“I don’t know,” I say.
“But we can be in no danger?” she confirms, thinking of our secret toast at dinner that Anne will fall and the king come to his senses and Princess Mary be named as his one true heir.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “Montague would have warned me. I think he has work for me to do. Perhaps we are on the winning side, at last.”
L’ERBER, LONDON, MAY 1536
Montague strides up and down our private chapel as if he wishes he were running to the coast to the helpful ship’s master at Grays and sailing off to his brother Reginald.
“He’s gone mad,” he says in a low whisper. “I really think he has gone mad now. No one is safe, nobody knows what he is going to do next.”
I am stunned by this sudden reverse. I put my cape to one side and I take my son’s hands in my own. “Be calm. Tell me.”
“Did you hear nothing in the streets?”
“Nothing. A few people cheered for me as I went by, but they were mostly quiet . . .”
“Because it is beyond belief!” He claps his hand over his mouth and looks around. There is no one in the chapel but us, the candle flames bob up and down, there is no quietly closing door to make them flicker. We are alone.
Montague turns on his heel and drops on his knees before me. I see that he is white and shaking, deeply distressed. “He has arrested Anne Boleyn for adultery,” he breathes. “And men of her court with her, for keeping her secrets. We still don’t know how many. We still don’t know who.”
“ ‘How many’?” I repeat incredulously. “What do you mean, ‘how many’?”
He throws out his hands. “I know! Why would he charge more than one man, even if she had bedded dozens? Why would he let such a thing be known? And what an extraordinary lie for him to tell when he can just put her aside without a word! They’ve arrested Thomas Wyatt, and Henry Norris, but also the lad who sings in her chamber, and her own brother.” He looks at me. “You know him! What is he thinking? Why would he do this?”
“Wait,” I say. “I don’t understand.”
I take the priest’s chair and I sink down, as my knees go weak underneath me. I think, I am getting too old for this, I am not quick enough to leap to suspicion or conclusions. Henry the king goes too fast for me in a way that Henry the prince never did. For Henry the prince was quick and clever, but Henry the king is as fast and as cunning as a madman: wildly decisive.
Slowly, Montague repeats the names to me, adds the names of a couple more men who seem to be missing from court.
“Cromwell is saying that she gave birth to a monster,” my son says. “As if that proves everything.”
“A monster?” I repeat stupidly.
“Not a stillborn child. Some sort of reptile.”
I look at my son in blank horror. “My God, how Thomas Cromwell does find sin and sodomy everywhere he looks! In my own priory, in the queen’s bedroom! What a mind that man has. What voice does he hear in his prayers?”
“It’s the king’s mind that matters.” Montague puts his hands on my knees and looks up at me as if I was still his all-powerful mother and could make this better. “Cromwell only does what the king says that he wants. He’s going to try her for adultery.”
“He’s going to try her for adultery? His own wife?”
“God help me, I’m going to be on the jury.”
“You’re on the jury?”
“We agreed!” he leaps to his feet and bellows. “All of us who met with Cromwell, who said that we would help him get the marriage annulled, are summoned to judge. We thought we were talking about releasing the king from his false marriage vows. We thought we would inquire into the validity of the marriage and find it wanting. Not this! Not this!”
“He’s trying the marriage? He will annul it?” I ask. “Like he tried to do with the queen?”
“No! No! No! Don’t you hear me? He’s not trying the marriage, he’s putting the woman on trial. He’s going to try her for adultery. And her brother, and some other men, God knows who, God knows how many. God knows if they are even our friends or our cousins. Surely only God knows why!”
“Any of us?” I demand urgently. “Not any of our family or those who are working with us? None of the princess’s supporters?”
“No. Not as far as I know. Not arrested yet. That’s what’s so strange. All those who are missing are those of the Boleyn party who are in and out of her rooms all day.” Montague makes a little face. “You know the ones. Norris, Brereton . . .”
“Men that Cromwell doesn’t like,” I remark. “But why the lute boy?”
“I don’t know!” Montague rubs his face with his hands. “They took him first. Perhaps because Cromwell can torture him till he confesses? Cromwell can torture him till he names others? Till he gives the names that Cromwell wants?”
“Torture?” I repeat. “Torture him? The king is using torture? Against a boy? The little musician?”
Montague looks at me as if the country we know and love, our heritage, is tumbling to hell under our feet. “And I have agreed to be on the jury,” he says.
Not just my son Montague but twenty-five other peers of the realm have to sit in judgment on the woman whom they called queen. The panel is chaired by her uncle, grim-faced at the fall of the woman whom he pushed onto the throne, who became the queen whom he hated. Near him is her former lover, Henry Percy, trembling with ague, muttering that he is too sick to attend, that he should not be forced to attend.
All the lords of my family are there. A good quarter of the jury are of our affinity or party, who support the Princess Mary and have hated the Boleyn woman ever since she usurped the throne. For us, though the accounts of kissing and seduction are shocking enough, the accusation that she poisoned the queen and was planning to poison the princess is a bitter confirmation of our worst fears. The rest of the panel are Henry’s men who can be relied on to hate or love as he commands. She made no friends while she was queen, no one says one word in her defense. There is no possibility of justice for her, as they study the evidence that Thomas Cromwell has so persuasively prepared.
Elizabeth Somerset, the Countess of Worcester, who attended the queen’s funeral with me at Peterborough, has turned against her friend Anne and provides a report of flirtations and worse in the queen’s bedchamber. Someone speaks of something that someone said on their deathbed. It is a mess of petty gossip and grotesque scandal.
Montague comes home, his face dark and angry. “The shame of it,” he says shortly. “The king says that he believes that up to a hundred men have had her. The disgrace.”
I hand him a glass of mulled ale, while I watch him. “Did you say ‘guilty’?” I ask him.
“I did,” he says. “The evidence was inarguable. Lord Cromwell had every detail that one might question. For some reason, which is beyond me, he allowed George Boleyn himself to tell the court out loud that the king was incapable of fathering a child. He announced the king’s impotency.”
“Did they prove that she murdered our queen?”
“They accused her of it. Seems that’s enough.”
“Will he imprison her? Or send her to a nunnery?”
Montague turns to me and his face is filled with a dark pity. “No. He’s going to kill her.”
BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, MAY 1536
I leave London. I cannot bear to hear the speculation and the gossip, the constant retelling of the obscene details of the trial, the unending wondering what will happen next. Even the people who have hated the Boleyn woman cannot understand why the king does not call his marriage invalid, name his daughter Elizabeth a bastard, and put the mother away in some distant cold castle where she can die of neglect.