The Favored Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII's Third Wife Read online

  Yet I never heard her so much as utter their names.

  My little nephews were living in the greatest secrecy at Croydon, in a house that belonged to the king’s good friend and trusted chamber gentleman Thomas Tyringham. I had arranged for them to be sheltered there, their true identities hidden. The servants in the household were told only that the boys were the orphaned sons of a kitchen maid who had fallen ill and died; they were being cared for, so the story went, out of the king’s charity.

  I had hired a nurse and two maidservants to look after the boys, and I visited them as often as my duties in the queen’s household allowed. Henry was barely three years old, and John only two, far too young to understand anything except that they missed their mother. They cried for her every night, the nurse told me. I was no real substitute for Cat, but the boys smiled when I visited and enjoyed the treats and toys I brought them. I hugged them and told them I loved them and tried to give them some motherly comfort.

  I often asked myself what future they might have, and how and when they would ever be told the truth about who they were, but never arrived at any answers, only more questions. Like me, they seemed adrift, the course of their lives much in doubt. Disowned by their father, their mother taken from them, no one else in the family coming to their aid, they had no one but me. I vowed never to abandon them, or to reveal who or where they were to a hostile world.

  * * *

  “Where is my lady!”

  King Henry’s rich booming voice, more jovial than commanding, rang out through the queen’s apartments.

  “Where is my Lady Anne? My joy, my light?”

  I winced.

  He came bounding in to where Queen Catherine sat at her embroidery, her maids of honor seated in a semi-circle around her. Jane Popyngcort, her favorite reader, was reading aloud to us all as we sewed, from The Lives of the Saints.

  At the sound of the king’s voice the reading ceased, and we all knelt.

  King Henry held out his hand to Anne, and she looked over quickly at the queen—who did not kneel, but went on with her embroidery, sitting where she was, taking no notice of her husband or Anne, though her wan cheeks flushed red. Boldly Anne stood, and took the king’s beringed hand. Henry motioned for the men waiting in the corridor outside to come in, and they obeyed, a dozen or so musicians, carrying drums and sackbuts and viols. They struck up a dance tune, and Henry led Anne in a lively dance, hopping and kicking with the energy of a man half his age and looking very pleased with himself as he grasped Anne and partnered her, smiling, through the twining, twisting steps.

  “What a charming tune,” I heard Queen Catherine say to her husband as she looked up briefly from her stitching. “Is it one of your own composition?” The king ignored her.

  “She dances well, does she not, my joy, my little puffball?” Henry said to no one in particular.

  “Like a tavern whore,” I heard Maria de Salinas mutter under her breath.

  King Henry dropped Anne’s hand and moved deftly to stand in front of Maria.

  “What was that?”

  Maria de Salinas was no coward. She looked up at the king, her eyes venomous.

  “I said nothing,” she answered, her voice seething with resentment, her Spanish-accented English exaggerated, or so it seemed to me. “I just sneezed.”

  “Are you sneezing at my lady?” the king demanded, with sudden ferocity, at which the Spaniard took a deep breath and sneezed, loudly and insultingly, in Anne’s direction.

  “Out!” shouted the king, pointing to the door.

  “But my lord—” Catherine began.

  “Quiet, woman!”

  Maria de Salinas got up slowly, and started to walk toward Catherine. But Catherine shook her head, ever so slightly. Maria stopped, cursed, and left the room.

  “See that that woman leaves my court,” the king snapped to Catherine’s gentleman usher Griffith Richards, who bowed in acknowledgment.

  Meanwhile Anne, knowing all eyes were on her, strolled to where the queen sat, still poking her needle into the cloth, held stiff in its frame, then drawing the needle out again.

  “Another altar cloth?” Anne asked in her silkiest voice, moving to Catherine’s side and plucking idly at the cloth-end that lay across Catherine’s lap. “Or a new cover for your prie-dieu?” She smiled. I thought her expression closer to a sneer than a smile.

  “The Lord loves fine embroidery!” Anne said with a flick of the cloth.

  “The Lord loves virtue—and modesty,” Catherine remarked, without looking up from her sewing.

  “And fruitfulness,” Anne retorted. “Fruitfulness above all, in a woman.”

  Catherine looked pointedly at Anne’s belly, and smiled slightly. The look was not lost on Anne—or on the rest of us.

  “A woman of twenty-five,” Ines de Venegas said, “ought to be married so that she can prove herself fruitful. Unless, perhaps, she has some flaw.” She held up her hand. “Such as too many fingers. No man would want a wife like that.” And she sneezed, following which the rest of us sneezed, all together.

  “Enough!” Henry called out and signaled to the musicians, who began to play the dance tune once again. He reached for Anne and held her closer to him than before as they dipped and swayed, deliberately altering the steps of the dance and substituting their own, more abandoned and suggestive choreography. Henry pulled Anne toward him, so tightly that her bodice was crushed against his doublet, then released her so that she practically fell back, half-laughing with the shock of his sudden release. He leaned over her and brushed his lips against her cheek, then murmured in her ear, then held her clasped hands behind her so that she was imprisoned in his embrace.

  I turned away, I could not watch the embarrassing display—not because it was wanton and lewd, which it certainly was, but because the king and Anne were deliberately humiliating Catherine, flaunting their liaison (for how could anyone doubt that they were lovers after this display?) and challenging the queen to reprimand or insult them, as Maria de Salinas and the other Spaniard had done.

  I was not prudish, Will and I knew each other’s bodies well though we had not made love; we had been saving that ultimate delight for our wedding night. But all our intimacy went on in private, while the king and Anne were carrying on a public performance. And a performance intended to wound.

  “Now, madam, what think you of our dancing?” Henry said, addressing his wife, when the tune ended. Despite his exertions he was not at all winded, though Anne, at his side, was panting and flushed, her black eyes bright with excitement.

  Catherine’s response was swift.

  “The king does honor to my maidens when he takes them for his partners,” she said equably. “And by honoring my maidens, he does honor to me!” She resumed her needlework, and the rest of us, having gotten up off our knees during the dancing, followed her example after King Henry threw up his hands and left the room, the musicians following at his heels.

  Anne remained standing, her nose in the air, tapping her foot impatiently. Presently she whistled for her little dog, which jumped into her arms and began licking her face.

  In the silence that followed, I sneezed. Soon others began sneezing, first Bridget, then the Spanish gentlewomen, then the other maids. Catherine could not help but smile at this sign of our loyalty. Anne stamped her foot.

  And then, at a signal from the queen, Jane Popyngcort resumed her reading from The Lives of the Saints, telling the story of Saint Clothilde, a Christian among the pagan Franks in a long-ago age, who endured with miraculous patience and fortitude all the cruelties and humiliations of the barbarians, all the while smiling and forgiving her enemies and committing them to the mercies of the Lord.

  * * *

  “The prince! Make way for the prince!”

  Dust rose in thick clouds as two horsemen galloped along the narrow roadway, shouting and waving their whips, scattering all the impediments in their path—heavily loaded carts and trudging peddlers, villagers on foot and pilgri
ms bound for the shrine of St. Hertha.

  I was on my way to Thomas Tyringham’s Croydon estate to visit my nephews when my journey was interrupted by the riders and their raucous shouting. I turned my horse toward the bushes that lined the roadside and let her crop the dry grass. Soon a small procession came into view as the dust began to clear.

  First came a herald, bravely suited and mounted and wearing the king’s livery. Then followed five mounted halbardiers, attempting to ride in phalanx though the road was too narrow and dipped sharply in the center. The halbardiers were escorting a gleaming silver litter, the metal worked into an elaborate design. Purple velvet curtains fringed in silver tissue hid the litter’s occupant, though not for long. Presently the velvet curtains parted slightly, and I saw, peering out, the pale face of a small boy. I recognized Henry Fitzroy, who by order of the king was referred to as “the prince,” though in fact he was only a duke in rank.

  The costly litter was princely indeed, but there was nothing regal about the boy’s white face; he looked frightened and ill. I imagined that the swaying and jouncing of the litter as it lurched along the rutted road had sickened him.

  “Set me down!” he called out weakly.

  At first he was not heard, the hubbub of squawking chickens and braying donkeys, loud voices and the rattle of carriage wheels drowned out his words. But after he had shouted several times the litter was at last set down.

  He pushed the curtains aside and stumbled out. He closed his eyes and crouched in the dust of the roadway, heedless of his cream-colored silken hose and his shoes with their elaborate silver buckles, his shirt of fine white linen, so thin his skin could be clearly seen through it. His bejeweled hat with its colorful feathers fell off, his finery soon became smeared with the dirt of the road.

  As I continued to watch, six men who had been farther back in the procession rode up, dismounted, and encircled the crouching boy. I could hear him coughing.

  The entire procession came to a halt as the six men—I knew them to be royal physicians, who accompanied Henry Fitzroy wherever he went—examined their patient and conferred with one another. At length they remounted and the file of men and horses resumed their journey, at a slower pace. I fell into line not far from the silver litter, concerned that my own progress was likely to be slow, and that John and Henry, who had grown very attached to me, would be distressed and in tears when I did not arrive.

  Before long the procession stopped again, and without waiting for the physicians to dismount and come to his aid, young Fitzroy burst out of the litter and ran clumsily to the roadside where he was sick.

  No one helped him.

  Having rid his stomach of its contents, he rinsed off his face in a muddy stream and managed to climb back into the swaying vehicle.

  Resigned to being late to meet my nephews, I touched my whip to my horse’s flank and she jolted forward, shooting past the heralds who were resuming their loud demand for all in the road ahead to make way for the prince. I dug my heels into her sides and soon she was trotting along at a brisk pace toward Croydon.

  SIX

  Following the sinking of the Eglantine, Will had said nothing more about our finding a way to escape together to some faraway place, but he had not lost all hope. He refused to yield to his parents’ demand that he marry into the Sidney family, and told me often that he was waiting for me, and could never love anyone else. It moved me to tears to hear him say this, but even as I wept I shook my head, for my better judgment told me that all was against us. I was at war within myself; my despair over my future was all but unshakable, yet a flicker of hope remained, for I wanted so badly to believe, against all evidence, that there might still be a chance for us to make a life for ourselves far from the restrictions of the court and of our parents.

  I was well aware that in choosing to care for my nephews I had taken on responsibilities that bound me and restricted me, yet when at my most sanguine I could see my way past them. Henry and John, against all odds, were thriving; though they missed their mother, they no longer cried for her every night, and as for their father, my brother Ned, he had always been a very remote figure to his sons, hardly ever seeing them as he was nearly always at court, constantly preoccupied with his duties for Cardinal Wolsey and with his own advancement. The boys had forgotten him, or so it seemed to me. At any rate they never said his name.

  I thought that odd—and I thought it even more odd that though I was assured by their nurses that they often cried for their mother at night, they did not speak her name to me.

  I had given up all thought of trying to convince Ned to restore his family, releasing his wife from her convent captivity and acknowledging her sons as his own. My poor sister-in-law Cat languished in isolation day after day, month after month, and I was not even allowed to visit her or write to her. No one in the family or among our servants ever mentioned her existence, and in fact Ned was talking of taking another wife. Like King Henry, he was seeking a way to have his first marriage declared no marriage at all (a “nullity,” in the language of the lawyers, whose terms we were all growing accustomed to using as the King’s Great Matter became more and more important). But I knew that Cat was no nullity, and I did not forget about her, or cease to think of her and her difficulties.

  Meanwhile King Henry had laid siege to Catherine and was storming the walls of her impregnable dignity every day. We all heard him, demanding and arguing, attempting to wear down Catherine’s resistance and shatter her pride.

  “You must listen to reason, madam,” he insisted. “You must remove yourself from our court and enter a convent. You have no place here! You are not a legal wife!”

  We heard Catherine’s low voice in reply, though it was often difficult to make out her words.

  “You and I have been living in sin all these years!” he went on. “You must repent—within the walls of a nunnery, where you may pray for forgiveness and mend your life.”

  It was always the same. He argued, urged, persisted in his forceful tone, and she resisted, quietly adamant. She infuriated him, until he became shrill.

  “Haven’t I told you a hundred times that all the clergy of England have accused me of tempting the judgment of the Lord, by wrongfully taking my dead brother’s wife? ‘If a man taketh his brother’s wife, it is an impurity,’ he quoted. ‘He hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.’ There it is, from the Book of Leviticus.”

  But Catherine, whose chaplains were quite adept at quoting Scripture, had been advised to answer this passage with another, and we heard her doing so in uncharacteristically loud tones.

  “The Book of Deuteronomy is even more clear,” she began. “‘When brethren dwell together, and one of them dieth without children, the wife of the deceased shall not marry to another, but his brother shall take her.’ You would have sinned, my lord, had you not married me after your brother Arthur died and left me a widow.”

  At this Henry cursed, and shouted, and demanded once again that Catherine retire to a convent. Had he been the Duke of Norfolk or my brother Ned, I thought, he would not have argued, he would simply have acted. He would have had his soldiers seize the queen and drag her off to a nun’s cell. But he was not that kind of man. He was not a brute, or a churl. And he had lived, fairly amicably it was said, with Catherine for nearly twenty years.

  More important, according to Ned—my source for all that was vital at court, especially where the King’s Great Matter was concerned—was the fact that Queen Catherine’s nephew was the most powerful man in Europe: Emperor Charles V. Ruler of a vast empire, commander of vast armies and possessor of untold treasure from the silver mines of the Americas. Emperor Charles, who was Queen Catherine’s protector—or so she believed. King Henry would not dare imprison her or harm her without risking the wrath of the fearsome emperor and his armies—not while his own treasury was all but empty, according to Ned, and his fighting forces sadly weakened as a result.

  King Henry did not harm his wife, at
least not physically. But he wounded her all the same. He banished her favorite Spanish ladies from court, and sent many of them back to Spain. She wept for days. She mourned their loss, they had been her lifelong companions and dearest friends and confidantes (though I remained her confidante, and she trusted me). And, what was even more hurtful to her, the king sent Princess Mary away as well. Separating mother and daughter was indeed cruel, and the queen suffered. She suffered, not only because her beloved Mary, her jewel and delight, was kept from her but because she feared their separation would be permanent.

  “He will never let me see her again,” she said to me, shaking her head sadly. “Not even if I do everything he wants. And I will not. I cannot. My poor, dear child. What will become of her?”

  * * *

  Had Anne or had she not agreed to marry the king? That was the question, endlessly debated in the chambers where we maids of honor clustered in corners to share what we knew, or suspected. The queen was still queen, but might not be for much longer, if the king’s lawyers and Cardinal Wolsey had their way. Was there a private agreement between the king and his new mistress? An agreement to wed? Would we soon be forced to bow to Anne as we now did to Queen Catherine, and to revere and serve her as we revered and served our present queen?

  The thought was too strange. Queen Catherine was a royal princess by birth, as far above us in rank as it was possible for a woman to be. Anne was just a girl, like us, in the queen’s court. The Boleyns were not royal. Anne’s mother was a Howard, to be sure, and the sister of the highborn Duke of Norfolk. But the Howards were not Tudors. Anne certainly did not act the way a royal lady ought to act—gracious, kind, generous to her inferiors. Pious. Dignified. Anne was none of these things.