The Boleyn Inheritance

Anne, Calais,
December 1539

The weather to cross the English Sea is, thank God, fair at last, after days of delay. I hoped that I would have a letter from home before we set sail, but though we have had to wait and wait for good weather for the crossing, no one has written to me. I thought that Mother might have written to me; even if she is not missing me, I thought she might have sent me some words of advice. I thought Amelia might already be hoping for a visit to England and might write me a letter of sisterly greeting. I could almost laugh at myself tonight, to think how low my spirits must be if I am wanting a letter from Amelia.

The only one I was certain of was my brother. I was sure I would have a letter from him. He never regained his temper with me, not in all the long preparation of leaving, and we parted on the terms that we have lived all our lives: on my side with a resentful fearfulness of his power, and on his side with an irritation that he cannot voice. I thought that he might write to me to appoint me with business to transact at the English court; surely I should be representing my country and our interests? But there are all the Cleves lords who are traveling with me; no doubt he has spoken or written to them. He must have decided that I am not fit to do business for him.

I thought at any rate that he was certain to write to me to lay down rules for my conduct. After all, he has spent his life dominating me. I did not think he would just let me go. But it seems I am free of him. Instead of being glad of that, I am uneasy. It is strange to leave my family, and none of them even send me Godspeed.

We are to set sail tomorrow in the early morning to catch the tide, and I am waiting in my rooms in the king’s house, the Chequer, for Lord Lisle to come for me when I hear something like an argument in the presence chamber outside. By luck my Cleves translator, Lotte, is with me, and at a nod from me she crosses quietly to the door and listens to the rapid English speech. Her expression is intent, she frowns, and then, when she hears footsteps coming, she scurries back into the room and sits beside me.

Lord Lisle bows as he comes into the room, but his color is up. He smooths down his velvet jerkin, as if to compose himself. “Forgive me, Lady Anne,” he says. “The house is upside down with packing. I will come for you in an hour.”

She whispers his meaning to me, and I bow and smile. He glances back at the door. “Did she hear us?” he asks Lotte bluntly, and she turns to me to see me nod. He comes closer.

“Secretary Thomas Cromwell is of your religion,” he says quietly. Lotte whispers the German words into my ear so that I can be sure of understanding him. “He has wrongly protected some hundreds of Lutherans in this city, which is under my command.”

I understand the words, of course, but not their significance.

“They are heretics,” he says. “They deny the authority of the king as a spiritual leader, and they deny the sacred miracle of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, that his wine becomes blood. This is the belief of the Church of England. To deny it is a heresy punished with death.”

I put my hand gently on Lotte’s arm. I know these are most perilous matters, but I don’t know what I should say.

“Secretary Cromwell himself could be charged with heresy if the king knew that he had sheltered these men,” Lord Lisle says. “I was telling his son, Gregory, that these men should be charged, whoever protects them. I was warning him that I cannot look to one side; I was warning him that good Englishmen think as I do, that God will not be mocked.”

“I know nothing of these English matters,” I say carefully. “I wish only to be guided by my husband.” I think briefly of my brother, who has charged me with bringing my husband away from these Papist superstitions into the clarity of reform. I think I shall have to disappoint him again.

Lord Lisle nods; he bows and steps back. “Forgive me,” he says. “I should not have troubled you with this. I just wanted to make clear that I resent Thomas Cromwell’s protection of these people and that I am wholly loyal to the king and to his church.”

I nod, for what else can I say or do? And he goes out of the room. I turn to Lotte.

“That’s not quite right,” she says very quietly. “He did accuse the Master Cromwell of protecting Lutherans, but the son, Gregory Cromwell, accused him of being a secret Papist, and said that he would be watched. They were threatening each other.”

“What does he expect me to do?” I ask blankly. “He can hardly think that I would judge on such a matter?”

She looks troubled. “Perhaps to speak to the king? To influence him?”

“Lord Lisle as good as told me that in his eyes I am a heretic myself. I deny that the wine turns into blood. Anyone of any sense must know that such a thing cannot happen.”

“Do they really execute heretics in England?” the woman asks nervously.

I nod.

“How?”

“They burn them at the stake.”

At her aghast expression I am about to explain that the king knows of my faith and is supposed to be allying with my Protestant brother and his league of Protestant dukes; but there is a shout at the door and the ships are ready to leave.

“Come on,” I say with a sudden rush of bravado. “Let’s go anyway, whatever the dangers. Nothing can be worse than Cleves.”

Setting sail from an English port on an English ship feels like the start of a new life. Most of my companions from Cleves will leave me now, so there are more leave-takings, and then I board the ship and we cast off, the rowing barges take the ships into tow out of the harbor, and they raise the sails and they catch the wind and the sails start to creak and the ship lifts up as if it would take flight, and now, at this moment, I feel truly that I am a queen going to my country, like a queen in a story.

I go to the bow and stare over the side at the moving water, at the crest of white waves on the black sea, and wonder when I shall see my new home, my kingdom, my England. All around me are the other little lights on the ships that are sailing with us. It is a fleet of ships, fifty great vessels, the queen’s fleet, and I am coming to realize the wealth and power of my new country.

We are to sail all the day; they say the sea is calm, but the waves look very high and dangerous to me. The little ships climb up one wall of water and then belly down to the trough between the waves. Sometimes we lose sight of the other ships in the fleet altogether. The sails billow and creak as if they would tear, and the English sailors haul on ropes and dash around the deck like blasphemous madmen. I watch the dawn break, a gray sun over a gray sea, and I feel the immensity of the water all around me and even beneath me, then I go to rest in my cabin. Some of the ladies are sick, but I feel well. Lady Lisle sits with me for some of the day and so do some of the others, Jane Boleyn among them. I shall have to learn the names of all the others. The day goes slowly by. I go up on deck, but all I can see are the ships around us; almost as far as I can see is the English fleet, keeping company with me. I should feel proud at this attention being paid to me, but more than anything else I feel uncomfortable at being the center and the cause of so much trouble and activity. The sailors on the ship all pull off their caps and bow whenever I come out of the cabin, and two of the ladies always have to escort me, even if it is just to the prow of the ship. After a while, I feel so conspicuous, so restless, that I force myself to sit still in my cabin and watch the waves going up and down through the little window rather than inconvenience everyone by wandering about.

The first sight I have of England is a dark shadow on darkening seas. It is getting late by the time we come into a tiny port called Deal, but even though it is dark and raining, I am greeted by even more grand people. They take me to rest in the castle, and to eat, and there are hundreds, truly hundreds, of people who come to kiss my hand and welcome me to my country. In a haze I meet lords and their ladies, a bishop, the warden of the castle, some more ladies who will serve in my chamber, some maids who will be my companions. Clearly, I will never be alone again for another moment in all my life.

As soon as we have eaten we are all to move on, there is a strict plan as to where we shall stay and where we shall dine, but they ask me very courteously, am I ready to travel now? I learn quickly that this does not mean, in truth, would I like to leave? It means that the plan says we should go now, and they are waiting for me to give my assent.

So even though it is evening and I am so tired I would give a fortune to rest here, I climb into the litter that my brother equipped for me at such begrudged expense, and the lords mount their horses and the ladies mount theirs, and we rattle on the road in the darkness with soldiers before us and behind us as if we were an invading army. I remind myself that I am queen now, and if this is how queens travel and how they are served, then I must become accustomed to it, and not long for a quiet bed and a meal without an audience watching my every move.

We stay this night in the castle in Dover, arriving in darkness. The next day I am so weary I can hardly rise, but there are half a dozen maids holding my shift and my gown and my hairbrush and my hood, and maids-in-waiting standing behind them, and ladies-in-waiting behind them, and a message comes from the Duke of Suffolk as to whether I would like to journey on to Canterbury once I have said my prayers and broken my fast? I know from this that he is anxious that we should leave and that I should hurry to say my prayers and eat, and so I say that I shall be delighted, and that I myself am keen to press on.

This is clearly a lie since it has been raining all the night and now it is getting heavier and it is starting to hail. But everyone prefers to believe that I am anxious to see the king, and my ladies wrap me up as well as they can and then we trudge out of the courtyard with a gale blowing, and we set off up the road they call Watling Street to the town of Canterbury.

The archbishop himself, Thomas Cranmer, a gentle man with a kind smile, greets me on the road outside the city, and rides alongside my litter as we travel the last half a mile. I stare out through the driving rain; this was the great pilgrim road for the faithful going to the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket at the cathedral. I can see the spire of the church long before I can see even the walls of the town, it is built so high and so beautiful, and the light catches it through dark clouds as if God was touching the holy place. The road is paved here, and every other house alongside was built to accommodate pilgrims, who used to come from all over Europe to pray at this most beautiful shrine. This was once one of the great holy sites of the world – just a few short years ago.

It’s all changed now. Changed as much as if they had thrown the church down. My mother has warned me not to remark on what we had heard of the king’s great changes, nor on what I see – however shocking. The king’s own commissioners went to the shrine of the great saint and took the treasure that had been offered at the shrine. They went into the vaults and raided the very coffin that held the saint’s body. It is said that they took his martyred body and threw it on the midden outside the city walls, they were so determined to destroy this sacred place.

My brother would say it is a good thing that the English have turned their backs on superstition and Popish practices, but my brother does not see that the houses for pilgrims have been taken over by bawdy houses and inns and there are beggars without anywhere to go all along the roads into Canterbury. My brother does not know that half the houses in Canterbury were hospitals for the poor and sick and that the church paid for poor pilgrims to stay and be nursed back to health and that the nuns and monks spent their lives serving the poor. Now our soldiers have to push their way through a murmuring crowd of people who are looking for the holy refuge that they were promised, but it has all gone. I take care to say nothing when our cavalcade turns through great gates and the archbishop dismounts from his horse to welcome me into a beautiful house that was clearly an abbey, perhaps only months ago. I look around as we go into a beautiful hall where travelers would have been freely entertained, and where the monks would have dined. I know that my brother wants me to lead this country still further away from superstition and Papacy, but he has not seen what has been spoiled in this country in the name of reform.

The windows, which were once made of colored glass to show beautiful stories, have been smashed so carelessly that the stone is broken and the tracery of stonework is all crushed. If a naughty boy did such a thing to windows, he would be whipped. High in the vaulting roof were little angels and, I think, a frieze of saints, which has been knocked out by some fool with a hammer who cared for nothing. It is foolish, I know, to grieve for things of stone; but the men who did this godly work did not do it in a godly way. They could have taken the statues down and made good the walls after. But instead, they just knocked off the heads and left the little angel bodies headless. How this serves the will of God, I cannot know.

I am a daughter of Cleves, and we have turned against Papacy and rightly; but I have not seen this sort of stupidity before. I can’t think why men would believe that it is a better world where something beautiful is destroyed and something broken left in its place. Then they take me to my rooms, which clearly once belonged to the prior. They have been replastered and repainted and still smell of new limewash. And here I start to realize the real reason for religious reform in this country. This beautiful building, and the lands on which it stands, the great farms that pay it rent and the flocks of sheep that bear its wool, once all belonged to the church and to the Pope. The church was the greatest landowner in England. Now all that wealth belongs to the king. For the first time I realize that this is not just a matter of the worship of God. Perhaps it is nothing to do with God. There is the greed of man here, too.

There is vanity as well, perhaps. For Thomas à Becket was a saint who defied a tyrant King of England. His body lay in the crypt of this most lavish cathedral, encased in gold and jewels, and the king himself – who ordered the throwing down of this shrine – used to come here to pray for help. But now the king needs no help, and rebels are hanged in this country, and the wealth and beauty must all belong to the king. My brother would say that this is a good thing and that a country cannot have two masters.

I am wearily changing my gown for dinner when I hear another roar of guns, and although it is pitch black and nearly midnight Jane Boleyn comes smiling to tell me that there are hundreds of people in the great hall come to welcome me to Canterbury.

“Many gentlemen?” I ask her in my stilted English.

She smiles at once; she knows that I am dreading a long line of introductions.

“They just want to see you,” she says clearly, pointing to her eyes. “You just have to wave.” She shows me a wave, and I giggle at the masque that we play to each other while I learn her language.

I point to the window. “Good land,” I say.

She nods. “Abbey land, God’s land.”

“Now the king’s?”

She has a wry smile. “The king is now head of the church, you understand? All the wealth” – she hesitates – “the spiritual wealth of the church is now his.”

“And the people are glad?” I ask. I am so frustrated by being unable to speak fluently. “The bad priests are gone?”

She glances toward the door as if she would be sure that we cannot be overheard. “The people are not glad,” she says. “The people loved the shrines and the saints; they don’t know why the candles are being taken away. They don’t know why they cannot pray for help. But you should not speak of this to anyone but me. It is the king’s will that the church should be destroyed.”

I nod. “He is a Protestant?” I ask.

Her quick smile makes her eyes sparkle. “Oh, no!” she says. “He is whatever he wishes to be. He destroyed the church so that he could marry my sister-in-law; she believed in a reformed church, and the king believed with her. Then he destroyed her. He has turned the church almost back to being Catholic, the Mass is almost completely restored – but he will never give back the wealth. Who knows what he will do next? What he will believe next?”

I understand only a little of this, so I turn away from her and look out of the window at the driving rain and the pitch darkness. The thought of a king who can determine not only what life his people lead but even the nature of the God they worship makes me shiver. This is a king who has thrown down the shrine of one of the greatest saints in Christendom, this is a king who has turned the great monasteries of his country into private houses. My brother was quite wrong to command me to lead this king into right thinking. This is a king who will have his own way, and I daresay nobody can stop or turn him.

“We should go to dinner,” Jane Boleyn says gently to me. “Do not speak of these things to anyone.”

“Yes,” I say, and with her just one pace behind me I open my privy chamber door to the crowds of people waiting for me in my presence chamber, and I face the sea of unknown smiling faces once more.

I am so delighted to be out of the rain and out of the darkness that I take a large glass of wine and eat heartily at dinner, even though I sit alone under a canopy and I am served by men who kneel to offer dishes to me. There are hundreds of people dining in the hall and hundreds more who peer in at the windows and doorways to see me as if I were some strange animal.

I will grow accustomed to this; I know that I have to, and I will. There is no point being a Queen of England and being embarrassed by servants. This stolen abbey is not even one of the great palaces of the land, and yet I have never seen a place so wealthy with gildings and paintings and tapestries. I ask the archbishop if this is his own palace, and he smiles and says his own house is nearby. This is a country of such great riches that it is almost unimaginable.

I do not get to my bed till the early hours of the morning, and then we rise again, early, to travel on. But however early we start it still takes us forever to leave as every day there are more people coming with us. The archbishop and all his train, truly hundreds of them, are now traveling with me, and this day I am joined by more great lords who escort me into Rochester. The people line the streets to greet me, and everywhere I go I smile and wave.

I wish I could remember everyone’s name, but every time we stop anywhere some richly dressed man comes up and bows before me, and Lady Lisle, or Lady Southampton, or one of the other ladies whispers something in my ear, and I smile and extend my hand, and try to fix a fresh set of names into my mind. And they all look the same anyway: all dressed in rich velvet and wearing gold chains and with pearls or jewels in their hats. And there are dozens of them, hundreds of them, half of England has come to pay their compliments to me, and I cannot tell one man from another anymore.

We dine in a great hall with much ceremony, and Lady Browne, who is to be in charge of my maids-in-waiting, is presented to me. She introduces my maids by name and I smile at the unending line of Katherines and Marys and Elizabeths and Annes and Bessies and Madges, all of them pert and pretty under tiny hoods that show their hair in a way that my brother would blame as immodest, all of them dainty in little slippers, and all of them stare at me as if I were a wild white falcon landed in a chicken coop. Lady Browne especially stares me out of countenance, and I beckon Lotte and ask her to tell Lady Browne in English that I hope she will advise me about my dress and English fashions when we get to London. When she gives her my message, Lady Browne flushes and turns away and does not stare anymore, and I fear that she was indeed thinking that my dress is very odd and that I am ugly.