The Mirror and the Light

The king reads out the letter. ‘Good and gentle to serve and please. So there you are,’ he says to the girl. ‘What news could be better? You will have a loving mistress, and I a loving mate.’

Anne blushes. ‘Mate’ seems blunt. Possibly she doesn’t like to think of the king in bed. How times change. Ten years back she would have been in bed with him.

In Calais Anna is lodged in the queen’s apartments at the Exchequer. Fitzwilliam writes that she has invited the English lords to supper. She is used to dining in public, and does not know it is no longer the custom of English kings. But she means well; she wants to see her new countrymen at table and learn their customs. Her manner was regal, Fitzwilliam reports. He and Gregory spend an hour with her teaching her card games that the king likes. It is her own idea, and a clever one.

The wind changes. 27 December, Anna lands at Deal, in the rain and after dark. They row her ashore, a princess coming out of the sea. She will go from Deal to Dover, from Canterbury to Rochester, and by the first week of the new year she will be approaching London from the east. The king will meet her at Blackheath, conduct her to Greenwich palace, and marry her by Twelfth Night.

III

Magnificence

January–June 1540

The king’s new castle at Deal is a way station for Anna to wash her hands, take a fortifying glass of wine, and then pass on to Dover. She is escorted by Charles Brandon and by Richard Sampson, the Bishop of Chichester, that tight-lipped prelate so experienced in the making and breaking of the king’s unions.

Brandon has his young wife with him. She is of a quick, warm nature; what could be better for an uncertain bride, than to be welcomed by a smiling young duchess who will divine what she needs? You can’t expect Charles to know, Bishop Sampson still less. But Charles cuts an impressive martial figure. And Sampson will take himself off to a corner and busy himself with paperwork.

In Dover, God willing, Anna’s baggage will catch up with her. Next day she will set out – with her chaplains and her secretaries and her musicians and maids – to Canterbury, where she will meet the archbishop. She will want ready money, and so he, Cromwell, has arranged for a gold chalice to be presented, fifty sovereigns inside. As she passes through to Rochester, Norfolk will escort her with a large party of gentlemen. There are no plans for her to meet the Bishop of Winchester. That treat can be saved up. After all, Lord Cromwell’s boys say, we don’t want her to turn tail and start wading out to sea again.

The weather en route is foul. But the bride was not seasick, and thinks nothing of travelling with the rain and hail in her face. The masters of ceremony are relieved, because they have planned a huge reception at Blackheath outside Greenwich palace, and if she does not keep on schedule they will incur heavy costs. He, Lord Cromwell, expects the countryside to turn out. He has had the streets at Greenwich cleaned and gravelled, and barriers erected so the crowds don’t push each other into the Thames.

All winter at Austin Friars he has been laying in muscatel and malmsey with a view to celebration. In the bakehouse they are making Striezel to take to Anna and her ladies, and the smell of cloves and cinnamon and orange peel has crept through the house. When Lizzie was alive, Twelfth Night was their occasion to feast their neighbours. They would enact the Three Kings, their costumes patched with every gilded offcut, scraps too small for the greediest tailor. Every hand that could hold a needle would go to work, and Lizzie would make them cheer while they sewed. One year they made Anne Cromwell into a cat with a coney-skin tail, and Gregory into a fish with shining silver scales; the low winter light slid over him, and he glimmered in the dusk.

He wonders how his daughter Jenneke is faring, and when he will see her again. He does not say to himself ‘if’, because he is always inclined to think the world will turn our way. It seems strange to him that Lizzie never saw her. She would have accepted the stranger; she knew when they married he was a man with a past.

It is a long time now since the women of the house put his little daughters in their graveclothes. He has got used to a certain feeling of tightness that settles behind the breastbone, that comes around by the calendar: Easter, St John’s Day, Lammas, Michaelmas, All Souls and All Saints.

The year 1539 is drawing to its close, and when he enters the king’s presence at Greenwich with a file of business in his hand, he is prepared to find the king playing the harp, or listing the New Year presents he hopes to receive, or merely making paper darts, but in any event unprepared for work. But there is a stir in the privy chamber, and young Culpeper comes out: ‘You will never guess, sir! He is going himself to Rochester, to meet the queen.’

He pushes his files at Culpeper. ‘Wriothesley, come in with me.’