The Boleyn Inheritance

Jane Boleyn, Rochester,
December 1539

“Advise her about her dress!” Lady Browne hisses at me, as if it is my fault that the new Queen of England looks so outlandish. “Jane Boleyn, tell me! Could she not have changed her dress in Calais?”

“Who could have advised her?” I ask reasonably. “All her ladies dress the same, after all.”

“Lord Lisle could have advised her. He could have warned her that she couldn’t come to England looking like a friar in fustian. How can I be expected to keep her maids in order when they are laughing their heads off at her? I nearly had to smack Katherine Howard. That child has been one day in royal service and already she is mimicking the queen’s walk and, what is worse, she has her to the life.”

“Maids are always naughty. You will command them.”

“There is no time for dressmakers until she gets to London. She will have to go on as she has begun, even if she looks like a parcel. What is she doing now?”

“She is resting,” I say guardedly. “I thought I would leave her in peace for a moment.”

“She is to be Queen of England,” her ladyship snaps. “That is not a peaceful life for any woman.”

I say nothing.

“Should we say anything to the king? Shall I speak to my husband?” Lady Browne asks me, her voice very low. “Should we not tell Secretary Cromwell that we have… reservations? Will you say anything to the duke?”

I think quickly. I swear that I am not going to be the first to speak against this queen. “Perhaps you should speak to Sir Anthony,” I say. “Privately, as his wife.”

“Shall I tell him that we are agreed? Surely my lord Southampton realizes that she is not fit to be queen. She is so graceless! And all but mute!”

“I have no opinion, myself,” I say rapidly.

She laughs at once. “Oh, Jane Boleyn, you always have an opinion; not much ever escapes you.”

“Perhaps. But if the king has chosen her because she brings with her the Protestant alliance, if my lord Cromwell has chosen her because it makes us safe against Spain and France, then perhaps the fact that her hood is the size of a house will not matter to him. She can always change her hood. And I would not want to be the one to suggest to the king that the woman he has solemnly and unbreakably betrothed is not fit to be queen.”

That stops her in her tracks. “You think I would be mistaken to criticize her?”

I think of the white-faced girl who peeped out of the closet in Calais, too shy and too frightened to sit in a room with her own court, and I find that I want to defend her against this unkindness. “Well, I have no criticism to make of her,” I say. “I am her lady-in-waiting. I may advise her as to her gowns or her hair if she asks me, but I would not have one word to say against her.”

“Or at any rate, not yet,” Lady Browne amends coldly. “Until you see an advantage for yourself.”

I let it pass, for just as I am about to answer, the door opens and the guard announces: “Mistress Catherine Carey, the queen’s maid-in-waiting.”

It is her. My niece. I have to face the child at last. I find a smile and I hold out my hands to her. “Little Catherine!” I exclaim. “How you have grown!”

She takes my hands, but she does not turn up her face to kiss my cheek. She looks at me quietly, as if she is taking the measure of me. The last time I saw her was when she stood behind her aunt Anne the queen on the scaffold, and held her cloak as the queen put her head on the block. The last time she saw me was outside the courtroom when they called my name to go in to give evidence. I remember how she looked at me then: curiously. She looked at me so curiously, as if she had never seen such a woman before.

“Are you cold? How was your journey? Will you have some wine?” I am drawing her to the fire, and she comes, but she is not eager. “This is Lady Browne,” I say. Her curtsy is good; she is graceful. She has been well taught.

“And how is your mother? And your father?”

“They are well.” Her voice is clear with just a hint of the country in her speech. “My mother sent you a letter.”

She brings it out of her pocket and hands it to me. I take it over to the light of the large square candle that we use in the royal household and break the seal.

Jane,

So starts Mary Boleyn, without a word of a title, as if I did not hold the very name of her house in my name, as if I were not Lady Rochford while she lives at Rochford Hall. As if she did not have my inheritance and my house while I have hers, which is nothing.

Long ago I chose the love of my husband over the vanity and danger of the court, and we perhaps would all have been happier if you and my sister had done the same – God have mercy on her soul. I have no desire to return to court but I wish you and the new Queen Anne better fortune than before, and I hope that your ambitions bring you the happiness you seek, and not what some might think you deserve.

My uncle has commanded the attendance of my daughter Catherine at court, and in obedience to him, she will arrive for the New Year. It is my instruction to her that she obeys only the king and her uncle, that she is guided only by my advice and her own good conscience. I have told her that, at the end, you were no friend to my sister nor my brother and advised her to treat you with the respect you deserve.

Mary Stafford

I am shaking after I have read this note and I read it again as if it might be different the second time. The respect I deserve? The respect I deserve? What did I do but lie and deceive to save the two of them till the very last moment, and then what did I do but protect the family from the disaster that they brought down on us? What could I do more? What should I have done differently? I obeyed the duke my uncle as I was bound to do, I did as he commanded me, and my deserts are these: that I am his faithful kinswoman and honored as such.

Who is she to call me a woman who might have been a good wife? I loved my husband with every inch of my soul and being, and I would have been everything to him if it were not for her and her sister and the net they made for him that he could not break, and that I could not break for him. Would he not be alive today if he had not gone down with his sister’s disgrace? Would he not be my husband and the father of our son today, if he had not been named with Anne and beheaded with Anne? And what did Mary do to save him? What did she ever do but suit herself?

I could scream with sheer rage and despair that she should set these thoughts running again in my head. That she should doubt my love of George, that she should reproach me! I am lost for words at the malice of her letter, at the veiled accusation. What else could I have done? I want to shout into her face. You were there; you were hardly the savior of George and Anne. What else could any of us have done?

But she was always like this, she and her sister; they always had a way to make me feel that they saw better, understood better, considered better. From the moment that I married George I was aware that his sisters were supposed to be finer young women than I: one the king’s lover and then the other. One, in the end, the king’s wife and Queen of England. They were born for greatness! The Boleyn sisters! And I was only ever a sister-in-law. Well, so be it. I have not got where I am today, I have not borne witness and sworn oaths to be reprimanded by a woman who ran away at the first sign of danger and married a man to hide in the country and pray Protestant prayers that good times would come.

Catherine, her daughter, looks at me curiously. “Did she show you this?” I ask, my voice shaking. Lady Browne looks at me, avidly inquisitive.

“No,” Catherine says.

I put it into the fire, as if it were evidence against me. The three of us watch it burn to gray ash. “I will reply later,” I say. “It was not at all important. For now, I will go and see that they have prepared your room.”

It is an excuse to get away from the two of them and the soft ash from the notepaper in the fire. I go quickly out and I call the maids and scold them for inattention, and then I go quietly to my own room and lean my hot forehead against the cool, thick glass. I shall ignore this slander, I shall ignore this insult, I shall ignore this enmity. Whatever its cause. I live in the heart of the court. I serve my king and my family. In time they shall all acknowledge me as the finest of the family, the Boleyn girl who served king and family to the end, never shrinking, never faltering, even if the king has grown fat and dangerous, and the family are all dead but me.