Disclaimer: I do not own The Tudors.
Author's Note (SPOILERS): In the process of recovering, editing, and re-posting stories I had deleted. I wrote this one in 2010 for a Last Author Standing contest on LiveJournal, and it was the winner for Round 2 under the writing prompt "All Is Not Lost". These words got me thinking about Anne Boleyn in The Tudors, imagining what she might have been thinking and feeling in her last hours before her execution at the end of Season 2.
And Yet She Smiled
Cerulean skies and the bright May sun came unexpected, considering what this day held for her. That part was all too clear to see from her window. On the Green below, a gathering throng clamored for the day's purpose to be done—a purpose she was sure most, if not all of them, believed was long overdue and most deserved. Their shouts echoed off the Tower walls, so that no one could hear and not comprehend what was happening. At the center of it all was a wooden platform, about as high as a grown man's shoulders, on which stood a tall figure dressed all in black. Just the sight of him should have made her shiver, or start weeping hysterically, as she had done frequently during the fortnight she had been here.
And yet she smiled.
Her jailers said nothing, but Anne's disposition obviously troubled them. She knew she appeared to have much joy in death. Good, give her subjects—for she was indeed their Queen until the moment she left this world—one more instance to wonder about her. Anne Boleyn had been an enigma all her life, to friends and enemies alike. Let her death be just as controversial and dramatic.
Anne shifted her focus toward her reflection in the window panes. Her hair was an unruly mess of dark curls, and her eyes appeared tired and swollen, as she had been sleepless with dread. She had reason to dread this day. What sane man, or woman, would look upon death as something to welcome? Of course she wanted to live. Desperately she craved another chance…one more chance to be what she had waited for and do what she had promised for years. She had pushed aside a Queen of England to take her place at the King's right hand, all so he could have what he wanted: a woman he loved by his side, and more importantly, a son to inherit his crown. One more chance to be first in Henry's heart, to love him as she always had and to be so loved by him that he would have not a thought or affection for anyone else, just as he had promised her long ago.
Her last chance for all of that had slipped away when she woke up that one accursed day to find her shift and sheets soaked with blood, when her hope for the future had died in her womb. That loss, and the fact that he had been a boy, was the final blow. Along with her son, Anne knew she had also lost her place in the King's heart. As if such humiliation were not enough, Henry rubbed salt into the wound with his open and unapologetic affair with her pale little mouse of a waiting lady, Jane Seymour. That wench played the same games that Anne had during Henry's courtship of her, refusing both his costly gifts and his attempts to seduce a virtuous maiden into sin before marriage. To think that Queen Anne was losing her place the same way that Queen Katherine had lost it: her own barrenness and the wiles of a younger woman. Farewell to her time and her youth, spent to no purpose at all.
Little remained to her now. Dear brother George was dead, executed along with four other men, under the shameful and blatantly false accusation of adultery. It turned her stomach to think on that spilled blood now, that these men had died needlessly, that the one member of her family whom she loved most was gone…the one person in the world, it seemed, who loved her for herself, not as a pawn to be used and discarded. Lord Norfolk, her own uncle, had presided over her trial and judged her guilty. Her father Thomas, though himself imprisoned for his children's scandal, was a seasoned enough courtier to know when to slink away and save his own skin when trouble came. Blood was not a thick enough tie to bind them; she saw that for herself when they locked eyes across the Tower courtyard, she from her prison window and he down below on his way to freedom, before he turned his back on her without a farewell.
Farewells now seemed a luxury that Anne did not deserve—from her family, her friends, or even her husband and child. She knew Henry well: those out of his favor were invisible, easily dismissible without a backward glance. Bad enough she was to die on slanderous accusations, but he had divorced her, as well—invalidated their marriage so that he could be free to re-marry with his infamous conscience clear, stigmatized little Elizabeth as an illegitimate mistake of a child, in order to clear the path for a trueborn heir.
Elizabeth…her firstborn, her only child. Not the boy Anne and Henry had anticipated with joyful certainty, but a little golden sun, her mother's heart and whole world. If nothing else, Anne had this one hope to cling to. Though stripped of her rank as Princess, Elizabeth was the daughter of two equally strong-willed and ambitious parents, of a King and Queen. Enemies might call her what they will, but Elizabeth had a claim to the throne by that fact alone. She would have to fight for her just rights and inheritances, but she would prevail. Anne had not failed. All was not lost.
As the dawning sun grew slowly stronger outside her window, Anne saw Elizabeth's sweet face in her mind's eye. In that moment, she could forget the sight of the scaffold below, all those people who hated her and cried for her blood. All she saw now was her daughter, with Henry's golden red hair and Anne's own piercing eyes, shining brightly like a sun in her own right. Though Anne must die, her Elizabeth yet lived, and would go on to be the greatest Queen ever to sit on the throne of England. She knew it in her heart and soul, and here in her last hours on earth, she felt at peace.
Though death waited just outside her window, Anne was smiling.