the shadow of her golden-haired sister’s radiant beauty, and mayhap even end by spending all the rest of her days cloistered in a convent as a nun, black-robed and bald-pated beneath her stark white wimple. It was her talisman and her way of keeping George with her always, even when they were physically apart. I could imagine her nervously fingering that golden B and thinking of him; I could even hear the three white teardrop pearls that hung beneath clacking against her fingernails. I remembered then the very last words they had spoken to each other in the garden at Greenwich Palace—I am with you always, until the end of time. And time for Anne was about to end.

  Upon her head, she wore a jaunty black velvet cap sporting a rakish spray of black and white feathers held in place by a diamond horseshoe—of all things, of all the talismans Anne might have chosen to don on the day of her death, she chose this, making certain the U was upturned to hold her luck and keep it from spilling out. Beneath the soft round brim of her chic little hat, her abundant black hair was tightly braided and pinned so as not to impede “the Sword of Calais,” as the headsman was called. Some joked that this was the last Valentine King Henry would ever give my daughter; in remembrance of the great love he had once borne her, he had summoned a swordsman from France to take her head, instead of subjecting her delicate swanlike neck to the sturdy but sometimes blunt and brutal ax of a British executioner. The sword was swift and surer, while the ax sometimes required repeated blows to get through all the bones and gristle. Unless the ax was sharp and the executioner skilled, it was not a pleasant way to die.

  “Good Christian people,” she said, “I am come hither to die according to the Law, and therefore I will speak nothing against it and accuse no man. I pray God to save the King and send him long to reign over you, for a kinder or more merciful prince there was never, and he was ever a good and gentle sovereign lord to me. . . .”

  It was Anne’s way of striking one last blow at Henry. Even though she left a defenseless daughter behind whom she had every cause to fear for, Anne unbridled her tongue and lashed the King with it one last time, letting his subjects see just what sort of a man Henry Tudor truly was. He was so kind and merciful, gentle and good, that he was sending his wife to the scaffold to make way for another.

  Regardless of how the people felt about her displacing their “good Queen Catherine, the one true queen,” they all agreed the travails and tragic outcomes of childbirth are not just grounds for taking a woman’s life. But divorce is messier than death, and the King wanted a change; he wanted Jane Seymour—that was what it was all about. King Henry wasn’t fooling anyone. And by saying that she accused no man, Anne was hinting, quite brazenly, that there was a man lurking in the background who might be accused of her murder and with just grounds.

  King Henry had taken full and most cruel advantage of the verdict delivered against Anne and her accused paramours “to be burned or beheaded at the King’s Pleasure,” and hinted that he was leaning toward the stake; however, Anne might change his mind and spare herself and the friends and brother she held so dear this hellish and gruesome fate by signing a document attesting to the fact that their marriage was a sham, invalidated by reasons of affinity, because her own sister had warmed his bed first, thus placing his eventual “marriage” to Anne in the forbidden degree.

  Fearing the fire, Anne signed, but not without noting that “without marriage there can be no adultery, therefore, if these sentences are carried out they shall be naught but murder.” She was absolutely right, and as she stood upon the scaffold, preparing to die, everyone knew they were about to witness not an execution but the murder of an innocent woman, just as they had already witnessed the murders of five innocent men. Though I was glad that Smeaton, though innocent of any actual carnal knowledge of Anne, despite his dreams and fantasies, had died for his lies and treachery. Some would counsel me to be kinder and gentler, and remind me that his confession was obtained under torture, that this poor, lowborn musician had no high birth and noble title to protect him from all the hellish implements of torture as it had the other men, the men that he himself had named, echoing Jane, as Anne’s lovers, but I don’t care about that; even if they racked him and broke every bone in his body, I cannot forgive him.

  Anne wasn’t even dead before an army of stonemasons, seamstresses, glaziers, and carpenters descended upon the royal palaces to eradicate her initials and replace them with Jane Seymour’s. Anne’s white falcon emblem was shot down and Mistress Seymour’s phoenix rose in its place.

  When I learned that George might have saved himself I wept all the more. The other men had already been condemned, found guilty of treasonable adultery with Queen Anne, and it was a foregone conclusion that the same verdict would be brought against her. For how could they be guilty and she not? It takes at least two to commit adultery.

  My own brother, Thomas Howard, who had succeeded my father as Duke of Norfolk, presided over that farcical fraud of a trial as Lord High Steward in his own set of bloodred robes. Besides keeping the King’s favor and proving he loved the sovereign more than his own flesh and blood, he had even more to gain by Anne’s death—his own daughter, Mary Howard, was married to the King’s illegitimate get by Bessie Blount; thus if King Henry died without giving England a legitimately born prince, and Henry Fitzroy, the Duke of Richmond, became king, my brother’s daughter would be queen. Truly, it was something to think about, a possibility well worth considering and even laying a discreet foundation for; I could almost hear the wheels of his mind turning even in the quiet country seclusion of my husband’s castle in Kent.

  Thinking to spare His Majesty undue embarrassment, my unusually considerate brother had written a particularly intimate question touching upon the royal member’s potency and vigor upon a piece of paper and given it to George to read silently and then consign to the flame of a conveniently provided candle a blank-faced page boy held upon a tray. George was inst
ructed to answer merely with a simple “yea” or “nay” and say nothing more.

  “Do you understand?” His uncle’s hard eyes bored into him.

  “Yes, Uncle,” George smiled and obediently answered, as though he were a young lad back in the schoolroom, then bent his head to read the paper that had just been placed in his hand.

  I could see that devilish smile lighting up his handsome face, as, over the paper’s edge, his eyes found Anne’s.

  My brother might just as well have handed him a weapon. Words, the poet and wit in George knew, could be as mighty as the sword; they could slay a reputation just as surely as a sharp thrust or slash of steel could end a human life.

  George raised his voice so that it would carry to the back of the hall and up to the rafters, so that each and every one of the two thousand people packed inside would be sure to hear it and send it spreading out the door to travel throughout London and eventually across the Channel. He read the question aloud and then said “nay” and went on to add that his sister had never confided anything pertaining to either the limpness or liveliness of His Majesty’s private member. And, in any case, he really would rather not give an answer that might in any way cast doubt upon the legitimacy of any offspring resulting from the King’s next marriage.

  Thus, he yanked the veil off Jane Seymour’s face and let all London know exactly what this farce of a trial was all about. Anne, for all her faults, was no adulteress; she had never cuckolded the King. Henry was merely of a mind to change queens again, and the one thing his divorce from stubborn and proud Catherine of Aragon had taught him was that when ridding oneself of a wife the ax is always quicker than the law of either church or state, and, in spite of the blood spilled, an execution really is less messy in the end.

  I rocked and laughed and cried until my sides ached and I was breathless.

  “My brave George!” I gasped as the tears poured down my face.

  I could see him standing there, tall and handsome, all garbed in black relieved only by the whiteness of his shirt, gazing at Anne over that scrap of paper right before he read it, locking eyes with her, the Gemini, together once more, alone against Satan and all his legions, determined not to fall without a spectacular fight—he the one who had arrived early, and she the other twin soul who had been fashionably late coming into this world, the two of them knowing exactly what was about to happen, and that, if it must end like this, falsely accused and condemned on the lies of a tortured, spurned, and lovelorn lute player and an insanely jealous wife’s lust for vengeance, with both their lives bleeding out upon a straw-strewn scaffold, they wouldn’t have it any other way. They would orchestrate their own dramatic exits as though this were just another masque they had devised and were dancing the lead roles in. Even as Anne’s eyes must have pleaded with him not to do it, to save himself if he could, she knew that if their roles were reversed and if she were standing there in his stead, no power on this earth could still her tongue from reading the damning words written there aloud for every ear in London to hear so that their voices would carry the truth to the far-flung reaches of England.

  For George and the loyal friends who had died with them—Henry Norris, Francis Weston, and William Brereton—I recited a verse from the Book of John that came at that moment like a white dove fluttering through the open window of my sorrow-filled mind. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

  They didn’t have to do that. They didn’t have to die. They could have saved themselves. They could have turned on Anne, the way the King entreated them to do; he gave the accused noblemen, with the exception of George, every chance to save themselves and swim free while Anne sank, even offering them money and lands to betray their friend. He tried particularly hard to persuade his favorite body servant, Henry Norris, to turn on Anne and stay with him, but he was too honorable and noble, too honest a man ever to accuse an innocent person. Henry Norris was a man who valued friendship—real, loyal, and true friendship—more than gold or the worldly goods the King offered him. They were all like that. They could have aped my husband and accepted the King’s bribes, chosen him over Anne, stood up in court, and spewed vile lies about attempts at seduction and assignations that had never taken place, portraying my daughter as an insatiable succubus who tried to lure them into her bed with caresses and costly gifts, and as an unnatural creature who lusted after her own brother as he lusted after her. They could have supported Jane in her evil accusations that Elizabeth was sired by George instead of King Henry, though only a blind fool would have believed that; one had only to look at the child Henry had affectionately dubbed his “red-haired brat” to know that she was a real Tudor rose—a rose with an inner core of steel I believe her father and the world will in time discover. What a pity I will not be there to see it! I would like to have another chance, and to not fail my granddaughter, to be there for her, as I never was for my children in the way that they needed me to be. But sometimes, no matter how much a person desires and longs for a second chance, it is not given.

  But they didn’t do that. They told the truth. They stood by their friends and, with great courage and verve, refuted and denied each and every foul charge—showing them for the lies they were. They even used their sharp wits like razors to shred through the false and flimsy “evidence” produced against them.

  It was all a ragbag of gossip, frayed and rotten fragments of speech and gallant, courtly banter, even snippets of poetry, all taken grossly out of context, wildly misconstrued and misinterpreted. Ludicrous things like dancing with the Queen, or little gifts and trinkets that had been exchanged, were used against them. For one last performance, they made their audience laugh as they deftly punctured each absurd accusation with the clever rapiers of their tongues. They were able to prove that adulteries allegedly committed at certain times and places had never happened at all, and that one or even both of the parties accused of the act were absent from that location or otherwise engaged on that occasion. At the time of one of these alleged adulterous liaisons, Anne was still in bed recovering from childbirth and in no condition to intimately entertain any man, even her own husband.

  But it availed them naught. Only the people in the crowd, the dear, vulgar, and savvy Londoners, believed them, not the jury; they were ambitious men bound to serve and obey or forfeit the King’s favor, and all they had gained, or hoped to gain, from it. The jury did what they were there to do and delivered up a verdict of “guilty” as a wedding gift to King Henry and set him free to marry Mistress Seymour.

  It was hard to believe that they were truly gone, that I would never see their smiling faces or hear their jests and laughter again. They were all such gay and vibrant young men, brilliant, stylish, and creative, the life and soul of every celebration! It was as though the heart of the court had been torn out.

  Sir Henry Norris was the gentle, soft-spoken one, but he was not afraid to speak up in the face of injustice, to bravely espouse the truth, nor did his quiet ways mean he was devoid of fun. Ladies liked to run their hands through the silky flaxen waves of his hair, and he liked to let them. He loved gaiety, dancing, music, poetry, and gambling just as much as the rest of them, otherwise he would never have been a part of that staunch circle of friends. After our long-ago wintertime liaison, he married a sweet girl he loved dearly yet lost shortly after she gave birth to his only son. At the time of his death, he had been considering marrying our cousin Madge Shelton. He enjoyed her perky, mischievous charms, but hesitated over the tales of her flightiness and wanton ways. He had a young son to bring up and wanted to provide a proper, and loving, stepmother who would love him like her very own. But Madge showed no sign of settling, of curbing the amorous exuberance she scattered like flower petals most generously over the court, nor had she ever exhibited any fondness for little ones either, much less any of the patience, dedication, and kind and loving wisdom that make a good mother (being a bad mother, negligent and morally lax as a London trollop, has ta
ught me well how to recognize the ingredients that go into making a good one). And the kind of “love” Madge gave to men, both young and old, suggested he would do better to look elsewhere, for both his own and his little boy’s sake.

  Sir Francis Weston, with his laughing eyes and fire red locks, was known as “Never Say No”; whether it be a loan of coins or a night of coitus he was always game. He was a soft touch for anyone with a tale of woe. With the largesse of a king, as magnificent and magnanimous as an emperor, he went through life spending and giving, racking up debts at an astounding rate. Money flowed through his fingers like water; for him trying to save a penny was like trying to hold back the wind. But he was so likeable no one could stay angry at him for long. To his tailors, goldsmith, and embroiderers he was like a pet peacock, and though he owed them all vast sums of money, they nonetheless adored him and could never say him nay when he came to them, hat in hands, smilingly proclaiming himself “in dire need” of a new doublet or a jeweled chain.

  Sir William Brereton, with his blue black hair and sharp, patrician face, was often taken for the serious one at first glance. But I saw him dancing atop a table with a wine cup in his hand and heart’s ease pansies in his hair too many times to be deceived. He was the best gambler of the bunch, almost as good as Anne, relying on that serious mien from which he could erase all expression when the dice or cards were in his hands and a gleaming pile of coins was on the table.

  Tom Wyatt and Sir Richard Page were, for whatever reason, exonerated. Acquitted of all blame, they never even set foot before the jury. They were held in the Tower until Anne and the others were dead and then released, though neither desired to linger at the court long and opted for diplomatic service instead.