Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn

by Nell Gavin

  “Let her die,” my father said.

  He said to let me die. Could my heart break any more than it already had?

  “It is too good for me,” I said, when I arrived and looked around me. My prison was the very house in which I had stayed while awaiting my coronation which, ironically, had led me to another form of imprisonment, as queen.

  “Jesu, have mercy on me.” I fell to my knees and began to cry.

  In the carriage on my way to this place, I had heard someone taunting me with a child’s chant. Or perhaps they were not taunting. I heard taunts in everything. Now, within my large and well-appointed prison I thought of that song, for I could not expel it from my head: “Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down!” I whispered it, kneeling, rocking myself, tears streaming down my cheeks, chuckling softly. There was a certain irony in this.

  “Mr. Kingston, shall I die without justice?” I asked, looking up.

  In response, the man said: “The poorest subject the king hath, hath justice.”

  His face increased the absurdity of the remark by being as sincere and as devoid of irony as Hal’s might have been had he been saying those same words in jest. I thought to myself, “Well done!” and nearly applauded as I would have done, had he been one of the jesters. I found Henry’s “justice”, and this man’s suggestion that it was “just” very humorous indeed. So I burst into a laugh.

  But having shown amusement, I did not stop. I erupted into hysterical laughter, like a hyena . . . like some wild, crazed, filthy lunatic who wandered the streets and ate rats and bit dogs. It was the crack in my mind that I had feared. The laughter was the crack that let the demons in.

  And so I laughed for minutes or perhaps hours, then through the entire day or a lifetime–I knew not which–quite mad, having completely lost my grip on my mind, falling down a well more terrifying than the one that leads to Hell. Or, perhaps it was the same one, for I lived in Hell while I outwardly laughed. I had no control over myself while the laughs convulsed me. It was hysteria that went to incalculable lengths beyond my normal tantrums and dangled me over a chasm where even God would not venture to save me.

  There was no God amid the laughter. There was no hope, and I had no mind. I had only an icy, gripping, all-encompassing terror and a total loss of self-control.

  “So this is what it means to be insane,” I thought at one point, overseeing myself from a distance. “It hurts.”

  But there was nowhere to run to escape it. It followed me.

  With great effort, I struggled to regain my mind and escape the fear. And then, shaken, I felt my self-control return, and I was calmer. I slept.

  When I awoke, I had a greater fear than death. It was that death would not come soon enough to spare me a return to madness.

  Periodically the laughter did threaten me, and with it returned my struggle against lunacy. In the end, I would win, and would be able to stand at my trial, then walk with a degree of solemn dignity through the crowd to face my executioner. It would be a triumph of stubborn willfulness, that I could shake the madness long enough to die.

  The treason commission convened in late April. I stood before the jurists, most stone-faced and hardened against me, spoke the truth, and was called a liar.

  I learned from the commission that I had indulged in lascivious acts for years, cavorted with my own brother as if I were his wife (and perhaps with my sister as well) and had arrogantly made my poor husband a hapless cuckold such as had never before been seen in England or beyond.

  I heard it said that Mark Smeaton, a young man from the music room, confessed to being my lover. It was known by all that he confessed under torture; no one cared about the reason he confessed. He would die for it.

  My brother George would die for it as well. And others . . . others of us would die. We would die, you know. All of us.

  We would die.

  Henry had not even waited for the trial to disband my household and dismiss my servants. He knew before any verdict was reached that I would have no further need of them.

  So, there was never a hope of fair sentencing or release. Each judge, 26 in all, had a task to do, and it was to please the king and see that I was sentenced to die. Each participant’s task was to make the accusations seem plausible before those judges by drawing in young men who were handsome enough to be convincing temptation for a lecherous queen. Their task was to loosely link persons to the story who were inconvenient to the king in some way, or expendable, and to condemn them to death.

  But having arranged for all that, Henry’s job was still not complete. Even in this, even when there was clearly no need for further harm, he chose to twist the knife. Included among the judges was Hal, forced to join their number as both a judge and a witness.

  Hal sat among the other judges hearing me speak but not hearing, jaundiced and ill, trapped and tortured, avoiding my eyes, mostly staring at his hands and not looking up at all.

  Very few of these judges and trial participants warred within themselves about the injustice. Most who did felt powerless to stop it, or were too cowardly or uninterested to protest on behalf of anyone at all, much less someone such as me, whom they did not much like. Their feelings, so prejudiced against me, in fact, were all the justification they needed to forego justice.

  Still there was a very small brave handful of men who, infuriated, spoke up about the manner in which the trial was being conducted, but these were silenced.

  King Henry’s justice moved onward as his whim and will decreed.

  Lord Henry Percy was called to testify about his association with the whore, Anne Boleyn, then was released to take his place again within the jury.

  Sir Thomas Wyatt was imprisoned for his false confessions and bragging, still loving me, yet still earning from me only feelings of contempt. He sat in his cell and wrote poetry for me until his family’s bribes freed him. Only now do I grieve for him, and for my own unkindness.

  Interviews and questioning continued until Henry and his team had accumulated stories enough to sentence everyone who needed to die for His Majesty’s convenience.

  At the announcement of the verdict my childhood nurse, who had come to support me, rose up and screamed. Hal collapsed and had to be carried from the courtroom. He died not so very long afterward.

  I held my head high and pretended I had been acquitted. I would not give them the satisfaction of seeing me crumple. I would walk out as a queen, and as mother to a queen. For the moment, I still had that.

  I was returned to my prison to await my death. These lodgings were far better than I deserved, considering the others accused were locked in small tower cells because of me. My concern was mostly for them, for they were not deserving of the punishment, as I was. After all, it was I who had loved a married man (I harkened back to that large sin to explain my circumstances). I prayed for God to take the others to His bosom, prayed they would forgive me, and prepared for the passing of my own soul into either darkness or light, I knew not which.

  The house was large and I had freedom of movement within it, although I was followed everywhere by people I viewed as shadows and ghosts. None of these was a friend–quite the opposite–and all of them wished me dead. I wandered the rooms, watched coldly by all in attendance. I was more fearful than I had ever been in my life and spent my days in prayer and preparation for my death. I wrote a letter to Henry. I played my lute. I wrote a poem about death that my chaplain later turned into a song. I stayed in my bed, and stared up at a window or wept. My melancholy was so deep that even sunlight, on days when I was allowed access to the grounds, could not penetrate my grim hopelessness.

  At times I was allowed friendly visitors. These were so welcome and such a relief that I developed high spirits and made light of my situation. I called myself “Queen Lackhead” or “Anna Sans Tête”, then laughed despite—or perhaps because of—their stares of consternation, shock, and horror. Afterwards, when they left, I sank quietly away into fear, des
pair and loneliness.

  My family stayed away, intent upon making my father’s cold words sound sincere, fearful that Henry would imprison and behead them along with George if they stepped into the light to side with me.

  Emma did not come. Probably they would not admit her, or perhaps she could not travel, for she was nearing the birth of a child she would name Anne.

  My fool was allowed entrance, for whatever reason, but he wept and this unnerved me and brought me too close to tears myself, so I sent him away. I watched him slip through the door at my command, away from me, then walked to the window where I stared after him as he disappeared down the path, pressing my fingertips, forehead and nose to the glass.

  Chapter 7

  •~۞~•

  Between a man and his wife, there is a basic, minimum level of trust. Accurately or in error, a woman trusts that her spouse will do more to keep her alive than to hasten her death, even if that spouse cannot abide her character.

  Even if neither spouse has ever loved, each is beholden to the other as a result of marriage vows. They each owe the other the reasonable assurance that murder is neither planned, nor desired. And if spouses have ever loved one another, as surely Henry and I loved, their hearts are tied together by a little thread. Neither spouse can cut that thread without suffering internal damage, just as neither spouse could kill without inwardly bleeding to death from the other’s wound.

  This, and God’s Commandments, are what keep endlessly sniping couples from doing each other grave damage. This is what I trusted. Consequently, I had been very slow to learn the true nature of Henry’s plan for me.

  There were times before my sentencing when I spoke the words: “I fear the King might kill me” to obtain someone’s reassurance that he would not. However, I could not wholly grasp, even as I spoke those words aloud–even as I knelt and waited to die–that my husband wished me dead and would not halt the execution.

  Over the weeks of my imprisonment, the understanding came to me but was frequently replaced by other thoughts. It was a test, I sometimes hoped. “He is trying to prove me, and once he is certain my heart is true, will come to save me.” I convinced myself that I needed only to make him understand that I had not betrayed him. When that happened, he would shudder over what he had almost done to me, and pray for my forgiveness.

  Even at those times when I fully understood that the charges against me were real and not a dream, and that the verdict would hold, I never, ever doubted that Henry truly believed I had betrayed him and that he was doing this in anger. I was able to sustain myself by believing Henry earnestly sought the truth in my trial, but that my defense was insufficient to persuade him. Since I never committed the act of adultery, even in thought, the problem was in the words. I must convince him! I thought. I must find the right words! When I did, all would be well, or at least, I would be alive.

  I fell back on Basic Marital Trust to sustain me, and never once thought that Henry might have fabricated the charges in order to rid himself of me. I sometimes ventured to experiment with the thought, and then recoiled in horror. It was more than I was capable of absorbing, and so I rejected it. (Even here, the full knowledge is only doled out to me in measured doses. I know, but only from the corner of my eye.)

  On occasion, when I was able, I carefully sorted the facts in my head and painfully considered that Henry was an evil man who had never loved me. His pursuit of me had, truly, only been a game designed to amuse him. He could never otherwise allow me to die. It was only during the last few seconds of my life that I fully succumbed to this conclusion, and by that time I would allow the entrance of no other thoughts. I would allow no forgiveness whatsoever.

  While I was struggling with that, I was also attempting to understand the crime for which I was to die, and for which I would be known throughout all time: I would forever after be the queen who had bedded her brother.

  I cannot describe the sensation of crawling horror one feels when accusations of depravity and sexual misconduct are spread hither and yon about oneself and then are confirmed by court of law. The embarrassment and shame—and the certain knowledge that I could say absolutely nothing and be believed—gave me such heightened anxiety I periodically, truly, lost my mind.

  The thought of dying was nothing compared to living through this. I wanted no eyes staring. I wanted nothing more than to hide and be seen by no one again. I wanted great distance from the shouts and the humiliation; I wanted succor and safety and warmth again, as I had had from my nurse in infancy.

  I wanted to be anyone but myself. I wanted fervently to be anyone at all, and would willingly have paid any price.

  Had I not once dreamt of being a nun? In my imagination, I replayed my life in my mind, but the fork in the road never appeared. There was no rape, and no reason to discard my dream. There was no reason to marry, and therefore no reason for a man to find me lacking and abandon me. And so I lived in quiet solitude and prayer, never once recognized by strangers, nor ever addressed with scorn or contempt.

  In my mind, I also erased the fork in the road that kept me from Hal Percy. I was now his grateful wife . . .

  Chapter 8

  •~۞~•

  They killed the others, five of them, first. In preparation for this, they came and fetched me, then installed me in the Bell Tower overlooking the scaffold, and forced me to watch. Henry was very clever: In this manner, I might die six times, instead of only once.

  My one hope, that Mark Smeaton would tell the truth in his final speech and declare that he was never my lover, died with Mark. He said a few hurried, thoughtless words then let the lie live on. He allowed me to die without truth.

  Throughout the days preceding my execution, they built my own scaffold outside my window, overlooking pretty East Smithfield Green. It was there for me to see and ponder, and the noise of the hammering was there to rob me of all rest during night or day. As I would die without friends, without family, without dignity, without justice and without truth, so would I also die without sleep.

  At least I would die by the sword, and not burned at the stake. Henry took a long while to reach that decision and, in the end, found a shred of compassion for me. He even honored my request for a French executioner who used a sword and not an axe. (Perhaps he did this to impress his virtue upon Jane Seymour, who was already preparing to wed him. Henry could thus show her that he was a “kindly” man . . . )

  My chaplain sat up with me the entire night while the hammering and pounding shook the walls.

  “My poor lamb,” he said to me as I rested my cheek upon his knee. He stroked my hair. “My poor, poor lamb.”

  It hardly mattered who touched me now, or stroked my hair, because I was no longer a queen. Our marriage had been annulled two days earlier, so Henry could now rest easily and content for, having stripped me of all the rest, he would have me die without my marriage and without my crown, and without the certainty that Elizabeth would ever be a queen. There was nothing left for him to take from me. Henry’s work was finally complete.

  Well done, my love. Well done.

  Then the sun rose and the day came for me, a sunny day in the height of spring, in May, my favorite month. This date was a silent anniversary I had passed through my entire life, never knowing it to be the eventual day of my death, but knowing now.

  One can think preparation is sufficient until the moment arrives and it is tested. I had been frantic for the day to come, not knowing how long my mental reserves would hold. I had experienced near-collapse when the executioner was delayed in his travels and the execution was postponed. Now, my jailers faced me and said it was time. I was not, in fact, prepared. I wanted to run, and I wanted to fight them. But where would I go? Who would hide and protect me?

  Then I thought, “What reason have I to remain alive?” and willingly submitted myself to them.

  We walked in a solemn line to the scaffold.

  I stood and looked over the people in the crowd, some of whom were tearful but most
of whom were there to cheerfully watch and comment.

  I spoke to them all in a final speech. The entire time I spoke, I awaited the shout: “Halt!” I awaited rescue by Henry, and watched for running foot soldiers from the corner of my eye. Henry’s voice and his army never rose against my murder, though I waited.

  I exchanged my headdress for a white cap, and then turned to my ladies who were weeping. I told them I was humbly sorry for having been harsh toward them at times and meant it sincerely, then asked them to remember me in their prayers. I gave my waiting woman my prayer book in which I had inscribed: “Remember me when you do pray that hope doth lead from day to day.” She thanked me, then succumbed to sobs.

  I said my own prayers for them. It was their responsibility to recover my severed head and prepare my body for entombment when all was done. My poor waiting woman was squeamish, God bless her, and would no doubt grow ill from it, I knew. I felt embarrassed and ashamed that I would be in such as state as to make my ladies ill, and hoped they would forgive me for it.

  Finally time ran out, and no Henry appeared. My death and his abandonment of me were both absolute. Forgiveness for this betrayal was now sealed away from me by a heavy metal door that slammed shut within my heart like the door to a prison cell. Forgiveness was firmly on the other side.

  And now, stomach fluids rose and fell in my throat. I was to face the final moment of my life. The moment was real, and it had come.

  Holy Father . . . Afraid!

  A swell of panic convulsed me and I felt the madness creeping toward me again. The only cure for it was death and so, in the end, I welcomed death as my salvation.

  My executioner stood waiting, sword waiting, block waiting . . . crowd . . . waiting. It was my duty not to disappoint, nor to make them wait.

  I looked into the faces one last time, searching eyes for pity and grief. I saw some, and took comfort. I felt just slightly less alone.