Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

She falls back, and they catch her and push her into kneeling before the block; she clings to it, as if it might save her. Even from here I can see she is weeping. Then gently, just as she does at bedtime, as if she were a little girl settling down to sleep, she strokes a lock of her hair away from her face with her hand, and puts her head down on the smooth wood. She turns her little head and lays her cheek on the wood. Tentatively – as if she wishes she didn’t have to do it – she stretches out her trembling hands and the headsman is in a hurry and his axe flashes down like a bolt of lightning.

I scream at the great gout of blood and the way her head bounces on the platform. The priest behind me falls silent, and I remember that I must not forget my part, not for a moment, and so I call out: “Kitty, is that you? Is that you, Kitty? Is it a game?”

“Poor woman,” the priest says, and gets to his feet. “Give me a sign that you have confessed your sins and die in faith, poor witless thing.”

I jump down from the windowsill for I hear the grate of the key in the lock, and now they will come to take me home. They will take me out of the back door and hurry me to the watergate and then, I guess, by unmarked barge, probably to Greenwich and then perhaps by boat to Norwich. “Time to go,” I say merrily.

“God bless her and forgive her,” the priest says. He holds out his Bible for me to kiss.

“Time to go,” I say again. I kiss it, since he is so urgent that I should, and I laugh at his sad face.

The guards stand on either side of me, and we go quickly down the stairs. But when I expect them to turn away to the back of the Tower, they guide me to the front entrance, to the green. I check at once. I don’t want to see Katherine Howard’s body being wrapped up like old laundry, then I remember I have to appear mad, right up to the last moment when they put me on the boat, I have to appear so witless that I cannot be beheaded.

“Quick, quick!” I say. “Trot, trot!”

The guards in reply take my arms, and the door is swung open. The court is still assembled, almost as if they are waiting for another show on the bloodstained stage. I don’t like to be taken through them, past my friends who were honored to know me. In the front row I see my kinsman, the Earl of Surrey, looking a little queasy at the sawdust drenched in his cousin’s blood, but laughing it all off. I laugh, too, and look from one guard to the other. “Trot! Trot!” I say.

They grimace as if this is disagreeable and they tighten their grip and we walk toward the scaffold. I hesitate. “Not me,” I say.

“Come along now, Lady Rochford,” the man on my right says. “Come up the steps.”

“No!” I protest, I dig my heels in, but they are too strong for me. They move me on.

“Come on now, there’s a good girl.”

“You can’t execute me,” I say. “I am a madwoman. You can’t execute a madwoman.”

“We can,” the man says.

I twist in their grip; when they march me to the steps, I get my feet against the first tread and push off from it, and they have to wrestle to get me up one step. “You can’t,” I say. “I am mad. The doctors say I am mad. The king sent his own doctors, his own doctors every day, to see that I am mad.”

“Had the law changed, didn’t he?” one of the guards puffs. Another fellow joins them and is pushing me from behind. His hard hands in my back propel me up the steps to the stage. They are lifting the wrapped body of Katherine off at the front, and her head is in the basket, her beautiful golden-brown hair spilling over the side.

“Not me!” I insist. “I am mad.”

“He changed the law,” the guard shouts at me over the laughter of the crowd, which has cheered up at this battle to get me up the steps. “Changed the law so that anyone convicted of treason could be beheaded, whether mad or not.”

“The doctor, the king’s own doctor, says I’m mad.”

“Makes no difference, you’re still going to die.”

They hold me at the front of the stage. I look out at the laughing, avid faces. Nobody has ever loved me in this court; nobody will shed a tear for me. Nobody will protest against this new injustice.

“I am not mad,” I shout. “But I am completely innocent. Good people, I beg you to implore the king for mercy. I have done nothing wrong but one terrible thing, one terrible thing. And I was punished for that; you know I was punished for it. Nobody blamed me for it, but it was the worst thing a wife could do… I loved him…” There is a roll of drums, which drowns out everything but my own crying. “I am sorry, I am sorry for it…”

They drag me back from the rail at the front of the stage and they force me down into the stained sawdust. They force my hands onto the block, which is wet with her blood. When I look at my hands, they are as red with blood as if I am a killer. I will die with innocent blood on my hands.

“I am innocent,” I shout. They wrestle the blindfold on me so I can see nothing. “I am innocent of everything. I have always been innocent of everything. The only thing I ever did, the only sin ever, was against George, for love of George, my husband, George, God forgive me for that – I want to confess-”

“On the count of three,” the guard says. “One, two, three.”

So, he is dead at last, my husband who denied me, the man who failed the promise of his youth, the king who turned tyrant, the scholar who went mad, the beloved boy who became a monster. It was only his death that saved his last wife, Katherine Parr, who was to be arrested for treason and heresy; but death, which had been his ally, his partner and his pander for so long, finally came for him.

How many did the king kill? We can start to count now that death has stilled his murderous will. Thousands. No one will ever know. Up and down the land the burnings in the marketplace for heresy, the hangings at the gallows for treason. Thousands and thousands of men and women whose only crime was that they disagreed with him. Papists who held to the religion of their fathers, reformers who wanted the new ways. Little Kitty Howard among the dead, whose only crime was that she loved a boy of her own age and not a man old enough to be her father, and rotting from the leg upward. This is the man they call a great king, the greatest king that we have ever had in England. Does it not teach us that we should have no king? That a people should be free? That a tyrant is still a tyrant even when he has a handsome face under a crown?

I think of the Boleyn inheritance that meant so much to Lady Rochford. She was the heir, in the end. She inherited the death of her sister-in-law, of her husband. Her inheritance and poor Kitty’s, was death on the scaffold, just like them. I have a share of the Boleyn inheritance, too, this pretty little castle set in the Kent countryside, my favorite home.

So it is over. I shall wear mourning for the king, and then I shall attend the coronation of the prince, the little boy I loved, now to be King Edward. I have become what I promised myself I would be, if I was spared Henry’s axe. I promised myself that I would live my own life, by my own lights, that I would play my part in the world as a woman in my own right; and I have done this.

I am a free woman now, free from him and finally free from fear. If there is a knock on my door in the night, I will not start up from my bed, my heart hammering, thinking that my luck has run out and that he has sent his soldiers for me. If a stranger comes to my house, I will not suspect a spy. If someone asks me for news of the court, I will not fear entrapment.

I will own a cat and not fear being called a witch; I will dance and not fear being named a whore. I shall ride my horse and go where I please. I shall soar like a gyrfalcon. I shall live my own life and please myself. I shall be a free woman.