Dear Heart, How Like You This (29 page)

“Yea, Anna. He was a very godly man.” I paused for a moment to look at Anna and smile. “Now George and I will wash our hands, and play to you our songs.”

So, that is what we did. My kinsman and I went over to the jug and basin placed on a square table near her bed, and washed and dried our hands. Then we played our lutes until the twilight moments of the day at length diminished, and the room became darkened by the night. And George and I found when we lit the candles around the bed that Anne had drifted into a deep slumber.

CONTENTS

1528–1532

Patience, though I have not

The thing that I require,

I must of force, god wot,

Forbear my most desire;

For no ways can I find

To sail against the wind.

I left Hever Castle the next day, accompanied by no one, as George had made the decision to stay and try his best to cheer his still ailing sister. Within a week I sailed for Calais, leaving England and my heart behind.

My cousin George told me, the night before I left Hever, that he truly believed God had chosen Anne to lead the King away from the great evil of the papacy and take him and England back to the road of righteousness. George, I found to my great dismay and concern, had become very much a Lutheran during my time abroad, and we argued through the night about the rights and wrongs of what I could not help but see as a terrible calamity for the three of us. At last, we concluded that we would never agree, so it was best to allow the other his own opinions. George, though, did admit to being sometimes plagued at night by many doubts and fears.

My new duties in Calais were immense, but still they did not keep me so busy that I remained unaware of the happenings back home. For certes, with a constant flow of letters from George and my father, I often felt better informed than when I resided in England!

Not long after I settled into my new life in Calais, I heard that Anne was now returned to court, though George wrote that she never fully regained the physical strength she had lost. He wrote worryingly that she pushed herself so much that George feared she would soon have a new and worse collapse. The only outward show of her body’s weakness, however, was that her temper would suddenly flare with apparent little reason, leaving some poor mortal singed in its wake.

When Anne eventually became Queen, many of the common people detested her because they saw her as the young hussy who had heartlessly used her youth to turn the King away from his older and more steadfast wife. Anne, they believed, was the shameless usurper—whore some called her—of a well beloved and sainted Queen. George wrote to me, in one of his many letters, how Anne still attended to the Queen even though it was now obvious to many at the court, what direction the tide took both of them. Indeed, the young woman the King wished to make his Queen would often play a game of chess with the older woman who had held right to that title for close to twenty years. George described one such scene so vividly that I felt I watched the same scene as he…

The Queen shifted the chess piece and, peering short-sightedly across at Anne, now puckered up her brow in concentration. With the final moments of daylight ebbing, a servant went around the room lighting candles in the Queen’s chamber. Waiting for the much younger woman to make her move, Catherine of Aragon—her Queen’s mask seemingly undisturbed—straightened her back and lifted her chin, rubbing the side of her face where her Spanish gable chafed her skin… Anne’s chair backed the long windows. Two hours before, when the game first started, sunlight shone bright upon the Queen, making her grey eyes water and squint in protest. But she hadn’t uttered a word of complaint. Rather, the game had been played with every iota of immense skill she could muster. Anne too played as if the game’s true meaning went beyond just a simple game. All watching knew the high stakes between these two women.

Hearing pieces click upon the board, the Queen dropped her gaze from studying the dark-haired girl, seeing her snatch a piece from the board. Dark eyes shining in triumph, Anne held the Queen’s king in her open palm. Catherine of Aragon’s composure broke.

“You are not satisfied with just the King; you mean to have all,” she snapped.

Yea. All who listened knew what the Queen meant—Anne held out for the crown.

Poor Queen Catherine! The Queen was not only very beloved by the common people—I was also one of those who were often torn with conflicting loyalties. As I heard one of my friends say, so will I say also: “Queen Catherine was beloved as if she was of the blood royal of England.”

Nonetheless, I do not believe that Anne was the complete cause of the final collapse of the King’s marriage. Yea, the King did fancy himself in love with Anne, but years before, when she was still a young child in her nursery at Hever Castle, he had already spoken to many at court of his doubts regarding his marriage to the good Queen Catherine.

My father told me one time in conversation how, as long ago as 1514, King Harry had flirted with the idea of getting rid of his Spanish wife. This was after his final falling out with Ferdinand, that old fox of Aragon, who also happened to be his wife’s father. Nonetheless, in 1514 Catherine was discovered to be again with child so the idea of a divorce was put aside, to eventually re-surface in 1528, when ten long years had gone by without the Queen showing any more sign of child-bearing. This could be hardly surprising, since it was also well known that the King and Queen very rarely co-habited with one another as husband and wife.

Furthermore, by this time King Henry had convinced himself that his marriage with Catherine had been cursed right from the start, taking as his proof a text in Leviticus, which said if a man married his brother’s widow their marriage would bear no fruit. True to his character, the King completely closed his eyes to the fact that there was a text in Deuteronomy that said a man
should
marry his brother’s widow, so to raise up living children in his dead brother’s name.

Yea. Events were rapidly on the move in England, moving swiftly to their final outcome. One only had look at what was happening to Cardinal Wolsey to realise how much change was in the air. Many years ago, when her heart was breaking over the loss of Hal Percy, Anne had sworn to me that one day she would bring the great Cardinal down. Letters from home made it clear that moves were now afoot in England to make that threat into an actuality. When Wolsey returned from France in the summer of 1527, Anne had tilted the power balance completely over in her favour. No longer would Henry sign Wolsey’s charters without first reading them for himself. No longer would the King receive Wolsey into his company without first acquiring the approval of that
upstart
Anne Boleyn. Clearly, the writing, for the Great Cardinal, was on the wall! However, nothing is ever that simple. The King still had need of the man who had virtually ruled England during those early years when the King was but a youth.

I gathered from my father’s letters that Wolsey was very uncertain if the King’s arguments regarding the validity of his marriage would hold much water when tested out in an ecclesiastical court. The Cardinal himself made it very clear that he did not fancy the prospect of Anne as the future Queen of England and, understanding how Anne felt about him, who could blame him!

The Cardinal pointed out to the King that if he were to decide on a political marriage—for instance deciding to marry a Princess of royal blood rather than insisting to marry for “love”—it would make achieving this divorce so much easier.

The King was flabbergasted and enraged by this argument; instead of making him change his stand regarding the divorce, it made him more determined than ever to triumph over all the obstacles that could be put his way.

George also wrote to tell me that Anne was making good use of the frequent separations of the King and Wolsey, using these absences to further the ever-widening gulf between them. My cousin went on to say, in this particular letter, that the nobles of the land, especially the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk, were delighted in what they saw happening between the King and the Cardinal. Thus, they did all that they could to encourage and assist Anne in her endeavours to bring the mighty Cardinal down.

This was no surprise to me.

The powerful nobles of the land had long resented Wolsey’s influence over the King.
The King and I
, usually spoken by the Cardinal to foreign dignitaries in the Latin,
ego et rex menus
, had been said so frequently by the Cardinal over the years that it had now become a common saying. Verily, I remember well a season at court when it was much quoted by one and all. However, this authority of the Cardinal annoyed those who believed that the authority should belong only to them. Indeed, all the nobility of England whole-heartedly believed that the power the King gave Wolsey was the right of one of their own ranks, rather than one they sarcastically called “the butcher’s son”—since rumour at court claimed him as such.

’Twas also clear, in these years when so much was changing, that Wolsey no longer was held in any esteem by the common people; indeed, whatever love or respect they had for him had long since flown. It was very easy to see the reasons for England’s disenchantment with Wolsey. The people of England perceived that the problems that afflicted the land, especially the constant threat to the much needed wool cloth trade with the Netherlands, trade which had brought prosperity and livelihood to so many, was very much due to the incompetence of the Cardinal. It surprised me to think how very few laid the blame upon the King.

Seeing his power rapidly slipping away from him, Wolsey desperately tried to gain the acceptance of Anne, but she heeded him not. In his great fear, the Cardinal then made the biggest mistake of his worldly ambitions. (Though, who knows? Perhaps his actions simply showed a man whose sleeping conscience had awoken and now looked uneasily on the events of the last few years.) Wolsey turned against the wishes of his King, and began to seek ways of supporting Catherine, her nephew the Emperor, and the wishes of Rome.

Anne discovered this turn-around, and became terrified of disaster, which would cause her fragile pack of cards to come tumbling down.

Anne’s own fear made her speak angrily to the King: “I have lost my youth and reputation for my love of you, Harry. Yet you will do nothing against Wolsey, who insists in trying to find more and more ways to destroy me. I can bear no more of this! Harry, either you must choose between having me as your wife and Queen, or continue in your favour of Wolsey. I will leave you, Harry. I swear to you, I will leave you, if you do not make up your mind and resolve to bring the Cardinal down!”

The King made his choice, and Cardinal Wolsey was arrested. I cannot help but wonder if it was just an act of fate that the man who was sent to take him in custody was none other than the Earl of Northumberland—once known as Hal Percy. Aye—Hal Percy, once the beloved boy of Anne Boleyn’s youth.

Thus, preparations were made to send Wolsey for trial, but before the Cardinal need be fight for his life, preserving all that he had gained in the service to the King, death came and took him to face a more eternal judgement.

Perhaps truth is starker when death looms vividly before your eyes.

Yea it must be so, because the Cardinal’s final words, as he lay on his bed a-dying, were: “If I had served God as diligently as I have done my King, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs.”

So the great Cardinal died; a mighty tree felled by a mere slip of a girl. And the loud sound of his fall made the whole land sit up and take notice

Was revenge sweet, my Anna?

I think not. I think now you began to truly taste the feast that your plot had led you to. And it was vile, utterly vile and spoiled. Like a decaying apple full of creatures of the earth. But, Anne, you were right when you told me that once begun there was no drawing back. Especially now that you had begun to truly love the King. Yea, it was obvious to me, who knew you better than you now knew yourself, that you were indeed caught in a trap of your own making. Thus, does fate make a mockery out of the plans and hopes of us poor mortals!