dance.
When he kisses her it all goes terribly wrong. I can see at once that she has no idea who he is, someone should have warned her. She thinks he is just some drunk old man who has staggered in to kiss her for a wager, and of course she is shocked, and of course quite repelled, because when he is in a cheap cloak and not surrounded by the greatest court in the world he does not look at all like a king. In truth, when he is in a cheap cloak and with his companions, also dressed poorly, he looks like some common merchant, with a waddling walk and a red nose, who likes a glass of wine, and hopes to go to court and see his betters. He looks like the sort of man my uncle would not acknowledge if he called out in the street. A fat old man, a vulgar old man, like a drunk sheep farmer on market day. His face is terribly bloated, like a great round dish of dripping, his hair is thinning and grey, he is monstrously fat, and he has an old injury in his leg that makes him so lame that he rolls in his walk like a sailor. Without his crown he is not handsome, he looks like anybody’s fat old grandfather.
He falls back, she stands on her dignity, rubbing her mouth to take the smell of his breath away, and then – it is so awful I could almost scream with shock – she turns her head and spits out the taste of him. ‘Leave me,’ she says and turns her back on him.
There is utter, dreadful silence, nobody says a word, and suddenly I know, as if my own cousin Anne Boleyn is at my side telling me, what I should do. I am not even thinking of the dancing and the young man, for once I am not even thinking of myself, and that almost never happens. I just think, in a flash, that if I pretend not to know him, then he can go on not knowing himself, and the whole sorry masque of this silly old man and his gross vanity will not tumble about our ears. I just feel sorry for him, to tell the truth. I just think that I can spare him this awful embarrassment of bouncing up to a woman and having her slap him down like a smelly old hound. If anyone else had said anything then I would have stayed silent. But nobody says anything and the silence goes on and on, unbearably, and he stumbles back, he almost falls back into me, and his face is all crumpled and confused and I am so sorry for him, poor humbled old fool, that I say, I coo: ‘Ooh! Forgive me, sir! But I am new to court myself, a stranger like you. May I ask – who are you?’
Jane Boleyn, Rochester, 31 December 1539
Lady Browne is ordering the maids to their beds in a bellow as if she were a Yeoman of the Guard. They are over-excited and Katherine Howard among them is the centre of it all, as wild as any of them, a true Queen of the May. How she spoke to the king, how she peeped up at him from under her eyelashes, how she begged him, as a handsome stranger, new-come to court, to ask the Lady Anne for dancing, is being mimicked and re-enacted till they are drunk with their own laughter.
Lady Browne is not laughing, her face is like thunder, so I hustle the girls into bed and tell them that they are all very foolish and that they would do better to copy their lady, the Lady Anne, and show proper dignity, than mimic Katherine Howard’s free and forward ways. They slip into their beds two by two like pretty angels and we blow out the candle and leave them in the darkness and lock the door. We have hardly turned away before we hear them whispering, but no power on earth can make girls behave well; and we do not even try.
‘Are you troubled, Lady Browne?’ I ask considerately.
She hesitates, she is longing to confide in someone, and I am here at her side, and known to be discreet.
‘This is a bad business,’ she says heavily. ‘Oh, it all passed off pleasantly enough in the end, with the dancing and the singing and Lady Anne recovered quickly enough as soon as you had explained to her; but this is a bad, bad business.’
‘The king?’ I suggest.
She nods and folds her lips over as if she would stop herself saying more.
‘I am weary,’ I say. ‘Shall we take a glass of warm ale together before we go to our beds? Sir Anthony is staying here tonight, is he not?’
‘God knows he won’t join me in my rooms for hours,’ she says unguardedly. ‘I doubt if any of the king’s circle will sleep tonight.’
‘Oh?’ I say. I lead the way into the presence chamber. The other ladies have gone to bed, the fire is burning low, but there is a jug of ale set at the fireside and half a dozen tankards. I pour us both a drink. ‘Trouble?’
She sits in her chair and leans forwards to whisper. ‘My lord husband tells me that the king swears that he will not marry her.’
‘No!’
‘He does. He does. He swears it. He says that he cannot like her.’
She takes a long draw on the ale and looks at me over the top of the mug.
‘Lady Browne, you must have this wrong …’
‘I have it from my husband this very night. The king seized him by the collar, almost by the throat, as soon as we retired, and said that the moment he saw Lady Anne, he had been struck with consternation, and that he saw nothing in her that he had been told.’
‘He said that?’
‘Those very words.’
‘But he seemed so happy as we left?’
‘He was as truly happy just as Katherine Howard was truly ignorant of his identity. He is as much a happy bridegroom as she is an innocent child. We are all actors here, but the king will not play the part of eager bridegroom.’
‘He has to, they are betrothed and the contract signed.’
‘He does not like her, he says. He cannot like her, he says, and he is blaming the men who made this marriage for him.’
I have to get this news to the duke, he has to be warned before the king gets back to London.
‘Blaming the men who made the marriage?’
‘And those who brought her to him. He is furious.’
‘He will blame Thomas Cromwell,’ I predict quietly.
‘Indeed.’
‘But what of the Lady Anne? Surely, he cannot refuse her?’
‘There is some talk of an impediment,’ she says. ‘And that is why Sir Anthony and none of the others will have any sleep tonight. The Cleves lords should have brought a copy of an agreement to say that some old previous contract to marry has been withdrawn. Since they don’t have it, perhaps there may be grounds to argue that the marriage cannot go ahead, it is not valid.’
‘Not again,’ I say, unguarded for a moment. ‘Not the same objection that he put against Queen Katherine! We will all look like fools!’
She nods. ‘Yes, the same. But better for her that an impediment is declared now and she is sent safely home, than she stays and marries an enemy. You know the king, he will never forgive her for spitting out his kiss.’
I say nothing. These are dangerous speculations.
‘Her
