Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

“The doctor, the king’s own doctor, says I’m mad.”

“Makes no difference, you’re still going to die.”

They hold me at the front of the stage. I look out at the laughing, avid faces. Nobody has ever loved me in this court; nobody will shed a tear for me. Nobody will protest against this new injustice.

“I am not mad,” I shout. “But I am completely innocent. Good people, I beg you to implore the king for mercy. I have done nothing wrong but one terrible thing, one terrible thing. And I was punished for that; you know I was punished for it. Nobody blamed me for it, but it was the worst thing a wife could do… I loved him…” There is a roll of drums, which drowns out everything but my own crying. “I am sorry, I am sorry for it…”

They drag me back from the rail at the front of the stage and they force me down into the stained sawdust. They force my hands onto the block, which is wet with her blood. When I look at my hands, they are as red with blood as if I am a killer. I will die with innocent blood on my hands.

“I am innocent,” I shout. They wrestle the blindfold on me so I can see nothing. “I am innocent of everything. I have always been innocent of everything. The only thing I ever did, the only sin ever, was against George, for love of George, my husband, George, God forgive me for that – I want to confess-”

“On the count of three,” the guard says. “One, two, three.”

So, he is dead at last, my husband who denied me, the man who failed the promise of his youth, the king who turned tyrant, the scholar who went mad, the beloved boy who became a monster. It was only his death that saved his last wife, Katherine Parr, who was to be arrested for treason and heresy; but death, which had been his ally, his partner and his pander for so long, finally came for him.

How many did the king kill? We can start to count now that death has stilled his murderous will. Thousands. No one will ever know. Up and down the land the burnings in the marketplace for heresy, the hangings at the gallows for treason. Thousands and thousands of men and women whose only crime was that they disagreed with him. Papists who held to the religion of their fathers, reformers who wanted the new ways. Little Kitty Howard among the dead, whose only crime was that she loved a boy of her own age and not a man old enough to be her father, and rotting from the leg upward. This is the man they call a great king, the greatest king that we have ever had in England. Does it not teach us that we should have no king? That a people should be free? That a tyrant is still a tyrant even when he has a handsome face under a crown?

I think of the Boleyn inheritance that meant so much to Lady Rochford. She was the heir, in the end. She inherited the death of her sister-in-law, of her husband. Her inheritance and poor Kitty’s, was death on the scaffold, just like them. I have a share of the Boleyn inheritance, too, this pretty little castle set in the Kent countryside, my favorite home.

So it is over. I shall wear mourning for the king, and then I shall attend the coronation of the prince, the little boy I loved, now to be King Edward. I have become what I promised myself I would be, if I was spared Henry’s axe. I promised myself that I would live my own life, by my own lights, that I would play my part in the world as a woman in my own right; and I have done this.

I am a free woman now, free from him and finally free from fear. If there is a knock on my door in the night, I will not start up from my bed, my heart hammering, thinking that my luck has run out and that he has sent his soldiers for me. If a stranger comes to my house, I will not suspect a spy. If someone asks me for news of the court, I will not fear entrapment.

I will own a cat and not fear being called a witch; I will dance and not fear being named a whore. I shall ride my horse and go where I please. I shall soar like a gyrfalcon. I shall live my own life and please myself. I shall be a free woman.

It is no small thing, this, for a woman: freedom.

Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard are the two wives of Henry VIII whom we know least; as is so often the case, we think we know them well. In this fictional account of the real facts I have tried to get past the convention that one wife was ugly and the other stupid, to consider the lives and circumstances of these two very young women who were, so briefly, the most important women of England, successive wives to a man on the brink of madness.

The main historical facts of the characters are as I describe them here. I could discover little detail about the childhood of Anne of Cleves; but I thought the illness of her father and the dominance of her brother were interesting in the light of her later decision to take her chance on staying in England. Her prettiness and her charm were widely reported at the time and are shown in the painting by Holbein. I believe it was the disastrous meeting at Rochester that caused Henry to reject her out of grievously wounded vanity. The conspiracy to accuse her of witchcraft, or treason, as an alternative to divorce is well documented, especially by the historian Retha Warnicke, and was clearly as much of a lie as other evidence about her marriage given to the inquiry.

Katherine Howard’s childhood is better known, but drawn almost wholly from evidence given against her. My fictional account explores the historical facts and my bias is toward understanding Katherine as a young girl at a court of far older and more sophisticated people. Her surviving letter to Thomas Culpepper shows, I believe, a very young girl sincerely in love.

The character of Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, is drawn from history – few novelists would dare to invent such a horror as she seems to have been. She did indeed give the crucial evidence that led to the beheading of her husband and sister-in-law, and there seems to be no explanation for this but jealousy and a determination to preserve her inheritance. She was at the deathbed of Jane Seymour, and gave evidence that could have been used to send Anne of Cleves to the scaffold (as I describe). The evidence against her, and her own confession, clearly show that she encouraged Katherine Howard’s adultery, fully understanding the fatal danger to the young queen. The suggestion that she did this with the purpose of getting the queen pregnant is my own. I suggest that she pretended madness in the hope of escaping the scaffold, but I hope I show, both in this book and in The Other Boleyn Girl, that Jane Boleyn was never wholly sane.

On my website, philippagregory.com, there is a family tree and more background information about the writing of this novel.

The following works have been invaluable in the research for this book:

Baldwin Smith, Lacey, A Tudor Tragedy, The Life and Times of Catherine Howard, Jonathan Cape, 1961.

Bindoff, S. T., Pelican History of England: Tudor England, Penguin, 1993.

Bruce, Marie Louise, Anne Boleyn, Collins, 1972.

Cressy, David, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual Religions and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England, Oxford University Press, 1977.

Darby, H. C., A New Historical Geography of England before 1600, Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Denny, Joanna, Katherine Howard, A Tudor Conspiracy, Portrait, 2005.

Elton, G. R., England under the Tudors, Methuen, 1955.

Fletcher, Anthony, Tudor Rebellions, Longman, 1968.

Guy, John, Tudor England, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Haynes, Alan, Sex in Elizabethan England, Sutton, 1997.

Hutchinson, Robert, The Last Days of Henry VIII, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005.

Lindsey, Karen, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII, Perseus Publishing, 1995.

Loades, David, The Tudor Court, Batsford, 1986.

– – -, Henry VIII and His Queens, Sutton, 2000.

Mackie, J. D., Oxford History of England: The Earlier Tudors, Oxford University Press, 1952.

Mumby, Frank Arthur, The Youth of Henry VIII, Constable and Co., 1913.

Plowden, Alison, The House of Tudor, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976. – - -, Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners, Sutton, 1998.

Randall, Keith, Henry VIII and the Reformation in England, Hodder, 1993.

Robinson, John Martin, The Dukes of Norfolk, Oxford University Press, 1982.

Routh, C. R. N., Who’s Who in Tudor England, Shepheard-Walwyn, 1990.

Scarisbrick, J. J., Yale English Monarchs: Henry VIII, Yale University Press, 1997.

Starkey, David, Henry VIII: A European Court in England, Collins & Brown, 1991.

– – -, The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics, G. Philip, 1985.

– – -, Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII, Vintage, 2003.

Tillyard, E.M.W., The Elizabethan World Picture, Pimlico, 1943.

Turner, Robert, Elizabethan Magic, Element, 1989.

Warnicke, Retha M., The Marrying of Anne of Cleves, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

– – -, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Weir, Alison, Henry VIII: King and Court, Pimlico, 2002.

– – -, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Pimlico, 1997.

Youings, Joyce, Sixteenth-Century England , Penguin, 1991.