Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn (36 page)

Try as I might, however, I could not quite
grasp the reason why we must kill a person for his religious
beliefs. There must be some sense behind it, for it had always been
done, but I could not follow the logic. I had known Jews in my
life, and they were no more evil than Christians. They were, in
fact, about the same in their evilness and goodness. I would not
think of killing one of them. The same was true for heretical
Lutherans, and now, the Catholics. I could find no compelling
reason why any of them must die and had not, as yet, had a reason
explained to me in terms I could fully understand. If the issue
were one of goodness versus evil, I would need to see more proof on
either side. If, on the other hand, it was an issue of punishing
sincere good intentions and simple interpretation of the
Scriptures, I had to protest.

I knew there was a movement within England to
reform the Church and to promote the various Protestant religions.
To them, Henry’s and my actions were welcome and long overdue.

Pitted against this movement were the
traditional Catholics who were driven to the point of war, and
would war, and would, in years to come and with Princess Mary at
the forefront, ruthlessly kill in defense of their religion, just
as Henry was now killing in defense of his.

Each one of these people–on both
sides–believed that only he and his kind were privy to the Truth
because of a larger wisdom and mental sobriety only accorded to
those who thought as they did. Each one of them was certain God
loved only him and his kind, and would cast the rest into oblivion,
or flames.

Each prayed to the same God to strike the
other dead; the same God, for there is only one.

Caught in the middle, still worshipping and
thinking of myself as a Catholic but having been thrust by
circumstance into the very odd role of “patron saint” of
Protestants, I was forced to think more deeply than most of the
other participants in the bloody drama.

I did not presume Protestantism was wrong.
New ideas were fascinating to me, and I fully respected and even
encouraged them. However, neither did I feel “Protestant”, myself.
I was a Catholic as certainly as I breathed. I just did not feel
strongly
against
Protestants and was now forced to become
one to secure my child’s future.

I wondered: How do I choose? I had no choice,
being Henry’s wife. I could not turn back now. I had brought Henry
to this point and, having done so, I had to follow his lead. I had
no open options left to me, yet still I viewed this as a situation
that called for careful thought.

And so I weighed the issues.

I was in desperate need of my God through
these dark days of doubt and fear, and it was in the midst of them
that I found myself questioning His very existence. I began to
think thoughts, terrible ones that had never crossed my mind
before. Had I spoken these thoughts aloud, I surely would have been
burned at the stake myself as a heretic.

I saw that each faction thought God existed
only within a circle it had drawn to enclose itself. Each believer
believed that to step outside his own circle was to hurl himself
out of God’s reach and beyond His concern. Each believer believed
that the reality of God could neither be greater than his own
marred and human perceptions, nor could it reach out to embrace the
other side.

All of them believed their own understanding
and beliefs were All Truth, and that settled it. They each had made
God just as small as they were, and just as they left no room for
mercy or respect, they left no room for logic or for thought.

I did not believe, as they believed, that
such circles and borders were supposed to separate the children of
God from each other. Did God really forsake one circle for another?
I did not believe so, nor did I believe those separations were of
God’s choosing. I did not even fully believe it mattered
how
one worshipped God, or how one defined God.

A small question grew larger within me. I
wondered if perhaps God did not care what we called Him, or how we
described Him to ourselves, or how we chose to worship Him. Did the
image we fixed our faith upon, our specific rituals and sacraments,
and the particular words we said in prayer have such power that
they counted more than what we felt within our hearts, or what we
did? I did not think so. I crossed myself whenever this question
taunted me.

Was my assumption correct? Or were the
others—those others with their bloody circles—the ones in
possession of the greater wisdom?

Was I, after all, becoming ensnared within a
circle that did not contain God? By
their
definition, by
everyone’s
definition, someone
had
to be without God.
The mystery was, which circle? Each one pointed to all the others
and said, “You.”

Someone must be wrong. No one thought it was
he.

In weighing thus, I came to the frightening
and disturbing realization that none of us could make our beliefs
real by believing, no matter how intensely we believed, or how
certain were that our viewpoint was true. Were we able to do so, I
wryly thought, Zeus would still preside over all of us, for the
ancient Greeks would have made him real, through believing.

It does not fall to Truth to find us; it
falls to each of us to think and search and seek it out. Truth,
after all, does not ask for our permission or require our
concurrence. It simply is. With or without us.

So what is true about God if we can
manipulate and change Him just so a king might marry his whore?
What is real and what is false? I did not know. God would not
say.

I would go to Hell for this, if for nothing
else. I knew it. I would burn in place of all the misfortune-struck
souls who trusted Henry to be right about God for, if he was wrong,
it was not their sin. It was mine. It was my thinking and
speculation that prodded Henry to give lengthy consideration to a
church other than the Roman one. It was in order to marry me that
he abandoned his faith. It was I who was the impetus.

It was
I
who believed the Protestant
circle we were about to enter and embrace was not outside of God’s
long reach and, as yet, I had no proof that I was correct. I
therefore had no right to take unwilling others with me.

What was I to do? I made my decision, firmly,
by not deciding at all.

I could not bring back the old God, for Henry
had declared Him dead. I could only do this: I could only try to
see that no one—no heretic of any kind—would lose his life in
England for his religious beliefs while I still drew breath. I
could not view any religion as a crime or its believers as
dangerous. There was too much doubt and too much upheaval, too many
conflicting views, and too many contradictions for certainty about
what and who was God.

As queen I had, from the first, defended
heretical writings. I had routinely obtained censored works and
read them voraciously, quieted Henry’s objections, and even pointed
out the logic and validity of some of the ideas they presented. I
thought these authors brave and sincere and felt they should be
heard, or at least not condemned and persecuted.

I had seen to it that Henry made it legal,
finally, for common folk to own Bibles rather than be wholly
dependent upon the clergy to intercede for them with God. I even
persuaded him to allow the Bible to be translated into English so
more people could be reached with God’s Word.

Throughout, I had persuaded Henry against
hangings, and firmly seen to it that no heretic was ever burned at
the stake during my tenure as queen. I must again defend the lives
of those who wrote, or who spoke, or who believed. This would no
longer be easy to do, for my influence had grown weak and my power
was greatly diminished.

The clerics and the cardinals had slipped
past me to their deaths. For that I grieved, and for them I built
my resolve. Henry might be God’s spokesman, but I was still his
queen and I could try to stay his hand in this. God had not made it
clear to me whose beliefs were false, and so I would see to it that
all were viewed with tolerance, at least as far as my power would
reach.

I would let God sort them out. Better He than
I. Better He than Henry.

It was far easier for me to persuade my
husband to slow imprisonment and killing for heresy than for
treason. Henry was the greatest heretic of them all in ousting
Rome, and could not condemn without inviting condemnation. Even his
convoluted logic shrank in defeat against that (though he would
find new rationale after my death, and the burnings would resume).
In this, at least, my will prevailed for a time.

And once again I did not earn Hell at all. I
find that, in the midst of this mental and emotional turmoil, I
chose correctly in deciding to protect and defend rather than draw
circles and condemn. In so choosing, I unwittingly earned my
greatest reward.

•
~
۞
~•

Henry’s next step was to commence a long
campaign to pillage and strip the monasteries. Through Henry’s
swift change in Gods, the gold and riches formerly claimed by the
Church became ours.

Greed. It was greed. Holy Father forgive me,
I could not restrain the greed around me. I even had to feign
pleasure and accept these riches as gifts to me—blood riches that
made my stomach queasy with sorrow and shame.

I had had no real fondness for priests since
my childhood in France, but still felt toward them a habitual level
of respect. I felt enough respect to wonder: Had we become such
petty road thieves that we now could steal from them? Had we, in a
palace like Hampton Court, a real need for more riches, while the
priests and nuns were now forced to beg? Furthermore, the poor that
these priests and nuns had once cared for no longer had them to
turn to in their hunger, and in fact, now begged beside them.

As the riches poured in, I distributed a vast
fortune in the name of “charity” to offset them, but could only
touch a few of the hungry, after all, in the time I still had
left.

The rains stopped, and Henry’s confidence
swelled again. No longer fearful of God, he left my bed once again,
and found another.

Henry had married two opposites, first a
modest, quiet wife, and then an outspoken, assertive one. He now
sought a wife who was different from either Katherine or myself,
and he found her in Jane Seymour whose singular noteworthy
quality—and what made her noticeably different from Katherine and
me—was her remarkable stupidity.

Secondly, the difference lie in her seeming
inability to remain upright and clothed, when in the presence of a
man. I suppose her dim-wittedness contributed in part to her lack
of balance in the bedroom; she toppled backward easily and
indiscriminately, whereas a woman of wit and sense might have shown
better taste and more restraint.

Neither did she
once
restrain herself
with loyalty or duty. I should have thought that my own thankless
efforts to spare Katherine during those early years might have been
rewarded with even a
feigned
attempt by Jane to discourage
Henry. However, that was not to be. Jane had no honor, and no
integrity. She had no power against her ambition, and no scruples.
Her solemn vows to serve me loyally caused her no anguish of
conscience at all, when afforded an opportunity to overthrow
me.

She was not even pretty. She was pale and
pasty-faced, with a thick neck and no chin. If I had been a ruby,
then
this
one was stained glass. That Henry should want her
after me was an insult.

England sought to overthrow its Whore Queen,
and cared little for the purity of her replacement. Purity, it
seems, was never the point even as they had screamed “Whore!” with
such fury, for they embraced Jane Seymour who had bedded most of
the court, and chose to overlook her indiscretions so long as she
ousted Queen Anne.

These past indiscretions did not even matter
to Henry. He had chosen Jane for her wide child-bearing hips
(though I found out here, they failed her in the end, and she died
soon after giving birth to the son Henry wanted so badly) and for
her family’s reputation for whelping litters and legions of
dim-witted, pasty-faced infants.

۞

I await a scolding and a reminder that my
thoughts are uncharitable and cruel, but my mentor is withholding
comment.

“Did you not hear what I just thought about
Jane and the dim-witted infants? Did you not hear me loathing and
despising her?” I am defiantly braced for sharp words, and would
rather hear them a hundred-fold, than make my thoughts more
charitable.

The Voice says only this, and says it
gently: “I only heard you weeping in despair.”

۞

Katherine could not have been any happier
than I was at Henry’s choice. I cared little for Katherine’s
happiness, as intent as I was upon hurting her, but years of enmity
had bound us into a form of twisted alliance (in fact, when she
came to die, I would be shocked to find I felt a deep grief). I
wondered at times what she thought, and would have valued a short
truce wherein we could discuss the current happenings together.

I was losing my edge in the battle with
Katherine. Her attacks were becoming far crueler than my own, for
she still had her focus and her clever supporters, whereas my mind
had now been pulled elsewhere. I no longer had Emma to coach me in
my wickedness. I no longer had Henry to lean on, nor did I have his
love, so my words and threats rang hollow and were better left
unsaid. However I said them anyway, as I was typically wont to do,
and let them ring hollow as they would. And now, with word of Jane
Seymour, I would quite possibly have to withdraw from the fight
with Katherine altogether. There was a woman I hated far more.