Greenwich Palace, Spring. 1536 #4
‘It must be a great concern for her? How are we to get a prince if the king is unmanned?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Exactly.’
‘Does she do nothing to help him? To assist him?’
I think of George telling me that he got the king drunk, so Anne could mount him before he lost the will, that she must do anything: French practices, nakedness. ‘She does everything a good wife should do.’
‘Kissing, kissing with tongues, that sort of thing?’
I blush. ‘Whatever is needed.’
‘Sortilèges. French practices?’
‘Nothing forbidden,’ I tell him firmly.
‘No potions or herbs? No spells?’
‘She drinks a posset,’ I say unwillingly. ‘The midwife gave it her . . . After the last . . . the last time.’
‘The last dead-birth?’
I nod.
‘And that was the second?’ he confirms, softly as a midwife himself, as gentle as the egg woman in the hen coop.
‘We denied the first.’
‘And the ladies all know the king is unmanned?’
‘No, of course not – these are private matters between husband and wife . . . except that we all spend all our lives trying to encourage him,’ I say in a little rush of resentment. ‘It’s hardly a secret. You know – you do it yourself?’
‘I?’ His blackcurrant eyes widen in astonishment that he might be thought part of the court’s ceaseless encouragement of the king’s potency.
‘When we tell the king how much we admire him, how beautiful Anne is, how everyone is in love with her, how he is the only man who can hold her?’ I challenge him. ‘When everyone talks all the time about his strength and his manliness? His good looks?’
‘You say this and don’t mean it?’ He looks astounded.
I ignore his false face. ‘We all speak to encourage love.’
‘She has created a court of constant love affairs to inspire him to love? To incite him? To arouse him? She creates sinful excitement with other men for this purpose? The masque is now The Most Desiring?’
‘No! The Most Desirable . . .’
‘But some of these love affairs are real,’ he pursues.
‘Of course they are. The game of courtly love often overflows into real love. Lord Thom and Margaret Douglas are courting, and Anne Parr and William Herbert, and Henry Norris and Margaret Shelton . . .’
‘I’m just a simple man. I don’t understand this game of courtly love.’
I smile at him, suddenly confident. ‘Master Secretary, you understand perfectly well. This has been the entertainment of every royal court since Eleanor of Aquitaine.’
‘Eleanor of Aquitaine? The adulteress?’
‘Well, yes. But that’s not the point.’
‘The point is that the court makes a game of adultery around the queen, to encourage the king in his love for her? Because everyone knows that he needs encouragement?’ My friend Thomas Cromwell smiles kindly at me.
‘Don’t worry, Lady Rochford. All this, I know already.
I use you as my touchstone for truth, not as a witness to be recorded. ’
He rises to his feet, and I understand that our meeting is over.
‘I thought you were preparing for a trial,’ I remark.
He shakes his head and opens the inner door for me and bows as I pass into the gap between two doors, and open the outer door into the shadowy stone hall. The double doors mean that no one can eavesdrop.
‘But what was that about Lady Margaret Douglas?’ he asks me very quietly.
A man is waiting outside – Dr Richard Sampson: Anne’s expert on church law. This is the advisor who produced all the church law to end the king’s marriage to Queen Katherine. Master Cromwell does not acknowledge him; I assume he is to be invisible.
‘She’s courting Lord Thom, my uncle’s young half-brother,’ I say quietly, one eye on Dr Sampson, wondering what he is doing here. ‘He gave her a cramp ring.’
‘Does she suffer much from cramps?’
‘Not now,’ I say. ‘Not now she’s got a cramp ring.’
He gives a little chuckle at that. ‘Anyway, nothing out of the ordinary for you ladies?’ he confirms.
I shake my head. ‘Just courtly love.’
‘Tell me if it goes further,’ he says casually. ‘She’s half-sister to the King of Scotland. He won’t want her marrying a Howard. Whatever you Howards would like.’
He turns to Dr Sampson, who bows to me in silence, with a smile, and walks past me into Master Cromwell’s private room to sit on the same chair where I was seated, and, no doubt, offer Master Cromwell information that he knows already.
WE HAVE TO plan a merry May Day for the king even though he cannot ride as his leg wound is still too bad. We declare loudly that Anne has begged him not to ride, she is so fearful for his safety – but the truth is far worse.
‘He’s afraid,’ George says quietly, as if fear is a shameful thing, looking over the raked sand of the tiltyard.
‘He dreams of being crushed under his horse, and he wakes up screaming. He keeps remembering it. It’s as if he has realised, for the first time, that he is mortal. He’s afraid that he’s going to die.’
‘We’ll create a joust of poetry and music and let him win,’ Anne says, gesturing at the space, as if she can fill it with dancers and musicians and drown out the terrible shriek of metal as the heavy horse went down on the steel-clad man.
‘Something to make him feel young and strong again, the finest of everyone at court.’
‘A joust without jousting?’ he asks.
‘Why not?’ she says grimly. ‘Isn’t everything just for show now?’
We plan minutely, choreographing every move.
There will be jousting at the centre of it all, but only the young men will ride.
George and Henry Norris are principal challengers, and they will wear green for Tudor and green for spring, entering the arena one after another with their ladies’ favours on their lances.
Each jouster will recite a poem or sing a song on the theme of love on a May Day morning, and the king, seated in his viewing balcony with his lame leg hidden, propped on a stool, will reply with a poem of his own, as if he has composed it in that moment.
Thomas Wyatt will be at hand to prompt him so that he looks as if he is composing poetry on the spot.
It will be a joust of wit and poetry – and the king’s cleverness will defeat everyone else.
The horse-riding will be the least important part, and when it is over, there will be a celebration dinner with more poetry and songs and dancing.
But the dances will be for show, like the jousting; neither Anne nor the king will dance.
There will be no tall king coming in disguise to surprise us this year; he cannot stand without pain, and his limping pace makes him furious, like a wounded bear at a baiting.
The maids are sewing ribbons on their headbands, with Anne irritably watching from her great chair at the centre of the queen’s presence chamber, when George comes lounging into the room with Henry Norris.
He bows generally to us all and then goes to Anne and kisses her hand.
Anne waves Henry into a stool at her side and spreads embroidery threads on her knees so that he can sort them.
He bends his dark handsome head into her lap, so close that he could be kissing her knees.
‘Where’s Mark?’ George asks, looking round. ‘I wanted him to play while I sing my song at the joust.’
‘I’ll play for you,’ Mary Shelton offers at once.
‘No, it’s in the jousting area,’ George says.
‘Oh! Can’t I go disguised as your squire?’
They both look at Anne, who must say at once that this is not allowed. A lady cannot cavort in squire’s clothes in the tiltyard before anyone who has paid for a seat.
‘I’ll come, too!’ Anne says immediately. ‘What a picture we’ll make! George, you shall dress me in your livery, and we can both be masked . . .’
I gently lean to whisper. ‘Better not,’ I say.
‘Why not?’ she demands. ‘I’d look wonderful as a page boy.’
I shake my head. ‘Too wonderful.’
She shrugs her arm from my hand. ‘Oh, very well.’ She thinks for a moment. ‘But if I’m not going, then Mary’s certainly not dressing up as a squire and showing off. You’ll have to get one of the king’s musicians or one of the choristers. There are enough wanton boys to choose from, God knows.’
George frowns at her bad temper and looks to me for help.
I shrug. Now the old queen is dead and the Spanish party silent, Anne has no enemies to plot against. Time hangs heavy in this fairytale life.
‘I’ll find one,’ George says agreeably. ‘D’you have a favourite? I know they are all in love with you.’
‘There’s a pretty lad called Peter Last,’ Anne volunteers. ‘He blushes like a rose when he sees me.’
‘Then the Last shall be First,’ George says pleasantly. ‘I’ll write a love song to you, and he can sing it.’
‘Won’t you write a song for me?’ Elizabeth Somerset asks. George turns and whispers something in her ear and she giggles and draws him away.
As if she cannot bear a moment of George’s attention on another woman, Anne rounds on Henry Norris: ‘And what are you doing here, sitting mumchance?’ she demands.
‘You should be cooing like a dove to your betrothed, not getting my embroidery threads in a tangle? When are you going to marry poor Margaret?’
‘I’ll marry in my own good time.’ Henry leans a little closer over the silk threads spread out on her knee, and touches one and then another, resting his finger on each one, so that she feels the warmth of his finger through her gown on her thigh.
‘Besides, you have set me a quest to find the perfect rose – and I think it’s here – not in the silks but in the blush in your lips. ’
‘I don’t believe you have any honourable intention towards Margaret at all,’ she scolds him, her mood sweetened by the flattery. ‘Why d’you haunt my rooms all day? Like a lovesick ghost!’
‘Because I am a ghost that has died of love!’ he says extravagantly. He takes up a red thread and winds it around her finger above her wedding ring. ‘It’s only you, for me,’ he says. ‘No one else.’