The Kiss of the Concubine: A story of Anne Boleyn (41 page)

I have chosen to write in the first person, giving voice to Anne’s imagined thoughts and fears. In my book she is an intelligent, devout woman with a keen desire to reform the
Church. Her relationship with Henry is complex, a love/hate relationship that brings down a queen, resulting in excommunication from Rome and the upheaval of the Church in England. She has many enemies, not least Spain, and it is the records of the Spanish ambassador, Chapuys, which provide the most damaging contemporary accounts of Anne.

We cannot know for
certain the circumstances of her fall, but we know it was swift. We know that right up until April 1536, just weeks before her arrest, Henry was as deeply enamoured with Anne as ever. Henry’s infidelity was not unusual at this time, and his dalliance with other women should not be read as signals indicating a failed marriage. Something happened between mid-April and early May to convince Henry that Anne was not all she seemed.

Early in her reign she worked in close conjunction with fellow reformer, Thomas Cromwell
, but prior to her fall there was a serious disagreement between them. Knowing the king’s desire for wealth, Cromwell intended to dissolve the monasteries, fill the king’s coffers and his own purse, and sell off ecclesiastic land to the gentry for profit. Anne, on the other hand, wanted to turn the monasteries into seats of learning, close the smaller abbeys and work with them to improve the standards and morals in those remaining. To raise awareness, she caused a sermon to be read in chapel by John Skip in which Henry VIII was compared to Ahasuerus, Anne Boleyn became Queen Esther, and Thomas Cromwell, who was in the process of suppressing the Lesser Monasteries, was Haman, the wicked minister to Ahasuerus. The sermon was essentially a gauntlet thrown at Cromwell’s feet. One can only imagine his displeasure.

After that
, her downfall was swift and complete. After her death, however, many records were lost. We are not in possession of all the facts, and this has left Anne’s story to be interpreted as her enemies wished.

It is easy to write Henry VIII off as a monster,
a tyrant, a wife murderer. He has featured as such in many novels; an omnipresent psychopath governing his country with a ruthless hand, dispatching anyone who dared to cross him. It was not until I started my research for
The Kiss of the Concubine
that I began to notice subtler aspects of his character, see him differently and come to have a greater understanding of this Tudor king.

Tyrants aren’t born, they evolve, just as saints do, their characters slowly shaped over time, just as ours are. Early chronicles of Henry provide no hint of the embittered man he was to become. On his assumption
of the throne, when his future stretched ahead of him in an unspotted landscape of graceful chivalry, he must have seemed the answer to the nation’s prayers.

While writing this book I had to forget what was to come later, I had to regard 1536 as a wall beyond which it was impossible to see. So in
The Kiss of the Concubine
you will find a gentler, more complex Henry; a man full of self-doubt, fearful of failure, his need for a son and heir all consuming.

I think
, as far as he was capable of it, he loved Anne. He wouldn’t have waited and suffered for so long and moved so many insurmountable mountains to obtain her if he hadn’t loved her. I think, at the end, he believed the accusations brought against her and it was his rage and hurt that made him turn against her. I suspect that the belief that his friends, George Boleyn, Henry Norris, William Brereton, Francis Weston, and above all, Anne, had betrayed him drove him to allow such drastic action to be taken. I also wonder if, once the deed was done, and he came to realise his mistake, the enormity of his actions turned his mind. After the fall of Anne Boleyn and those accused alongside her, Henry VIII was never the same again.

The
Kiss of the Concubine
is based on prolonged historic research, but it is, above all, fiction, and I have ignored some incidents and invented others. I hope you enjoy it.

Judith Arnopp’s other books include:

The Winchester Goose: At the court of Henry VIII

The Song of Heledd

The Forest Dwellers

Peaceweaver

Dear Henry: Confessions of the Queens