Anne Boleyn, a King's Obsession

The next day, as they were preparing to mount their horses for the chase, Henry beckoned George over.

“Lord Rochford,” he said, very stern, “you should look to your wife.”

George grimaced. “What has she done now, sir?”

“I’ve just been informed that, when the Lady Mary lately left Greenwich, a great crowd of women—unknown to their husbands, I have no doubt—were waiting for her, weeping and crying that she was their true Princess, notwithstanding my laws to the contrary. Some were poor women, some the wives of citizens and a few were of gentle birth. One, my lord, was your wife.”

“God’s blood!” George swore, shaking his head. “She is a born troublemaker.”

“Certainly she is in trouble now,” Henry told him. “She is among the chief offenders, for she persists in her opinions, and to teach her the error of her ways I have sent her to the Tower. Your aunt, Lady William Howard, is there too.”

George winced. “I can only apologize for my wife’s conduct. Your Grace knows that ours has been a miserable marriage. We see as little of each other as we can; she has lived at Grimston since your Grace banished her. Had it been otherwise, I would have curbed her treacherous folly.”

“She should have stayed there!” Henry’s eyes narrowed. “It seems strange to me that your wife should support the Lady Mary.”

“It is not so strange when your Grace considers that her father, Lord Morley, loved the Lady Mary from her childhood, and that Jane herself was brought up at court in the household of the Princess Dowager. She always held the Lady Mary in great esteem.”

“She hates our family,” Anne told Henry, “but she has never until now been disloyal.”

“I think there is a reason for this protest,” George explained. “Lord Morley once served your Grace’s grandmother, the Lady Margaret Beaufort. He was a great friend of her confessor, the late Bishop Fisher. I think it must have been the Bishop’s execution that turned Jane.”

“That may be so,” Henry said, severe, “but I am charging you to ensure me of her good behavior in future. Do that, my lord, and you shall see her released.”

“I will stand surety for her,” George promised, his tone implying that it would be the most unwelcome task in the world.



At last! At last! The thing she had prayed for, which might save her and render her invincible, had come about.

“I am with child,” Anne murmured to Henry as they came from Mass on the first Sunday of December.

“Truly? God be praised! It is the answer to all our prayers.” He seized her hand and raised it to his lips in full view of the courtiers. Anne smiled at them in triumph, ignoring the thinly veiled hostility in many faces. Soon they would have cause to regret their enmity.

She was horribly sick with this pregnancy. Henry was all solicitude in public, sending for delicacies to tempt her, urging her to rest, concocting remedies to soothe her nausea. Outwardly he did everything a concerned husband should do, but she had a strong sense that he shrank from her in private.

Looking out of her window one day, she saw Jane Seymour surrounded by a small crowd of people. Sir Francis Bryan and Sir Nicholas Carew were there, talking animatedly with Jane’s brothers, Edward and Thomas, who seemed rapidly to have risen high in the King’s favor of late. And with them, to her surprise, was Chapuys.

The sight filled her with a sense of foreboding. It was disconcerting to see these men making so much of plain little Jane.

And now Henry came into view, wrapped in furs against the cold, his entourage at a respectful distance. As if on cue, Jane’s admirers bowed and dispersed. Anne watched as she curtseyed and Henry raised her, took her hand, and kissed it fervently. And then, to her surprise, Jane drew it away, said something, curtseyed again, and hastened back toward the palace, leaving him standing there looking utterly discountenanced.

It was true: he was chasing Jane. And she, the sly bitch, was playing a clever game, one that Anne herself had played in her time. For, once denied something he wanted, Henry would move Heaven and earth to have it.

Anne had to sit down, she felt so faint. She must think of the child. She would not reproach Henry. Jane was powerless while she, Anne, carried the heir to England in her womb. By the time this babe arrived, Jane Seymour would probably be a distant memory, a passing irritation, no more.

What was more worrying was the possibility of the Emperor bearing down vengefully on England.

“I cannot tell you how it terrifies me to think that, if we are invaded, our children might be excluded from the throne for the sake of the Lady Mary,” she told Henry when he came to pay the daily duty visit he felt due to his gravid wife. “Because, if the Emperor has his way, that is what will happen.”

“You must stop worrying, Anne,” Henry comforted her. “If he invades these shores, we will be ready for him.” His bravado sounded a little forced.

“Sir!”—and she was vehement, desperate—“The Lady Mary will never cease to trouble us. Her defiance of your just laws has only given courage to our enemies. I pray you, let the law take its course with her! It’s the only way to avert war. What profit can Charles gain when there is no one to fight for? He needs our trade and our friendship.”

Henry’s solicitous expression had turned into a scowl. “You are asking me to send my own daughter to the scaffold.”

“She is a traitor, and a danger to you. While she lives, our son will never be safe!”

He was looking at her with distaste. “Maybe my threatening to have her executed would serve as a sufficiently effective warning to the Emperor.”

She said nothing. It was enough for now, and as a strategy it might work. She would bide her time until her son was born.

But then Henry spoke again. “You’re right. I am resolved. It shall be done.”



The next day, he visited her before dinner.

“I have just come from the Privy Council,” he told her. “I declared to them that I would no longer remain in the trouble, fear, and suspicion that Katherine and Mary are causing. I said the next Parliament must release me by passing Acts of Attainder against them or, by God, I will not wait any longer to make an end of them myself!”

“What did they say?”

“They looked shocked, but I told them it was nothing to cry or make wry faces about. I said that, even if I lose my crown for it, I would do what I have set out to do.”

Would he? Still she wondered.

“It was well done, Henry,” she congratulated him. “It is the only way to secure the future of our children.”

“Yes, but, by God, at what a price!” he cried. Already he was wavering.



Later she sent for George and told him what Henry had threatened.

“Even if he weakens now, when I have a son, he will not deny me. But it is now that I worry about. I fear that my enemies are poised to destroy me. Already they pay court to that wench Seymour.”

“They cannot touch you if you bear the King a son,” George reassured her.

“No, but what if God denies me that blessing?”

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