Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy

by Leslie Carroll

  Mary wasn’t too upset about it. She devoted herself to her husband and their two children. But in 1528, after the thirty-two -year-old William Carey died during the outbreak of the sweating sickness, Mary found herself buried under a mound of debts. Petitions to her family were fruitless. Requests to Henry fell on deaf ears as well. Only Anne, who at the time of William’s death was the king’s inamorata, managed to procure something for her sister—an annual pension of £100 (nearly $72,000 today), and an elaborately wrought golden cup.

  In 1534, Mary secretly married William Stafford, a commoner without rank of any kind. She bore him two children. For wedding a man so far beneath her station, the Boleyns disowned her for good, but Mary emphatically averred, “For well I might a’ had a greater man of birth, but I assure you I could never a’ had one that loved me so well. I had rather beg my bread with him than be the greatest queen in Christendom,” a rather pointed swipe at her sister, as well as a triumphant declaration of True Love. But the jibe struck too close to Anne’s bones, and Anne, now queen, declared that Mary and her husband would never again be received at court.

  Her ostracism was probably a blessing; Mary was well rid of the vipers’ nest of the Tudor court. She rusticated with her small family at Rochford in Essex while Anne and their brother George tasted the full measure of Henry’s rough justice. Mary did not visit her siblings as they waited in the Tower for the executioner’s blade to end their lives. Perhaps she was cannier than she’d been credited; she deliberately remained as far from the madness as possible, the better to avoid getting swept into the bloody dustbin of her family’s history.

  Mary died at home on July 19, 1543.

  Her son, Henry Carey, was eventually made a Knight of the Garter by Elizabeth I. Mary’s daughter Catherine became a maid of honor to both Anne of Cleves and Kathryn Howard. One of Catherine Carey’s daughters, Lettice Knollys, was Queen Elizabeth’s bosom companion, lady-in-waiting—and later, her rival and enemy, after she married Robert Dudley, the great love of Elizabeth’s life.

  Mary Boleyn’s twentieth-century descendants include Winston Churchill; Mary Bowes-Lyon (the mother of Elizabeth II); Diana, Princess of Wales; and Sarah Ferguson.

  HENRY VIII and Anne Boleyn (“The Most Happy”) 1500(?)-1536 Queen of England 1533-1536

  Anne Boleyn, the younger daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn and Elizabeth Howard, was from the outset a political animal. She spent her teenage years in France in the train of Queen Mary Tudor, the younger sister of Henry VIII. Sir Thomas had sent both his daughters there in the hope that they would gain the polish and sophistication that would make them irresistible to a king. Sir Thomas would never exactly be father of the year, but the scheming and ambitious courtier did achieve his aim.

  At François I’s notoriously licentious court, Anne developed her taste for all things French—the language, the fashions, the music. She perfected the art of flirtation, her black eyes expertly conveying an entire gamut of emotions.

  Anne was not a conventional beauty like her sister, Mary. She was of middling stature, and her features were angular and fine, though her mouth was considered wide. Her complexion was sallow, her bosom “was not much raised” (according to the Venetian ambassador, who evidently got close enough to evaluate it), and her hair was a brownish auburn that cascaded past her slim hips. Anne’s detractors delighted in depicting her as deformed, with warts or moles all over her body, a huge wen on her throat (she was described as having a large Adam’s apple, but the wen, an abnormal and unsightly growth or cyst, was a gross exaggeration that seemed to grow with the telling of the tale), and a sixth finger on her left hand. Rather than truly endowed with an eleventh digit, Anne probably had a vestigial extra nail on her left pinky, but if she had been even a tenth as malformed as her enemies painted her, the persnickety Henry, with his discerning eye for beauty, would never have looked twice at her, let alone moved heaven and earth to wed her. Still, it was believed at the time that any physical deformity was an outward manifestation of inner corruption, a superstition that would come back to haunt the dusky beauty.

  Anne was in other ways very different from her giddy sister. She was smarter and brighter, quicker to pick up on nuances. Anne understood the role for which she was being groomed by her family, and assiduously applied herself to perfecting it.

  In 1521, Anne was recalled to England, possibly because her father wished to arrange her marriage to a wealthy distant cousin. In the meantime, she was placed in Queen Katherine’s household. Anne’s cosmopolitan sophistication, her facility with languages, and her rapier wit and skilled repartee made her one of the most popular young women at court, and she soon had several admirers, including the very-married poet Thomas Wyatt, who resided near Anne’s parents’ Kentish home, Hever Castle.

  In 1522, her hopes for a marriage to the handsome courtier Henry Percy, the son and heir of the Duke of Northumberland, were destroyed by her father and Cardinal Wolsey, acting on behalf of the duke. Anne saw the cardinal as the architect of her misfortune, her broken heart, and worst of all, her chance to marry not just for love but for wealth, status, and power. And Anne had always been ambitious.

  By the middle of 1525, Anne had utterly captivated the king. She was now in her mid-twenties and Henry was then thirty-five years old, in the seventeenth year of his reign, still vigorous, handsome, and athletically built with just the slightest trace of pudginess. But it was not until the Shrovetide merriment in 1526 that people began to discern the infatuation that Henry had secretly harbored for nearly a year, scarcely daring to confess it to the object herself.

  During the joust on Shrove Tuesday, 1526, Henry hinted at his feelings by wearing a tabard embroidered with the motto “Declare je nos” (I dare not declare), a hint to the lady who had captured his fancy.

  It was not long before Henry asked Anne to be his lover, but her reply took him by surprise. “I would rather lose my life than my honesty,” she told the king. “Your wife I cannot be . . . your mistress I will not be.”

  Where Mary Boleyn had played for love, Anne played for power. She had seen too well that once the king achieved what he desired, it soon lost all luster for him. And Anne Boleyn had no interest in becoming one of Henry’s castoffs. She wanted to be his queen.

  Just before Christmas 1526, after nearly eighteen months of pursuit, Henry wrote to tell Anne that . . . if it pleases you to do the duty of a true, loyal mistress and friend, and to give yourself body and heart to me, who has been and will be your very loyal servant. I promise that not only the name will be due to you, but also to take you as my sole mistress, casting off all others than yourself out of mind and affection and to serve you and you alone.

  Replying in writing on New Year’s Day in 1527, Anne told Henry she would accept him as her betrothed only after the king promised to make her his wife and queen—clarifying her interpretation of his plea to make her the sole mistress, or possessor, of his heart, body, and soul. She sent him a present as well—a “handsome diamond” and a brooch shaped like a ship in which a lonely damsel appears tempest-tossed. Accompanying the gift was a note that resounded with passion, but also slyly encouraged Henry to continue to press for an annulment from Katherine if he wanted to enjoy her.

  From that point, Anne must have permitted Henry certain liberties with her body, because in one of his letters dating from 1527, Henry wrote, “I would you were in my arms or I in yours for I think it is a long time since we kissed.” Like an infatuated schoolboy, he designed an emblem with their initials, AB and HR, entwined, and the motto “aultre ne cherse” (I seek no other).

  And although Henry’s lust was directed toward Anne, throughout his life his greatest passion was the begetting of a male heir.

  Henry’s desire for Anne had convinced him that God was punishing him for marrying his deceased brother Arthur’s wife by denying them sons. Getting rid of Katherine was the only way to break the curse. Just before May 1527, the king conceived the idea of divorcing Katherine of Aragon—or
rather, seeking to have their marriage annulled because they had violated the word of God. Brandishing a Bible, he invoked the verses of Leviticus that made it a sin for a man to lie with his dead brother’s wife.

  But Katherine was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella and her nephew was Charles V, the Spanish king and Holy Roman Emperor; as such, he wielded tremendous power over most of Europe and the papacy as well. Charles would never stand idly by while the English king dared to cast off his aunt.

  And Katherine had been well coached. Knowing Henry’s reliance upon Leviticus, she countered the argument with the insistence that she had never consummated her marriage with Arthur. Negotiations to legally divest himself of Katherine and take Anne as his second wife and queen dragged on from 1527 to 1533, and all the while, Anne kept Henry panting after her.

  Anne and Henry were initially secretive about their affair, but each was too excited about their conquest to remain discreet for long. They appeared together as a couple at a reception hosted at Greenwich Palace to honor the French ambassador on May 15, 1527. Two days later Cardinal Wolsey opened the secret trial in what came to be known as the King’s Great Matter, which was the case to prove his right to annul his marriage to Katherine. Indeed, the trial was such a secret that Queen Katherine was not even informed of the proceedings!

  Anne and Henry, however, were waist-deep in the Matter. They communicated daily by letter when they were not in proximity to each other. As a team they discussed and dissected the divorce, its political, religious, and social ramifications and consequences. Anne found scholars and theologians to support their theories, pushing Henry harder to think out of the box. She had developed her humanist leanings in France, and endeavored to convert the king to her views.

  To “divorce” Katherine, Henry sought a papal dispensation from Clement VII that would effectively overturn, or cancel, a previous dispensation to marry his late brother’s wife that he had secured from Pope Julius II, back when he thought it was a good idea. Now, nearly a quarter century later, the king was demanding that Clement’s dispensation uphold the nullity of his marriage to Katherine for that very reason—because she had been his late brother’s wife.

  But Henry required two separate things from Rome: permission to divorce Katherine and permission to marry Anne. For the second half of the equation, because Henry had slept with Anne’s sister, he would need a papal dispensation to ignore the subject of the first degree of affinity.

  At the outset of the Great Matter, both Anne and Henry seemed to believe that the issue would be swiftly resolved. Though they anticipated resistance from Charles V, neither of them had pegged Katherine correctly. Her retreat into religious devotions had made her stronger, rather than more malleable. She was not going to go quietly. Furthermore, she loved Henry, as a queen, as a wife, and as a woman.

  In February 1528, two English envoys set out for Rome with the king’s petition, bearing a letter from Cardinal Wolsey (which it must have choked him to write) extolling Anne’s many virtues of character.

  The events of that year reflect Anne’s emergence as a Reformer, a well-informed, intelligent proponent of the burgeoning Protestant religion. For all her impatient, arrogant, shrewish qualities, the truth is that there would have been no Anglican religion without Anne’s scholarly reading of such banned treatises as the works of Martin Luther and her persistent encouragement of Henry to embrace many of Luther’s views, break with the Church of Rome, and become the Head of the Church in England—which eventually led to all the British monarchs being the Head of the Church of England.

  But that summer, Henry nearly lost the real reason for sending his envoys to Rome. Anne fell ill from the sweating sickness, a virulent strain of the flu that periodically swept through England. Always cautious about infections, the king removed himself from her company, although he wrote to her from the safety of Hundson House, passionately avowing, “wherever I am, I am yours,” and assuring Anne that he “would willingly bear half” of her illness that she might suffer that much less. In another letter to his favorite convalescent, Henry wrote that he was “Wishing myself (specially an evening) in my sweetheart’s arms, whose pretty dukkys I trust shortly to kiss.” (“Dukkys” was “dugs,” which is still a slang word for breasts.)

  That September, Anne languished at Hever, in semi-exile from the court. Even after she recuperated from her illness, it was not seemly that she be omnipresent while Henry shed crocodile tears over the prospect of nullifying his marriage of more than two decades.

  Believing Anne too imperious, too arrogant, too French, the people detested her. No matter how Henry tried to present it, in their view he was looking for a way to cast aside a loyal and faithful wife who had become stout, old, and barren, in favor of his pert young mistress who was nothing but a hussy. His subjects’ attitude angered Henry at the beginning of his affair with Anne, but by the time he wished to rid himself of Anne as well, the king relied upon their spite and distaste to stir up public sentiment and destroy her reputation.

  As the years wore on and the Great Matter remained unresolved, Anne began to lose patience with the process and with her sovereign. At first it was probably fun and exciting to devise new ways of simultaneously keeping him at bay and yet utterly in her thrall. Anne’s very unobtainability had made her all the more alluring to Henry. But she had grown disgusted with the sympathy Katherine was engendering, not merely from the public but at times from the king himself, which gave her reason to fear that Henry, tired of the fight and anxious about the enemies it was making, might from frustration or exhaustion abandon the Great Matter and return to Katherine after all.

  Anne made it very clear to Henry that she might have already sacrificed the best years of her life, reminding the king that children—heirs—were the real reward that lay at the end of the fight. “I have been waiting long and might in the meanwhile have contracted some advantageous marriage out of which I might have had issue, which is the greatest consideration in the world, but alas! Farewell to my time and youth spent to no purpose at all.”

  As temperamental as they were passionate, Henry and Anne quarreled rather often, but she made sure to switch her seductive powers into high gear when they made up so that her royal lover would never forget what it was he wanted from her. Anne was a demonstrative and uninhibited spitfire, and the king found the cocktail highly erotic. He could deny her nothing.

  On December 8, 1529, Anne’s father, Thomas Boleyn, was made Earl of Wiltshire. The imperial ambassador, Eustache Chapuys, reported to King Charles V on the festivities. Anne sat by the king’s side, taking precedence over the other ladies, “occupying the very place allotted to a crowned queen. After dinner, there was dancing and carousing so that it seemed as if nothing were wanting but the priest to give away the nuptial ring and pronounce the blessing.”

  In those days, Anne’s presence was conspicuous, and from late 1529 onward, she spent Henry’s money lavishly. The Privy Purse was opened wide to pay for everything from sumptuous fabrics and furs to “playing money” for her to gamble with. Her influence on the king was exceptional, and no one got Henry’s ear or his trust without her say-so. It was becoming common knowledge that Anne Boleyn was the power behind the throne. And those who for years had enjoyed Henry’s favor—such as Wolsey, Norfolk, and Henry’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk, Charles Brandon—feared they might be cut out of the picture entirely once Anne became queen.

  During the spring of 1530, Henry embarked on a Royal Progress, accompanied by the ubiquitous Anne. The imperial ambassador Chapuys remarked, “the king shows greater favor to the lady every day . . . very recently, coming from Windsor, he made her ride behind him on a pillion, a most unusual proceeding, and one that has greatly called forth people’s attention here.” In his report to his sovereign, Charles V, Chapuys added that Henry had two men imprisoned for gossiping about the incident.

  Anne might not have had the people’s hearts, but she had Henry’s. And, no matter how long it took, she wou
ld be his queen—and theirs, like it or not. At Christmastime in 1530, Anne commissioned new livery for her attendants embroidered with the French phrase “Ainsi sera, groigne qui groigne” (that’s how it’s going to be, no matter who grumbles). She thought it was a terrific tongue-in-cheek way to get her message across. But as soon as Henry saw the uniforms, he angrily ordered Anne to dispose of them. Evidently, she had no idea that the motto had first been used as a rally cry for one of England’s continental enemies, the Burgundians.

  That same month, Pope Clement demanded that Henry dismiss his mistress from court while the matter of the dispensation remained under judicial review, because any children born of their union under such circumstances would be bastards. That directive spurred Henry to press Parliament even harder to agree to the swift resolution of an act that had been under discussion since November 3, 1529, granting the king supreme leadership of the Church in England. Finally, on February 11, 1531, following a secret meeting between Thomas Cromwell and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the humanist William Warham, Henry was acknowledged “Supreme Head of the Church, in so far as the Law of Christ allows.” (The disclaimer at the end of the sentence would soon be struck out, leaving Henry the entirely unrestricted Head of the Church.)

  Anne was ecstatic, “as if she had actually gained Paradise,” a contemporary reported.

  But as far as Rome and Katherine were concerned, the Great Matter remained unresolved. The pro-Katherine faction intended to reveal the real reason for Henry’s petition. If it were known that he wanted an annulment just so he could marry someone else, Henry would never get his way. In 1529, seventeen of Henry’s love letters to Anne were stolen by an agent of Cardinal Campeggio, one of the papal legates charged with determining the Great Matter. The letters were brought to the Pope, and to this day they remain in the Vatican’s archives. Though the correspondence was not officially cited by Rome as a reason for refusing Henry’s request, they got the message.