The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn (34 page)

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 Northumberland, 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.

So I reined the furious voice that wished to shriek curses at these spineless insects, and only pled not guilty to the charges, asking God to be the witness to my innocence. Then Norfolk made demand from all the Lords who sat upon their benches for a verdict in the case and they, one by one with no choice to make but guilty, so found me. I watched as that single word fell again and again from their corrupted lips, but I was little moved by its repetition … except by its pronouncement from one mouth.

Henry Percy faltered ‘fore he uttered those syllables that would put to death the only woman he had ever loved. He faltered and I made a challenge of the moment, tried to meet his eye. But like a gauntlet thrown down and never taken up out of mortal fear, he refused my engagement. Just stared straight ahead and said “guilty” more loudly even than the others had.

Norfolk pounded his white staff upon the floor three times and its crashing echoed in the hall, now so still the sound of a dove’s wings against the air might be clearly heard.

“Because thou has offended our Sovereign, the King’s Grace, in committing treason against his person, thou hast deserved death and shall be burnt here within the Tower of London on the Green, else to have thy head smitten off as the King’s pleasure shall be further known.”

I heard then a great muttering from the crowd. “Foul play!” “Where’s the King, with his new mistress?” “Where’s justice here?” and other low curses on this cowardly Court. I might have been marched away without another word had not the mood been such, but my Lord the Duke of Norfolk weighed the intelligence of letting me speak or forcing my silence, and finally gave me my permission.

If ever I owned dignity, ‘twas then and there that I knew I must needs make use of it. I kept all trembling from my voice and looked square at each of my accusers in their turn and said, “Gentlemen, I think you know well the reason why you have condemned me is something other than the evidence brought before you today. My only sin against the King has been my jealousy and lack of humility. But you must follow, if not your own clear conscience, the King’s. I have prepared my self to die, my Lords, and regret only that men innocent and loyal to Henry must lose their lives on my account.” Then I turned to the on-looking crowd, my own subjects who were very still, and let them look upon my face, that which they had for so long reviled, to see the truth of my innocence for them selves, and asked them humbly to pray for me. I let no man touch me as I swept, the Queen of England, from that hall.

Later in my prison rooms Lady Sommerville came and sadly gave report of my Brothers farce they called a trial. She said that he’d acquitted him self with so much grace and wit that most believed he would be freed. But it seems his rage got the best of George and he, enjoying one bittersweet moment of defiance, made publick a charge he’d been forbidden most explicitly to speak — that of Henry’s impotence. ‘Twas said that I told to my sister in law, and she to George, that the King had neither vigor nor strength for the manly act. This provoked such great whispering, nay laughter from the audience that my Uncle had to call for order. But this moment of contempt, said the good lady, so angered the Lords that it cost my brother his liberty and life. As final punishment we are to be kept until our deaths without the comfort of each other’s company.

Finally she told how, with court adjourned, all the Peers were bidden rise by Norfolk and they did — all but one. Henry Percy still sat slumped in his chair quite collapsed and deathly ill. He was carried from the hall by four guards, for all the other Lords had no time to delay with the weak or wounded.

So now I face the flames or if some memory of me should bestir the King’s generosity, the axe. I am very tired and pray to find some peace in sleep, but this wretchedly condemned woman’s hope to find sweet dreams is naught but a dream it self.

Yours faithfully,

Anne