A/N:
"The maxim is "Qui tacet consentit": the maxim of the law is "Silence gives consent". If therefore you wish to construe what my silence betokened, you must construe that I consented."
- Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons
"Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it's fear."
-Paul Beatty, The Sellout
A Tudor does not know silence, and from her first breath, Mary, Princess of Wales, boasts all of her father's Tudor spirit and her mother's Spanish pride. She makes her presence known - not by crying, she is a girl who never cries - but in the way that all royal heirs must. She does not know silence.
(That is a lie. The silence of her nursery, with no sons or siblings, is deafening enough that she drowns it out by being twice as loud.)
A Boleyn woman shakes their world, and Mary yells, screams, insults, thumbs her nose at her father who would see her erased. She will not take this insult quietly, she was not made for silence and she declares she knows no other queen or princess. The heretical faction wants her silence to accentuate their own chaos they plan to unleash - she will deafen them with her own.
Her father condemns her with his silence, and her mother is condemned to silence. Thomas More relies on silence not to condemn him, until it is no longer enough.
The concubine is strangely silent towards Mary, save the rare occasions that their paths cross and they spark so violently that it echoes. But she knows the woman is no true queen, knows how Anne fails to employ silence wisely elsewhere, and how it costs her her place.
Anne Boleyn is skillfully silent on the scaffold, but her true meaning resounds in the words she does not say, and Mary gnashes her teeth to know that that woman had one final victory.
But with Anne gone, Mary is finally, finally free to be as vocal as she wishes - but of course, she finds herself silenced in the end, all her words shut away to clamor in her chest until the day comes, if ever, that she may speak them. And it burns, burns, burns to know that even from beyond the grace, when she should rightfully be silenced, Anen can still tear the words from Mary's tongue and heart and mind.
It is not so - it will not be so, Anne left nothing behind on this earthly plane, Mary believes and knows, except a red-haired wraith with hauntingly familiar black eyes and an uncanny dignity.
Elizabeth is young yet, freed of her mother's malign influence in time, and shows every sign of being a true Tudor. If she is strangely quiet where her mother is concerned, it is only because how can she have questions about what she does not remember?
(That is a lie. Mary is also a motherless princess-turned-bastard, who has been forced to don the mantle of silence, and she knows dissembling when she sees it. Elizabeth's constructed silence unnerves her, knowing what it might hide just as Mary's own silence conceals the unspeakable, and it is for that reason she knows not to trust her fully - not hate, never hate, but never trust either. Tudors do not know silence, and what she does not know, Mary does not trust.)