‘Good,’ he says shortly. ‘And if this is successful, with the queen and ladies-in-waiting, with sworn evidence and legal annulment, then we’ll never say it was Cromwell’s plan, Jane. I will take the credit and earn the favour of the king.’
‘Very well.’ I think: yes, you braggart. You take the credit, and you’ll never know that it was my plan. I am too clever to take the credit. I will see this through from the shadows, and only I will know that you are all dancing to my tune.
‘You’ll never mention Thomas Cromwell again,’ he tells me.
I know that this is the death of Thomas Cromwell, who was a friend to me when I had no friends and made me feel loved when nobody loved me. He was my tutor, my spymaster – he taught me all about treachery; it will come as no surprise to him when he learns that I have let him go to the scaffold without a word in his defence.
‘Very well.’
Richmond Palace, Summer
1540
WE TELL THEqueen that we have come to Richmond to avoid the plague and the heat of the summer city and that the king will join us shortly. We embroider this lie by assuring her that the king always leaves London in summer on a progress to beautiful country houses and that she will enjoy this.
Katheryn Howard is missing: the Norfolk barge took her on the high tide to her family house at Lambeth before we embarked. She did not say goodbye to the queen, nor to any of the ladies but only to her bedfellow and cousin, Catherine Carey, who says that she cried a great deal and said that she would never be happy again. For once, I think that the foolish child is right. She has the most glorious prospect of any girl in England – but I doubt that she will find happiness.
We tell the queen that Kitty Howard’s step-grandmother, Agnes Howard the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk has been taken ill and that Kitty has gone back to Lambeth. The queen glances at me, as if to ask me if this is another lie, like all the others we are telling her now, but she can read nothing from my expressionless face. ‘But she will come back?’
‘I don’t know when.’
Nobody tells the queen that parliament is in daily session, but in early July, we hear that they have passed a new law to say that a second marriage, undertaken after one that was not consummated, is legal and not bigamous. The queen does not ask me what this law means, and I don’t volunteer that the king can marry a new wife at once; he need not wait for any annulment, all he has to do is prove his marriage to her was not consummated.
Three days later the king’s new advisors – old noblemen and favourites, not one scholar or lawyer among them – are rowed upriverin two barges, with her new ambassador Herr Harst. I stand beside the queen as her lord chamberlain tells her that the privy council has implored the king to hold an inquiry into their marriage. Her ambassador is silently furious; her receiver general is embarrassed. I am as empty of emotion as a mask laid aside.
They give long speeches in English that are translated laboriously into bad German by that established liar Richard Rich. Queen Anne gives no answer, not in English nor German. In the afternoon, they come again to explain what was completely clear to her from the day I told her in chapel: that she must pretend to believe a string of lies. They tell her that she was precontracted to the Duke of Lorraine when she married the king, that God warned the king of this on their wedding night, and that their marriage was never consummated on all the nights after.
‘You’ll have to see them again,’ I tell her. ‘You’ll have to reply that it shall be as the king wishes.’
She looks at me. ‘Whatever he wishes? Whatever it might be?’
‘It’s not the king you need fear,’ I tell her. ‘The king has new advisors, and I don’t know what they will do. They have all the power, and you have none. Your brother will not defend you; he’s in France. He’s given up on you and on England. You’ve got no choice but to accept.’ I hesitate. ‘I beg you to accept...’
‘It is not the king who does this?’ she asks me.
I shake my head. ‘He doesn’t do anything – they do everything for him, before he even says what he wants. Now, he wants a new wife.’
The king’s men come in: Charles Brandon, the king’s brother-in-law, and Thomas Audley, sailing before a new wind. William Fitzwilliam comes in with Bishop Stephen Gardiner. Sir William Kingston the constable of the Tower, who escorted my husband George to the scaffold and Anne to the block, follows them. My heart misses a beat. Has he come to arrest his queen? Like he arrested his friends, Lord Lisle and Thomas Cromwell?
She tries to stand to greet them, but when the five of them march in – so hard-faced and old, so unflinching before her youngprettiness – her legs fail her, and she falls back into her chair. Charles Brandon – the most senior and the stupidest – hardly waits for her to recover before he says that they have documents to prove that she was precontracted to the Duke of Lorraine.
Ambassador Harst blusters in German and demands to see the documents; nobody pays any attention to him. It is a masque not a real consultation. They don’t even have the documents to hand, they mime, gesturing with empty hands. The king’s men are blockheads; I have seen them in a dozen masques, as Russians, as Turks: now they enter as hangmen. Queen Anne, silent on her throne, is like a woman playingMischanceseated on a painted wood wheel of fortune. Impossible to take this theatrical confrontation seriously – except that it could not be more grave. If we do not play our parts in this masque which is calledSurrender, there can be no doubt that we will be dance in another called:Witch-hunt.
I lean forward and whisper to her. My part isKind Counsellor, and I play it as well as ever. Obedient to my advice, speaking my script, the young queen raises her head and tells them that she is always content with His Majesty the king, and that of course, he must be right in whatever he says. If he says that there was a precontract and the marriage should be annulled, he cannot be mistaken.
The Lords Audley, Suffolk, and Southampton bow low and manage to restrain themselves from slapping each other on the back.
They stay overnight at Richmond Palace, and they eat well and drink deep in the great hall, while the queen and us ladies dine in her rooms. They come in after dinner to say goodnight, and William Fitzwilliam beckons me to see him out.
‘Tomorrow morning, before breakfast, please bring two ladies with you to swear that the marriage was not consummated,’ he says. ‘I take it there will be no difficulty?’
‘None.’
‘Who will you bring?’
‘I thought Katherine Edgcumbe?’ She was in service with me to Katherine of Aragon, and dropped her without remorse. ‘AndEleanor Manners the Countess of Rutland?’ I suggest. Eleanor was Anne’s lady-in-waiting and gave evidence against her and my husband. Swearing on oath that a marriage was not consummated is nothing compared to what she will have said then.
‘And they know what they have to do?’
