Chapter 8
Three years passed after Princess Elizabeth’s birth in much the same way every year in my marriage had passed before it. Percy was silent, the household was cold, and word of the world beyond Wressle always reached me a season late.
Anne Boleyn was arrested in May.
My father’s letters were brief and careful.
His caution was plain, even as he felt obligated to share the news.
“The Queen has been taken to the Tower,” he wrote.
“Charges of adultery, they say, though some claim worse. I do not know what to believe, and I would counsel you not to believe anything fully until it is confirmed by better sources than the ones currently feeding me.”
I read that letter three times before I finally set it down.
I remember the strange dizziness of trying to hold two truths in my mind at once.
Anne Boleyn had been crowned just over three years before in a spectacle so grand it had traveled to me almost as legend.
Now she sat somewhere in a stone room awaiting a fate that no one could have predicted.
The precontract surfaced again within the week, though this time from a direction I had not anticipated. My father’s next letter carried a note of genuine astonishment.
“Cromwell himself is asking after the old matter,” he wrote.
“Your matter, Mary. It seems the King wishes his marriage to Anne undone as cleanly as possible, and an old precontract serves that purpose better than adultery ever could. There is even talk that the Queen herself raised the subject, hoping an annulment might spare her.”
Cromwell was the King’s own chief minister and the one person in England the King seemed to trust with details other men found too dangerous to touch.
If Cromwell himself had taken an interest in my old petition, this was no longer simply a matter between a woman and her husband. It had become a matter of state.
I set the letter down to think. The idea that Anne might have reached for the very same argument I had once reached for in my own attempt at freedom struck me with a force I had not expected.
In different ways and for different reasons, we had both tried to use Percy’s tangled history as a door out of marriages that were slowly destroying us.
I had failed because Percy would not confess to save me.
I wondered whether he would confess now to save her, or whether he would once again choose the same self-serving silence he had chosen before.
He did not confess. My father’s next letter confirmed what I half suspected, delivered as flatly as a man reporting news he had predicted all along.
“Percy has written to Cromwell directly,” my father noted.
“He denied the precontract again, and he swore it as firmly as he swore it before Norfolk years ago. Whatever the Queen hoped for, she will not find her rescue in your husband’s conscience.
He has none to spare her, any more than he had any to spare you. ”
Reading those words, I felt something far more complicated than triumph.
I had once wanted the world to know that Percy had lied to keep me trapped.
Now that same lie stood between another woman and her only hope of escaping the executioner’s blade.
I could take no satisfaction in watching him repeat it.
***
By the time news of Anne’s trial reached Wressle, the verdict was already rendered.
Guilty. And not only Anne, but her own brother George and four other men as well.
George was tried that same day on a charge of incest so lurid that even my father, usually so careful never to repeat rumor as settled fact, seemed to have abandoned his caution in describing it.
The words that arrived in my father’s hand looked small, as if the ink itself had shrunk from the weight it carried.
It was the detail that followed, buried almost as an afterthought in that same letter, that stopped me cold.
“Percy sat among the jury for both trials. Hers and her brother’s,” my father wrote. “I am told that when the second verdict was read, he collapsed where he stood and had to be carried from the room. No one seems certain whether it was illness or grief.”
I pondered that passage for an entire afternoon.
My father had described grief as though it were adequate to explain what might have moved a man forced to help condemn a woman he had once loved.
I tried to imagine it. I failed. I could not picture Percy’s face in that room, watching a jury of his peers pronounce the word that would end Anne’s life.
He must have understood exactly what that verdict meant.
He returned to Wressle some weeks later, thinner than I remembered him.
He moved through the house with none of his usual brittle authority.
I found him alone in the hall one evening, and I did something I had rarely allowed myself to do in all our years together.
I asked him something that I knew would expose the part of him that Anne had broken.
Some old, stubborn part of me still wanted to know.
“What happened,” I said, “when the verdict was read?”
He did not look at me immediately. When he finally did, his face held nothing I could read with any certainty. I saw no grief I could name and no illness I could diagnose. I saw nothing but a stillness that somehow felt more unsettling than any visible distress would have been.
“I do not wish to discuss it,” he said.
“I am not asking you to discuss it,” I said. “I am asking you what happened.”
“I collapsed,” he said. “That is what happened. Whatever anyone else wishes to make of it is their own business, not mine. And certainly not yours.”
I should have let it end there. I did not. “Four men plus her brother,” I said. “And incest. You sat in judgment on that too. Did you really believe it? Of any of them?”
Something moved behind his eyes that I could not read. It was gone before I could study it. “I was asked to render a verdict,” he said. “I rendered one. What I believed privately was not a question anyone on that jury was asked, and it is not one I intend to answer now.”
I foolishly waited for something more. It did not come.
He turned from me and left the hall. And I stood there in the same cold quiet I had grown so accustomed to over the years.
I had asked the one honest question of our entire marriage and received the same type of answer he had always given me: Enough truth to prove he was hiding something, and not nearly enough to tell me what.
I never learned what truly happened in that room. I do not think anyone did. Not fully, and not even Percy himself, if the stillness I saw in him that evening was any indication.
What I do know, because my father mentioned it almost in passing some months later, is that the same illness, or the same collapse, left Percy “too weak” to take an active part when rebellion broke out.
Looking back, I wonder whether that illness was as convenient as it was genuine.
A man too ill to choose a side in a rebellion is a man who survives that rebellion’s aftermath with his head still attached to his shoulders.
I do not say this to accuse him of lying.
I say it only because I lived beside Henry Percy for over a decade.
In all that time, he never once learned to distinguish his true suffering from his careful self-preservation.
Perhaps there was no difference between them by then. Perhaps a man who spends enough years protecting himself at the expense of every truth he owes to other people cannot tell his own genuine collapse from a convenient one.
I only know that he came home from that trial changed. And Anne Boleyn, whose fate had shadowed the whole of my adult life, died by sword on the scaffold within days of a verdict my own husband had helped pronounce. Then he conveniently fell too ill to answer for anything that came after.
I never learned whether Percy stood among the crowd that watched her die. I never knew whether his health, real or convenient, kept him from it as it had kept him from so much else that year. I have imagined it both ways, and I am not always proud of which version prevails.