To Die For: A Novel of Anne Boleyn

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I stood in front of Anne Boleyn on Easter Sunday, or I should say, I stood in front of her portrait at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Because I wanted to reflect on her life but not inhibit others from viewing the painting, I stood a few feet back and let others pass in front of me. Two women of a certain age did just that.

“Floozy!” one sputtered.

“Schemer!” her friend hissed as she moved quickly past Anne, who stared, calmly, back.

I felt as though someone had just spat on a friend.

Throughout the ages Anne has been portrayed as a man-eater, the woman who used her feminine wiles to woo Henry away from his faithful, aging wife. And while it’s true that Henry sought to divorce Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, the woman, and her story, is much deeper, purer, and more complicated than that. Historian Dr. Eric Ives, perhaps the world’s most respected biographer of Anne Boleyn, says, “Historians see through a glass darkly; they know in part and they pronounce in part.” Maybe there has been more pronouncing than knowing where Anne has been concerned.

While this is a work of historical fiction, I’ve sought to remain as true to the history as to the fiction. Ives says that Anne “would remain a remarkable woman in a century that produced many of great note. There were few others who rose from such beginnings to a crown and none contributed to a revolution as far reaching as the English Reformation.”

Anne really was lifelong friends with the sisters of Thomas Wyatt, and they are believed to have accompanied her to the scaffold. The son of the eldest Wyatt sister did have a son named John Rogers who became a priest, and then a Reformer, and was commonly believed to be the first Protestant martyred under Bloody Mary, Henry’s eldest daughter. In my story and genealogy chart, I have switched the names of Meg and her mother and Henry Wyatt’s eldest daughter and her mother for this story so that two “Annes” wouldn’t confuse the reader. Many believe Margaret, Lady Lee, to have been the Margaret in my story, but the birth dates of Henry Wyatt’s children, as well as his first marriage and the birth date of Lady Lee, suggested something else to me, as seen on my genealogy charts and in the story within. Many of the things said and done in the book are actual recorded history, and some, like making Henry and Katherine Carey the illegitimate offspring of Henry VIII and Mary Boleyn, are theories I have adopted based on what I feel is good history. This is true, too, of the private commitment of Anne and Henry in November 1532, espousals de praesenti, formalized by intercourse, which, according to Eric Ives in his biography The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn is a plausible alternative scenario put forth not only by Anne’s and Elizabeth’s supporters but also by those who had no personal stake, and even by soem who had potential motivation to undermine.

In 1540, just five years after the king made Thomas Cromwell the highest civil and religious authority in the land, after himself, he had him beheaded because he did not like Anne of Cleves, procured for the king by Cromwell. And, perhaps, Henry felt that Cromwell had risen too high, always a danger in Henry’s courts. Henry married his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, that very same day. The king seems to have made a practice of tying together murder and marriage.

Jane Rochford, George’s wife, did die by the sword just six years after Meg had said she might. Jane was found guilty of assisting in arranging clandestine meetings between Henry’s fifth wife, Anne’s cousin Catherine Howard, and Queen Catherine’s lover. Jane was imprisoned in the Tower, declared insane, and finally executed by a single blow of the ax in 1542.

Meg’s fuller story, of course, is mainly fictional but drawn from the time. Many women, then as now, give their lives to the call of service that goes unrecorded except by the One who notes all and never forgets.

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