Chapter Nine The Trial
Chapter Nine
The Trial
George had been at his best the last time he and Anne were together, after their arrests and imprisonment.
They sat together at a big wooden table in the king’s hall at the Tower, as first she was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, then he.
Under the table, she held George’s hand.
Two thousand spectators packed in to witness the great whore’s trial—adulteress and brother fucker, liar and traitor, dirty little homewrecker getting her comeuppance. The air crackled with spite.
In the audience was half the court, ladies-in-waiting who’d always hated her, a smattering of clerks, ambassadors and diplomats, dukes and duchesses, viscounts and viscountesses, including George’s own wife, Jane, whom Cromwell called as a witness against George and Anne.
She’d always resented Anne for her closeness to George, always resented George for the way he stood too close to other men, laughed too loudly in their company, flirtatiously touched their arms when bantering, neglected Jane in the wedding bed.
Not present was the king. Not present was her father.
Not present was her mother, who had been sick with a fever at her arrest, whose health Anne had worried over in the Tower, whom Anne had been eager to see.
No, the good woman was not there, from either ill health or self-preservation.
Not present was Mary, who by then had been banished from court for remarrying, in secret and below her station, after her first husband died.
Anne regretted going along with Mary’s banishment now.
What a silly thing to banish your sister for, even if she had shown up to court giddy with having married behind your back, visibly pregnant, flaunting her goddess-like fecundity in your face.
She wished Mary were at the trial, but then again she was safer away, living on the purse of money Anne had sent her when nobody else at court would answer her pleading letters, not their parents, not Cromwell, not even her former lover, the king.
Under the table, Anne gave George’s hand a squeeze.
A pulse to say I love you. A pulse to say I’m scared.
He looked at her, the same sea-gray eyes from her childhood.
The same rakish looks. The same blond curls.
My Ganymede, Anne thought, my golden cupbearer.
George, her brilliant brother, her better half.
He squeezed her hand back. A pulse to say We’ve had a good run, Sissy. A pulse to say I love you too.
And what about Cromwell’s accusations? Cromwell, sweating at the front of the hall, a social climber, the king’s man through and through, talking piously about incest and all Anne’s supposed affairs, talking about her sexual appetites, the insatiable and disgusting queen, absolutely animalistic, would hump anything, even a bedpost, even the corner of a table.
What kind of woman, what kind of ungrateful woman, what kind of queen.
Though Anne knew that Cromwell knew she was no harlot.
She was no horned-up bitch in heat. Anne knew Cromwell knew she was barely recovered from her last miscarriage, and the one before that, and the one before that.
Cromwell, the liar, the persuader, the tactician.
Making his case easier was Anne’s habit, picked up from her time in France, of allowing men into her private apartments.
This was de rigueur in France, where French queens entertained noblemen and advisors in their chambers.
It was not customary in England, where the only men who were supposed to be allowed in the queen’s chambers were the king and male relatives.
But of course she had to have noblemen and councillors in her private apartments—she was busy working, appointing abbots and abbesses, weighing in on who should be a groom of the king’s privy chamber, lobbying for her allies to rise in prominence in land and title, securing strategic wardships for children like her nephew, Henry Carey, who stood to inherit a great fortune after the death of his father.
She’d been as busy as a king, and needed to be able to conduct the business of state in her apartments, just as Queen Claude had done in France, just as Margaret of Austria had done in the Low Countries.
But in England, strict land of manners, a nation that was European but not continental, such things were not done.
Why, she had all those men in her rooms because she was fucking them!
it was easy to argue. And Cromwell did, though he knew better, though he had been one of the men in her apartments, doing the work of governing England with her.
But, he could now argue, and did, why else would a woman entertain men in her chambers if not to fuck them?
For certainly it could not have been for reasons of governance or intellectual exchange.
Everyone knows a woman’s only use is what’s between her legs, which might be an insatiable cunny, if she is bad, like Anne Boleyn.
Or might be the head of a baby crowning, if she is good, like the sainted, obedient, and quiet Virgin Mary, to whom all women should aspire, on whom Anne should have modeled herself more closely. Here, Cromwell nodded sanctimoniously.
Never mind that there was also always a surplus of ladies and maids in Anne’s rooms. Of course it was not lost on Cromwell, he did not hesitate to remind, that these maids were oft as not flirting with the men in Anne’s chambers, that, in the French style, these ladies and men of court were playing cards and dancing in the queen’s chambers and, worst of all, writing love poetry to one another in a bound book he held up as evidence of the general licentiousness of all present in the queen’s chambers.
What kind of horny bacchanal was going on in there?
Never mind that the bacchanal was mostly chaste, that there was flirtation and fun, but not more, not under Anne’s eye.
Never mind that Anne sat aside, not dancing with men, not writing love poetry.
No, Anne was constantly being watched, constantly monitored, for half the ladies were those appointed for her, whom she had not chosen, who were effectively spies.
Anne was never alone; she had no time to slink off into the bedchamber or a quiet room and fornicate with Henry Norris, or William Brereton, or Francis Weston, or the lowly musician Mark Smeaton, or, most outlandishly spun falsehood, most ridiculously fabricated accusation, most odious lie, her own fucking brother.
At the trial, Cromwell could barely make eye contact with her, that bloated carp of a man; Anne could taste her hate for him, coppery, like blood in her mouth.
What did he want? The king to himself and Anne out of the way.
But he didn’t actually want to see her die, he didn’t actually want to see his lies play out—he wasn’t a complete monster.
He didn’t want to stand before the scaffold and witness the swordsman slice her head off and feel the spatter of blood upon his pale, creased cheek.
Maybe he didn’t think Henry would actually kill her?
Anne was convicted quickly, her discussions with Kingston, the Tower constable, used against her, though they had not been confessions at all but rather justifications: explanations of how she had been misperceived, how she had been slandered and lied about though she had never stepped outside the bounds of courtly flirtations.
Everyone knew Anne would be found guilty.
Everyone knew she would be sentenced to death.
Leading the jury was her Uncle Norfolk, her mother’s domineering brother, who had been so keen to shove her into Henry’s bedchamber.
When Anne was arrested, he’d said, “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” shaking his head disapprovingly, barely containing a self-satisfied grin, for hadn’t she outshone him, as she outshone many men, hadn’t the flower of her success outgrown his?
Nobody was surprised at Anne’s conviction.
The world loves to put a woman in her place.
But when George was convicted, an audible rumble moved through the spectators.
So eloquent he’d been in speaking in his own defense that it seemed truly possible he’d be acquitted.
When the jury returned George’s guilty verdict, he’d squeezed Anne’s hand under the table and mouthed “Be bold” to her.
Be bold, be bold. Boldly, his head now decorated London Bridge.
Boldly, Anne had seen it, one of five, tarred and indistinguishable, her beloved brother, desecrated.
Of course, there had been rumors about George, that he’d had a secret lover, or a string of secret lovers.
That those lovers, all or some of them, had been men.
Anne didn’t know anything about that. She loved George, and she didn’t pester into his personal matters, though of course, like all the men in her life—her father, her uncle, the king—she couldn’t say the same of George, who constantly advised her on whom she should court, whom she should marry, how quickly she should try to conceive another child, on who was flirting with her at court and to what end and when she should reciprocate and when she shouldn’t.
The two spent hours discussing Anne’s personal life, her love life, the way her love life could be used for her own self-promotion, for the family’s.
Had George had lovers? Maybe. Had some, or all, of those lovers been men?
It was certainly possible. Did Anne know, definitively, the answers to these questions?
No. She didn’t think that Jane, George’s wife, knew the answers to these questions either, though the spite with which she testified against him suggested her suspicions.
George was enigmatic, good at making others feel like they shared a special intimacy with him, when, in fact, he rarely revealed anything personal about himself.
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