Читать книгу Fanfare for Elizabeth - Edith Sitwell - Страница 9

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The heavens seemed made of fire, as if the Judgment Day had come, or as if the martyrdoms of the future were prognosticated in the skies—a refulgence spreading like a sea, “the terrible Red Sea of death”, of which Nicholas Sheterden, martyr, wrote to his wife before he was burned “in the sight of God and his angels”; red and yellow flames of fire changed into seas and lakes of the damned, into the haloes, aureoles, glories of the blessed, or into petals, calyxes, fronds, and vast leaves of flames. These flared upon the horizon, sometimes with a ferine incendiarism, a glare like that of blood, sometimes breaking into a splendour like that of the martyrs’ hearts, and of their cries in that death which was to lead to the eternal life—the dying words of John Lambert, “None but Christ—none but Christ”—the cry of a Catholic saint as his heart was torn from his living breast—“What wilt thou do with mine heart, O Christ?”

Amid the fires of that winter sunset, on the 27th of January 1536, the hollow sound of footsteps echoed through the upper storey of the Queen’s apartments in Greenwich Palace. Dying away again, fading to join the dust in remote and unlived-in rooms, the sound of that footfall would soon be forgotten in the high places. But now it came a little nearer to the life in the rooms below.

A young woman was walking downstairs. Slowly she came from the highest storey, turning her head, sometimes, in her descent, as if some voice behind her were urging her on. This was her habit, that from time to time she would look behind her. Sometimes, as she passed a high window, the accusing light fell for a moment on her oval face, with its rather sallow skin, her high broad forehead, her great slanting black eyes, her black hair, and her long throat on which was a mole resembling a strawberry. This was kept hidden by a collar of big pearls, but from time to time she would pull aside the pearls with her left hand, on which was a rudimentary sixth finger. This was a sure sign of a witch, and at the sight of it, whispers arose. It was said that not Lord Wiltshire, but the Prince of the Powers of the Air, was the father of the new Queen.

Step by step she came lower and lower, and with every few steps her aspect seemed to change, according to the direction from which those fires from the skies fell upon her. In the highest storey of all, with the small dazzling notes of an unreal gold falling in showers, in a universal rain, upon her, she seemed a light being, a native of the summer. Then great branches of darkness barred the way, lit by a flare like that of lightning, and she became a creature of the chase, hunter or hunted, who, lost in the forest, had paused for a moment in the desperate flight or pursuit, to listen from which quarter came the sound of the horn. A few steps more; and a barbarous refulgence fell upon her face, and one could see that she was a place of torment,—not a woman at all; but an infernal region, a Pandemonium of the Princes of Darkness and all the Powers and Principalities of the Air. Then the darkness of the descent, varying from a Stygian blackness to an umbrageousness like that cast by the boughs of a forest, shrouded her once more, till again the huge fires of the skies, falling through the windows, flaring down on her dress of damned-colour, outlining her body for a moment, made her seem a creature of Doom.

We see her now, as she pauses for an instant on a stair, with the flares casting a light of damnation on her face. So it was that Eustachio Chapuys, the Emperor’s Ambassador, saw Anne Boleyn, the Concubine, the pretender Queen. But that face with the light upon it was not the face that her brother, her mother, and the friends to whom she was so faithful, knew.

Is it indeed she, or a creature born of the imagination that we see, as she turns her head to look behind her?

Great were the changes that the light wrought on this summer being. Yet the extraordinary sense of will-power, of the will to live and to conquer, were such that it seemed as if they must stain the air through which she passed, leaving upon it some colour of summer and its wilfulness, impressing upon the air, for ever, some memory of her being. Then again her face and throat would lie in the blackest shadow, and only her body would be seen—the body of a headless Queen; and you would know that this, too, would soon be enveloped by the waiting darkness, and that all her thoughts and hopes and all that summer existence would soon be forgotten.

She went on her downward way, and as she passed, cold airs drifting through windows, from under the doors of deserted rooms—little rustling airs and the dry whisper of winter leaves blown across a floor, sounded like far-off rumours that would soon come nearer, thickening as they approached, and dry as the dust that would soon engulf her.

Those sounds were almost articulate as they gathered force: “The true Queen had died of a broken heart”. “The Messenger of the King held to her lips a cup.” “She drank her death from a cup of gold.” “The drink was dark, and it was deep.” “Slow was the venom, and insidious.” “Some say that the death sank from her throat to her heart.” “The poison was sent from Italy by the agent Sir Gregorio da Casale, and was brought to England by his cousin Gurone.” “They have given Casale a pension of eight ducats a day, as payment for his part in the work.”

Hen voices clacking, feathered voices clucking, adder-voices shrilling and hissing. So sounded the winter airs and the fallen leaves. It is impossible at this time to say how much of truth, how much of falsehood, those voices, those airs, were bringing. The rumours spread over the countryside, for Anne Boleyn was hated and, because of her, the King. The guilty pair were even blamed for the weather. Edmund Brocke, husbandman, eighty years of age, walking home in the rain in August 1535, at Crowle, in Worcestershire, had said to Margaret Higons—“It is ’long of the King that this weather is so troublous and unstable, and I wene that we shall never have better weather whiles the King reigneth, and therefore it makes no matter if he were knocked or patted on the head.”—That remark was to bring Mr. Brocke to a death for treason. But still the rumours grew.

Anne Boleyn, walking down the long stairway till she came to a closed door, opened it, and disappeared into the room beyond, heedless of rumours or of warning. She had triumphed. The repudiated wife, the rival Queen, had gone. No longer would the memory of those eyes, flat, black, blaring yet silent, and always opened too wide, as if, should she shut them, they would remain closed for all time, follow, with that inexpressive gaze, that yet held a continual mockery, the new Queen in her triumph. Catherine the Queen was dead, and those eyes were closed for ever. She who had been hunted by the Furies silently, across the plain of the years, in the heat of the sun, wasted by the fires in her own nature, clasping her faith to her breast, using her patience and her virtue as deadly weapons, now lay on her bier like a dwindled figure of wax that had lain too long exposed to the heat of the sun.

Yet the triumph of Anne was mixed with a fear—so overwhelming that at times, when she was conscious of it—for it was not always there, it came and went like the illness which had destroyed the Queen—Anne would turn cold as if she were already dead. What would be her own fate, if this second child she was about to bear was not a son? ... Then she would remember that the Queen was gone, and could trouble her no more. And with that thought, the chill would pass.

The death of the Queen, delayed, it was thought by many, through fear of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, her nephew, had not been undesired, even by those who pretended to be her protectors. Charles, “void of all excess, either of virtue or vice, as brave as a prince ought to be, but not as pious as a man should be”, protected her through pride. But the Pope had told Stephen Gardiner, the future Bishop of Winchester, that “it would be for the wealth of Christendom if the Queen were in her grave”—saying also that “he thought like as the Emperor had destroyed the temporalities of the Church, so should she be the destruction of the spiritualities”.^[15]

With every day that the life of this saintly yet narrow woman continued, that life was a menace to the peace of England. Henry had put her aside mainly in order that he might have a male heir to the throne. Catherine resisted with all the means in her power, and although she told Chapuys that she did not ask His Holiness for war, and would rather die than be the cause of it, the conspiracies of the nobles in favour of her and of her daughter, her fears, her prayers to be rescued from the dangers that she believed threatened her, brought the peril of war nearer.

For three years before that time, her fears had increased steadily. Chapuys was warned by some unknown person^[16] “to send word to the Queen as soon as possible, that she ought to have her chamber well locked from night till early morning, and carefully examined that none was hidden there, for there was a danger that they should play some trick upon her, either an injury to her person, or an accusation of adultery, or a charge of plotting to go to Scotland or Wales and raise an insurrection”.

The Queen feared that her death would follow, and with equal tortures, the martyrdom of those gentle saints the Monks of the Charterhouse, whose hearts were torn from their bodies because they defied Henry’s will, in refusing to take the oath of allegiance to Anne and her offspring as Queen and heir to the throne, and to Henry as Supreme Head of the Church.

But martyrdom was not the only fate that the Queen believed threatened her.

Nothing seemed to her safe. Even when the King and Secretary Cromwell showed her an apparent amiability, she feared that this hid some new danger. She told the Emperor, “I cannot forbear to tell you that I am as Job, waiting for the day when I must sue for alms for the love of God.”

For the King was often slow in paying the moneys due to her.

Yet Henry’s generosities were great, and the Privy Purse expenses record sums of money paid to “An old Poor Man, that laboured to obtain a bill to be signed”, to “a footman to relieve him in his sickness”, “to little Gwilliam, because he was sick in London”, “to a blind man being a harper”, “to a frantick man”, to “a poor woman labouring to obtain her husband’s freedom and hers in London”.^[17]

“These gifts”, wrote the editor of the Privy Accounts, “could only have emanated from momentary motions of benevolence, and they prove that, like even greater monsters, Henry’s heart was not entirely shut to the wants and sufferings of his fellow creatures.”

To Catherine’s they were shut, for the moment, because she had opposed that princely will, and because it was no question of generosity, but of giving her what was rightfully hers.

Under this rain of complaints, Chapuys urged the Emperor to consider invading England, to avenge “the enormous injury done to your Aunt. The enterprise”, he wrote, “would be more justifiable to obviate the scandal which will arise from the divorce, and likewise to prevent the kingdom from alienating itself entirely from the Holy Father”. This was in 1533.

Everywhere the country was ripe for rebellion. Bishop Fisher had urged the Emperor to invade England, seconded in this advice by the young Marquis of Exeter. The discontented among the lords were listening to the half-fraudulent, half-mad, falsely-illuminated Nun of Kent, Elizabeth Barton, as she prophesied death to the King and woe to his new marriage. It was said everywhere that the King, by his sins, had forfeited the crown and that his death, either by visitation of God or by visitation of man, was imminent. Was there not a northern prophecy that “the decorate Rose should be slain in his mother’s belly” ... and did this not mean, as certain of the friars believed, that the King would die by the hands of priests? ...

Such were the conditions in England when, in December 1533, three months after the birth of Elizabeth, Chapuys assured the Emperor that people would be glad to see the Emperor’s fleet, and that many declared he had a better title to be King of England than the monarch who reigned.

“If you do not claim the title,” he continued, “they” (certain discontented nobles) “think that forbidding intercourse with Flanders is the best course. The King is very much afraid of that, knowing he could not prevent a mutiny unless he were willing for some time to subsidise those who live by making cloth, who are considerably more than half the people of England; and this he could not do without double the money he has. Though this would make him popular, I think the sin into which he has fallen will not allow him to do it, or anything else that he ought to do.”

The King’s gigantic strength of will and of nature prevented the dangers of war and of rebellion from becoming facts. But they increased as time went on, and at last were only averted by the death of the Queen.

Chief Secretary Cromwell began to throw out hints about the benefits that would arise from the deaths of the Queen and the Princess. These were countered by veiled threats from the Emperor’s Ambassador as to what might happen should those deaths occur.

On the 30th of June 1535, he told the Emperor that Cromwell had said, “If God had taken to himself the Queen and the Princess, the whole dispute” (between the King and the Pope) “would have been ended, and no one would have doubted or opposed the King’s second marriage, or disputed the Succession, unless it were the King of Scotland, of whom he made no great account.”

The Ambassador’s reply had a sinister tone. In a gentle voice he said he thought there were others who might make claims ... oh, not the Emperor! His Imperial Majesty was not so ambitious. But what would happen were the Pope to fulminate censures and invoke the aid of the secular arm to deprive the King of his titles and deliver his kingdom to whoever might take possession of it? Would not this be the most Catholic title any prince could have?

Cromwell was silent for a moment. Then he replied that the Emperor was bound by so many treaties to King Henry that it was unbelievable that they could be broken.

But his voice had a hollow sound.

... The death of an old, unwanted woman ... so small a flame to be extinguished....

And the choice lay between that or rebellion....

Cromwell asked himself if Chapuys really believed he knew nothing of what was going on—was ignorant of Chapuys’ secret conversations with the malcontent lords—his ponderings as to whether it would be better to marry the Princess to the King of Scotland and dethrone her father that they might take his place, to marry her to some great English noble and raise an internal rebellion, or to do as Catherine suggested, choose Reginald Pole, grandson of the Duke of Clarence, as Mary’s husband, since he already had claims to the throne.

The veiled threats against the life of Catherine continued.

Three years before the death of the Queen, Gregorio da Casale, the agent sent by Henry to the Pope, whispered to Chapuys that the King had grave doubts if Catherine, who had been his Queen, would live long. She had a dropsy, he said.

The Ambassador replied sternly that the Queen had never suffered from dropsy. But he knew, or thought that he knew, the meaning that lay behind the rumour. This illness was to be induced in her by artificial means, or she would die by some subtle poison which would produce the symptoms of dropsy. Anne, the supplanter-Queen, had laid her plans, as she believed, in secrecy. But Dr. Ortiz warned the Emperor two days after the birth of Elizabeth (9th September 1533) that he had been told in Rome by the auditor Simonetti that Anne purposed the Queen’s death and that she had become openly threatening. In the summer of 1534, a conversation was overheard between the witch-Queen and her brother Lord Rochford in which she said that when the King was in France and she was his Regent, she would have Mary executed for disobedience. Rochford warned her of the King’s rage, but she replied, violently, that she would do it even if she were burned or skinned alive as a punishment.

Later, Dr. Ortiz, visiting England in the Imperial service, told his master (22nd November 1535) that “La Mancheba” (Anne) had often said of Mary, “She is my death, and I am hers, so I will take good care that she shall not laugh at me after my death.”

By this time, the threats, from being veiled, had suddenly become open and immediate: the danger was very close.

On the 6th of November, the Marchioness of Exeter, a devoted adherent of the Queen, warned Chapuys that the King had lately told his most trusted councillors that he would no longer remain in this trouble, fear, and suspicion on account of the Queen and Princess. This he swore with great oaths.

A fortnight later, according to the same informant, Henry swore that he would contrive that Mary should need neither New Year’s gifts nor company. She should be made an example to all that no one could disobey the law with impunity.

But the King’s councillors heard these threats with fear. They knew a Bill of Attainder against the Queen and Princess would be followed instantly by an uprising backed by the power of the Emperor. Not only would the King be in danger; but also the properties and lives of those who were his Ministers.

The King’s threat was uttered in November ... and was listened to in silence by the Council. Four weeks later the illness of the Queen began.

Was that illness encompassed, or did she die, as modern authorities have thought, of melanotic sarcoma, the cancer of the heart? At the time of her death, the rumour spread over Europe that she was poisoned. The Emperor believed it, Chapuys was convinced of it; and at the trial of Anne Boleyn, a scapegoat having been found, this charge was brought against her.

The Imperial Ambassador told his master, when he heard of the Queen’s death, “Should they open her, the traces will be seen....”

Catherine died, at two o’clock in the afternoon, of that mysterious illness that came, and went for a little, leaving a shadow upon her face, leaving the waxen figure a little more shrunken, more twisted, and then returned again, and remained, and would not go until the being it haunted lay dead.

“January the 7th,” wrote Sir Edward Bedingfield, Keeper of the house where the Queen passed her nun-like existence, “about ten o’clock the lady dowager was aneled with the holy ointment; master chamberlain and I being called to the same, and before two in the afternoon she departed to God. I beseech you that the King may be advised of the same.”

It was a cold day in January, but the keepers of the house where she lay decided that the woman who had died at two o’clock must be embalmed the same night, by the housechandler, and enclosed in lead, far from the eyes of men—“the which”, he wrote to Secretary Cromwell, “must soon be done, for the work will not tarry”.

Why would the work not tarry, on this cold day of January? The silent creature to whom that note was written may have known of a reason. It is not only the heat of the sun that brings corruption.

The work must be done quickly, as if the fires of the sun that flare over the dead woman’s native Granada, were at their height. So at ten o’clock that night, the dead Queen’s confessor, Juan de Atequa, the old Spanish Bishop of Llandaff, her doctor Miguel de la Sà, and her apothecary de Soto, were told they must quit the room where she lay, leaving the chandler of the house and his two assistants alone with the body.

Surrounded by the yellow flares of great candles, the waxen figure that had been wasted by fires lay on her bier, under a black-velvet pall embossed with a large silver cross and the royal escutcheon of Spain.

In the yellow flickering light of the candles, the shadows of the three men who must leave their Queen on her death-bed, were thrown upon the wall—black shadows with exaggeratedly long noses like those of Punchinello. One shadow stooped a little, as if it had been eavesdropping. Dr. de la Sà, for months past, had seemed to be listening—in the house, in the gardens—for something unheard by the rest of the world. He seemed always, now, to be about to tell a secret, bending towards his companions, warningly, as if to enjoin them to silence.... He, the Queen’s confessor and the apothecary, left the room.

In the early morning, finding those faithful servants of the dead woman waiting, alone, in the anteroom, the chandler and his two assistants told them, in a fearful undertone (as though the words they said, if repeated, would cost them their lives), that at first they had thought the body of the dead Queen was quite sound. Then they saw the heart, which lay exposed in the opened breast. That heart, exposed to their eyes and to the light of the candles, was entirely black, and hideous to the sight.

They stood staring at it for a moment, in silence. Then they washed the heart, strongly, in water that they changed three times. But that frightful blackness did not alter. Seeing this, the chandler clove the heart in two, and found its innermost depths were of the same blackness that no water could wash away.

This was the secret that they whispered to the Queen’s devoted servants. Then, looking at them with terror, the chandler and his assistants told them they had found a black thing, clinging to the core of the heart with such force that it could not be dislodged.

That black heart and the body it had consumed as a fire melts wax, were shut away in a covering of lead before the light of day could witness the fate that had befallen them.

Next day, came the mourners who were to watch beside the body and follow in the funeral procession—the young Duchess of Suffolk, the Countess of Worcester, the young Countess of Bedford, and a number of other ladies. The Queen lay, night after night, amid the banners proclaiming her great lineage—the houses of Aragon, Castile, Sicily, Naples, Portugal, the Empire, and with these, the banners of Lancaster, of England, four great standards of gold, on one of which was painted the Trinity, on another Our Lady, on the third St. Katherine, and on the fourth St. George—little pennons on which were portrayed the device of King Ferdinand, father of the deceased, and the device of the dead Queen, with other banners bearing the painted emblems of the bundle of arrows, the pomegranate, the lion, the greyhound. And round the chapel were painted in letters of gold the words “Humble et Loyal”.

On the night when the funeral procession arrived at Peterborough Cathedral, a dirge was sung. Next morning the three funeral masses were celebrated, and the nine chief mourners made offerings of cloth of gold. But the dead woman went to her grave under the title, not of Queen, but of Princess-Dowager. Therefore her old and faithful friend the Imperial Ambassador did not attend the funeral of “her who for twenty-seven years has been true Queen of England, whose holy soul, as every one must believe, is in eternal rest, after worldly misery borne by her with such patience that there is little need to pray for her”.

The fires in her heart were gone. But they had faded slowly. And sometimes, as though the heat of those fires had melted the heart itself into rain, that could only find release in weeping, the stones on which she knelt in prayer were wet with her tears. As she lay dying, she who had said “it were better to be judged in Hell, for no truth can be suffered here, whereas the devils themselves I suppose do tremble to see the truth in this cause so far offended”, sent to her husband a letter which her own hand was too weak to write:

“My lord and dear husband,—I commend me unto you, the hour of my death draweth fast on, and my case being such, the tender love I owe you forceth me with a few words to put you in remembrance of the health and safeguard of your soul, which you ought to prefer before any consideration of the world or flesh whatsoever, for which you have cast me into many miseries and yourself into many cares. For my part I do pardon you all: yes, I do wish and dearly pray God that he will also pardon you. For the rest, I commend unto you Mary our daughter, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have hitherto desired. I entreat you also on behalf of my maids, to give them their marriage portions, which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants, I solicit a year’s pay more than their due, lest they should be unprovided for. Lastly, I vow that mine eyes desire you above all things.

“Farewell.”

Perhaps as she lay dying, Catherine saw the only man she had loved as he was in his youth. But he was changed, to her, and to all men: the prince with the face of an angel who had fallen under the spell of his own princely will.

Wolsey, who understood Henry better than any of his other Ministers, said, on his death-bed, “He is sure a prince of royal courage, and hath a princely heart; and rather than he will either miss or want any part of his will or appetite, he will put the loss of one half of his realm in danger. For I assure you that I have often kneeled before him in his privy chamber on my knees the space of an hour or two, to persuade him from his will and appetite; but I could never bring it to pass to dissuade him therefrom.... Therefore ... I warn you to be well advised and assured what matter ye put into his head, for ye shall never put it out again.”

With Catherine’s death, an obstacle in the path of that princely will had been removed.

Therefore, in answer to that letter from the tomb, the Court rang with the noise of balls and feasts. The King exclaimed, “God be praised that we are free from all danger of war.” And the father and brother of Anne, openly exulting, declared that the only thing they regretted was that the Lady Mary was not keeping her mother company.

The King and his new Queen both wore yellow—for mourning, as it was said.

The day after the death was a Sunday, and the usurper-Queen’s child was carried, with great pomp, preceded by trumpets and followed by a train of servants, to Mass. In the afternoon was a Court ball, and the husband of the dead woman, “clad all in yellow from top to toe, excepting for the white feather he had in his bonnet”, entered the room where the ladies were dancing and there did several things like as one transported with joy. “At last he sent for his little Bastard, and carrying her in his arms, he showed her first to one and then to another.”^[18]

Watching the little child, leaping up and down in her father’s arms, where the great fires lit the winter dusk, who could imagine this being as she would be in sixty-five years’ time—the old sandalwood body smelling of death, the beautiful hands that were like long leaves, grown a little dry from age, so that the lines on the palms were like those on a map? Then, too, she would leap into the air like a thin flame—like the flames she saw as she was about to die. (“I saw one night”, she told one of her ladies, “my body exceeding lean and fearful in a light of fire.”)

In those last days of her life she danced to the sound of a pipe and a drum, alone, in a small room, excepting for the musicians and her faithful friend and lady-in-waiting Lady Warwick. She danced, as she did everything, to fight the shadow of death. When she could no longer dance, she would sit and watch the maids of honour dancing—to the sound of the Dargason or Sedany, Flaunting Two (a country dance), Mopsy’s Tune, Turkerloney, Frisks, the Bishop of Chester’s Jig, the Spanish Lady, Farnaby’s Woodycock, Nobody’s Jig, Dusty, my Dear—and perhaps the wonderful Lachrymae Pavanes of Dowland, published in 1605, three years after her death, with a number of other Pavanes, Galliards, and Almands, in a book with the title Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares, figured in Seven Passionate Pavanes,—the last words being