St Andrew’s Abbey, Rochester, Kent, January 1540
St Andrew’s Abbey, Rochester, Kent, January
SHE IS A pretty young woman in her early twenties – slim and white-skinned, though her gown is padded to make her as big as a horse, and the hood on her head is like the roof of a house.
I am to be chief lady-in-waiting again. Who knows better than I how to run the queen’s rooms for my fourth queen?
I curtsey to her and suggest that she change into the gowns we have brought from the royal wardrobe before she continues her journey to London.
She widens her brown eyes at me, and she smiles: ‘Was?’ she says encouragingly. ‘Was?’
‘God save me, does she not speak English?’ I exclaim to the Duchess of Suffolk, who greeted her at Dover.
Catherine Brandon is twenty years old now, and she’s been married to old Charles Brandon since she was fourteen – she should know better than to giggle.
‘You’re the first person to wait for an answer,’ she explains.
‘Everyone else reads aloud the ceremonial welcome in Latin, and she nods and smiles and doesn’t speak.
My lord husband bellows at her like she was his cavalry.
He hasn’t noticed she never answers. I don’t blame her – never answer him myself if I can help it. ’
I glare at Susannah Hornebolt, the artist. ‘You were supposed to teach her English!’
She spreads her hands in apology; I can see a stain of paint on her forefinger.
‘You’ve spent all your time painting,’ I accuse her.
‘No – I am teaching Her Grace English – she is making good progress.’
I turn to the silent queen-to-be. ‘Francais? Parlez-vous francais?’ I ask her.
The pretty smile widens, but she shakes her head.
‘Latin?’
She laughs. ‘Kannst du Deutsch?’
‘Yes,’ I reply in German. ‘A very little. But we’ll have to teach you English at once.’
She claps her hands at my reply and says in German: ‘Of course I must speak English. I have started to learn, but everyone speaks so quickly!’
‘I will speak slow,’ I say in measured tones, and Katheryn Howard, a new maid-of-honour, niece to the duke, giggles like a naughty schoolgirl, nudges Catherine Brandon, and whispers: ‘I vill speak slow.’
I go with the queen to her bedroom to look at the gowns in her heavy travelling chests.
She refuses to wear English dress but insists that she will make her grand entry to London in her best cloth of gold gown that her mother told her to wear, with a hood that looks like an anvil stuck on her head.
There is no point arguing with a queen in a language that only she speaks fluently, so I leave her ladies to dress her in her ugly heavy gowns.
I am going to my own rooms, when a manservant asks me to come to the hall.
I see at once why I have been summonsed.
Half a dozen gentlemen are in the hall, boisterously swinging marbled masquing cloaks around their shoulders, throwing off large glasses of wine, musicians with them, dancers trying out steps around them.
In the middle is the noisiest of them all, an instantly recognisable figure: broad as a beam, swathed in a cloak swirling with colours, a hat pushed back from his wide face, a brightly coloured mask stretched from forehead to smiling mouth.
I drop into a curtsey, my hand to my heart as if I am breathless with surprise.
‘You guessed!’ he says. ‘You guessed at once! I had a bet that you would! Didn’t I say that Jane Boleyn would know me anywhere? In any disguise?’
The others whoop and laugh and clash their gold cups together in a toast to me.
‘Now, Jane, you’re going to have to join our band and be sworn to keep our secret.’
I come up, smiling. ‘Your Majesty, it could be no one else but you! So tall and so handsome and so gaily dressed! And what lord but you would ride all this way to surprise his bride?’
‘I am a fairytale prince out of the old Romances!’ He roars at the thought. ‘I did as my brother did all those years ago – he rode halfway to greet his bride on the road to London. Everyone said he was a true knight errant, and now I have outdone him.’
‘You have far outdone him.’ I pick up my cue, and one of the men behind him, richly dressed and masked, shouts: ‘Hurrah!’
‘I will keep your secret,’ I promise. ‘But I must go and get your bride ready for her surprise.’
I am absolutely determined that she won’t wear her ugly hood when she meets the king, and I turn to go back up the stairs to her rooms.
‘Not so! Not so!’ The king grabs me by my sleeve and then draws me down the stairs with an arm around my waist. His breath is a hot gale of stale wine in my face.
‘I’m not having you spoiling our surprise, Jane.
I mean it. You shall stay with us and have a cape and a mask of your own, and you shall join my band.
We’ll come in with music while she’s watching the bull baiting – we have it all planned.
We’ll dance with her and her ladies, and you shan’t betray us. ’
‘I won’t tell, I swear.’ I am desperate to get her out of that ridiculous hood and into a low-cut gown. ‘But she’ll want to look her best. You must surprise her at her best.’
‘Is she not pretty as she is?’ he asks, instantly suspicious, his eyes sharp through his mask. ‘Pretty as my Jane?’
‘Very pretty,’ I say at once. ‘Who is a better judge than you? Who catches a likeness better than Master Holbein? You couldn’t be mistaken in your choice. I just want to—’
‘No, no,’ he says. He hands me to Sir Anthony Browne, whose evidence brought my sister-in-law to the French swordsman and my husband to the block.
We greet each other with clasped hands and warm kisses.
‘Sir Anthony! Give my sweetheart Jane a cape and a mask and a hood!’ the king exclaims. ‘She is my man for the night!’
I laugh with everyone, as if this is the best joke in the world, and Sir Anthony takes me to the back of the hall and gives me a little silvered looking-glass to hold, as he swirls a marbled cape around my shoulders and turns up the collar.
‘I have to go to her . . .’ I say urgently.
‘First swop your hood for a bonnet,’ he says, and with a strangely intimate gesture, he unpins my hood and replaces it with a man’s hat, pulled down over my eyes like his own. He ties the brightly coloured mask on my face and pulls up the hood of the cape so that my face is in shadow.
I look at myself in the mirror and see that my anxiety does not show behind a smiling face, which is hidden by the mask, and concealed by a hood.
‘I wouldn’t know myself,’ I say.
‘We all have many faces,’ he replies. ‘Come on – we’re going in.’
‘Wait,’ I say. ‘I have to—’
But he takes me by the hand and makes me follow the others up the broad stone stairs.
‘Where’s Lord Cromwell?’ I demand desperately as the noise from the courtyard below swells to tumult and I guess the bull has been loosed and they are throwing dogs into the yard for him to gore.
Sir Anthony laughs recklessly. ‘Left behind in London! This is courtier work! Not for an old counting-house clerk!’ He pulls me by my hand up the staircase.
‘Tonight’s our night! The king and his comrades!
King goes in first, we come behind, musicians follow us!
King greets her, gives her a gift, steals a kiss, musicians strike up, we all dance. Usual. Dance is a gavotte.’
‘But she won’t know him,’ I say urgently. ‘Sir Anthony, let me go and tell her. She won’t know that she’s supposed to recognise him only after he unmasks. She doesn’t know to pretend not to know him before unmasking. She doesn’t know how it’s done . . .’
He laughs. I think he’s too drunk to understand that this is going to go terribly wrong; but in any case, it’s too late. The door before us opens, and we pour into the queen’s great chamber.
She’s at the window, looking down at the bull baiting below.
She looks up when we come in, and her smile of welcome dies as she sees the troop of drunk men, strangely masked, with musicians coming in behind them.
For a moment, she looks at bay, like the bull in the courtyard below, facing the dogs running in to torment her.
Sir Anthony has tight hold of my hand and is readying me for the dance.
‘Let me go!’ I wrench my hand from his. ‘I have to warn her—’
The king lurches at the still figure at the window, and, horrifyingly, he pulls her into his arms and plants a hearty kiss on her lips.
She recoils immediately, jumping back, shoving him away from her, looking around for her guards.
She shouts something at him in German. She wipes her mouth on her sleeve, and terribly, she spits on the floor.
She whirls around to turn her back to him, snapping an order at her servants that they throw him and all the half-drunken minions out of her rooms.
The musicians shudder to silence; everyone is frozen with horror.
The king stands alone, his mask pulled half-off; he looks completely stricken.
He has kissed his bride, and she spat his kiss out of her mouth.
He looks nothing like the most handsome prince in Europe – he looks like an overweight man of nearly fifty who has been knocked back hard.
He looks around, as if for help. He looks around for someone to laugh it off.
He looks around as if his legs are weak and he wants to sit down, to sit on a throne, so everyone knows he is king.
Nobody moves. Nobody says a word.
And then little Katheryn Howard, the newest arrival, the most junior of all the maids, trips forward. ‘The king!’ she coos. ‘So handsome! I would know him anywhere. See, my lady! It is our handsome king!’
She breaks the spell that holds us frozen.
Catherine Brandon darts forward and tells the queen that this is King Henry and not – as she thought – a drunk fool with a band of mummers.
Anne turns back to him, sinks into a curtsey, scarlet with mortification, and Henry laughs it off with a harsh, ragged laugh.
Everyone laughs with him, wide-mouthed, as if they were shouting. The musicians bravely strike up the gavotte again but straggle off into silence when nobody takes a partner, nobody moves. Nobody wants to dance a gavotte with its climax of a kiss, seeing how the last kiss was received.
I look at Sir Anthony. ‘You should’ve let me prepare her.’
He is beaming. ‘Better that the king sees Lord Cromwell’s choice as she truly is.’
Something is happening here that I don’t understand. ‘She was the king’s choice—’
‘From a short list of two Lutheran duchesses.’ He takes my hand and kisses it. ‘She’s Cromwell’s choice. His lordship picked her for his own good reasons. Now he’ll have to answer for them. And if the king doesn’t like her – Lord Cromwell will have to answer for that, too.’
I realise that this is not a masque that has gone wrong; this has all gone exactly right.
The king’s first meeting with Cromwell’s bride is a disaster; but the Howard girl saves the day.
I have just witnessed the first move in the Howards’ brilliant bid for the throne, and another Howard girl is in play.
I send a letterlocked note that night by one of Lord Cromwell’s messengers. I mark it haste, and know that the man will ride all night.