The horses halt, and the king swings heavily down from his saddle and reaches up for her. She drops her reins and puts her hands on his shoulders, as if he were her groom, and he lifts her down from the saddle. He slides her down his body, holding her close even though half the court is watching and half of them will report to their patrons that the king has a new favourite. The Spanish party will celebrate putting their spy in the royal bed to supplant the Protestant queen.
‘Stop her,’ George hisses in my ear. ‘Anne’ll be here any moment.’
I can hear the hoofbeats of a dozen horses, Anne’s guard around her mule litter, her mother riding on one side. The king hears it too, and abruptly releases Agnes and turns to greet his wife. He helps Anne out of her litter, tells her that he has had a great day’s sport, and escorts her to dinner.
She is looking her best, in a dark-red riding jacket with a gold net over her black hair, as if she has ridden here on a high-bred palfrey. She asks the king if George’s new mare kept up; she turns and laughs with George and Nicholas Carew; she strips off her red leather gloves and washes her hands in the golden basin. She is at her best at these informal events. She glows so brightly that she makes the king shine beside her, boosting his pride, making him feel equally beautiful, equally clever, equally beloved in a court of lovers.
The cooks have set up charcoal burners to roast meat, and ovens to bake bread, and the sweet-smelling smoke hangs in the dappled sunshine and makes everyone hurry to their places at the rustic tables. There are crocks of thick creamy butter to go with three sorts of bread, huge wheels of cheeses, fish in crisp skins, and crayfish and oysters in their shells.
Anne throws back her head to swallow an oyster from the shell, looks at the king and licks her lips, sensual as a cat. The king flushes and waves the silver platter away from her. ‘They’re not fit for you in your condition.’
Smilingly, she agrees; but she misunderstands. He does not mean her fertility; he means her condition as a queen. He does not like to see Anne sucking on oyster shells like a woman with earthly desiresand a healthy appetite. Now that they are married, he does not want a real woman. He wants a wife who is above other women: a saintly wife and a remote queen.
They bring roasted game, pheasant and woodcock, and pies of beef and lamb, honey puddings and mead cakes and pond-pudding with a ball of spiced butter at its sweet heart. The king drinks deeply of strong red wine; his server refills his glass again and again, and he toasts the huntsmen and the deer, the day and the ladies. Anne, at his side, is drinking water with a splash of wine, stone-cold sober while the king laughs more and more loudly at his own jokes. He repeats a story about hunting in France that he told at the beginning of the meal, and his men roar with laughter as if they are hearing it for the very first time; the ladies echo the false merriment but cast a nervous look towards his stone-faced wife.
Anne won her place in this court as the young woman who would stay and drink with the men and laugh with the king. She refused to withdraw with Queen Katherine, who always left as soon as her young husband became rowdy. No one ever told a bawdy jest to the Spanish queen, but Anne was the first to tell a joke, the first to challenge the king to a riddle or a poem or a game. She made herself the heart of the laughing, lovemaking, singing, noisy court. No one was over thirty years old; no one cared for the rules in Anne’s court as it undermined the sombre dignity of the older queen.
But now Anne is the queen, her rival court is now the only court, and no one quite knows what to do as this new Anne: sober, pale, and quiet, sits beside her hard-drinking husband while he starts making toasts to her ladies.
‘To the beautiful Lady Rochford!’ he bellows, and the court raises their gold cups to me, and I have to stand and smile and drink a toast in reply to the king.
‘To the beautiful countess, Elizabeth Somerset!’ the king declares. ‘Our favourite county!’
Somebody shouts that he has been in Somerset often, and Elizabeth’s brother, Anthony Browne, slams down his gold cupand glares at her. But the king sees nothing; he is working his way through the ladies. I can see at once where this is going and what is going to happen next; but I am powerless to stop it.
‘To Lady Margaret Douglas, my dear niece,’ he says.
All the men cheer, and Lord Thom Howard – the Duke of Norfolk’s baby-faced half-brother – raises his cup to Margaret in a silent pledge. She rises to her feet and takes the toast, her eyes on Lord Thom, and then the king shouts loudly: ‘To the most beautiful lady of your heart! And you must each drink to your own choice!’
The men roar with laughter, and the women flutter and smile. Some wives shoot cautionary glances at their husbands, the men rise to their feet and raise their cups to their favourite flirts. Some old lords leer at their second wives, young enough to be their daughters. Charles Brandon’s pretty ward is now his duchess, and young Catherine Brandon stands up to drink in reply to her husband – old enough to be her grandfather.
This is all part of the game of courtly love that the king likes to play; but the dividing line between his prudishness and his rowdy joy is always hard to guess. The old queen drew a clean line – her ladies were strictly raised and modestly behaved. But Anne is trapped in the paradox of mistress turned wife, poacher turned gamekeeper. She has to play the part of a Spanish duenna and yet be as exciting and promising as a new lover. She must be both lascivious favourite and dignified queen: it is aparadoxos. It can’t be done.
George looks straight past me, his wife, and raises his cup to Anne. So does William Brereton – in a sober reproach to the king; so does Francis Bryan, with a twisted smile on his masked face, as if he is winking under his black eye patch. Surprisingly, so does Charles Brandon, up on his unsteady legs for the second time. He has always been our enemy, a staunch friend to the old queen, a loyal member of the Spanish party, and for a moment I hope that his courtesy to Anne means that he has changed sides. But then Iunderstand that both Francis Bryan and Charles Brandon are giving the king cover for his own game, as he gets to his feet, staggering a little, and points his cup directly at Agnes and whispers her name.
She looks back at him intently and she rises to her feet to reply to his toast, but he does not sit down, so as everyone else subsides, the two of them are left standing as if they are alone. She raises her cup to him then throws off her drink with an upraised arm so that her sleeve slides back to give him a forbidden glimpse of the crook of her elbow and the hidden pale flesh of her rounded upper arm. She smiles at the king, a long smile, sweet as a promise, and she sits down again, among the maidens, as modest as a primrose.
The court is stunned into silence, it is the end of the dinner. I wish to God it were the end of the day, but we all have to ride home together. George and I sweep Anne into her litter and ride beside her, ahead of everyone, so she cannot see the king, lingering behind with Agnes. She draws the curtains, and we ride on either side in stony silence.
When we are nearly home, we hear the king canter up behind us with Francis Bryan and Charles Brandon on either side, and I give up my place so that he can ride beside Anne’s litter. I mutter quickly: ‘The king!’ so she knows he’s there, but she does not draw back the curtain to greet him.
‘I think the queen is sleeping,’ George volunteers to explain the silence and the drawn curtains.
The king chuckles; he is still drunk. ‘We’ll let sleeping dogs lie, shall we?’
Charles Brandon laughs out loud. ‘Sleeping bitches bite.’
Anne tears the curtain open, and Charles Brandon bows his head and turns his horse to one side.
‘Are you tired, my lady?’ the king says, with the careful politeness of a drunk husband.
She shoots him a furious look and says nothing in reply. George drops back to give them some privacy; but everyone can see Anne’shand gripping the silk curtain against the gold-leaf frame and hear her low-voiced stream of complaints.
‘Stop her,’ George says to me.
‘You stop her,’ I reply, for we both know I cannot push my way between the king and the litter, and anyway, the grooms have pulled the mules to a halt, and the whole court can hear the king’s furious bellow.
‘Madam, I tell you this, and I will only tell you once. You will shut your eyes and endure, as your betters have done—’
