To Die For: A Novel of Anne Boleyn

TWENTY-FOUR

Year of Our Lord 1536

Greenwich Palace

The next morning guards were sent to take Anne to be interrogated before the council at Greenwich. I dressed her quickly in a gown that was both somber and regal and pulled her hair under one of her famous French hoods.

“I hear my uncle Norfolk will be on council,” she said. “Mayhap he will bring some reason to the questions. ’Tis not so long ago he were an official at my coronation and the birth of Elizabeth.”

“Yes, Your Majesty, we may pray ’tis so,” I said, but held little hope in the constancy of Norfolk’s affections.

“Fitzwilliam will be there too,” Nan Zouche said. “Have a care. Have a care.” Fitzwilliam had been an especial friend to Wolsey and had always held Anne responsible for his death. For which among us could serve a master we believed to order the slaughter of innocents? No, no, ’twas far better to scapegoat someone to the side so that we might continue to shut our eyes and serve in peace.

With the hour news came back to us that while Anne had not been condemned, yet she would be taken by boat to the Tower. I quickly packed several of her gowns, and her prayer books, Bible, and letter-writing materials. Her hair combs. I left the royal jewels in her box but took her personal items out, some strings of pearls and a dual locket ring, afore racing down to my own rooms.

“Edithe!” I handed the jewels over to her. “Quickly. I want you to leave Greenwich and go to Hever. Find Roger and get him, and your son still at home, and leave Hever. Go to My Lord Asquith’s home, however you may get there. I do not know what will happen at Hever but you need to find safe employment and ’twill not be here nor there.”

I handed the bundle to her. “Do not open this, stash it in your saddle bag, and be gone. Give it to Will when you reach him. He will find service for you in his household, with his lady, or in his family. Go! Now!”

“What has happened to the queen, my lady? Where is Anne?” she asked me, wringing her red hands.

“She is to be taken to the Tower.”

“Oh no. No!” Edithe cried. “And you, mistress. Where will you go?”

“I shall stay here until I am allowed to join the queen. My place is to be with my friend and offer her whatever comfort and love I may.”

“No, ma’am, please. You must to your sister’s house. Or Allington. Edmund will take you, given the circumstances.”

“Go,” I said to her firmly. I held her to me, hugged her one last time, and left for Anne’s rooms.

She was there when I arrived. “It went poorly. My uncle Norfolk was no help at all. He simply said ‘tut tut’ and shook his finger at me. In a haste to return to his rooms and dally with his mistress, I suppose.”

“We shall not need his help,” I said defiantly. “There are surely others.”

“You’re not to come with me, Meg,” she said. “Lady Kingston, the wife of the lieutenant of the Tower, will be in charge of the four ladies I may take with me. Mrs. Stonor, the mother of the maid who has ‘witnessed’ much of my illicit goings-on, will come. My aunt Lady Boleyn, favorite of Katherine of Aragon, is come to twist the sword. As is Jane Rochford.”

“Jane?”

“I suspect to keep me from talking,” Anne said. Her eyes were red and rimmed but she’d regained her dignity and I would not do or say anything to unsettle it. “Thank you for packing my things, dearest. And, and should I not see you again….”

I ran to her and held her tightly in my arms. “I shall follow anon. I shall find a way to get to you. I will not leave you in any manner. I will be there shortly. Depend upon it.”

She nodded and said no more, nor did I. We both needed to believe that it would happen.

That night word filtered back to Greenwich that Henry, still at York Place, alternated wandering about the palace bemoaning his bad luck to all who would hear with festive, flirtatious merriment with Jane Seymour. He’d taken to carrying a small book in which he had written down all of the ways Anne had tricked and bewitched him, pressing it upon all who would read it and agree. His capacity at table was surpassed only by his appetite for self-pity. His maudlin moaning drew silent disgust from all listeners, even those who wished to see his daughter Mary reinstated in the succession. If he’d stuck simply with Anne’s perhaps having had one lover, some may have believed him. But when he claimed that she had had more than one hundred secret lovers in three years, including her brother, even her enemies knew to disbelieve him.

That night, afore his baseborn son the Duke of Richmond went to sleep, he stopped by his father’s chambers. Word came that Henry kissed his son violently on each cheek and told him, weeping, “You and your sister Mary owe God a great debt for having escaped the hands of that cursed and poisoning whore who had planned to poison you both.” One can only imagine what Richmond, whose wife, Mary Fitzroy, was an especial favorite of Anne, thought of this rant.

Greenwich was in a silent panic. No one knew whether to go, to stay, who would be next, or what was happening at the Tower. I moved in with my sister, Alice, and shared her lady maid, who, because of her long affiliation with the Rogers family, would not be tainted by us Wyatts. It was a good thing Alice and I were together because on May 8 our brother Thomas was conducted to the Tower under suspicion of adultery with Anne.

I allowed myself the indulgence of letting my mind wander for a moment to consider what life would have been like had Anne married Thomas and I married Will. I ached with the wishing of it and turned my thoughts away.

“I had not a chance to bid Thomas good-bye!” I wailed in her chambers. This time I let myself cry and Alice did too. Even Edmund, mayhap with an eye to our family name if not for fraternal devotion, tried to get Cromwell to speak on Thomas’s behalf. It was no use. The king’s bloodlust had been stirred beyond restraint, and, I fear, he viewed this as a chance to rid himself of all who may have irritated him for any reason at all.

My father had been told of Thomas’s arrest and aroused himself from stupor long enough to say, “If he be a true man, as I trust he is, his truth will him deliver.” Then he fell asleep. Edmund said he would prevail upon Father to write a letter on Thomas’s behalf to the king.

I sat down one night, after Alice had gone to bed, and prayed. Lord Jesus, please let me go to Anne. Her trial, if there even be one, will happen quickly. She needs comfort and love and that means me. And surely, Lord, of all the bishops she has placed on Your behalf in England, one could be spared to soothe and console her?

A picture came to mind. Lambeth Palace. I would speak, if I could, to Archbishop Cranmer.

I confess it was not easy to find Cranmer, but now that I had no duties to Anne I was free to make my way. I took my steed and rode to Lambeth Palace. I’m sure I looked a sight when I arrived, and his servants were loath to let me in.

“Wait—’tis Lady Blackston,” one of them pointed out. I was glad to be recognized and nodded as I shook off my hood. They let me in and I pleaded for a moment with Cranmer.

When I was ushered into his chamber he greeted me kindly but coolly. None of us knew whom to trust and whom to keep at arm’s length.

“Archbishop,” I said, “thank you for seeing me.”

“Gladly, my lady,” he said. “I know you are the aunt of John Rogers, devoted to the cause. And, of course, great friend to the queen. I am, even now, writing to the king on her behalf.”

I could barely stop the sobs from coming forth. “So you will champion her, then?” I asked.

I saw the look on his face and knew that he would not go as far as she needed him to, and my voice grew pointed. “She needs your assistance, sir, as she readily offered it to you in placing you to this position. Have you no shame or sense of honor?”

“I do what I can, my lady. I offer the king a letter in which I explain that I have never had a better opinion of a woman than I did in her, which makes me think that she should not be culpable. But,” he added to me, “of course His Highness would not have gone so far except she surely had been culpable.”

“You cannot think that!” I said. “You know that is untrue.”

He flinched. He was a man conflicted in the job he never wanted; I suspected he would like nothing more than to retreat to a small country home with his secret wife. But it was not to be.

“None of us chose to be here but, Bishop Cranmer, as we find ourselves in this time and in this place, you must play the man and do your part.”

“You shall not scold me, madam,” he said. “I tell the king, herein”—he tapped the letter—“that I love her not a little, for the love which I judge her to bear toward God and His gospel. But if she be culpable of these things, then no one should but hate her because of the way she has mistreated the gospel.”

“I understand now. You are going to allow Anne to take a fall to save the reform.” He did not deny it. “How does your letter finish, sir?”

He looked down upon it. “I tell him that I trust His Grace will bear no less entire favor to the gospel because he was not led to it by affection to her but by zeal unto the truth.”

“If there is one thing made plain, Archbishop, in this entire matter, it is not that His Majesty has zeal unto the truth.”

He looked at me, stricken, as I said that, realizing that by my saying it and his hearing it we could both be judged guilty of treason. “Is there anything further I can do for you, madam?”

“Yes.” I drew my cloak about my riding habit. “You can convince Master Cromwell to replace Anne’s ladies with friends who love her and will bring her care and comfort in her last days. ’Tis the least you can do. Find a way to get me to the Tower.”

He nodded. I expected that he would not act upon it. But he did.

Within days the council began to break up Anne’s household. It would be disbanded by the thirteenth of May. Anne had not yet had her trial. Would she have one at all? The fact that her household was being broken up indicated that the king had already concluded that she would not be coming back to court. The courtiers who had gained so much by her favor now fled and, like Saint Peter, denied in every manner possible knowledge of her at all.

The king, for his part, made several romantic rendezvous to Beddington, wherein Mistress Seymour lodged with Sir Nicolas Carewe, chief perpetrator of the case against Anne. Even the fishwives of London, we’d heard, the same stout matrons who had hurled dung and insults at her carriage three years past, now stood by her in righteous indignation. The king had not a care for their, or anyone else’s, opinion of the matter.

“My lady,” said a messenger come from Cromwell’s. I had been packing my things, supposing that Edmund would, compelled by duty or at least not wanting to shame the Wyatt name, take me in for a short while if I could not lodge with Alice for a spell.

“Yes?” I said.

“’Tis orders.” He handed a scroll to me. “You, your sister, and Lady Zouche are commanded to the Tower. These men”—he indicated four burly guards standing behind him—“are to escort you on the tide.”

“Do we go as…. prisoners?” I swallowed back my fear.

“You go first to serve the queen,” he said tautly. “After that, I know not.”