Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

We go back to Richmond. The tide is with us, and I wish the barge would go more slowly and not rush us home to the palace where she will be watching for the barge and looking so very pale.

“What have we done?” asks Catherine Edgecombe dolefully. She is looking toward the beautiful towers of Richmond Palace, knowing that we will have to face Queen Anne, that her honest gaze will go from one of us to the other, and that she will know that we have been gone all day on our jaunt to London to give evidence against her.

“We have done what we had to do. We may have saved her life,” I say stubbornly.

“Like you saved your sister-in-law? Like you saved your husband?” she asks me, sharp with malice.

I turn my head away from her. “I never speak of it,” I say. “I never even think of it.”

It is the second day of the inquiry to conclude whether my marriage to the king is legal or not. If I were not so low in my spirits, I would laugh at them sitting down in solemn convocation to sift the evidence they have themselves fabricated. We must all know what the result will be. The king has not called the churchmen, who take his pay and serve in his own church, who are all that is left now that the faithful are hanging on scaffolds all around the walls of York, for them to tell him that he is inspired by nothing but lust for a pretty face, and that he should go down on his knees for forgiveness of his sins and acknowledge his marriage to me. They will oblige their master and deliver a verdict that I was precontracted, that I was never free to marry, that our marriage is therefore annulled. I have to remember that this is an escape for me, it could have been so much worse. If he had decided to put me aside for misconduct, they would still have heard evidence, they would still have found against me.

I see an unmarked barge coming up to the great pier, and I see the king’s messenger, Richard Beard, leap ashore before the ropes are even tied. Lightly he comes up the pier, looks toward the palace, and sees me. He raises his hand and comes briskly over the lawns toward me. He is a busy man; he has to hurry. Slowly, I go to meet him. I know that this is the end for my hopes of being a good queen for this country, a good stepmother to my children, a good wife to a bad husband.

Silently, I hold out my hand for the letter he carries for me. Silently, he gives it to me. This is the end of my girlhood. This is the end of my ambitions. This is the end of my dream. This is the end of my reign. Perhaps it is the end of my life.

Who would have thought she would take it so hard? She has been crying like a brokenhearted girl, her useless ambassador patting her hands and muttering to her in German like some old dark-feathered hen, that ninny Richard Beard standing on his dignity but looking like a schoolboy, agonizingly embarrassed. They start on the terrace, where Richard Beard gives her the letter, then they bring her into her room when her legs give way beneath her, and they send for me as she cries herself into a screaming fit.

I bathe her face with rose water, and then give her a glass of brandy to sip. That steadies her for a moment, and she looks up at me, her eyes as red-rimmed as those of a little white rabbit.

“He denies the marriage,” she says brokenly. “Oh, Jane, he denies me. He had me painted by Master Holbein himself. He chose me, he asked for me to come, he sent his councillors for me, he brought me to his court. He excused the dowry, he married me, he bedded me, now he denies me.”

“What does he want you to do?” I ask urgently. I want to know if Richard Beard has a guard of soldiers coming behind him, if they are going to take her away tonight.

“He wants me to agree to the verdict,” she says. “He promises me a…” She breaks into tears on the word settlement. These are hard words for a young wife to hear. “He promises fair terms if I cause no trouble.”

I look at the ambassador, who is puffed up like a cockerel at the insult, and then I look at Richard Beard.

“What would you advise the queen?” Beard asks me. He is no fool; he knows who pays my hire. I will sing to Henry’s tune, in four-part harmony if need be, he can be sure of that.

“Your Grace,” I say gently. “There is nothing that can be done except to accept the will of the king and the ruling of his council.”

She looks at me trustingly. “How can I?” she asks. “He wants me to say that I was married before I married him, so we were not married. These are lies.”

“Your Grace.” I bend very low to her and I whisper, so that only she can hear. “The evidence about Queen Anne Boleyn went from an inquiry, just like this one, to the courtroom and then to the scaffold. The evidence about Queen Katherine of Aragon began with an inquiry just like this one, took six years to hear, and in the end she was alone and penniless and died in exile from her friends and from her daughter. The king is a hard enemy. If he offers you any terms, any terms at all, you should take them.”

“But-”

“If you do not release him, he will be rid of you anyway.”

“How can he?” she demands.

I look at her. “You know.”

She dares me to say it. “What will he do?”

“He will kill you,” I say simply.

Richard Beard moves away so that he can deny he ever heard this. The ambassador glares at me, uncomprehending.

“You know this,” I say.

In silence, she nods.

“Who is your friend in England?” I ask her. “Who will defend you?”

I see the fight go out of her. “I have none.”

“Can you get a message to your brother? Will he save you?” I know he will not.

“I am innocent,” she whispers.

“Even so.”

I cannot, I cannot believe it: but it is so. My grandmother has just told me, and she has just had it from my uncle Norfolk, and he was there, and so he knows. They have done it. They have examined all the evidence and announced that the king’s marriage to Queen Anne of Cleves was never valid and that they are both free to marry someone else, as if they had never been married to each other at all.

I am amazed. All that wedding, and the gown, and the beautiful jewels and gifts, and us all carrying the train and the wedding breakfast and the archbishop… none of it counted. How can that be? The sables! They didn’t count either. This is what it is to be king. He wakes up in the morning and decides he is to marry and he does. Then he wakes up the morning after and decides he doesn’t like her, and voilà! (this is French, it means something like: gracious, look at that!), voilà! He is not married. The marriage was never valid, and they are now to be seen as brother and sister. Brother and sister!

Only a king could do such a thing. If it were done by an ordinary person, you would think him a madman. But since he is king nobody can say that this is madness, and not even the queen (or whatever she happens to be now) can say this is madness. We all say: “Oh, yes, Your Majesty,” and he comes to dinner with my grandmother and me tonight and he will propose to marry me and I will say: “Oh, yes, Your Majesty, thank you very much,” and never, never say that this is mad, and the work of a madman, and the world itself is mad that it does not turn on him.

For I am not mad. I may be very stupid, and I may be very ignorant (though I am learning French, voilà!) but at least I don’t think that if you stand in front of the archbishop and say “I do,” then that doesn’t count six months later. But I do see that I live in a world that is ruled by a madman and governed by his whims. Also, he is the king and head of the church, and God speaks to him directly, so if he says that something is the case, then who is going to say no to him?

Not I, at any rate. I may have my thoughts (however stupid I am assured they are), I may have my stupid thoughts in – what did she say? – “a head that can hold only one nonsensical idea at a time”; but I know that the king is mad, and the world is mad. The queen is now to be his sister, and I am to be his wife and the new queen. I am to be Queen of England. I, Kitty Howard, am to marry the King of England and to be his queen. Voilà indeed.

I cannot believe it is true. And I wish someone had thought of this: what real gain is there in it for me? For I have thought about this now. What should prevent him waking up one morning and saying that I, too, was precontracted and that our royal marriage is not valid? Or that I am unfaithful, and he had better behead me? What should prevent him taking a fancy to a stupid, pretty maid-in-waiting of mine, and putting me to one side for her?

Exactly! I don’t think this has occurred to anyone but me. Exactly. Nothing can prevent him. And those people like my grandmother, who are so free with their insults and their slaps, who say that it is a tremendous honor and a fine step up for a ninny like me, might well consider that a fool can be jumped up, but a fool can also be thrown down; and who is going to catch me then?

I have written to say that I agree with the findings of the inquiry, and they have all witnessed it, one after another, the great men who came here to argue with me, the ladies whom I had called my friends when I was Queen of England and they were desperate to serve in my court. I have admitted that I was precontracted, and not free to marry. I have even apologized for this.

This is a dark night for me in England. The darkest night I have ever faced. I am not to be queen. I can stay in England at the king’s unreliable favor, while he marries the little girl who was my maid-in-waiting, or I can go home penniless to live with my brother, whose spite and negligence have brought me to this. I am very much alone tonight.

This is the most beautiful palace in the kingdom, overlooking the river in its own great park. It was built by the king’s father as a great show palace in a peaceful, beautiful country. This wonderful place is to be part of the payment the king offers to be rid of me. And I am to have the Boleyn inheritance, their family house: the pretty castle of Hever. No one but me seems to find this amusing: that Henry should bribe me with the other Queen Anne’s childhood home, which he owns only because he beheaded her. Also, I can have a generous allowance. I shall be the first lady of the kingdom, second only to the new queen, and regarded as the king’s sister. We shall all be friends. How happy we shall be.

I don’t know how I shall live here. To tell the truth, I cannot imagine how my life will be after tonight, this dark night. I cannot go home to my brother; I should be shamed as a whipped dog if I were to go home to him and say that the King of England has put me aside, calling in archbishops to get his freedom from me, preferring a pretty girl, my own maid-in-waiting, to me. I cannot go home and say this. I cannot go home and face this shame. What they would say to me, how I would live as spoiled goods at my brother’s court, I cannot imagine. It is not possible.

So I shall have to stay here. There is no refuge for me anywhere else. I cannot go to France or to Spain or even to a house of my own somewhere in Germany. I have no money to buy such a place. If I leave England, I will have no rich allowance; they will pay me no rents. My lands will be given to someone else. The king insists that I live on his generosity in his kingdom. I cannot hope for another husband to offer me a home either. No man will marry me knowing that I have lain under the king’s heavy laborings for night after night and that he could not bring himself to do it. No man will find me desirable knowing that the king’s manhood shriveled at the sight of me. The king has volunteered to his friends that he was repelled by my fat belly and by my slack breasts and by the smell of me. I am shamed to the ground by this. Besides, since every churchman in England has agreed that I was bound to marry the son of the Duke of Lorraine, that will be an obstacle to any marriage I might want in the future. I will have to face a single life, without lover, or husband, or companion. I will have to face a lonely life, without family. I will never have a child of my own, I will never have a son to come after me, I will never have my own daughter to love. I will have to be a nun without a convent, a widow with no memories, a wife of six months, and a virgin. I will have to face life in exile. I will never see Cleves again. I will never see my mother again.