Richmond Palace, Summer 1540
Richmond Palace, Summer
WE TELL THE queen that we have come to Richmond to avoid the plague and the heat of the summer city and that the king will join us shortly. We embroider this lie by assuring her that the king always leaves London in summer on a progress to beautiful country houses and that she will enjoy this.
Katheryn Howard is missing: the Norfolk barge took her on the high tide to her family house at Lambeth before we embarked.
She did not say goodbye to the queen, nor to any of the ladies but only to her bedfellow and cousin, Catherine Carey, who says that she cried a great deal and said that she would never be happy again.
For once, I think that the foolish child is right.
She has the most glorious prospect of any girl in England – but I doubt that she will find happiness.
We tell the queen that Kitty Howard’s step-grandmother, Agnes Howard the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk has been taken ill and that Kitty has gone back to Lambeth.
The queen glances at me, as if to ask me if this is another lie, like all the others we are telling her now, but she can read nothing from my expressionless face. ‘But she will come back?’
‘I don’t know when.’
Nobody tells the queen that parliament is in daily session, but in early July, we hear that they have passed a new law to say that a second marriage, undertaken after one that was not consummated, is legal and not bigamous.
The queen does not ask me what this law means, and I don’t volunteer that the king can marry a new wife at once; he need not wait for any annulment, all he has to do is prove his marriage to her was not consummated.
Three days later the king’s new advisors – old noblemen and favourites, not one scholar or lawyer among them – are rowed upriver in two barges, with her new ambassador Herr Harst. I stand beside the queen as her lord chamberlain tells her that the privy council has implored the king to hold an inquiry into their marriage.
Her ambassador is silently furious; her receiver general is embarrassed.
I am as empty of emotion as a mask laid aside.
They give long speeches in English that are translated laboriously into bad German by that established liar Richard Rich.
Queen Anne gives no answer, not in English nor German.
In the afternoon, they come again to explain what was completely clear to her from the day I told her in chapel: that she must pretend to believe a string of lies.
They tell her that she was precontracted to the Duke of Lorraine when she married the king, that God warned the king of this on their wedding night, and that their marriage was never consummated on all the nights after.
‘You’ll have to see them again,’ I tell her. ‘You’ll have to reply that it shall be as the king wishes.’
She looks at me. ‘Whatever he wishes? Whatever it might be?’
‘It’s not the king you need fear,’ I tell her.
‘The king has new advisors, and I don’t know what they will do.
They have all the power, and you have none.
Your brother will not defend you; he’s in France.
He’s given up on you and on England. You’ve got no choice but to accept.
’ I hesitate. ‘I beg you to accept . . .’
‘It is not the king who does this?’ she asks me.
I shake my head. ‘He doesn’t do anything – they do everything for him, before he even says what he wants. Now, he wants a new wife.’
The king’s men come in: Charles Brandon, the king’s brother-in-law, and Thomas Audley, sailing before a new wind.
William Fitzwilliam comes in with Bishop Stephen Gardiner.
Sir William Kingston the constable of the Tower, who escorted my husband George to the scaffold and Anne to the block, follows them.
My heart misses a beat. Has he come to arrest his queen?
Like he arrested his friends, Lord Lisle and Thomas Cromwell?
She tries to stand to greet them, but when the five of them march in – so hard-faced and old, so unflinching before her young prettiness – her legs fail her, and she falls back into her chair.
Charles Brandon – the most senior and the stupidest – hardly waits for her to recover before he says that they have documents to prove that she was precontracted to the Duke of Lorraine.
Ambassador Harst blusters in German and demands to see the documents; nobody pays any attention to him.
It is a masque not a real consultation. They don’t even have the documents to hand, they mime, gesturing with empty hands.
The king’s men are blockheads; I have seen them in a dozen masques, as Russians, as Turks: now they enter as hangmen.
Queen Anne, silent on her throne, is like a woman playing Mischance seated on a painted wood wheel of fortune.
Impossible to take this theatrical confrontation seriously – except that it could not be more grave.
If we do not play our parts in this masque which is called Surrender, there can be no doubt that we will be dance in another called: Witch-hunt.
I lean forward and whisper to her. My part is Kind Counsellor, and I play it as well as ever.
Obedient to my advice, speaking my script, the young queen raises her head and tells them that she is always content with His Majesty the king, and that of course, he must be right in whatever he says.
If he says that there was a precontract and the marriage should be annulled, he cannot be mistaken.
The Lords Audley, Suffolk, and Southampton bow low and manage to restrain themselves from slapping each other on the back.
They stay overnight at Richmond Palace, and they eat well and drink deep in the great hall, while the queen and us ladies dine in her rooms. They come in after dinner to say goodnight, and William Fitzwilliam beckons me to see him out.
‘Tomorrow morning, before breakfast, please bring two ladies with you to swear that the marriage was not consummated,’ he says. ‘I take it there will be no difficulty?’
‘None.’
‘Who will you bring?’
‘I thought Katherine Edgcumbe?’ She was in service with me to Katherine of Aragon, and dropped her without remorse.
‘And Eleanor Manners the Countess of Rutland?’ I suggest. Eleanor was Anne’s lady-in-waiting and gave evidence against her and my husband.
Swearing on oath that a marriage was not consummated is nothing compared to what she will have said then.
‘And they know what they have to do?’
I could almost laugh at him telling me of my own plan. ‘Yes, my lord. We all know very well what we have to do.’
WE PREPARE OUR statement like three Judases on the first Spy Wednesday, sitting in the back of the barge, wrapped up warmly in our capes, hoods together like three witches, rewriting the past so the future will read as we want.
We devise an unlikely account of a conversation, ignoring that Katherine and Eleanor have no German and the queen knows no English words for intimacy.
Never mind that the queen would never have spoken to anyone about her marriage bed and her husband.
Never mind that nobody could seriously believe one word of the conversation that I scribble in the back of the barge, that springs forward so powerfully as the rowers pull and reset, that we look as if we are in a masque, miming the rocking of a pretend boat on the painted waves of a silk sea.
‘We could say that we asked her if she thought she might be with child?’ I start, as the oars creak and the barge heaves.
‘She’d never have discussed that with us,’ Eleanor objects, letting likelihood get in the way of a good story.
‘Doesn’t matter. She’s not going to deny it,’ I remind her.
‘She wants this over as much as the king does. She knows we have to say this. We all know this is not truth but an escape for them both.’ I look from the cold determined face of one career courtier to another and I think: Christ! Do I look like this?
‘All right,’ Eleanor says. ‘I’ll say I asked her what he does when he comes to bed.’
‘And she can answer that he kisses her and takes her by the hand and lies down and sleeps the night beside her,’ Katherine agrees. The two of them snigger like whoremongers.
‘We have to say that she knows nothing,’ I remind them. ‘We have to say that she is innocent.’
‘Oh, we can say I asked her what he says in the morning, and that she told me he says: “Farewell, darling, until mass!”’
The two of them collapse at this high wit. Really, I should have hired Will the fool to write a merry masque.
‘D’you think it likely that one of us would have asked her for more details?’ I enquire, writing to their gleeful dictation.
‘I shall say that I said: “Madam, there must be more than this, or it will be long ere we have a Duke of York, which all this realm most desireth”,’ Eleanor says grandly. ‘I don’t mind swearing to that.’
I make a note of the superbly unlikely dialogue. ‘And we stick to this,’ I urge them. ‘We’re swearing on oath. We can never betray our word; we can never betray each other, nor the queen.’
‘The king wants this?’ Katherine asks, as if it is the only question. ‘He wants rid of Anne and to marry Kitty?’
‘This is what he wants,’ I say. ‘And this is the only way to get the duchess out of this snare that the men have put her in.’
‘Oh! The men!’ Eleanor says, throwing her hands up as if she has one scrap of fellow feeling for another woman. ‘Yes, yes, Jane. We have our script, we know our parts, we’ll never let you down. And there will be a reward?’
‘There will be a reward,’ I confirm.