Hampton Court, November, 1541 #4
THE NEXT DAY, Thomas Cranmer comes back again after breakfast to speak to Kitty and takes a seat beside her at the head of the table, like the father of a family, while the rest of us nibble sweetmeats at the far end and pretend we are not straining to listen.
He does not look much like a man who is shitting himself: he looks like a kind old grandfather who is ready to hear a confession.
I cannot think how to signal to Kitty that she should trust this kindness no more than the most frightening men of the kingdom who tried to bully her yesterday; but then I see her talking earnestly to him, and his whispered replies, and I think: not to worry – she will wrap him around her little finger.
At first, she has him dancing to her tune; but then I see him get graver and quieter, and now Kitty seems to be stumbling as she speaks, and now she is more and more distressed, and I can tell that she is frightened. I beckon to one of the youngest maids-of-honour.
‘Go ask the queen if she wants some wine and water,’ I tell her.
She looks across the room. ‘I don’t dare, Lady Rochford,’ she says. ‘He’s raking her over.’
She’s right. Thomas Cranmer is no longer grandfatherly; but has become the terror he can be in the pulpit. His fluffy white hair is standing on end, his bright-brown eyes never leave her face, and I can see him speaking urgently, insisting, overbearing.
Kitty blushes hot scarlet, and then she bursts into tears.
It is agony watching her being bullied into saying things that might damage her.
She cries more and more, mopping her flushed face on her priceless sleeves and on her table handkerchief, and he does not give her a moment’s pause but still goes on speaking, low-voiced, until she slides from her chair at the head of the table and collapses onto the floor in floods of tears.
Now I can interrupt, and I go forward to help her up, and he stops, gets to his feet, puts his hand with the great ruby signet ring on her head, and he blesses her and leaves her, the Queen of England, on the floor of her own presence chamber.
I had hoped that she was playacting despair; but even when he has gone, she continues to cry bitterly, her breath catching, her sobs getting louder. Her wet face is in the strewing rushes; she throws off her cream and pearl hood and spreads herself on the floor in a frenzy of distress.
She is not pretending. Over and over again, she says: ‘My husband the king!’ but nothing else is clear. At any rate, I think, nobody can say that she has confessed anything, for she is quite beyond speech.
I take her head onto my lap to let her have her cry, and I see, from the corner of my eye, the door close behind the skirt of a gown. Someone has gone running to tell their spymaster that the queen has collapsed in tears.
Isabel Baynton, her sister, gets awkwardly gets to her feet. ‘I’d better tell my husband.’
‘Tell him that she will die of grief if they try rough handling,’ I say over her weeping.
‘Who could doubt her innocence? Her heart is breaking at these questions. Tell him that they will have her death on their conscience. She is too fine and too pure to be accused of anything base. Ask him how they will answer to the king if they kill her?’
I see the tiny gleam of understanding, and she nods and goes out. I think – they’ll never dare to push the king’s little sweetheart into collapse. They have had a denial to their faces. Cranmer has frightened her into uncontrollable weeping, and none of this is evidence.
I raise her from the floor, still crying, and take her to her bedroom, sit her in a chair by the fire and dry her face and pat her hands with lavender water, as if she has fallen from a horse and is still shaken.
After about an hour of this quiet petting, there is a knock at the door, and it is Archbishop Cranmer again.
I try to refuse him, saying she is too distressed, but he insists on coming in, and Sir Edward Baynton is nowhere to be found to refuse him.
So Kitty emerges from her bedroom, her hair tumbled down, still weeping, and Cranmer sits beside her, at the fireside in her privy chamber, and whispers in her ear.
I try to intercept, but he looks mildly at me with his gentle smile and says: ‘I will not distress your royal mistress again, Lady Rochford. I am come to bring her comfort and promise that His Majesty will be graciously kind to her if she confesses the truth. Please leave us.’
With no support from her sister and no senior ladies-in-waiting to refuse him, I have to wait with her ladies in her presence chamber, hearing sounds of comfort and reassurance.
But I think: nobody could accuse her; nobody who sees her in this despair could doubt her innocence.
Even I believe in her innocence, and I held the purse that Dereham gave her in my safekeeping!
They stay together for the rest of the day, though the archbishop goes to the great hall for his dinner, and Kitty takes a little meat and some wine in her bedroom and lets us wash her face and hands and change her gown.
‘You’re doing very well,’ I whisper to her, plaiting her hair and putting on her hood.
A sudden chill clutches me when I meet her gaze in her looking-glass and see the despair in her eyes.
They really are going to kill this child if they continue hounding her.
I warned them not to distress her, and I spoke more truly than I knew.
She is too young and too fearful of the infinite power of the king to be able to bear this interrogation from his archbishop.
She feels that she is under the eye of God and Man.
She is not on a rack, but they are pulling her apart all the same.
Cranmer returns with a fresh ream of papers in his arms and a pot of ink and a sharpened quill and sealing wax and a candle.
Surely, he cannot hope that she can speak coherently enough for a statement of innocence?
And then I think: of course he does not!
He will have it already composed in his own mind.
This is him, wrapping it up neatly: a confession of small sins in girlhood and a general plea for mercy.
I am so happy that I help him with the ink and the candle, and settle the two of them at the table in the privy chamber and order the ladies to bed, except for Isabel and I, who wait in the presence chamber.
It goes very quiet behind the great doors to the privy chamber, and I know, as surely as if I were a spy at the keyhole, that he is writing down an account, a completely fictional version of Kitty’s petty misdeeds at Norfolk House, Lambeth, forgivingly transcribed.
At midnight, the archbishop comes out with a sheaf of papers, heavy with seals.
‘Watch her,’ he says to me, as if it was not him who drove her to hysterical crying. ‘She is much distressed; but she will feel better for her confession.’
I dare not say: she has confessed to nothing but what you have named to her – this is a quaesita – an inquiry by torture.
My spymaster Thomas Cromwell would have had every scrap of evidence from everyone else before he even spoke to her; and then he would only have allowed her to confirm what the king wanted to know.
Thomas Cromwell knew every word of evidence that he wanted before he looked for it.
But you – prurient as any old midwife – will have been raking through her linen and asking her about privy marks and hot breaths and dirty sheets, and now she is crying for shame at your disrespect in naming such things to her.
You are a fool as my spymaster was not: you don’t know what you want to know, and you don’t know what to do with what you’ve found.
THE NEXT MORNING, the archbishop comes to our rooms and says that although she may not meet with the king today, she may write him a letter.
She is to explain all that she has done and explain everything that has been said against her.
This will serve as confession, vindication, and plea for pardon, and her husband the king will read it and forgive her.
Of course, she should have a clerk or secretary to write for her, and she ought to have a lawyer to warn her what not to say.
But I remember Sir Thomas More warning Bishop Fisher to write nothing, to say nothing, and then Sir Thomas More was executed for saying nothing and the bishop was executed, too.
So it makes little difference what she writes, as the archbishop has already heard the confession, set a penance, and is about to deliver the king’s pardon.
I carry sharpened quills and pots of ink behind the two of them, and I lay them on the table before her, as tidily as I used to prepare the writing table in my father’s library.
I rest a hand on her trembling shoulder, and I say to Archbishop Cranmer: ‘Would you like me to write for the queen, as her secretary, Your Grace?’
And the old fraud says: ‘No, no, she shall write it herself.’
I think of her misspelled love letter to Culpeper and how she told him that she had taken such pains to write in her own hand.
She is incapable of assembling her distress into coherent sentences; she cannot even form legible letters.
If a fluent statement of confession comes out of this morning’s work, we will all know that the author is the Cambridge University educated archbishop and not the girl who was taught nothing more than flirtation and dancing at Norfolk House.
It takes him the full day, but in the dusk of the early evening, the father of the church comes out smiling, with three pages of beautifully written narrative, and says to me: ‘She will be easier in her mind now that she has made a full confession and asked the king for pardon.’
One glance at her anguished exhaustion tells me that she is not easier in her mind, and I am very sure she has not made a full confession; but I curtsey very low, bowing my head, and he gives me his signet ring to kiss.