LEGACY the acclaimed novel of Queen Eliz - By Susan Kay Page 0,2

the black eyes of Anne Boleyn he never envisaged anything less. He would conquer and walk away, and the world would no more be concerned with the fate of Anne than it had been with a score of pretty women who, at one time or another, had provided a few diverting hours in the royal bed.

Six years later he was still waiting for that satisfaction, waiting in the humiliation of the public gaze, with the world a scandalised witness of his insane pursuit. War and religious schism hung in the balance, because a wilful young woman had put the ultimate price on her favours, and a prince, mad with desire, had sworn to pay it.

For six years the Divorce dragged through foreign universities and papal courts, while Henry hacked at the legal shackles which bound him to his wife, the Emperor’s aunt, Katherine of Aragon. And all that time Anne held him at bay, alternately enticing and repulsing, changing a confident easy-going man into a monster of poisonous self-doubt and paranoia, a man unable to distinguish friends from enemies, who swept aside all opposition with a merciless hand. Late in 1532 Anne staked her fate on a final desperate gamble and surrendered the citadel; by New Year she had laid her last card on the table and won the game: she was pregnant.

Henry was aghast, amazed, overjoyed; neatly trapped, like a rabbit in a snare, between his desire for compromise with Rome, and his pressing need for the son Anne swore she carried. So an unborn child tipped the balance and Rome lost the battle with Henry’s conscience. Within three months a new independent Church of England had authorised the annulment of Henry’s first marriage and presided over Anne’s extravagant coronation in Westminster Abbey.

Four months to go, thought Anne, as she rode through the hostile crowds, and neither the Pope’s impotent threats nor the moody muttering of this ragtag and bobtail crowd could make a scrap of difference to her new state. She was Queen of England and she would rule through Henry as she had done these past six years of her scheming; if he died, she would rule through the boy now kicking vigorously beneath her heart.

When Anne went into labour that hot, still seventh of September, there was silent anticipation all over the sprawling riverside palace of Placentia at Greenwich. Tension had everyone by the throat, for friends and enemies alike of the new Queen knew how much depended on the birth of a son, the final vindication of all the ugly and unprecedented events which had led up to the “the Concubine’s” present triumph.

It was just after three in the afternoon, when the heat was at its most oppressive, that they brought the news to Henry and for a moment he refused to believe it was true. After all the frustrations, the humiliations, the risks to his power and his eternal soul—another girl to take the place of Katherine’s daughter, Mary, recently bastardised to make room for a new prince.

One by one the horrors he had dared to defy rose up to hit him like separate blows. Excommunication; war; rebellion—they were words to make any Christian monarch tremble, but he had risked it all and much more for the spurious promise of a clever woman who had not been quite so clever after all. Oh yes, he could hear it already, the tittering sniggers, the self-righteous satisfaction that would attend the announcement in European courts that “God has entirely deserted this king.”

Blood pounded through his swollen veins and throbbed hot with the urge to take the whole world in his mighty hands and crush it like a ripe fruit. They were plucking at his sleeve, asking in timid voices if he would be pleased to look upon his new daughter. As he went blindly out of the room, only pride restrained him from having the brat thrown into the river; no one must know how keenly he felt this failure to justify his own behaviour.

Anne’s room was still crowded with spectators, who backed out hastily when the King entered. The child lay on a cushion on the midwife’s lap, naked, bawling, and still caked with blood. He paused to examine her resentfully and found her as ugly as only an unwanted new-born child could be, yet perfectly formed, infuriatingly healthy. He remembered his sons by Katherine, miserable, mewling scraps of short-lived flesh that had torn his heart with anguish. There was nothing about this child to