The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [114]
I turned and stared. It could not be. But it was. And not just a few recalcitrants, but row upon row. They turned, looked mournfully up toward the altar where Cranmer stood, then filed out through the great Abbey doors.
They refused to pray for Anne as Queen, or even to remain in a building where others did so!
I stood, stunned, unable to believe what I had just seen-the spontaneous public rejection of Anne. Such a thing I had never even considered. I had seen the Pope and the Emperor and some conservative Northern lords, like the Earl of Derby, Lord Darcy, Lord Hussey, the great Marcher lords, Katherine’s partisans, as Anne’s enemies. But the common people! She was one of them. How could they reject her?
Katherine must have paid these people! Her sneaking little monkey of an ambassador, Chapuys, was behind this insulting display. Well, I would have him brought before me and punished.
In the meantime, there was this interminable Mass to endure—this Mass, so long awaited, now so ruinous. Beside me, Anne was still. I could feel her anger; it had a shape of its own.
Alone in our royal apartments that night, she screamed with fury. It was past two in the morning, and by this time I had thought to be drifting off into a sleep of paradise—in Anne’s arms, feeling her kisses and murmurs of endearments and pretty thanks for all the dangers I had braved to make her Queen, to have brought her to this moment.
But this moment had turned, like so much else in our lives, into an experience of pain and sorrow, of humiliation and frustration.
“I hate them!” she shrieked for the tenth time. “I shall be revenged on them!” Then, to me: “Why did you not stop them? Why did you stand there like a ploughboy?”
“I was as stunned as one,” I muttered.
“You should have rounded them up and had them questioned!”
Rem">ont size="3">Was it then that the unbidden thought exploded inside my head, past the barriers of desire and obsession? This is the behaviour of a commoner, not a Queen. Common she was born, common she remains. She is not the stuff of royalty. Immediately my love for her intercepted the thought, wrestled it to the ground, and deprived it of its liberty.
“They are long since asleep in their beds. We could not find out who they were, even if we wanted. Forget it.” I myself intended to question Chapuys, but privately. “There is always a stir at a change. Even spring brings sadness of a sort.”
I patted the bed, for which I still had hopes. “Come to bed, sweetheart. Let me make love to my Queen.”
But I was as useless with her as I had been that other time, and I slept not at all the rest of that evil night.
Were we cursed? Side by side we lay, each pretending to sleep, while those words ran like rats through our brains.
XLIX
It had happened all over the land. In church after church, when the prayer naming Anne as Queen had been read, people either fell silent or left the Mass. They spoke as loudly as the madman who had run about the streets the previous summer, yelling, “We’ll no Nan Bullen!”; as forcibly as the crowd who had pursued Anne and tried to stone her; as angrily as the Ahabpreaching friar.
Now, for the first time, I had doubts about Anne’s Coronation. Anne had coveted it, and I had promised it. But what if the people rejected her as wholeheartedly on that day? How much worse that would be than no Coronation at all.
What could I do to prevent it? I could not physically silence every Londoner; there were more than a hundred thousand of them. Nor could I silence them with money. The Royal Treasury was almost empty, and the Coronation would require every spare pound. Behind the golden garments and sumptuous dinners of state, the Crown was in urgent need of money. Toward the latter end, I conferred with Master Cromwell.
He reminded me of the deplorable moral state of the monasteries, where corruption existed side by side with immense wealth. “The sight of it must surely strike sorrow into the bosom of Our Lord,” he said piously. He asked permission to send a group of commissioners to visit and report