At the bottom of the scaffold steps, I hesitate. These steps lead me to my death, and my feet refuse to begin the ascent of their own accord. Mr Kingston, seeing my predicament, offers me his hand and I cling to it, trying not to let my terror show.
I raise one foot.
And then another, until somehow I am at the top. I look across the people gathered, men who stand bareheaded in the May morning. I begin to speak but a crowd of ravens set up a rumpus on the battlement, making a mockery of the solemnity of the moment. I wait for them to quieten.
My mouth is dry, my tongue thick and arid, but I know I must address the crowd, as is the custom. I must speak well of the king. I must ignore the truth of his actions and lie for the sake of those I leave behind.
Above the Tower, the ravens continue to screech their mirth, while those men who have come to see me punished wait in silence, only the occasional shouted remark breaking the peace.
I am to die now and my last words must be kind ones. I force my mind to happy times, a place where the grass was tall and the meadows full of flowers.
Mary.
George.
… and Tom.
A time before Henry.
I raise my head and smile. It is a simple thing to perjure myself to ensure that my family go unmolested. The Boleyns must not be punished any further. I clear my throat and raise my hands.
Hands that no longer tremble.
“Good Christian people, I am come hither to die, for according to the law and by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I am come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak anything of that whereof I am accused and condemned to die, but I pray God save the king and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never: and to me he was ever a good, a gentle and sovereign lord. And if any person will meddle of my cause, I require them to judge the best. And thus I take my leave of the world and of you all, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me. O Lord have mercy on me, to God I commend my soul.”
The masked man stands like an effigy. I turn toward him and hold out a small bag of coin that he accepts, bows his gratitude, keeping his face averted. Then I grasp my women’s hands to bid them goodbye and, even though they are Cromwell’s spies and have no love for me, they are overcome. Their fingers tremble, their faces are wet with tears as they cling to me and bid me farewell.
“Come,” I command for one last time. “You must be strong.”
“It is time to kneel.” Mr Kingston interrupts our leave taking and I pass my prayer book to Lady Lee, my beads to my aunt. Someone helps me down. I tuck my skirts modestly about my ankles to ensure that in the moment of death, I am not shamed. Then, amid much weeping, my cap is removed. As the blindfold is tied their nervous fingers snag my hair, but I do not scold them, my last words on Earth shall not be a reprimand.
My suffering is over at last, and I trust that Heaven’s gate stands ajar. George, wait for me, George, I call silently, hoping that he has not yet passed into Paradise without me.
To my surprise I am no longer afraid, and with one last prayer for my sweet Elizabeth, I begin to pray aloud. The crowd holds their breath while silence screams like a blade around us; even the ravens have ceased their cackle in honour of my end.
“To Jesus Christ I commend my soul. Lord Jesu’ receive my …”
The falling blade is like the sighing of the sea.
***
Everything stops—sound, vision, sensation—but I am aware of everything. I can see back through time to a world where men barely scratched a living from the earth. And I see forward, a hundred thousand years into the future, to a time where royalty is disempowered, to a time when religion is crumbling and only war remains.
War and misery.
But I can still see the present, and realise that this year, 1536, is but a tiny speck in the vastness of forever. From a great height I see my women scrabbling to cover the bundle of bloody rags that was my body, the grisly sphere that was my head.
As they bear their burdens away, Cromwell turns his back, rubbing his hands on his gown as if to rid them of my blood. My uncle of Norfolk and Fitzroi follow him, the king’s son snivelling with a cold. And Master Kingston, my jailer, who at the very last became my friend, bids Fitzroi hasten home to bed. Then he turns his sad eyes to his wife, my enemy, Cromwell’s spy, and together they pass into the darkness of the keep where, high up in a Tower cell, Tom Wyatt stares blankly into a damp, dark corner.
Life goes on.
Even when we no longer wish it to.
Then my vision shifts and I am in the garden at Lambeth, where Cranmer sits upon a bench, weeping amid the early roses, torn petals scattered at his feet. In a rush of gratitude I reach out to make my farewell, but before I can comfort him, the setting changes again.
I am at Hatfield with Elizabeth. She has not yet been told of my passing and she is laughing, defying her nurses, her face alight with stubborn mischief. She is the king’s daughter in temperament as well as appearance.
I see Hever, where Grandmother huddles before a lazy fire. She is still dribbling, still ruled by her noxious little dog, Merlin. She will not comprehend what they have done to me, unlike my poor mother who sobs unrestrainedly in her chamber.
Where is Mary? I search through the mist that separates me from the living and find her at last, praying on her own in a chapel. To my surprise, she is praying for me, and for our brother, George. Poor Mary, left alone, disgraced by those who had thought themselves disgraced by her.
And then, suddenly, I am with you, Henry, speeding along beside your horse as you gallop to Wolf Hall to be with Jane. Filled with a jealous anger greater than any I ever knew in life, I remain at your side as you ride, whispering curses in your ear, denying you happiness, ill-wishing your unborn children.
And I have been with you every day since, my husband. I have seen you change from a prince to a monster. I’ve witnessed every cruelty, every sin, seen each small betrayal, each moment of joy, watched every discarded wife falter and fall.
And I’ve wept for every one of them.
28th January 1547 – Whitehall
What were you running from, Henry? All your life you’ve been afraid; afraid of failure, afraid of discovery, afraid of the Devil catching up with you. Well, now that time is here. And I have lingered just to see it.
I uncurl my legs and slide from the bed. His breath is scarcely audible now, and soon the rattle will begin, denoting the end.
The bitter end.
Cranmer clutches his master’s hand, praying for his soul, knowing what will come, and fearing it.
The court holds its breath.
The rattling in the king’s throat falters, and then stops …tension mounts, his breath begins again but I can wait no longer and reach out from the darkness to take back what is mine.
Author’s note
The story of Anne Boleyn has been written many times, in many different ways, but I have tried to relate in it a way that Anne might prefer it to be told.
Of all the women in history, Anne Boleyn has to be among the most vilified. Almost from the moment of her death, her attributes were suppressed and her faults exaggerated. Her story, written largely by her enemies, brands her a whore, a witch, an adulteress, and a traitor, and many modern day novelists have followed that path, even embellished the lurid details to make her worse. But despite their best efforts
there is nothing in the existing record to suggest any of these things were true.
The damning evidence used at her trial can now be disregarded, and historians have proved that on many of the dates and times when she was alleged to have been with lovers, she was in fact elsewhere; on one occasion recovering from giving birth to Elizabeth. The accusation of incest is unlikely to be true—incest, like witchcraft, was a tag used to demonise a person’s character, particularly women, and like many other people, I chose to dismiss it. What I have done is provide a fictional spark to explain ho
w rumours of this nature can quickly burst into flame.
I have chosen to write in the first person, giving voice to Anne’s imagined thoughts and fears. In my book she is an intelligent, devout woman with a keen desire to reform the Church. Her relationship with Henry is complex, a love/hate relationship that brings down a queen, resulting in excommunication from Rome and the upheaval of the Church in England. She has many enemies, not least Spain, and it is the records of the Spanish ambassador, Chapuys, which provide the most damaging contemporary accounts of Anne.
We cannot know for certain the circumstances of her fall, but we know it was swift. We know that right up until April 1536, just weeks before her arrest, Henry was as deeply enamoured with Anne as ever. Henry’s infidelity was not unusual at this time, and his dalliance with other women should not be read as signals indicating a failed marriage. Something happened between mid-April and early May to convince Henry that Anne was not all she seemed.
Early in her reign she worked in close conjunction with fellow reformer, Thomas Cromwell, but prior to her fall there was a serious disagreement between them. Knowing the king’s desire for wealth, Cromwell intended to dissolve the monasteries, fill the king’s coffers and his own purse, and sell off ecclesiastic land to the gentry for profit. Anne, on the other hand, wanted to turn the monasteries into seats of learning, close the smaller abbeys and work with them to improve the standards and morals in those remaining. To raise awareness, she caused a sermon to be read in chapel by John Skip in which Henry VIII was compared to Ahasuerus, Anne Boleyn became Queen Esther, and Thomas Cromwell, who was in the process of suppressing the Lesser Monasteries, was Haman, the wicked minister to Ahasuerus. The sermon was essentially a gauntlet thrown at Cromwell’s feet. One can only imagine his displeasure.
After that, her downfall was swift and complete. After her death, however, many records were lost. We are not in possession of all the facts, and this has left Anne’s story to be interpreted as her enemies wished.
It is easy to write Henry VIII off as a monster, a tyrant, a wife murderer. He has featured as such in many novels; an omnipresent psychopath governing his country with a ruthless hand, dispatching anyone who dared to cross him. It was not until I started my research for The Kiss of the Concubine that I began to notice subtler aspects of his character, see him differently and come to have a greater understanding of this Tudor king.
Tyrants aren’t born, they evolve, just as saints do, their characters slowly shaped over time, just as ours are. Early chronicles of Henry provide no hint of the embittered man he was to become. On his assumption of the throne, when his future stretched ahead of him in an unspotted landscape of graceful chivalry, he must have seemed the answer to the nation’s prayers.
While writing this book I had to forget what was to come later, I had to regard 1536 as a wall beyond which it was impossible to see. So in The Kiss of the Concubine you will find a gentler, more complex Henry; a man full of self-doubt, fearful of failure, his need for a son and heir all consuming.
I think, as far as he was capable of it, he loved Anne. He wouldn’t have waited and suffered for so long and moved so many insurmountable mountains to obtain her if he hadn’t loved her. I think, at the end, he believed the accusations brought against her and it was his rage and hurt that made him turn against her. I suspect that the belief that his friends, George Boleyn, Henry Norris, William Brereton, Francis Weston, and above all, Anne, had betrayed him drove him to allow such drastic action to be taken. I also wonder if, once the deed was done, and he came to realise his mistake, the enormity of his actions turned his mind. After the fall of Anne Boleyn and those accused alongside her, Henry VIII was never the same again.
The Kiss of the Concubine is based on prolonged historic research, but it is, above all, fiction, and I have ignored some incidents and invented others. I hope you enjoy it.
Judith Arnopp’s other books include:
The Winchester Goose: At the court of Henry VIII
The Song of Heledd
The Forest Dwellers
Peaceweaver
Dear Henry: Confessions of the Queens
The Kiss of the Concubine: A story of Anne Boleyn Page 30
