The Boleyn Inheritance

Five years later
Anne, Hever Castle,
January 1547

So, he is dead at last, my husband who denied me, the man who failed the promise of his youth, the king who turned tyrant, the scholar who went mad, the beloved boy who became a monster. It was only his death that saved his last wife, Katherine Parr, who was to be arrested for treason and heresy; but death, which had been his ally, his partner and his pander for so long, finally came for him.

How many did the king kill? We can start to count now that death has stilled his murderous will. Thousands. No one will ever know. Up and down the land the burnings in the marketplace for heresy, the hangings at the gallows for treason. Thousands and thousands of men and women whose only crime was that they disagreed with him. Papists who held to the religion of their fathers, reformers who wanted the new ways. Little Kitty Howard among the dead, whose only crime was that she loved a boy of her own age and not a man old enough to be her father, and rotting from the leg upward. This is the man they call a great king, the greatest king that we have ever had in England. Does it not teach us that we should have no king? That a people should be free? That a tyrant is still a tyrant even when he has a handsome face under a crown?

I think of the Boleyn inheritance that meant so much to Lady Rochford. She was the heir, in the end. She inherited the death of her sister-in-law, of her husband. Her inheritance and poor Kitty’s, was death on the scaffold, just like them. I have a share of the Boleyn inheritance, too, this pretty little castle set in the Kent countryside, my favorite home.

So it is over. I shall wear mourning for the king, and then I shall attend the coronation of the prince, the little boy I loved, now to be King Edward. I have become what I promised myself I would be, if I was spared Henry’s axe. I promised myself that I would live my own life, by my own lights, that I would play my part in the world as a woman in my own right; and I have done this.

I am a free woman now, free from him and finally free from fear. If there is a knock on my door in the night, I will not start up from my bed, my heart hammering, thinking that my luck has run out and that he has sent his soldiers for me. If a stranger comes to my house, I will not suspect a spy. If someone asks me for news of the court, I will not fear entrapment.

I will own a cat and not fear being called a witch; I will dance and not fear being named a whore. I shall ride my horse and go where I please. I shall soar like a gyrfalcon. I shall live my own life and please myself. I shall be a free woman.

It is no small thing, this, for a woman: freedom.