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For an application I decided to write a piece of creative nonfiction in the form of a letter written by Anne Boleyn to her daughter on the night before her execution. The insight and advice from doomed mother to daughter on the brink of greatness is meant to foreshadow the woman Elizabeth will become and obstacles she will face, and the challenges that in her short but powerful life Anne managed to overcome.18 May, 1536, Tower of London
From Queen Anne Boleyn to
her daughter, the Right Honorable Princess Elizabeth Tudor of Wales,
This
shall be the last letter I ever write, and I would not see it written to anyone
but you, my only daughter. From my window I watch the dusk ebb away, and the
sky flare up like a blushing rose; twilight of this new day, my last day, has
come.
They will
make sure that you never know me, my Elizabeth, and if they do me, they will
see that you know me as the lewd, traitorous whore your father created and
destroyed. Still I urge you to love him because though the fiery passion with
which he once loved me soured he always made an effort to love you despite your
mother.
Very soon
I will go forward and die disgraced, humiliated, but for now I urge you to live
as I have. When I was just a child in the court of Margaret of Austria, and
then in that French court of Marguerite of Navarre, I had a taste of what true
living, exciting living, was, and in time I hope that you will heed my advice
and continue to change this world where I could not.
I have charged my own
chaplain Matthew Parker with your spiritual care and he has assured me that he
will bring you up according to the faith I myself would have chosen for
you. This is an age of reform in every way imaginable, and perhaps someday you
will live in an England where the religious books I read might be celebrated as
the paragons of truth that I know them to be.. In matters of church you may not
always be your own leader; your father was ever-generous with me, and I am
thankful for it, that he allowed me to preside over his clergy, appoint his
men, endorse the English Bible, and even spare heretics who might have suffered
deaths more shameful than mine shall certainly be.
Whatever your faith I hope
that you will sympathize with the persecuted and be a friend to those who show
you kindness; I fear that, because of who your mother is, there will be few who
do. Dawn approaches; I must finish. Sweet girl, I fear that you may never be
queen; but regardless you must be the most learned princess that you can.
Let your sex not hamper your mind; develop opinions, share opinions. This world
is vain, this world is lascivious; love God but follow that word of
Ecclesiastes and live every day knowing the next one might be taken from you
without preamble
Lastly I warn you, from a
woman condemned to the beautiful woman someday you shall be, of the treachery
of men. Men will rule you, Elizabeth, and they will lead you by your desire and
by their promises; but know that you must lead men by their passion and
with your half-promises. That is the only way. I have no shame in that I
was not the icy mother to you that a queen ought to be with her litter. I have
loved you as your father loves you, but they will never let you know that.
Your loving mother,
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