Great Harry

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Wolsey, his staff and his guests waited while their king put off his masking costume and arrayed himself in his kingly velvets. Then when he returned and took the place of honor under the cloth of estate— ''commanding no man to remove but sit still as they did before"—the new banquet began. Two hundred different dishes were set before the king and his sated courtiers, ''of wondrous costly meats and devices, subtly devised," and excellent wines in great variety. When they had eaten so much they could scarcely walk they made their way to another hall where a Latin comedy, Plautus' Menaechmi, was performed, and then returned once again to the banqueting chamber.

  Here a final entertainment was offered. On a platform stage Venus and six beauteous attendants appeared, looking as radiant "as if she and they had really come down in person from heaven." Then at the sound of trumpets Cupid was brought in on a cart, dragging behind him six old men who were his prisoners. Love bound these aged victims hand and foot; their sweethearts, who were Venus' attendants, had wounded them by failing to return their love. Cupid made an eloquent Latin oration to his

  mother on their behalf, causing her to take compassion on the sufferers. She ordered her attendants to end their lovers' torment at once, "commanding them to afford them all solace and pastime, and requite them for past pangs." The pageant ended with an intricate dance, after which the king and his minions took partners and danced on and on until daybreak.^

  The agile dancing, elaborate masking and general enthusiasm and energy Henry showed that night at the cardinal's banquet belied the oppressive mood that had preoccupied him and disturbed his thoughts for many months. The outward change was slight; inwardly, though, he had reached an impasse.

  The besetting dilemma of the succession seemed insoluble. The thought of it filled him with frustration and sadness, and time and again he wore down his wits in a self-defeating effort to think it through. In his role as king, much that had been knitted together favorably in the first decade of his reign had come unraveled. The vision of conquest that had sustained his military ambitions had faded when, with bewildering finality, his enemy had been defeated by another power. The French king was no longer a strutting rival, but an enfeebled captive in the emperor's custody; the grand campaign Henry had determined to launch against France had been undercut by the emperor's obstinacy and the recalcitrance of his own subjects. He had been given reason to fear his courtiers, and to note with concern his loss of popular favor. He had, in fact, been thwarted in nearly all that he undertook, and the more he turned this dispiriting realization in his mind the more his self-confidence was eroded and his natural resiliency impaired.

  Worst of all, Henry was losing his sense of mastery. Once accustomed to sweeping aside all obstacles to his desires he had now grown accustomed to rebuffs. He was repeatedly, consistently overmatched by circumstances, and if he seemed to make headway one day he met with reversals the next. To struggle on in unseemly battle with all the odds against him was humiliating for a king, bred since boyhood to dominate; defeat was beginning to eat away at Henry's assured manner, shadowing his sunny nature on occasion and making him short-tempered and curt.

  Since the spring of 1525, when his hopes for the conquest of France had collapsed amid the alarming advance of popular rebellion, Henry had stepped back from his responsibilities, allowing himself to be carried through the days by diversions rather than purposeful activities. In the winter months he read in his library, or called in the scholars at his court to debate with him. He busied himself concocting possets and preventives and medicinal salves, and in looking after his dozens of keyboard instruments and seeing that they were kept properly strung and tuned. He exercised his horses in the afternoons and, in the evenings, looked at the m.oon and stars through "speculative glasses" with his companion Thomas More. And when the "grass season" came, the warm months when there was game in the woods and long hours of daylight to chase it in, he abandoned himself in isolated fury to the hunt.

  From mid-May well into October he was on the move from one hunting lodge or country estate to another, now accompanied by his large

  *'riding household," now only by the queen and a few dozen servants and companions. Ten-year-old Princess Mary, who headed a large establishment of her own on the borders of Wales, joined her father occasionally, though he saw as little of her as he did of the ambassadors who often had to wait from morning till nightfall for him to come in from the fields.

  The hart and falcon and stag, not his family or his courtiers, ruled Henry's schedule during the hunting season. An official who approached him with a packet of letters one day in July of 1526 was brushed aside and told to wait; "he was going out to have a shot at a stag," Henry said to the man, and asked him to keep the letters until the evening.^ Other officials were given the same reception. The king was hawking with his Flemish falconers, they were told, or harboring a stag with his keen-scented lyam hounds, or going after harts his huntsmen had gathered for his sport, so that "he must needs hunt them."^

  In September of 1526, after he had been released from captivity and was moving toward an alliance with England, King Francis sent Henry a shipload of wild swine. He heard they were scarce in England, he wrote, and thought Henry might enjoy the challenge of their ferocity, as "the hunting of them was very pleasant, and a king's game."'* "The high enterprise and dangerous hunting of the perilous wild swine" was indeed a challenging sport, and one at which Francis had excelled ever since his famous exploit against the runaway boar at Amboise at the start of his reign. The frenzied beast, a ton of lumbering madness, was driven into a wide net. The hunters, stripped to their doublets and hose and armed with sharp spears, then turned their dogs on him; as he charged the dogs, wounding many and goring others to death with his tusks, the men inched closer until the boar began to lunge at them as well. The fainthearted backed off then, but the most intrepid of the hunters stayed on, keeping just out of reach of the great tusks while watching their chance to move in for the kill. Eventually the moment came; the sinews were slashed and the spear thrust to the heart, and the raging beast staggered and fell. The hunter who killed him was accorded great honor, and accounted as valorous "as though he had slain a man of arms."

  Where and when Henry dispatched the French boars Francis sent him is not recorded, but it is certain they filled out his sporting calendar in the late summer of 1526. He followed a leisurely itinerary during these months, staying at one country estate for a week or so and then moving on, traveling ten or twelve miles in a day, to the next. With him went a footman with a purse full of coins, for charity along the way. For amusement he took his fools and jesters, and for safety a locksmith who installed new locks and bolts on the chamber doors of each residence he occupied.^

  The king's route in August led from Arundel in Sussex, where the earl of Northumberland's officers presented him with six oxen and forty wethers for his cooks to serve and where he "had good game for his recreation," to Thruxton, Ransbury, Compton and Langley. He was reportedly "merry and in good health," and appeared to have no other care but for how much venison he could present to his host and to the

  patient secretaries and men of affairs who met him in the evenings, dispatches in hand. But he was seldom able to throw off for long the dark musings that confounded him, and his moods became more intense as day after day of unseasonal rain spoiled his hunting in September. He moved to Bycester, then to Buckingham, then to Ampthill and Grafton, everywhere encountering the same dripping foliage and leaky roofs, everywhere housebound and irritable.

  The rain did not stop when Henry gave up his hunting later in the fall, but continued to descend in torrents. Rivers and streams overflowed their banks and flooded fields and villages. The panicked villagers hoisted their children onto their backs and set off to seek higher ground, leaving their com to rot under water and their sheep and cows to drown in the inundated pastures.

  Once back at court, in the intervals between public business the king returned to his indoor pastimes, emerging from time t
o time to address ambassadors and other visitors and to learn from them news of continental affairs. He kept himself well informed, as always; the Milanese ambassador Scarpinello admired the range of his understanding and his eloquence, "worthy of a great orator rather than king."^ Observers still noted in him that unique blend of guileless candor and high aspiration he had shown at the outset of his reign; the king is "simple and candid by nature," Scarpinello wrote, yet at the same time he burned to be at the center of every undertaking, to join every expedition and govern every negotiation. As the Milanese explained to his superiors, Henry "wants to have his feet in a thousand shoes."^

  Two influences were working to revitalize Henry and to lift him out of his pensive mood in the fall of 1526. The first was an alchemy of personality. As he reached his mid-thirties Henry's resemblance to his father began to be more pronounced.

  Erasmus had noted long before how alike they were. The son resembled the father "not in name and likeness only," he said, "but with all royal gifts so representing his father that the latter seems rather to have renewed his youth than died." The two terracotta busts Torrigiano sculpted of Henry VII and Henry VIII show little likeness of features, yet in manner and mental address Henry was very much his father's son. It was his keen alertness, the bright and wide intelligence that lay behind his "quick and penetrable eyes," and his air of self-assurance more than any physical resemblance that led Erasmus to observe how like his father Henry was. Now other characteristics were emerging, qualities which enabled Henry to regain a conviction of mastery and to begin to assault his besetting dilemmas head on.

  He was taking on for the first time the full weight of princely authority, an overriding majesty of presence which aroused both terror and awed respect. Henry had always been a formidable, outsize figure; now he was becoming a fearsome one. His father had known, to a fine degree of accuracy, when to check and when to unleash his wrath. Now Henry was beginning to master this art, and to use it to increase his sense of command. In time this new consciousness of sovereignty worked to

  counteract the concerns that oppressed him, until eventually he moved forcefully to seize and maintain control of his own and England's future. But there was an even stronger influence at work on the king as the year 1526 drew to a close and the new year, celebrated by the cardinal's banquet, began. While his head was clouded and his emotions in disarray, he had fallen helplessly, exhilaratingly in love.

  Joy, dearest lover, thine shall be

  And I shall lead thee tenderly

  Where hope would have thee seek thy pleasure,

  Alive I shall not part from thee,

  And still when death has come to me

  My soul its memories shall treasure.

  Anne Boleyn was already a ripening, self-aware girl when she was brought to the court of Henry VIII in late 1521 or 1522. She may have been no more than fourteen or fifteen years old—the date of her birth is uncertain—when her grandfather, the octogenarian duke of Norfolk, and his close-lipped, ungentle son obtained a place for her among Katherine's maids of honor.^ But already she was distinctive. She wore her thick black hair long, letting it fall unbound to below her waist. Her skin complemented her hair; she had an olive complexion, though her critics called it dark or sallow. In later years they made much of Anne's other singular physical attributes: a tooth that was out of line with the others, a large mole on her neck, a double nail on one hand where a sixth finger had begun to grow. These blemishes were more than eclipsed, though, by the elegance of dress and grace of movement she displayed at court functions, and by her ability to attract and fascinate men.

  Anne was always full of life, creating excitement and tension wherever she was. The fact that she was a nubile young girl, "likely enough to have children," gave that excitement a strong sexual edge. All Anne's vitality and magnetism seemed to center in her large, almond-shaped dark eyes—"black and beautiful"—which quickly took in the subtle crosscurrents of court society while remaining outwardly coquettish and captivating. As she matured she grew more and more provocative; at nineteen she had become, to Henry and others, a woman of infinite allure.

  It was no small part of that allure that Anne had spent the formative years of her early adolescence at the French court. At age twelve she had gone to France with her father, Henry VIII's ambassador Thomas Boleyn, and had joined the large suite of girls in the household of Francis I's queen Claude. There, under the tutelage of the ill-favored but virtuous queen—Claude limped and was afflicted with a squint, and was described as "very small and strangely fat"—Anne became fluent in French, acquiring a taste for the literature and art of King Francis' gilded Renaissance court. Her pronounced musical gifts too were developed; she

  187

  became a skilled singer and lutenist, and may have met the reigning luminaries of French music, Josquin des Pres and Claude Mouton. Poets dedicated books and poems to her, saluting her charm and confirming the judgment of other observers that, in subtle ways, she had become a Frenchwoman. In the language of one poet, she was such a graceful maiden that no one would have believed she was English.

  Anne's idea of the relations between men and women were also formed at the French court. Here, in contrast to the atmosphere surrounding Henry VIII, a sort of relaxed decadence prevailed. In England even the most companionable of the king's courtiers observed an outward show of respect for his person; in France the courtiers lounged casually near their sovereign, "some leaning upon his chair, and some upon his table, all much more familiarly than is agreeable to English manners." Rakish in their silk doublets and hose, earrings glittering in one or both ears, the courtiers of Francis I were equally familiar in their treatment of women. The king himself set the tone for their eager voluptuousness. "Alexander the Great saw women when there was no business to be looked after," a contemporary wrote; "Francis I looks after business when there are no women."

  Anne Boleyn arrived in France shortly after the king took the first of his official mistresses, the dark, strapping Fran9oise de Foix. Frangoise maddened her royal lover with her infidelities, while he found solace reveling until morning with his "little band" of lesser favorites and the officially appointed prostitutes and their madam, "la dame des filles de joie." The entire court was privy to the quarreling of Francis and Fran^oise, which grew to be as predictable as the king's neglect of his pathetic wife.

  Between the ages of twelve and fifteen Anne became habituated to the spectacle of stormy amorous liaisons, erotic adventures and the living of private lives in public. The experience made her worldly before her time, as did another influence: the example of her sister Mary. By the time Anne joined Queen Claude's household Mary Boleyn, who had been in France for five years, had become a full participant in the sensual pastimes of the French court. She not only lost her innocence but became known for her sexual complaisance; long after she had returned to England Francis kept her in memory as a "hackney" or "English mare" he and others had often ridden. Still later, looking back across nearly twenty years, he called Mary "a great prostitute, infamous above all."^

  No doubt her sister's chosen path of compromising dalliance swayed Anne. To countervail it she had only the example of the lonely queen and the more upright of her ladies, who hastened to cross themselves whenever they heard an obscenity and remained closeted with their needlework while the king made merry.

  "Rarely or never did any maid or wife leave that court chaste," Brantome wrote. Whether Anne's sojourn in France tarnished her reputation as it did her sister's is not recorded, but it seems certain that Thomas Boleyn and his brother-in-law Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, looked on both girls as useful pawns in the dangerous game of court politics. Norfolk intended to use them to advance himself at the expense

  of the all-powerful Cardinal Wolsey and his other rival, Charles Brandon, while the handsome, coolly observant opportunist Thomas Boleyn stood to gain even more.

  Oddly enough, Anne Boleyn's father is among the most obscure figures at the court of He
nry VIII. His imprint on the records of the time is tantalizingly slight: a quarrel with Wolsey in the early years of the reign, close ties with his Howard relations and with William Compton, a revealing comment by a French diplomat that Boleyn "would sooner act from interest than from any other motive." Erasmus praised his love of learning and sent him one of his works. The rest is evidence from silence. As adroitly as he made his way to power he outlasted its backlash, deflecting the fate that brought his son and second daughter to the block and dying calmly in his bed.

  'Thy niece, thy cousin or thy daughter," the poet Thomas Wyatt wrote in a satire of court life.

  If she be fair, if handsome be her middle. If thy better hath her love besought her, Advance his cause and he shall help thy need.

  Wyatt's words describe the Boleyns perfectly. Mary Boleyn was brought to England, married to the king's esquire of the body, William Carey, and installed as informal royal mistress. Within months her father had become treasurer of the household, a Garter Knight, and keeper of several manors and parks—a lucrative list of offices that was to grow still longer in the years to come. By 1525 he had been created Lord Rochford, the only commoner to hold such a title; more significant was his assured place in the innermost circle of power around the king. Ambassadors and foreign rulers now reckoned with his influence, and tried to make use of it. In 1525 he was receiving a pension of a thousand crowns a year from the imperial court—as high as that paid to Norfolk and Brandon.