Between Two Kings by Olivia Longueville

ambitions, insatiable avarice, and perverse machinations aimed at securing more wealth, power, and prestige.
    The days of her early youth weren’t marked by Henry’s brutal betrayal and the betrayal by her father and her uncle – Thomas Boleyn and Thomas Howard. Those happy days were carefree and easygoing, and Anne wished that she had always stayed in France, thus avoiding her death at the stake.
    The only pure thing that had come out of her love for Henry was her beloved Elizabeth who would never see her mother again and would be taught that Anne had been a treasonous whore and the usurper of the throne. Her forced separation from Elizabeth and Arthur infuriated Anne most of all, making her hate Henry with a ferocious hatred.
    Anne’s love for Henry ended just as many fabled amorous legends had – with tragedy and betrayal. Their love had been broken into many pieces when she’d failed to produce a son for him, and that love had no potential to rise from ashes. It appeared that Anne had made a mistake because their love hadn’t been a fathomless, miraculous feeling of eternal love for each other. Although Anne had loved Henry for many years, she gradually grew to understand that he would always love himself more than anyone else, which, combined with his obsession to have a male heir, could make him manically cruel in his decisions as it had been in her case.
    Anne remembered all of Henry’s numerous mistresses and at last Henry’s new infatuation – Lady Jane Seymour – whom he imagined to be an angel who would save him from the darkness and who became one of the reasons of Anne’s final downfall. She imagined how happy the Seymours were that Anne would be executed by burning, opening the way for Henry and Jane to marry.
    Now, when her minutes were numbered and with the knowledge she would soon depart to another word, Anne hated Jane with all her heart, with a deeper hatred than she had ever felt for the woman whom Henry was openly courting and who would eventually become his next wife. She hated Jane so much that she wished her death at the stake instead of hers. At that moment of despair, Anne was convinced that if Jane had been sentenced to be executed for whatever reason, she would have preferred that her enemy had been burnt at the stake, and she would have witnessed that spectacle, laughing at Jane’s torments. She couldn’t have felt otherwise at that excruciating time.
    On the threshold of her death, Anne was ready to laugh at herself because she once told her brother George that Lady Mary Tudor had been her death and that she had been Mary’s death. She was mistaken – Jane Seymour was Anne’s death.
    Anne was ready to scream in pain and anger because she hated and despised Jane Seymour with all her heart. She hated her because Henry viewed Jane as an angel and her, Anne, as a demoness and a witch. But what angel would sit on the knees of another woman’s husband, even the king’s knees, when a wife of that man carried his child? Anne couldn’t forget how Henry paraded Jane Seymour around the court when Anne was expecting their last child whom she had lost only because of Jane Seymour. She was convinced that Jane had been born to be a country matron running her household somewhere in the countryside, but not to be a Queen of England. The idea that Jane Seymour would be a queen after Anne was repugnant.
    Anne still didn’t understand how she could have been so foolish and hadn’t seen all the intrigues around her. She should have got rid of Jane Seymour earlier, but she was too blinded by her love for Henry. She didn’t take into account that if the king had truly wanted to be free of her, he would have found a way at any price. She knew that Jane Seymour had an oversimplified mind and was very undereducated compared to herself, but she also understood that the Seymours were an ambitious, crafty family, no less cunning than the Boleyns.
    The Seymours had undoubtedly instructed Jane what to do