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Before we were so rudely interrupted by the modern-day monarchy known as capitalism, I was telling you the story of Jane Grey. So where was I? Oh, yes, right. Jane had been rescued, Edward was getting busy, and Mary was on the throne. Well, I suppose I’ll get right to it, since we have other things to talk about this time. To sum up, Edward and Jane assembled a coalition made up of Ethians, everyday Verity folks who believed it was no big deal if you had fur or feathers some of the time as long as you were a good neighbor, and nobles who weren’t interested in meeting the business end of Mary’s crossbow. The coalition got big enough that the rats saw the ship sinking and even more nobles joined up. This continued until Mary found herself wildly outnumbered, upon which she fled for Spain and the welcoming arms of fellow zealot, Philip.
With that sorted, Jane decided to tell court life to fuck off into the sun and left to live happily ever after with Guildford. Edward stuck around for about five minutes before he similarly decided that he would rather run away with handsome tomcat Fitz than deal with the nonsense of being king again, so he named Bess queen (seeing as she was not a bigoted homicidal maniac) and went off to live in the country. That’s how Bess found herself the newly crowned queen of a united Ethian-Verity England, and, for the first time in her life, completely free of Tudor family bullshit. Or was she? For you see, young Queen Elizabeth had a steadily growing suspicion that her mother, Anne Boleyn, discarded and beheaded on the order of dear old dad, might actually be alive and well.
Now, look, I know what you’re thinking, and I’m not definitively saying that Anne Boleyn escaped death (I mean, we can’t go around rewriting history to save absolutely everyone who got inappropriately executed during the Tudor years or we’d never get anything else done, now would we?), but here are six reasons why Bess has her doubts.
DIVORCED
There are a lot of filters surrounding the court. It’s the strangest thing, but people tend to censor themselves when they’re talking to people with the power to have them jailed and/or killed on a moment’s whim. But sooner or later, say, when a palace servant gets earwormed by a certain tune, whistles it while she works, the earworm spreads to a lady-in-waiting who hums it to herself over her embroidery, and a court musician a bit too far into his cups picks up on the riff and spontaneously plays a song that has been a hit all across the kingdom for more than a decade but that has never once been played inside the walls of the palace, the truth will out. This is how Bess finally learned of the existence of “She Gave Him Her Love, He Wanted Her Head.”
As everyone outside the royal family already knew, this was a popular song that appeared somewhere around the end of Henry VIII’s fourth marriage and really blew up after the end of his fifth. The more-than-a-little risqué lyrics were taken from an anonymous satirical French poem about “the most divorced man in history,” a serial monogamist who couldn’t handle being single for more than fifteen minutes and kept getting older as his women got younger. The tune was a remixed version of “Greensleeves” (it’s a banger), and the song was a popular dance hit in taverns across the land. Fear of her father’s wrath had kept it away from court for years, but now that Bess knew about it, she demanded to know everything.
“Tell me everything you know about this song, now,” she demanded of the musician, who found sheer terror to be the quickest route to sobriety he’d ever had. Swearing to himself that if he survived this day he would never drink again, he answered her questions and found, to his relief, that she didn’t plan on killing him.
“Nobody really knows who wrote it, your majesty. It was popular in France first, but it was already in English when people started singing it here. I always figured it was somebody trying to earn favor with the French court by sending up King Henry, but nobody knows. Every time he, begging your pardon, got married again, a new verse would just sort of turn up.”
Bess was awfully young when her mother died, but something about the turns of phrase in the song struck her as naggingly familiar. And her mother had spoken fluent French.
BEHEADED
The official version was that her mother was executed for adultery. The unofficial version was that her mother was executed because King Henry already had his eye on Jane Seymour and Anne had made powerful enemies. The even less official version was that King Henry learned his wife was an Ethian, flew into a frothing rage about filthy animals (Mary learned it by watching him, one supposes), and had her locked up and disposed of. Some rumors said her mother's Ethian form had been that of a black cat, but that seemed awfully convenient given the allegations of witchcraft. Bess had always secretly hoped that perhaps Anne, too, had been a fox, so that they would have something more in common. Once she was queen, she began to investigate the facts of the execution. She couldn’t do the questioning herself, of course, everyone was scared to talk to her about it, but a queen needs to have ears everywhere, so she set about recruiting a few. An odd pattern emerged.
According to Bess’ steadily growing network of investigators, scads of people said they were there, that they saw the headsman strike Anne Boleyn down, that they were so close they were practically in the splash zone, but they were all a pack of liars.
“He took her head off in one clean strike,” one of them said, “I heard she asked as a favor that they sharpen up the sword first so it would be quick.”
“It took ages for her to die, must have been six or seven whacks of the axe,” said another. “And she cried, too, begging for the king’s mercy but he wasn’t even there to watch.”
Not one of them, not a single, solitary one, told the story the same way as any other.
“She was so serene, so dignified, so peaceful. Demure, even. Laid her head down like she was going for a nap and didn’t make a sound. The king turned away and couldn’t look. I always thought she was his one true love.”
“The worst part was that the king laughed. Jane Seymour was there, too, whispering in his ear, and they brought the princesses and made them watch, too.”
Bess knew that one was nonsense, obviously, but the more versions of the story she heard, the more she began to suspect that they all were.
DIED
Not long after her coronation, Bess got a message from her great-grandmother Margaret requesting a meeting. Before his departure, Edward had shared his experiences with Granny, who he described as “a fucking nutter, but she did cure my poisoning, at least,” so Bess was cautious and agreed to meet on neutral ground to avoid any possibility of torture. Granny’s anti-Verity agenda made her untrustworthy at best and dangerous at worst. Bess thought it better to keep an eye on her, and perhaps take the opportunity to ask some questions.
“It was so good of your people to rescue Edward,” she said, “Petunia was so helpful to him.”
“Edward is a great disappointment to me,” Granny said with a shake of her head, “I really believed he would be the one I was waiting for, the one from the prophecy—”
Bess sat patiently through the inventory of sketchy and sometimes stomach-turning signs and portents that followed. Let’s just say that a lot of intestines were involved at one point and the less said about that the better.
“You, though, dear girl,” Granny continued, “considering your mother, I wonder…”
“Yes, about my mother,” Bess said, “I don’t suppose there’s any chance your people rescued her, too, like they did Edward? Or that you know anything about her death that I also ought to know?”
“Lovely weather today, isn’t it? If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go sun myself on a rock for a bit.”
Before leaving, Granny offered up a nunnery-based network of Ethian spies for Bess’ use, on the condition that Bess reveal her (presumed) Ethian nature and promote anti-Verity policies. Bess, not sure the kingdom was ready for an Ethian queen so soon, chose not to reveal herself to Granny or to anyone else, for now. She also opted not to use the spy network, but rather continued building her own. Bess did keep in touch, but Granny remained oddly reticent about the topic of Anne Boleyn, almost suspiciously so, and none of Bess’ spies could penetrate the nunneries. When the old hag finally shuffled off into reptile heaven a few years later, Bess’ people finally picked up something interesting. Nothing solid, just a whisper of a rumor: Granny herself had been asking questions about Anne’s fate over the years, almost as if she were searching for her.
DIVORCED
From the time she was just a young girl, Bess had exchanged letters with a distant relative in France, a cousin of some sort named Marguerite. Marguerite was older than Bess, living in Paris, and wrote long newsy letters full of tales of life in France and questions about Bess’ life. Their correspondence was so longstanding that it wasn’t until Bess was already queen and really started to wonder about her mother’s death that she even thought to be curious about it.
“If I may be so bold as to offer one piece of advice to your newly crowned majesty,” Marguerite wrote not long after Bess took the throne, “let it be this. Marriage is overrated. If you marry, even if you marry well, you will only dilute your power. You are one of a kind, dear [inkblot] cousin, and it is my fondest wish that you remain exactly so.”
“I thank you for the advice, cousin,” Bess wrote, “I will take it under consideration. I know that far too many marriages end badly for the woman. In fact, I recently learned of a song, one that I think came from France, so perhaps you are familiar with it, telling the tale of a man who treated his many wives poorly.”
“I’m afraid I don’t keep up with popular music,” Marguerite responded, “but I hope the song did not displease you. I am certain that the poor poet would be unhappy if she had caused distress to a queen. Although I gather your sister Mary is quite distressed in recent times, thanks to the merry band of Ethians who have been rescuing people from the Inquisition.”
BEHEADED
Cousin Marguerite proved to be surprisingly well-informed about the Ethians who had only recently begun rescuing people from the Inquisition, assorted witch-burnings, and so on. This newer force seemed to be entirely separate from Granny’s group, which mostly cared about Ethians who were part of the nobility or the church. If they were half as successful at staging these rescues as the rumors suggested, they were keeping themselves quite busy.
Bess’ spies told her that the group was made up of Ethians from all over – England, Spain, France, Scotland, even as far away as the Ottoman Empire. They came out of nowhere, fading in from the wilderness in their animal forms, freed both Ethian and Verity prisoners, especially those slated for execution, and disappeared again as quickly as they came. Without killing every animal for miles around, it was impossible to hunt them down, and reports were that Mary and Philip were both at wits' end over it.
Nobody who knew much about it was willing to talk, but her spies were able to interview some of the Verities who had been rescued. The legend grew, and so did that of the mysterious Ethian who was their leader. Thinking of the Robin Hood tales she had heard as a girl, and of how difficult it must be to keep such an operation well-funded, Bess decided to quietly divert some funds from the royal treasury whenever she could, as an anonymous donation.
SURVIVED?
Over the course of several patient years of work, the chain of events Bess assembled is as follows: Anne Boleyn escaped, presumably with Ethian help, although possibly not Granny’s, and fled to France, where she already spoke the language, Ethians could live openly, and nobody gave a shit about Henry VIII unless they were at war with him that year. King Henry, embarrassed at being outsmarted by his Ethian wife and eager to remarry without the hassle of another divorce, spread the story that she was executed. Maybe that crafty bastard Cromwell came up with the lie. Hard to say, because unfortunately everyone who would plausibly have been involved was too dead to question about it. But, if they made the story sensational enough, everyone would want to say that they were there and they saw it with their own eyes, even though not a single blessed one of them actually did.
In this version of events, Anne wound up living (happily, one hopes) in France but couldn’t resist dropping the occasional diss track about her ex, nor could she resist checking in on the daughter she had to leave behind by writing letters in the guise of a nonspecific cousin Marguerite. The evidence for her involvement with the Ethian network and their anti-inquisition, anti-witch burning activities is the weakest part of the story, but a girl does need a hobby, and something about the way cousin Marguerite wrote about the rumors always seemed oddly specific to Bess. And then there’s the fact that their leader was always referred to only as The Vixen.
This is all very circumstantial evidence, of course, so I leave it up to you whether or not to believe it. But to Bess, it’s canon.