Under the pretense of trying to protect her and her servants from any possible outbreak of plague in the heat, Queen Anne’s household was sent to Richmond Palace on the outskirts of London. It was a ruse to get her away from the King before the divorce proceedings began, or technically, the annulment, since Henry insisted the marriage had never been legal in the first place. Catherine stayed with her family while the council prepared to dissolve the King’s marriage. As a young girl, Queen Anne had been betrothed to the Marquis de Pont-à-Mousson.V Despite having received the documentation which proved that the nature of that precontract had left both parties free to wed elsewhere, the English government insisted that this engagement meant the Queen was never legally free to marry Henry VIII.84 They had known all about the precontract early in negotiations for Anne’s hand and pressed ahead rather than angling for her youngest sister, Amelia, which they could have done if they considered the impediment serious enough.85
To justify divorcing Anne, Henry fired out reasons like an erratic machine gun—his reluctance on his wedding day showed that he had been coerced into the marriage with a woman he “liked so ill he was sorry she had come,” his inability to consummate the match was described in detail, as were his subsequent wet dreams to prove he could and should marry somebody else.86 A delegation was dispatched to Richmond to deliver the news to Anne that she was no longer to be queen, through her translator, “who did his part very well.” The King’s representatives reported that the Queen took the news “without alteration of countenance” and that she replied, through her official, “that she is content always with your Majesty.”87 In fact, as subsequent events were to show, Anne felt utterly humiliated.88 Her earlier quiescence may have been because she genuinely did not understand that the decision had already been reached, and when she realized that she was definitely being divorced, Karl Harst remembered, “Good Lord, she made such tears and bitter cries, it would break a heart of stone.”89
The three ladies-in-waiting who had joked with the Queen about her lack of pregnancy during Lent testified to what she had said. The courtiers who had once been mortified about the King’s frankness on the subject now fell over themselves to relay what had gone wrong in the royal bed—the King’s physician, Dr. Butts, confirmed the monarch’s wet dreams but inability to perform with the Queen; the Earl of Southampton apologized for praising Anne’s looks so highly when he met her in Calais, though in his own defense he pointed out that considering he was escorting her to her wedding he felt that “it was no time to dispraise her”; Sir Anthony Browne, who witnessed the royal couple’s first meeting at Rochester, confessed that he had suspected from then that the King disliked her, and another gentleman of the privy chamber, Sir Anthony Denny, described the King’s revulsion for his wife’s drooping breasts, because the King had it in his head that sagging or large bosoms were a sign that a woman was not a virgin.90 A remark by the late Lady Browne, who had allegedly told her husband “how she saw in the Queen such fashion and manner of upbringing so gross that in her judgement the King should never heartily love her,” was one of the milder insults tossed around during the inquest.91 Anne’s appearance, her personal hygiene, upbringing, and her most intimate parts were traduced to make sure the annulment went through. When asked about the nonconsummation of the marriage, Henry could not answer in a simple affirmative; he constantly qualified it with aspersions such as “if she brought her maidenhead with her,” he “left her as good a maid as [I] found her.”92
On July 9, 2 archbishops, 16 bishops, and 139 clergymen declared the marriage between Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves null and void on grounds of nonconsummation and precontract.93 Four days later, their decision was ratified by Parliament, which then made itself even more useful by rushing through a special act that permitted the King to marry a woman whom he had previously had sexual relations with or with any of her close relatives.94 The act served as a legal exorcism for the ghost of Anne Boleyn.95 The councillors could breathe easily, having made good on their promise to Henry at the start of the divorce proceedings—that they would secure “your Highness’s virtuous desire.”96 Anne of Cleves’s obedience was rewarded by a King anxious to show his generosity to the world and buy her silence. She was given an honorary position in the royal family, ranked above everyone except the King’s children and his future wife, accorded the legal rank of one of his sisters, a sizable entourage of servants, Henry VII’s palace at Richmond, Anne Boleyn’s childhood home at Hever Castle, and multiple smaller estates to supplement her income, as well as plate, jewels, clothes, and furniture for her houses.97 In return for this, she was required to go quietly and write letters to her relatives in Europe lauding Henry’s chivalry and the justice of her annulment.98 She must also reside in England for the rest of her life, and her servants were asked to keep an eye on her, open her correspondence, and report if she ever attempted to take a lover or find another husband.99 Nobody could replace the King, even someone he had never wanted. Anne herself was fulsomely obedient—when her brother wrote to her, she sent the letters for inspection to Henry, who then sent them back to her.100
As Anne of Cleves began her new life, a betting Londoner’s money was with the rumor heard by one of the diplomats, that “it is commonly said that this King will marry a lady of great beauty, daughter of Norfolk’s deceased brother.”101 A few weeks before the divorce, lawyers working on the case had leaked news that Catherine was the intended replacement, when one of the team raised the possibility that “the King could not marry the Lady Howard [sic], because she and Queen Anne [Boleyn] were in the second degree of blood,” a point which necessitated the subsequent dispensation.102
Writing a century later, the Bishop of Salisbury saw the circumstances of Catherine’s rise and Cromwell’s fall as proof of the power of political faction at Henry VIII’s court. In this version of events, the King had been manipulated by a young girl who fulfilled her family’s agenda as they and their allies found, or manufactured, evidence against their opponents. This faction used Catherine’s sexuality to unseat a queen supported by one of those opponents and in doing so secured his ruin and their triumph. He concluded, “The charms of Catherine Howard, and the endeavours of the duke of Norfolk and the bishop of Winchester, at length prevailed . . . [and] thus fell that great minister, that was raised merely upon the strength of his natural parts.”103 It is an arresting but misleading narrative.
An octagonal tower stood in the grounds of the Palace of Whitehall. It was the court’s cockfighting arena. It was built in 1533, and inside there were three tiers of seats for the spectators who would gather to watch as two aggravated birds tore each other to shreds. The Queen’s viewing gallery had originally been constructed for Anne Boleyn, and its location, with obstructed views, suggests that the late queen had not particularly enjoyed this blood sport.104 Her husband was more enthusiastic, to say the least. The King’s chair sat on top of the birds’ cages. On Henry’s nod, the grilles were raised and the contestants darted out into the pit.
Henry VIII was adept at letting his servants appear to pursue their own agendas when in fact they corresponded closely with his own. When they appeared to put anyone’s needs before his own, when they bungled badly, or if they pursued a policy that upset or embarrassed Henry, as Cromwell did in 1540, he lifted the cage doors. Many of the leading nobles of Henry VIII’s court detested his policies at one point or another, but not once did they side with a rebellion against him. Henry let them get away with comparatively little things, but obedience and fear were too ingrained in most for them to strike out from their sovereign. As the former Bishop of Worcester had stressed, “When the king’s Majesty himself commandeth me to do so, then I will do it, not afore.”105 Technically, Thomas Cromwell, like Lord Exeter, Anne Boleyn, and Cardinal Wolsey before him, was destroyed by others, but only once the King signaled that it was time for the game to start.
* * *
I. The famous portrait of Anne by Hans Holbein, which now hangs in the Louvr
e, is usually blamed for misleading the King. However, Holbein did not go to Schloss Düren to paint Anne’s portrait until August 1539 and it was not complete until September, by which point the negotiations for the marriage were almost concluded.
II. The habit of a disguised royal bridegroom spying on his fiancée was a trope borrowed from numerous romances, but one which actual princesses seemed to find both offensive and annoying. Three years after Anne’s marriage, Princess Maria Manuela of Portugal shielded her face with a fan when she heard her betrothed was dressed as a commoner in the crowds as she entered at Salamanca.
III. Eleanor of Austria (1498–1558) was Charles V’s eldest sister and the widow of King Manoel I of Portugal when she married King François I of France in 1530.
IV. Dauphin was the traditional title given to the heir to the French throne. A dauphine was his wife.
V. In a twist of fate, Anne’s childhood fiancé eventually married Christina of Denmark, the Emperor’s niece who had avoided Henry’s advances in 1538–39.
Chapter 8
* * *
“The Queen of Britain will not forget”
I met a Traveller from an antique land,
Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck . . .”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias” (1818)
Oatlands Palace, one of Henry’s favorite spots for hunting, lay within the Hampton Court Chase, a ten-thousand-acre private royal hunting route linking several palaces and lodges, which had recently been completed at enormous cost because, as his councillors explained after his death, “his Highness waxed heavy with sickness, age and corpulences of the body, and might not travail so readily abroad, but was constrained to have his game and pleasure ready at hand.”1 It was there that Henry planned to spend what we might call his honeymoon.
Catherine cannot have seen much of her fiancé in the run-up to the wedding. He remained in London for most of July to host the visitors from the empire, then to testify to the illegality of his marriage with Anne of Cleves. Catherine’s wedding was even more private than Anne’s, and the formal announcement was not made until August 8.2 In the meantime, there were rumors in London that Catherine was already pregnant, and derogatory comments were making the rounds at foreign courts, fueled by their respective ambassadors’ assessment of the situation, which included the guess that the wedding only took place because Catherine had found herself enceinte.3
By marrying Catherine, Henry VIII achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the most married Christian monarch in European history—the previous record had been held by Emperor Charles IV, who had managed to avoid Henry’s reputation for matrimonial misadventures by the natural deaths that resulted in three of his four wives predeceasing him.4 Despite their relief that Cleves had lost its most powerful protector, at the Hapsburg court Henry’s latest matrimonial hiccup was cited as proof that murky and megalomaniacal morals had been the real reason for his rupture with Rome. In a letter to the Emperor’s secretary, a Spanish governor wrote, “A very good joke of the king of England again divorcing his Queen. Not in vain does he pretend and assume spiritual authority that he may at will decide upon matrimonial cases whenever he himself is concerned. Although this is a wicked and abominable thing to do, yet it must be owed that concerning—as it does the Duke of Cleves—the Queen’s brother, it is not so bad after all.”5
While the King was preparing to welcome the Marquis of Massalombarda, Catherine received a letter from her old friend, secretary, and ally in mischief, Joan Acworth, now Joan Bulmer following her marriage to a small landowner from York.6 A knight in the Dowager Duchess’s service, Sir George Seaford, had recently called on Joan during his visit to the city. Seaford told her about Catherine’s impending marriage, and Joan was not slow to put ink to paper asking for permission to join her in London. As her letter makes clear, she did not enjoy married life and she trusted in Catherine’s newfound influence to rescue her from it.
If I could wish you all the honour, wealth, and good fortune you could desire, you would neither lack health, wealth, long life, nor yet prosperity. Nevertheless, seeing I cannot, as I would, express this unto you, I would wish these my most hearty salutations might you to know, that whereas it had been shown unto me, that God of his high goodness hath put unto the knowledge of the king a contract of matrimony that the queen hath made with another before she came into England, and thereupon there will be a lawful divorce had between them; and as it is thought that the king of his goodness will put you in the same honour that she was in, which no doubt you be worthy to have, most heartily desiring you to have in your remembrance the unfeigned love that my heart hath always borne towards you, which for the same kindness found in you again hath desired always your presence, if it might be so, above all other creatures, and the change of fortune that hath brought me, on the contrary, into the utmost misery of the world and most wretched life. Seeing no ways, then, I can express in writing, knowing no remedy out of it, without you, or your goodness, will find the means to get me to London, which will be very hard to do; but if you write unto my husband and command him to bring me up, which I think he dare not disobey, for if it might be, I would fain be with you before you were in your honour; and in the mean season I beseech you to save some room for me, what you shall think fit yourself, for the nearer I were to you the gladder I would be of it, what pains soever I did take. I would write more unto you, but I dare not be so bold, for considering the great honour you are towards, it did not become me to put myself in your presence; but the remembrance of the perfect honesty I have always known to be in you, and the report of Sir George Seaford, which hath assured me that the same thing remains in you still, hath encouraged me to this.
Whereupon I beseech you not to be forgetful of this my request for if you do not help me, I am not likely to have worldly joys. Desiring you, if you can, to let me have some answer of this for the satisfying of mind, for I know the queen of Britain will not forget her secretary, and favour you will show.
Your humble servant,
With heart unfeigned,
Jone Bulmer7
Given Joan’s behavior at Horsham and Lambeth, many historians have wondered why Catherine agreed to her request and appointed someone who had the potential to cause her so much harm. Looking at the letter, it is understandable why some subsequent writers have been quick to think that Joan’s effusive humility masked “a subtle form of blackmail.”8 Phrases such as “I would write more unto you, but I dare not be so bold,” her confidence that “the queen of Britain will not forget her secretary,” and the slightly commanding tone in which she instructed Catherine on how to summon her to court could be interpreted as Joan applying pressure to ensure that Catherine answered her, rather than reflective of the sentiment she doused the letter in. One of Queen Anne’s maids of honor, Mary Norris, was leaving court to marry Sir George Carew, a soldier who later drowned when the warship Mary Rose capsized in 1545, and Mary’s departure left a vacancy, although since Joan did not come from an aristocratic background and was now married, that particular place could not pass to her.9 In a better mood, the King was also beginning to relax the cap on numbers in the Queen’s household, which theoretically gave Catherine the leeway she needed to appoint former companions like Joan. The first beneficiary of this expansion was Catherine’s distant cousin and childhood companion, Katherine Tilney, who was
brought to court as one of the chamberers.
In themselves, such appointments were typical and invited no suspicion at the time. The noble mind-set in 1540 was still predominantly feudal. The promotion of families who had served or were tied to one’s own was the sine qua non of aristocratic employment. Everything turned on the idea that there was an inextricable link between loyalty, service, and obedience and protection, patronage, and generosity. Not long before, Catherine’s uncle William had helped find a new job for Alice Wilkes when she wanted to move on and get married.10 When Sir George Seaford brought her the news that her old superior was only a few weeks away from becoming queen, Joan Bulmer was well within her rights to ask for a place at her side. She can hardly be blamed for wanting a place in the Queen’s household, which, if light on salaries, was heavy on kickbacks. Household employees had plenty of opportunities to enrich themselves through selling their influence to outsiders. In 1545, a man called Clement Throckmorton, who worked as the Queen’s cupbearer, was able to pay £654 for lands in Worcestershire and Warwickshire, a sum that even a nobleman might have hesitated at.11
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