Mayflowers for November: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (14 page)

Old Archbishop Fisher was the next to be sent to prison for refusing to acknowledge the Act. Father thought he was very brave. Then, in May, we heard that the Observant Friars were on the run from Greenwich and I remembered the friar who had stood with his back to Anne Boleyn’s water pageant. It seemed that there were many folks who were so true to the Pope and the Catholic religion that they were willing to defy the King with their lives. In church, I prayed that Father, Mother and Tom would keep their sympathies to themselves and I asked God to take care of them.

‘Will the common people have to swear to the oath?’ I asked Mistress Madge.

‘The common people? Really, Avis, what do I know of them? Now that Master Cromwell is appointed Secretary of State it is his concern to seek out traitors. He was a common man himself once, he’ll know what to do. It is your concern to help me dress. Fetch my new damask gown of blue and my yellow forepart. There is to be dancing tonight in the Queen’s presence chamber and I think I will let you wait in the hall place outside the door so that you will be around to straighten my hood and veil. I may allow the page to let you slip inside and hide behind the arras to watch the dancing for I know how much you love to see the Queen’s ladies in all their finery.’

I did not know Cromwell. I knew nothing of what kind of man he was and to my shame, I was too afraid to admit even to myself the strength of my father’s opposition to the divorce and the new Act. I knew Father had been urgently seeking Tom since he disappeared. I suspected that Tom was involved in a Catholic plot concerning the Lady Mary. I had heard Lady Shelton’s threats against my family. I should have warned Father. I know this now, but I never did.

Instead, I decided not to speak to Father or Mother of Tom, or of the pomander. I told father nothing of the missive found in the Lady Mary’s orange. I could not believe that he would be anything except ignorant of the plots which Lady Shelton had feared and I thought it better that he should know nothing if he were questioned. I remembered Mother and Father’s warning to me when first I came to court; to speak nothing of religious matters. Surely my parents would heed their own advice. Surely they would hold their tongues and keep their dislike of Anne Boleyn and their love of the Pope to themselves, and anyway, surely someone as close to the King as Master Cromwell would not concern himself with lower servants in the outer courtyard.

‘Oh, the arrogance of the young who think they know all,’ I tell White Boy. ‘I was, as my mistress so often told me, “a foolish, ignorant girl.” I will never forgive myself. If I live to be ancient, I will never shake off the error of my youth. I should have warned father; I know that now.’

‘Aye, mistress, maybe so, but take comfort. The wisdom that comes with great age will teach you to forgive the folly of your youth. The priest will give you absolution in the confessional,’ White Boy says gently. ‘The master has often talked of this on Sundays when he reads the Bible.’

‘What great sin does the master have need to confess?’ I wonder aloud.

White Boy shrugs his shoulders. ‘Youthful pranks?’ he suggests.

I know very little of my husband’s youthful days excepting that he was a serious, sometimes angry boy. I know that he was secretive, even then. He will not speak of how he earned his living in those three years when Anne Boleyn was queen.

And his night time journeys across the river are a great worry to me, yet I dare not ask the purpose.

‘It is unlawful and dangerous to be out on the river at night,’ White Boy says as if reading my thoughts.

*

Mistress Madge took me by the hand and led me upstairs to the first floor of Hampton Court Palace where the Queen had her apartments. We passed through chamber after chamber until we came to the hall place outside the Queen’s presence chamber. Here I straightened my mistress’s veil and long train. Other of the Queen’s maids-of-honour and her married ladies-in-waiting were attended by their maids or assisted by an older lady who bustled about amongst them. She was lady mistress, the maids’ mother, whose responsibility it was to ensure that the Queen’s maids-of-honour behaved according to the Queen’s wishes. The little hall place was filled with the ladies in their big bright gowns with their full wide sleeves, and heavy with the smell of the ladies’ musk and rose water perfume. One of the young ladies admired my mistress’s new gown.

‘What a beautiful, deep shade of blue and such fine silk damask.’

She spoke quietly and I thought she seemed rather shy. Mistress Madge thanked her and said that the blue cloth was a gift. She spoke seriously in that quiet way of hers, as if her gift were a matter of great importance, a secret not to be shared. Several of the other ladies turned to look. They raised their eyebrows and turned away to talk in whispers.

‘Oh indeed?’ the quiet lady replied. She had a way of pressing her lips together after she had spoken, as if long conversation were frowned upon and she needed to cut short her sentences. Mistress Madge did not respond. Neither did she compliment the other lady upon her attire which I thought was rather rude of my mistress. Mother had told me that one compliment always deserves another and the lady’s forepart and matching sleeves were very finely embroidered with silver thread. The quiet lady turned away.

I asked Mistress Madge if she was new to court.

‘Not so new,’ my mistress whispered. ‘With her fair complexion she could be quite pretty but that chin!’

I had to admit that she did have quite a knobbly chin that spoiled her face.

‘Who is she?’ I asked.

‘Nobody special. Mistress Jane Seymour. She is not related to the Queen as some of us are. She has no gentlemen admirers that I know of, talking of which,’ Mistress Madge giggled and turned towards the doorway to the Queen’s presence chamber where the guards stood aside to let a gentleman and his servant pass into the hall place. The gentleman doffed his feathered cap in a sweeping bow to include all of the ladies present then he offered his hand to my mistress. I rose from my curtsey and he was smiling at Mistress Madge and she at him yet I felt that he was smiling for me too when he gave me the tiniest of winks that no one else would have noticed. It was the King’s friend, Sir Henry Norris, groom of the stool, the man who was closer to the King than anyone else; the middle-aged, kindly gentleman who had been with the King when I came upon him in the nursery at Greenwich. And he had remembered me. Why was my mistress smiling at him so, in that teasing way of hers? He was old enough to be her father.

The Queen’s ladies passed into her presence chamber with Sir Henry and now the hall place was busy with pages, servers and ushers coming and going into and out of the presence chamber with food and drinks, all frowning and cursing me for being in the way.

‘Come with me Avis.’ Sir Henry’s servant guided me towards the great doorway, the guards let us pass and I gasped, I couldn’t help it. I was inside the Queen’s great presence chamber. Before I could even look around at the wonder of it all I was steered into semi-darkness.

‘Mistress Shelton wishes you to stay behind the arras, I understand,’ Sir Henry’s servant explained, ‘and I shall stay with you a while to keep you company.’

‘I thank you sir, but really there is no need for you to spoil your plans for the evening on my account.’

I could tell by his clothes that he was a much higher status servant than myself; a gentleman of some standing. What did he want with me?

‘I have told your father that I will look out for you, and here you are and here am I. I have found us two stools and we can make ourselves quite comfortable whilst we listen to the music and peek between the arras to watch the dancing. Here, you boy,’ he called, pulling aside the heavy tapestry, ‘fetch two goblets of wine. You do like spiced wine, Avis?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, tonight you shall try it.’

‘How is it that you know my father, sire?’

‘He bakes good bread and I am always hungry.’

I laughed. I liked this good humoured, pleasant man. He wasn’t young but he was certainly not as old as my father or the King. I liked the peppery red wine that tasted of cloves.

‘There are always hungry people at the bakery door in the late mornings begging father to give them a bread roll to settle their empty stomachs while they wait for their dinners, especially those on second sitting.

‘I fear I must crave your pardon, Mistress Avis,’ he said, ‘for I have forgotten my manners. You have no idea who I am.’

‘Indeed, I do not, except of course, that you are a servant of the King’s good friend.’

‘George Constantine, at your service madam.’

He bowed, I curtseyed and we both laughed.

‘We will be good company together this evening, young Mistress Avis.’

‘My father has often spoken of your master and his acts of kindness to the Queen.’

‘Oh, you mean the peacocks and the pelican that kept the Queen awake below her window that now keep my Sir Henry and yours truly awake at his house in Greenwich.’ He began to laugh again. ‘Did anyone ever tell you what King Henry did to the roof of my master’s house.’

‘Whatever did he do?’

‘A great, new gun was wheeled to Plumstead park for the King to try and it was so powerful that the King, not being familiar with the new weapon, missed his target completely and blasted off the roof of my master’s house in Greenwich Town.

‘That’s not the funniest part of the story,’ he added between bouts of laughter. ‘That evening, in the King’s privy chamber, Sir Henry and the King played cards well into the night. When they were finally done, my master had lost a fortune to the King. The King is very witty, you know. With a serious face he told Sir Henry, “Now I can afford to pay for your new roof,” and handed back some of his winnings. The King was bellowing with laughter and my master joining him heartily while the King’s fool was leaping about, ringing his bells and chanting: “The groom of the stool is all kindness and charity. Blow up his house with gunpowder if you will. Sir Henry will only laugh and let you beat him at the card table”.’

‘You are lucky to have such a master,’ I told Constantine. ‘My father says Sir Henry Norris is a good, kind man.’

‘Aye, so he is. Sometimes too kind for his own good.’

We live our lives in conversations. How many of our words fly from our mouths and are lost forever? How many conversations hang like bats between stark, stone walls and dusty tapestries, ready to dart into remembrance when the time is right? Even now, twenty-four years hence, it is a great sadness for me to remember those innocent, prophetic words spoken so carelessly by Sir Henry Norris’s fond servant.

The wine and the laughter were making me dizzy in my dim hiding place. Then the music began. I peered between the tapestries. In the minstrels’ gallery I saw Mark Smeaton leaning over the balustrade watching the Queen while he played his lute and sang. He was not wearing his old duds. He was dressed like the other musicians in a feathered cap and bright clothes. When he had finished, the Queen thanked him with a little wave of her hand and a smile and she turned to another gentleman who was leaning over her shoulder, gestured towards the musician and smiled again; and even from a distance I could see a flush spreading across Mark Smeaton’s face.

A single drum began to beat a steady rhythm and the Queen left her canopied seat. Her brother came to her and they held hands and paraded together to the far end of the long presence chamber. All the other lords and ladies stood aside and the musicians began to blow their swarms and sackbuts, flutes and recorders and other instruments whose name I didn’t know, and I couldn’t keep my feet still. Even the banners hanging from the trumpets and the feathers in the musicians’ caps were jigging about. The music was everything all at once: so lively it made me happy, yet sad enough to make me want to cry, so slow it could accompany the King on a procession through the palace, yet so fast my feet were hopping.

‘You like to dance Avis?’ Constantine asked.

‘Oh, not these court dances,’ I told him. ‘Only simple branles which the country people dance in rounds at weddings.’

‘The Queen and her brother are dancing a pavane. It is the stateliest of court dances and a favourite of the Queen, I believe. The basic steps are really quite simple. Not so much more difficult than your peasant dances.’

The dance certainly allowed the Queen to show off her clothes. The long crimson train flowed elegantly as she walked. She smiled while she watched her brother dance back to where they had begun and then they faced each other across the chamber and she waited while he danced alone towards her.

‘See how Lord Rochford shows off his dancing skills and improvises his steps as he moves towards the Queen,’ Constantine said. ‘Now he will retreat and it is the Queen’s turn to dance alone.’

George Boleyn was certainly, I thought, the most handsome man in the chamber but so very proud of himself, the way he moved his head from side to side towards the watching courtiers with hardly a glance through his lowered lids. What lady would dare to dance with such an arrogant man? I wouldn’t.

The Queen danced gently, parading her pregnancy for all to see. She raised her arms and swayed making the crimson velvet sleeves swing heavily. Candlelight from the many chandeliers made the golden tinsel glisten upon her bulging forepart.

‘Who is that man who watches the Queen?’ I asked