Mayflowers for November: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (15 page)

‘Everyone is watching the Queen,’ Constantine said.

‘That man in black with the long beard who leans his elbow upon the table, who is he?’

‘That is our poet, Thomas Wyatt. Why do you ask?’

‘He watches so intently. I think he is in love with her.’

‘Oh, that is not allowed,’ Constantine said with sudden seriousness. ‘He may play courtly games and profess to be smitten with the Queen. He may plead that he is dying for love. He may choose a lady to serve, if that is his wish, but that is all he may do. If he has list to fall in love he must do so in his poems, not at court, and certainly not with the Queen.’

The Queen had returned to her seat under her cloth of estate. Now the chamber was full of dancing courtiers. The couples circled sedately around the chamber once or twice before the ladies and gentlemen went to opposite ends of the chamber and took turns to display their skills. The ladies danced with more vigour than the pregnant Queen Anne, yet were proud and stately as she had been and I thought they appeared to enjoy showing off their best attire more than their dancing. The gentlemen, unhampered by heavy hoods, skirts and trains performed high leaps and thrashed their arms about as if they were on a battlefield.

‘Ah, I see my old school friend, Sir William Brereton, newly returned from the Welsh Marches. I crave leave, Mistress Avis, for a moment, to speak to him.’

Constantine and his friend embraced as old friends do and chatted and laughed together for some time. I thought his friend a very handsome gentleman. The Queen’s ladies did too. They laughed and flirted when he asked them to dance. He approached the Queen and after he had bowed immediately said something to make her laugh.

‘The ladies like your friend,’ I said, when Constantine returned.

‘Your father begged me to warn you against gentlemen who think you to be easy prey,’ he replied suddenly becoming very serious again. ‘Avis, do not take into your heart any handsome young man, nor mayhap not so young, who seeks to entice a damsel with vows of love.’

‘ Goodness,’ I exclaimed. Are you suggesting that your friend, Sir William Brereton, is a seducer?’

‘I say nought against my old friend. He is a married man. You must judge for yourself. But you need to understand that here at court, games of love can sometimes, shall we say, get out of hand,’

He said no more. I thought that he would have said less but that the dimness of the space behind the arras invited confidence. I made no reply to his warning and I guessed that he did not expect it. Perhaps he knew that I was blushing in the darkness.

‘When will the King come to dance?’ I asked to change the subject.

The tapestry was pulled aside and my mistress appeared.

‘The King may dance later tonight with his beautiful mistress after the Queen has retired to her bedchamber. He knows she will not keep late hours.’

Clementine heaved a loud sigh.

‘Tis common knowledge, George,’ Mistress Madge purred cheerfully. ‘Come Avis, I need to retire for a while.’

She led me to a little bedchamber where we both made use of the garderobe. Then I rearranged her clothes, for the dancing had loosened the ties in her sleeves and her bodice had slipped, exposing more bosom than I thought to be seemly.

I never did get to see the King dance. Shortly after we returned the Queen left the presence chamber in the middle of a dance, accompanied by some of her ladies including Mistress Madge. I was told to return to my mistress’s chambers where I was to wait.

*

Mistress Madge’s servant boy lit the candles and tended the fires in the inner and outer chambers of her lodging. He brought a pitcher of clean conduit water for the bowl in the little closet off her bedchamber and strewed fresh herbs around the garderobe. I brought my bedclothes from the coffer while he pulled out my little truckle bed and set it in its place beside my mistress’s big bed. He departed with a brief, ‘goodnight, Avis’ and I was left alone. Some nights my mistress returned so late she had to wake me to undress her. I took off my kirtle and coif, folded them carefully and placed them in the coffer. I would wear my shift in bed. Tomorrow, it would need to go to the laundress. I found a crisp clean shift in my coffer and draped it over the lid ready for the morning. I fed seed and water to Mistress Madge’s songbird and covered its cage with the night-time cloth.

Usually, I enjoyed being alone in this luxurious apartment. The other maids-of-honour usually only had one chamber but my mistress, being a cousin of the Queen, was allocated a double lodging at every palace. I would walk around both chambers gazing at tapestries where ladies in old fashioned, high-waisted, flowing gowns and high conical headdresses held posies of flowers, whilst timid, startled deer faltered in forest clearings. Tonight, in my mistress’s bedchamber I combed my hair and saw a sulky young girl’s reflection in her looking glass. I had wanted to see the King dance but most of all I had wanted to see for myself the beautiful mistress whom he served who was so much gossiped about. Also, secretly, I had hoped that Constantine would step out with me to dance. My mistress would not have minded. The maids’ mother was busy fussing over the Queen’s maids-of-honour. Who would have noticed me? Mistress Madge was having fun, why shouldn’t I?

Mistress Madge’s boy returned breathless with an usher wearing the Queen’s purple and blue livery.

‘You must come now. I’ve to take you,’ the usher said.

‘Take me where? Where is Mistress Shelton?’

‘Make haste, come at once.’

‘You have to go with him now, Avis,’ the boy said.

‘Mistress Shelton told me to wait here.’

The Queen’s usher grabbed my arm, ‘Mistress Shelton commands me to bring you now.’

‘I cannot go about the palace in my hair and my shift, if you please,’ I cried, pulling away. ‘Let me dress. Wait outside the door if you please.’

I had to lace my kirtle and tie my coif while I ran to follow the usher up the same grand staircase where my mistress had led me earlier and through the great watching chamber. The guards seemed heedless of a maidservant running between them behind the Queen’s light-footed servant. Once inside the Queen’s presence chamber he commanded me to walk behind the arras towards the privy chamber where Mistress Shelton waited. The music had ceased. I heard someone laugh and, stopping to peek between the arras, I saw that the big chamber was almost empty. Only a cluster of ladies and gentlemen remained. Weary pages yawned and stood around waiting for them to leave so that they could bid the servants tidy up and snuff out the candles for the night.

From a little closet outside the Queen’s privy chamber Mistress Madge pounced upon me.

‘What took you so long. Come to the Queen.’

I stood stock still. Ahead of me through the doorway two gentlemen stared in my direction.

‘What is she doing here, this cunning maid with her sorcery,’ an angry voice demanded. It was Lord Rochford, the Queen’s brother.

‘She knows midwifery and, what is more, cousin George, she knows how to keep her mouth shut,’ my mistress told him calmly.

‘Any maid of yours would need to.’

‘And your servants do not, George? Come Avis, the Queen has asked for you.’

‘Can she do something, with her sorcery? Can she save it?’ the other gentleman asked. There was anger, or was it fear, in his tone. He was older than the Queen’s brother, grey hairs streaked his dark hair and his red beard.

‘How should I know, uncle,’ Mistress Madge answered in her soft, gentle manner. She would make a good nurse, I thought. Nothing ruffles her temper.

Lord Rochford grabbed my mistress by her arm. ‘If it is a boy stillborn tell the wench to get rid of it before anyone else sees it and tells the King.’

In a bedchamber beyond, the Queen lay on her bed in her shift and cap with her knees drawn up. On one side of the bed stood a young gentlewoman wearing an elegant court gown. She was looking all around the room, everywhere except at the sobbing Queen on the bed. An older gentlewoman wearing a gable hood sat by the Queen’s side and wiped her brow.

‘Are you sure of your dates, Anne? Maybe you are mistaken. There may well be a happy outcome from this night,’ she said gently.’

‘I bled in December, Mother. This is barely a seven-month child.’

The Queen’s mother waved me to the bedside. ‘Do whatever you can for the Queen and her child,’ she said and the younger lady left the room murmuring, ‘I will wait with Madge and my husband.’

‘Do you all desert me in my pain and sorrow?’ Queen Anne protested between her pains. ‘Where is my friend, Lady Lee, the poet’s sister? Bring her to me.’

‘She is not at court, Anne,’ her mother said sadly.

Child-bed is the loneliest place. There is the mother and there is her pain. All else is distant.

‘My lady, will you stay?’ I asked Lady Wiltshire, for I had never attended a birth alone.

‘Pray, do not leave me, Lady Mother,’ the Queen pleaded.

It was all over very quickly. The pregnancy just slipped away. The Queen lay empty, holding her mother’s hand, while a bloody mess lay between her legs like an oversized leech. Her father strode into the bedchamber. Immediately her screams of pain turned to wailing for her dead son.

‘Get rid of it now, wench,’ he told me. He had the same lively black eyes as his daughter but his were small and fierce.

‘My lord, whatever are you thinking,’ the Queen’s mother cried. ‘Be gone, my lord, the birthing chamber is no place for a man.’

‘Tell the King it was a maid child,’ he charged his daughter. ‘Speak prettily to him and promise that the next will be a boy; and when you are up, consult with doctors and wise women who know of these matters. You must ask them what you did to cause the King’s boy to be untimely expelled from your womb. Your sister managed to give the king a son although he will not own it.’

‘Not a son, my lord, just the one daughter, Katherine,’ Lady Wiltshire whispered. ‘Pray do not talk of such matters now. Show kindness to your daughter in her grief.’

Lord Wiltshire wasn’t listening to his wife. He stood beside the bed glowering at the Queen.

‘You, Anne, with your high spirits and your temper, you have too much mettle to keep a tender man-child in your womb,’ he said. ‘It must not happen again.

‘Will someone find a way to rid the court of the King’s mistress,’ he hissed to his son and daughter-in-law as he strode through the doorway into the outer chamber. ‘He cannot be allowed to waste his seed. He has enough bastards.’

‘I will do my best, sire,’ Lady Rochford said.

‘You’re a good girl, Jane,’ I heard him say with surprising kindness.

‘When you are alone with the King in his bedchamber, George,’ he bawled to his son, ‘when it is your turn to put the King to bed, tell him he has to fuck his wife to get an heir, not his mistress. And you might heed that advice yourself.’

‘My lord,’ Lady Wiltshire chided her husband in a whisper, ‘poor Jane will be crimson with shame, standing beside you, her father-in -law, listening to this.’

I wrapped the tiny stillborn boy in the Queen’s sheet. Then I had to wash the Queen and make her comfortable. I could not expect the ladies to do these things in their rich clothing. Mistress Madge had brought clean sheets from another chamber. Lady Wiltshire told me I must be rid of everything very soon before the King might know of it.

‘He must never know that it had been a boy.’

‘Where shall I take the child, my lady?’

She made no answer. Mistress Madge shrugged her shoulders at my pleading look. Oh, how I wished we were at Greenwich Palace. Aunt Bess would know what to do.

‘I want my son to be blessed,’ the Queen said.

‘Shall I take him to a priest?’ I asked.

‘It never lived. Just get rid of it,’ the Queen’s brother barked from the doorway.

‘Who will tell the King?’ the Queen asked and began to weep again.

‘Norris, of course,’ her brother answered. ‘Who else? Go to him tonight, Madge. The guards and pages on duty will not bat an eyelid to see Mistress Shelton heading for Norris’s apartments. Tell him the Queen has miscarried a girl. Ask of him where the King sleeps tonight.’

‘With luck,’ Lord Wiltshire added, ‘the King will be occupied in his bedchamber with madam all night. Norris will have no opportunity to tell him until morning by which time the thing will be got rid of.’

How? Where should I take a seven-month foetus? If I took it to a priest, he would ask for the mother and father’s names. I could not bury it secretly in the gardens or the King’s parkland without someone seeing. It was summer. Servants and courtiers were everywhere.

‘Will someone fetch Elizabeth,’ the Queen pleaded. ‘I want so much to hold my daughter.’

‘Tomorrow. The princess sleeps as you must,’ Lady Wiltshire told her gently. ‘Be comforted Anne for you know that the good Lord gave me a child for every year of my marriage when I was a young wife. Now, I have only two daughters and one son. You must not expect every child you conceive to be strong and to live, whatever your father might say. Better to lose a weak boy now than later when he is grown and you have had years of loving him. No one knows more than I what heartbreak it is to a mother to bury her sons. You are right to take comfort from your living child, Anne, as I did. With God’s grace, other sons will follow.’