Anne Boleyn: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

spectators. The bear overbalanced and came to his knees; at the same moment Catherine touched his arm, and he turned angrily; the kill was near and he didn’t want to miss it. Now he was down, one of the dogs would get his throat...
    “With Your Grace’s permission, I wish to retire,” she said; she was terribly pale, and to his annoyance he saw that her eyes were full of tears. “‘Tis too cruel. The poor bear...I can’t watch it...”
    She was out of her seat, beckoning to her ladies, and the whole finale of the fight was disrupted while they moved. The last to go was Anne; one of the ladies touched her shoulder and whispered urgently before she rose to follow, and for a moment she looked into Henry’s face. She was flushed and excitement had made her brilliantly beautiful; she waited to curtsy to him, and her eyes expressed disappointment. Then she was gone. By the time he settled down again, the bear was dead on the floor of the pit and the dogs were tearing it to pieces.
    They suggested another bear and another fight, but he refused and stamped back to his apartments in a savage temper. Why had she come, he demanded furiously, and no one dared to answer him. He knew she was squeamish, always petting her cursed lap dogs and feeding her tame birds; why did she ask to come and then spoil his pleasure? His voice rose to a bellow, while his gentlemen stood about awkwardly. Was it part of her policy to force herself on him, he shouted, knowing her presence embarrassed him, thinking perhaps he was too kindhearted to forbid her?
    From that moment he would forbid her! Was there no one to protect him from the Queen’s pestering? He stood straddled like an angry bull, his pale eyes reddening like his own breed of pit dogs.
    “Are you all dumb?” he roared. God’s blood, where was Wolsey...Wolsey would have found something to say, Wolsey would probably have stopped her attending. But Wolsey was at York House, working on the problem of the divorce. He ordered them out and sat by himself, brooding and vindictive and as usual when he was depressed or angry, his thoughts turned to the divorce and his grievances against his wife. How many children had Henry fathered in the Queen, the Cardinal asked, and how many had survived? One; the sickly ten-year-old Princess Mary; the rest had died. He knew the kindness of the King, but such a mortality surely betokened the anger of God and his punishment for a union which was incestuous...
    They had discussed it so often that the King had begun to believe it; he was profoundly superstitious, the religion of form and ritual was a passion with him, and theology a hobby with which he sharpened his intellect, in common with most brilliant men of his time. But the seat of his religion was within himself; he held the same beliefs as the rest of Christendom until that time, because the beliefs had never conflicted with his own will. The possibility that the two might differ never seriously occurred to him; once he believed that Catherine had deceived him, that he had committed incest and been punished by the deaths of all but one of his children, then the belief became an unshakable truth. And he had Wolsey to assure him that the Pope would share the conviction.
    The Cardinal never missed an opportunity to praise the Princess Renée; he was shrewd enough to know that sixteen years of marriage to the admirable Catherine had predisposed his master toward a congenial union as well as a political one. The Princess was intelligent, graceful and very womanly, and as eager to marry Henry as her modesty allowed. He would find her an excellent wife, and the French royal family were notoriously prolific; her brother Francis had bastards in every corner of the Kingdom.
    Then he stressed the need for the French alliance. The Emperor Charles was too powerful for the safety of Europe; he was expanding his dominions at the expense of the Italian states, and his armies ringed the Vatican. His dominions in the