The Boleyn Wife

by Brandy Purdy

  As she made her way to Tower Green, escorted by her female attendants, guards, and Master Kingston, she showed no sign of fear or sorrow. Her eyes were clear, dry, and bright, and her steps never faltered.

  There was no more of the morbid jesting she had so freely indulged in during her stay in the Tower. “Queen Anne Sans-Tête, Queen Anne Lackhead, history shall call me!” she had quipped, her wild laughter sending shivers down the spines of all who heard it. “Decapitation shall be my fate, because Henry’s love turned to hate!” Of the French executioner imported especially for her, she had said, “I have heard tell the executioner is very good, and I have a little neck!” And as she was carefully choosing her clothes, she remarked, “While I select a gown to die in, Jane Seymour is trying on her wedding gown! Out with the old, in with the new!” Leaning in the window, breathing in the night air for the last time, she gave an exaggerated sniff. “Master Kingston, is that a whiff of bridal cake I smell borne upon the breeze?” But there was none of that now. She was calm and ready to meet her fate.

  At the foot of the scaffold she hesitated. Master Kingston held out his hand to help her up the steps. But it was not fear that stayed her.

  “Master Kingston.” She spoke loud and clear, because she wanted everyone to hear. “Please commend me to His Majesty, and tell him that he has ever been constant in advancing me; from a private gentlewoman he made me a marquess, from a marquess he made me a queen, and now that he has no greater honor to bestow upon me, he gives my innocence the crown of martyrdom.”

  Then she gathered up her skirts and ascended the thirteen steps.

  Aye, I hated her, it’s true—and I still do—but she was undoubtedly the bravest person I have ever known.

  At the top of the steps she unclasped her robe and let it fall backwards into the arms of Meg Lee, and I saw then that over her blood red satin kirtle she wore a plain, unadorned gown of black damask with a deep, square bodice cut so low the curves of her shoulders showed.

  Head held high, as imperious as the queen she still believed herself to be, she went to meet the executioner. He was a tall man, dressed all in black and wearing a half mask.

  Gallantly, the French executioner knelt and kissed her hand and they spoke softly for a few moments in French. Her voice was lilting and cheerful, and her dark eyes flashed with a beguiling sparkle. She reached up behind her neck and unclasped her favorite necklace—the pearls with the golden B—and pressed it into his hand. Then, with apparent regret, he began to instruct her.

  After she had made her parting speech, she was to kneel just there—at the center of the scaffold—and look straight ahead. Unlike with English executions—so clumsy, so messy, with the big, cumbersome axe—there was no need for a block.

  “Good Christian people,” Anne began to speak. “I am come hither to die according to the law, and therefore I will speak nothing against it and accuse no man. I pray God to save the King and send him long to reign over you, for a kinder or more merciful prince there was never, and he was ever a good and gentle sovereign lord to me….”

  Oh! If she had run at Henry screaming obscenities and attacked him tooth and nail and driven her knee into the royal codpiece, Anne could not have made her meaning plainer! It was all there in her manner and voice. Her sardonic tone and the way she arched her brows and cocked her head spoke volumes. It was brilliant! No one could fault her words, but they were like pellets of poison rolled in honey and sugar. The phrasing was unerringly correct—it sounded just like a proper leave-taking—but the way she said it…If Henry had been there he would have run up onto the scaffold and throttled her, or seized the great two-handed sword and beheaded her himself!

  “I submit to death with good will, asking pardon of all the world, and yield myself humbly to the will of the King. And if any person will meddle with my cause, I require them to judge best. Thus, I take my leave of the world, and heartily desire you all to pray for me.”

  With swift grace, she turned and sank to her knees, taking a moment to arrange the drape of her skirts more becomingly, and fold her hands placidly in her lap, letting the deep, hanging cuffs of her famous sleeves fall over them.

  Meg Lee tottered towards her, nearly blind with tears, clutching a white linen cloth—a blindfold. But Anne waved it away and stared straight ahead; she would face death as boldly as she had faced life.

  “To Jesus, I commend my soul!” she cried.

  A swift slash of silver steel ended Anne’s life. So died the only woman who had ever made a fool of Henry Tudor, challenged and denied him.

  At that very moment the Tower cannons boomed to let Henry know that he was now free to marry Jane Seymour.

  A good Catholic, the French executioner crossed himself and murmured a prayer, then reluctantly bent to do his duty. In heavily accented English he spoke the traditional words as he held her head high. “So perish all the King’s enemies!”

  Suddenly the air was rife with screams, and dozens of women fell fainting to the ground, some of whom were injured and trampled by those who fled in terror.

  Anne’s lips and eyes were moving still, opening and closing. When at last they stopped, eyes frozen wide in an accusing stare, she was looking right at me.

  True to her words, Anne had left Henry’s life with her head held high, but by a French executioner’s hand, and not her own damnable pride.

  Very gently, the French executioner lowered her head and laid it in the straw, and with a tender brush of his hand that was almost a caress, he closed her dark eyes. His face showing pale below his mask, he stumbled down the steps and called for wine. His manservant came running with a leather wineskin and, brushing aside the pewter cup, the executioner raised it to his lips and gulped it down. When he turned round and saw that his assistant was stripping the corpse, he shouted angrily, “Her shift, leave the good lady her shift and some dignity!” Her clothes were his perquisite, so his orders were obeyed.

  Meg Lee and Mistress Orchard came to wrap her body in a length of black cloth. It was only then that they discovered that no coffin had been provided, and an old battered arrow chest was hastily brought out to fill the need.

  I watched mutely as Anne’s makeshift coffin was lowered down into the vault beneath the floor of St. Peter ad Vincula to rest atop George’s coffin, beside their dearest friends and the lowborn, lovestruck musician.

  “Now they are at rest,” Meg Lee said.

  “Who?” I asked blankly, my mind again wandering lost, confused, and dizzy, in a strange, swirling mist.

  “Anne and George—your husband,” she added, seeing my blank, bewildered stare and the way I crinkled my brow quizzically at the mention of his name.

  “No!” I shook my befuddled head adamantly, as I stared down into the dark and dusty vault.

  They were both gone now, the person I had loved most and the person I had hated most, and I had helped kill them both.

  “He is not my husband; he was never really mine.”

  Part Two

  Jane Seymour

  Anna of Cleves

  1536–1540

  33

  Ten days after Anne died, I watched the King marry Jane Seymour in the chapel at Whitehall. Both wore radiant white satin, though the more superstitious members of the court whispered that it was not meet to marry in diamonds and pearls as they symbolized tears and sorrow.

  “This time I marry for love!” King Henry crowed, jubilant and smiling, conveniently forgetting his grand, all-consuming passion for Anne Boleyn, and not once throughout the ceremony did his eyes leave his beloved’s face.

  Framed by shining, abundant waves of white-blond hair, crowned by a chaplet of pearls and white roses, Jane Seymour’s face wore an expression of breathless awe, as if she could not quite believe this was truly happening and expected at any moment to awaken from a dream.

  I watched the sunlight streaming in through the stained glass window bathe her in an eerie blue light and, in spite of the warmth of the day, I shivered. She looked li
ke a woman drowning in blue, the way her pale face, hair, and gown absorbed the color. My mind would hark back to this day eighteen months later when I watched her die, with her face and lips tinged blue, gasping for air.

  Afterwards, Henry showered his beloved in pearls, pouring a basket filled with large, lustrous white pearls over her head, and draping long ropes of them about her neck and waist.

  “Pearls for my pearl!” he cried, laughing as she spun slowly around in happy bewilderment, pearls dripping from her hair and the folds of her gown to scatter upon the floor with a sound like raindrops on a tile roof.

  Jane Seymour made her debut as Queen that night. She entered the Great Hall wearing a gown of rust-red velvet, with a gold fishnet pattern embroidered on the wide cuffs of her hanging sleeves, and a gold and black gable hood hiding her hair. Pearls, double-stranded and interspersed with ruby-centered gold roses, bordered her hood, edged the modest square neckline of her gown, and encircled her throat and waist. In the hollow of her throat rested a pendant of gold acanthus leaves set with an oval-shaped ruby and a square emerald, with an enormous pearl dangling like a milky teardrop beneath.

  Personally, I thought the gown a poor choice. Anne Boleyn could wear red, but when she did, she dominated the color; not so her bland, pasty-faced successor.

  Servile, demure, meek, subdued, and placid as a sheep, Queen Jane took as her motto “Bound to Serve and Obey.”

  I was there, also bound to serve and obey, walking behind her, the black sheep, snubbed and shunned by most of the court. But as long as I lived and England had a queen, Cromwell, on behalf of his grateful master, promised there would always be a place for me as one of her ladies-in-waiting.

  Jane Seymour took Anne Boleyn’s place on May 30, and on May 31, I went mad. That morning I stopped making excuses, tallied up the facts, and admitted that I was carrying the Devil’s child.

  I had tried to ignore it. I had tried to deny it. I blamed my grief over George’s death for drying up my courses; and, after all these years of marriage and what the learned physician had said, my womb had remained stubbornly barren. But I could not run away from the truth forever; I had to confront it. The Devil, not God, had heard my prayers and decided to give me a child—but not my husband’s child.

  Vainly, I tried to rid myself of Cromwell’s creature, but it would not die. I downed in a single gulp the vile, stinking black-green concoction I bought from a toothless old hag in a dark London alley. But all it gained me was bilious green skin and loud, sulfurous farts and belches. The Devil’s imp remained lodged firmly in my womb, resting and biding his time, waiting to be born. I rolled upon my bed, writhing and gripping my belly, until the whole room was rife with the aroma of rotten eggs. My frightened maid fled, gagging at the stench; then I staggered weakly to the window and flung it open wide. Leaning queasily upon the sill, I gulped in mouthfuls of fresh air and then I vomited.

  Next I sat in a tub of water just as hot as I could bear, rivulets of sweat dripping down my face as my skin turned first bright pink then boiled-crayfish red, hoping to scald it out. When this also failed I hired a rough cart and had myself driven about for hours, being jostled and jounced over the worst rutted and rock-strewn roads the driver could find, trying to jar Satan’s spawn from my womb. When I dragged myself, weary and aching—with every tooth feeling like it had been jarred loose—up the palace stairs, I turned impulsively, spread my arms wide, and flung myself down. When I picked myself up again I felt a mocking flutter in my belly, as if it were laughing at me and saying, “I am still here! You cannot get rid of me!”

  In desperation I tried to claw it out. Standing in my room with my nails blood-caked and deep, stinging scratches furrowing my belly and oozing bright red blood, my maid caught me squatting and preparing to insert a long knitting needle.

  I was given an elixir of poppy to render me docile and taken from court by my father for a “much-needed rest” in the country.

  I remember little of my confinement except it was passed under watchful eyes, restraints, and in a state of almost perpetual sleep that ended with urgent commands to “Push!” and intense searing, tearing pain, like a great zigzag of lightning shocking me back to my senses, before I fell briefly back into oblivion again.

  I nearly screamed the house down when I discovered that creature had been given George’s name. They thought it would please me! Everyone thought that George was the father. Everyone knew how much I had always wanted a child, so they were all struck dumb with amazement when I rejected it. No one could understand why I couldn’t bear the sight of my baby. When they tried to place the loathsome thing in my arms, I shoved it away and turned my face to the wall. When it cried, I ordered them to take it away before I silenced it forever by bashing its head against the wall.

  Satan’s imp was hastily farmed out; sent to live with strangers. My father would see to its care and education, and I was back at court by Christmastime.

  Once again I felt life had made a mockery of me. Perhaps God, I thought, has a sense of humor and I am one of His favorite jokes. When I die and step through the pearly gates of Heaven, I fully expect to find Him doubled over and howling with glee, laughing at me.

  When I tried to sleep I would hear George and Anne laughing. I would clap my hands over my ears, but it had no effect; I could not shut it out no matter how hard I tried.

  The court I returned to was a very different place from the one I had known.

  Now that they were gone, we realized how much the flamboyant Francis Weston, stalwart Will Brereton, and chivalrous Henry Norris had been a part of our lives, and how much their lively wit and escapades had made us laugh. And George and Anne…together or apart, they could light up a room; they were both absolute magic! Perhaps it was black magic, but it was magic just the same. Now they were all gone, dead; candles snuffed out much too soon. Though it was all the King and Cromwell’s doing, the finger of blame was also pointed at me, and I would spend the rest of my life waiting for an absolution that would never come. They called me “The Red Widow” and said my black widow’s weeds made a mockery of George’s memory, and that I should have worn red to match the blood on my hands and the ineradicable scarlet stain that was like the mark of Cain on my soul.

  I watched as Anne’s initials, crest, and motto were scraped off the walls or painted over, and the stitches unpicked from the banners, canopies, and coverlets, and replaced with Jane Seymour’s. Her portraits were taken down off the walls to be either burned or consigned to dusty attics, as every trace of her must be removed. Henry wanted no reminders.

  It was as if Anne and her “evergreen gallants” had never even existed. No one dared speak their names, and their surviving kin all crept away like thieves in the night, retreating into seclusion and silent disgrace. Both Anne’s parents would be dead within two years; first the elegant and patrician Lady Elizabeth in 1538, followed by ambitious, ruthless Thomas Boleyn a year later. It was as if neither could survive the embarrassment. Keeping their heads was not enough; it was not their son and daughter they mourned, but the loss of the King’s favor. It was as if all the light had gone out of their lives and they had been condemned to perpetual darkness; without Henry VIII to illuminate their lives, it was just not worth going on.

  Even Elizabeth, Anne’s greatest failure, the princess who should have been a prince, was bastardized and banished to Hatfield. It angered the King to see Anne’s dark, defiant eyes staring back at him from out of their daughter’s face.

  Only Thomas Wyatt, who had emerged from the Tower a bitter and disillusioned man, dared break the silence. Out of Will Brereton’s request was born the poem “Circa Regna Tonat (Thunder Rolls Around the Throne).” It was George’s warning to beware of the vanities of the world and the flatteries of the court, set to verse as only Wyatt, who lived to tell the tale, could render.

  Who list his wealth and ease retain,

  Himself let him unknown contain.

  Press not too fast in at that gate

&
nbsp; Where the return stands by disdain.

  For sure, circa Regna tonat.

  The high mountains are blasted oft

  When the low valley is mild and soft.

  Fortune with Health stands at debate.

  The fall is grievous from aloft.

  And sure, circa Regna tonat.

  These bloody days have broken my heart.

  My lust and youth did then depart,

  And blind desire of estate.

  Who hastes to climb seeks to revert:

  Of truth, circa Regna tonat.

  The Bell Tower showed me such a sight

  That in my head sticks day and night:

  There did I learn out of a grate,

  For all favor, glory, or might,

  That yet, circa Regna tonat.

  By proof, I say, there did I learn:

  Wit helpeth not defense too yearn,

  Of innocence to plead or prate.

  Bear low, therefore, give God the stern.

  For sure, circa Regna tonat.

  There were other verses circulating secretly, I soon found out. They were only spoken about in whispers and recited in deepest secrecy lest the King find out.

  On the last night of his life, George had taken up his lute and pen to compose one final song. He asked Master Kingston to deliver his lute and writings to Anne after he was gone, so that she might finish what he began. And she did. Brother and sister collaborated one last time on one last song.

  Oh death, rock me asleep

  Bring on my quiet rest

  Let pass my very guiltless ghost

  Out of my careful breast.

  Ring out the doleful knell,

  Let its sounds my death tell;

  For I must die,

  There is no remedy,

  For now I die!

  My pains who can express