And – of course – there is no George. My husband’s body is buried with his decapitated head in the chapel in the Tower. His sister Anne lies beside him, in an old arrow box, her head pushed under her feet – they forgot to order a coffin for her. They are as inseparable in death as they were in life – and I am very far from them both.
I cannot make myself understand that everything is the same – except that six of us are missing. I cannot make myself understand that I am in my accustomed place, on the right hand of the queen’s chair, ready with a smile or a prompt to cover an awkward silence – but those six are absent. I cannot believe that when I glance to my left, there is the queen on her heavy carved chair – but it is not Anne; it is not even Katherine of Aragon. They are both dead. It is little Jane Seymour, with her ugly English hood crammed down over her pale hair and her white face shining with astonishment at finding herself in Anne’s chair, with Anne’s friends, at the summit of Anne’s court.
There are new ladies, of course; the Spanish party has won and are taking the prizes. They appoint Poles, Courtenays, Greys, Darcys, and Husseys, and of course Seymours. Almost none of the new ladies have been chosen by the new queen – Mary Brandon, the daughter of Charles Brandon’s first marriage, has been foisted on her, and she cannot possibly have wanted Margaret Douglas, whose heated flirtation with Lord Thom – the boyish half-brother of our uncle Thomas Howard – is going to blow up like a purse of serpentine now that we have a queen who notices nothing and commands no one. Eleanor Manners, Mary Zouch, and Anne Parr have returned, even though Anne Parr is red-hot for the reform of the Church and sits uneasily in this court which is going to bring back the old religion as soon as it can.
How can any of us treat Jane Seymour with respect, when she was our despised junior and we laughed when Anne slapped her face for perching her arse on the king’s one good knee? The newly made queen appoints ladies who are not worthy of their place: Margaret Dymoke, who was a hard-hearted spy on Anne in the Tower, and some vulgar Seymour countrywomen: Anne Seymour is the worst of them, now that her sister-in-law is queen.
They look at me with disdain and suspicion, wondering how I have clung to my place, despite all that has happened, and I smile my courtier’s smile. I may no longer be kinswoman to thequeen – as they now are. I may not be of the royal family – as they now are. I may not be rising upwards on the skirts of my sister-in-law as once I did – as Anne Seymour does now – but I have survived, though my fortune, my friends, my husband, and my queen have been taken, in a greatauto-da-féby the Spanish party, who are now triumphant.
And here – as if to prove their ascendancy – comes Lady Margaret Pole, visiting the new queen to arrange for the return of Lady Mary to her proper place at court. Her ladyship strolls into the royal rooms as if she owns them once again. Two sons and her cousins are in the king’s favour; she and her kinswoman, Gertrude Courtenay, are welcomed in the queen’s rooms and honoured at every great occasion. Her cousin, Arthur Plantagenet, Lord Lisle, commands the key fort of Calais; her scholar son, Reginald, is high in the favour of the pope at Rome, and now his great book is going to offer a brilliant compromise between reform and the old church: a way for our king to return to Rome. This is the end of Anne’s reform, the triumph of the Spanish party and the restoration of Rome.
They have thought of everything – except they forgot, or perhaps they never knew, the quiet power of Thomas Cromwell. The only thing that gives me any pleasure this summer is watching their realisation dawn, like a pearly summer morning when the birds are loud at four o’clock and the sun is hot by eight, that Thomas Cromwell is a great power, and – now that Anne is gone – there is no power to rival him.
The Spanish party are welcome at court and showered with honours, but they do not take control of government. They pray fervently with the king in the chapel night and morning, but he still signs his name during mass to the orders of examination of one religious house after another and levies great fines on the church. Thomas Cromwell puts the papers before him, and takes them away to execute. The Spanish party speak fondly of Lady Mary and the king smiles and nods, but she will not be excused the oath: she has to swear that she is a bastard if she wants to come to court.
The reform queen is dead; but reform still goes on. How can this be? Thomas Cromwell is a greater threat to them and to their faith than Anne ever was. Thomas Cromwell, the quiet commoner, is more than a mere clerk doing the king’s will. Slowly, they understand that they have done Cromwell a great favour by destroying his only rival. Now, there is no advisor to the king but him. He keeps his place at the king’s ear; his wooden chest holds the royal orders that he translates into laws. It is his administration that enforces them.
The Seymour brothers can bob about, babbling suggestions, but they don’t have royal business at their fingertips like Cromwell. The Pole family are of the old royal house, and Sir Geoffrey Pole can tell everyone that he knows great secrets; but they have no network of foreign agents and spies.
The king comes to Jane Seymour’s bed every night and passes me in the queen’s bedroom with a warm smile and familiar greeting for a beloved friend, his eyes on the big golden bed and the fair head in the prim white nightcap where Anne used to be lazily smiling. Being shamed as a cuckold has cheered him; being publicly named as impotent has stimulated his ardour. A new wife with absolutely no allure has achieved what the most desirable woman in England could not do: incite his lust. Jane’s pallid lack of enthusiasm reassures him that bedding her is holy work without sin – clearly without pleasure for her. The mockery of his poetry inspires him to write – he has completed a three-act tragedy based on the events of his life, and he reads it to anyone who he thinks learned enough to understand it. To me: he reads it to me.
I freeze my face into an expression of polite interest as he goes on and on, through three acts of clanking pentameters about his seduction with French practices and sortilèges, his betrayal by a witch-wife with hundreds of men, and the final act of his righteous wrath when he strikes her head from her body as you would behead a serpent. Surely, the king must be mad to read a play about a man’s incest with his sister and their bloody execution tothe man’s widow?
‘You are the only one who understands what I have been through, Jane,’ he says to me, his voice choked with tears.
‘I share your grief,’ I say.
He takes my hand and kisses it.
The king is the only one to speak of Anne and George; but he makes up for everyone else’s silence, for he speaks of them all the time, as terrible events in his distant past, a time near the creation of the world – the Fall, and Anne and George as a mythological monster like a double-headed serpent. No one else speaks of the absent six at all.
We call Jane ‘Queen’ from the day she is proclaimed, a little more than two weeks after the swordsman took off Anne’s head. Nobody remarks that Anne’s beautiful gowns must be cut down to fit Jane’s bony frame. Nobody says that Jane’s English hood is like a nun’s wimple; she looks like the king’s grandmother. Nobody asks why the queen’s ladies are now famous for modesty when – only two weeks ago – we were famous for wit? Nobody remembers that last summer, the royal progress went to Jane’s home, the Seymour home, Wulfhall, and it was a little house, badly placed, not big enough to house the court. The drains overflowed, and her family were an embarrassment – how can a young woman from there now sit on the throne of England?
I remember us Boleyns as a unified three: atroika, going like the wind, inseparable all day, and every night I slept with either one or the other of them. Now, I am a third of the being that I once was. Now I am alone, the only point left from an erased triangle.
I cannot see how to be myself, for I don’t know what I am, now that I am not beside George or one step behind Anne.
The lords of the inquiry hold a great dinner at Greenwich to celebrate their work, before they disperse to their country houses. I find my father in a guest room, ready to leave. ‘I can’t live without them,’ I say simply. ‘I can’t live here without them.’
‘You’ve no choice in the matter,’ he says irritably. ‘If you leavenow, we’ll never get you back to court again. And, without your salary as a lady-in-waiting, you’ll have no money. George has left a heap of debts; the king has confiscated all his goods as a traitor, and the Boleyns aren’t going to be generous with your jointure – not to a childless widow to a traitor son. You have no expectations, Jane. You’d have to marry again, and who would have you, looking at what you did to your last husband?’
‘I didn’t give evidence against him,’ I say wearily. ‘You were judge on the inquiry; you, of all people, know that.’
‘Well, you didn’t try to save him, as Francis Weston’s wife tried to save him.’
‘You told me not to!’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That’s true. But anyway, you can’t come home; you’ll have to stay at court.’
‘I don’t mean that I can’t live at court without them. I mean that I can’t live without them at all! I mean that I cannot be myself without them! I am a third of a person without them. I am two-thirds dead!’
For a moment, he looks interested. ‘Are you really? Do you imagine yourself two-thirds gone? How do you imagine your absence?’
I think for a moment. ‘No,’ I say. ‘You’re right. I can’t imagine my absence, but I do feel a void. But, Father, I didn’t mean philosophy. I just mean I am in despair. Such despair.’
‘Despair at court is an appropriate emotion,’ he tells me. ‘The courtier’s disease is despair.’
‘I want to go to Beaulieu! I want to live as a widow.’
