Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

“He prays that you will not suffer from infertility, nor the king from impotence; he prays that the power of Satan will not unman the king nor unwoman you.”

“Amen,” I say promptly, as if anyone could believe this nonsense. Then I turn to my ladies, and they escort me from the room to my own chamber, where I will change into my nightgown.

When I come back, the king is standing with his court beside the great bed, and the archbishop is still praying. The king is in his nightshirt with a great handsome cloak lined with fur thrown over his shoulders. He has laid aside his hose, and I can see the bulky bandage on his leg, where he has an open wound. The bandage is clean and fresh, thank God, but even so the smell of the wound seeps into the bedchamber to mingle, sickeningly, with the smell of incense. The prayers seem to have been going on while we both changed our clothes. Really, you would have thought that we were safe from demonic dreams and impotence by now. My ladies step forward and slip my cloak from my shoulders. I am dressed only in my nightshift before the whole court, and I am so mortified and embarrassed that I could almost wish myself back at Cleves.

Lady Rochford quickly lifts the covers from the bed to shield me from their inquisitive stares and I slip between them and sit up with my back against the pillows. On the other side of the bed a young man, Thomas Culpepper, kneels for Henry to lean on his shoulder and another man takes the king’s elbow to push him upward. King Henry grunts like a weary carthorse as he hauls himself into bed. The bed dips at his great weight, and I have to make an ungainly little wriggle and grab the side to stop myself rolling over toward him.

The archbishop raises his hands above his head for a final blessing, and I look straight ahead. Katherine Howard’s bright face catches my eye; she has her hands pressed together, held against her lips as if devoutly praying, but she is clearly struggling not to giggle. I pretend I have not seen her, for fear that she should set me laughing, too, and when the archbishop completes his prayers I say: “Amen.”

They all go then, thank God. There is no suggestion that they should watch the marriage being consummated, but I know that they will need to see the sheets in the morning and know that it has been done. This is the nature of the royal marriage. That, and marrying a man old enough to be your father, a man whom you hardly know.

I am one of the last to leave, and I close the door quietly on yet another marriage of the king’s that I have seen progress through courtship to the marriage bed. Some, like that young fool Katherine Howard, would think that this is where the story ends, that this is the conclusion of everything. I know better. This is where the story of a queen begins.

Before this night there are contracts and promises, and sometimes hopes and dreams; rarely there is love. After this night there is the reality of two people working out their lives together. For some, it is a negotiation that cannot be done; my own uncle is married to a wife he cannot tolerate, and they live apart now. Henry Percy married an heiress but could never free himself from his love for Anne Boleyn. Thomas Wyatt hates his wife with a vengeance, since he fell in love with Anne when she was a girl and he has never recovered. My own husband… but I will not think about my own husband now. Let me remember that I loved him, that I would have died for love of him – whatever he thought of me when we were put to bed together for the first time. Whoever he thought of when he had to do the deed with me. God forgive him for holding me in his arms and thinking of her. God forgive me for knowing that, and letting it haunt me. In the end, God forgive me for having my head turned and my heart turned so I liked nothing more than to lie in his arms and think of him with another woman – jealousy and lust brought me so low that it was my pleasure, a wicked sinful pleasure, to feel his touch on me and think of him touching her.

It is not a matter of four bare legs in a bed and the business done. She will have to learn to obey him. Not in the grand things, any woman can put on a bit of a show. But in the thousand petty compromises that come to a wife every day. The thousand times a day when one has to bite the lip and bow the head and not argue in public, nor in private, nor even in the quiet recesses of one’s own mind. If your husband is a king, this is even more important. If your husband is King Henry, it is a life-or-death decision.

Everyone tries to forget that Henry is a ruthless man. Henry himself tries to make us forget. When he is being charming, or setting himself out to please, we like to forget that we are playing with a savage bear. This is not a man whose temperament is tamed. This is not a man whose mood is constantly sweet. This is not a man who can manage his feelings; he cannot keep constant from one day to another. I have seen this man love three women with an absolute passion. I have seen him swear to each of them an eternal, unchangeable fidelity. I have seen him joust under the motto “Sir Loyal Heart.” And I have seen him send two to their deaths, and learn of the death of the third with quiet composure.

That girl had better please him tonight, and she had better obey him tomorrow, and she had better give him a son within a year, or I, personally, would not give a snap of my fingers for her chances.

One by one they leave the room, and we are left in candlelight and an awkward silence. I say nothing. It is not for me to speak. I remember my mother’s warning that whatever happens in England I must never, never give the king reason to think that I am wanton. He has chosen me because he has faith in the character of the women of Cleves. He has bought himself a well-mannered, self-controlled, highly disciplined Erasmian virgin, and this is what I must be. My mother does not say outright that to disappoint the king could cost me my life, because the fate of Anne Boleyn has never been mentioned in Cleves since the day when the contract was signed to marry me to a wife killer. Since my betrothal it is as if Queen Anne was snatched up to heaven in complete silence. I am warned, constantly warned, that the King of England will not tolerate lightness of behavior in his wife; but no one ever tells me that he might do to me what he did to Anne Boleyn. No one ever warns me that I, too, might be forced to put my head down on the block to be beheaded for imaginary faults.

The king, my husband, in bed beside me, sighs heavily, as if he is weary, and for a moment I think that perhaps he will just fall asleep and this exhausting, frightening day will be over and I can wake tomorrow a married woman and start my new life as Queen of England. For a moment, I dare to hope that my duties for today will be done.

I lie, as my brother would want me to lie, like a frozen moppet. My brother had a horror of my body: a horror and a fascination. He commanded me to wear high necks, thick clothes, heavy hoods, big boots, so that all he could see of me, all anyone could see of me, was my overshadowed face and my hands from my wrists to my fingers. If he could have put me into seclusion like the Ottoman emperor with his imprisoned wives, I think he would have done so. Even my gaze was too forward for him; he preferred me not to look directly at him. If he could, he would have had me veiled.

And yet, he constantly spied on me. Whether I was in my mother’s chamber sewing under her supervision, or in the yard looking at the horses, I would glance up and see him staring at me with that look of irritation and… I don’t know what… desire? It was not lust. He never wanted me as a man wants a woman; of course I know that. But he wanted me as if he would dominate me completely. As if he would like to swallow me up so that I should trouble him no more.

When we were children he used to torment all three of us: Sybilla, Amelia, and myself. Sybilla, three years older than him, could run fast enough to get away; Amelia would dissolve into the easy tears of the baby of the family; only I would oppose him. I did not hit him back when he pinched me or pulled my hair. I did not lash out when he cornered me in the stable yard or a dark corner. I just gritted my teeth, and when he hurt me, I did not cry. Not even when he bruised my thin little-girl wrists, not even when he drew blood with a stone thrown at my head. I never cried. I never begged him to stop. I learned to use silence and endurance as my greatest weapons against him. His threat and his power was that he would hurt me. My power was that I dared to act as if he could not. I learned that I could endure anything a boy could do to me. Later, I learned that I could survive anything that a man might do to me. Later still I knew that he was a tyrant and he still did not frighten me. I have learned the power of surviving.

When I was older and watched his gentleness and his command of Amelia and his pleasant respect to my mother, I realized that my stubbornness, my obstinacy, had created this constant trouble between us. He dominated my father, imprisoned him in his own bedroom, usurped him. He did all this with the blessing of my mother and with a proud sense of his own righteousness. He allied with Sybilla’s husband, two ambitious princelings together, and so he still rules Sybilla, even after her marriage. He and my mother have forged themselves into a powerful partnership, a couple to rule Juliers-Cleves. They command Amelia, but I could not be dominated or patronized. I would not be babied or ruled. For him I became an itch that he had to scratch. If I had wept, or begged, if I had collapsed like a girl or clung like a woman, he could have forgiven me, adopted me, taken me under his protection and cared for me. I would have been his little pet, as Amelia is: his sweetheart, the sister that he guards and keeps safe.