Chapter Twenty-Two The Sweat #2
Henry’s perseverance overwhelmed her. Letter after letter arrived, tokens of jewelry, gifts of venison, carried to Hever Castle by anxious footmen.
“I send you a buck killed late last night by my own hand,” read one letter, “hoping that when you eat of it you may think of the hunter.” What an odd gesture, she thought, to send me meat, to imagine me imagining him as I put the flesh in my mouth.
The innuendo seemed over the top, scandalous.
For a year the letters had arrived, proclaiming his love, his fidelity, his dedication to annulling his marriage to his wife, the riches and comforts with which he’d shower her if she’d acquiesce to be his mistress.
She wouldn’t; she demanded a proposal, that he commit to marrying her after his annulment, that he promise that she’d be the next queen, that he accept they’d wait until marriage to consummate their relationship so that any child born would be legitimate, and he agreed.
Anne had returned to court then, the king’s fiancée, but in the summer of 1528, the sweating sickness swept through England.
Anne retreated back to Hever, where her mother and father, brother, sister, Mary, and her family, were already isolating.
More letters arrived from Henry, but in these letters were his worries.
Illness was at the court. Was illness also at Anne’s house?
Yes, all at Hever Castle, Anne included, contracted the sweat.
It killed Mary’s husband, the good and kind William Carey.
After his passing, Mary sat for hours in her chamber, staring out the window at the rolling Kentish hills, at the trees that blanketed them, persistently green despite the illness and death inside the castle walls, a woman alone, no husband, no lover.
Henry was anxious about getting the illness.
He was anxious about Anne getting it, and then anxious when she contracted it.
Would she perish? Unwritten in his letters was his worry over an heir.
Having lived through the death of his own older brother, having been the second in line who rose to the throne, Henry was fixated on having a child with Anne, on having his male heir, on having more than one male heir, on filling a bench with male children who could step in to take the throne after his death, who could save England from the chaos of uncertainty, from the political infighting over who would reign if the king left no heir at all, from the violence of civil war that might erupt in the absence of an heir as the nobility chose sides and split into factions.
Nobody wanted a return to the warring of his father’s and grandfather’s generations, when the Yorks fractured and clung to power with a maniacal but weak king, easily slain on the battlefield, easily disposed of, no heirs left behind.
This had been how Henry’s own father ascended to the throne—after his troops had killed Richard III on the battlefield, he’d married the villainous usurper’s niece, the sister of the lost princes Richard had had murdered in the Tower, and claimed the throne.
Henry was anxious not to repeat the mistakes of the previous dynastic family.
Having a cavalcade of heirs was his way of ensuring stability, the longevity of the Tudor royal dynasty, and, Anne had often thought, of easing the sorrow of his own dear brother Arthur’s death.
She’d even suggested Arthur as a name for Elizabeth when she was pregnant, had the baby been a boy, and Henry had loved the idea.
Anne stayed at Hever through Christmas, after the sweating sickness had passed.
Henry’s letters continued, and he took to sending state papers for her to read and advise him on, like a member of his council, like a man.
She’d send back pages of notes, scribbled in her bed by candlelight where she lay convalescing.
At New Year’s she sent Henry a little golden ship as a present.
My good Lord the King, she’d written. Find here a ship bedecked with a beauteous diamond, a North Star to guide the vessel homeward.
On its bow, a maiden, trusting in God to deliver her.
For there’d been a little maiden on the ship, holding a glass lantern.
Her meaning: The sweating sickness will end and I will return to you.
I trust God will guide us through this plague, as through the plague of your incestuous marriage to your brother’s widow, to the miracle of your annulment.
A symbolic toy, delivered on a velvet pillow by a servant in her absence, to Henry’s great delight.
Meanwhile, at Hever, she and Mary exchanged oranges while Mary’s children, redheaded and square-faced, ran about the courtyard, screaming and playing chase, until Mary’s young son Henry ran inside and said, tattling on his sister, “Catherine hath pulled my hair and slammed me to the ground,” and Mary said, “How like his father he is, quick to complain when a woman treats him roughly, though never would he speak of what he’s done to provoke her,” and Anne knew she did not mean William Carey, who’d never complained about anything, but Henry the king.
—
It was evening when Anne and the bull reached a small encampment on the bank of the river, where seven or eight men sat huddled around a campfire, drinking from leather pouches and singing shanties as a fat pike roasted on a spit over the open flame.
Anne slowed to a halt and quieted the bull, then hid with him behind the broad trunk of a tall pine.
Who were these men? Thieves? Monks? Perhaps a band of servant emissaries sent on the king’s behalf with an urgent message?
As she peered around the tree’s trunk to get a closer look, the bull moved out behind her, in plain view of the men, let out a long, loud sigh, and dragged his front hoof through the dirt of the forest floor, snapping several loose sticks.
The men around the fire stopped their singing and merrymaking and turned, all at once, to look at her.