Читать книгу My Lady of Cleves - Margaret Campbell Barnes - Страница 3

Table of Contents

Henry Tudor straddled the hearth in the private audience chamber at Greenwich. Sunlight streaming through a richly colored oriel window emphasized the splendor of his huge body and red-gold beard against the wide arch of the stone fireplace behind him. He was in a vile temper. The huddle of statesmen yapping their importunities at him from a respectful distance might have been a pack of half-cowed curs baiting an angry bull. They were trying to persuade him to take a fourth wife. And because for once he was being driven into matrimony by diplomacy and not desire, he scowled at all their suggestions.

“Who are these two princesses of Cleves?” he wanted to know.

That didn’t sound too hopeful for the latest project of the Protestant party. But Thomas Cromwell hadn’t pushed his way from struggling lawyer to Chancellor of England without daring sometimes to pit his own obstinacy against the King’s.

“Their young brother rules over the independent duchies of Cleves, Guelderland, Juliers and Hainault,” he reported. “And we are assured that the Dowager Duchess has brought them up in strict Dutch fashion.”

Henry thought they sounded deadly, and he was well aware that their late father’s Lutheran fervor was of far more value in Cromwell’s eyes than the domestic virtues of their mother.

“Those Flemish girls are all alike, dowdy and humorless,” he muttered, puffing out his lips. The audience chamber overlooked the gardens and the river, and from where he stood he could hear sudden gusts of laughter from the terrace below. He thought he recognized the voices of two of his late wife’s flightiest maids-of-honor. Only yesterday he had heard his dour Chancellor rating them for playing shuttlecock so near the royal apartments. And because he was having his own knuckles rapped—although much more obsequiously—he snickered sympathetically.

“And if I must marry again,” he added, “an English girl would be more amusing.”

It was growing warm as the morning wore on and a bumble bee beat its body persistently against the lattice. But Cromwell was a born taskmaster. “Your Grace has already—er—tried two,” he pointed out, looking down his pugnacious nose.

“Well?” demanded Henry, dangerously.

Naturally, no one present had the temerity to mention that Anne Bullen had not been a success or to gall his recent bereavement by referring to the fact that Jane Seymour had died in childbirth.

“It is felt that a foreign alliance—like your Majesty’s first marriage with Catherine of Aragon—,” began the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had obligingly helped to get rid of her.

Marillac, the French ambassador, backed him up quickly, seeing an opportunity to do some spade work for his own country. “Your Grace has always found our French women piquantes,” he reminded the widowed King, although everybody must have known that Archbishop Cranmer had not meant another Catholic queen.

Henry turned to him with relief. Like most bullies, he really preferred the people who stood up to him. He didn’t mean to be impatient and irritable so that men jumped or cowered whenever he addressed them. He had always prided himself on being accessible. “Bluff King Hal,” people had called him. And secretly he had loved it. Why, not so very long ago he used to sit in this very room—he and Catherine—with Mary, his young sister, and Charles Brandon, his friend—planning pageants and encouraging poets...

“Your Majesty has but to choose any eligible lady in my country and King Francis will be honored to negotiate with her parents on your behalf,” the ambassador was urging, with a wealth of Latin gesture which made the rest of the argumentative assembly look stupid.

“I know, I know, my dear Marillac,” said Henry, dragging himself from his reminiscent mood to their importunities. “And weeks ago I dictated a letter asking that three of the most promising of them might be sent to Calais for me to choose from. But nothing appears to have been done.” He slewed his thickening body round toward his unfortunate secretary with a movement that had all the vindictiveness of a snook, and Wriothesley—conscious of his own diligence in the matter—made a protesting gesture with his ugly hands.

“The letter was sent, your Grace. But, I beg you to consider, Sir, your proposal was impossible!”

“Impossible!” Henry Tudor rapped out the word with all the arrogance of an upstart dynasty that has made itself despotic.

“Monsieur Marillac has just received the French King’s reply,” murmured Cranmer.

“And what does he say?” asked Henry.

Seeing that the prelate had forced his hand and thereby spoiled his bid for another Catholic alliance, Marillac reluctantly drew the letter from his scented dispatch case. After all, he was not Henry’s subject and his neck was safe. “He says that it would tax his chivalry too far to ask ladies of noble blood to allow themselves to be trotted out on approval like so many horses at a fair!” he reported verbatim. And many a man present had to hide a grin, envying him his immunity.

Henry gulped back a hot retort, reddening and blinking his sandy lashes in the way he did when he knew himself to be in the wrong. There had been a time, before that bitch Nan Bullen had blunted his susceptibilities about women’s feelings, when he would have been the first to agree with Francis. Mary, his favorite sister, had been alive then, keeping him kind. Lord, how he missed her! He sighed, considering how good it was for a man to have a sister—some woman who gave the refining intimacy of her mind in a relationship that had nothing to do with sex. Someone who understood one’s foibles and even bullied back sometimes, affectionately. Mary would have said in her gay, irrepressible way, “Don’t be a mule, Henry! You know very well those stuffy old statesmen are right, so you might just as well do what they want without arguing.” But even if they were right, and he did, it wasn’t as simple as all that, he thought ruefully. For, after all, whatever foreign woman they might wish onto him, it was he who would have to live with her.

“How can I depend on anyone else’s judgment?” he excused himself plaintively. “I’m not a raw youth to go wandering about Europe looking for a bride. I can’t do more than offer to go across to my own town of Calais. Yet see them I must before I decide, whatever Francis says—see them, and hear them sing. I’m extraordinarily susceptible to people’s voices, you know.” The gay, light chatter of the disobedient maids-of-honor still drifted up from the terrace, and in spite of Cromwell’s disapproval it was pleasant enough. “That is why it would be so much simpler to marry an English girl,” reiterated Henry obstinately. But this time he said it in the inconclusive grumble of a man who no longer feels very strongly about anything and only wants to be let alone.

“The young Duchess of Milan has just been widowed,” suggested his cousin, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, dangling the last Catholic bait he could think of.

Henry, who had just called for a glass of wine, brightened considerably. “Coming from such a cultural center, she should be accomplished,” he remarked complacently, turning the well-mulled Malmsey on his tongue.

“But there is just one difficulty, your Grace,” put in Cromwell.

“Yes?” prompted Henry, setting down his empty glass.

Cromwell cleared his throat uncomfortably. “The lady herself seems—er—somewhat unwilling.”

The vainest monarch in Christendom stared at him incredulously. “Unwilling!” he repeated. He settled his new, becomingly padded coat more snugly about his shoulders and shifted his weight testily from one foot to the other so that he appeared to strut where he stood. “Why should she be unwilling? What did she say?”

But nobody dared tell him exactly what the lady had said; and the Italian ambassador—less hardy than his French colleague—had found himself too indisposed to be present.

Henry glared at them like a bull that has been badly savaged. It was beginning to be borne in upon him that he was no longer the splendid prize that had once fluttered the matrimonial dovecotes of Europe. So he blustered and blinked for a bit to hide his embarrassment and everybody was glad when an ill-aimed shuttlecock created a diversion by smacking sharply against a window pane.

The drowsy bumble bee was still banging its fat body against the inside of the glass, trying to get out. Henry wanted to get out, also. The room was too full of contentious people and the clever court tailor who had designed the widely padded shoulders of his coat had considered only the slimming effect and not the heat. His shoes, with the rolled slashings to ease the gout in his toes, shuffled a little over the broad oak floor beams as he went to the window; but he still moved with the lightness of a champion wrestler. He pushed open a lattice and stood there in characteristic attitude, feet apart and hands folded behind his back beneath the loosely swinging, puff-sleeved coat. He had turned his back on the dull, musty world of diplomacy, and the world outside was alive and fresh. The wide Thames sparkled at high tide. On the grass immediately below, four or five girls in different colored gowns flitted like gay butterflies as they struck the shuttlecock back and forth. With the outward swinging of the window their voices had come up to him, clear and strong. There was a slender auburn-haired child who laughed as she ran, and her laughter was like a delicious shivering of spring blossoms. Even his grave, embittered daughter Mary—pausing on her way to chapel to watch the forbidden game—smiled at her indulgently and forbore to reprimand. Seventeen the girl might be—and, judging by her delight in the game, quite unsophisticated and unspoiled.

Henry wondered why he had been stuffing indoors all morning, when with a touch of his hand he could open a window onto this enchanting world of youth. And what would he not give to re-enter it? He, who had known what it was to enjoy youth with all the gifts the gods could shower! Music, poetry, languages, sport—he had excelled in them all. “Mens sana in corpore sano,” he muttered, looking back over that splendid stretch of years and seeing, as men do in retrospect, all the high spots of success merged into one shining level of sunlight and strength. Alas, so easily had he excelled that gradually the strong impulses of the body had sapped the application of a fine and cultured mind! So that now, at forty-seven, while still hankering vainly after past physical exploits, he realized that had he developed that other side of himself, life might still mean growth, rather than gradual frustration.

Henry saw his daughter pass on, hands primly folded about her rosary; but he remained at the window, looking down benignly on the laughing, chattering players. They were girls of good family. And he had only to go down and lift up his finger...

“After all, why should I get married?” he suggested blandly. “There’s plenty of fruit down there for the picking!” He threw the challenge over his shoulder to his disconcerted councilors, and the answer he expected came back at him pat as a well-placed tennis ball. The careful placing, of course, was Cromwell’s. “To secure the succession, Sir.”

Henry swung round on him again in a flurry of purple and fine linen. “Haven’t I already done that?” It was the vindication of the male who after twenty years of frustrated hopes, has produced a son at last. The only possible justification for his having divorced Catherine and defied the Pope. It had always seemed to him the supreme irony that weaklings could beget heirs whilst he, the fine athlete and lusty lover, had been able to sire only daughters and still-born sons. And now Jane’s dying gift to him had both salved his vanity and satisfied parental yearning.

Archbishop Cranmer hated to prick the fragile bubble of his pride, but felt constrained to point out that Prince Edward was far from strong.

Henry’s anxiety for the child far outweighed theirs but he never would look upon the things he did not wish to see. His light eyes flickered over the group of statesmen to the lean imposing figure of the court physician, who began to understand why the others had pressed him to attend the meeting. “You don’t think he looks any worse, do you, Chamberlain?” he asked.

Chamberlain caught Cromwell’s compelling eye. As a doctor he was above coercion but in order to frighten the King into another marriage it was necessary only to tell the truth—a lamentable and half-understood truth beginning to be discussed in medical circles because it appeared to affect not only the King’s heir but also a large proportion of the population. “There is a kind of wasting sickness,” he admitted reluctantly, “which in its first stages frequently imparts a fallacious glow of health—” But seeing the stricken look on his patron’s face and being essentially a healer, he tried hastily to allay the gravity of his own words. “With care, Sir, he may improve.”

Henry had evidently been badly frightened, and when he was frightened he blustered. “Care!” he shouted. “Haven’t we denied ourselves the joy of his presence so that he may be safe from all infection at Havering? Hasn’t he every care that human thought can devise? A devoted foster mother. Dr. Butts in constant attendance. His food—and even his tiny clothes—tested for poison. And haven’t I recently given orders that no one, not even his own sisters, may go and dandle him and breathe on him without my signed permission?”

He cared so much that it almost swung his thoughts beyond the necessity of re-marriage. If anything should happen to his son—his little, lovable son—who already looked for his coming and talked to him with the marvel of his first words... What did all the women in the world matter compared with this precious replica of himself? And here were these wretched councilors wasting his time when he might be on his way to Havering. He must get rid of them—promise them anything. He looked round and beckoned to Thomas Culpepper, a personable young man whose pleasant manners had already earmarked him for personal service.

“Tell them to have the horses ready for Havering, Tom,” he ordered. “I shall want you to come with me. And bring that toy puppet show we bought in Kingston and some of those big peaches from the south wall.” It would be pleasant riding today. But how often had he set forth quite happily on such a morning only to worry himself into a frenzy on the way lest anything should have happened to the child before he got there! That was the worst, he supposed, of having only one son.

The Archbishop touched him on the arm. The austerity of his heavily-jowled face was softened by pity. Of them all, he alone guessed at the Tudor’s inmost thoughts, understanding that mixture of sensitiveness and self-deception which men called the King’s conscience.

“For England’s sake, Sir, settle something definite before you go,” he urged gently.

Henry relaxed from his defiant stance and smiled at him. Wolsey, the most powerful archbishop of them all, had died lamenting that he had served his king much better than his God. But the King himself knew this to be much more true of Cranmer, who, however troubled in his conscience, invariably helped to get him what he wanted. So he listened to his appeal. Beyond the trivial pastime on the terrace, his eyes sought the Thames, bearing laden ships from half the world’s ports to the wharves of his throbbing capital. The river had flowed past all his palaces—that was part of his daily life and the very life stream of his land. A land weakened by the interminable Wars of the Roses and which he, born of a Lancastrian father and a Yorkist mother, had solidified and made strong. No weakling could have done that, he thought, expanding his mighty chest. The vigor of his manhood had both reflected and inspired the resilience that always lay coiled at the slow-beating heart of England waiting on necessity and some leader’s call. In this he had not let England down. Strength and physical courage and heartiness he had shown his subjects, and these were the credentials they demanded of their rulers. His private life was his own But he would do much to secure the succession, to keep England peaceful and prosperous as he knew and loved her now.

“I tell you what, milords,” he suggested, turning towards the waiting group. “If I can’t go myself and see these prospective brides, we’ll send Holbein to paint ’em. For, upon my soul, he catches people’s expressions so marvelously and is so scrupulous of detail that this should help me to decide. Have them send him up,” he ordered, almost genially. “I saw him down in the garden but a few minutes ago being besieged by ladies who hope to get their miniatures done.”

While waiting for his court painter to come, Henry went and stood before his portrait of Queen Jane. He had ridden to Windsor the moment the breath was out of her body sooner than sleep in the same house as her corpse; but immediately on his return he had her painting hung where he could see it from his work table. And so truthfully had Holbein reproduced her fair gentleness that it seemed to all of them as if Jane Tudor herself looked gravely down at him. Only once—to Catherine of Aragon—could Henry give the clean, uncalculating love of youth, and his body had never burned for Jane beyond control of reason or religion as it had for Nan Bullen; but so happy had their short married life been that he felt no desire to replace her. In fact, after the first shock of her death he had rather enjoyed playing the new rôle of widower, and—giving himself up to an orgy of self-pity and sentiment—he had managed to wrap her memory in a shroud of perfections which would have startled diffident Jane. But all his life he would be sincerely grateful to her for the tranquillity she had brought him after the disappointing torments of his second marriage, and because she had died in giving him his son. Never, he knew, would have she have defied him as proud, virtuous Catherine had done or deceived him like Anne. If he must marry a fourth time he could imagine himself marrying a Catherine or a Jane—but never, never another girl called Anne!

Hans Holbein brought into the room a breath of the wider life of art, unbounded by nationality and uncontaminated by scheming politics. The King welcomed him with genuine pleasure. Here was a man whom he felt he had made and who—unlike Cromwell—had remained unchanged. His appreciation of the arts had been quick to recognize Holbein’s genius, and it was his own generosity that kept him in the country. And because so many of the things he did made Henry feel shabby he found it comforting to warm himself at times in the glow of his own good deeds. So he laid an affectionate arm about the painter’s shoulders and led him to the late Queen’s portrait.

“It’s more than two years since you painted it, Hans,” he said. “And I would sooner lose anything in the palace.”

They stood side by side in front of the canvas, not wholly unalike in appearance. The fortuitous resemblance was accentuated by the light, spade-shaped beard Holbein had grown in deference to his patron. The color of it, like his eyes, was warmly brown and the width of his face was refined by half a lifetime of diligent seeking after perfection in his art. However unconventionally he lived, there was little of the gross about him—it had all been whittled out of him by hard work. In his brown velvet he would have passed for any kindly, middle-class student. But he was master of his craft and that was the kind of equality the King recognized. With mutual appreciation they examined the texture of Jane’s brocaded bodice and the fine network on her sleeves.

“I remember that dress well and how happy we were when she wore it!” sighed Henry, his small, light eyes suffusing with easy emotion. “You know, Hans, I sometimes think if she were alive today my little son would be stronger. And there wouldn’t be all this pother now about getting married again.” He made a gesture as if to wash his hands of the whole wearisome business and turned Holbein over to his councilors.

The Archbishop drew him into their midst and they discussed the commission at length.

Milan was a painter’s paradise—particularly to one who had not been able to afford such opportunities in his youth. But when they told him it was the young Duchess they wanted him to paint and Norfolk explained eagerly what a famous beauty she was, Holbein looked skeptical. He had usually found these famous beauties to be remarkably uninteresting sitters—smug and expressionless. “Are they expecting me?” he asked practically.

Some of the statesmen exchanged uneasy glances. Knowing the lady’s objections they had proceeded no further with the negotiations. Cranmer stole a glance at the King’s uncompromising back. “We could send an envoy, could we not, milord Chamberlain?” he suggested uncertainly.

“Send Wotton,” snapped the King, without turning round.

“But he is only a Lutheran doctor of divinity,” objected the Duke, whose connection by marriage with the Tudors gave him considerable liberty of speech.

“He’s the most discreet man I know for the business,” said Henry. “And I don’t want to be compromised until I’ve seen the portrait.”

“And if there should be any hitch in Milan,” demurred Thomas Cromwell obstinately. “Have they your Grace’s leave to proceed to Cleves?”

“Hitch? Why should there be?”

Cromwell had learned his able statecraft as Wolsey’s secretary but, being the son of a blacksmith, he had not been brought up to soften his blows. “Sir, we have combed Europe,” he explained bluntly. “And, failing the Duchess of Milan there seem to be no others available.”

It was a humiliating thought and Henry swallowed it in silence. “I don’t know anything about these two Cleves women. I don’t even know their names!” Henry burst out presently, pacing back and forth beneath Jane’s portrait.

Cromwell hastily consulted a document in his hand. To his legal mind the ladies themselves had seemed relatively unimportant. “The Lady Anne and the Lady Amelia,” he read.

Another Anne! And they would probably foist her onto him because she was the elder! “But of what consequence is this duchy of Cleves? Nothing ever happened there.”

Cromwell could have reminded him for the hundredth time that an alliance with Cleves would send up his stock with the Emperor and keep France guessing; but it was Holbein who unexpectedly relieved the tension. He looked up from a clever little cartoon of the King which he had been drawing surreptitiously on the back of a book.

“Nothing—except that I was born near there!” he said.

“Why, of course—one forgets you are really German!” exclaimed Henry. “You’ve lived here so long and you came to us from Basle—”

“My father had to go there to illuminate manuscripts. He used to paint people’s portraits within the initial letters of their important documents. They were so small and exquisite that their lovers used to cut them out and keep them in lockets. That’s how I got the idea of making miniatures.”

“But you remember Cleves?”

“As a small boy I lived in the lower Valley of the Rhine. I loved the vast skyscapes—the long, straight canals—and the windmills.”

Henry gave him a friendly punch. “Why, all this time we’ve been keeping a homesick man!” He laughed good-naturedly. “And avidly as the artist in you yearns for the art treasures of Milan, all the little boy in you wants 1s the windmills! Well, go on there if you like, and paint all the Flemish princesses you want to. In all their stuffy petticoats! But mind you let me have young Christine of Milan’s portrait first!”

Good humor was restored. Henry’s great laugh rang through the room so that the maids-of-honor outside remembered their duties and scuttled from the terrace; and the solemn, middle-aged men within smiled as they were wont to do at home, without the closed and wary look that concealed their tortuous minds at court. The King made a gesture of dismissal and they bowed themselves out, streaming thankfully into the ante-room and corridors. Only Cromwell and Cranmer and Holbein remained, arranging a meeting with Dr. Wotton; and young Culpepper who was to ride with his master to Havering.

“You can see how it is, Hans,” said Henry. “The two parties on at me all the time. And the brides only ciphers for the men’s separate ambitions. Religious faction wrapped up in romance!”

“Like the carvings I’m designing for Hampton, of the lion and the unicorn fighting for the crown,” laughed Holbein.

Henry stretched himself, looking down appreciatively at the great muscles that still swelled on either forearm. “Ah, well, now we can get out,” he yawned, relaxing from a public character to a private individual. “Have they brought round the horses, Tom?”

“They’re in the courtyard, Sir.”

“Then we’ll get going. I wonder now if Mary would like to come with us? If she’s finished her everlasting devotions!” He was all brimming over with kindness now, and it pleased him to know how his proud elder daughter, now a grown woman, adored her half-brother. He stepped back to the window to see if there was any sign of her, but the terrace was deserted save for the slim, auburn-haired girl who had laughed so deliciously. Having nothing in particular to do, she was putting the shuttlecocks back in their box.

“Who is that girl?” he asked idly, noting the untamed grace of her most ordinary movements.

Culpepper, helping him into his riding coat, craned over the royal shoulder to get a glimpse of her. “The Dowager Duchess of Norfolk has only just brought her to court,” he answered evasively.

“A poor relation of sorts, so probably her name is Howard,” vouchsafed the departing Chancellor, gathering up his papers and his unbecoming little hat. “An undisciplined wench, anyhow,” he added, remembering how she had distracted the King in the middle of a solemn council meeting.

“I should like to paint her as Persephone,” murmured Holbein.

The Archbishop joined them at the window. “Scarcely out of the schoolroom, I should imagine,” he remarked indulgently. With an apprehensive side glance at the sensual Tudor whose whims he had cause to know so well, he did his best to defend the girl by placing her definitely in the category of the very young and unimportant. “Young Tom here should be able to tell us her Christian name. I saw them dancing together last night.”

This time the good-looking gentleman-in-waiting could not very well withhold the information.

“It is Katherine, milord—and she’s a cousin of mine,” he mumbled, reddening. And he, too, glanced at the King.

But Henry had turned from the window, cheerfully humming one of his own songs.

“Katherine Howard,” he repeated absently, gathering up gloves and whip from a page. “A charming name!”