The Boleyn Bride Read online

  Anne and George swayed together, side by side, thrusting out their hands, as though to block or ward off a blow or push an invisible foe away—death, I now know. With this dance they were acting out their struggle against fate, a tug of war between hope and despair, alternately denying and accepting that they had no choice in the end, that this was the way it had to be; whether they fought tooth and nail or submitted gracefully, it wouldn’t change how the story would end—their destiny was preordained and about to play out its final act on the stage of life for all the world to see.

  Again and again, they came together, then separated, spinning away from each other and then returning, unable to bear to let go, until a moment came, as the music swelled and grew even faster, more frantic, and desperate, when Anne stayed in George’s arms, and they circled together, round and round, faster and faster, spinning in a blurring swirl of sleeves and pearls, midnight black, lustrous white, and shimmering silver. Faster and faster, in perfect step, they swirled and spun, leapt, swayed, and dipped, in each other’s arms, side by side, or standing face-to-face. Until, as the music reached its defiant crescendo—one that spoke of hope in the face of hopelessness, defiance in defeat, of thumbing one’s nose at fate—they held each other close and made the greatest leap of all, like one of faith, a leap that, although magnificent, chilled my heart, for it was as though each was saying to the other, “If you are going to jump off this cliff, I am going with you.” I shivered, and instinctively I crossed myself and whispered a silent prayer. I felt as though I had just watched my two children leap to their deaths.

  As one, clasped tight in each other’s arms, they spun out onto the moon-silvered white marble terrace, Anne’s pearl-heavy skirts wrapping around George’s long, slender black silk–clad legs. There they stopped, frozen forever in my memory, though in truth it only lasted a moment, facing one another, lips parted, breasts heaving, catching their breath, as Anne’s sleeves and skirts settled and stilled, and George took a kerchief from his doublet and wiped the sweat from his brow.

  Deaf to the applause and the praise and compliments called out by their friends, George slipped his arm tenderly around Anne’s waist and she laid her head gratefully upon his shoulder and put her arm around him, and they walked out into the garden, where the fountains plashed and white roses glowed like ghosts gently billowing in the silvery moonlight.

  Abruptly, spilling red wine, like blood, all over her hands and pale blue gown, George’s wife leapt up.

  “I have to go!” she cried and departed quickly before anyone could cock an inquiring brow or question her. The little Judas, I now know, was scurrying off, straight to Cromwell, to collect her thirty pieces of silver.

  Yawning, Tom Wyatt, his sister Meg, Richard Page, and Madge Shelton, as well as the musicians and servants, said their good nights and went to their beds. But Weston, Norris, and Brereton lingered. They tossed their velvet cloaks over their shoulders and gathered up the wine bottles and their gilded cups and followed Anne and George out into the garden and arranged themselves in a circle upon the grass. Smeaton lagged behind, cradling his lute and staring longingly after Anne and George, but when he started to follow the others out into the garden, I stopped him with the curt and cold pronouncement, “You may go, Master Smeaton!” and he had no choice but to obey, as I was the Queen’s mother and a noblewoman high above him.

  Before the cock crowed he would be in the custody of Cromwell, singing the desperate song that only caged birds do, hoping to save his life. The poor fool!

  I had been troubled lately by a persistent cough that sometimes brought up a trickle of blood or two. I should have stayed inside. Yet I too went out into the garden, to sit upon a bench on the terrace with my shawl draped, but loosely, over my shoulders so that it did little to defend me against the night’s dampness and chill.

  The circle of friends sat and drank until, yawning and heavy-eyed, they wrapped themselves in their cloaks and lay down amongst the flowers.

  “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” Francis Weston said, his words, punctuated by a yawn, only half a jest, amongst agreeing murmurs, before they fell asleep.

  Anne and George remained awake. Standing amongst dew-dampened white flowers, they watched the sun rise, leaning in each other’s arms, with Anne’s head pillowed on George’s shoulder, and his resting against hers, their black hair mingling, weaving together in such a way that anyone looking at them would be unable to tell where one ended and the other began.

  When the sun was fully in the sky and the palace behind them bustling with life, servants coming in with inquiries about breakfast and whether Anne would like a bath, which I took the liberty of shielding her from and shooing them out, Anne and George turned and faced one another. They stood and stared for a long time into each other’s eyes. He cupped her face in his hands and bent and gently kissed her lips.

  Jane was back, having come in with the servants; she stood behind me, looking over my shoulder. She saw them kiss. But I, the mother who gave birth to them, can swear, in spite of what that lying little snake would tell Cromwell, there was nothing carnal in that kiss. They did not touch and mingle tongues as would be claimed in a court of law where they soon would both be fighting for their lives and to clear their vilely slandered names.

  As Jane smoldered behind me, a quaking volcano of rage so soon to erupt, seething, hissing through tightly clenched teeth, “You’ll be sorry; soon you’ll all be sorry!” Anne flung her arms around George’s neck, and for a long time they clung together, desperate and shaking, as though neither could bear to let the other go.

  At last, they stepped apart. With tears streaming down her face and lips trembling, Anne caught his hand, desperately, clutching it between both of hers, against her heart, as though she could not bear to let him go. Gently, George took one of her hands in his and drew her arm straight out.

  “To life’s last faint ember,” he said as he bowed gallantly over her trembling hand and pressed his lips reverently against its flesh as though there were nothing in this world more precious to him.

  Anne nodded. Seemingly too overcome to speak. She shut her eyes and swallowed hard.

  “Good-bye—no!” She hastily amended as a frown creased George’s brow. “We would never say good-bye! Adieu, Sir Loyal Heart.”

  “Adieu, Lady Perseverance.” George smiled through his own tears. “Adieu,” he whispered and swiftly kissed her hand again before he tore himself from her side.

  Halfway to the terrace, he turned, pausing where their friends still slept, snoring, cocooned in their velvet cloaks, amidst a litter of golden goblets and wine bottles cradled by the dew-damp grass and May flowers. He plucked a white flower and, with a cocky smile, stuck it in his black hair, behind his ear, and picked up a wine bottle that was still half full and drank from it. How typical of George, to try to introduce a note of levity into the saddest song.

  “I am with you always. . . .” he called back to Anne.

  She nodded, smiling through her tears, and finished with him, “until the end of time.”

  After George had gone, Anne rushed past me, in a blur of clacking white pearls, shimmering silver threads, and white fur, with her black hair flying out behind her like the tail of a comet, and ran into her room and slammed the door.

  I never saw either of my children again.

  I went to my room. I was of a sudden very hot and wanted to bathe my face with cooling water and strip off my velvet gown and lie down in my shift for a little while. My head ached abominably and felt heavy as stone, though I had not drunk much wine at all. I felt my face and found it afire with fever. My throat also burned; every swallow pained me, and I wanted to ask Marie to make me a tonic of lemon juice and honey to ease it, but I lacked the strength even to pull the tasseled silk rope beside my bed to summon her.

  I will lie down, just for an hour or so, mayhap two, I said to myself. Then I will rise and go to Anne and give her what comfort I can.

  But it was not to b
e.

  16

  When I next opened my eyes I was in my own bed at Hever, stripped down to a sweat-sodden shift that I had worn for many days with my hair an oily, sweaty, matted mess rats might have nested in and showing more gray than ever before.

  “My lady, you mustn’t!” Marie pleaded as she tried to hold me back as I struggled to sit up and floundered amidst the tangle of bedsheets.

  Slapping my maid’s hands away, I bolted from my bed. Without sparing a care for dignity or modesty, I ran in my bare feet and dirty, stinking shift with my ratty-nest hair down the corridor to my husband’s chamber.

  I found him standing before his silver mirror, attended by his valet and tailor, as he tried on a new bloodred velvet robe edged in ermine.

  “Elizabeth!” he rebuked me sharply. “You should be in bed. Andrew!” he barked at his valet. “Fetch a robe to cover my lady-wife. She forgets herself; the fever has clearly addled her senses.”

  I ignored the rat gray—what a fitting color given who it belonged to and the circumstances!—velvet dressing gown Andrew draped over my shoulders and approached my husband. I put out a trembling hand to touch his red robe.

  “What are you doing, Thomas?” I asked. “What occasion is this for?”

  “The trial,” he answered crisply. “I am to sit upon the jury.”

  He went on to explain that Anne and George, along with several of their friends—Henry Norris, William Brereton, Francis Weston, Thomas Wyatt, and Richard Page—were being held as prisoners in the Tower of London. Also imprisoned with them, albeit in worse quarters on account of his common birth, was the lute player, Mark Smeaton, who, though he had given evidence against the others, was himself accused alongside them of having carnally known Queen Anne. The charges were high treason, adultery, and incest. All these men were accused of having carnally known Anne, and the paternity of her children, Princess Elizabeth as well as the babes who had died, was now suspect and under legal scrutiny.

  “And you, my husband, you would do this for the King?” I asked even though I already knew the answer. That he was being fitted for new robes made it rather obvious. I sincerely doubted that Thomas, even if he viewed this as a loathsome and unwelcome responsibility he would rather avoid, had the courage to feign illness at the last instant.

  “Yes,” he answered without hesitation, with an expression in his eyes that conveyed to me that he thought this the most ridiculous of questions, “of course I would.”

  He did not even have the grace to pretend it would be a sacrifice that cost him dear, that the lives of Anne and George mattered to him at all.

  I stood there reeling. It was as though I was seeing Thomas Boleyn, the real Thomas Bullen, for the very first time. “Use and then lose” sums up nicely his philosophy regarding people, including his own children. His affection for them lasted only as long as their usefulness, and the profits and glory they could bring him or help him, through their influence, to acquire. Now Anne and George were finished; they could be of no further use to him, and nothing could be gained by speaking out in their defense and declaring their innocence. They were already as good as dead in their father’s eyes, and he clearly had no qualms about being the one to bang the last nail into their coffin.

  I remember nothing more. It was then that the floor seemed to come up and strike a mighty felling blow to my face. But it didn’t matter. No stone floor could ever, I discovered, be as hard as my husband’s heart.

  When I next regained consciousness, my children were already dead, unbeknownst to me, lying headless in the Tower’s crypt, condemned by their own father, as a jury man in robes the color of blood, as “this vile, incestuous pair,” who deserved death for the crimes they had committed against the King’s person and majesty.

  My husband was at Hampton Court preparing for a wedding. He had given it out that I was “diseased with a bloody cough, which grieves her sore,” to explain my absence, lamenting on my behalf to Mistress Seymour that it grieved me just as sorely as my mortal illness did that I could not be there to walk behind her on her wedding day. But Thomas knew that if I had been there, walking behind her in a festive new gown—not mourning!—I most assuredly would have kicked her. So it was far better for everyone that I keep to my sickbed and spare my husband any embarrassment and the next Queen of England a sore rump.

  And vile Jane—that poisonous viper, the daughter-in-law I now disowned, who had accused Anne of luring George to her bed with her tongue in his mouth, causing George to cry out, “Upon the word of this one woman you are prepared to believe this great evil of me! ”—had taken pride of place amongst the soon-to-be Queen Jane’s ladies of the bedchamber. It would be she, instead of I, who would don a new gown and smilingly carry Mistress Seymour’s ermine-trimmed train upon her wedding day.

  But her prize did not come without a price. There is some justice in this world after all. A widow clad in full woebegone black, a hypocrite mourning the death she caused, Jane was destined to lead a friendless existence. There would be no wooer to relieve her widowhood; George’s blood was on her hands, and no one would ever forget it. She might as well have been wearing red gloves; that was what everyone saw when they looked at her—a woman with bloodstained hands that could never be washed clean. Given the wild distortions and outright lies she had uttered against George and Anne, all the other ladies who likewise served the new queen shied away from her, fearing a day might come when thoughtlessly spoken words or careless actions might be embroidered upon and used against them for some evil, or even fatal, purpose. Whenever she would approach a gossipy gaggle they would instantly fall silent and break apart, making it clear that she was persona non grata.

  They died bravely. Everyone—our chaplain; my physician; the apothecary; the neighbors who came to call bearing gifts, condolences, and remedies for my cough; the servants; Lady Margaret; and even that Judas Jane, who had braved the crowds and borne witness to all the executions, relishing in particular each one of Anne’s last moments—said that as though they expected it to bring me comfort. They died bravely. But they died. They died! George, Weston, Brereton, Norris, and Smeaton on May 17, 1536, and Anne two days later, on the nineteenth. While my prideful streak applauded them for their bold, gracious, and elegant exits, dignified to the very end, my mother’s heart wept tears of blood and stinging salt. That they had died bravely was really no consolation at all. Whether cowardly or courageous upon the scaffold, it was bound to end the same way—they died.

  This flood of maternal grief was so great it took me completely by surprise. I had lost so many children before; I didn’t expect to feel so much. Yet Anne and George, and Mary too, were different; these three had lived long enough to grow up and become people, individuals I could know and see as real human beings, unique in all their foibles and flaws, virtues and vices, passionate in their desires, needs, and convictions, their joys and sorrows, not dead little blue babies I never knew. I knew them all well enough to like, admire, or at least understand, and even love them, and, most assuredly, grieve their loss like no other lives that had ever touched my own. I brought them into the world; I should not have had to watch them leave it. I was old with rotting lungs; they were young, vital and vibrant—I should have been the one to go first.

  Anne accepted death with a goodly grace. Who taught my daughter how to do that? Who taught her how to die, and how to live, so bravely, so differently and defiantly? To dance to her own music instead of the same old staid rhythm everyone else did. Certainly not I. What did I, her own mother, ever teach her except to spend her life in proud defiance trying to prove to the world that she was indeed worthy of love, admiration, and respect, that there is more to beauty than golden hair, a porcelain and roses complexion, and buxom, voluptuous curves. The things that I taught her were not very good lessons for a mother to teach her daughter.

  I marvel now that I did not destroy Anne in a completely different way. What might her life have been if she had not been somehow imbued with such a proud,
fighting spirit? What if she had wilted instead of growing strong and defiant in the face of our disdain? What if she had returned from France quiet and dowdy and never learned to make the most of what she had and let her inner beauty shine in a way that blinded all to her flaws? Would she still be alive today? She would never have danced with kings, set fashions, driven a monarch nigh mad with lust, become Queen of England, and given birth to Elizabeth; the world I had known when Catherine was queen would still be the same, but Anne would, God willing, still be alive. But—I have to ask—would the life that she would have as that meek, ugly, and drab creature, perhaps confined to rot behind convent walls, a life akin to being buried alive, even be worth living? Was the life she had actually lived worth the sacrifice, worth dying for when it all fell apart?

  When the verdict condemning Anne “to be burned or beheaded at the King’s Pleasure,” was read out in court by her own uncle, with her father sitting there straight-faced, she accepted it like a queen, gracious and elegant, never letting her composure slip or crack.

  “Gentlemen”—she turned to address the jury, looking each and every man, including her own relatives, boldly in the eye—“I think you know well the reason why you have condemned me is something other than the evidence presented here today. But you must follow not your own conscience, but the King’s. My only sin against His Majesty has been my jealousy and lack of humility toward him, which his goodness to me merited. I confess I have had jealous fancies and suspicions of him, which I had neither wisdom nor discretion enough to conceal. But God knows, and is my witness, that I have not sinned against him in any other way. Think not that I say this in the hope to save my life. God hath taught me how to die, and He will give me strength. As for my brother, and the other men unjustly condemned, I would willingly die many deaths to save them, but, since it is the King’s Pleasure, I shall accompany them into death, with this assurance, that I shall lead an endless life of peace with them at the foot of the throne of Our Lord.”