Chapter 2
Greenwich Palace, Autumn
GEORGE IS MASTER of the buckhounds, and it is his task to make sure that the hunt goes off perfectly for all the court.
The king and all his friends are magnificent horsemen, trained for a cavalry charge, and they come out into the yard laughing and shouting bets on the day’s sport.
They will hunt stags and bucks this late in the season, and they make crude jokes about being bucks and stags themselves.
They jump up on the mounting blocks as the grooms bring the horses, who are sidling and pulling at their reins in eagerness. The king rides heavier every year; his horse is a big Chapman horse, well-muscled with strong shoulders and huge haunches. George is at his side on his new chestnut mare.
‘She’ll never last the day,’ the king says to George.
‘Would you put a guinea on it, Sire?’
The king laughs, and the bet is laid.
Agnes is riding a neat grey, and I see her mount and gather up the reins. My groom brings me my roan, a gift from the Duke of Norfolk, and I get into the saddle and bring her up alongside Agnes.
‘Don’t crowd the king,’ I tell her. ‘He’s riding with my husband the viscount.’
‘If he asks for me, I’ll have to ride beside him.’ She smiles at me from under her green velvet cap. ‘Or d’you want me to tell him that you forbid it?’
‘I want you to behave like a young woman who knows her place,’ I snap. ‘It is an honour to be in the queen’s rooms; it is an art to be a courtier. It is not jostling for favours like a fishwife in a marketplace.’
‘Of course,’ she says simply. ‘But the queen was a maid-of-honour just as I am now. Her sister Mary too. Didn’t they jostle?’
My reprimand is drowned out by the baying of the hounds and the blast of the horns as the dogs pour out of the kennel yard into the great park, across the public highway, where the common people wait and cheer as we go by.
Agnes shows me a small triumphant smile and loosens her reins to let her horse go forward with the others.
We ride deep into the forest of the great park and then wait, while the hounds cast about for a scent and the huntsmen shout their names and watch them trace the ground and turn and cast again.
Then, suddenly, the first hound bays, a great excited roar, and all the hounds peel away after him, the whippers-in behind them and the king ahead of George and behind him, everyone else at full gallop, wherever the dogs lead, through streams, over fallen trees, and bursting out into the park over hedges and ditches.
I ride cautiously at the back of the hunt, going round hedges rather than jumping them, finding my way along grassy lanes rather than tearing across rough ground.
But the men ride as if their lives depend on it, and some of the ladies recklessly keep up with them.
The kill comes quickly with the stag at bay, and the huntsman hold off the hounds, and three of them get hold of the poor beast, hauling its head upwards for the king to strike the murderous slash across his throat.
It is the perfect end to a long, exciting chase – the creature defeated, helpless before the king, and then the spurt of pumping blood.
Excited by the chase, wiping his bloodstained dagger, seeing that Anne has not yet arrived in her litter, the king beckons Agnes to ride beside him to the little city of tents the servants have set up for us in a forest clearing.
The horses halt, and the king swings heavily down from his saddle and reaches up for her.
She drops her reins and puts her hands on his shoulders, as if he were her groom, and he lifts her down from the saddle.
He slides her down his body, holding her close even though half the court is watching and half of them will report to their patrons that the king has a new favourite.
The Spanish party will celebrate putting their spy in the royal bed to supplant the Protestant queen.
‘Stop her,’ George hisses in my ear. ‘Anne’ll be here any moment.’
I can hear the hoofbeats of a dozen horses, Anne’s guard around her mule litter, her mother riding on one side. The king hears it too, and abruptly releases Agnes and turns to greet his wife. He helps Anne out of her litter, tells her that he has had a great day’s sport, and escorts her to dinner.
She is looking her best, in a dark-red riding jacket with a gold net over her black hair, as if she has ridden here on a high-bred palfrey.
She asks the king if George’s new mare kept up; she turns and laughs with George and Nicholas Carew; she strips off her red leather gloves and washes her hands in the golden basin.
She is at her best at these informal events.
She glows so brightly that she makes the king shine beside her, boosting his pride, making him feel equally beautiful, equally clever, equally beloved in a court of lovers.
The cooks have set up charcoal burners to roast meat, and ovens to bake bread, and the sweet-smelling smoke hangs in the dappled sunshine and makes everyone hurry to their places at the rustic tables.
There are crocks of thick creamy butter to go with three sorts of bread, huge wheels of cheeses, fish in crisp skins, and crayfish and oysters in their shells.
Anne throws back her head to swallow an oyster from the shell, looks at the king and licks her lips, sensual as a cat. The king flushes and waves the silver platter away from her. ‘They’re not fit for you in your condition.’
Smilingly, she agrees; but she misunderstands.
He does not mean her fertility; he means her condition as a queen.
He does not like to see Anne sucking on oyster shells like a woman with earthly desires and a healthy appetite.
Now that they are married, he does not want a real woman.
He wants a wife who is above other women: a saintly wife and a remote queen.
They bring roasted game, pheasant and woodcock, and pies of beef and lamb, honey puddings and mead cakes and pond-pudding with a ball of spiced butter at its sweet heart.
The king drinks deeply of strong red wine; his server refills his glass again and again, and he toasts the huntsmen and the deer, the day and the ladies.
Anne, at his side, is drinking water with a splash of wine, stone-cold sober while the king laughs more and more loudly at his own jokes.
He repeats a story about hunting in France that he told at the beginning of the meal, and his men roar with laughter as if they are hearing it for the very first time; the ladies echo the false merriment but cast a nervous look towards his stone-faced wife.
Anne won her place in this court as the young woman who would stay and drink with the men and laugh with the king.
She refused to withdraw with Queen Katherine, who always left as soon as her young husband became rowdy.
No one ever told a bawdy jest to the Spanish queen, but Anne was the first to tell a joke, the first to challenge the king to a riddle or a poem or a game.
She made herself the heart of the laughing, lovemaking, singing, noisy court.
No one was over thirty years old; no one cared for the rules in Anne’s court as it undermined the sombre dignity of the older queen.
But now Anne is the queen, her rival court is now the only court, and no one quite knows what to do as this new Anne: sober, pale, and quiet, sits beside her hard-drinking husband while he starts making toasts to her ladies.
‘To the beautiful Lady Rochford!’ he bellows, and the court raises their gold cups to me, and I have to stand and smile and drink a toast in reply to the king.
‘To the beautiful countess, Elizabeth Somerset!’ the king declares. ‘Our favourite county!’
Somebody shouts that he has been in Somerset often, and Elizabeth’s brother, Anthony Browne, slams down his gold cup and glares at her.
But the king sees nothing; he is working his way through the ladies.
I can see at once where this is going and what is going to happen next; but I am powerless to stop it.
‘To Lady Margaret Douglas, my dear niece,’ he says.
All the men cheer, and Lord Thom Howard – the Duke of Norfolk’s baby-faced half-brother – raises his cup to Margaret in a silent pledge.
She rises to her feet and takes the toast, her eyes on Lord Thom, and then the king shouts loudly: ‘To the most beautiful lady of your heart! And you must each drink to your own choice!’
The men roar with laughter, and the women flutter and smile.
Some wives shoot cautionary glances at their husbands, the men rise to their feet and raise their cups to their favourite flirts.
Some old lords leer at their second wives, young enough to be their daughters.
Charles Brandon’s pretty ward is now his duchess, and young Catherine Brandon stands up to drink in reply to her husband – old enough to be her grandfather.
This is all part of the game of courtly love that the king likes to play; but the dividing line between his prudishness and his rowdy joy is always hard to guess.
The old queen drew a clean line – her ladies were strictly raised and modestly behaved.
But Anne is trapped in the paradox of mistress turned wife, poacher turned gamekeeper.
She has to play the part of a Spanish duenna and yet be as exciting and promising as a new lover.
She must be both lascivious favourite and dignified queen: it is a paradoxos. It can’t be done.