The Boleyn Inheritance

Anne, Westminster Palace,
April 1540

I thought that I would be crowned as part of the May Day celebrations, but we are already less than a month away and no one has ordered any gowns or planned the order of the coronation, so I begin to think it won’t be this May Day, it can’t be. In the absence of any better advisor I wait until the Princess Mary and I are walking back from the Lady Chapel to the palace, and I ask her what she thinks. I have grown to like her more and more and trust her opinion. Also, because she has been the child and then the exile of this court, she knows better than most what it is to live here and yet know yourself to be an outsider.

At the very word coronation she gives me a quick look of such concern that I cannot take another step. I freeze to the spot and cry: “Oh, what have you heard?”

“Dear Anne, don’t cry,” she says quickly. “I beg your pardon. Queen Anne.”

“I’m not crying.” I show her my shocked face. “I am not.”

At once we both look round to see if anyone is watching us. This is how it is at court, always the glance over your shoulder for the spy; truth told only in whispers. She steps closer to me, and I take her hand and put it through my arm and we walk together.

“It can’t be this May Day because we would have had everything planned and ready by now if he was going to crown you,” she says. “I thought that in Lent, myself. But it’s not so bad. It means nothing. Queen Jane wasn’t crowned either. He would have crowned her if she had lived, once she had given him an heir. He will be waiting for you to tell him that you are with child. He will be waiting for you to have a child and then there will be the christening and then your coronation after that.”

I flush deeply at this and say nothing. She takes a glance at my face and waits until we have gone up the stairs, through my presence chamber, through my privy chamber, and to my little withdrawing chamber, where nobody comes without invitation. I close the door on the curious faces of my ladies and we are alone.

“There is a difficulty?” she says with careful tact.

“Not of my making.”

She nods, but neither of us wants to say more. We are both virgins in our mid-twenties, old for spinsters, afraid of the mystery of male desire, afraid of the power of the king, both living on the edge of his acceptance.

“You know, I hate May Day,” she says suddenly.

“I thought it was one of the greatest days of celebration of the year?”

“Oh, yes, but it is a savage celebration, pagan: not a Christian one.”

This is part of her Papist superstition, and I am going to laugh for a moment, but the gravity of her face stops me.

“It’s just to welcome the coming of spring,” I say. “There is no harm in it.”

“It is the time for putting off the old and taking on the new,” she says. “That’s the tradition, and the king lives it to the full, like a savage. He rode in a May Day tournament with a love message to Anne Boleyn on his standard, and then he put my mother aside for the Lady Anne on a May Day. Less than five years later, it was her turn: the Lady Anne was the new Queen of the Joust, with her champions fighting for her honor before her royal box. But the knights were arrested that afternoon, and the king rode away from her without even saying good-bye. That was the end of the Lady Anne, and the last time she saw him.”

“He didn’t say good-bye?” For some reason, this seems to me the worst thing of all. No one had told me this before.

She shakes her head. “He never says good-bye. When his favor has gone, then he goes swiftly, too. He never said good-bye to my mother either, he rode away from her and she had to send her servants after him to wish him Godspeed. He never told her that he would not return. He just rode out one day and never came back. He never said good-bye to the Lady Anne. He rode away from the May Day tournament and sent his men to arrest her. Actually, he never even said good-bye to Queen Jane, who died in giving him his son. He knew she was fighting for her life, but he did not go to her. He let her die alone. He is hard-hearted, but he is not hard-faced; he cannot stand women crying, he cannot stand good-byes. He finds it easier to turn his heart, and turn his face, and then he just leaves.”

I give a little shudder, and I go to the windows to check that they are tight shut. I have to stop myself from closing the shutters against the hard light. There is a cold wind coming off the river; I can almost feel it chilling me as I stand here. I want to go out to the presence chamber and surround myself with my silly girls, with a page boy playing the lute, with the women laughing. I want the comfort of the queen’s rooms around me, even though I know that three other women have needed their comfort before, and they are all dead.

“If he turn against me, as he turn against the Lady Anne, I would have no warning,” I say quietly. “Nobody at this court is my friend; no one even tell me that danger is coming.”

Princess Mary does not attempt to reassure me.

“It could be, like for the Lady Anne, a sunny day, a tournament, and then the men at arms come and there is no escape?”

Her face is pale. She nods. “He sent the Duke of Norfolk against me to order my obedience. The good duke, who had known me from childhood and served my mother loyally, with love, said to my face that if he were my father, he would swing me by the heels and split my head open against the wall,” she says. “A man I had known from childhood, a man who knew me to be a Princess of the Blood, who had loved my mother as her most loyal servant. He came with my father’s goodwill, under his orders, and he was ready to take me to the Tower. The king sent his executioner against me and let him do what he would.”

I take a handful of priceless tapestry, as if the touch of it can comfort me. “But I am innocent of offense,” I say. “I have done nothing.”

“Neither had I,” she replies. “Neither had my mother. Neither had Queen Jane. Perhaps even the Lady Anne was innocent, too. We all saw the king’s love turn to spite.”

“And I have never had it,” I say quietly to myself in my own language. “If he could abandon his wife of sixteen years, a woman he had loved, how readily, how easily can he dispose of me, a woman he has never even liked?”

She looks at me. “What will become of you?”

I know my face is bleak. “I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I don’t know. If the king allies with France and takes Kitty Howard as his lover, then I suppose he will send me home.”

“If not worse,” she says very softly.

I give a rueful smile. “I don’t know what could be worse than my home.”

“The Tower,” she says simply. “The Tower would be worse. And then the scaffold.”

The silence that follows those words seems to last a long time. Without speaking I rise up from my chair and go to the door that leads out to my public rooms; the princess steps back to let me precede her. We go through the withdrawing room in silence, both of us haunted by our own thoughts, and enter through the small door of my rooms to a great bustle and fuss. Servants are running from gallery to chamber carrying goods. A dining table is being set up in my presence chamber, and it is laid with the gold and silver plate of the royal treasury.

“What is happening now?” I ask, bewildered.

“His Majesty the king has announced that he will dine in your rooms.” Lady Rochford bustles forward and curtsies to tell me.

“Good.” I try to sound as if I am very pleased, but I am still filled with dread at the thought of the king’s spite and the Tower and the scaffold. “I am honored to invite His Grace by my rooms.”

“To my rooms,” Princess Mary corrects me quietly.

“To my rooms,” I repeat.

“Shall you change your gown for dinner?”

“Yes.” I see that my ladies-in-waiting have already put on their best; Kitty Howard’s cap is so far back on her head she might as well dispense with it altogether, and she is loaded with chains of gold strung with little seed pearls. She has diamonds dancing in her ears and pearls wound round and round her neck. She must have come into some money from somewhere. I have never seen her wear more than a little chain of thin gold before. She sees me looking at her, and she sweeps me a curtsy and then spins on the spot so I can admire the effect of a new gown of rose silk with an underskirt of deep pink.

“Pretty,” I say. “New?”

“Yes,” she says, and then her eyes slide away like a child caught out in thieving, and I know at once that all this finery has come from the king.

“Shall I come and help you dress?” she asks, almost apologetically.

I nod, and she and two of the other maids-in-waiting follow me into my inner privy chamber. My gown for dinner is already laid out, and Katherine runs to the chest and takes out my linen.

“So fine,” she says approvingly, smoothing the white-on-white embroidery on my shifts.

I slip on the shift and sit before the mirror so that Katherine can brush my hair. Her touch is gentle as she twists my hair up into a gold-encrusted net, and we disagree only when she puts my hood far back on my head. I put it right, and she laughs at me. I see our faces side by side in the mirror, and her eyes meet mine, as innocent as a child, without any shadow of deceit. I turn and speak to the other girls. “Leave us,” I say.

From the glances they exchange as they go, I see that her new riches are common knowledge and that everyone knows where those pearls came from. They are expecting a jealous storm to break on Kitty Howard’s little head.

“The king likes you,” I say to her bluntly.

The smile has faded from her eyes. She shifts from one little pink-slippered foot to the other. “Your Grace…” she whispers.

“He does not like me,” I say. I know I am too blunt, but I have not the words to dress this up like a lying Englishwoman.

Her color rises up from her low-cut neckline to burn in her cheeks. “Your Grace…”

“Do you desire him?” I ask. I don’t have the words to disguise the question in a lengthy conversation.

“No!” she says instantly, but then she bows her head. “He is the king… and my uncle says, indeed, my uncle orders me…”

“You are not free?” I suggest.

Her gray eyes meet mine. “I am a girl,” she says. “I am only a young girl; I am not free.”

“Can you refuse to do what they want?”

“No.”

There is a silence between us, as we both come to realize the simple truth that is being spoken. We are two women who have recognized that we cannot control the world. We are players in this game, but we do not choose our own moves. The men will play us for their own desires. All we can do is try to survive whatever happens next.

“What will happen to me, if the king wants you for his wife?” I know, as the words come awkwardly into my mouth, that this is the central, unsayable question.

She shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows that.”

“Would he have me killed?” I whisper.

To my horror, she does not start back in terror and exclaim a denial. She looks at me very steadily. “I don’t know what he will do,” she says again. “Your Grace, I don’t know what he wants or what he can do. I don’t know the law. I don’t know what he is able to do.”

“He will command you to his side,” I say through cold lips. “I see that. Wife or whore. But will he send me to the Tower? Will he have me killed?”

“I don’t know,” she says. She looks like a frightened child. “I can’t tell. Nobody tells me anything except that I have to please him. And I have to do that.”