Don't Lose Your Head by Harriet Marsden

Author:Harriet Marsden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ulysses Press
Published: 2021-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

ANNE: Ha! All this sympathy, Jane. But I didn’t see you come visit me.

How could I? People thought me simple, but I was hardly such a ninny as to visit you in jail.

ANNE: True. But mon Dieu, all my passion to be replaced by a bland beige like you.

Yes, well, that aside, Anne was still a problem. Who knows what she might say on the hour of her death? So Cromwell decided to keep her execution private. They said it was as a courtesy to her, but I knew better.

You see, opinion was divided. Anne, whom the people had hated so much that they spat at her in the streets, the witch who had seduced their beloved king and tried to kill their old Queen Catherine, was starting to gain pity. Honestly? Henry had made the people feel stupid. Woe betide a ruler who does that to his subjects. You can lie to the people, you can disregard the people, but you cannot make fools of them. Henry had torn the country apart for her, and now there we were just a few short years later, and he had thrown her aside.

Nobody knew what was going on. Was a young queen supposed to die for flirting with her courtiers? What kind of king was this? Those who had supported his getting rid of Catherine weren’t happy to be made turncoats.

People mocked me, and I was scared. I wasn’t a great royal princess of Europe; I wasn’t a strong intellectual. I was just a simple farm girl at heart. I wanted to be married, but I didn’t want to be queen. Not in its own right. What did I know of running a great house or navigating the political currents, of surfing the waves of favour and the religious disputes? I just wanted to garden in peace.

I don’t know much about anything, really, but in my heart, I do know this: Anne didn’t deserve to die. He could have sent her to a convent. He could have sent her into exile in France. He could have humbled her to dust. But he didn’t have to kill her. And when he rushed to tell me the good news, that his beloved had been sentenced to death, it made me sick.

The poet Thomas Wyatt wrote that those bloody days broke his heart. What nobody knows is that they broke mine, too. Because I knew at that moment who I was marrying. And there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

I knew who Henry was. I had watched him toss over one loyal wife in madness for another and then turn on her with the French sword. But I had sworn to love Henry ’til the end, and I stood by him. We were betrothed the very next day.

At least I got my way over the wedding. I wanted no great fuss, no solemn state occasion. It was simply too tasteless. We were married ten days later at the Palace of Whitehall. He

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.