The Christmas Tale of Anne Boleyn#Wattys2014

The Christmas Tale of Anne Boleyn

Greenwich, 1528

I am Anne.  With trembling hands, I write this on snowy parchment, scrawling my usual swirling A.  I stare at it: I am Anne. What mischance to be alive during the strangest of times.

It is Yuletide, and the winter is as hard as silver.  The trees are bare, like a string of gold that has lost its pearls.  The ground is as frostbitten as my heart.  The ice forms over it, hardening it to the world.  The winter solstice is behind us, not that nature seems to have noticed as the cold has choked it of life.

Wafts of sweet aromas fill the Palace, and I can still smell cinnamon on my hands from a small comfit I ate earlier. He has housed me in magnificent apartments. It is as if England has two Queens, the legal one and the one of Henry Tudor's heart. Spanish Catherine presides officially over the festivities, while all look my way.

Now the fourth day of Christmas, we are well into the exhausting rounds of masques, dances and entertainments.  I am at my most busy and constantly required. But if I neglect the King then he could be turned from me. My limbs ache and I long for sleep, so I lay my pounding head down on the table. I close my heavy eyes and ponder my arduous life.

I am surrounded by admirers all day long.  I see myself interact with them, as if watching from another corner of the room.  I laugh and throw back my dainty head, deliberately exposing my swan-like neck.  I dance; amuse my companions, and rush through the hours like a fresh, brisk wind.  I act as if I am a girl of seventeen with her whole life ahead of her and not a maid of twenty-eight.  But really, I am alone. My friends are fair-weather. If I fall from grace they will melt away like snow.

I once loved, a boy called Henry Percy. I dreamt, as young fools do, of a family and a life as a wife. The scarlet man, Wolsey, stunted my flowering love and I will never be that happy, carefree girl again.  Though neither am I the lovesick, milksop youth who confused dreams with the realities of life.  Henry Percy proved himself to have the backbone of a tall jelly.  Cardinal Wolsey forbade our union, and Percy fled like a mouse, into his angry father's arms.  I was publically forsaken and humiliated.  But I learnt a valuable lesson of how love blinds us to weakness.  Now Percy is unhappily married to Mary Talbot, and both our lives have taken sadder turns. Maybe there is some consolation in growing old. With Henry my eyes are wide open.  They are never shut.

I am neither a wife nor a mistress, and I am cast in this in-between, twilight world. I have to entertain like a pet monkey, for in truth there is no turning back.  If I lose the King’s high favour, then I will be thrown to the lions of Court to be torn apart. My reputation is in shreds. There is not a man in England who will want Anne Boleyn; I’ll be cast-off Royal wares and my family will be tossed into the den with me.  

What started out as an exciting flirtation became serious beyond my expectations, once it was plain that Queen Catherine would never give him a son.  But the tedious obstructions and legalities blocking our union seemed insurmountable.  As soon as I realised that Henry and I were bound to go round and round, like merrymakers circling the maypole, it was too late.  By then he had fallen in love and would not let me go.  I became the ‘thing’ he most desired and could not have. Even Rome forbade it.

This is terrifying, as I know from hunting how Henry loves the chase.  But I have also watched him capture a deer; blood trickling over the doe’s neck as he slices it clean. Henry Tudor’s grim smile of satisfaction chills me, as he wipes the blood from the knife onto his servant’s cloth. The King loves me, as I once loved Percy.  But I know love is fickle too.  He writes me imploring letters, and signs 'No other AB", yet I cannot help but wonder if he ever wrote such letters to Catherine.  Now, she is as unwanted as the sweating sickness.  So I have gambled for the highest prize, to be Queen of England.  Until I am such, I cannot rest easy.  I cannot abide Catherine's refusal to admit the obvious; that she will never have a son and the Tudor dynasty is destined to fall with her stubbornness.