The Boleyn Inheritance

Jane Boleyn, Westminster Palace,
May 1540

The queen is in the royal box high above the jousting lists, and though she is pale with anxiety she carries herself like a queen indeed. She has a smile for the hundreds of Londoners who have flocked to the palace to see the royal family and the nobles, the mock battles, the pageants, and the jousts. There are to be six challengers and six defenders, and they circle the arena with their entourages and their shields and their banners. The trumpets scream out the fanfare, and the crowd shouts their bets, and it is like a dream with the noise and the heat and the glare of the sun beating off the golden sand in the arena.

If I stand at the rear of the royal box and half close my eyes, I can see ghosts today. I can see Queen Katherine leaning forward and waving her hand to her young husband; I can even see his shield with this motto: Sir Loyal Heart.

Sir Loyal Heart! I would laugh if the king’s changeable heart had not been the death of so many. Loyal only to its own desires is the king’s heart, and this day, this May Day, it has changed again, like the spring wind, and is blowing another way.

I step to one side, and a ray of sunshine peeping through a gap in the awning dazzles me; for a moment I see Anne at the front of the box, my Anne, Anne Boleyn with her head flung back in laughter and the white line of her throat exposed. It was a hot May Day that year, Anne’s last year, and she blamed the sun when she was sweating with fear. She knew that she was in trouble, but she had no idea of her danger. How should she have known? We none of us knew. We none of us dreamed that he would put that long, lovely neck down on a block of wood and hire a French swordsman to hack it off. How should anyone dream that a man would do that to the wife he had adored? He broke the faith of his kingdom to have her. Why would he then break her?

If we had known… but it is pointless to say: if we had known.

Perhaps we would have run away. Me, and George my husband, and Anne his sister, and Elizabeth her daughter. Perhaps we might have run away and been free of this terror and this ambition and this lust for this life that is the English court. But we did not run. We sat like hares, cowering in the long grass at the sound of the hounds, hoping that the hunt would pass by; but that very day the soldiers came for my husband and for my beloved sister-in-law Anne. And I? I sat mum and let them go, and I never said one word to save them.

But this new young queen is no fool. We were afraid, all three of us; but we did not know how very afraid we should have been. But Anne of Cleves knows. She has spoken with her ambassador, and she knows there is to be no coronation. She has spoken with the Princess Mary and knows that the king can destroy a blameless wife by sending her far away from court, to a castle where the cold and damp will kill her if the poison does not. She has even spoken to little Katherine Howard, and now she knows that the king is in love. She knows that ahead of her there must be shame and divorce at the least, execution at the worst.

Yet here she sits, in the royal box, with her head held high, dropping her handkerchief to signify the start of a charge, smiling with her usual politeness on the victor, leaning forward to put the circlet of bay leaves on his helmet, to give him a purse of gold as his prize. Pale under her modest, ugly hood, doing her duty as Queen of the Joust as she has done her duty every day since she set foot in this country. She must be sick to her belly with terror, but her hands on the front of the box are gently clasped and do not even tremble. When the king salutes her, she rises up from her chair and curtsies respectfully to him; when the crowd calls her name, she turns and smiles and raises her hand when a lesser woman would scream for rescue. She is utterly composed.

“She knows?” asks a quiet voice in my ear, and I turn to the Duke of Norfolk. “Can she possibly know?”

“She knows everything but what is going to become of her,” I say.

He looks at her. “She cannot know. She cannot have understood. She must be too stupid to understand what is going to happen to her.”

“She isn’t stupid,” I say. “She is incredibly courageous. She knows everything. She has more courage than we know.”

“She’ll need it,” he says unsympathetically. “I am taking Katherine away from court.”

“Taking her away from the king?”

“Yes.”

“Is that not a risk? Will you deprive the king of the girl of his choice?”

The duke shakes his head. He cannot hide his triumph. “The king himself has told me to take her from court. He will marry Katherine as soon as he is rid of Anne. It is he who wants Katherine taken away. He wants her away from court so that she is not exposed to gossip while this false queen is ended.” He bites down on a smile; he is almost laughing. “He wants no shadow of gossip attached to Katherine’s unsullied name.”

“The false queen?” I pick out the strange new title.

“She was not free to marry. The marriage was never valid; it has not been consummated. God guided his conscience, and he did not fulfill his vows. God prevented him from consummating the marriage. The marriage is false. The queen is false. It is probably treason to make a false declaration to the king.”

I blink. It is the king’s right, as God’s representative on earth, to rule on such matters, but sometimes we mortals are a little slow to follow the whimsical changes of God. “It is over for her?” I make a little gesture to the girl at the front of the box who stands now to acknowledge the salute of the champion, and raises her hand and smiles at the crowd who shouts her name.

“She is finished,” the duke says.

“Finished?”

“Finished.”

I nod. I suppose this means that they will kill her.