The Baker's Daughter Volume 1 Read online

  George put his fingers gently to her lips. “Do not say it. The child will be a prince. All the prognosticators have predicted that it will be so. Besides, it cannot be long now,” he said soothingly. “Isn’t that so?”

  Anne stared at her beringed fingers. “I suppose so,” she said. “Certainly this misery and the exile it entails cannot go on forever!”

  George snorted. “You are lucky that you are not any more closely confined than this,” he said, looking about the room at the gaily dressed courtiers. “In the days of that old termagant, the Countess of Richmond, you would have been placed in a dark chamber for weeks, and would not have been allowed out until long after you’d whelped!”

  Anne smirked. “What a great comfort you are! If that is the best you can do to cheer me, I pray you go back and make pastime with your wife!” She shifted uncomfortably, taking hold of the precious burden that was the cause of all her misery at the moment, and yet was at the same time her only hope of salvation. “Those men will say anything to please the king. You know that, brother. What man, or woman, would dare to step forward and predict that I shall deliver a princess, not a prince, and that the king shall once again be denied a male heir? No one who wished not to say farewell to his head!”

  George chucked her under the chin. “Do not worry,” he said. “Such excessive melancholy is bad for you. Look forward to the day when your burden shall be shed, a fair prince shall doze in his gilded cradle, and you can once again partner me in the dance.” With that he slipped away and joined in the dancing.

  Anne noticed that he partnered not his wife Jane, but one of Anne’s other ladies-in-waiting, Elizabeth Holland. Elizabeth was only fifteen, and still had the dew of youth upon her flower-petal skin. The pink plumpness of her face, her blue eyes and her pale tresses were all exemplary of the epitome of beauty popular at the English court. Henry had once admired her own olive skin, black eyes and dark hair. But now it seemed that the scales had been lifted from the king’s eyes, and he no longer found her dark looks attractive.

  Just as this thought flitted through her mind, the king came into view among the dancers whirling and twirling about the solar. Damn and blast, thought Anne, another of those young, fresh-faced, milk-maid type girls had caught the king’s eye; but this time it was her own cousin, Madge Shelton. Whereas Anne and George took after the Boleyn side of the family with their dark hair and eyes, Madge was the spit of the Sheltons, with her strawberry blonde hair and intriguing yellow-greenish eyes. She could hear Madge’s tinkling laugh as Henry lifted her high into the air. Just as he used to do with me, she thought bitterly.

  Among the twirling couples Anne spotted Charles Brandon and his newly made bride, Lady Catherine Willoughby, now the new Duchess of Suffolk. What extraordinary luck the girl had! Lady Catherine had been the ward of the Duke and former Duchess of Suffolk, none other than Mary Tudor, Henry’s sister. Lady Catherine had been betrothed to their son Henry, the first Earl of Lincoln. Henry Brandon was a callow youth, and while not sickly, he always seemed pale and undersized next to his robust father. No wonder Lady Catherine’s desire had unsheathed its claws and snared the duke instead!

  All would have been for naught, however, if Mary Tudor had not had the grace, not to mention the good timing, to die at thirty-eight from the misery in her gut. There was no love lost between Anne and her former sister-in-law, she who had done all in her power to snub Anne and all her relations. And now Lady Catherine, the new Duchess of Suffolk, sat, looking smug, between the king and her new husband, on the settle on the opposite side of the room. The couple had been married just that day in a quiet ceremony at the Chapel of the Observant Franciscans, and this afternoon’s celebration attended by just a few of the king’s intimates was in their honor.

  Anne’s eyes filled with tears. She did not often allow herself the luxury of even thinking about her lost love, Harry Percy. It was too painful. But watching Lady Catherine, so obviously in love with Charles Brandon, Anne could not help feeling bitter, and jealous of the girl’s happiness. A wave of self-pity such as she had not allowed herself to feel for years swept over her.

  Suddenly Henry arose and said, “Good friends, it is time to bid our happy couple adieux for the evening. Let us escort them to their bed, for which they have waited long enough, I trow!” With that Henry held his arm out to the first lady to catch his eye, which just happened to be Madge Shelton.

  So! thought Anne. The signs were all there. If Henry had not yet seduced her cousin, he soon would. Many whispered that the girl, as young and fair as she was, was Bessie Blount all over again. Anne rose abruptly and said, “My Gracious Lord, will you not accompany your good wife to see the duke and duchess off to their marriage bed?” Her black eyes threw the challenge at him, daring him to refuse.

  Henry laughed. “My good wife,” he said, with just an ever-so-slight emphasis upon the word wife, “you should not even be present at such a gathering as this, and are here only upon my sufferance and willingness to flout custom. I pray you, madam, retire to your rooms and await my pleasure. I will wait upon you anon.”

  In a flash, the whole room seemed to turn red, and a hot mist seemed to sting Anne’s eyes. “After you have had your way with yon maiden, you mean! I will not retire to my rooms and “await your pleasure” whilst you debauch yet another of my house!”

  Henry regarded her coldly, while the little party held its collective breath. Everyone knew that all was not well between the king and queen. Anne’s hopeful rivals crossed their fingers, while those who simply hated her licked their lips. Others in the room who truly loved and cared about her longed to urge her to keep her temper. Her brother, George, Harry Norris, Francis Weston, William Brereton, even Brandon, all felt helpless as they saw her flashing eyes. They knew what Anne’s haughty expression meant, and so did the king.

  All were braced for a show of the fiery Tudor temper, so they were surprised when the king finally spoke. They had to strain their ears to hear him.

  “Madam,” he said coldly. “I pray you remember that I am the king and your sovereign, and that I can lower you at any time as much as I have raised you. You must needs learn to shut your eyes and endure, as your betters did before you.” With that, he turned on his heel and walked calmly from the room, with a wide-eyed Madge hanging on his royal arm.

  Those who hated Anne and wished her ill longed to stay and watch her reaction, but must follow the king out the door. The hearts of those who loved her went out to her, but they also had to follow the entourage which would escort Brandon and his new duchess to their bed.

  When all had filed out, Anne sat back down on the settle. A public breach! The very worst thing that could have happened. Why, oh why, she thought, can I not contain my ire? Suddenly a stabbing pain ripped through her abdomen, and she cried out. It passed, but when she made to rise another pain seized her.

  Oh, dear God, she thought, it is the child. What delicious irony that while she lay in childbed, Henry would be making love to another woman! For she knew that was what he planned to do, if only to spite her, as soon as the door closed upon Brandon and Lady Catherine. I will find a way to make him pay, she resolved. He will pay for publicly insulting me. But then the pain speared her again like a sword thrust, and it was all she could do to get from the solar to her privy chamber, where her confinement was to take place.

  The steely-eyed midwife met her at the door, reproach evident in her stiff bearing and in every line of her face. Making merry with a party of people when she should be resting in bed! The babe would probably be born dead, and everyone would blame the midwife! The king might even execute her, especially if the child was a boy. This was the queen’s first child, and she went into her ordeal in ignorance. The midwife resolved in that moment that she would not soothe Anne with any of the remedies she knew that would ease the pain of childbirth.

  Chapter 2

  “Seldom can the sex of an infant have been of greater significance.”

  – David Loades from
his biography, “Mary Tudor: A Life”

  Greenwich, September 1533

  “Can he do this?” asked Henry peevishly, tapping the parchment on the table before him with an impatient finger. The corners of the thick, heavy vellum document were weighted down with various items from the king’s writing table to keep it from slipping off the edge with the weight of the enormous red wax seal dangling from its bottom by a thick cord.

  “Of a certainty, Your Grace,” replied Thomas Cromwell in his velvety voice. The soothing quality of Cromwell’s voice, had he but known it, was one of the characteristics that the king liked most about him.

  Henry regarded his chief minister thoughtfully. His former confidante, Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey, had also possessed a soft, melodious voice. But Wolsey had had an emotional hold upon his king that Cromwell would never attain.

  Henry could see it now; Wolsey had not feared him, until the very end, because he had thought that he could manipulate his wayward royal charge, who, though he was his king and sovereign, had been like a son to him. Not so Cromwell. Cromwell feared few men, but King Henry of England was one of them. And Henry knew it. Besides, he was older now, and wiser; Cromwell feared his king, and that was a good thing; but Henry knew that his fear would not prevent him from telling the truth or speaking his mind to his king if it were for the good of England. A rare and valuable commodity was Cromwell to Henry for these reasons. But even more so because owing to the fact that Wolsey had been Cromwell’s mentor, Cromwell had absorbed many of the cardinal’s mannerisms. To be sure, there was no physical resemblance between the two men, but there was something perhaps more subtle which both men possessed and that Henry found strangely comforting.

  Cromwell hesitated for a moment, waiting for his sovereign to reply. When the king made no move to answer, Cromwell said softly, “Your Grace, he is the pope. He may do as he pleases.”

  Henry slapped his fist into the palm of his other hand. “And there is the rub!” he expostulated. “I do not recognize Clement as any more than the Bishop of Rome. But the rest of Christendom does, Thomas.” Henry’s eyes shifted back to the pope’s letter. “What are we to make of this, then? What are we to do?”

  Cromwell had worked painstakingly for years to ensure that the king’s rejection of his Spanish queen, his Catholic queen, Katharine of Aragon, had proceeded steadily, albeit slowly. At first, which woman the king chose as his new queen had mattered little to Cromwell as long as she was amenable to the new religion. The people of England may want no Nan Bullen, but for Cromwell, Anne Boleyn had actually done very well indeed. Her marriage to the king depended upon the repudiation of Rome.

  Certainly it might have been more advantageous in some people’s opinions, mainly those of the king’s council, if Henry had agreed to choose as his new queen a protestant princess from amongst the newly Lutheran states of Germany. But to Cromwell, the king choosing an Englishwoman upon which to father his heir had certain advantages, namely, that the heir to the throne would be wholly English, with no foreign entanglements to hamper him; also, it was much easier to steer England’s political ship in the here and now without that same concern about foreign loyalties and obligations. An English queen, an English prince to inherit the throne when the time came. Yes, Mistress Anne Boleyn, almost incidentally, suited Cromwell’s designs for England very well.

  Cromwell steepled his fingers under his chin, again had he but known it, a favorite pose of Wolsey’s, the use of which further endeared him to the king. “Your Grace,” he said quietly. “You have solicited my advice and I will give it to you. I believe that we need do nothing. England has proved that she can stand alone here on our island without foreign approval. After all, men whose livelihood depends upon trade with us will, I think, find a way to justify their actions; and I trow that no one wants to go to the expense of war over which woman wears the English crown. Not even the emperor will do so, unless I miss my guess, and he is the Princess Dowager’s own nephew! No, I think we need fear nothing. No man wants to give up a ducat in order to dictate to us who shall be queen of this realm. If the rest of Christendom wants to continue to kow-tow to the Bishop of Rome, let them do so. If they want to continue to pay Peter’s Pence ad infinitum, let them do so. What care we?”

  Henry shifted uneasily in his chair. He had worked long and hard on the treatise that he had presented so many years ago to Pope Leo X to repudiate Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses. As a reward for his labors, and its tangible product, the Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, A Defence of the Seven Sacraments, the pope had granted him the title Fidei Defensor, or Defender of the Faith. How proud he had been! But those days were past. A weak and ineffctual pope now sat on the papal throne, a man not worthy of his charge. And now look what the fool had done!

  “I agree, Thomas, that where the benefit of trade or the cost of war is concerned, most men will find a way to salve a sore conscience. But think you not that it will hurt us, hurt England, for the child to be declared a bastard in the eyes of the world by virtue of the pope declaring my marrige to the queen null and void? Would that this applied to Katharine, and not to Anne!” Henry glanced distastefully at the parchment that declared, in the eyes of the Christian world, at least, that he was not married to Anne and that the child she had just borne him was a bastard. Thank God in heaven that it had not been the long-awaited prince that Anne had given him!

  Henry guffawed. “I never thought I would find myself saying that!”

  Cromwell squinted in his confusion. What had he missed? “Begging your gracious pardon, Sire, saying what?”

  Henry arose abruptly from his chair, almost knocking it backwards. “A girl, Cromwell! How could it have happened? All the soothsayers, all the physicians, all the midwives, predicted that the child would be male! And when I think of all I have been through, all I put England through, to arrive at that day, only to find that I had begotten yet another daughter! It comes dangerously close to making a travesty of the whole affair!”

  Henry looked quickly away so that Cromwell would not see the tears of frustration that filled his eyes. His gaze strayed out of the window. The day was very fine, and yet he no longer felt the old excitement that was his wont at the thought of the out-of-doors. What was happening to him? He drew a ragged breath. “It is the same as when Mary was born! Everyone hoping for, expecting, a prince, and getting a girl instead! Any day of the week in London, Thomas, one can find babies, some of them boys, mind you, buried under the offal heaps or floating dead in the Thames! God’s eyeballs, Thomas, after two wives and twenty-four years of marriage, why cannot I beget a legitimate male heir? What is God trying to tell me, man? Would that I could see it!”

  Cromwell rubbed his chin. It was better not to point out to the king that by his own adamant claim, he had never been married to Katharine. “I see Your Grace’s point,” he said soothingly. “The pope has declared your marriage to Queen Anne invalid, incidentally making the Princess Elizabeth a bastard. These are confused times, Your Grace. Perhaps it is better that the child is a girl. It would have been a shame, as you say, to have had a prince so besmirched. And do not forget, it could have been excommunication.”

  Henry, who had begun rapidly pacing the length of the room, stopped and said, “Yes. You are right. Clement threatened last July that if I did not take Katharine back and desert Anne, he would excommunicate me and place all of England under an interdict. An academic point here on our shores, but such would have resulted in some unpleasant repercussions from the Continent, to be sure. After all, men will always find a way to justify their actions for a ducat, as you say, but few would be willing to imperil their immortal soul for one.” Henry stopped, looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, “Can you not rid me of her?”

  Cromwell was taken aback. He was an amoral man without scruple, but even he had his limits. Could he murder a child? “Rid you of whom, Your Grace?” he asked carefully, quietly. “Mean you the Princess Elizabeth…?”

  “No, man, not the Prince
ss Elizabeth! After all, what is one more bastard daughter, eh? No, I mean the queen! To hand me a girl after all I have done for her! Perhaps she is not capable of a son after all. Perhaps I should divorce Anne and try again with someone else.” That would teach the termagant to throw Harry Percy in his face!

  Cromwell thought quickly. He had no especial love for Anne Boleyn, but neither did he hate her, as some did. The politics and petty jealousies of the situation were a tempest in a teacup as far as he was concerned. To him one queen was much like another, provided she was protestant and of child-bearing age. But there were other peoples’ opinions to consider in the matter.

  That was another of Cromwell’s great strengths; almost a complete lack of ego. His goal was a strong England, nothing more, nothing less.

  “Your Grace,” he said, his mouth suddenly dry as a bone, “there are those, even here in England, who believe that your marriage with Queen Anne is bigamous. If, when, she delivers a male heir to this realm, all that will be forgiven, I assure you. But to divorce Queen Anne now, to take yet another wife…there are few, Sire, here or abroad, who would be able to stomach such a thing. While the Princess Dowager lives, I fear me that all thought of ridding yourself of Queen Anne must be banished from your mind.”

  Henry looked pathetically childish for just a moment as he wrinkled his brow, wrung his hands and said, “What shall I do, then?”