In the Shadow of the Crown - By Jean Plaidy Page 0,33

a witch, they said. I was not sure about that, but there were times, when my hatred for her was at its height, when I made myself believe it.

She had come from the Court of France whither she had gone when a child in the train of my Aunt Mary Tudor who went there to marry the ageing Louis XII. She had not returned until soon after the occasion of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, on account of the rapidly deteriorating relations between France and England. She was then to marry Piers Butler because there was some dispute in the Boleyn family about a title, and the marriage of Anne to the son of the Butlers had been arranged to settle the matter.

My father must have been aware of her at that time, for the proposed marriage was mysteriously prevented. I could not believe that at that time he thought of marrying her. The suggestion would have been too preposterous. I was shocked to hear that Mary Boleyn, Anne's sister, had been my father's mistress for some time.

These rumors of his philanderings upset me very much when I first heard of them. Now I know that that is the way of men. Well, Mary Boleyn was his mistress and I suppose that at the time of Anne's return to England the King became aware of her and decided to replace one sister with another.

I heard, too, about the passionate love between Anne and young Henry Percy, the eldest son of the Earl of Northumberland, and how they planned to marry. That would have been a very good match for Mistress Anne Boleyn, for although her father had received many honors, largely because of the favor the King showed to Mary Boleyn, and Anne's mother was a Howard of the great Norfolk family, her father had his roots in trade. There was some story of an ancestor's being a merchant. True, he had acquired a title and become Lord Mayor, but still trade.

Anne no doubt thought all was set fair. She had been so much in love with Percy, people said. As for Percy, he was besotted. People used to marvel at her devotion to him, because he was not a heroic sort of young man but rather weak. That he adored her was not surprising but her genuine love for him was amazing, for they said it was not due to the great title he would one day inherit.

I grew to hate her so much that I could not see any good in her; but later on, when her terrible fate overtook her, my bitterness diminished a little and I often thought that, if she had been allowed to marry Percy, she could have been a happy wife and mother and much anguish spared to many.

My father, by this time, was beginning to be deeply enamoured of her and ordered Wolsey to prevent the marriage with Percy going ahead. Young Henry Percy was humiliated by the Cardinal, and the Earl of Northumberland was sent for. He came to London and berated his son for his folly. Henry Percy was banished to Northumberland, and Anne Boleyn to Hever.

I could imagine her grief and anger. She would be passionate in her emotion, although at the time she would not have known that the breaking up of their match had been due to the effect she was having on the King and that he was forming plans for her. She thought it was because she was not considered of noble enough breeding to mate with the mighty House of Northumberland, which had deeply wounded her dignity.

The rest of the story is well known: her return to Court at the instigation of the King, a place in my mother's household as one of her ladies-inwaiting, where she could grace the Court with her special talents of dancing, singing and writing masques with the young poets of the Court, most of whom were her slaves.

She was one of those women who I believe are called a femme fatale. My father was not the only one who desired her.

I did not know—I am not sure even now after so many years have passed—whether she deliberately set out to wear the crown. She could not in the beginning have believed this possible—she, from a family associated with trade—and in any case the King already had a wife. It seemed quite preposterous. No, I think at that stage she might have been sincere.

When he made it