Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

“All you can do is confess. All you can do is confess.”

This is so like being some poor soul trudging toward Smithfield with a fagot of wood to be burned to death that I stop, and giggle, from sheer terror. “Really, Archbishop, I have done nothing. And I confess every day, you know I do, and I have never done anything.”

“You laugh?” he says, horrified.

“Oh, only from the shock!” I say impatiently. “You must let me go to Oatlands, Archbishop. Indeed, you must. I have to see the king to explain.”

“No, you have to explain to me, my child,” he says earnestly. “You have to tell me what you did at Lambeth, and what you did thereafter. You have to make a full and honest confession, and perhaps then I can save you from the scaffold.”

“The scaffold?” I shriek the word as if I have never heard it before. “What do you mean, the scaffold?”

“If you have betrayed the king, then this is an act of treason,” he says slowly and clearly, as if I am a child. “The punishment for treason is death. You must know that.”

“But I have not betrayed him,” I gabble at him. “The scaffold! I could swear it on the Bible. I could swear it on my life. I’ve never committed treason, I’ve never committed anything! Ask anyone! Ask anyone! I am a good girl, you know I am; the king calls me his rose, his rose without a thorn. I have no other will than his…”

“Indeed, you will have to swear to all of this on the Bible. And so you should make very sure that there is not a word of a lie. Now, tell me about what took place between you and the young man at Lambeth. And remember, God hears every word you say; and besides, we already have his confession, he has told us everything.”

“What has he confessed?” I ask.

“Never you mind. You tell me. What did you do?”

“I was very young,” I say. I peep up at him in case he is disposed to be sorry for me. He is! He is! His eyes are actually filled with tears. This is such a good sign that I feel much more confident. “I was very young, and all the girls in the ladies’ chamber were badly behaved, I am afraid. They were not good friends and advisors to me.”

He nods. “They allowed the young men of the household to come into the girls’ chamber?”

“They did. And Francis came in at night to court another girl; but then he took a fancy to me.” I pause. “She wasn’t half as pretty as me, and I didn’t even have my lovely clothes then.”

The archbishop sighs for some reason. “This is vanity. You are supposed to be confessing your sin with the young man.”

“I am! I am confessing. I am very distressed. He was very pressing. He insisted. He swore he was in love with me, and I believed him. I was very young. He promised me marriage; I thought we were married. He insisted.”

“He came to your bed?”

I want to say no. But if that fool Dereham has told them everything, then all I can do is make it seem better. “He did. I did not invite him, but he insisted. He forced me.”

“He raped you?”

“Yes, almost.”

“Did you not cry out? You were in the room with all the other young ladies? They would have heard you.”

“I let him do it. But I did not want it.”

“So he lay with you.”

“Yes. But he was never naked.”

“He was fully dressed?”

“I mean, he was never naked except for when he took his hose down. And then he was.”

“He was, what?”

“He was naked then.” Even to me this sounds weak.

“And he took your virginity.”

I cannot see a way to avoid this. “Er…”

“He was your lover.”

“I don’t think…”

He rises from his feet as if he would go. “This does you no good at all. I cannot save you if you lie to me.”

I am so afraid of his walking away that I cry out and run after him and catch his arm. “Please, Archbishop. I will tell you. I am just so ashamed, and so sorry…” I am sobbing now, he looks so stern; if he does not take my side, then how shall I explain all this to the king? I am afraid of the archbishop, but I am utterly terrified of the king.

“Tell me. You lay with him. You were as husband and wife to each other.”

“Yes,” I say, driven to honesty. “Yes, we were.”

He lifts my hand from his arm as if I have some infection of the skin and he does not want to touch me. As if I am a leper. I, who only two days ago was so precious that the whole country thanked God that the king had found me! It is not possible. It is not possible that everything could have gone so wrong so quickly.

“I shall consider your confession,” he says. “I shall take it to God in prayer. I have to tell the king. We will consider what charges you will have to face.”

“Can’t we just forget that it all happened?” I whisper, my hands twisting together, the rings heavy on my fingers. “It was so long ago. It was years ago. Nobody can even remember it. The king doesn’t need to know; you said yourself, it will break his heart. Just tell him that nothing important happened, and can’t everything be as it was?”

He looks at me as if I am quite mad. “Queen Katherine,” he says gently. “You have betrayed the King of England. The punishment is death. Can you not understand that?”

“But this was all long before I was married,” I whimper. “It wasn’t betraying the king. I hadn’t even met him. Surely the king will forgive me for my errors as a girl?” I can feel the sobs coming up into my throat, and I can’t hold them back. “Surely he won’t cruelly judge me for my childhood errors when I was nothing but a little girl with poor guardians?” I gulp. “Surely His Grace will be kind to me? He has loved me, and I have made him so happy. He thanked God for me, and this, this is nothing.” The tears are pouring down my face. I am not pretending to be sorry; I am absolutely appalled to be here, facing this awful man, having to twist myself up in lies to make things look better. “Please, sir, please forgive me. Please tell the king that I have done nothing that matters.”

The archbishop pulls away from me. “Calm yourself. Calm yourself. We will say no more now.”

“Say you will forgive me, say that the king will forgive me.”

“I hope he will; I hope he can. I hope you can be saved.”

I grab onto him, sobbing without control. “You cannot go until you promise me I will be safe.”

He drags himself to the door though I am clinging to him like a wailing child. “Madam, you must be calm.”

“How can I be calm when you tell me that the king is angry with me? When you tell me that the punishment is death? How can I be calm? How can I be calm? I’m only sixteen, I can’t be accused, I can’t be-”

“Let me go, Madam; this behavior does not serve you.”

“You shan’t go without blessing me.”

He pushes me from him and then crosses the air rapidly above my head. “There. There you are, in nomine… filii…There, now be quiet.”

I throw myself down on the floor to sob, but I hear the door close behind him, and even though he is not there to see me, I cannot stop crying. Even when the inner door opens and my ladies come in, I am still crying. Even when they flutter round me and pat me on the head, I do not sit up and cheer up. I am so afraid now, I am so afraid.

That devil the archbishop has terrified the girl half out of her wits, and now she does not know whether to lie or confess. My lord the duke has come with him for another visit, and while they try to pull the sobbing queen from her bed, he pauses beside me. “Will she confess to Culpepper?” he whispers, so low that I have to lean against him to hear it.

“If you let the archbishop work on her, she will confess to anything,” I warn him in a hurried whisper. “I cannot keep her quiet. He torments her with hope, and then he threatens her with damnation. She is only a silly girl, and he seems determined to break her. He will drive her mad if he keeps threatening her.”

He gives a short laugh, almost like a groan. “She had better pray for madness; it could be the only thing that saves her,” he says. “Good God. Two nieces as Queens of England, and both of them end on the scaffold!”

“What could save her?”

“They can’t execute her if she is mad,” he says absently. “You can’t stand trial for treason if you are mad. They would have to send her away to a convent. Good God, is that her screaming now?”

The eerie cries of Kitty Howard begging to be spared are echoing through her rooms as the women try to pull her in to face the archbishop.

“What will you do?” I demand. “This can’t go on.”

“I’ll try to keep clear of this,” he says bleakly. “I hoped to see her with her wits about her today. I was going to advise her to plead guilty to Dereham and deny Culpepper, then she has done nothing worse than marry with a precontract in place, as Anne of Cleves. She might have got away with that. He might even have taken her back. But at this rate she will kill herself before the axeman gets her.”

“Keep clear?” I demand. “And what about me?”

His face is like a flint. “What about you?”

“I’ll take the French count,” I say to him rapidly. “Whatever the contract is, I’ll take him. I’ll live with him in France for a few years – wherever he likes. I’ll lie low until the king has recovered from this, I can’t go back into exile, I can’t go back to Blickling. I can’t stand it. I can’t go through it all again. I really can’t. I’ll take the French count even without a good settlement. Even if he is old and ugly, even if he’s deformed. I’ll take the French count.”

The duke shouts with sudden laughter like a baited bear, bellowing in my face. I recoil, but his amusement is horribly sincere. In these terrible rooms filled with women crying to Katherine to compose herself and her awful, high-pitched wailing, and the archbishop praying loudly over the noise, the duke roars out his merriment. “A French count!” he bellows. “A French count! Are you mad? Are you run as mad as my niece?”

“What?” I demand, quite baffled. “What are you laughing at? Hush, my lord. Hush. There’s nothing to laugh at.”

“Nothing to laugh at?” He cannot contain himself. “There never was a French count. There never could have been a French count. There never would be a French count or an English earl or an English baron. There would never be a Spanish don, or an Italian prince. No man in the world would ever have you. Are you such a fool that you don’t know that?”

“But you said-”

“I said anything to keep you at work for me, as you would say anything to suit your own cause. But I never thought you really believed me. Don’t you know what men think of you?”

I can feel my legs starting to tremble; it is like the time before, when I knew that I would have to betray them. When I knew that I would have to hide my falseness from my own face. “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t want to know.”

His hard hands come down on my shoulders, and he drags me to one of the queen’s expensive gilt-edged looking glasses. In the soft silver reflection I see my own wide eyes looking back at me, and his face as hard as the face of Death himself. “Look,” he says. “Look at yourself and know what you are: you liar, you false wife. There is not a man in the world who would marry you. You are known the length and breadth of Europe as the woman who sent her husband and her sister-in-law to the axeman. You are known in every court in Europe as a woman so vile that she sent her husband to be hanged” – he gives me a shake – “to be cut down while still living, in his piss-wet breeches” – he shakes me again – “to be slit from cock to throat, to see his belly and his liver and his lights pulled out and shown to him, to bleed to death while they burned his liver and his heart and his belly and his lungs before his face” – he shakes me once more – “and then finally to be sliced up like a beast on the butcher’s block, the head, the arms, the legs.”

“They didn’t do that to him,” I whisper, but my lips barely move in the reflection.

“No thanks to you,” he says. “That’s what people remember. The king, his worst enemy, spared him the torture that you had sent him to. The king let him be beheaded, but you sent him to be disemboweled. You, on the witness stand, swearing that he and Anne had been lovers, that he had mounted his own sister, that he was a sodomite, a bugger, with half the court, swearing that they had plotted the king’s death, swearing his life away, sending him to a death that you would not give to a dog.”

“It was your plan.” In the mirror my face is green with sickness at the truth being spoken out loud at last, my dark eyes bulging with horror. “It was your plan, not mine. I shall not be blamed for it. You said that we would save them. They would be pardoned if we gave evidence and they pleaded guilty.”