Chapter Nine The Trial #2
“Dead men’s shoes” had been the refrain of Anne’s trial.
“You look for dead men’s shoes,” she’d said to Henry Norris, teasingly, when he’d dragged his feet proposing to her cousin, “for if aught came to the king but good, you would look to have me.” You won’t marry my cousin because you’re waiting for the king to die so you can step into his shoes and marry me, the woman you truly lust after.
That had been her meaning: a joke badly told, a joke that landed poorly, a joke misunderstood, misconstrued.
Of course she didn’t mean she wanted to marry Norris, or fuck him, or that she had fucked him.
“Dead men’s shoes,” Cromwell trumpeted around the great hall, to the jury, to the two thousand attendees, all the while refusing to meet Anne’s eyes.
He couldn’t even show her that common decency.
He couldn’t face what he’d done. It didn’t matter, after all, if Anne had fucked Norris.
In conjuring up the dead men’s shoes that she’d joked that Norris wanted to fill, she’d imagined the king’s death, and that in itself was a crime, under the very laws she’d helped Henry write.
She was getting her just deserts. She was getting her due.
She was reaping what she’d sowed. She was a hussy and a slut, Cromwell argued, and her crimes didn’t stop with tawdry fantasies and hidden affairs; she’d actively imagined the king’s death, wanted it, waited for it, spoken of it, could perhaps even have spoken it into being, into a real plot to take the king’s life, if she hadn’t been arrested, if she hadn’t been stopped, for the good of the king, for the good of the whole damp and musty country.
The sun in the king’s hall that day had blinded her, shining through the high-arched windows, making her squint.
“If you keep making that face, it’ll stay that way,” Anne’s mother used to say to her when she rolled or crossed her eyes as a child or sneered or snarled.
“Look happier, little raincloud, little bull,” her mother used to urge.
Mistaking the squint for a scowl, Cromwell crowed, “Look, the lady cannot even make it through the proceedings without mocking us with her expressions. She knows not her place!” And at that, Anne had given up and actually glared at the man.
Who cared? He was going to kill her no matter what she did.
Let this shadow man know how she really felt about him.
She glared, but it was no different from the squint, and she wasn’t sure if Cromwell noticed the change.
Even Anne’s defense, her courtroom speech, couldn’t save her.
She’d capitulated. She’d admitted to her sin, her one sin, which was nagging Henry, telling him what to do, not showing humility, not being humble, pussy whipping him into submission, bossing him, bossing him, bossing him.
She’d risen from the table and declared, “I do not say I have always shown him that humility that his goodness to me, and the honors to which he raised me, merited.” She’d admitted to that.
Squinting into the sun, she’d admitted it, Cromwell in his stuffy velvet robes refusing to look at her, Uncle Norfolk on the jury rolling his eyes, George’s wife somewhere in the audience yawning, bored, eager to be a widow, eager to be done with George, her flamboyant, effusive husband.
George, seated beside her, had watched her admiringly.
Even in their demise they were allies. Even then their love for each other shone with a luster that others envied.
“I have been ever a faithful wife to the king,” she’d proclaimed, standing to address the jury, and it was true.
George, looking up at her with such affection.
Though as always, she had gone too far. In her defense, in her speech, she had raised the king’s infidelities.
She couldn’t help herself. “I confess,” she’d added, defiant, “I have had jealous fancies and suspicions of him, which I had not discretion enough, and wisdom, to conceal at all times.” What a foolish thing to do, to raise the specter of the king’s adulteries at her own trial for adultery.
Only Anne would do something so daft, so hardheaded, so stubborn.
Yet there, still, was George, looking up at her admiringly.
When they pulled George away from her, after the trial, after they’d both been convicted, he mouthed again, “Be bold. Be bold.” Her George.
—
The next time Anne saw him, two days before her own execution, he was being marched past her chamber window at the Tower with the other four doomed men, on his way to the scaffold on the hill outside the Tower walls.
She preferred to think of him that way, forever walking away from her, after one last smile and wave as he passed, head squarely on his shoulders, not as she’d just seen him, defiled and displayed, mutilated, defeated, a barbaric trophy hung up by a barbarous band of men, by a barbarous government, by a barbarous court and council, in a barbarous country, headed by her barbarous husband, who, no matter how many ribbons he tied above his codpiece, on his shoulders, no matter how many refined portraits he had painted of himself, no matter what good works he thought he’d done, would always be the barbarous man who killed her beautiful, kind, smart gem of a brother, would always be Mr. Fox, dragging another dead body through a finely appointed castle, after he’d extracted all he could from it.