Dear Heart, How Like You This (39 page)

In June, my increasing estimation in the King’s eyes was proved furthermore by his granting to me, for my lifetime, the command in time of war of all the able-bodied men of the counties of Kent. The King even went so far as to approve my request that I have a small band of men dressed in my own livery.

My climb upon the ladder continued even higher the following year, for at the beginning of that year I was made High Steward of the West Malling in Kent. And then, the most glorious honour of all: I at last gained my knighthood at Easter.

After my knighthood, I returned to my home, and it was not until the summer of 1535 that I was commanded by the King to accompany the court on a progress to Severn and then down to Hampshire. When I made my return to court, I was relieved to find that Anne was somewhat restored to the King’s favour. When the King and Anne were together it seemed to me that this progress was for other reasons than the official one given. It was as if they had selected this time to rediscover each other and make anew their tottering relationship. Indeed, sometimes the King and Anne were as merry as when they were first courting.

For certes, the whole progress had with it a feeling of a happy holiday. But then, perhaps this too was easy to understand; Anne and the King were engaged in pursuits that they both enjoyed to the full: riding and hawking in the best possible weather. Aye, this was a joyful and restful time for us all. It did not even seem that the King was overly concerned about dealing with state business.

In September though, we stopped for a while at Winchester, where Anne watched with much delight the consecration of not only Hugh Latimer, but two other of her favourite clerics as Bishops. Anne had told me, so long ago, that she saw the King’s passion for her as a way for the new religion to take deeper roots in England. Much of her time as Queen she spent ensuring that this would indeed be the case.

After the consecration of the Bishops, the court went to stay at Wolf Hall, the family home of the Seymour family. The King spent some of his time there dealing with the official business that had proven to be unavoidable, but still the holiday feeling lingered on. Around Wolf Hall were wondrous hunting woods, and many of our days there were spent, either on foot or on horse, hunting after all sorts of wild game.

Anne and I enjoyed these days to the full, but the King came not, and I wondered what matter of importance could be keeping him from the hunt.

Little did we know that the King had found other game to pursue without having to venture out of doors. And, perchance, the pursuing was not only on the part of the King.

One day, while we were chasing our quarry, the weather began to take a nasty turn. Most of the party that had gone to hunt with the Queen decided, after looking at the grim, grey clouds coming fast over the far horizon, to back up their tracks to where they had first set out not long before.

I rode my horse alongside Anne’s, and we, not caring about the increasing strength of the wind or the darkening of the sky, allowed our horses to move slowly along the paths that took us back to Wolf Hall. Soon we were far behind the rest of the company.

Anne was dressed this day all in green. No longer in masculine attire as I remembered from our youth and childhood, but upon her dark hair (tightly plaited around her head, and thus in no danger of escaping) she wore an over-large cap—a cap I would swear to have seen upon the head of the King only days before.

Despite the rain beginning now to drizzle, and the skies that became more and more dismal, we had no sense of hurry, no urge to make quick our return. Anna and I had ridden our horses in our youth and childhoods in worse weather than this. Thus, we were content to allow our horses to choose the speed that they would like to trot. This leisurely ride also gave us an opportunity to talk together, an opportunity fast becoming something of a rarity, so difficult was it to gain a moment of privacy in our hectic lives at court.

“See how swiftly the rabbits run!” Anna said, laughing, gesturing her head slightly not to the ground but to the retreating backs of the courtiers, as Urien, her wolfhound, began to sniff out the nearby foxholes.

I laughed with her, but noticed that we indeed were being fast left far behind. Inside of me began to grow a surge of warmth and contentment.

Hold still this moment. Hold on tight to it
.
Treasure it
.
Remember it
.
As you will always treasure and remember that other summer’s day when you thought you had gained part of your heart’s desire. So much has turned and changed since that day became but a cherished memory. Verily, ’tis not often now that you are so utterly alone with her
—
this woman beside you who has always held your heart.

I looked at Anna, held onto her vision of loveliness with my eyes, and said: “Do you remember how many times you and I came home to Hever completely drenched from our rides together, Anne?” Being thus alone with my beloved, I could not help but feel very nostalgic for other times long past, even Urien made me remember Pluto, Uncle Boleyn’s long dead wolfhound, a dog so loved by his youngest daughter.

That daughter glanced at me, and smiled.

“Yea, Tom. I remember. And I remember how dear Simonette would scold us dreadfully, and make us take off our wet clothes, and threaten that we would be forbidden our horses if we came home so wet again.”

“But she never did,” I said with a laugh.

“Nay. She never did.” Anne glanced at me again, but this time appeared both sad and reflective before beginning to speak again.

“I think Simonette knew that riding gave to me an outlet for this wild spirit of mine. Tom, you are so very lucky not be cursed with a foul temper!” She had been speaking with her eyes directed towards the track before us, but at these final words she looked wildly across at me.

I gazed at her again, and smiled to reassure her.

“I never noticed it when you were a child.”

“Nay, Tom, as a child there hardly ever was a reason to lose such control upon myself. In sooth, when I was a child, Simonette, Father Stephen, my brother and sister, and you too, Tom, surrounded me with much love. It little prepared me for the world that I was one day to face.”

“But, if it was not for that love, Anne, what wells of joy could we look back on now? My dearest dark Lady, when I look back on our childhoods, I remember such a golden time. It is like the landscape you have left behind is filled with blessed sunlight, where everywhere you look is full of beloved things, even if the landscape you have before you is dark and unknown. I take so much satisfaction that our beginnings were so lacking in unhappiness.”

“Yea, Tom. Perchance you have the right of it. But I know that my beginnings prepared me not for disappointment and despair. And when those two things struck me down in my life, well, Tom, you know—if anyone knows—how it shaped and twisted me… I would wish, and do pray for Elizabeth, that she is wiser than I, and makes not the same mistakes as her mother.”

Suddenly, it was as if the courtiers racing ahead had realised that the Queen was being left further and further behind. A group of them now swung back and began to return fast to us.

I sighed. So brief a time!

Anne gazed long at me and smiled, such a tender and loving smile that my heart caught in my throat.

Calling, “Urien!” she turned her eyes from me and moved her horse to swiftly meet up with the approaching courtiers. I stayed back, to linger, and watch her safely from a distance.

I thanked God for the rain. It did much to hide the tears now falling from my eyes.

I returned to Wolf Hall, sometime after the rest of the royal party, to discover the place in something of an uproar. It appeared that the King had been unaware of the Queen’s early and unexpected arrival, for the Queen discovered him embracing and kissing the quarry he had been pursuing during her absence. When the Queen had entered into the room, the two parties had guiltily separated from each other. Anne, it was said, spoke not one word, but turned upon her heel and returned hence to her chambers.

It astonished me utterly to hear who this quarry was. Where once the King’s vision had been enraptured by the sight of a very young falcon flying high and free, so much so that he brooked at nothing to capture it and make it his alone, now his vision remained land bound. The woman who now interested him was alike to Anne as a falcon is to a field mouse.

Jane Seymour was the eldest child of the house. Indeed, the woman must have been at least twenty-seven, thus well past her youth and not much younger than Anna. And, as for her looks! I think the King had begun to lose his eyesight! Jane was so fair and whey-faced that she seemed completely colourless. Even her eyes were such a faded blue that those “windows to the soul” were not worth a second glance. Aye, not to me at least, who had long gloried in my beloved’s bright and bold beauty.

More opposite to Anne you could not get, and perhaps that is where the attraction lay. Yea, demure and utterly plain, Jane had caught the King’s eye.

But Anne was still his wife, and very, very attractive on this day. I could easily imagine that it was the sight of her, when she had interrupted his tender moment with Jane, that had stopped the King from going any further with his new
lady-love
. Yea, the sight of Anna, so vividly and dazzlingly dressed in green, somewhat damp from being caught out of doors in the light rainfall, and cheekily wearing his own cap upon her head, would have made him take better stock of the situation. As it would any man with red blood flowing through his veins.

But I can honestly only speculate, even though I know that things were very different between the King and Anne after this day. Perhaps it was the guilt, or the fact that, for once, Anne had not savagely lashed him with her tongue, as she would have done in days past, or perchance, a mixture of all these things. For the moment, the King seemingly forgot the Lady Jane to lust after his own wife.

Anne plainly welcomed the King’s attentions. Since her miscarriage the previous year the King’s passion had been much on the wane, and she was obviously relieved that, for whatever reasons, he now frequented her bed. Thus, by the time the royal progress had drawn to its close, Anne knew herself to be again with child. And all of us who loved Anne, prayed hard that all would go right for her this time.

But bad omens haunted the land.

December had been a bad time in the county of Kent; half the crop harvests of many counties had been lost and now the spectre of famine loomed before many peasants’ eyes. It was often said, even by those who should have known better, that this was the judgement of God upon the marriage of the King. Thus, this state of affairs did nothing to improve the feelings of the common people towards his chosen Queen. In sooth, the King’s executions of Bishop Fisher, Sir Thomas More, and the holy Carthusian monks only served to increase the people’s hatred of her. It seemed to me that Anna was increasingly made the King’s scapegoat for his own wrong doings.

January came, and Anne, though not having an easy time of it again, began to feel secure in her new pregnancy. And a death now came to make her feel even more secure.

Catherine of Aragon, pushed from bad abode to worse, took her final breath. Some said it was poison, sent by Anne’s own hand. But I know my Anna, and speak the truth when I say nay. It was not Anne. But I know what killed the poor, noble lady. Catherine’s tender heart was broken by the callous acts of the King and she wished no longer to live. For a long while she had been sickening, and she was made even sicker and more invalid by the fact that Kimbolton Castle, where Catherine was forced to make her final home, was damp throughout, being situated on the Fens, and in a dreadful state of disrepair. For a long while, knowing that this illness was likely to be her last one, Catherine of Aragon had begged sight of her daughter Mary, and the King heeded her not.

Still the poor Lady died loving him, saying, in her final letter: “I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.”

Yea! Poor Catherine!

She died loving a man not fully realising that this man was no more. The King had been killed by his own selfish lust: lust for power and lust for things of the flesh. Yea, the Henry who she loved was long dead himself.

And how did the King act when he heard of this lady’s death?

“God be praised,” he cried to all his court. “We are freed at last of the harridan. No longer do we have to live in fear of war!”

The King believed that Catherine, fearing that her daughter’s rights were in danger of being lost forever, had written to her nephew the Emperor and begged him not to hesitate to make use of his armies, if that was what it required, so to protect his cousin Mary’s birthright.

Anne also was pleased to see the end of Catherine. As Catherine was afeared for her daughter Mary, so was Anne for her own daughter Elizabeth. Anna knew that as long as Catherine lived the party resolute against her would have a backbone difficult to break. But now all was different. With Catherine gone there was no one to claim that there was one who had greater right to sit by the side of the King. Thus, Anne was the only Queen in the land, the King’s undisputable wife. The child within her would be born without the doubt that had shadowed over the birth of Elizabeth.