Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

“The block, my lady?”

“Yes, the executioner’s block. Can I have it here in my room?”

“If you wish… but… what do you want it for?”

“To practice,” I say impatiently. I go across to the window, and I look down. The green will be filled with people who were proud to be at my court, people who were desperate to be my friend. Now they will be watching me die. If I am to do it, I had better do it properly.

He gulps. Of course he doesn’t understand what I mean; he is an old man, and he will die in his bed with his friends watching his last breath. But I shall be watched by hundreds of critical eyes. I want to do it gracefully if I have to do it.

“I shall have them bring it at once,” he says. “And will you see your confessor now?”

I nod. Though if God knows everything already, and already has decided that I am so bad that I should die before my seventeenth birthday, it is hard to know what the point of confession might be.

He bows and goes from the room. The soldiers bow and close the door. The key turns in the lock with a great clunk. I go and look out of the window at the workmen and the scaffold below. It looks as if they will be finished by tonight. Perhaps they will be ready tomorrow.

It takes two of them to bring in the block with much huffing and puffing as if it is heavy, and many sideways glances at me as if I am rather peculiar in needing to practice. Really, if they had been Queen of England like me, when I was still a girl, then they would know what a comfort it is to get the ceremonies right. There is nothing worse in the whole world than not knowing what you are supposed to do and looking foolish.

I kneel before the great thing and put my head down on it. I can’t say it’s very comfortable. I try it with my head turned one way and then the other. There’s no vast improvement in either direction, and no change of view anyway as I will be blindfolded, and underneath the blindfold I shall have my eyes tight shut, hoping like a child that it isn’t happening. The wood is smooth, cool under my hot cheek.

I suppose I really do have to do this.

I sit back on my heels and look at the damned thing. Really, if it were not so dreadful, I could laugh. All along I thought I had the Boleyn inheritance of grace and beauty and charm, and it turns out that all I have inherited is this: her block. This is the Boleyn inheritance for me. Voilà: the executioner’s block.

She is to be beheaded today; already the crowd is gathering on the green. Looking from the window I can see so many faces I know. These are friends and rivals who go back years and years with me; we were children together when Henry VII was on the throne, and some of us were ladies at the court of Queen Katherine of Aragon. I wave merrily, and a couple of them see me, and point, and stare.

Here comes the block now! They have had it tucked away somewhere, and two of the workmen heave it up to the scaffold and spread the sawdust around it. That’s to catch her blood. Beneath the scaffold is a basket filled with straw to catch her head. I know all of this, for I have seen it before, more than once. Henry has been a king who has used the headsman very often. I was there at the beheading of Anne Boleyn; I saw her walk up those shallow steps to the scaffold, and stand before the crowd, and confess her sins, and pray for her soul. She looked over our heads to the Tower gate, as if she were waiting for the pardon that she had been promised. It never came, and she had to kneel down and put her head on the block and stretch out her arms as a signal that the sword could come down. I’ve often wondered what it must be like, to fling your arms out as if you were flying, and the next moment hear that swish and feel the hair on the back of your neck lift with the wind of the passing blade and then…

Well, Katherine will know soon enough. The door behind me opens and a priest comes in, very grave-looking in his vestments, with a Bible and a prayer book hugged to his chest.

“My child,” he says,“are you prepared for the hour of your death?”

I laugh out loud, and then it sounds so convincingly mad that I laugh again. I cannot tell him that he is mistaken and that I cannot be sentenced to die, because I am insane, but I point at him and say, “Hello! Hello! Hello!” very loudly.

He sighs and kneels down on the floor before me, folds his hands together, and closes his eyes. I skip away from him to the far side of the room and say,“Hello?” But he starts the prayers of confession and penitence and pays no attention to me at all. Some fool has told him that I am to be prepared for death, and I suppose I shall have to go along with it since I can hardly argue with him. I suppose at the last moment they will come and commute the sentence to imprisonment. “Hello!” I say again, and climb up to the window ledge.

There is a stir in the crowd, and everyone is craning to look at the door at the foot of the tower. I stand up on my toes and push my face against the cold glass so that I can see what they are all looking at. It is her: little Kitty Howard, staggering to the scaffold. Her legs seem to have given way; she is being carried between a guard and a woman-in-waiting, and they half drag her to the steps. Then her little wavering feet wander about, and they have to bodily lift her and push her up to the stage. I laugh at the incongruity of this; then I catch myself at the horror of laughing at a girl, almost a child, on the way to her death. Then I realize it sounds as if I am mad, and I laugh again for the benefit of the priest, praying for my soul in the room behind me.

She looks as if she has fainted; they are slapping her face and pinching her cheeks, poor little mite. She stumbles to the front of the stage and clutches the rail and tries to speak. I can’t hear what she says; I doubt anybody can hear much. I can see her lips. It looks as if she is saying: “Please.”

She falls back, and they catch her and push her into kneeling before the block; she clings to it, as if it might save her. Even from here I can see she is weeping. Then gently, just as she does at bedtime, as if she were a little girl settling down to sleep, she strokes a lock of her hair away from her face with her hand, and puts her head down on the smooth wood. She turns her little head and lays her cheek on the wood. Tentatively – as if she wishes she didn’t have to do it – she stretches out her trembling hands and the headsman is in a hurry and his axe flashes down like a bolt of lightning.

I scream at the great gout of blood and the way her head bounces on the platform. The priest behind me falls silent, and I remember that I must not forget my part, not for a moment, and so I call out: “Kitty, is that you? Is that you, Kitty? Is it a game?”

“Poor woman,” the priest says, and gets to his feet. “Give me a sign that you have confessed your sins and die in faith, poor witless thing.”

I jump down from the windowsill for I hear the grate of the key in the lock, and now they will come to take me home. They will take me out of the back door and hurry me to the watergate and then, I guess, by unmarked barge, probably to Greenwich and then perhaps by boat to Norwich. “Time to go,” I say merrily.

“God bless her and forgive her,” the priest says. He holds out his Bible for me to kiss.

“Time to go,” I say again. I kiss it, since he is so urgent that I should, and I laugh at his sad face.

The guards stand on either side of me, and we go quickly down the stairs. But when I expect them to turn away to the back of the Tower, they guide me to the front entrance, to the green. I check at once. I don’t want to see Katherine Howard’s body being wrapped up like old laundry, then I remember I have to appear mad, right up to the last moment when they put me on the boat, I have to appear so witless that I cannot be beheaded.

“Quick, quick!” I say. “Trot, trot!”

The guards in reply take my arms, and the door is swung open. The court is still assembled, almost as if they are waiting for another show on the bloodstained stage. I don’t like to be taken through them, past my friends who were honored to know me. In the front row I see my kinsman, the Earl of Surrey, looking a little queasy at the sawdust drenched in his cousin’s blood, but laughing it all off. I laugh, too, and look from one guard to the other. “Trot! Trot!” I say.

They grimace as if this is disagreeable and they tighten their grip and we walk toward the scaffold. I hesitate. “Not me,” I say.

“Come along now, Lady Rochford,” the man on my right says. “Come up the steps.”

“No!” I protest, I dig my heels in, but they are too strong for me. They move me on.

“Come on now, there’s a good girl.”

“You can’t execute me,” I say. “I am a madwoman. You can’t execute a madwoman.”

“We can,” the man says.

I twist in their grip; when they march me to the steps, I get my feet against the first tread and push off from it, and they have to wrestle to get me up one step. “You can’t,” I say. “I am mad. The doctors say I am mad. The king sent his own doctors, his own doctors every day, to see that I am mad.”

“Had the law changed, didn’t he?” one of the guards puffs. Another fellow joins them and is pushing me from behind. His hard hands in my back propel me up the steps to the stage. They are lifting the wrapped body of Katherine off at the front, and her head is in the basket, her beautiful golden-brown hair spilling over the side.

“Not me!” I insist. “I am mad.”

“He changed the law,” the guard shouts at me over the laughter of the crowd, which has cheered up at this battle to get me up the steps. “Changed the law so that anyone convicted of treason could be beheaded, whether mad or not.”