I could almost laugh at him telling me of my own plan. ‘Yes, my lord. We all know very well what we have to do.’
WE PREPARE OURstatement like three Judases on the first Spy Wednesday, sitting in the back of the barge, wrapped up warmly in our capes, hoods together like three witches, rewriting the past so the future will read as we want. We devise an unlikely account of a conversation, ignoring that Katherine and Eleanor have no German and the queen knows no English words for intimacy. Never mind that the queen would never have spoken to anyone about her marriage bed and her husband. Never mind that nobody could seriously believe one word of the conversation that I scribble in the back of the barge, that springs forward so powerfully as the rowers pull and reset, that we look as if we are in a masque, miming the rocking of a pretend boat on the painted waves of a silk sea.
‘We could say that we asked her if she thought she might be with child?’ I start, as the oars creak and the barge heaves.
‘She’d never have discussed that with us,’ Eleanor objects, letting likelihood get in the way of a good story.
‘Doesn’t matter. She’s not going to deny it,’ I remind her. ‘She wants this over as much as the king does. She knows we have to say this. We all know this is not truth but an escape for them both.’ I look from the cold determined face of one career courtier to another and I think: Christ! Do I look like this?
‘All right,’ Eleanor says. ‘I’ll say I asked her what he does when he comes to bed.’
‘And she can answer that he kisses her and takes her by the hand and lies down and sleeps the night beside her,’ Katherine agrees. The two of them snigger like whoremongers.
‘We have to say that she knows nothing,’ I remind them. ‘We have to say that she is innocent.’
‘Oh, we can say I asked her what he says in the morning, and that she told me he says: “Farewell, darling, until mass!”’
The two of them collapse at this high wit. Really, I should have hired Will the fool to write a merry masque.
‘D’you think it likely that one of us would have asked her for more details?’ I enquire, writing to their gleeful dictation.
‘I shall say that I said: “Madam, there must be more than this, or it will be long ere we have a Duke of York, which all this realm most desireth”,’ Eleanor says grandly. ‘I don’t mind swearing to that.’
I make a note of the superbly unlikely dialogue. ‘And we stick to this,’ I urge them. ‘We’re swearing on oath. We can never betray our word; we can never betray each other, nor the queen.’
‘The king wants this?’ Katherine asks, as if it is the only question. ‘He wants rid of Anne and to marry Kitty?’
‘This is what he wants,’ I say. ‘And this is the only way to get the duchess out of this snare that the men have put her in.’
‘Oh! The men!’ Eleanor says, throwing her hands up as if she has one scrap of fellow feeling for another woman. ‘Yes, yes, Jane. We have our script, we know our parts, we’ll never let you down. And there will be a reward?’
‘There will be a reward,’ I confirm.
I am satisfied with the words I have noted. There’s nothing about witch-given impotence blighting the royal bed. There is nothing to suggest the king is impotent now or was earlier – essential if everyone is to believe Prince Edward is his son, essential if he is to be credited with fathering any future son. The king and his line must be free of any suspicion of lack of vigour. He will tell everyone that God warned him not to bed his bride; all we have to do is toconfirm that he did not. The completely ridiculous dialogue, all in English, invading royal privacy, makes it clear that Anne of Cleves is a maid – even more virginal than her predecessor Anne Boleyn, who once told me that she was as virginal as the Virgin Mary.
The barge slows, and the oarsmen spin it round so that it will face upriver, ready to take us home on the flowing tide when our work is done. Charles Brandon steps on board to help us down the gangplank and along the quay. The other two lords fall in behind him. It is a guard of honour, although it feels for a moment unpleasantly like arrest. I suddenly think: is this a double-cross, and am I leading the way to my confession, and am I not the spider here but a stupidly buzzing fly?
Brandon leads the way through the maze of courts and gardens to the heart of the palace, to the room I know well: my spymaster’s room. It is clean and bare – just as he always has it – his big chair one side of the table and two smaller ones set opposite, convenient for conversation or confession. I can’t think how many times I have sat here and seen his slowly dawning smile or heard the quiet click of a letter falling through the slit behind me and known that the sluice gate of the Cromwell information mill is open, and it is grinding grist. But today it is my dark chamber; I am the spymaster.
IT TAKES USabout an hour to finish, and the clocks are striking the half hour when Charles Brandon’s young wife Catherine knocks on the door and enters the room, followed by a clerk carrying a great wooden box.
‘My lord requires me to invite you ladies to breakfast,’ she says with studied indifference. I know she is sulky at having to obey him and meet with us. She is a reformer, a secret supporter of Lord Cromwell; she welcomed the Lutheran queen. ‘And here is my lord’s steward.’
Silently, the man opens the wooden box like a gaping jaw for me to drop our signed pages inside. There are papers at the bottom ofthe box already. I recognise the regular clerkish hand of Thomas Cromwell, the half-moon loop of theCof his signature like a smile. He has signed his statement, and here it is in the box, sitting neat and orderly below mine. I cannot see what he has written, but I trust him, as I always did. I know it will be an accurate account of the coming of the queen to England and the king’s immediate rejection of her – inspired by God – and how her precontract means the marriage must be annulled with no blame to her but a handsome pension.
Beneath his statement are more papers – every courtier will have wanted to demonstrate his support for the king’s case. They will repeat the cruel and disgusting lies the king told about her – that she is fat, that she smells, that her breasts are slack, that she is no maid. Dr Butts will witness that the king is as lusty as a bull in the meadow, but God spoke to him and warned him the queen is the wife of another man.
I remember saying to Cromwell:You won’t get him through the gate, and for a moment, I could almost laugh at this box of scripts, this enormous theatrical production, this great masque – one of the greatest that the court has ever produced – and all to slide the king from the bed of one beautiful young woman worthy to be queen and into the bed of her maid. This is the third time we have rid the king of a good woman for a lesser one. But I am the first advisor to achieve this without bloodshed, and I give myself credit for that.
We eat a good breakfast with the sulky young duchess, and then take the barge on the flowing river back to Richmond. As soon as we enter the queen’s pretty rooms, she asks us where we have been all morning? The other two ladies leave it to me to curtsey while they whisk away to change their gowns. I tell her we were called in by the convocation to say that we believe her marriage was not consummated.
She gives me one dark look, as if I have betrayed her to her enemies, and I lean close to her and whisper in her ear: ‘You know I hadto do this. You know this is the only way, the best way, that you set him free so he does not fight for his freedom. I did it for your good.’
She says: ‘Yes, I know. I am not his wife but his subject, in his country. He has all the power.’
‘But think of this lovely palace being your own, and 8,000 nobles a year!’
She looks at me gravely and turns away and goes into her private closet.
