The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn

by Robin Maxwell

  “Go and have your horse faced, mealy mouthed girl,” I cried. “Have her! But you best remove from your memory all thoughts that Anne Boleyn ever loved Your Gracious Majesty. For she never did. Never.”

  He fixed me with his terrible stare and in that moment I thought that he might raise his hand and kill me with a blow. Instead he said, “Your dog is dead.” And then he smiled. “Pity, since he was surely your most loyal servant.” I never saw Henry go, so blinded was I by instant tears. Tears that he had satisfaction seeing he had caused.

  Yours faithfully,

  Anne

  9 April 1536

  Diary,

  Briefly I believed that all was well again. Ambassador Cha-puys had relayed a message from the Emperor that he wished to deal with Henry and my self with hopes of some treaty with him, now that Katherine’s death removed a great obstacle from the path to our alliance. That he wished to treat with my self as well as Henry pleased me greatly and bespoke Charles’ new respect for me as Queen. And this Spanish scheme pleased Secretary Cromwell mightily, since he of late believed the French were poor and unreliable friends. More than this I think he worried at one day finding England left to stand alone against both Spain and France. And so was planned a round of meetings and festivities with Chapuys at their center.

  Henry made no move excluding me from these plans, and I made great preparations for a private dinner in my chambers after mass for the High Lords, with Chapuys as the guest of honor, hoping that some important business might be accomplished at my table. All was well at mass with Bishop Cranmer offering a most politick sermon, and many pleasant smiles returned from Chapuys to my self. But when ‘twas time for the Ambassador to repair unto my chambers, Henry slyly routed him and members of the Privy Council to his own apartments and left me presiding o’er some hollow feast whose main course was my humiliation.

  In the end the King never did accept Chapuys’ terms, for he demanded first that Henry now submit his will to the Pope, and second legitimize his bastard Mary. Cromwell, furious his own careful plans were in a shambles, took his leave and went home ill, where now five days later still he lies. His discomfiture, I fear, is my only consolation in the matter.

  These days Henry makes little demonstration of his love for Elizabeth and no pretence at all for me. I think my days at Court are numbered, and several of my ladies dare to speak to me of distant convents where a discarded Queen might find sanctuary.

  There is little that consoles me lately. Only Mark Smeaton’s sweet music and Niniane’s foolishness are balms to my sore soul. A few staunch friends still surround me, Thomas Wyatt, Henry Norris, Francis Weston. Their flattery and flirtation I know to be much less true romantic ardor — for I am no longer beautiful — but more of brave constancy and Courtly love. This kind attention grows in me for them a passionate and most profound love, more deep that what I knew for Percy or the King, and more rare than what I feel toward Elizabeth, for she is tied to me in flesh and blood and body. ‘Tis friendship in its finest flower, the gift of one unselfish heart unto another. And for this I am altogether grateful.

  I care little for most women as they have always hated and mistrusted me, but Margaret Lee is more a sister than I ever had in Mary. How she dotes upon my self. She is Mistress of the Queen’s Body and ‘tis her duty to see to my care, but I know she chooses overcarefully the clothing I should wear to be the ones that are to my advantage — color, style and flattering cut. She preens me endlessly, warms my chilly feet and hands and rubs my aching head with such tenderness I am sometimes brought to tears.

  And sweet George. No woman had a better brother than I do in him. We share memories of our lives that stretch back in time to childhood days. He teases me still, and in our laughter all care and sorrow of the present vanish magickally. I close my eyes and hear him creeping up the curved stair to my room in Hever Hall where we whispered, lest our childish voices planning great wars and silly entertainments be heard.

  I see us in an autumn wood at Edenbridge, he crowning me with a flower wreath, naming me Queen of the Leaves. “Fall to your knees, for I am your Liege!” I would grandly shout, and down would tumble red and gold and orange leaves in their thousands. George would cry, “All powerful Majesty, see how your subjects bow to your command!” Then we would shriek with laughter till our bellies ached with it. Once I was the Queen of England. Now I am only Queen of the Leaves.

  Yours faithfully,

  Anne

  I am a prisoner, Diary, a prisoner in the Tower of London. Woe to me for I am surely finished, accused of adultery, nay treason. For in England adultery practiced by a Queen is treason and treason is death. This is no just accusation to be argued in a court for its fair outcome. No, a distant nunnery will never do, for Henry needs me dead. Mark Smeaton and Henry Norris poor boys, accused of carnal knowledge of the Queen are also in the Tower. ‘Tis said that they’ve confessed to laying with me. Surely they have not for they are honest men and this heinous accusation is altogether false. A lie. Have they been tortured into such confessions? Shall I be tortured too? Cromwell, this must be his scheme. He’d turned on me of late. And he is capable of such a deed as this. I watched him guide the King thro the maze of his divorces from Katherine and the Pope, and into my bed. Those beady eyes. That cruel mouth. I saw the look of him leading that evil delegation into my rooms. Even silent as he allowed my Uncle Norfolk to serve me with arrest, Cromwell’s foul presence cast a pall of doom around my head. They took me in the light of day upriver on a rude barge for all to see my disgrace. No friend nor loyal courtier escorted me, only horrid enemies and harridans. Lady Kingston, my aunt the Lady Boleyn, Mistress Coffin whose name so fits her. No kind words could they afford. They stood behind and out of my sight. I felt their eyes on me staring at my neck and I felt my sanity slip from my mind and join with the swirling river currents leaving my brain empty of good sense and reason. O God help me. I think that when I came here I acted badly, not a Queen. I laughed and wept and trembled uncontrollably. The barge brought me to the Tower steps and I grew so cold looking at those grey weeping prison walls I faltered then and fell upon my knees. Lord Kingston, Constable of the Fortress there to meet me caught my arm and said a kind word. I think ‘twas kind for I remember little of that time except my asking if I should be taken to a dungeon and Lord Kingston saying no, that I should be lodged within my old apartments, those in which I’d stayed before my Coronation. And I remember too that as I was led to my rooms I saw the Tower’s fat raven hop hop hopping cross the green and laughed at its an ticks, but in that moment heard the Fortress cannon booming cross the Thames announcing my arrival and saw a wooden scaffold, place of execution. Thomas More, I thought, good Father More. His head rolling upon the green grass and so I cried bitterly. Master Kingston guided me thro my prison door and made to leave. I clutched his arm and cried, Shall I die without justice? He replied the poorest subject the King hath, hath justice. I laughed a mad laugh. He looked on me with pity. I called for a mirror to see how a pitiful Queen should look, but they did not obey my command. I am trapped here. Trapped with these horrid women who taunt me saying all London now rejoices on the street at my arrest and that now the Lady Mary, nay Princess Mary shall take her lawful place in the succession. They hate me but attend me carefully. I know they’ve been told, Remember all she says, she will incriminate her self further. I know they listen but I cannot hold my tongue. Gibberish spills from my mouth like water from a deep well of fear, calling curses to my enemies that if I die all England should be punished for seven years with droughts and pestilences. Elizabeth, Elizabeth what have I done to you? If I am a traitor then you are naught but a traitor’s child. You have surely lost your mother, lost the future crown and mayhaps lost your life. I am to blame I am to blame I am to blame. Sweet girl forgive me. And my Mother. She will die of sorrow. Die as I die. Jesu help me. I am all alone and so afraid.

  Anne

  13 May 1536

  Diary,

  I have regained my
senses, but the world made clear again is so anguishing a place that I am sore tempted back to madness. They’ve arrested George my brother charging we were lovers. We, incestuous! I truly wonder at Henrys fierce determination to have this homely woman, that he might make this accusation. Francis Weston and William Breyerton are also named in that way, and now join Mark Smeaton and Henry Norris in the Tower. Even Thomas Wyatt and Richard Page are now imprisoned on these lewd charges. O God, I cannot bear that these good men should suffer from the folly of my life. I beg my gaolers hourly for some news pertaining to my fate, but they feed me only mean bits of gossip meant to give me pain. That Henry nightly floats a barge downriver to the Carews’ house where lodges Mistress Seymour, and there all the time making merry, awaits my trial and death.

  I have bid Lord Kingston take my letters to Henry and to Secretary Cromwell, but he refuses saying he will take only spoken messages abroad from the Tower. I know the Constables loyalties lie with Princess Mary and before her, with Katherine, so he will grant me no favors that might restore my power. But I must find a way to make communication with my accusers, serve them with notice that I will not confess to these or any other charges made of lies and of corruption. And remind them all that they will find no honest man to bear witness to these alleged crimes.

  I have still had no word from my Father or of him, whether he be similarly charged with treasonous crimes and languishing in prison, or if he is one of my accusers I have no knowledge at all. With a son and daughter so disgraced most men would fold and die of shame. I imagine my Father, if he is not him self implicated, somehow using our downfall to his own advantage.

  Of some consolation to me in my miserable confinement is Lord Kingston’s niece, a Mistress Sommerville who’s come to join the ranks of my gaolers. The Lady is no longer young nor pretty but she has the quietest eyes, and uses them to soothe all those round her. To her uncle and the other ladies’ irritation she treats me more than kindly. She treats me as the Queen. I find my self longing for the small moments we are alone so that I may speak plainly and with no fear, and in these times I have leave to write to you. Tho she gives me no false promises of my release from prison or these false charges, she offers me the hope of joy in Heaven should I die, for she swears that she knows no better woman than my self. She gives me other comforts too — reading to me from the Scriptures, letting me speak of my Elizabeth, then telling stories of her own children. And Diary, she brushes my hair. Delights in it. This small service sometimes makes me cry, for she does it so tenderly, so like Henry used to do.

  I have had thoughts of asking Mistress Sommerville for some secret assistance taking my letters abroad, but I have not had the heart for this. For I believe she would not refuse, and such actions would place her life in jeopardy for me. Even pleas that Archbishop Cranmer come and hear my confession have been cruelly ignored. I sometimes fear I shall never in my life again lay eyes upon a friendly and familiar face.

  Yours faithfully,

  Anne

  15 May 1536

  Diary,

  A dream unimaginable has become my fate. I am to die for treason against Henry, condemned by my peers of a great lie. A lie. My husband, my friend and lover of these ten years will murder me most publickly in cold blood … and no one will object. How can this be so? How has it come to this, that all the Lords of England have embraced evil so fervently that they would execute one Lady so that her husband might marry another? It might be said that Henry is no ordinary husband. He is the King. The Sun. A God on earth. But I have known him, and the truth of it is Henry is a man, no more no less, placed upon the throne by other men, thro war and bloodshed and the love of power. This is what they know and what their fathers and their fathers Tore them knew, and they are debased by it. All trappings of Court life, like a spicy sauce which cannot hide the taste of putrid meat beneath it, cannot disguise the base instincts which rule the hearts of England’s noblemen.

  Today those who have survived this bloodletting sit like hungry vultures perched o’er the carcasses of those who fell. Pairs of black and liquid eyes covet the feast below — the properties of those condemned with me — incomes and rents, tapestries, clothing, furnishings from their great houses — like hunks of gory sinew to be fought over, tugged and torn between so many greedy beaks.

  Their families will deny them, for ‘tis unwise to love a traitor, even one’s own kith and kin. But my Father is not an unwise man, this is well known. Thomas Boleyn will never be taken for a sea captain who refuses to desert his sinking ship. O no, not my Father. They say he stood at the trial of Weston, Norris, Breyer-ton and Smeaton, helped condemn them of adultery with his child. And it is said that he made offer to stand even at my trial and George’s, but in the end was spared the indignity. I think had he been there he would have found us, as all twenty-six of my peers did, guilty as charged. For my Father values his neck too highly to love a traitor. Nay, I give my self more credit than is due. For I think my father never loved me. Never even saw me. I was just a girl to use, a clever girl with some beauty and as much willfulness and pride as any man. It galled him, no doubt, that his youngest daughter dared to rip the reins from his iron grip and bestride the reckless stallion that was her own life, ride headlong into glory and disaster. He never loved me.

  I must write of my trial for it is part of History now, and tho ‘tis dangerous for any living man or woman to see it other than as Henry will have them do, this Court’s infamy, its gross injustice must one day be known and surely reviled. My friends had their day before the peers on 12 May and all were found guilty of treason — having carnal knowledge of the Queen and conspiring the death of the King. They are to be butchered horribly as only a traitor or a heretic is punished. Three days after their debacle came mine.

  I was marched from my apartments cross Tower Green to the grey and ancient battlements of the King’s Hall. As I entered I saw ‘twas so vast a room that it could and did hold two thousand men and women who had come for the great occasion of a Queen’s trial for treason. Jostling there shoulder to shoulder in the stinking, sweltering hall were London’s Mayor, its Aldermen, countless courtiers, divers ambassadors from foreign lands with their hunched scribes beside them, country squires and their ladies who had surely begged to come to London for such a spectacle as this, and great swarms of common folk there to see Justice done to the Great Whore whom they had hated for so long.

  Throngs parted as I made my way forward. Pretending some imagined triumph, I held my back more straight, my chin more high than I had managed in many years. My ladies, save Mistress Seymour who was fittingly absent, appeared to me as colorful birds arrayed in their finest plumage. But they who had for so long made a pretty, giggling flock round me, stood not together but now perched within the protection of their families or bands of new friends.

  Margaret Lee stood clutching Thomas Wyatt’s arm with a look that bespoke a rare combination of joy and grief for her brother’s recent clearing and release, and my own omnipresent doom. Wyatt looked unutterably sad and I thanked him silently for you, Diary, my most loyal friend of all my days.

  Niniane had placed her self in my sight as I passed. And perhaps moved by the pure ridiculousness of the occasion, I chose my jester as the only one to whom I spoke within the crowd. “Niniane,” I said and stopped before her. She was right amazed and brought forth a wicked smile. She leaned close to me.

  “I think they mean to rename you,” she whispered.

  “And what name would that be?” said I.

  “Queen Anne Lackhead, Your Majesty.”

  “Then they will have named me most wisely,” I said and gave a smile back to her.

  “I love you, My Lady,” said she. “And you will be sorely missed in this fool’s heart.”

  I walked on. There before me waiting at the bar all robed in rustling scarlet in two long rows, was all the peerage of England, each of twenty-six faces decorated with the gravest of countenances. I saw there among them Henry Percy of Northumbe
rland, pale and pinched and older than his years. At their head upon a high platform, beneath the royal canopy sat not the King (for he had no stomach for this) but my Uncle Norfolk, weighted down with golden chains, a long white staff in hand, the Earl of Surrey, Duke of Suffolk and the Lord Chancellor Audley.

  My Uncle made no waste of time and read out with a clear and bloodless voice the charges that I the Queen, for more than three years despising my marriage and bearing malice in my heart against the King, and following daily my fickle and carnal lust, falsely and traitorously by foul talk and kissing, touching, gifts and divers unspeakable incitations, did procure the King’s daily and familiar servants to be my adulterers and concubines. Of my brother George was charged that I seduced him, alluring him with my tongue in his mouth and he in mine, and that he carnally knew his own natural sister in incestuous liaison. With the others it was said that I conspired the King’s murder, having never loved him in my heart, even promising marriage with one of my treasonous bedfellows after Henry’s death. Places and dates were furnished of my lewd crimes, lascivious carriage. It seems that my uncontrollable lusts guided me willy nilly to frequent dangerous indiscretions. I took these lovers several in a night, and less than one month after Elizabeth’s birth, and sometimes during pregnancy. To be fair they brought forth some truths — that I had laughed at the King, his clothes and person, that I had ridiculed the ballads he had wrote. But that these should be evidence of my treason made me wonder at their desperation.

  All accusations read, I stood to make my own defense, but I was silenced harshly by my Uncle. No witnesses, no testimony on my behalf were to be allowed. These outrageous and irregular proceedings so shocked the onlookers that they stirred noisily with their displeasure crying “Give her leave to speak!” and “Let her show proof!” That moment was, I think, the sweetest I have had as Queen, for I felt the people there were with me. I cannot say that they loved me. Perhaps ‘twas only knowing if the King’s own wife could be treated thus within a court of law, their lot was much the poorer, and Justice had surely died in England.