Three Sisters, Three Queens

WESTHORPE HALL, ENGLAND, AUTUMN 1532

Harry is preparing another state visit to France and is spending a fortune on gowns and jewels, horses and jousts to impress Francis of France (ransomed home but proud as ever). I have said I am too ill to go, I cannot bear the thought of it and I have such a heaviness in my belly and my bowels that I truly am too ill to face it. I couldn’t dance at such a feast, my feet would not lift. When I think of the Field of the Cloth of Gold when we were so young and so happy! I could not sail to France again with a shameless woman in the place of the true queen.

Harry does not think of taking Katherine, he has not even seen her this year. He sends her the coldest of messages and she has to move house again and go to Enfield, because so many people are visiting her that Harry is shamed. I write to her, but Charles says that I may not go. It would displease Harry too much and I have to show loyalty to him, my brother and king, before anyone else. I have to greet the Boleyn woman with the respect due to the greatest woman in the land. I don’t dare say a word against her. I do it. I do everything that Harry and Charles ask of me, with a heart like stone, and when she sends out a dish to me I pretend to eat while my stomach turns over.

She is all smiles. All smiles and glitter in Katherine’s jewels. She shines like poison.

I have not seen Katherine for ten months, not for all this year, and I used to see her almost every day. She does not write to me often, she says that there is nothing for her to say. There is this terrible gulf in my life where she used to be. It is as if she were dead, as if my brother had wiped her from the face of the earth. You will think I am exaggerating but I truly feel that Harry has killed her—as if a king could execute a queen!

At any rate, I shall not go to France with the woman Anne. None of us will. And I hear that none of the royal ladies of France will greet her. How can they? She is Harry’s mistress and her father has a title so new that no one can remember it and everyone still calls him Sir Thomas out of habit. The only companions she can command are those who support her ambition: her sister, her sister-in-law, and her mother—and the gossips say that Harry has had all three of them. They are hated all round England. She and Harry had to come home early from this year’s progress because she was booed whenever she was seen.

I swear that sometimes I wake in the morning and I forget that all this has happened. I think Harry is a handsome king new-come to his throne, Katherine a beloved queen and his most trusted advisor, and I am a girl again, and for a moment I am happy, and then I remember and I am filled with such a terrible sickness that I retch up bile as green as envy. Thank God that our dear mother died before seeing this woman sitting in her place and bringing such shame on our sister, on us and on our name.

Mary