The Queen of Subtleties Read online

  The Queen of Subtleties

  Suzannah Dunn

  For my own little

  Tudor-redheaded heir,

  Vincent

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Anne Boleyn

  Lucy Cornwallis SPRING 1535

  Anne Boleyn

  Lucy Cornwallis SUMMER 1535

  Anne Boleyn

  Lucy Cornwallis AUTUMN 1535

  Anne Boleyn

  Lucy Cornwallis WINTER 1535-6

  Anne Boleyn

  Lucy Cornwallis SPRING 1536

  Anne Boleyn

  Lucy Cornwallis SUMMER 1536

  Anne Boleyn

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Suzannah Dunn

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Anne Boleyn

  Elizabeth, you’ll be told lies about me, or perhaps even nothing at all. I don’t know which is worse. You, too, my only baby: your own lifestory is being re-written. You’re no longer the king’s legitimate daughter and heir. Yesterday, with a few pen-strokes, you were bastardized. Tomorrow, for good measure, a sword-stroke will leave you motherless.

  There are people who’d have liked to have claimed that you’re not your father’s daughter at all, but you’ve confounded them. You’re a Tudor rose, a pale redhead, whereas I’m a black-haired, olive-skinned, coal-eyed Englishwoman as dark as a Spaniard. No one has felt able to suggest that you’re other than your father’s flesh and blood.

  You won’t remember how I look, and I don’t suppose you’ll ever come across my likeness. Portraits of me will be burned. You’ll probably never even come across my handwriting, because my letters and diaries will go the same way. Even my initial will be chiselled from your father’s on carvings and masonry all around the country. And it starts tomorrow, with the thud of the sword to my bared neck in time for my husband’s public announcement of his forthcoming marriage. As his current wife, I pose a problem. Not such a big one, though, that the thinnest of blades can’t solve it.

  I want you to know about me, Elizabeth. So, let’s start at the beginning. I was born at the turn of the century. And what a turn, what a century: the sixteenth, so different from every one before it. The changes I’ve seen. Gone, quite suddenly, is the old England, the old order of knights and priests. England used to be made of old men. Men born to their place, knowing their place. We Boleyns have always prided ourselves on knowing just about everything there is to know about anything, with the exception of our place.

  I was born in Norfolk. My mother is a Howard. Her brother is the Duke of Norfolk. I was born in Blickling Hall. I’ve no memories of Norfolk, but I’m told that the land is flat, the sky high and wide. So, from the beginning, it seems, I’ve had my sights on the horizon. The climate, in Norfolk, is something I’ve heard about: blanketed summers and bare, bone-cracking winters. Inhospitable and uncompromising, like the Howards. If the world had never changed, that would have suited the Howards.

  Something else I’ve heard about the Howards: that the Duke, my Uncle Norfolk, has the common touch. At first, it seems a strange thing to hear about the last man in England to have owned serfs; but in a way, it’s true, because, for him, business is everything and he’s unafraid to get his hands dirty. No airs and graces. Land and money: that’s what matters to a Howard. My uncle has never read a book, and he’s proud of the fact. Ruthlessness and efficiency: that’s what matters. He’ll clap you on the back, one day; stab you in it, the next. No hard feelings, just business as usual. Never trust a Howard, Elizabeth, not even if you are one. Look where it got me, sent here to the Tower by my own uncle.

  But I’m a Boleyn first and foremost. My father didn’t have the Howard privileges; he’s had to make his own way in the world. And he has; oh, he has: cultured, clever, cool-eyed Thomas Boleyn. England has never seen the likes of him. For a start, he has a talent almost unknown here: he speaks French like a Frenchman. Which has made him indispensable to the King.

  We Boleyns have lived a very different life from everyone else, in this country; from everyone else under these heavy English skies, in their musty old robes and gowns, slowly digesting their stews. I lived in France from when I was twelve until I was twenty. I grew up to be a Frenchwoman, I came back to England as a Frenchwoman. There are women in France who are strong, Elizabeth, because they’re educated. Unlike here, where the only way to be a strong woman is to be a harridan. Imagine how it was, for me, to come back. For years, I’d been thinking in French. In France, anything seems possible, and life is to be lived. Even now, stuck in the Tower, a day away from death, I’m alive, Elizabeth, in a way that most people here haven’t ever been and won’t ever be. I pity their bleak, grovelling little lives.

  Forget Norfolk, Elizabeth; forget the Howards, and old England and Catholicism and creaky Blickling Hall. Think Hever: the castle which we, the Boleyn family, made our home. Mellow-coloured, grand and assured. Perhaps you’ll go there, one day. I grew up there.

  I was a commoner, but I became queen. No one thought it possible, but I did it. I supplanted the woman who’d been England’s queen for nineteen years, a woman who’d been born ‘the daughter of the Catholic Kings’. Her royal blood, her regal bearing, her famed grace and benevolence were nothing against me, in the end. She was a fat old pious woman when I’d finished with her. And England was changed for ever. It had to be done. I got old England by the throat, and shook it until it died.

  Forget the ex-wife, for now, and let’s start instead with men. Because the story of my life—and now, it seems, my death—is largely a story of me and men. I like them. They’re easy to impress. I like male openness, eagerness. When I came to the English court, twenty and fresh from France, I fell in love with Harry, Lord Percy. Nothing particularly unusual in that. Women did it all the time. What made the difference was that Harry was in love with me. Twenty-two-year-old Harry Percy: that lazy smile; the big, kissable mouth. He dressed beautifully, but with none of the awful, old-fashioned flamboyance of his fellow-Englishmen. He was stylish. He could afford to be: he was one of the wealthiest heirs in the country. Which was another point in his favour.

  Too easy-going for the saddle, and clearly bored by the prospect of tennis, he managed to be surprisingly popular with the men. He was a drinker, though, even then, which might explain it. He was somehow in the thick of things yet an outsider, an observer; and that appealed to me, newly arrived at court. Women loved him because he loved women: loved women’s company, women’s bodies. That was obvious, or at least to women. Men, clueless, probably didn’t see him for the competition that he was. We women instinctively understood that Harry was a pleasure-seeker and that if we granted him his pleasures, he’d savour them. Nevertheless, as far as I could discover, he had no reputation for sleeping around. On the contrary, it seemed that he was choosy, and unwilling to play the game of big romances. There was a take-it-or-leave-it air to him, a clarity of purpose and refusal to compromise that intrigued me and which I admired.

  We circled each other for a couple of weeks, if ‘circled’ isn’t too active a word for Harry. I knew he’d noticed me. How could he not?—I was the new girl at court, wearing the latest French fashions. One late afternoon, when I was sauntering down a passageway, he stepped from behind a door to stop me in my tracks.

  ‘Walk with me,’ he said.

  I said nothing—biding my time—and simply did as he requested, moving ahead of him through the doorway into a courtyard. The air was warmer than I’d anticipated. All day long, I’d been stuck indoors, doing my lady-in-waiting duties: playing cards, p
laying music. Outside, my eyes seemed to open properly, wide, and I felt my shoulders drop. I wondered, briefly, why I didn’t do this more often: get away, walk away.

  We went towards the rose garden. ‘Back home,’ he said, breaking the silence, ‘in our gardens, we can smell the sea. I miss it. I feel so hemmed in, here.’

  ‘Oh, so, we’re walking and talking, are we?’

  That shut him up. Good. Walk with me, indeed.

  I had a question for him: ‘What did you think of the play, last night?’

  He looked about to offer up a platitude, but caught himself in time. His shrug was pitched somewhere between non-committal and despondent.

  I said, ‘Yes, but you laughed all through it.’

  He was defensive. ‘We’re at court.’ Court: eat, drink, and be merry. Then came that smile of his: ‘And, anyway, so were you; you were laughing.’

  My turn to shrug. ‘We’re at court.’

  ‘You were probably laughing the most of anyone. You’re very good at it, aren’t you.’

  ‘At laughing?’

  ‘At being at court.’

  I said, ‘I don’t do anything by halves.’

  In the garden, we sat on a bench, and I said, ‘Do you want to know what I really think, Harry Percy, about that play? And all the plays, here? And the music, the poetry, the food, clothes, manners?’ I sat back, crossed my ankles. ‘The gardens, even?’

  Elbows on thighs, he stared at the ground. ‘You miss France.’

  I snatched a petal, rolled it between my fingertips. ‘Don’t get me started. I mean it. Tell me about where you miss. Tell me about that home of yours.’

  So, we started with the places we’d come from, and ended, hours later, with the books that were changing our lives. I remember asking him how he’d got hold of one of them, still banned in England, and him replying that he had his sources. I said that was a secret I’d like him to let me in on, when he felt able.

  He took the fragment of petal from me and said, ‘Oh, I don’t envisage keeping any secrets from you.’

  Dusk had closed over us. The palace was emerging as a constellation of lit porches, lit windows. Passers-by, spellbound by the half-light, talked less guardedly than usual. Harry and I were adrift from the rest of the world, yet right at the heart of it. On dark water, but in the shallows.

  ‘Anne?’ He sounded almost weary. The kiss was the barest brush of his lips, very slowly, over mine. And mine over his.

  From that moment onwards, all that mattered to us was being together. Whenever I saw him across a room being sweet and attentive to some woman, I’d smile to think how, a little later, he’d have his mouth jammed against mine and I’d have him helpless. I lived in a permanent state of offering silent thanks to God for Harry’s existence. I couldn’t believe my luck; I couldn’t believe how close I’d come, unknowingly, to a living death of never having known him.

  But I’d reckoned without the man who, in England, at that time, played God: Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey had other plans for Harry, for various political reasons. He had plans for Harry’s family which didn’t include a Boleyn. He contacted Harry’s father, who came and gave him hell before dragging him home and marrying him to a woman he didn’t know and grew to hate. And he’s still there: up there in Northumberland, rattling around his ancestral home, childless and drunk.

  The worst that happened to me was that I was sent home to Hever for the summer; but, of course, at the time, it felt like a fate worse than death. I spent that summer railing against Wolsey. It wasn’t long before I was joined in that by the rest of my family, because that was the summer when my father was made a peer—Lord Rochford—and it looked as if all his hard work was paying off until Wolsey forced his resignation as Lord Treasurer. Some rubbish about a conflict of interests. We Boleyns lost a salary, and Wolsey gained considerably in our animosity.

  My father hadn’t been alone, kneeling to be honoured in that crowded and unbearably hot Presence Chamber. In front of him was six-year-old Fitz, the king’s bastard son. Dimple-faced, apricot-haired Fitz, brought from his nursery in Durham House on the Strand. He was made Duke of Richmond, then he sat for the rest of the ceremony on the royal dais at his father’s right hand. Officially welcomed to court. A month later, he was sent away again, but only because of the sweating sickness that drove into London’s population. Suddenly he was the owner of a castle up north, and recipient of an income from eighty manor houses. Travelling up there with him was a staff of three hundred, including a retinue of the very best tutors. My point is that he left court not as he’d arrived—as Betsy Blount’s lovely little boy, the king’s adored bastard boy—but as a kind of prince.

  Of course, something similar had to be seen to be done for the princess. Ludlow, for her, in August. I didn’t see Fitz’s departure but I was there in the courtyard for Mary’s; I remember the vivid livery of those two hundred servants: blue and green. I was one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. The queen was snivelling; she snivelled not only when the princess was taken away through the gates but for days afterwards. She was already becoming hard to please. Certainly the pomp of her daughter’s departure for Ludlow wasn’t enough to mollify her. She’d sat through little Fitz becoming a knight of the garter in April, but his peerage in June and the northern palace in July was, in her view, going too far. Wolsey dismissed three of her women for moaning about Fitz’s fortunes, and, worse, when she appealed, he refused to reinstate them. He had his uses, he had his moments. This was quite a shot across Catherine’s bows. And at a bad time, for her, too: the previously talked-of Spanish betrothal for her under-sized brat having been scuppered. My point is that quite suddenly, that summer, no one of any standing was taking Catherine seriously, nor did they look set to.

  The story that everyone tells is that Henry divorced his long-suffering, sweet-natured, middle-aged queen for me, a younger woman, a dark-eyed, gold-digging, devil-may-care temptress. The truth is more complicated. Take my age. I was twenty-six when Henry fell for me. No girl, then. At that age, I really should have been married (and would have been—I’d have been Countess of Northumberland—but for Wolsey). I should have had children. At twenty-six, I was worldly, educated, ambitious. No wide-eyed plaything. Yes, I was younger than Catherine—but who wasn’t? She was forty, and seemed half as old again. It was all over, for her: the supposed bearer of heirs, she hadn’t been pregnant for a decade. She was a dead weight on Henry.

  And what a weight! What she lacked in stature, she made up for in girth. With all the health problems that you’d expect. And no wonder: all those failed pregnancies. And no wonder they failed, with everything that she put herself through: the ritual fasting, the rising during the small hours to pray, the arduous pilgrimages, trekking in all weathers, for weeks on end, to Walsingham. All this took a toll on her spirits, too. She retreated among her pious Spanish ladies and their Spanish priests. Ceased to live in the real world. But, then, in many ways, she never had. I’ll not deny what people say, that she always had a kind word for everyone. The problem was in understanding it. Despite all her years in England, she was hopelessly foreign.

  Why had Henry ever married her? Let’s not forget it was his choice. His father had died. Only just died, in fact, and there’s the answer: the marriage was Henry’s choice, his first; the first big decision of a new, seventeen-year-old king. Marrying Catherine, he all at once made his mark and a prudent political move, an alliance with Spain. And, anyway, Henry was a chivalrous man; big-hearted, and determined to do the right thing. He wanted to end Catherine’s misery: this kind, stoical, scholarly young woman, as he saw her, who was stuck in England, widowed, orphaned, and impoverished.

  Anyway, there they were, years later: an odd couple. They even looked mismatched: she was the shortest woman at court; he, probably the tallest man in England. She waddled, whereas he was one of the best tennis players in Europe. She played cards with her ladies and then retired early to her bed. He partied until the early hours. She’d become an old lady
while he was still a young man. She was looking forward to grandchildren, he was still hoping for heirs. There was, too, a fundamental difference in their attitudes to their faith. Henry’s relationship with God was robust, direct. He didn’t so much kneel before priests, in Catherine’s manner, as clap them on the back and challenge them to debate.

  By the time that I was one of her ladies-in-waiting, her life revolved around that scrappy, priest-worshipping daughter of hers. A repulsively colourless child. It was ridiculous, the idea that the dwarf daughter of an old Spaniard from a defunct lineage could ever follow in Henry’s footsteps and rule England.

  When Henry made his first move on me, my attention was elsewhere, albeit reluctantly. I hadn’t bothered with love since Harry Percy. I didn’t seem to have the heart for it. I didn’t quite have the heart for Thomas Wyatt. Don’t get me wrong, I was very fond of him: we’d been friends since childhood, and he was probably one of the best friends I had. But as a lover? I wasn’t convinced. His feelings on this matter were unequivocal, though, and he was making them known. Easy, if you’re a poet; and he was—is—one of England’s finest. Everyone was reading the poems. No one could understand my reticence. The consensus among my friends was that Tommy was the ultimate catch: dashing, and clever; sensitive, and baby-blond.

  Henry made his first move with a gift: a sugar rosebud. Placed on my pillow. Someone had come into my room while I was out, and placed on my pillow a bud cast in molten sugar. Glassy; rosewater-tinted. I didn’t know it was from Henry until I read the tag, HR.

  The presents that started coming were sometimes sugar, sometimes gold, and sometimes the sugary-gold of marchepane. Brooches, emblems, statuettes; stars, unicorns, Venus herself. Of course I thanked him for every one of them. But I hated it. With every ounce of sugar and gold, he must have felt that he was putting down another payment. And I wasn’t for buying. Eventually I decided that something would have to be said, and asked him for a moment in private. I hated it, that I had to go and ask and he got what he wanted: word from me.