Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  Anne was to be tried by the peers in the King’s Hall inside the Tower of London. They were afraid to take her through the City to Westminster. The mood of the City which had sulked at her coronation was now turning to defend her. Cromwell’s plan had overreached itself. There were few people who could believe that a woman could be so gross as to seduce men when she was pregnant with a baby from her own husband, as the court had claimed she had done. They could not credit that a woman would seek two, three, four lovers under the nose of her husband when her husband was the King of England. Even the women at the dockside who had shouted ‘Whore!’ at Anne during Queen Katherine’s trials now thought that the king had run mad again and was setting aside a legal wife on a pretext, for yet another unknown favourite.

  Jane Seymour had moved into the City into the beautiful house of Sir Francis Bryan in the Strand, and it was common knowledge that the king’s barge was tied up at the river stairs till well after midnight every night and that there was music and feasting and dancing and masquing while the queen was in the Tower and five good men held as well, four of them under sentence of death.

  Henry Percy, Anne’s old love, was among the rest of the peers, sitting in judgement on the queen at whose table they had all feasted, whose hand they had all kissed, who had danced with each and every one of them. It must have been an odd experience for them all when she walked into the King’s Hall and took a seat before them, the gold ‘B’ at her throat, her French hood set back to show her dark shining hair, her dark gown setting off her creamy skin. The constant crying and the praying before the little altar in the Tower had left her calm for the day of her trial. She was as confidently lovely as she had been when she came from France, all those years ago, and was set on by my family to take my royal lover from me.

  I could have gone along with the common people and taken a place behind the Lord Mayor and the guildsmen and the aldermen, but William was too afraid that I would be seen, and I knew I could not bear to hear the lies they would tell about her. I knew also that I could not bear to hear the truths. The woman from the lodging house went to see the greatest show that London would ever be offered and came home with a garbled account of the list of times and places where the queen had seduced the men of the court by inflaming their desires by kissing with tongues, that she gave them great gifts, that they tried to outdo each other night after night; a story which sometimes touched the truth and sometimes veered off into the wildest of fantasies which anyone who knew the court would have realised could not be true. But it always had that fascination of scandal, it was always erotic, filthy, dark. It was the stuff that people wished that queens might do, that a whore married to a king would be sure to do. It told us much, much more about the dreams of Secretary Cromwell, a low man, than it did about Anne or George or me.

  They called no witnesses who had ever seen her touching and blandishing, they called no witnesses to prove that Anne had ill-wished Henry into illness, either. They claimed that the ulcer on his leg and his impotence were her fault too. Anne pleaded not guilty and then tried to explain, to the peers who knew it already, that it was normal for a queen to give little gifts. That it was nothing for her to dance with one man, and then another. That of course poets would dedicate poems to her. That naturally the poems would be love poetry. That the king had never complained, not for one moment, against the tradition of courtly love which ruled every court in Europe.

  On the last day of the trial the Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, her love from so long ago, went missing. He sent as his excuse that he was too ill to attend. That was when I knew that the verdict would go against her. The lords who had been in Anne’s court, who would have sold their own mothers to the galleys to have her favour, gave their verdict, from the lowliest peer to our uncle. One after another, they all said: ‘Guilty’. When it came to my uncle he choked on his tears and could barely say the word ‘guilty’, or speak the sentence: that she should be burned or beheaded on the Green, at the king’s pleasure.

  The lodging-house woman found a scrap of cloth in her pocket and dabbed at her eyes. She said it did not seem much like justice to her, if a queen had to be burned at the stake for dancing with a couple of young men.

  ‘Very true,’ William said judicially, and directed her from the room. When she was gone, he came back to me and took me onto his knee. I curled up like a child, and let him put his arms around me and rock me.

  ‘She will hate to be in a nunnery.’

  ‘She’ll have to tolerate whatever the king rules,’ he said. ‘Exile or a nunnery, she will be glad of it.’

  They tried my brother the next day, before they could lose their stomach for the lies. He was accused, as the other men had been, of being her lover and plotting against the king, and like them, he denied it completely. They accused him also of questioning the paternity of the Princess Elizabeth and of laughing at the king’s impotence. George, speaking on his sacred oath, fell silent: he could not deny it. The strongest evidence against him was a statement written by Jane Parker, the wife he had always despised.

  ‘They would listen to an aggrieved wife?’ I asked William. ‘On a hanging matter?’

  ‘He’s guilty,’ he said simply. ‘I’m not one of his intimates but even I’ve heard him laugh at Henry and say that the man couldn’t mount a mare in season, let alone a woman like Anne.’

  I shook my head. ‘That’s bawdy and indiscreet but …’

  He took my hand. ‘It’s treason, my love,’ he said gently. ‘You wouldn’t expect it to come to court, but if it does, it is treason just as Thomas More was treasonous to doubt the king’s supremacy in the church. This king can say what is a hanging offence and what is not. We gave him that power when we denied the Pope the right to rule the church. We gave Henry the right to rule everything. And now he rules that your sister is a witch and that your brother is her lover, and that they are both enemies of the realm.’

  ‘But he’ll let them go,’ I insisted.

  Every day my boy Henry went to the Tower and met his sister and saw that she was well. Every day William tracked him there and tracked him back, always watching that no-one else was watching. But there were no spies on Henry. It was as if they had done their worst in listening to the queen and entrapping her, in listening to George and his ridiculous indiscretions, and entrapping him.

  One day in the middle of May I went with Henry and met my little girl as she walked out of the Tower of London. From where we stood, outside the gate, I could hear the knocking of the nails into the scaffold where they would execute my brother and the four men with him. Catherine was composed. She was a little pale.

  ‘Come home with me,’ I urged her. ‘And we can go to Rochford, all of us. There’s nothing more you can do here.’

  She shook her little hooded head. ‘Let me stay,’ she said. ‘I want to stay until Aunt Anne is released to the nunnery and it is over.’

  ‘Is she well?’

  ‘She is. She prays all the time and she prepares herself for a life behind the walls. She knows that she has to give up queenship. She knows that she has to give up the Princess Elizabeth. She knows that she won’t be queen now. But it’s better since the trial is over. They don’t listen to her and watch her the same way. And she is more settled.’

  ‘Have you seen George?’ I asked. I tried to keep my voice light but my grief choked me.

  Catherine looked up at me, her dark Boleyn eyes filled with pity. ‘This is a prison,’ she said gently. ‘I can’t go visiting.’

  I shook my head at my own stupidity. ‘When I was here before it was one of the many castles of the king. I could walk where I wanted. I should have realised that everything is different now.’

  ‘Will the king marry Jane Seymour?’ Catherine asked me. ‘She wants to know.’

  ‘You can tell her it is a certainty,’ I said. ‘He is at her house every night. He is as he was, in the old days, when it was her.’

  Catherine nodded. ‘I should go,’ she said, glan