The Queen of Subtleties. Suzannah Dunn

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       Anne Boleyn

      Elizabeth, you’ll be told lies about me, or perhaps even nothing at all. I don’t know which is worse. You, too, my only baby: your own lifestory is being re-written. You’re no longer the king’s legitimate daughter and heir. Yesterday, with a few pen-strokes, you were bastardized. Tomorrow, for good measure, a sword-stroke will leave you motherless.

      There are people who’d have liked to have claimed that you’re not your father’s daughter at all, but you’ve confounded them. You’re a Tudor rose, a pale redhead, whereas I’m a black-haired, olive-skinned, coal-eyed Englishwoman as dark as a Spaniard. No one has felt able to suggest that you’re other than your father’s flesh and blood.

      You won’t remember how I look, and I don’t suppose you’ll ever come across my likeness. Portraits of me will be burned. You’ll probably never even come across my handwriting, because my letters and diaries will go the same way. Even my initial will be chiselled from your father’s on carvings and masonry all around the country. And it starts tomorrow, with the thud of the sword to my bared neck in time for my husband’s public announcement of his forthcoming marriage. As his current wife, I pose a problem. Not such a big one, though, that the thinnest of blades can’t solve it.

      I want you to know about me, Elizabeth. So, let’s start at the beginning. I was born at the turn of the century. And what a turn, what a century: the sixteenth, so different from every one before it. The changes I’ve seen. Gone, quite suddenly, is the old England, the old order of knights and priests. England used to be made of old men. Men born to their place, knowing their place. We Boleyns have always prided ourselves on knowing just about everything there is to know about anything, with the exception of our place.

      I was born in Norfolk. My mother is a Howard. Her brother is the Duke of Norfolk. I was born in Blickling Hall. I’ve no memories of Norfolk, but I’m told that the land is flat, the sky high and wide. So, from the beginning, it seems, I’ve had my sights on the horizon. The climate, in Norfolk, is something I’ve heard about: blanketed summers and bare, bone-cracking winters. Inhospitable and uncompromising, like the Howards. If the world had never changed, that would have suited the Howards.

      Something else I’ve heard about the Howards: that the Duke, my Uncle Norfolk, has the common touch. At first, it seems a strange thing to hear about the last man in England to have owned serfs; but in a way, it’s true, because, for him, business is everything and he’s unafraid to get his hands dirty. No airs and graces. Land and money: that’s what matters to a Howard. My uncle has never read a book, and he’s proud of the fact. Ruthlessness and efficiency: that’s what matters. He’ll clap you on the back, one day; stab you in it, the next. No hard feelings, just business as usual. Never trust a Howard, Elizabeth, not even if you are one. Look where it got me, sent here to the Tower by my own uncle.

      But I’m a Boleyn first and foremost. My father didn’t have the Howard privileges; he’s had to make his own way in the world. And he has; oh, he has: cultured, clever, cool-eyed Thomas Boleyn. England has never seen the likes of him. For a start, he has a talent almost unknown here: he speaks French like a Frenchman. Which has made him indispensable to the King.

      We Boleyns have lived a very different life from everyone else, in this country; from everyone else under these heavy English skies, in their musty old robes and gowns, slowly digesting their stews. I lived in France from when I was twelve until I was twenty. I grew up to be a Frenchwoman, I came back to England as a Frenchwoman. There are women in France who are strong, Elizabeth, because they’re educated. Unlike here, where the only way to be a strong woman is to be a harridan. Imagine how it was, for me, to come back. For years, I’d been thinking in French. In France, anything seems possible, and life is to be lived. Even now, stuck in the Tower, a day away from death, I’m alive, Elizabeth, in a way that most people here haven’t ever been and won’t ever be. I pity their bleak, grovelling little lives.

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