by Joann Spears
“That wasn’t all they shared,” boasted Ann Boleyn. “Elizabeth showed Francis the ring that she always wore, with the conjoining cameo portraits—hers and mine—and, at Francis’s humble request, she had a similar jewel made for him.”
The Drake Jewel, I knew, was legendary. It was one of the few such treasures ever given to a commoner (such as everyone believed Francis Drake to be). The jewel contained double, miniaturized cameos: one was of Elizabeth herself, and one was of a phoenix. From the ashes of the two fiery queens whose lives Henry VIII snuffed out, two of the Renaissance era’s greatest overachievers rose up; and not only did they rise up, but they found each other and got those unforgotten wrongs redressed. I was suitably impressed and congratulated Catherine Howard.
“Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, you achieved what Henry VIII never did: a son bathed in glory.”
She beamed and accepted my congratulations with pleasure.
As for myself, I could not help thinking again of my Harry’s Neddie. I’d always felt a little sorry for the boy—half as big, half as smart, half as everything as Trent, Harry’s stepson by his fifth wife, Kitty. I knew that had always stuck in Harry’s craw, because he had raised Neddie with every advantage, but Trent, born when Kitty was only sixteen, had only had what little advantage Kitty was able to provide through her efforts as a go-go dancer. I had always thought that Trent was a young man who would go places. After what I had just learned, however, I had absolutely no doubt that he would find his way around the world and back and never forget his mother wherever he went.
The Sir Francis Drake story had come full circle. Catherine Howard was ready to wrap up her segment and produce her question for me.
“Dolly,” she asked, “is there someone that you have you never forgotten?”
“There are lots of people I’ve never forgotten: relatives…the friends and neighbors I grew up with…former classmates. Tons of people,” I answered.
“I think there may be one former classmate in particular,” replied Catherine.
“Wally, of course,” I said.
“And I’m sure there is a reason you have never forgotten him,” she prompted.
“Does any woman ever forget the man who got away?” I asked.
“Now, Dolly, you know there is a rule against you asking us questions. There is no rule though, against asking yourself the same question.”
Does any woman ever forget the man that got away?
Chapter Thirty-Two
Ann Boleyn Holds Dolly Spellbound
The set and curve of a French hood suited Ann Boleyn’s face and neck perfectly. I could see why she had imported the style from France when she had returned to England from there in 1522. Absolutely everything else about Ann Boleyn’s outfit was flattering to her, as well. Her flattish bustline, slender waist, and middling height were set off to perfection by the cut of her dress, which was innocent of ornament other than her trademark “B” necklace. She surpassed the five more elaborately dressed wives in elegance even though she was dressed so simply, like a Renaissance Audrey Hepburn in a little black dress. She looked so sophisticated that I was a little surprised when she initiated our tête-à-tête by pointing out the obvious.
“My predecessors tonight have all had surprises for you, Dolly.”
I acknowledged that they had and that I expected even more surprises with her own story still to come. I was sure hers would be the juiciest of the six—and that was up against some pretty stiff competition. I have to confess that, after all that I’d heard thus far, I was feeling more than a little overstimulated, and I hoped that wouldn’t make me too twitchy to savor Ann Boleyn’s story to its fullest.
“If I didn’t have my wedding to get back to, and if time wasn’t so short,” I said to Ann, “I would ask for a break from the action for a couple of hours before you begin. You know, just a little quiet time to recoup and get my head together.”
Anne of Cleves, wrist cocked back at the wooden bedpost, blew a wisp of hair from her eyes and rubbed her knuckles. She looked all knocked out.
“Don’t bother, Anne! Give those knuckles a rest,” said Ann Boleyn. “There are more ways than knocking on wood to ensure good luck! It’s high time we employ an alternative method to ward off evil.” She turned to Katherine Parr and said, “You are closest to it. Would you be so kind as to bring me my craft basket? It’s over there on that table.”
Katherine agreed to oblige.
“I will get the basket for you, but please, don’t get carried away with it. You know how Kat Ashley complains when she has to clean up behind you and your ‘more ways than one.’ Besides, Dolly might be allergic, so do be sparing with that stuff!”
The basket that Katherine Parr brought over was full of plump little stuffed cloth bags, tied up with ribbons and neatly labeled. Ann Boleyn foraged through them, selected one, and poured some powder from it into her hand.
“Stand back, Dolly!” she warned, and then she chanted, “Hex, hex, heads on necks!”
With that, Ann Boleyn threw the powder into the air and dispersed it with a puff of breath.
“Phew!” I gasped.
“Paugh!” sputtered Jane Seymour.
“Eeeeeyuck!” gagged Anne of Cleves.
“Ann, really! Was brimstone absolutely necessary?” asked Katherine Parr.
“It’s the best thing for protection,” Ann Boleyn assured her. “And it can have other advantages, as well. I’ll bet that now, finally, Dolly will remember not to make a careless comment like that again.”
She had me there. There was nothing like having sulfur blown into your face to jog your memory in the future.
“And now, back to business,” Ann said. “Since you were looking so forward to my story, Dolly, I hope you will not be disappointed to learn that, unlike my predecessors, I have no surprises in store for you at all.”
I found that hard to believe but said nothing, simply shrugging my shoulders. Ann continued speaking.
“They have all told you things about themselves that history neither intimated nor recorded.”
“True,” I acknowledged.
“I, on the other hand, have nothing to tell you about myself that my contemporaries did not surmise. And they recorded it all for posterity.”
I could only guess that she was referring to the adultery charges that had led to—or rather, justified—her execution. Boleyn apologists have always maintained that they were trumped-up charges, and, until that moment, I had always been inclined to agree with them. I said as much to Ann Boleyn, and she harrumphed with disgust.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Dolly. As though Henry VIII, or any other man, ever meant anything to me between the sheets! I had bigger fish to fry.”
I had seen enough of Ann Boleyn’s fishwife side to believe with asperity that she was a woman with other fenny snakes to fillet, as Shakespeare put it.
“Would your bigger fish be the poet Wyatt?” I asked. “He did precede Henry Tudor as your suitor. I always assumed that yours was a platonic relationship, since he went on in such standard troubadour format about how unattainable you were. Maybe I was wrong.”
“Faugh!” said Ann. “Thomas Wyatt was as bad as Henry, all toil and trouble. He couldn’t keep it in his codpiece, even though I made it perfectly clear I wanted nothing to do with him.”
“‘Fire burn and cauldron bubble,’ you sent Wyatt packing on the double,” I conjectured.
“Precisely, Dolly.”
“Then maybe your bigger fish was Lord Percy, the callow youth you were engaged to before Henry VIII came along. It was full steam ahead with you two until Cardinal Wolsey got involved and killed the relationship in its crib. Wolsey’s interference in the affair is said to have been the catalyst for your vendetta against him.”
“Dolly, be serious. That affair was just a passing fancy. As if Lord Percy was worth wasting that kind of emotion on! We are talking about the same Lord Percy who let Henry VIII take me away from him without a fight and the same Lo
rd Percy who voted to convict me, years later, when I was on trial for my life. Come on, now.”
Dragon’s scale, wolf’s tooth; so much for the callow youth, I thought. Percy was reputed to have died young and broken hearted because of his perfidy, but I thought it best not to mention it to Ann just then. I proposed another piscatorial candidate instead.
“Your tame musician, Mark Smeaton, could have been the catch of the day; the adoring young artist, chastely devoted to his Lady Bountiful, makes quite a pretty picture.”
Ann snorted; it was fortunate that the brimstone had dissipated, or she would have been in real trouble. “Smeaton! He would have preferred duets with my brother George to consorting with me—not that that kind of thing isn’t perfectly alright.”
Toe of dog and eye of newt, I thought, it was not the boy who played the lute. I was out of aces and admitted as much to Ann Boleyn.
“So, your bigger fish and fennier snakes were not the admirers you had before Henry VIII came along.”
“No,” Ann replied. “The bigger fish had nothing to do with the love of men, Dolly.”
“Don’t tell me that you’re a lesbian, too!” I said.
“No, I’m not a lesbian; not that that wouldn’t have been alright, as well,” Ann replied. “But really, Dolly, I am shocked at such a feeble guessing—and from someone who vaunts her brains as you do.”
Katherine Parr concurred.
“I must admit to being surprised at you as well, Dolly. I would have thought the sulfur to be a dead giveaway. The lateness of the hour must be catching up with you. It’s not like you to be so obtuse.”
“Dolly is not obtuse, she is prescient!” Catherine Howard proclaimed, rushing to my defense. “Anyone would become disoriented with sulfur being blown at them.”
“Let’s see just how prescient Dolly really is,” said Ann Boleyn.
With that, Ann pushed back her black sleeve and, with her exposed right hand, pulled down the high collar of her gown. This revealed a large, and not very pretty, mole on her neck and the growth of a stunted sixth finger off of her right pinky.
“I don’t know about prescient,” I said modestly, “but I do recognize those, Ann. Your contemporaries recorded the growths on your neck and finger as evidence of your being a witch. Modern minds are more enlightened, though, and know that those markings are just blips of nature.”
“You are correct, Dolly, insomuch as markings like these not making a witch. But initiation by bell, book, and candle—now that is another story.”
Wing of bat and dragon’s willie! How could I have been so silly? I wondered. I addressed Ann Boleyn forthwith.
“So, it wasn’t the adultery charges brought against you that were true; it was the allegations of black magic made against you by people in the know! You weren’t guilty of being a whore; you were guilty of being a witch!” I said.
“I will own up to being a witch, but I am in no way guilty of it or about it,” Ann Boleyn said. “I am proud to be a witch. Even in this godforsaken place, I practice my craft every opportunity I get.”
“I thought a witch would have said ‘goddess-forsaken,’” I offered, halfway joking.
“I have had my trials, but they were never because the Goddess had forsaken me.”
I was not about to go toe-to-toe with a woman who had “the Goddess” at her back and a craft basket at her side. I yielded to the inevitable and asked Ann Boleyn to tell me her story—“in all its gory detail”—to which she obliged, starting with her childhood.
“As a girl growing up, I was sickened, Dolly, by the sexual laxity of the women in my immediate family. Each one was such a willing victim of Henry VIII’s lust! Those weak-willed females were the fish I would like to have seen literally fried, Dolly. Fried for their sexual laxity, for one thing. Fried for their failure to capitalize on their sexual conquests, for another.”
“So, you wanted those fish fried since they’d already been boned?” I asked.
“See, Dolly, even you are making jokes about my closest relatives! My mother was the daughter of a duke and descendant of a king! Yet, she had allowed herself to be a mere plaything of Henry’s in her youth, and for a humiliatingly brief period; I overheard the servants talking about it when I was a child. You can imagine my fury.”
“I can! And the word ‘ew’ does come to mind.”
I heard Jane’s Seymour’s voice, howling from the proverbial wilderness.
“Ew is not a word, Dolly. It is an interjection, isn’t it? Or maybe I mean an ejaculation.”
We all tried hard to keep straight faces. It wasn’t easy, and Jane sensed the contained laughter in the room.
“Have I made a faux pas? I didn’t mean to be purulent,” Jane said.
“You mean ‘prurient,’ Jane,” corrected Katharine of Aragon. “Purulent is—”
“Purulent is like the sores on Henry’s gouty leg!” interrupted Catherine Howard. “I ought to know!”
I simply could not contain my laughter anymore, but Ann Boleyn was not amused. She foraged something else out of her craft basket: white rose petals. She sprinkled some over Catherine Howard, who, in spite of opening and closing her mouth repeatedly, was now unable to make a single sound.
“’You tried to be cute, so now you are mute! There is nothing like white rose petals for silence spells. They work every time,” said Ann Boleyn. She was positively gloating.
“Pardon me, but wasn’t that a bit extreme?” I asked.
Anne of Cleves reassured me. “Don’t worry, Dolly, Ann’s spells never last long. Knowing how much ruckus she caused with her witchcraft back on earth, the Almighty put limits on the magic she is able to perform here in this place.”
“If I may continue, after I was so rudely interrupted,” Ann Boleyn went on. “I grew up in silent shame at my mother’s weakness and in fury at her failure to exploit an opportunity. Sleeping with a king as a means to an end is one thing; in our time, it was a good way for a woman to earn long-term security for a short-term investment of time and effort. Really, though, to sleep with a king for no other reason than the codpiece payoff, the way my mother did—ugh. I thought it would be such a relief when I was finally able to leave home for France.”
Knowing Tudor history as I do, I knew that the girl was going to be disappointed.
“Imagine my mortification when I arrived, a blushing maiden, to serve Queen Claude at the French court,” Ann Boleyn continued. “I learned that my sister Mary was no better than my mother and had become the mistress of the French king. Then, when he tired of her and sent her back to England, she hopped directly into the bed of Henry VIII. Disgusting! Codpieces were all that my sister Mary was interested in.”
“It does fall into the category of ‘almost too “ew” to be true,’” I admitted. “They say the French king called your sister his English mare, because he enjoyed riding her so much.”
Ann glowered. “The French king also said that my sister Mary was the greatest and most infamous whore of all, but that was nothing compared to what I had to say about her! I was mortified that my beautiful and promising sister had followed so pusillanimously in my mother’s footsteps. And at two different royal courts, no less! You would not have wanted to be in my shoes, Dolly. I left the French court with my head hung low because of my sister’s shame, only to find her shamed again at the English court—and by the same man who had traduced our mother!”
Having both mother and sister traduced must have reduced the Team Boleyn self-esteem to nil, and very understandably so, in my opinion. I said as much to Ann, who then proceeded with her tale.
“My sister was just as foolish as my mother when it came to making the most, or should I say the least, of an opportunity. It still makes me shudder to think that with all her potential, Mary settled for marriage and rustication with that fuddy-duddy William Carey!”
“I’m not surprised that Mary’s ‘just settling’ unsettled you so,” I told her. I could have said more, but I felt it best to leave it at th
at. Maybe later in the proceedings would be the right time to clue Ann in on what happened when the dust finally settled from Mary Boleyn’s “just settling.” For whatever it was worth, Mary Boleyn could count the current queen of England, the late Princess Diana of Wales, and the current heir to the throne among her descendants.
Ann moved on to the next traduced relative. It seemed like she had a never-ending supply.
“My cousin Madge Shelton wound up flat on her back next. I grew up with Madge, and I knew her well. The girl had the soul of a poet, so it was particularly saddening that Henry VIII brought her low, as well. When it was all over, she was fobbed off with a marriage even less advantageous than my sister Mary’s.”
The whole thing really was pretty unthinkable once you had connected all the relationship dots: Henry VIII slept with a mother and her daughter, an aunt and her niece, and two first cousins in the Boleyn family. And that was before Ann Boleyn and the temporarily silent Catherine Howard, who was also a Boleyn cousin, were under starter’s orders. Even though he lived in a court where just about everyone was related in one way or another, there was something creepy about Henry’s serial predilection for the flowers of Boleyn womanhood.
“After all that, you can’t have been very surprised when Henry VIII followed suit and took up pursuit of you, Ann. Skeeved maybe, but not surprised,” I said.
“In 1526, just before Henry turned his attention to me, I learned what was behind the whole sorry business. It was my own father.”
“Don’t tell me Henry had a thing for your father, as well!”
My mistaken supposition drove Ann Boleyn back to her craft basket. When she returned, she sprinkled some very aromatic herbs over my head. I remember thinking that I was going to have a devil of a time shampooing the smell of them out of my hair before the wedding tomorrow.
“I cover you in leaf of bay, your imagination no more to run away,” Ann chanted.