The Boleyn Inheritance

Jane Boleyn, Hampton Court,
March 1540

We are riding to London, to the palace of Westminster for the opening of parliament. But this riding back to London is not the same as when we were riding out. Something has happened. I feel as if I am an old hound, the pack leader, who can lift her grizzled head and smell the change in the wind. When we rode out, the king was between the queen and young Kitty Howard, and anyone looking at them would have seen him distribute his smiles between his wife and her friend. Now, to me, perhaps only to me, the scene is quite different. Once again the king rides between the queen and her little favorite but this time his head is turned, all the time, to his left. It’s as if his round face has swiveled on the fleshy neck and got stuck. Katherine holds his attention like a dancing mayfly holds the attention of the fat, gaping carp. The king is goggling at Katherine Howard as if he cannot take his eyes from her; and the queen, on his right, and even the Princess Mary on her other side, cannot divert him, cannot distract him, can do nothing but provide a shield for his infatuation.

I have seen this before – my God – so many times. I have been at Henry’s court since I was a maid and Henry was a boy, and I know him: a boy in love, a man in love, and now an old fool in love. I saw him run after Bessie Blount, after Mary Boleyn, after her sister Anne, after Madge Shelton, after Jane Seymour, after Anne Bassett, and now this: this pretty child. I know how Henry looks when he is besotted: a bull, ready to be led by the nose. He is at this point now. If we Howards want him, we have him. He is caught.

The queen reins back to speak with me, and leaves Katherine Howard, Catherine Carey, Princess Mary, and the king riding together before us. They barely turn their heads to see that she has gone. She is becoming a cipher, a person of no significance.

“The king likes Kitty Howard,” she observes to me.

“And Lady Anne Bassett,” I say equably. “Young people make him merry. You have enjoyed the company of the Princess Mary, I think.”

“No,” she says shortly; there is no diverting her. “He likes Katherine.”

“No more than any other,” I persist. “Mary Norris is a favorite.”

“Lady Rochford, be my friend: what am I to do?” she asks me simply.

“Do? Your Grace?”

“If he has a girl…” She breaks off to find the right word. “A whore.”

“A lover,” I correct her rapidly. “Whore is a very bad word, Your Grace.”

She raises her eyebrows. “Ach, so? Lover.”

“If he takes a lover, you must pay no attention.”

She nods. “This is what Queen Jane do?”

“Yes indeed, Your Grace. She did not notice.”

She is silent for a second. “They do not think her a fool for this?”

“They thought her queenly,” I say. “A queen does not complain of her husband the king.”

“That is what Queen Anne do?”

I hesitate. “No. Queen Anne was very angry; she made much noise.” God spare us ever again from the storm that broke over our heads on the day that Anne found Jane Seymour squirming and giggling on the king’s lap. “The king was then angry with her. And…”

“And?”

“It is dangerous to anger the king. Even if you are queen.”

She is silent at this; it has not taken her long to learn that the court is a death trap for the unwary.

“Who was the king’s lover then? When Queen Anne made much noise?”

This is rather awkward to tell the king’s new wife. “He was courting Lady Jane Seymour, who became queen.”

She nods. I have learned that when she looks most stolid and stupid, it is then that she is thinking the most furiously.

“And Queen Katherine of Aragon? She makes a noise?”

I am on firmer ground here. “She never once complained to the king. She always greeted him with a smile, whatever she had heard, whatever she feared. She was always a most courteous wife and queen.”

“But he took a lover? Just the same? With such a queen at his side? Her, a princess whom he had married for love?”

“Yes.”

“And was that lover Lady Anne Boleyn?”

I nod.

“A lady-in-waiting? Her own lady-in-waiting?”

I nod again at the remorseless march of her logic.

“So both his two queens were ladies-in-waiting? He see them in the queen’s rooms? He meet them there.”

“That is so,” I say.

“He meet them while the queen watches. He dance with them in her rooms. He agree that they should meet later?”

I cannot deny it. “Er, yes.”

She looks ahead to where Katherine Howard is riding close to the king and watches as he leans over and puts his hand on hers, as if to correct how she is holding the reins. Katherine looks up at him as if his touch is an honor she can hardly bear. She leans slightly toward him, yearning; we both hear her breathless little giggle.

“Like that,” she says flatly.

I can think of nothing to say.

“I see,” says the queen. “I understand now. And a wise woman say nothing?”

“She says nothing.” I hesitate. “You cannot prevent it, Your Grace. Whatever comes of it.”

She bows her head, and to my surprise I see a tear fall onto the pommel of her saddle. She covers it quickly with her gloved finger. “Yes, I can do nothing,” she whispers.

We have been settled in our apartments at Westminster for only a few days when I am summoned to the rooms of my kinsman the Duke of Norfolk. I go at midday, before we dine, and I find him pacing about his rooms, not his usual contained self at all. It is so unusual to see him disturbed that I am at once alert to danger. I do not enter the room but stay by the wall, as I would if I had opened the wrong door in the Tower and found myself among the king’s lions. I stay by the door and my hand rests on the doorknob.

“Sir?”

“Have you heard? Did you know? Cromwell is to be an earl? A damned earl?”

“He is?”

“Did I not just say so? Earl of Essex. Earl of bloody Essex! What do you think of that, madam?”

“I think nothing, sir.”

“Have they consummated the marriage?”

“No!”

“Do you swear? Are you certain? They must have done. He’s got it up at last, and he’s paying his bawd. He must be pleased with Cromwell for something!”

“I am utterly certain. I know they have not. And she is unhappy; she knows he is attracted to Katherine, and she is anxious about that. She spoke to me of it.”

“But he is rewarding the minister who gave him the queen. He must be pleased with the marriage; something must have pleased him. He must have learned something; he must be turning from us for some reason. He is rewarding Cromwell, and Cromwell brought him the queen.”

“I swear to you, my lord, I have held nothing back from you. The king has been coming to her bed almost every night since the end of Lent, but it is no better than it was before. The sheets are clean, her hair is still in plaits, her nightcap straight every morning. She cries sometimes, during the day, when she thinks no one is watching. This is not a well-loved woman; this is a hurt girl. I swear she is a virgin still.”

The duke rounds on me in his rage. “Then why would he make Cromwell Earl of Essex?”

“It must be for some other reason.”

“What other reason? This is Cromwell’s great triumph: this alliance with the Protestant dukes and the king, this alliance against France and Spain, sealed with this marriage with the Flanders girl. I have an alliance with the King of France at my fingertips. I have filled the king’s head with suspicions against Cromwell. Lord Lisle has told him that Cromwell favors reformers, has hidden heretics away in Calais. Cromwell’s favorite preacher is to be accused of heresy. Everything is piling up against him, but then he gets an earldom. Why is that? The earldom is his reward. Why would the king reward him if he is not pleased with him?”

I shrug my shoulders. “My lord uncle. How should I know?”

“Because you are here to know!” he shouts at me. “You are put at court and kept at court and dressed and fed at court so that you shall know everything, and so that you shall tell me! If you know nothing, what is the point of your being here? What was the point of sparing you from the scaffold?”

I feel my face grow stiff with fear at his anger. “I know what goes on in the queen’s rooms,” I say softly. “I cannot know what happens in the Privy Council.”

“You dare to say that I should know? That I am remiss?”

Mutely, I shake my head.

“How should anybody know what the king thinks when he keeps his own counsel and rewards the man whose face he has been slapping in public for the past three months? How should anyone know what is happening when Cromwell is blamed for the worst marriage the king has ever made and is now to lord it around us as earl, as damned Earl of damned-to-hell Essex?”

I find that I am pressed back against the wall and the silky feel of the tapestry is behind my outspread hands. I can feel the fabric grow damp with my cold sweat.

“How is anybody to know what the hell is in the king’s mind when he is by turns as cunning as a crow and as mad as a hare?”

I shake my head in silence. That he should name the king in the same breath as madness is as good as treason. I will not repeat it even here, safe in Howard rooms.

“At any rate, you are sure that he still likes Katherine?” the duke says more quietly.

“Hotly. There is no doubt in my mind.”

“Well, tell her to keep him at arm’s length. We gain nothing if she becomes his whore but he stays married to the queen.”

“There can be no doubt-”

“I doubt everything,” he says flatly. “And if he beds her and then beds the queen and gets a son on her and thanks Cromwell for the addition to his nursery, then we are ruined, along with the little slut.”

“He will not bed the queen,” I say, returning to my only certainty.

“You don’t know anything,” he says rudely. “All you know is what can be gleaned from keyholes and privy chamber whispers, out of the chamber sweepings and the midden. You know everything that can be found in the dirt of life; you know nothing of policy. I tell you, he is rewarding Cromwell with rank beyond his dreams for bringing him the Cleves queen; and your plans and my plans are all thrown down. And you are a fool.”

There is nothing I can say to this, so I wait for him to tell me to leave, but he turns to the window and pauses, looking out and gnawing his thumbnail. After a little while a page comes to tell him that he is required at the House of Lords, and he goes out without another word to me. I curtsy, but I don’t think he even sees me.

When he is gone, I should go, too, but I do not leave. I walk around his room. When the room is quiet and no one comes to the door, I draw back the chair. Then I sit behind his table in his big carved chair with the crest of the Howards, hard and uncomfortable behind my head. I wonder what it would have been like if George had lived and his uncle had died and George had been the great man of this family; I might have sat here, beside him, in my own right. We might have had matching chairs at this great table, and hatched our own plans, our own schemes. We might have made a great house of our own and raised our own children in it. We would have been brother and sister-in-law to the queen, our children would have been cousins to the next king. George would have been a duke for sure; I would have been a duchess. We would have been wealthy, the greatest family in the kingdom. We might have grown old together. He would have prized me for my advice and my fierce loyalty; I would have loved him for his passion and his good looks and his wit. He would have turned to me; in the end he would surely have turned to me. He would have tired of Anne and her temper. He would have learned that a steady love, a faithful love, a wife’s love is the best.

But George died, and so did Anne – both of them dead before they could learn to value me. And all that is left of the three of us is me, the only survivor, wishing for the Boleyn inheritance, perching in the Howard chair, dreaming that they are still alive and that there is greatness before us, instead of loneliness and old age, petty plots and disgrace and death.