‘Anne of Cleves?’
‘God Send Me Well to Keep.’
‘Katherine Howard?’
Nan makes a face as if the memory is a bitter one: ‘No Other Will but His, poor little liar,’ she says.
‘Katherine of Aragon?’ We both know this one. Katherine was my mother’s beloved friend, a martyr to her faith and to her husband’s terrible infidelity.
‘Humble and Loyal, God bless her. Never was a woman more humbled. Never was one more loyal.’
‘What was Jane’s?’ Jane Seymour will always be the favourite wife, whatever I say or do. She gave him his son and she died before he tired of her. Now he remembers a perfect woman, more saint than wife, and even manages to squeeze out a few hot little tears for her. But my sister, Nan, remembers that Jane died terrified and alone, asking for her husband, and nobody had the courage to tell her that he had ridden away.
‘Bound to Obey and Serve,’ Nan says. ‘Bound hand and foot, if the truth be told.’
‘Bound? Who bound her?’
‘Like a dog, like a slave. Those brothers of hers sold her to him as if she were a trussed chicken. Drove her to market, put her on sale right under Queen Anne’s nose. Trussed her and stuffed her and put her into the oven heat of the queen’s rooms, certain that the king would want a taste.’
‘Don’t.’
Both of my former husbands lived far from court, far from the gossip of London. When I got any London news it was weeks late and through the rosy glow of distance, as told by the travelling pedlars, or in a rare hurried note from Nan. The rumours of royal wives that came and went over the years were like fairy stories told of imaginary beings: the pretty young whore, the fat German duchess, the angelic mother dead in childbirth. I don’t have Nan’s clear-eyed cynicism about the king and his court, I don’t know half what she knows. Nobody knows all the secrets that she has heard. I only came to court in the last months of my husband Latimer’s life to find a complete wall of silence around any mention of the last queen, and no happy recollections of any of them.
‘Your motto had better be a promise of loyalty and humility,’ Nan says. ‘He is raising you to a great position. You have to declare publicly that you’re grateful, that you will serve him.’
‘I’m not naturally a humble woman,’ I say with a little smile.
‘You have to be grateful.’
‘I want something about grace,’ I agree. ‘Knowing that this is the will of God is the only thing that will carry me through.’
‘No, you can’t say anything like that,’ she cautions me. ‘It has to be God in your husband, God in the king.’
‘I want God to use me. He has to help me. I want something like All that I Do Is for God.’
‘All that I Do Is for Him?’ she suggests. ‘Then it sounds as if you’re thinking only of the king.’
‘But it’s a lie,’ I say flatly. ‘I don’t want to use clever words to mean two things at once, like a courtier or a crooked priest. I want my motto to be something clear and truthful.’
‘Oh, don’t be all blunt and Northern!’
‘Just honest, Nan. I just want to be true.’
‘What about: To Be Useful in All that I Do? It doesn’t say useful to who – you know that it’s for God and for the reformed religion, but you don’t have to say that.’
‘To Be Useful in All that I Do,’ I repeat without much enthusiasm. ‘It’s not very inspiring.’
‘The Most Happy was dead in three and a half years,’ Nan says harshly. ‘No Other Will but His had her lover in the jakes. These are mottoes: they aren’t predictions.’
Lady Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, is brought from her little court at Hatfield to be presented to me, her new stepmother – her fourth in seven years – and the king decides that this meeting shall be formal and public, so the nine-year-old child has to walk into the huge presence chamber at Hampton Court, the place crowded with hundreds of people, her back like a poker, her face as white as the muslin at the top of her gown. She looks like a player’s brat, born to walk on a stage made from carts, lonely in a crowd, all show and no solid ground. Anxiety makes her plain, poor little thing, her copper hair scraped back under her hood, mouth pinched, her dark eyes goggling. She walks as her governess has taught her, back stiff, her head rigidly high. As soon as I see her I feel such pity for her, poor little child – her mother beheaded on her father’s orders before she was three years old, her own safety always uncertain as she tumbled overnight from royal heir to royal bastard. Her very name was changed from Princess Elizabeth to Lady Elizabeth and nobody curtseyed any more when they served her bread and milk.
I don’t see a threat in this little mite. I see instead a little girl who never knew her mother, who was not even sure of her name, who rarely saw her father, and has been loved only by servants who cling to their posts by luck and work for nothing when the royal exchequer forgets to pay them.
She hides her terror behind a rigid formality – she has a veneer of royalty like a shell – but I am sure that inside, the soft little creature is cringing like a Whitstable oyster squirted with lemon juice. She curtseys low to her father and then she turns and curtseys to me. She speaks to us in French, expressing her gratitude that her father should allow her into his presence, and her joy in greeting her new honoured mother. I find I am watching her almost as if she is a poor little beast from the menagerie at the Tower, ordered by the king to do tricks.
Then I see a swift glance between Elizabeth and Lady Mary and I realise that they are sisters indeed, both of them afraid of their father, completely dependent on his whim, uncertain of their position in the world and instructed never to put a foot wrong on a most uncertain path. Lady Mary was forced to wait on Elizabeth when she was a baby princess, but this failed to breed enmity. Lady Mary came to love her half-sister, and now she nods encouragingly as the little voice trembles over the French words.
I rise from my seat and step quickly down from the dais. I take Elizabeth’s cold hands and I kiss her forehead. ‘You’re very welcome to court,’ I say to her in English – for who speaks a foreign language to their daughter? ‘And I shall be very glad to be your mother and care for you, Elizabeth. I hope you will see me as a mother indeed, and that we will be a family together. I hope that you will learn to love me and trust that I will love you as my own.’
The colour floods into her pale cheeks, up to her sandy eyebrows, her thin lips tremble. She has no words for a natural act of affection though she had speeches prepared in French.
I turn to the king. ‘Your Majesty, of all the treasures that you have given me, this – your daughter – is the one that gives me most delight.’ I glance at Lady Mary, who is blanched with shock at my sudden informality. ‘Lady Mary I love already,’ I say. ‘And now I will love Lady Elizabeth. When I meet your son my joy will be complete.’
The favourites, Anthony Denny and Edward Seymour, look from me to the king to see if I have forgotten my place and embarrassed him – his commoner wife. But the king is beaming. It seems that this time he wants a wife who is as loving to his children as she is loving to him.
‘You speak to her in English,’ is all he remarks, ‘but she is fluent in French and Latin. My daughter is a scholar like her father.’
‘I speak from my heart,’ I say, and I am rewarded by the warmth of his smile.
HAMPTON COURT PALACE, SUMMER 1543
They tell me I must put aside mourning for my wedding day and wear a gown from the royal wardrobe. The groom of the wardrobe brings one sandalwood chest after another from the great store in London and Nan and I spend a happy afternoon pulling out gowns, looking them over, and taking our pick as Lady Mary and a few other ladies advise. The robes are powdered and stored in linen bags and the sleeves are stuffed with lavender heads to keep away the moth. They smell like wealth: the cool soft velvets and the sleek satin panels have an odour of luxury that I have never known in my life before. I take my choice from the queens’ gowns, in cloth o
f silver and cloth of gold, and I look at all the many sleeves and hoods, and the underskirts. By the time I have made my choice, of a richly embroidered gown in dark colours, it is nearly time for dinner. The ladies pack the spare gowns away, Nan closes the door on everyone and we are alone.
‘I have to talk to you about your wedding night,’ she says.
I look at her grave face, and at once I fear that she somehow knows my secret. She knows I love Thomas and we are lost. I can do nothing but brazen it out. ‘Oh, what is it, Nan? You look very serious? I’m not a virgin bride, you need not warn me of what’s to come. I don’t expect to see anything new,’ I laugh.
‘It is serious. I have to ask you a question. Kat – do you think you are barren?’
‘What a thing to ask me! I’m only thirty-one!’
‘But you never got a child from Lord Latimer?’
‘God didn’t bless us, and he was away from home, and in his later years he wasn’t . . .’ I make a dismissive gesture. ‘Anyway. Why do you ask?’
‘Just this,’ she says grimly. ‘The king cannot bear to lose another baby. So you can’t conceive one. It’s not worth the risk.’
I am touched. ‘He would be so grieved?’
She tuts with impatience. Sometimes I irritate my London-bred sister with my ignorance. I am a country lady – worse even than that – a lady from the North of England, far from all the gossip, innocent as the Northern skies, blunt as a farmer.
‘No, of course not. It’s not grief, for him. He never feels grief.’ She glances at the bolted door and draws me further into the room so that no-one, not even someone with their ear pressed to the wooden panels, could hear us.
‘I don’t believe that he can give you a baby that can stay in the womb. I don’t think he can make a healthy child.’
I step closer so that we are mouth to ear. ‘This is treason, Nan. Even I know it. You’re mad to say such a thing to me, just before my wedding day.’
‘I’d be mad if I didn’t. Kateryn, I swear to you that he can’t make anything but miscarriages and stillbirths.’
I lean back to see her grave face. ‘This is bad,’ I say.
‘I know.’
‘You think I will miscarry?’
‘Or worse.’
‘What on earth could be worse?’
‘If you were to birth a child, it might be a monster.’
‘A what?’
She is as close as if we were confessing, her eyes on my face. ‘It’s the truth. We were told never to speak of it. It’s a deep secret. No-one who was there has ever spoken of it.’
‘You’d better speak now,’ I say grimly.
‘Queen Anne Boleyn – her death sentence was not the gossip and slander and lies they collected against her: all that nonsense about dozens of lovers. Anne Boleyn gave birth to her own fate. Her death sentence was the little monster.’
‘She had a little monster?’
‘She miscarried something malformed, and the midwives were hired spies.’
‘Spies?’
‘They went at once to the king with what they had seen, what had been birthed into their waiting hands. It was not a child born before its time, not a normal child. It was half fish, half beast. It was a monster with a face cleaved in two and a spine flayed open like something they might show pickled in a jar at a village fair.’
I tear my hands from hers and cover my ears. ‘My God, Nan . . . I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear this.’
She pulls my hands away and shakes me. ‘As soon as they told the king, he took it as proof that she had used witchcraft to conceive, that she had lain with her brother to get a hell-born child.’
I look at her blankly.
‘And Cromwell got him the evidence to prove it,’ she said. ‘Cromwell could have proved that Our Lady was a drunk; that man had a sworn witness for anything. But he was commanded by the king. The king would not let anyone think that he could give a woman a monster.’ She looks at my horrified face and presses on: ‘So you think on this: if you miscarry, or if you give him a damaged babe, he will say the same about you, and send you to your death.’
‘He can’t say such a thing,’ I say flatly. ‘I’m not another Queen Anne. I’m not going to lie with my brother and dozens of others. We heard of her even in Richmondshire. We knew what she did. Nobody could say such a thing of me.’
‘He would rather believe that he was cuckolded ten times over than admit that there is anything wrong with him. What you heard in Richmondshire – the king’s cuckolding – was announced by the king himself. You knew it, because he made sure that everyone knew it. He made sure the country knew that she was at fault. You don’t understand, Kateryn. He has to be perfect, in every way. He cannot bear that anyone should think, even for a moment, that he is in the wrong. He cannot be seen as less than perfect. His wife has to be perfect too.’
I look as blank as I feel. ‘This is hogswill.’
‘It is true,’ Nan exclaims. ‘When Queen Katherine miscarried he blamed it on God and said it was a false marriage. When Queen Anne gave birth to the monster he blamed it on witchcraft. If Jane had lost her baby he would have blamed it on her, she knew it, we all knew it. And if you miscarry it will be your fault, not his. And you will be punished.’
‘But what can I do?’ I ask fiercely. ‘I don’t know what I can do? How can I possibly prevent it?’
In answer she brings a little purse from the pocket of her gown and shows it to me.
‘What’s that?’
‘This is fresh rue,’ she says. ‘You drink a tea made from it after he has had you. Every time. It prevents a child before it is even formed.’
I don’t take the little purse she holds out to me. I put out one finger and poke it.
‘This is a sin,’ I say uncertainly. ‘It must be a sin. This is the sort of rubbish that the old women peddle behind the hiring fair. It probably doesn’t even work.’
‘It’s a sin to walk knowingly towards your own destruction,’ she corrects me. ‘And you will do that if you don’t prevent a conception. If you give birth to a monster, as Queen Anne did, he will name you as a witch and kill you for it. His pride won’t allow him another dead baby. Everyone would know it was a fault in him if another wife, his sixth healthy wife, birthed a monster or lost a baby. Think! It would be his ninth loss.’
‘Eight dead babies?’ I can see a family of ghosts, a nursery of corpses.
She nods in silence and holds out the purse of rue. In silence, I take it.
‘They say it smells awful. We’ll get the maid to bring you a jug of hot water in the morning, and brew it ourselves, alone.’
‘This is terrible,’ I say quietly. ‘I’ve given up my own desires –’ I have a pulse like a stab of lust in the belly when I think of my own desires – ‘and now you – my own sister – give me poison to drink.’
She lays her warm cheek to mine. ‘You have to live,’ she says with quiet passion. ‘Sometimes, at court, a woman has to do anything to survive. Anything. You have to survive.’
There is plague in the City of London and the king rules that our wedding shall be small and private with no crowds of common people that might bring infections. It will not take place in a great ceremony in the abbey, the fountains are not going to flow with wine, the people are not to roast oxen and dance in the streets. They are to take physic and stay in their homes, and nobody is allowed to come from the pestilential city to the clean river and the green meadows of the countryside around Hampton Court.
This, my third wedding, is to take place in the queen’s oratory, a small, beautifully decorated room off the queen’s chambers. I remind myself that this will be my private chapel, just off my closet, where I will be able to meditate and pray alone when this is all over. Once I have said my vows this very room – and all the others on the queen’s side – will be mine, for my exclusive use.
The room is crowded, and the courtiers shuffle back as I enter in my new gown, and walk slowly towards th
e king. He stands, a man-mountain, as broad as he is tall, before the altar, which is a blaze of light: hot white wax candles in branching golden candelabra on a jewel-encrusted altar cloth, gold and silver jugs, bowls, pyxes, plates, and, towering over it all, a great golden crucifix studded with diamonds. All the treasures looted from the greatest religious houses of the kingdom have silently found their way into the king’s keeping and now blaze, like pagan sacrifices, on the altar, overwhelming the open pages of the English Bible, choking the simplicity of the chapel till the little room is more like a treasure hoard than a place of worship.
My hand is lost in the king’s big sweating palm. Before us, Bishop Stephen Gardiner holds out the book of service and reads the marriage vows in the steady voice of a man who has seen queens come and go and quietly improved his own position. The bishop was a friend of my second husband, Lord Latimer, and shared his belief that the monasteries should serve their communities, that the church should be unchanged but for the head, that the wealth of the chantries and the abbeys should never have been stolen by greedy new men, and that the country now is poorer for throwing priests and nuns into the marketplaces and breaking the sacred shrines.
The service is in simple English, but the oration is in Latin, as if the king and his bishop want to remind everyone that God speaks Latin, and the poor and the uneducated, and almost all women, will never understand Him.
Behind the king, in a smiling crowd, are his most personal friends and courtiers. Edward Seymour, Thomas’s older brother – who will never know that I sometimes search his dark eyes for a family resemblance to the man that I love – Nan’s husband, William Herbert, standing with Anthony Browne, and Thomas Heneage. Behind me are the ladies of the court. First among them are the king’s daughters, Lady Mary and Lady Elizabeth, and his niece Lady Margaret Douglas. Behind the three of them come my sister, Nan, Catherine Brandon and Jane Dudley. Other faces swim together; it is hot and the room is overcrowded. The king bellows his oath as if he were the herald announcing a triumph. I speak my words clearly, my voice steady, and then it is done and he turns to me, and his sweating face is beaming. He bends down to me, and now, amid a ripple of applause, he kisses the bride.