Chapter Twenty-Six A Great Grief
Chapter Twenty-Six
A Great Grief
At daybreak, early, the sun barely risen, Anne woke nestled against the bull’s soft, warm chest. By the time they’d taken sight of London, it must have been nearly midnight.
She and the beast were so fatigued that they’d wandered into a ditch beside the road and lay down to sleep the four or five hours that remained before sunrise.
She shivered and drew closer to him, pulling the summer cloak she’d borrowed from Alice tighter around herself, not that it did much good, made as it was from some thin fabric.
Anne didn’t know what kind. That was Cromwell’s area of expertise, she thought groggily, who seemed to know everything about textiles, having so recently been a wool merchant.
A wool merchant, advising the king. She scoffed at the absurdity of it.
She covered her face with the cloak’s hood and tried to go back to sleep, but her mind stayed on Cromwell.
Surely he’d be at Whitehall with Henry. Her greatest enemy, she’d thought Cromwell at the end, when he’d had her arrested, when he’d argued for her guilt at trial, when he’d shown up to witness her execution, certainly at Henry’s bidding.
Where had Henry been? The last time she saw him was before he rode away from the May Day festival with Norris, the day before her arrest. Henry hadn’t shown his face at the Tower during her two-and-a-half-week imprisonment.
He hadn’t come to the trial at the Tower’s great hall, to hear George call him impotent in front of all his courtiers.
He hadn’t come to witness the execution of Anne’s alleged lovers.
He’d sent Archbishop Cranmer with an annulment for her to sign the day before her execution, and, when she’d refused to do so—not wanting to illegitimize her own daughter, not believing Cranmer’s promises that if she signed, she’d be sent to a nunnery instead of the scaffold, not caring, even if such promises were true, as she’d rather die than see Elizabeth removed from the line of succession—when she’d refused to sign the annulment, Cranmer granted one for Henry anyway, just as he had done for Henry’s marriage to Katherine.
Her mean Aunt Elizabeth Boleyn, one of the detested ladies sent with her to the Tower to spy for the king, who’d never liked Anne, had delivered the news of the annulment to her smugly, saying, when asked, that the reason had been Anne’s prior precontracted engagement to Henry Percy.
Never mind that the king himself had canceled that precontract because he wanted to court her, never mind the king himself had just three years earlier forced Henry Percy to testify that the precontract never even existed in the first place, so that Henry and Anne could wed.
“ ’Twas your dalliance with Henry Percy, slut,” her Aunt Elizabeth had said.
“You get what you deserve. And if that hadn’t’ve been the reason, ’twould’ve been your whoring sister Mary’s bedding of the king before you, that he lay with you both.
” Her aunt had spit on the stone floor. “Consanguinity and incest,” she’d continued, “ ’twould’ve been that would’ve voided your marriage, and no surprise there, your sister being as big a trollop as you, a whole family of whores. ”
Henry hadn’t shown up at her execution, either, but Cromwell was there.
She’d walked past him on her way to the scaffold.
He looked miserable, guilty, and even in the chilly mid-May temperature, hot.
Cromwell often looked hot. He was a large, sweaty man, with the habit of wearing black velvet, no matter the season, in which he sweltered.
He didn’t look satisfied, as she’d expected he might, having served up to Henry exactly what he wanted: Anne gone so he could marry Jane; Anne gone and Henry not having to bother with her big mouth, her pushy attitude, her unending ideas, her miscarriages, her grief.
The shot doe’s neck slit without Henry having to get his hands dirty, without having to watch the animal suffer, limping and bleeding through the forest. A servant to do it for him.
And Cromwell was an excellent servant. He’d served well and true.
And yet at the execution he’d looked positively miserable, mopping his brow with a kerchief—was it also made of black velvet?
That couldn’t be—and avoiding looking at Anne as she was marched past him.
She’d hoped some of her blood would spatter on him when she was beheaded, would stain and spoil his silly velvet.
For what did men know about removing blood from fabric?
Nothing. They knew how to draw blood, how to spill it, but they knew nothing of the blood that came from women, of menstrual blood, of the blood of childbirth, of the blood of babies lost. They’d never scrubbed a bloody undergarment in a stream when they were out riding and menstruation came early or unexpected.
When Anne first arrived at the English court, nearly fifteen years ago, Cromwell had mistaken her flirtatious behavior and youthful hedonism for a lack of intelligence.
He’d thought her frivolous, as educated as a courtier must be but not particularly smart.
Then Henry had taken an interest in her, and as she and the king exchanged books and letters and stayed up for hours debating religion and philosophy, even Cromwell recognized her intellect.
They were both reformers and, for a while, allies, but as they fought over the ends of those reforms, eventually they became adversaries.
The two had moved against each other again and again, strategically one-upping each other with feats of influence over the king, sometimes feuding in public.
It was a game of strategy and cunning, one Anne thought she was winning.
That was, until this April. Fed up with Cromwell’s repeated attempts to direct the funds from the dissolution of the monasteries into the pockets of courtiers, Anne had her almoner, John Skip, preach a sermon on Passion Sunday about Queen Esther and King Ahasuerus.
The sermon focused on the scheming and sinful behavior of King Ahasuerus’s advisor Haman, who pressured Ahasuerus to kill the Jewish people camped outside his city gates.
Meanwhile, Ahasuerus’s wife, Queen Esther, a secret Jew herself, convinced Ahasuerus not to kill the Jews, thus saving both the king from the damnation of committing murder and her people from certain death.
It was clear to any who listened that Esther was meant to represent Anne, saintly in her quest to spend the vast wealth of the religious orders on education and hospitals for the people, and that Haman was Cromwell, the crooked advisor, encouraging the king to hoard that vast wealth instead.
In retrospect, Anne knew that she’d gone too far.
John Skip’s sermon had publicly humiliated Cromwell, and that had caused him not to cower, as she’d hoped, but rather to lash out, to work to oust her.
She knew she’d gone too far, but Cromwell was under her skin, contradicting her, edging her out.
He kept company with the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys, spy for Katherine’s nephew Charles V, who Anne knew hated her.
Chapuys was Charles V’s eyes and ears at the court of the king who had cast aside his beloved aunt.
Chapuys wasn’t an old man—like Henry and Cromwell, he was only ten or fifteen years older than Anne—but he seemed old.
He smelled perpetually of herbs used to treat aching joints, went to bed at sundown, and was unbelievably pious.
Anne wasn’t sure if he’d ever been with a woman.
She knew what he wrote about her, that he called her the concubine and the great whore in letters.
A lady-in-waiting who’d recently been a courtier at Charles V’s court in Brussels had told Anne that Chapuys reported back to the emperor that she was ugly and had a sallow complexion, and that she’d learned acts of sexual perversion while in France, with which she must have ensorcelled the king, for why else would he prefer an unattractive, flat-chested whore to Katherine of Aragon?
Men like Chapuys knew how to take a woman down a few notches, how to aim below the belt.
How to sit smugly sipping their wine before a comfortable fire and, in solemn voices, question whether women were really people, really had souls, really ought to even be mourned when they died in childbirth.
She wasn’t sure why Cromwell enjoyed Chapuys’s company.
Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best, and she supposed that, like Chapuys, Cromwell might just hate women.
Anne wasn’t sure it was that simple though.
If Cromwell was just another woman hater, how to explain the pain on his face, the way he’d nervously mopped his brow as he watched his queen marched to the scaffold for an execution he’d orchestrated and organized?
Guilt, that was the emotion she’d seen in Cromwell from the scaffold.
And Cromwell certainly didn’t seem to hate women when he’d educated his daughters the same as his son, or when, brokenhearted, he showed no interest in remarrying after his wife died.
And he didn’t seem to hate women when Anne found him weeping in the Cloister Green at Hampton Court one autumn evening a couple of months after losing both his daughters to the sweating sickness.
He’d wiped his eyes, embarrassed, and apologized.
“No, no,” Anne had said, “yours is a great grief. Your sorrow is true.” Cromwell had smiled at her, grateful, and let out a final sob before patting her arm and walking back to whatever meeting with Henry awaited at that hour.