I am afraid the king will still be very displeased with me, though I am sure he will not blame me for everything as Archbishop Cranmer seems to do. But when I see him, I am sure he will forgive me. He is like the duchess’s old steward who would tell us all that we should be punished for some naughtiness like jumping in the hay or breaking the boughs of the apple trees, and he would beat one or two of the boys but when it came to me and I would look up at him with tears in my eyes, he would pat my cheek and tell me that I must not cry and it was all the fault of the older children. I expect the king will be like that when I actually get to see him. Surely, since he knows everything, he knows that I was always a silly girl and always very easily led astray? And surely, in his wisdom, he will understand that I fell in love and couldn’t help myself? Someone as old as he is must understand that a girl can fall in love and quite forget right and wrong? A girl can fall in love and think of nothing but when she can next see the boy she loves. And now that poor Thomas has been taken from me and I will never see him again, surely I have been punished enough?

JANE BOLEYN, THE TOWER OF LONDON,

JANUARY 1542

And so we wait.

The king must be minded to forgive the whore his queen, since he waits for so long. And if he forgives her, he forgives me, and I escape the axe again.

Ha ha! What a joke my life has become that I should end up here in the Tower where my husband was kept, awaiting the fate that met him, when I could have walked away from court and the court life, when I could have been safe and snug in Norfolk. I had escaped once, escaped with my title and a pension. Why ever did I rush to come back?

I did truly think I would set him free. I did think that if I confessed everything on his behalf then they would see that she was a witch, as they called her, and an adulteress, as they called her, and they would see he was ensnared and enslaved and they would release him to be with me, and I should have taken him home to our house, Rochford Hall, and made him well again, and we could have had our children and we could have been happy.

That was my plan, that was what should have happened. I did think that she would go to the block and he would be spared. I did think I would see her lovely neck hacked in two but that I would have my husband safe in my own bed at last. I thought I would comfort him for the loss of her and that he would come to see that she was no great loss.