The Boleyn Inheritance

Jane Boleyn, Rochester,
New Year’s Eve 1539

Lady Browne is ordering the maids to their beds in a bellow as if she were a Yeoman of the Guard. They are overexcited, and Katherine Howard among them is the center of it all, as wild as any of them, a true Queen of the May. How she spoke to the king, how she peeped up at him from under her eyelashes, how she begged him, as a handsome stranger, new to court, to ask the Lady Anne for dancing, is being mimicked and reenacted till they are drunk with their own laughter.

Lady Browne is not laughing; her face is like thunder, so I hustle the girls into bed and tell them that they are all very foolish and that they would do better to copy their lady, the Lady Anne, and show proper dignity, than mimic Katherine Howard’s free and forward ways. They slip into their beds two by two like pretty angels, and we blow out the candle and leave them in the darkness and lock the door. We have hardly turned away before we hear them whispering, but no power on earth can make girls behave well; and we do not even try.

“Are you troubled, Lady Browne?” I ask considerately.

She hesitates; she is longing to confide in someone, and I am here at her side, and known to be discreet.

“This is a bad business,” she says heavily. “Oh, it all passed off pleasantly enough in the end, with the dancing and the singing, and Lady Anne recovered quickly enough as soon as you had explained to her; but this is a bad, bad business.”

“The king?” I suggest.

She nods and folds her lips over as if she would stop herself saying more.

“I am weary,” I say. “Shall we take a glass of warm ale together before we go to our beds? Sir Anthony is staying here tonight, is he not?”

“God knows he won’t join me in my rooms for hours,” she says unguardedly. “I doubt if any of the king’s circle will sleep tonight.”

“Oh?” I say. I lead the way into the presence chamber. The other ladies have gone to bed, the fire is burning low, but there is a jug of ale set at the fireside and half a dozen tankards. I pour us both a drink. “Trouble?”

She sits in her chair and leans forward to whisper. “My lord husband tells me that the king swears that he will not marry her.”

“No!”

“He does. He does. He swears it. He says that he cannot like her.”

She takes a long draw on the ale and looks at me over the top of the mug.

“Lady Browne, you must have this wrong…”

“I have it from my husband this very night. The king seized him by the collar, almost by the throat, as soon as we retired, and said that the moment he saw Lady Anne, he had been struck with consternation, and that he saw nothing in her that he had been told.”

“He said that?”

“Those very words.”

“But he seemed so happy as we left?”

“He was as truly happy just as Katherine Howard was truly ignorant of his identity. He is as much a happy bridegroom as she is an innocent child. We are all actors here, but the king will not play the part of eager bridegroom.”

“He has to; they are betrothed and the contract signed.”

“He does not like her, he says. He cannot like her, he says; and he is blaming the men who made this marriage for him.”

I have to get this news to the duke; he has to be warned before the king gets back to London.

“Blaming the men who made the marriage?”

“And those who brought her to him. He is furious.”

“He will blame Thomas Cromwell,” I predict quietly.

“Indeed.”

“But what of the Lady Anne? Surely, he cannot refuse her?”

“There is some talk of an impediment,” she says. “And that is why Sir Anthony and none of the others will have any sleep tonight. The Cleves lords should have brought a copy of an agreement to say that some old previous contract to marry has been withdrawn. Since they don’t have it, perhaps there may be grounds to argue that the marriage cannot go ahead, it is not valid.”

“Not again,” I say, unguarded for a moment. “Not the same objection that he put against Queen Katherine! We will all look like fools!”

She nods. “Yes, the same. But better for her that an impediment is declared now and she is sent safely home, than she stays and marries an enemy. You know the king; he will never forgive her for spitting out his kiss.”

I say nothing. These are dangerous speculations.

“Her brother must be a fool,” I say. “She has come a long way if he has not secured her safety.”

“I would not be in her shoes tonight,” Lady Browne says. “You know I never thought she would please the king, and I told my husband so. But he knew best; the alliance with Cleves is vital, he tells me, we have to be protected from France and Spain, we have to be protected against the Papist powers. There are Papists who would march against us from every corner of Europe; there are Papists who would kill the king in his own bed, here in England. We have to strengthen the reformers. Her brother is a leader of the Protestant dukes and princes, that is where our future lies. I say: ‘Yes, my lord; but the king will not like her. Mark my words: he will not like her.’ And then the king comes in, all ready for courtship, and she pushes him away from her as if he was a drunk tradesman.”

“He did not look kingly at that moment.” I will not say more than this cautious judgment.

“He was not at his best,” she says, as careful as I. Between us is the unsayable fact that our handsome prince has grown into a gross, ugly man, an old, ugly man; and for the first time we have all seen it.

“I must go to my bed,” she says, putting down her cup. She cannot bear even to think of the decay of the prince we have adored.

“I, too.”

I let her go to her room and I wait till I hear her door close, then I quietly go to the great hall, where, drinking heavily, and clearly nearly dead drunk, is a man in Howard livery. I crook my finger at him, and he rises up quietly and leaves the others.

“Go to my lord duke,” I say to him quietly, my mouth to his ear. “Go at once and get to him before he sees the king.”

He nods; he understands at once. “Tell him, and tell him only, that the king does not like the Lady Anne, that he will try to declare that the marriage contract is invalid, and that he is blaming those who made this marriage and will blame anyone who insists on it.”

The man nods again. I think hard, in case there is anything I should add.

“That’s all.” I need not remind one of the most skilled and unscrupulous men in England that our rival Thomas Cromwell was the architect and inspiration for this match. That this is our great chance to bring down Cromwell, as we brought down Wolsey before him. That if Cromwell is down, then the king will need an advisor, and who better than his commander in chief? Norfolk.

“Go at once, and get to the duke before he sees the king,” I say again. “Our lord must not meet the king without warning.”

The man bows; he leaves the room at once, without saying good-bye to his drinking companions. By his swift stride he is clearly completely sober.

I go to my own room. My bedfellow for tonight, one of the other ladies-in-waiting, is already asleep, her arm outflung to my side of the bed. Gently, I lift it and slide in between the warm sheets. I don’t sleep at once, I lie in the silence and listen to her breathing beside me. I am thinking about the poor young woman Lady Anne and the innocence of her face and the directness of her gaze. I am wondering if Lady Browne could possibly be right and this young woman could be in danger of her life simply by being the wife that the king does not want.

Surely not. Lady Browne is exaggerating for certain. This young woman is the daughter of a German duke; she has a powerful brother who will protect her. The king needs her alliance. But then I remember that this brother let her come to England without the one piece of paper that would secure her marriage, and I wonder that he should be so careless with her, to send her such a long way into such a bear pit with no protector.