The Last Boleyn

by Karen Harper

  “I do not covet your gratitude in any way, my lord. I did it for the love I bear my wife and her mother.”

  They faced each other staring over Mary, who stood between them. “I regret, Stafford, that Hever must revert to the crown upon our deaths, now that George is gone. In proper times it would have gone to Mary as the surviving heir or her Uncle James. It is a wonder to me that His Royal Majesty left me Hever even until I die. Sometimes I think he did it for Mary. Do you understand me, Stafford? Hever goes to the crown.”

  “Mary values Hever, not I, my lord. Wivenhoe will always be enough for me.”

  “I see. Then would you ever choose to do me any service for myself?”

  “For the love I bear your daughter who loves you all too well, my lord, yes.”

  Thomas Boleyn was the first to break the grip lock of their eyes as he looked toward the door. “Mary has often been foolish, but then so have you, Stafford. No, Elizabeth, I will say this. You had the chance to have much of wealth and lands from the king.”

  “I wanted nothing from him but my freedom, Lord Boleyn, even as Mary and I want that from you.”

  “Well, maybe you were right not to trust him. Trust no one. Cromwell did one last favor for Anne when he fetched Mary to her and then he turned on us all. I would ask you for one favor before you go to Wivenhoe.”

  “My lord, they can well stay in my house as long as they should like to,” Elizabeth Boleyn said, rising from her chair.

  “Their home is Wivenhoe, wife. They prefer it. He has said it.”

  “We shall go today then, but we may be back to see Lady Elizabeth. And I assume that your grandchildren are welcome here to see their grandmother. If not, she will be asked to come to Wivenhoe in the summers or whenever she would wish.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course.” Lord Boleyn pointed toward the solar, and Mary feared he would order them from his home instantly. His hand shook as he pointed. “I would like you, Lord Stafford, to take the king’s portrait down from the wall in my entryway and bury it somewhere in the gardens and do not tell me where. Bury it and slice it to ribbons if you would, for us both, for all of us! I should like to put my fist through it again and again, but, ’sbones, I have not the strength!”

  Elizabeth Boleyn went to him and wrapped her thin arms protectively around him as his dry sobs wracked his shaking body. Staff went to the door and then came back to pull Mary after him. He closed the door to the solar gently.

  “I have never seen them like that, Staff. She is comforting him,” she whispered in the hall as they stood under the big portrait.

  “Maybe it will be a new start for them now in the years they have left, Mary.” He turned and pulled the portrait out from the wall to peer behind it. “Dirt and dust and wretched bugs,” he said. He grasped the heavy frame and lifted the painting high off its hooks. “I almost think,” he said low to her, “that he would have softened if we would have begged him to let us stay here and live with them.” He turned his alert face to hers.

  “But he must know we could never do that, my love. Wivenhoe is our home.”

  A beautiful smile lit his tired face and his eyes caressed her. “Then we shall do this last task and gather up Nancy, Stephen, and the lad and be on our way home, my wife.”

  They went far out past the knot garden and the beds of tightbudded roses to the pond by the willows. “Will you fetch me a gardener with a shovel?” he said to her as he bent over the painting and drew his dagger. She stared down on the rough oil-painted surface at the face she had once known so well. Shadows of the willow boughs flitted across the strong, stern features. The narrow eyes seemed to shift and the huge hands were in shadow.

  “When Anne was little, she used to be afraid of this portrait,” Mary thought aloud. “She said once the hands were too big and the eyes were like father’s.” She turned away and hurried to find Michael, the gardener who had always lived about the grounds at Hever. Michael’s face lit when he saw her and he came on the run with his shovel. She sat on the bench near the sundial which would soon be surrounded by the young shoots of mint and dill and watched Michael and then Staff dig. This is where she had been sitting before the labor pains for Harry began, she thought, and Michael was here to help her then. Suddenly reality stabbed at her again. Anne had just drifted off to leave her sitting here alone because she did not feel well enough to tell her how things were going at court. Tears of memory blinded her eyes, for Anne would never laugh and flit about the gardens of Hever again.

  She went no nearer as the two men took turns digging a hole under the willow tree to bury the king’s head, and her thoughts wandered again. Had sad Meg Roper finally buried her father’s head? she mused. Staff always got on so democratically with servants that it amazed her. Why, it was as though Stephen was his best friend.

  And then, as she watched them lift the huge frame into its grave and begin to shovel the soil back in, it came to her that her awful past was surely ready to be buried now too. It was as though, through the grief of losing George and Anne, it had gone with them off her shoulders and from her haunted thoughts. “Wait, Staff,” she called and dashed to them. “Wait, my lord, do not fill it all in yet. There is something I would add.”

  She darted through the gardens and into the house past the still closed solar door. She ran up the steps which she had once descended to face the king only to find Staff’s dark eyes awaiting her. She shoved the strands of pearls from dear Anne aside and dug under the garnet necklace Staff had given her so long ago at Whitehall. There it was. She had not dared to look on it since the sad death of its beloved giver two years before. It was just as the fair Tudor Rose had handed it to her over their chess game so long ago.

  Staff and Michael awaited her return, and Michael looked on in surprise as Mary showed Staff the green and white gilded chess pawn in her open palm. “’Tis a little thing,” Michael observed.

  “No, Michael, it is a big, big thing,” Staff told the puzzled man as Mary dumped the pawn into the freshly turned earth of the grave and Staff covered it.

  “I have seen your fine gardens, Michael,” Staff complimented the man after the hole was filled. “I have seen them over the years and admired them. Are you wed, Michael?”

  The gangly man smiled guiltily and the gap between his teeth showed as it always had. “No, milord. I never did yet find the lass to love and wed with, an’ I couldna see weddin’ only to raise a passel a young ones.”

  “A wise man,” Staff said seriously and patted the glowing Michael on the shoulder. “I will tell you this, Michael, and I want you to remember my words.”

  “Oh, yes, milord.”

  “When the day should come that Hever must be sold, if you do not wish to stay, buy a horse and come to Wivenhoe near Colchester to Lady Mary’s home there. We will be expanding our meager gardens there over the years, and we shall have need of a sure hand like yours. Even if it never happens for years, you remember to come to Wivenhoe to us.”

  “Thankee, milord,” Michael managed, and tears sprang to his green eyes.

  “Goodbye for now, Michael. You have always been a true friend to the Bullens,” Mary said and found a smile for him inside her bereft, tired mind.

  Staff took her arm and they went slowly toward the painted facade of the house through the gardens. “I did not bury the portrait, Mary,” he said at last as they went under the iron teeth of the drawbridge. “I cut it out and buried only the frame. The portrait should be for Elizabeth. He is her father nevertheless and it will be a heritage from Hever which she may well never see.” He shoved the tightly rolled canvas under his doublet.

  “Very well, my Staff,” she said, “but do not hang it in my house in the meanwhile.”

  “I shall hide it in the deepest chest in the cellar, I promise,” he said.

  As they entered the house, the front door stood ajar to catch the fresh breezes and in a pool of sunlight on the floor, Andrew played with his carved horse and a heavy gold chain. Mary bent over him to examine it.
“What do you have, sweetheart?” she inquired and Staff halted on the first step upstairs.

  “Staff, it is my father’s chest chain with the king’s seal. But where...”

  “I gave it to the lad, Mary. I have no need of it,” her father’s voice came from the door of the solar. “I have another I shall send your Harry if you like. Leave the boy be. He is having a fine time smashing that wooden horse into it, though he looks at me as though I am some sort of gremlin from a nightmare.”

  “Thank you for the gift to him, father. He is only a bit shy around, well, strangers. I would be proud to have him know you more over the years.”

  “There will not be many years, daughter. I can feel it.” He nodded toward the dusty rectangle on the wall where the sun never went. “I see the portrait is gone.”

  “Yes, it is gone,” Staff said.

  “Then you and I are even, Stafford. You have Mary and you did me a favor freely.”

  Staff nodded silently, the lower half of his body in the same pool of sun in which Andrew played quietly now. Lady Elizabeth came to the open door of the solar and old, crooked Semmonet leaned hard on her cane behind.

  “You will stay for a noon supper before you set out,” Elizabeth Boleyn’s voice came to them in the silence of the house.

  “Yes, of course, Lady Elizabeth,” Staff said, his eyes still on Thomas Boleyn as though he were waiting for something.

  “We—I wish you well, Mary,” her father said then. “And, of all the plans and dreams and the three fine children, he ensnared us all, and only golden Mary survived,” he chanted as though he were in a trance. He looked down jerkily at the boy who played with the shining chain in the sunlight and turned back into the solar.

  Mary stared after his back as he disappeared behind the door. For a moment she thought he would come out again young and strong, and ask her what she had overhead, and tell her that she was going to Brussels to the court of the Archduchess. But, no, that was a long dead time ago and there sat her son, hers and Staff’s.

  “Mother, could you summon Nancy to watch Andrew while we pack to go home?” Mary asked.

  “I think his grandfather and I shall tend him in the solar until you are ready to sup with us, my Mary,” her mother answered with tears in her blue eyes. Her silver head bent down and she lifted the boy to his feet.

  Behind Mary, Staff touched her shoulder, and she turned to smile at him. Then they hurried up the stairs hand in hand to pack.

  Author’s Note

  I have been intrigued by Mary Boleyn since I first stumbled upon brief mention of her during my undergraduate history classes in the late 1960s. And so, after graduate school studying European literature and many trips to England, I wrote about Mary for British History Magazine in 1980 and then wrote this novel, which was first published in 1983. Since then, it is obvious that interest in this woman, formerly the least remembered of the radiant and rapacious Boleyn clan, has greatly increased.

  Mary, I believe, emerges as the loveliest, and eventually, the wisest and strongest of that fated family. As I have written other historical novels and Elizabethan mysteries over the years centered on Elizabeth Tudor, England’s greatest queen, I have wondered if Mary’s story impacted her brilliant niece. Perhaps it wasn’t only the way Henry VIII had treated Elizabeth’s mother and his other queens that taught Elizabeth never to trust a man, especially if he was a king. The lessons her Aunt Mary had learned the hard way were probably not lost on this clever woman.

  Several minor characters in this novel such as servants are necessarily fictional; however, the major characters and places are as authentically drawn as on-site visits, history, maps, and records will allow. I have been fortunate to be able to travel to the sites used in this story, some several times.

  Quiet moated Hever Castle, which becomes almost a character in Mary’s story, like much else, fell to the king in 1538 when Thomas Boleyn died a year after his wife. At that time, instead of merely taking Hever, as was the legal custom, the king arranged a sort of sale and, for an unrecorded reason, made certain that a sum was paid to his long-ago mistress Mary Stafford. Guilt money? Affection money? Money to assure her eldest son was well-reared? That is for us to wonder, but it does again suggest the magnetism of this woman.

  Henry Tudor and Francois of France died the same year, 1547. Henry had finally been given his male heir through his marriage to Jane Seymour, who died soon after bearing the child, but, as is fully recorded, it is the Boleyn child Elizabeth who was the great-est Tudor ruler. Mary Stafford’s two eldest children served their cousin and queen, Elizabeth I, loyally. Catherine Carey became gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber at the accession of the queen. Henry Carey, 1st Lord Hunsdon, served as her trusted advisor and put down the Catholic Dacre Rebellion in 1570.

  Those who were so treacherous to the Boleyns at the last eventually met their own tragic ends: Thomas Cromwell was hanged, drawn, and quartered after falling from power for failing to please his king in the procurement of his fourth queen; Jane Rochford was beheaded with King Henry’s fifth queen, Catherine Howard, for acting as her panderer; and the king himself died a gross and disease-ridden man.

  I wish to especially thank Gavin Astor, second Baron Astor of Hever Castle in Kent, who owned Hever when I wrote this novel, for his kind correspondence, the use of his own research, and his encouragement. The Astor family no longer owns Hever, but it is still open to the public and makes a great day trip from London.

  And my gratitude as always to my husband, travel companion, and proofreader, Don.

  Karen Harper

  April 2005

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  The Last Boleyn

  About this Guide

  Greed, lust for power, sex, lies, secret marriages, religious posturing, adultery, beheadings, international intrigue, treachery, and betrayal. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The Last Boleyn tells the story of the rise and fall of one of England’s most powerful families, through the eyes of the eldest daughter, Mary.

  Although her sister Anne (who became the queen), and secondarily her brother George (who was executed alongside Anne), and father Thomas are the ones most remembered by history, Mary was the Boleyn that set into motion the chain of events that brought about their meteoric rise to power, as well as the one who managed to escape their equally remarkable fall. Sent away from home at an extraordinarily young age, Mary is quickly plunged into the dangerous world of court politics, where everything is beautiful, but deceptive, and everyone is always watching and manipulating. As she grows into a woman, Mary must navigate the dangerous waters ruled by two kings (not to mention her own family) in order to finally find a place for herself and the love she so deeply desires.

  The questions in this guide are intended as a framework for your group’s discussion of The Last Boleyn.

  1. Throughout The Last Boleyn, the image of life in court as a game of chess is discussed. What does the chess game mean to Mary Bullen, and how does the way she plays the game differ from those around her? Who at court is the wisest player, and who wields the most power over time?

  2. When Mary leaves the French court to return to England, what lessons does she take with her? Who has she met that has had the greatest impact (either in a positive or negative way) on her as she has grown? What experiences in her adolescence in France most shape the woman she becomes?

  3. In the world of this novel, a great deal of one’s status is determined by family—both William Stafford and William Carey for example are in positions where their limited social standing is directly linked to the rebellion of previous generations, and much is made of the “Howard blood” in Mary Bullen’s lineage. To what extent do you see the roles of the characters as fixed, and where do we see someone making their own place in the world? Can a person ever truly escape the sins of their fathers in Tudor England? How far can the ambitious self-made man or woman carry themselves?

  4. Of all the Queens of both France and England we see, which one do y
ou like the most? Who is the shrewdest player of her precarious part? Who is the bravest in asserting herself? In what way do the actions of one have repercussions on those that come after her? How do you see the future Queen Jane Seymour’s role?

  5. Discuss the relationships Thomas Bullen has with his children. In what ways do they each rebel and in what ways are they influenced by the way he treats them? Why is it that they each react somewhat differently to their place in the world and in his life? In what ways do their relationships with him play out in their relationships with each other?

  6. Why do you think Lady Elizabeth was once able to stand up to Lord Bullen when he tried to force her to become the king’s mistress, but could never do the same on behalf of her children? How do you see the power structure in the Bullen household, and how does it compare to the power structure in the outside world?

  7. Discuss the character of Anne. What do you think of the woman she grew up to be? Do her actions at the end of her life redeem her for the way she treated Mary and others previously? Where do we see her most blatant play for power within the family, and could you, as a reader, ultimately forgive her behavior?

  8. Mary tells Staff of the nightmares that have been haunting her since Sir Thomas More’s execution. Why do you think the story of Meg Roper affects her as deeply as it does? What in this tale strikes such a deep chord within Mary that she can’t get the image out of her mind and even feels the need to reach out to the girl?

  9. Why do you think Anne changes the family’s name from Bullen to Boleyn? Is this a cosmetic change she makes at a whim, or is she making a larger statement to the world and/or the rest of her family?

  10. At what point, if ever, do we really see Mary assert her independence? What enables her to stand up for what she really wants and stay firm in her convictions and her choices? From where does she draw her strength?