Chapter 7
I learned of the marriage before most of England did. And I learned of it the way I learned everything concerning Anne Boleyn: through my father, whose sources at court had grown more attentive to her fortunes after my failed petition.
I read that letter twice, sitting alone in the cold great hall at Wressle.
If I am honest, what I felt was not any single feeling.
There was a flash of something close to satisfaction.
It was small, ugly, and gone almost as soon as I recognized it.
I enjoyed the thought that Percy would have to watch another man, and a king at that, claim the woman he loved.
But beneath that flash sat something harder to forgive myself for: envy, plain and unflattering.
She had waited for the king for years, as I had waited years.
Where my waiting had ended in a cold bed and a dismissed petition, hers was ending in a crown.
I could not decide whether I hated her more for having it, or hated myself more for the envy I felt at the prize she was about to receive.
***
That January, word came from my father that a small, hidden marriage ceremony had taken place, though few beyond the King’s closest circle knew of it.
The secret did not hold for long. By spring, Anne was no longer seen at court without every eye in the room dropping to her expanding waist. And almost overnight, a marriage that had once been whispered about behind closed doors became something the whole realm was permitted to see for itself.
I remember standing in my own kitchen at Wressle after the marriage rumors started to catch. I was inspecting some matter of household accounts, and I overheard two of my own women discussing the news with the relish people save for scandal.
“They say she’s to be addressed as queen now, whether the church has blessed it or not,” one said. “And she’s carrying his child besides. You can see it plainly now, if you know to look. Her father finally got what he wanted. It only took two of his daughters.”
“Small wonder the king looks so pleased with himself,” the other replied. “A wife set aside and half the goodwill of the realm spent besides. He’d better get a son out of all that trouble.”
I said nothing, and neither woman noticed my presence long enough to grow embarrassed by it.
So I just stood there, absorbing what I’d heard.
Anne had married a king who had just upended his entire kingdom to have her, and my own husband had been forced into a marriage he never wanted because he’d lost her.
I had once built a fantasy of Henry Percy as a boy who might learn to love me if given enough time. Listening to my own servants marvel at a king willing to risk everything for his new bride, I understood exactly how thoroughly that fantasy had failed, and how little chance it had ever truly had.
***
Anne’s coronation came in June. By then the news had grown so large that it no longer required my father’s letters or my servants’ gossip to reach me.
It arrived the way great events eventually do, through every channel at once.
I heard of it through visiting relations, traveling clergy, and a realm that could not stop discussing it.
Anne Boleyn had been crowned Queen of England and was carried through the streets in a procession so lavish that even the retellings that reached me secondhand detailed its splendor.
Cranmer himself, newly seated as Archbishop, had finally ruled Anne’s marriage as lawful and Catherine’s at an end. It was the very ruling I had once hoped for my own marriage.
I thought about that news for days before I understood what I truly felt about it. And what I felt, when I finally admitted it to myself, surprised me more than jealousy would have. I felt something close to kinship.
I had spent years imagining Anne Boleyn as the architect of my misery. I thought of her as the woman who had taken my husband’s affection before I ever had the chance to earn it myself.
But sitting with the news of her coronation, I found myself constructing a different woman than the one I had built out of bitterness and envy.
Gossip claimed her father had pushed her toward the King’s bed from the start.
It said he’d deliberately raised both of his daughters to catch a crown the way my own father had raised me to catch an earldom.
I did not know whether that rumor carried the full truth.
But Wolsey had crushed her betrothal to Percy all the same, whatever her father’s true intentions.
She’d had to watch her sister with the King.
And then she had spent years as the King’s obsession before she ever became his wife.
She’d been watched and negotiated over by men who cared more about what her marriage offered them than what she herself might want.
I had married the man she loved. She had married the man whose desire for her had set everything else in motion. The king was partly the reason Wolsey tore her and Percy apart and the reason Percy was ever free to marry me instead.
We had both been moved by the same hands toward different ends. And I had spent years hating her for a fate that was never truly hers to control any more than mine had been.
I did not forgive her, exactly. I do not think forgiveness is the right word for what settled over me that summer, watching her crowned from a distance I would never manage to close.
What I felt was closer to recognition. It was the uncomfortable clarity of seeing an old enemy and suddenly understanding her as a fellow prisoner instead. We were sentenced by the same court and simply given a different cell to occupy.
That summer, I thought of the very first time I heard her name.
I thought of my father’s voice calling her a girl with French airs and her father’s ambition.
He said it as though ambition in a girl is a crime, rather than simply the only tool available to a woman with no other means of shaping her own life.
I thought of the coronation - the crowds, the gold, and the King who could not stop beaming at his bride. I finally understood that I was watching the same machinery that had once arranged my own small, unremarkable betrothal, dressed in far grander clothes and playing out on a far larger stage.
I had been promised to a boy I had never met, in a contract negotiated entirely without my knowledge or consent. She had been crowned to a king who had broken his family to have her, in a ceremony negotiated without any true freedom of her own.
In the end, we were both women whose lives had been decided by men who called it love, duty, or ambition, depending on which word served them best.
Word reached me that autumn of one thing more: a child had been born to Anne and King Henry in September.
It was a girl rather than the son the whole of England had been promised.
They named her Elizabeth. I remember feeling something almost like pity, absurd as pity may sound for a woman who had been crowned queen of England.
But Anne Boleyn had given the King a healthy child, and somehow she still had not given him enough.
I did not know then how soon her crown would prove as fragile as my own contract had been. I only knew that I had finally stopped seeing Anne Boleyn as the woman who ruined my life.
We had both been given away. We had simply been given away to different fates, and I was no longer certain that hers was truly the better one.