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Forbidden Love and a King’s Schemes

Author: Martha Jean Johnson

Anne Boleyn stole the scene at court – until she lost her head. All these hundreds of years later, she still captivates us; her story – a grand rise and a horrible, bloody fall – fill both our history books and our lurid imaginations. What’s not to love? A forbidden romance. A thwarted, egotistical king wanting an heir. An ambitious, beautiful young woman wanting to rise in the world and willing to do anything – absolutely anything – to make it happen. A kingdom divided between them. Man and church warring against them. The victory, then the fall out. It has everything that makes a good, scandalous story with the added benefit of being real.

But what about the other people? What about the bit players in the back, who, along with the dishonored queen, went to their deaths? Well, they were just game pieces in Henry VIII’s move to unravel a mistake and claim another new wife. The story of the unseen, of the average person in the wrong place at the wrong time, is where Martha Jean Johnson focuses her imagination, and through the lens of an annotation in the history books, she builds a story of a man executed and of his secret lover, Anne Boleyn’s cousin.

The Queen’s Musician follows Mark Smeaton, a real man who was executed, having been accused of having an affair with the queen. Little else is known about the historical Smeaton, other than that he was a talented musician at the court who lost his head a day before the queen herself.

Johnson here imagines Mark Smeaton, a man that lived through the takeover of Cardinal Wolsey’s castle and choir to work his way through a tumultuous new court with an increasingly frazzled and anxious queen. Mark finds enjoyment through crafting music, and his talent raises his station and also brings him powerful enemies. He is unaware of all of it. He’s a young man, empire building, living on a high tide, building his wealth and living above his means. He’s a man who dreams, and who only faintly sees the danger around him. He’s also a man who dares to love above his social station.

This is where Madge Shelton, a cousin and lady-in-waiting of Anne Boleyn’s, comes into play. She also feels a pull towards this musician, but their relationship is forbidden, and Madge is a creature of practicality, a woman who understands that the romantic desires of her imagination are thrills only allowable in daydreams. Real life is about following expectations in hope of security.

Dancingtudorqueen, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

As Anne Boleyn’s triumph starts to sour, the court around her becomes agitated. The queen acts out dangerously, and her promise of an heir remains increasingly unfulfilled. There is a girl child, then there are miscarriages, and finally there is Jane Seymour.

As Mark becomes more aware of the court around him, he realizes it is too late to distance himself. He has flown too high and too close to dangerous people to survive. Madge too realizes that the Boleyn reign is over, and she only has one last desire: to try and save the man she secretly loves.

The Queen’s Musician does a good job at showcasing the Boleyn story from the outside. Usually, tales are told from Anne’s perspective, or even from Henry VIII, but here we get a true view of the matters at court, of the highs and lows, and of the continually tenuous position of the king and his chosen paramours among a resentful people. The story soars in representing the emotions and foibles of the royals from the outside, building suspense towards the inevitable betrayal and fall.

Mark and Madge are ok characters, although both remain faintly drawn. For Mark, he is too oblivious and self-concerned to draw us in at first. In this he is realistic. He’s a young man trying to make his way in the world. Whether that is earning money from his musical talent and wasting it on horses that only gentry should own or sleeping around with married women, he is mostly unconcerned by any larger elements of life. By the time he does wise up to the danger he is in, it’s too late. But we haven’t especially grown close to him. We don’t hate him, but we don’t love him either. We mostly feel apathy at his averageness and his moral ineptitude. He is self-concerned to a fault, and this is his downfall.

Wynfield, David Wilkie; The Arrest of Anne Boleyn at Greenwich; Royal Armouries at the Tower of London; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/the-arrest-of-anne-boleyn-at-greenwich-135148

Madge is more well drawn. We feel her envy at times for her cousin and her disappointment in her family’s politicalizing of every moment of life. They have chosen an older husband for her, a man still in love with his dead wife, and Madge’s future is a bleak one that promises only duty and stability. She longs for more. In this, she is more aware than Mark and more well developed. She also keenly notices the dangers in court and what is happening around her.

The love story between her and Mark, however, needed far more, especially for the ending to be read as believable. They love each other, infatuated from afar, but there is little reason, beyond the supposed attractiveness of each of them. A chance meeting and a sudden promise is the only thing the relationship stands on when the ending comes. It makes Madge’s final risky action unearned, a plot device. It was as though the story needed a love affair, but couldn’t come by one organically, and so instead created one in a whirlwind moment and expected us to believe that these characters, so separated in their own worlds, would fall for one another and risk everything based on brief and insubstantial encounters.

Still, The Queen’s Musician had me turning pages, desperate to watch how the court goes from forced celebration to backstabbing, lying, betrayal, and political aggrandizing. The end scenes at the chopping block are surreal and unforgettable, and the author’s note at the end has us thinking about these side-lined figures in history, real people that died merely for a king’s convenience.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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