The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn

by Robin Maxwell

  “As Your Majesty wishes,” intoned Cecil and inclined his head in a bow. He never ceased to be amazed by the woman who was suddenly the Queen, the frail, incandescently pale girl who had overnight assumed a frighteningly assured command over her men. In such moments Cecil knew unequivocally that the old rumors — the ones surrounding her mother Anne Boleyn’s trial for treason and adultery, the ones claiming Elizabeth had never been sired by Henry at all — were completely ridiculous. Even a fool could see her father in the girl. Not just the fine russet gold hair, the aquiline nose, the sunburst smile, but the same inborn imperiousness, perfect authority, and pure animal magnetism. Too, he thought ironically, Elizabeth like her father possessed that rare quality that inspired men and women to cleave to her with passionate love and unshakable devotion, despite her inexperience and sometimes callous insults.

  Elizabeth, who had been pacing incessantly as much from an overabundance of nervous energy as to warm her body in the morning chamber’s chill, now sought the highbacked chair with its crimson cushions and drummed her fingers on the carved wooden claw arms. “Shall we move on?”

  “The time has come, Madame, to take the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity before Parliament and write them into law.”

  “Like your father you shall be named Supreme Head of the Church of England,” announced the Lord Treasurer, the Marquess of Windsor, a sweet-faced old man whose head seemed balanced precariously in the folds of his starched ruff.

  “I prefer ‘Governor’ — ‘Supreme Governor,’” said Elizabeth. “And my late brother Edward’s Prayer Book? Will it be reinstated?”

  “Immediately, Your Majesty,” replied Cecil. “And services shall henceforth be conducted in English.”

  “God be praised,” said the Queen.

  “We propose also that attendance at mass should be a crime punished by imprisonment,” Cecil went on. “Repeated thrice, punishable by life imprisonment.”

  “Is this not inordinately harsh, my lords, and far too similar to Roman persecution? On the Continent a new Dominican Inquisitor has been named, and Jews are again forced to wear yellow squares on their backs. I do not want it said that our reformation tends toward cruelty.”

  “’Tis far less harsh than your sister’s burning of Protestant heretics during her reign,” answered Lord Clinton.

  Elizabeth noticed Lord Arundel, the only remaining Catholic in her Privy Council, wince at the reference to Mary’s outrageous and deadly persecution of adherents to the New Faith. Many good men, women, even children had died horribly in the flames, among them her mother’s good friend Archbishop Cranmer.

  “I have been witness to my brother’s Protestant fanaticism, which was as repugnant as my sister’s Catholicism. The realm is in need of healing and unity, and a middle road in the matter of religion will engender both. And whilst I have no patience with saints, indulgences, and miracles, we shall seek outward conformity, without forgetting that each man’s belief is a matter most personal. I have no wish to open windows in men’s souls.”

  “Your Majesty. There is something else we must needs discuss,” Cecil began, as gingerly as a man entering a roomful of angry boars.

  Elizabeth, knowing full well the subject of his digression, covered her smile with a fist pressed to her lips. “And what could that be, my lord Cecil?”

  “Your marriage, Majesty. It is of the utmost importance. A foreign alliance —”

  “Do not speak to me of a foreign alliance!” Elizabeth leapt from her chair in a swirl of rustling brocade and wafts of heady perfume which left her councillors dizzy. “When I took the throne I was hailed as a queen of no mingled blood of Spaniard or stranger, but born mere English and therefore most natural. What you want from me is a child of my body, is it not? An heir. Well, do you not believe my subjects wish for a true English prince?”

  “But, Your Majesty —”

  “I should be better off marrying you!” She twirled to face her Lord Steward. “Indeed, the Earl of Arundel wishes me to believe he is the best match in all of England.” She turned again and came eye to eye with the old Marquess of Windsor who had served under both her father and her brother. He was bent and frail, but when the Queen ran her ivory fingers over his grey beard he smiled like a young boy in love. “If my Lord Treasurer were a younger man I could find it in my heart to have him as my husband!”

  “Forgive me, Madame, but you jest upon a most serious subject,” said her chief counsellor.

  “If I did not know you better, Lord Cecil, I would think you subscribed to the common belief that beauty is nature’s gift to woman in compensation for her deprivation of brains —”

  “Your Majesty —” he begged.

  “— or to the writings of that pompous idiot John Knox who holds that for a woman to rule over men is as reasonable as the blind leading the sighted.”

  Elizabeth was no longer smiling and an angry flush had spread across her pale cheeks. “I ‘have told you and I will tell you once again. I will act in this matter as God directs me. Besides…” she said, regaining her composure as handily as she regained control of an unruly gelding, “I am already married.”

  Her councillors froze. Hardly a whispered breath could be heard from the lot of them. Had the worst happened? Had the Queen secretly married Dudley? Elizabeth raised her right hand, brandishing the heavy gold and ruby coronation ring at her councillors.

  “My husband is the Kingdom of England! Good day, my lords.”

  She had never seen anyone quite so old. When Kat Ashley showed the bent and hobbling woman into the Presence Chamber, Elizabeth found herself staring. The hair under the cap was thin and dull grey and the face impossibly wrinkled, like an apple left to dry in the sun. The ancient’s gown was frayed, faded, and altogether out of fashion, hanging loosely on her bony frame. Nevertheless Elizabeth felt quite certain this was a highborn lady. The woman’s deep and well-schooled curtsy despite painful joints was further proof of her nobility and training.

  Elizabeth’s curiosity piqued, she dispensed with formality and said, before the woman had even time to rise, “Speak. Tell me why you have come.”

  The woman was now upright but the great widow’s hump forced her to throw back the aged head at an extreme angle in order to meet the Queen’s steely gaze.

  “We must speak alone, Your Majesty.”

  Kat spluttered at the outrageous demand and with her eyes implored the Queen to allow her to eject the woman. But although the old lady’s overproud demeanor seemed at odds with her shabby appearance, Elizabeth sensed a strange importance in the occasion. She dismissed her lady, and Kat, red-faced with annoyance, swept out the door.

  “I have something once belonging to your mother,” the crone said.

  “Tell me your name, old woman, and let us dispel all secrecy. I may have interest in what you bring, but little patience.”

  The woman stared unflinching into Elizabeth’s eyes. “Lady Matilda Sommerville, Your Grace. And perhaps patience will, like creaking joints, be acquired with age.” As the Queen gazed at the crone unsure whether she was amused or infuriated, the woman reached deep into the folds of her skirt and extracted a worn old book, then hesitated.

  “Let me see this book,” commanded Elizabeth tersely.

  “It is not a book, Your Majesty.”

  “Come now, I can see with my two eyes that it is.”

  Seeming to know precisely the limits to her own insolence, Lady Sommerville hobbled forward and, with gnarled fingers splayed at an unnatural angle, held out the claret leather volume. She came as close as she dared to the Queen and whispered, “It is a diary. Your mother Anne Boleyn’s diary.”

  At once the skin on Elizabeth’s body began to crawl and her heart heaved. Her mother! She had almost no memory of her mother and in truth had not even uttered her name aloud for more than twenty years. She willed herself to calm and took time before she spoke.

  “A diary? And how, may I ask, would the lady Sommerville come into possession of a queen�
�s diary?”

  The woman’s rheumy eyes lost their focus, as if she had left this time, this place. “I had the great honor of attending your good mother before her death,” she said with quiet pride.

  Though logic demanded that the woman’s story be viewed skeptically, and the article in her hand subjected to extreme scrutiny, Elizabeth reached for the volume with uncharacteristic open-heartedness. The leather under her fingers was coarse, and the faint odor of parchment and vellum wafted into her nostrils.

  The old woman was watching the Queen with eyes filled with calm certainty. The young monarch must know she was telling the truth. She would not be punished.

  “Sit,” Elizabeth said, more an invitation than a command. “Tell me about my mother.”

  Lady Sommerville gratefully lowered herself onto a chair and arranged her legs under the voluminous skirts in a way that gave her the least pain.

  “My uncle, Lord Kingston, was constable of the Tower of London in your father’s reign. My relative had been a great soldier who fought bravely in the battle of Flodden, where he was gravely injured. He oftentimes said he wished he’d died there in glory, for a cripple he was all his life thereafter, and a bitter man. Good King Harry rewarded my uncle with guardianship of the London fortress, and though it was a great honor, he was unhappy with his post. The grey walls filled him with gloom, the cold mists from the river ached his poor bones, and the great royal armory inspired longing for battle on open fields, the clash of metal on metal.” Lady Sommerville’s voice was gaining strength and confidence as she warmed to the memories and lived again as a young woman.

  “Kingston was in attendance when your mother, already five months pregnant with you, came for three days of happy confinement in the Tower before her coronation as queen. He served her grudgingly, having been, like so many Englishmen, a loyal supporter of your father’s first wife Katherine, foreign though she was. But valuing the safety of his family if not his own skinny neck, he bowed before the new queen and made her stay most comfortable. Three short years later she was back, disgraced and charged with treason and witchcraft. He remembers her arriving on the barge, her face grey and sodden as the sky was. She stumbled as she walked through the river gate into the Tower courtyard, and he caught her arm. She smiled, he said, grateful for any small kindness then, for she had been shown none for so long and had no friends, only enemies.”

  Elizabeth found her hands trembling and held the diary tightly to quiet them. For she was a part of this story of doom. It was not just the memory of the Tower, that bleak hell where she herself had been imprisoned for months when her half sister Mary, as queen, suspected Elizabeth of plotting her demise. No, it was more than that. This old woman dredged the dark depths of Elizabeth’s beginnings and her mother’s end, all woven intricately together like a fine tapestry. Till now she had little allowed herself to dwell on Anne’s life or her death.

  The promise of her own birth had been Anne’s great hope — a male child, the heir that Katherine had not been able to give Henry. She knew also that her own sex had contributed to Anne’s death. If she had been born a boy, her mother might still be alive today, might still be queen.

  “Continue, Lady Sommerville. You said you attended my mother at her end.”

  “My uncle needed women to serve the Queen in her terrible confinement and few were willing. Your mother was much reviled, Your Majesty.” The old woman lowered her eyes, ashamed to speak this truth to Elizabeth.

  “She was, indeed. ‘Nan Bullen the King’s whore’ they called her.” Elizabeth’s mouth quivered and a surge of pity swept over her in a great wave. Like her mother she had been the object of hatred and jealousy, rejected and, even as a princess, called ugly names. A few short years ago, until her succession was realized, she had been nothing more than Henry’s bastard. Elizabeth’s chest hurt. Her throat felt dry and tight.

  “I loved your mother,” said Lady Sommerville quite unexpectedly, “from the first moment I laid eyes on her lonely soul.”

  Elizabeth searched the old lady’s lined face for any flicker of emotion to match her words. But there was nothing more than the shriveled lips moving, conveying a precious secret between two women of noble blood.

  “She was delicate in stature, her wrists as tiny as a switch, and that long swan neck. …” Lady Sommerville went on. “And graceful, so full of grace that you overlooked the sallow skin, the eyes almost too large for their sockets. Her voice was lovely, sparkling and gay, despite her terrible circumstances. And such wit. Your mother made me laugh, she did. We laughed together, just her and me, for no one else would share it. The other lady keepers stared and whis-/ pered, and my uncle became very cross with me. But I said, bold as a man, ‘She’s still the Queen until she’s dead. She commands me, not you.’” The old lady stopped and smiled privately, perhaps remembering that moment of brave resistance, then went on.

  “Each night of the weeks she was there she let me brush out her long dark hair. Like thick silk it was, and black as a raven’s wing. That was when she would cry, your mother. Angry bitter tears. And soft whimpering ones as well. Once she said, ‘Henry loved to brush my hair.’ That was all. ‘Henry loved to brush my hair.’ The only other time I saw her cry was when they executed her brother — watching his beheading from a Tower parapet. The deaths of the others, the men accused with him of debauchery with her, did not affect her so. But she loved her brother George.” Lady Sommerville looked into the Queen’s eyes. “Your uncle.”

  “Yes, my uncle.” Elizabeth tried thinking back. Did she remember George Boleyn? Handsome in his portraits, charming by his reputation. No, she had no memory of him, nor of her grandfather, Thomas, who traded his daughter for ambition and abandoned her for expediency. Even her mother, Anne, was an ephemeral vision, a faint scent of spice, a lilting laugh. But always her face was suffused with a light so bright that its details were all but obliterated.

  One of Elizabeth’s childish mementos was a fine linen kerchief embroidered with her mother’s A and her father’s H entwined like embracing lovers. Later, when Anne was gone and forgotten, supplanted by Jane Seymour, all linens, carvings, paintings, and crests with that bold symbol of Anne’s success were destroyed or discarded, replaced by the new queen’s J entwined with Henry’s H. All through her lonely and miserable childhood Elizabeth kept the kerchief, an illicit treasure, in a tiny chest that contained what poor jewels she’d been given, and other trinkets of little value. As she grew older the box of trinkets was pushed to the bottom of a wooden chest, and her mother’s memory faded like a painted fan.

  “Tell me about the diary.”

  “I knew nothing of the diary until the day your mother went to her unhappy death. She was agitated on that day, as workmen had been outside her prison window sawing and hammering the platform upon which she was to die. Her last pleas to your father for clemency had come to naught, and she was out of hope. It seemed for a time that all grace had left her. She was clumsy, tripping on her skirt and wringing her hands. She would rake her fingers across her face and through her hair, muttering, ‘God forgive me. God forgive me.’

  “I felt sick at my stomach and light-headed. She was pitiful and not the queen I knew she’d want to appear before the audience of her execution. So I rallied myself and went kindly to her, asking if she did not want me to brush her hair. She looked at me then and it appeared something inside of her settled. She grew very calm and said, ‘Yes please, Lady Sommerville, I would very much like that.’

  “I did the long slow strokes she so enjoyed, patting the hair down gently behind the brush, and then she asked if I would put it up and fasten it off her neck. It was when she said that I began to cry, for I knew her reasoning.” The old woman unconsciously touched the back of her own neck. “They’d imported a fine French executioner, but she was afraid of pain and wanted no hindrances to the sword’s clean cut.”

  Elizabeth found her eyes were wet, but she made no move to hide the tears from this woman, her mother’s fri
end in life and death.

  “When her hair was done and I’d helped her into a soft grey gown, she came to me holding that book. She was very calm by then and the terror had gone from her eyes. ‘Take this,’ she said. It is my life. Give it to my daughter, Elizabeth. Give it to her when she is grown, when she is queen. She will have need of it.’

  “I’m ashamed to admit, Majesty, I thought then that Henry’s daughter from a wife he so despised would never rule England. But I loved your mother, who was going to her death, and I said it would be my honor. And so it is my honor, these years hence, to give you this diary.”

  Lady Sommerville rose painfully from the chair. Elizabeth put out a hand to steady her and their eyes met and held.

  “Your mother died with grace, Your Majesty. She died a queen.” Lady Sommerville curtsied low and, taking Elizabeth’s white be jeweled hand, kissed her ring.

  “Thank you, kind lady,” whispered Elizabeth. “You should be proud that you have fulfilled the promise you made to my mother so long ago.”

  The old woman smiled and gazed at the Queen’s pale face.

  “You have your father’s eyes, Elizabeth, but it is your mother’s spirit shining through them.”

  Lady Sommerville turned and hobbled out the door, not bothering to close it behind her. Kat and several younger waiting ladies were poised there and came fluttering into the chamber. Elizabeth, as if in a sweet dream she wished undisturbed, raised a hand and bade them depart.

  The Queen, who throughout Lady Sommerville’s entire story had clutched the diary in her hands, now studied it carefully. It was old. The claret leather was fading to pink and the binding was fragile. There was little left of a gold leaf border, but once, she could see, it had been a very pretty book indeed. As though she were handling the wings of butterflies, Elizabeth opened the front cover. There in stylish penmanship in large black letters on yellowing parchment was the inscription