Chapter Five John and the River #2
Bullheaded was a word that had been used to describe Anne, by her father, by her husband, by the women who whispered behind her back at court, by her own sister, Mary, by Thomas Cromwell, who she’d once thought was her ally.
When Anne knew she was right about something, she couldn’t let it go.
She couldn’t let it go that Katherine was actually Henry’s sister by marriage, that their marriage was incestuous, heretical, illegal, and in need of rapid annulment.
She couldn’t let it go that Henry’s first daughter, Mary, was a bastard who should not be in the line of succession.
She couldn’t let her copy of Tyndale’s English-language Bible go, though it was forbidden in England and a punishable offense to be in possession of it.
She couldn’t let it go that the pope had too much power, that the church was a second government extending out from Rome and undercutting the authority of Europe’s kings and queens, who ought to be the final link to God, ordained by God as they were.
She pushed and pushed for Henry to declare himself head of the churches of England.
She pushed for reformation. She was bullheaded.
It was her nature. She didn’t know when to shut up.
And why should she keep quiet when she was right?
When she knew better? When she was smarter and better read and more thoughtful and able to connect ideas more quickly and spit out beautiful sentences and arguments like the great orators of ancient Rome?
Why should she hide the light of her intelligence?
Perhaps Henry’s greatest betrayal had been when he stopped loving her for her intellect and started hating her for it, when he started telling her to hold her tongue, not to speak out of turn, when he told her that she had one job, to make him a male heir, and until she did that she should shut her mouth, when he stopped visiting her in her chambers, stopped talking to her, stopped laughing at her witticisms, when he said to her, upon her anger over his affairs, “You must shut your eyes and endure as well as more worthy persons, and you ought to know that it is in my power to humble you again in a moment more than I have exalted you.” She had thought he was a different sort of man, a man who could recognize and receive her for her mind and spirit, not just for her body and the heirs it could produce. But she could see that she was wrong.
Anne had been eleven when her father sent her across the channel to live and be educated in the Archduchess Margaret’s palace at Mechelen, in the Low Countries, which Margaret ruled as regent for her young nephew Charles.
There, Anne learned about the ancient queen Boudicca, and her mind wandered to her now, as she lay by the Thames, the site of Boudicca’s bloody victory.
Latin came easily to Anne, and she remembered reading the Roman histories of ancient England.
Boudicca’s husband had been king of the Iceni, though under the thumb of the Roman invaders, to whom he supplicated himself for security.
He prospered and lived a long life, but when he died, leaving his kingdom to his daughters, the Romans, assuming a weakness, assuming women couldn’t lead, charged in.
His household was looted. His wife, Boudicca, was lashed. His daughters were raped.
Boudicca did not take kindly to being lashed.
She did not take kindly to her daughters being raped.
The Roman historians described her as a tall woman with long red hair and a shrill voice.
Wasn’t that always how powerful women’s voices were described—shrill, shrieking, annoying, loud, grating?
The message being that it was better for women to shut up, to keep their shrill voices quiet.
But not Boudicca. The army Boudicca raised was over a hundred thousand strong, populated heavily by women.
Where were the men? Hiding away. Afraid.
Before she conquered London, Rome’s stronghold, and burned it to the ground, Boudicca delivered a speech.
“It is not as a queen but as a citizen I fight, avenging my lost liberty, my lashed body, the defiled honor of my daughters,” Boudicca’s speech began.
“The Romans come for your liberty, your bodies, your way of life. The Romans hide their women away, rape them, devalue their power. If you value your liberty, you will fight with me. The gods are on our side and we will have our revenge. This is what I, a woman, will do; as for men, they can live as slaves if they choose.”
Anne had recited this speech in Latin, in French, in her own ad hoc English translation, running through the halls of the Mechelen palace draped in an old cloak, shrieking, “I am Boudicca! As for men, they can live as slaves!” Of course, Anne had been a girl then, and nobody took her childhood play seriously.
The archduchess herself had laughed at the sloppy costume, at Anne’s speeches.
Anne remembered Margaret’s stern face breaking into giggles.
Once, she’d even chased Anne down a long hall, pretending to be a Roman general, then pretending to die in agony when Anne turned and stabbed her with an imagined spear.
Judicious, wise, and calculating, Margaret, like Boudicca, was a woman ruling singularly where men could not.
And shouldn’t that have been my fate? Anne thought, mulling the story over.
Shouldn’t it be Elizabeth’s? My daughter, my dearest love?
Shouldn’t I make that fate Elizabeth’s, put my daughter, my smart, precocious daughter, on the throne?
When Elizabeth was born, Anne had tried to nurse her.
Noblewomen in France, where Anne had spent her teenage years, were nursing their own babes, and Anne wanted that closeness with Elizabeth.
She had gotten Elizabeth to take some milk before Henry found out and put a stop to it.
It just wasn’t done in England, he’d said, not by royalty.
He’d been gentle enough about it—this being early in their marriage, when he was still infatuated with her—but firm.
His decision was final. So off to a wet nurse Elizabeth went every time she squawked, and Anne had to watch, jealously, as another woman fed her daughter, as another woman got to snuggle with and coo to her Elizabeth, her princess.
She could add this to the list of things Henry had taken from her: her reputation, her virginity, her freedom, her brother, and, finally, her life.
The man was like a whirlpool, sucking anything that came too close down into the obliterating, icy depths of the sea.
Failing to find Taurus in the stars, Anne searched for a leopard, then searched for a white falcon, both her emblems. She searched for an A and an H carved together in the dark wood of the night sky, two initials intertwined in the heavens—her love, her failure.
It wasn’t there. She needed money to cross the bridge.
The bridge, which she could see upriver from where she lay next to John, asleep still in the grass—the windows of its shops and houses lighted and reflecting into the black water below.
She needed to hurry. She had already lost a day, and she knew Henry would wed Jane quickly.
He was an impatient man on a quest for a son, eager to put a baby in the belly of that quiet, pale-eyed virgin.
She knew John had money in his coat pocket, a few coins that he’d saved up for a big night out.
She’d given him that, hadn’t she? She reached into the pocket, pulled the coins out, and held them in her fist. Then she slid his jacket off and laid it over his sleeping chest, before kissing him on the forehead, gently, as a mother would kiss a child, and slipping away.