“Francis defeated?” I asked disbelievingly, thinking of the ambitious dark prince who had been the rival of our golden king.
“Smashed to pieces,” Francis Weston confirmed. “What a day for England! What a triumph!”
I looked across at the king and queen. He was no longer attempting to dance, he had lost the rhythm of the steps, instead he had wound her in his arms and was kissing her forehead, her eyes and her lips. “My dearest,” he said. “Your nephew is a great general, this is a great gift he has given us. We will have France at our feet. I shall be King of England and France in reality as well as title. And Richard de la Pole is dead—his threat to my throne is dead with him. King Francis himself is taken prisoner, France is destroyed. Your nephew and I are the greatest kings in Europe and our alliance will own everything. Everything that my father planned from you and your family has been given to us this day.”
The queen’s face was radiant with joy, the years were stripped off her with his kisses. She was rosy, her blue eyes sparkling, her waist supple in his grasp.
“God bless the Spanish and the Spanish princess!” Henry bellowed suddenly and all the men of his court shouted it back to him in a full-throated reply.
George glanced sideways at me. “God bless the Spanish princess,” he said quietly.
“Amen,” I said, and I found it in my heart to smile at her glow as she rested her head against her husband’s shoulder and smiled on her cheering court. “Amen, and God keep her as happy as she is at this moment.”
We were drunk with victory, that dawn and the four dawns that followed. It was like the twelfth night revels in the middle of March. From the leads of the castle we could see the beacon bonfires burning all the way to London and the city itself was red against the night sky with fires at every street corner and men spit-roasting carcasses of beef and lamb. We could hear church bells pealing, a constant chime as everyone in the country celebrated the total defeat of the oldest enemy of England. We ate special dishes which were given new names to mark the occasion: Pavia Peacock and Pavia Pudding, Spanish Delight, and Charles Blancmange. Cardinal Wolsey ordered a special High Mass of celebration in St. Paul’s and every church in the land gave thanks for the victory at Pavia and the emperor who had won it for England—Charles of Spain, the beloved nephew of Queen Katherine.
There was no question now of who sat at the right hand of the king. It was the queen, who walked through the great hall wearing deepest crimson and gold with her head high and a little smile on her lips. She did not flaunt her return to favor. She took it as she had taken her eclipse: as the nature of royal marriage. Now that her star was risen again she walked as proudly as she had ever done when in shadow.
The king fell in love with her all over again as a thanksgiving for Pavia. He saw her as the source of his power in France, as the source of his joy at the victory. Henry was first and foremost a spoiled child; when he was given a wonderful present, he loved the giver.
He would love the giver of a gift right up to the moment that the present bored him, or it broke, or it failed to be what he wanted. And toward the end of March the first signs came to us that Charles of Spain might prove a disappointment.
Henry’s plan had been that they should divide France between them, tossing only a share of the spoils to the Duke of Bourbon, and that Henry should become King of France in reality and take the old title which the Pope had conferred on him so many years ago. But Charles of Spain was in no hurry. Instead of making plans for Henry to go to Paris to be crowned King of France, Charles went to Rome for his own coronation as Holy Roman Emperor. And worse even than this was that Charles showed no interest in the English plan to capture the whole of France. He had King Francis as a prisoner; but now he was planning to ransom him back to France, to return him to the throne which had been so recently destroyed.
“In God’s name, why? Why would he?” Henry bellowed at Cardinal Wolsey in a great explosion of rage. Even the most favored gentlemen of the king’s inner circle flinched. The ladies of the court visibly cowered. Only the queen, on her chair by the side of the king at the top table of the great hall, was impassive, as if the most powerful man in the country was not shaking with uncontrollable fury only one foot from her.
“Why would the mad Spanish dog betray us so? Why would he release Francis? Is he mad?” He turned on the queen. “Is he insane, your nephew? Is he playing some costly double game? Is he double-crossing me, as your father would have double-crossed mine? Is there some vile traitorous blood in these Spanish kings? What’s your answer, madam? He writes to you, doesn’t he? What did he write last? That he wants to release our worst enemy? That he is a madman or just a fool?”
She glanced at the cardinal to see if he would intercede; but Wolsey was no friend of the queen after this turn of events. He stayed dumb and met her sharp look of appeal with diplomatic serenity.
Isolated, the queen had to face her husband without support. “My nephew does not write to me of all his plans. I did not know he was thinking of releasing King Francis.”
“I should hope not!” Henry yelled, bringing his face very close to hers. “For you would be guilty of treason at the very least if you knew that the worst enemy this country has ever seen was to be set free by your nephew.”
“But I did not know,” she said steadily.
“And Wolsey tells me that he is thinking of jilting Princess Mary? Your own daughter! What d’you say to that?”
“I did not know,” she said.
“Excuse me,” Wolsey remarked softly. “But I think Her Majesty has forgotten the meeting she had with the Spanish ambassador yesterday. Surely he warned you that the Princess Mary would be rejected.”
“Rejected!” Henry bounded from his chair, too inflamed to sit still. “And you knew, madam?”
The queen rose, as she must, when her husband was on his feet. “Yes,” she said. “The cardinal is correct. The ambassador did mention that there were doubts over the betrothal of the Princess Mary. I did not speak of it because I would not believe it until I had heard it from my nephew himself. And I have not.”
“I am afraid there is no doubt at all,” Cardinal Wolsey interpolated.
The queen turned a steady gaze on him, noting that the cardinal had exposed her to her husband’s rage, and had done it twice, and willfully. “I am sorry that you should think so,” she said.
Henry flung himself into his chair, too enraged to speak. The queen remained standing and he did not invite her to sit. The lace at the top of her gown stirred with her steady breath, she merely touched the rosary that hung from her waist with her forefinger. She could not be faulted for dignity or presence.
Henry turned to her, icily angry. “Do you know what we will have to do, if we want to seize this opportunity which God has given to us and which your nephew is about to throw away?”
She shook her head in silence.
“We will have to raise a huge tax. We will have to muster another army. We will have to mount another expedition to France, and we will have to fight another war. And we will have to do this alone, alone and without support because your nephew, your nephew, madam, fights and wins one of the most lucky victories that could ever come to a king, and then plays ducks and drakes with it, skims it away off the waves as if victory was a pebble on the beach.”
Even at that, she did not move. But her patience only inflamed him more. He leaped down from his chair again and there was a little gasp as he flung himself toward her. For a moment I even thought he might strike her but it was a pointing finger, not a fist, which she got in the face. “And you do not order him to be faithful to me?”
“I do,” she said through half-closed lips. “I commend him to remember our alliance.”
Behind her, Cardinal Wolsey shook his head in denial.
“You lie!” Henry yelled at the queen. “You are a Spanish princess more than an English queen!”
“God knows that I am a faithful wife and Englishwoman,” she replied.
>
Henry flung himself away and there was a sudden flurry as the court threw themselves out of his path and dropped into curtsies and bows. His gentlemen bowed briskly to the queen and followed his impetuous progress; but he checked at the door. “I shall not forget this,” he shouted back at the queen. “I shall neither forgive nor forget your nephew’s insult to me, nor shall I forgive or forget your behavior, your damned treasonous behavior.”
She sank slowly and beautifully into her deep regal curtsy and held it like a dancer until Henry swore and banged out of the door. Only then did she rise up and look thoughtfully around her, at all of us who had witnessed her humiliation and who now looked away from her that she might not claim our service.
At dinner the next night I saw the king’s eyes on me as I walked demurely into the great hall behind the queen. After dinner, when they cleared a space for dancing, he came over to me, walking past the queen, all but turning his back on her as he stood before me and claimed me for a dance.
There was a little rustle of attention as he took me out on the dance floor. “The volte,” Henry said over his shoulder and the other dancers, who had been readying to form into a set and dance with us, fell back and formed a circle to watch instead.
It was a dance like no other, a dance of seduction. Henry did not take his blue eyes off my face, he danced toward me, stamped his foot and clapped his hands as if he would strip me naked then and there before the whole court. I banished the thought of the watching queen from my mind. I kept my head up and my eyes fixed on the king, and I danced toward him, the sly tripping steps, with a sway of my hips and a turn of my head. We faced one another and he snatched me up in the air and held me, there was a ripple of applause, he lowered me gently to my feet and I felt my cheeks burning with a potent combination of self-consciousness, triumph, and desire. We parted to the beat of the tabor and then came back as the dance turned our steps toward each other again. Once again he threw me up in the air and this time slid me down, so that my body was pressed against his. I felt him down every inch of my body: his chest, his hose, his legs. We paused, our faces so close that if he had leaned forward he could have kissed me. I felt his breath on my face and then he said very quietly: “My chamber. Come at once.”
He took me to bed that night, and most of the nights that followed, with a steady desire. I should have been happy. Certainly my mother and my father and my uncle and even George were delighted that I was the king’s first choice once more, and that everyone in the court was once again gravitating toward me. The ladies of the queen’s chamber were as deferential to me as they were to her. Foreign ambassadors bowed to me as deeply as if I were a princess, the gentlemen of the king’s bedchamber wrote sonnets to the gold of my hair and the curl of my lips, Francis Weston wrote a song for me and everywhere I went there were people ready to do me a service, to assist me, to pay court to me, and always, always to whisper to me that if I could mention a little thing to the king they would be greatly obliged to me.
I followed George’s advice and I always refused to ask the king for anything, even for myself, and so he was comfortable with me in a way that he could never be with anyone else. We made an odd little domestic haven behind the closed door of the privy chamber. We dined alone, after the dinner had been served in the great hall. We had the company only of the musicians and perhaps one or two chosen friends. Thomas More would take Henry up on to the leads and look at the stars and I would go too, looking up at the dark night sky and thinking that the same stars were shining down on Hever, gleaming through the arrow-slit windows to light my baby’s sleeping face.
I missed my course in May, and in June I missed again. I told George who put his arm around me and pressed me close to him. “I’ll tell Father,” he said. “And Uncle Howard. Pray God that it’s a boy this time.”
I wanted to tell Henry myself but they decided that news so momentous and so rich with the possibility of profit should come from my father to the king, that the Boleyns could garner the full credit for my fertility. My father asked for a private audience; and the king, thinking it was something to do with Wolsey’s long negotiations with France, drew him into a window embrasure, out of the court’s hearing, and invited him to speak. My father spoke a short, smiling sentence, and I saw Henry look from my father to me, where I sat with the ladies, and then heard his loud whoop of delight. He rushed across the room and was about to snatch me up when he suddenly checked himself for fear of hurting me, and caught my hands instead, and kissed them.
“Sweetheart!” he exclaimed. “The best news! The best I could hear!”
I glanced around at the agog faces, and then back to the king’s joy.
“Your Majesty,” I said carefully. “I am so glad to make you happy.”
“You could do nothing to make me more joyful,” he assured me. He urged me to my feet and drew me to one side. To one woman the ladies craned forward and simultaneously looked away, desperate to know what was going on and equally desperate not to appear to be eavesdropping. My father and George stepped before the king and started talking loudly about the weather and how soon the court would leave on its summer progress, blocking out the whispered conversation between the king and me.
Henry pressed me into the window seat and laid his hand gently on my stomacher. “Not laced too tight?”
“No,” I said, smiling up at him. “It is very early days yet, Your Majesty. I hardly show.”
“Pray God it is a boy this time,” he said.
I smiled up at him, with all the Boleyn recklessness. “I am sure it is,” I said. “Remember that I never said so with Catherine. But this time I am sure of it. I am sure that he will be a boy. Perhaps we will call him Henry.”
The reward for my pregnancy came quickly to my family that summer. My father became Viscount Rochford and George became Sir George Boleyn. My mother became a viscountess and entitled to wear purple. My husband had another grant of land to add to his growing estate.
“I am to thank you for this I think, madam,” he said. He had chosen to sit beside me at dinner and serve me with the very best cuts of meat. Looking up the hall to the high table I saw that Henry’s eyes were on me and I smiled up at him.
“I am glad to be of service to you,” I said politely.
He leaned back in his chair and smiled at me but his eyes were dull, drunkard’s eyes, filled with regret. “And so we spend another year with you at court and me in the king’s train and we never meet, and we rarely talk. You are a mistress and I a monk.”
“I did not know that you had chosen a celibate life,” I observed mildly.
He had the grace to smile. “I am married and not married,” he pointed out. “Where am I to get heirs for my new lands if not on my wife?”
I nodded. There was a brief silence. “Yes, you’re right. I am sorry,” I said shortly.
“If you have a girl and his interest wanes they will send you home to me. You will be my wife again,” William remarked conversationally. “How do you think we shall fare? Us and the two little bastards?”
My eyes flew to his face. “I don’t like to hear you speak like that.”
“Careful,” he cautioned me. “We’re being watched.”
At once my face glazed with an empty social smile. “Watched by the king?” I asked, carefully not looking around.
“And your father.”
I took a piece of bread and nibbled it, turned my head as if we were talking of nothing important. “I don’t like to hear you talk of my Catherine like that,” I said. “She bears your name.”
“And that should make me love her?”
“I think you would love her if you saw her,” I said defensively. “She is a most beautiful child. I don’t see how you could fail to love her. I hope to be with her this summer at Hever. She will be learning to walk.”
The hard look left his face. “And is that your greatest wish, Mary? You, the mistress of the King of England? And your greatest wish is that you could live in a little manor c
astle and teach your daughter to walk?”
I gave a little laugh. “Absurd, aren’t I? But yes. I would like nothing more than to be with her.”
He shook his head. “Mary, you correct me,” he said gently. “When I think that I have been abused by you and I am angry with you and this wolfpack of your family I suddenly see that we are all of us doing very well off you. All of us are thriving very handsomely and in the middle of it all, like a piece of soft manchet bread nibbled by ducks, is you, being eaten alive by every one of us. Perhaps you should have married a man who would have loved and kept you and given you a baby that you could have suckled yourself, without interruption.”
I smiled at the picture.
“Don’t you wish you had married a man like that? Sometimes I wish you had. I wish that you had married a man who would have loved you and kept you, whatever the advantages to handing you over. And when I am drunk and sad I sometimes wish that I had had the courage to have been that man.”
I let the silence extend until the attention of our neighbors had been distracted by something else.
“What’s done is done,” I said gently. “It was all decided for me before I was old enough to think for myself. I am sure, my lord, that you were right to do as the king desired.”
“I will exert my power to do one thing,” William said. “I will get him to consent to you going to Hever this summer. I can do that for you at least.”
I looked up. “I would be so glad,” I whispered. I felt my eyes filling with tears at the thought of seeing Catherine again. “Oh, my lord. I would be so glad of that.”
William was as good as his word. He spoke to my father, he spoke to my uncle, and then finally he spoke to the king. And I was allowed to Hever for the whole of the summer so that I could be with Catherine and walk with her in the apple orchards of Kent.