Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

He stumbles back, he, the great king, almost falls back before her contempt. Never in his life has a woman pushed him away; never in his life has he ever seen any expression in any woman’s face but desire and welcome. He is stunned. In her flushed face and bright, offended gaze he sees the first honest opinion of himself that he has ever known. In a terrible, blinding flash he sees himself as he really is: an old man, long past his prime, no longer handsome, no longer desirable, a man that a young woman would push roughly away from her because she could not stand his smell, because she could not bear his touch.

He reels back as if he has taken a mortal blow to the face, to his heart. I have never seen him like this before. I can almost see the thoughts running behind his stunned, flabby face. The sudden realization that he is not handsome, the realization that he is not desirable, the terrible realization that he is old and ill and one day he will die. He is no longer the handsomest prince in Christendom; he is a foolish old man who thought that he could put on a cape and a hood and ride out to meet a girl of twenty-four, and she would admire the handsome stranger, and fall in love with the king.

He is shocked to his soul, and now he looks foolish and confused like a muddled grandfather. Lady Anne is magnificent. She is drawn up to her full height, and she is angry, powerful; she is standing on her dignity, and she shoots a look at him that dismisses him from her court as a man that no one would want to know. “Leave me,” she says in heavy-accented English, and she turns her shoulder on him as if she would push him away again.

She looks around the room for a guard to arrest this intruder, and she notices for the first time that no one is springing to save her. We are all appalled; no one knows what to say or do to recover this moment: Lady Anne outraged, the king humbled in his own eyes, thrown down before us all. The truth of the king’s age and decay is suddenly, painfully, unforgiveably apparent. Lord Southampton steps forward but is lost for words; Lady Lisle looks at me, and I see my shock mirrored in her face. It is a moment of such intense embarrassment that all of us – we skilled flatterers, courtiers, liars – are lost for words. The world we have been building for thirty years, around our prince who is ageless, eternally handsome, irresistibly desirable, has been shattered about our ears – and by a woman we none of us respect.

He turns wordlessly, he almost stumbles as he goes, his stinking leg giving way beneath him, and Katherine Howard, that clever, clever little girl, catches her breath in a gasp of absolute admiration and says to him: “Ooh! Forgive me, sir! But I am new to court myself, a stranger like you. May I ask – who are you? What is your name?”

I am the only person to see him come in. I don’t like bullbaiting, or bears, or cockfighting, or anything like that, I think it’s just downright nasty – and so I am standing a little back from the windows. And I am looking around, actually, I am looking at a young man whom I had seen earlier, such a handsome young man with a cheeky smile, when I see the six of them come in, old men, they must all be thirty at the least, and the big old king at the front, and they are all wearing the same sort of cape, like a masquing costume, so I guess at once that it is him, and that he has come in disguise like a knight errant, silly old fool, and that he will greet her and she will pretend not to know him, and then there will be dancing. Really, I am delighted to see him because this makes it a certainty that there will be dancing, and so I am wondering how I can encourage the handsome young man to be near me in the dance.

When he kisses her, it all goes terribly wrong. I can see at once that she has no idea who he is; someone should have warned her. She thinks he is just some drunk old man who has staggered in to kiss her for a wager, and of course she is shocked, and of course quite repelled, because when he is in a cheap cloak and not surrounded by the greatest court in the world, he does not look at all like a king. In truth, when he is in a cheap cloak and with his companions, also dressed poorly, he looks like some common merchant, with a waddling walk and a red nose, who likes a glass of wine, and hopes to go to court and see his betters. He looks like the sort of man my uncle would not acknowledge if he called out in the street. A fat old man, a vulgar old man, like a drunk sheep farmer on market day. His face is terribly bloated, like a great round dish of dripping; his hair is thinning and gray; he is monstrously fat; and he has an old injury in his leg that makes him so lame that he rolls in his walk like a sailor. Without his crown he is not handsome; he looks like anybody’s fat old grandfather.

He falls back, she stands on her dignity, rubbing her mouth to take the smell of his breath away, and then – it is so awful I could almost scream with shock – she turns her head and spits out the taste of him. “Leave me,” she says, and turns her back on him.

There is utter, dreadful silence, nobody says a word, and suddenly I know, as if my own cousin Anne Boleyn is at my side telling me, what I should do. I am not even thinking of the dancing and the young man; for once I am not even thinking of myself, and that almost never happens. I just think, in a flash, that if I pretend not to know him, then he can go on not knowing himself, and the whole sorry masque of this silly old man and his gross vanity will not tumble about our ears. I just feel sorry for him, to tell the truth. I just think that I can spare him this awful embarrassment of bouncing up to a woman and having her slap him down like a smelly old hound. If anyone else had said anything then, I would have stayed silent. But nobody says anything, and the silence goes on and on, unbearably, and he stumbles back, he almost falls back into me, and his face is all crumpled and confused and I am so sorry for him, poor humbled old fool, that I say, I coo: “Ooh! Forgive me, sir! But I am new to court myself, a stranger like you. May I ask – who are you?”

Lady Browne is ordering the maids to their beds in a bellow as if she were a Yeoman of the Guard. They are overexcited, and Katherine Howard among them is the center of it all, as wild as any of them, a true Queen of the May. How she spoke to the king, how she peeped up at him from under her eyelashes, how she begged him, as a handsome stranger, new to court, to ask the Lady Anne for dancing, is being mimicked and reenacted till they are drunk with their own laughter.

Lady Browne is not laughing; her face is like thunder, so I hustle the girls into bed and tell them that they are all very foolish and that they would do better to copy their lady, the Lady Anne, and show proper dignity, than mimic Katherine Howard’s free and forward ways. They slip into their beds two by two like pretty angels, and we blow out the candle and leave them in the darkness and lock the door. We have hardly turned away before we hear them whispering, but no power on earth can make girls behave well; and we do not even try.

“Are you troubled, Lady Browne?” I ask considerately.

She hesitates; she is longing to confide in someone, and I am here at her side, and known to be discreet.

“This is a bad business,” she says heavily. “Oh, it all passed off pleasantly enough in the end, with the dancing and the singing, and Lady Anne recovered quickly enough as soon as you had explained to her; but this is a bad, bad business.”

“The king?” I suggest.

She nods and folds her lips over as if she would stop herself saying more.

“I am weary,” I say. “Shall we take a glass of warm ale together before we go to our beds? Sir Anthony is staying here tonight, is he not?”

“God knows he won’t join me in my rooms for hours,” she says unguardedly. “I doubt if any of the king’s circle will sleep tonight.”

“Oh?” I say. I lead the way into the presence chamber. The other ladies have gone to bed, the fire is burning low, but there is a jug of ale set at the fireside and half a dozen tankards. I pour us both a drink. “Trouble?”

She sits in her chair and leans forward to whisper. “My lord husband tells me that the king swears that he will not marry her.”

“No!”

“He does. He does. He swears it. He says that he cannot like her.”

She takes a long draw on the ale and looks at me over the top of the mug.

“Lady Browne, you must have this wrong…”

“I have it from my husband this very night. The king seized him by the collar, almost by the throat, as soon as we retired, and said that the moment he saw Lady Anne, he had been struck with consternation, and that he saw nothing in her that he had been told.”

“He said that?”

“Those very words.”

“But he seemed so happy as we left?”

“He was as truly happy just as Katherine Howard was truly ignorant of his identity. He is as much a happy bridegroom as she is an innocent child. We are all actors here, but the king will not play the part of eager bridegroom.”

“He has to; they are betrothed and the contract signed.”

“He does not like her, he says. He cannot like her, he says; and he is blaming the men who made this marriage for him.”

I have to get this news to the duke; he has to be warned before the king gets back to London.

“Blaming the men who made the marriage?”

“And those who brought her to him. He is furious.”

“He will blame Thomas Cromwell,” I predict quietly.

“Indeed.”

“But what of the Lady Anne? Surely, he cannot refuse her?”

“There is some talk of an impediment,” she says. “And that is why Sir Anthony and none of the others will have any sleep tonight. The Cleves lords should have brought a copy of an agreement to say that some old previous contract to marry has been withdrawn. Since they don’t have it, perhaps there may be grounds to argue that the marriage cannot go ahead, it is not valid.”