Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn (37 page)

I could not abide Jane. I took to pinching
and shaking her, and slapping her witless face. At least Katherine
had been a worthy opponent. Katherine had been one for whom I had
to plan and hone my insults and attacks—and these had to involve
some artistry and imagination in order to have effect. Jane could
only understand a simple boxing of the ears, but even that gave me
some pleasure. It was satisfying at times, to box the harlot’s
ears.

Ye gods! Why had they never called
her
a whore? Why could she warm dozens of beds without criticism? Why
was I, whose only partners were a rapist and my husband, enduring
attacks more rightly owed to Jane?

More importantly, how could Henry love her?
Did
he love her? Or, did he simply claim to out of spite?
How could a man who had always required thoughtful discourse and
the mental stimulation of an intelligent woman abide the company of
Jane, who was more aptly viewed as a
pet
than as a lover?
She could not even read or write, except to copy letters written
for her by someone else. She could only write her name, and
unskillfully at that!

Had Henry ever really loved me?

•
~
۞
~•

I did not fully realize it, and it would not
have pleased her to know this, but Katherine was the one person
saving me from abandonment. Henry could not claim his marriage to
me invalid as long as she lived or the end of his marriage to me
would, through political pressure from Spain and Katherine’s
followers, mean resuming his marriage to her. This, of course, was
out of the question. He wanted to marry Jane. He would need to rid
himself of both Katherine and me in order to do this.

Most terrifying to me were the circumstances
of Katherine’s death, for indeed she died, writhing and vomiting,
in agonizing pain. Since I was not made aware of the details of her
cancer, I assumed she had been poisoned . . . by Henry? He
certainly was not displeased to hear word of her passing.

He was now rid of one.

I saw this only in retrospect. My fool,
however, clearly saw it all as it was happening. He took bites of
my food before handing it off to me, not trusting anyone. In the
beginning, I humored him and thought he was silly to be concerned
on my behalf, for Henry, I told him, could never harm me.

“Of course not, Your Majesty,” he quickly
replied with a strained and guarded look. “The king deeply honors
Your Majesty. However, there are others who may wish Your Majesty
harm, and it is from these that the threat comes.”

He was so solemn as he said this. His words
held no humor at all as they should, and it was his jarring absence
of humor that shook me into vigilance.

I would soon learn I was suspected of being
Katherine’s murderer. I was roundly accused of plotting to poison
everyone–there were even persons who would die after me, whom it
was said succumbed to slow poison administered by “the she-devil,
Anne Boleyn while yet she lived”. My fool had heard the rumors and
did what he could to protect me from retaliatory actions from that
camp. He suspected Henry might be planning mischief as well, but
could do nothing about that, except fret.

It was at this time that Henry first asked if
I would renounce Elizabeth’s claim to the throne. My reaction to
this was to swallow down the bile of outrage. It was a disgrace and
a shame for reasons that went beyond his lack of loyalty to his
children, for had he not treated Princess Mary the same? I felt it
was right that
I
should hate Princess Mary, for she
continually snubbed and insulted me, and furthermore was a threat
to me and my child. But Henry’s cold treatment of her had, at
times, given me pause to reflect—even as I, in hurt or in anger,
had pushed and goaded him to do it.

What infuriated me more than that was how
frivolously Henry could destroy lives. For what reason had he
caused those people to die, if not in defense of Elizabeth’s right
to be queen? Were their lives all so cheap that Henry could simply
say: “I changed my mind”? I would that he could bring them all back
as easily as he had just now made their deaths so meaningless with
his request. Were he able to do this and give them back their
lives, I would happily renounce my rights and my daughter’s.
However, as it stood, I could not. I never could. I would die
myself before doing so, and I told him as much, and I did not back
down.

Furthermore, I would never allow a child of
mine to step aside and make room for a child of Jane Seymour’s. I
had lost virtually everything when I married Henry, and in return
had gained nothing that still remained, or that I still valued from
my marriage, except the knowledge that my child would be a queen. I
would not relinquish it to the likes of Jane.

Henry would have to do what his conscience
dictated. I would not give in to this. Not ever. Not even if it
meant divorce.

That was what I feared: divorce. I never,
ever feared for my life–truly I did not–even as I stood and smelled
the corpses rotting.

Henry was preparing to move me out as he had
moved Katherine out. I did not have supporters as Katherine had
had, and my outlook became hopeless. Even my family was leaping
like rats from a ship. All my loved ones, the same ones who had
haunted me ceaselessly throughout my marriage with hands held out
for gifts and favors, were seeking shelter elsewhere by
disassociating themselves from me.

There was seemingly no end to the
humiliation. Henry ordered me away to the palace in Greenwich, even
though I was pregnant once again and could be carrying a male
child, a legal heir to the British throne.

Surely, I thought, the timing was such that
this pregnancy was God’s kind intervention. Surely He was answering
my prayers and would give me a son. When that occurred, I told
myself, I would be called back to London, and Henry would love me
again.

I comforted myself in this manner, but it was
an unrealistic hope, that this child could reunite us. The
pregnancy had come about in violent fashion, and without love.
Henry raped me, in hatred and in spite, because it suited him to
frighten and punish me for all the times I told him “no”.

I am certain he had other reasons: my tongue,
the naggings, the dead male heir, the healthy daughter, the greedy,
grasping in-laws, and years filled with curses for me from his
subjects and his court. Every whispered warning and unheeded bit of
advice from his counsel was coming to the fore of his consciousness
and mocking him. And so, it was only right that he make a mockery
of me and my love for him.

One night when Jane was presumably indisposed
and Henry had time to mull over all the grief I had caused him, he
made his way into my chambers. Then, he wordlessly grabbed me and
hurled me onto the bed, pressed me face down while he held my arms
and tore at my clothes. He raped me, and left me there,
weeping.

I tried to believe afterwards that his
actions were prompted by passion, even though he had shown no
gentleness and spoke no words of love. I sometimes pretended such
as this to myself, all the while knowing the truth in my heart.

When I could face that truth, I wondered:
Does Henry now understand that a woman can be forced? Then I
realized, “No.” I was his wife whom the law said he could abuse as
he wished. The rape taught Henry nothing about himself, or about
me. He viewed me coldly, and had barely spoken to me since.

Then, one day when Henry was away, word
reached me that he had fallen from his horse and was dead. This
declaration was uttered prematurely, or perhaps the message was
purposeful and malicious; I was surrounded by people who took
pleasure in causing me upset and distress.

With Henry dead, I would be drawn and
quartered by the crowds, I thought. I could not survive a day.

I also felt sorrow for my lost husband, and
despair that we had parted on bad terms before his death. I shared
this only with my fool. I trusted no one else with the shame I felt
in still loving the man (though all knew, and made me the object of
their sniggering contempt).

I had a fit of nervous hysteria. Soon
afterward, I lost the child, which was said to be male and severely
deformed. In truth, I could not determine myself either its gender,
or the state of the infant’s overall development. I trusted what I
was told by persons who were not my friends.

Henry was not dead at all, but had suffered a
head wound from which he was thought to fully recover. By now,
however, the child was lost. I had no hope of conceiving another,
convinced as I was that Henry no longer even cared enough to rape
me.

I did not know this then, but he was not
recovered, nor would Henry ever recover from the head wound. There
was damage to one sector of the brain from the fall, and this
weakness gave his illness full rein there. He now had only a
tenuous hold on his own mind.

He seemed at times a different person, though
how, exactly, I could not say. He had, more and more over time,
given the impression of a dual character, and I had long been aware
of this “second” Henry. What I was viewing now was simply all of
the second Henry, and none of the first. The person I now saw was
the one whom I did not much like. When I appealed to my husband,
however, I spoke to the first Henry as if he could somehow still
hear me, not understanding why he did not, and not knowing where he
had gone.

Henry was understandably upset by the aborted
birth. He was curt and said only that God obviously did not want
him to have a son. Then he turned and left me without further word
or concern.

To others, after he left me, he publicly
mentioned that the child could not be his, since it was
deformed.

•
~
۞
~•

After I miscarried, Henry began to
orchestrate a conspiracy involving the family of Jane Seymour, Jane
Seymour herself, my underlings and officers, members of my own
extended family, and members of the court. This would ultimately
result in my death. I, of course, could not know this then. My
suspicions were only that he was plotting a divorce.

With increased confidence from having finally
gained his ear with regard to Anne Boleyn, Henry’s counsel now
spoke more loudly, and with stronger conviction against me. Added
to their voices were the voices of those they recruited. There was
no end to the line of people prepared to discredit me. Some of
these I had never met, nor seen.

One by one, these people stood before Henry
(at his invitation), and denounced me as a whore and an adulteress.
Others did the same, without provocation or encouragement. Even
people whom I barely knew provided shocking reports of a very
personal nature. Some of these fabricated stories out of spite
towards me; others believed what they were told and were repeating
tales as though they themselves were witnesses. These strangers and
near-strangers were caught up in the momentum of the movement to
overthrow me, and were anxious to be treated with the same
consideration as the others.

They had proof. Had I not once dropped my
handkerchief? Such an act was clearly one of seduction and proved I
was a flirt.

And they had names. In response to the
accusations, Henry called for the arrest of several people, all of
whom I was said to have bedded, including my own brother
George.

Henry nodded in seeming pain at learning the
“truth” about the wife who had so betrayed him, and rewarded my
accusers who lined up their friends for more rewards.

I was taken away to the Tower of London, in
broad daylight rather than in the dignity of darkness, and locked
away to await my trial. I was alone, now. I had no fool, no Emma,
no husband, no friend.

I had no family. My father . . . my own
father made public declarations against me in a vain attempt to
hold onto his influence, and perhaps his life. My mother was silent
and, I presumed, felt the same.

“Let her die,” my father said.

He said to let me die. Could my heart break
any more than it already had?

“It is too good for me,” I said, when I
arrived and looked around me. My prison was the very house in which
I had stayed while awaiting my coronation which, ironically, had
led me to another form of imprisonment, as queen.

“Jesu, have mercy on me.” I fell to my knees
and began to cry.

In the carriage on my way to this place, I
had heard someone taunting me with a child’s chant. Or perhaps they
were not taunting. I heard taunts in everything. Now, within my
large and well-appointed prison I thought of that song, for I could
not expel it from my head: “Ring around the rosy, pocket full of
posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down!” I whispered it, kneeling,
rocking myself, tears streaming down my cheeks, chuckling softly.
There was a certain irony in this.

“Mr. Kingston, shall I die without justice?”
I asked, looking up.

In response, the man said: “The poorest
subject the king hath, hath justice.”

His face increased the absurdity of the
remark by being as sincere and as devoid of irony as Hal’s might
have been had he been saying those same words in jest. I thought to
myself, “Well done!” and nearly applauded as I would have done, had
he been one of the jesters. I found Henry’s “justice”, and this
man’s suggestion that it was “just” very humorous indeed. So I
burst into a laugh.

But having shown amusement, I did not stop. I
erupted into hysterical laughter, like a hyena . . . like some
wild, crazed, filthy lunatic who wandered the streets and ate rats
and bit dogs. It was the crack in my mind that I had feared. The
laughter was the crack that let the demons in.