you're too young & eager to love

I needed some historical romance in my life today, so I had a marathon of the second season of The Tudors. Then promptly jumped to the last episode of the series where the ghosts of his wives, as he lay dying, visit Henry VIII. The idea of a ghostly after-life was too much for me to pass up, so I made this.

Notes: Catherine died of what historians think to be cancer after being banished/exiled. Jane Seymour died in childbirth and her son, the only legitimate male heir Henry ever had, died sometime after Henry’s death. Katherine Howard was executed after found for treason – she had a sordid affair with one of the courtiers. He was, naturally, executed as well. Howard was Anne’s cousin. Anne was executed during the month of May.

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“Are you the most happy?”

He does not remember.

In his arrogance and strength, Henry has bent the illusions of his heaven to match his will. To him, it is always these golden months of bright hope and happiness, his hand on her stomach. She is lovely now, because he makes her so. Full of ambition and simmering beauty, though it had not really been so – her head should be severed from her long neck, her belly sunken from months of fear and isolation in the Tower. Anne had watched from the window as they built her scaffold, her death place, and her eyes should show such terror.

But he does not know this, not here. Not when he wanders down the halls, still King and divine Master, still England in its prime, youthful and brazen. As he walks, the living shudder with cold, and the torchers flare up.

Anne sighs, and Henry does not understand. He is playful, and she cannot help but love this man that was hers, once, this embodiment of her greatest triumphant and ultimate mistake. Pressing her palm to his cheek, he turns and kisses her skin. She should have feared him when she was alive, should have been less impertinent, before it was too late. Now? It is never too late, and it is never anything but this younger sovereign kneeling before her, devoted.

(How quickly he had changed. Shifted into a lion that she could not pacify. Just as the court and people had been so quick to follow his lead, turning against her.)

“Anne?”

She slips her hand from his face and turns her eyes to the window. Somewhere nearby, her daughter is whispering her name in prayer. It distracts her. When she stands and looks, she can see the grounds of Whitehall. Her forehead pressed to the glass, she wonders why the others have deserted him. If Catherine’s piety overtook her queenly devotion, if Jane Seymour rests with her son, if her poor young cousin walks the decay of the Tower, choosing her lover’s arm instead of her King’s. Perhaps they are more fortunate with their choices.

It does not seem fair he should get such peace. Not when he was the reason for so much despair.

For all the suffering she did, Anne is not sure how she can feel so weary now. (She remembers her brother’s beheading, remembers the sorrow that burned her throat as she screamed. Remembers the blood of so many children between her legs, of Henry’s disappointed, withering stare.) Anne prickles with anger and bitterness and ice. In the palace, the air turns frigid and Elizabeth, newly crowned and every bit as clever as her mother, orders for a warmer wrap to be brought to her.

“You turn so far from me, my love.” Henry meets her at the window, his strong arms wrapping around her waist, chastising affectionately. This fresh monarch, this lover and husband, knows only the moment of his greatest victory when he returned to her, that time when he’d lorded over the whole world his triumph.

He’s smiling, like he always is now.

So this is her fate, she thinks, turning to press her mouth against his jaw. To resent and remember the man he became, yet love the man of their younger years – this man he’s chosen as his eternal guise. To know that the hand now stroking her hair once signed a death sentence, a sentence against her.

“Today, Henry, today.” She tells him, because she cannot bear the weight any longer. Because she has heard the fall of a sword haunt her since dawn. Because May forever wraps her in an anguished embrace.

For a moment, his hand weighs heavy on her shoulder. He stiffens, and there is a flicker of recognition in his eyes, a coldness. His mouth shapes words he does not speak; still, Anne thinks she reads the curve of his lips. You lost my boy.

But the moment is ended quickly, and he does not listen.

Before or after her, he never learned that quality, and she was not allowed the time to teach him. He continues to control, beckoning and demanding with a gesture of his fingers, shaping a death that allows him the comfort of not remembering. While some days Anne awakens (if one can sleep in death) and thinks she is back there, in the Tower, and not amongst the unchanging columns of this palace.

“You never bid me farewell.” She tells him, softly, sadly.

For him, she never has left. He kisses her hair and laughs.

Fandom: The Tudors
Lyrics: Damien Rice


I know I left you in places of despair.
I know that I loved you.


You usurped a Spanish Queen and now your throne is full of thorns.

You are unable to give the King a son.

In a country where flaxen hair was desirable, your exoticism came in the darkness of your complexion, the deep set of your eyes and the shadowy fall of your hair. Now, he calls it a sign of the curse which is you.

You beat your fists against your belly. Claw at your arms in your grief. There is no child. There is only blood, for the second time. There is only an ache and an emptiness and his uncaring, blaming eyes. Your Ladies circle and coo and stroke your hair away from your face, and you push them away for the heavy taste of English wine. Madame, they call you. Majesty. But you were not born to this position and now you wish that you had not risen so high, because the fall looks dreadful.

The bed has been cleaned. The sheets are pristine and soft, but you can still smell the acrid scent of loss. Your boy that they took away, wrapped in linens, without letting you touch him. George comes and however inappropriate it is for another man to touch your royal skin he holds you while you cry. Kisses your temple and touches you with his thick hands. Hands that you held as a little girl when the hardest obstacle you faced was whether or not you were fast enough to run away. There is nowhere to run now. No place to hide.

You are not as strong as you supposed. Your ambitions blinded you, while your father turned deaf to your concerns. You have a marriage that can be dissolved if the King so wills it. A womb that will not hold a child. You are failing as a woman when that single trait was once your strongest characteristic. So, your husband finds enjoyment with Jane Seymour. Mark plays his violin. Thomas writes his satires, his poetry, and watches you with a desire born from familiarity.

The world continues on, neither golden nor silver.
You cry in the hold of your brother and your insides twist.