Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (170 page)

Catherine slept for all that day and all that night, and when she awoke, William had the horses ready and she was on her horse before she could protest. We rode to the river and took a ship downriver to Leigh. She ate while we were on board. Henry beside her. I had my baby on my hip, watching my two older children, thanking God that we were out of the city and that, if we were lucky and kept our wits about us, we might escape notice in the new reign.

Jane Seymour had chosen her wedding clothes on the day that they executed my sister. I did not even blame her for that. Anne or I, would have done the same thing. When Henry changed his mind he always changed it fast, and it was a wise woman who went with him and did not oppose him. Even more so now that he had divorced one faultless wife and beheaded another. Now he knew his power.

Jane would be the new queen and her children, when she had them, would be the next princes or princesses. Or she might wait, as the other queens had waited, every month, desperate to know that she had conceived, knowing each month that it did not happen that Henry's love wore a little thinner, that his patience grew a little shorter. Or Anne's curse of death in childbed, and death to her son, might come true. I did not envy Jane Seymour. I had seen two queens married to King Henry and neither of them had much joy of it.

And as for us Boleyns, my father was right, all we could do now was survive. My uncle had lost a good hand with the death of Anne. He had thrown her onto the gaming table just as he had thrown me or Madge. Whether a girl was fit for seduction or a sop for the king's rage, or even to aim at the highest place in the land, he would always have another Howard girl at the ready. He would play again. But we Boleyns were destroyed. We had lost our most famous girl, Queen Anne, and we had
lost George, our heir. And Anne's daughter Elizabeth was a nobody, worth even less than the despised Princess Mary. She would never be called princess again. She would never sit on the throne.

‘I'm glad of it,' I said simply to William as the children slept, rocked by the movement of the boat on the ebbing tide. ‘I want to live in the country with you. I want to bring up our children to love each other and fear God. I want to find some peace now, I have had enough of playing the great game at court. I have seen the price that has to be paid and it is too high. I just want you. I just want to live at Rochford and love you.'

He put his arm around me and held me close to him against the cold wind that blew steadily off the sea. ‘It's agreed,' he said. ‘Your part in this is done, please God.' He looked forward to where my two children were in the prow of the boat, looking downriver to the sea, swaying with the rhythmic beat of the oars. ‘But those two? They'll be sailing upriver again, back to court and power, sometime in their lives.'

I shook my head in protest.

‘They're half Boleyn and half Tudor,' he said. ‘My God, what a combination. And their cousin Elizabeth the same. Nobody can say what they will do.'

Mary and William Stafford lived happily together at Rochford. When her parents died (in 1538 and 1539), Mary inherited the whole of the Boleyn family holdings in Essex, and she and William became wealthy landowners.

She died in 1543 and her son, Henry Carey, rose to become a major advisor and courtier at the court of his cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, the greatest queen England ever had. She made him Viscount Hunsdon. Mary's daughter Catherine married Sir Francis Knollys and founded a great Elizabethan dynasty.

I am indebted to Retha M. Warnicke, whose book
The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn
has been a most helpful source for this story. I have followed Warnicke's original and provocative thesis that the homosexual ring around Anne, including her brother George, and her last miscarriage created a climate in which the king could accuse her of witchcraft and perverse sexual practices.

I am very grateful to the following authors, whose books helped me to trace the otherwise untold story of Mary Boleyn, or provided background for the period:

Bindoff, S. T.,
Pelican History of England: Tudor England
, Penguin, 1993

Bruce, Marie Louise,
Anne Boleyn
, Collins, 1972

Cressy, David,
Birth, Marriage and Death, ritual religions and the life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England
, OUP, 1977

Darby, H. C.,
A new historical geography of England before 1600
, CUP, 1976

Elton, G. R.,
England under the Tudors
, Methuen, 1955

Fletcher, Anthony,
Tudor Rebellions
, Longman, 1968

Guy, John,
Tudor England
, OUP, 1988

Haynes, Alan,
Sex in Elizabethan England
, Sutton, 1997

Loades, David,
The Tudor Court
, Batsford, 1986

Loades, David,
Henry VIII and his Queens
, Sutton, 2000

Mackie, J. D.,
Oxford History of England, The Earlier Tudors
, OUP, 1952

Plowden, Alison,
Tudor Women, Queens and Commoners
, Sutton, 1998

Randell, Keith,
Henry VIII and the Reformation in England
, Hodder, 1993

Scarisbrick, J. J.,
Yale English Monarchs: Henry VIII
, YUP, 1997

Smith, Baldwin Lacey,
A Tudor Tragedy, the life and times of Catherine Howard
, Cape, 1961

Starkey, David,
The Reign of Henry VIII, Personalities and Politics
, G. Philip, 1985

Starkey, David,
Henry VIII: A European Court in England
, Collins and Brown, 1991

Tillyard, E. M. W.,
The Elizabethan World Picture
, Pimlico, 1943

Turner, Robert,
Elizabethan Magic
, Element, 1989

Warnicke, Retha M.,
The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn
, CUP, 1991

Weir, Alison,
The Six Wives of Henry VIII
, Pimlico, 1997

Young, Joyce,
Penguin Social History of Britain
, Penguin