by Amy Licence
At the end of December, news of Catherine’s failing health reached court. It was clear from the doctors’ reports that she would not live long; she was in the final stages of what was probably cancer, suffering from pain in her stomach, had lost all her strength, and couldn’t eat or drink. When she died on 6 January 1536, Henry and Anne’s choice to dress in yellow was considered callous by many at the time and since: Anne was to justify this by claiming it was the Spanish colour of mourning. Other sources claimed they wore regal purple. However, Catherine’s death removed a vital safeguard to the new queen’s position; while she had lived, if Henry had chosen to separate from Anne, foreign and religious expectations were that he would return to his first wife. With Catherine out of the way however, any rupture in the new marriage might precipitate Anne’s replacement and the queen was already aware of a serious rival on the horizon. On the day of Catherine’s funeral, 29 January, Anne went into premature labour and miscarried a son of about fifteen weeks. Chapuys later reported that she laid the blame with ‘the duke of Norfolk, whom she hates, saying he frightened her by bringing the news of the fall the King had six days before’ or that she was afraid of being cast aside like her predecessor, whilst other voices at court began to doubt her ability to bear children. He named a Mistress ‘Semel’ or Seymour, to whom Henry had lately given many presents.33 By January, Jane Seymour was already the king’s favourite and accounts of Anne discovering her sitting on his knee may have precipitated her loss. The Life of Jane Dormer, a later Catholic biography of one of Elizabeth’s waiting women, describes frequent scenes of conflict between the two women, ranging from ‘scratching and bye-blows between the queen and her maid’, to the incident where Anne supposedly snatched a portrait of the king which Jane wore about her neck.34 The impending sense of history repeating itself cannot have helped her composure or pregnancy. With hindsight, this loss was to prove a turning point for Anne, a sign to Henry that this marriage, like that to Catherine, was flawed in God’s eyes. Stunned, he told her on her lying-in bed that he would speak with her when she was up. In a phrase commonly repeated by twentieth-century historians, Anne had ‘miscarried of her saviour’ and Henry went to spend Shrovetide alone at Whitehall.
At three and a half months, the miscarried foetus would have been partially developed, about the size of an avocado or goose egg. Later hostile sources sought to justify Anne’s later fall by claiming it had some physical defect or deformity but this was not mentioned at the time, nor during her trial and appears to be what Eric Ives calls historical ‘newspeak’35 or later Catholic defamation. The key to these rumours lies in the contemporary belief that a child’s healthy appearance was God’s comment on the sexual morality of its parents: Martin Luther wrote that birth of deformed children was a personal criticism and political omen. Contemporary medicine identified varying types of deformed or malformed foetuses, called a mola, false conception or moon calf. The false conception was a lump of flesh gathered together like a bird’s gizzard, usually expelled between the second and fourth month. A mola could exist in the womb for longer; up to a year or in extreme cases, even as long as a woman lives. It was an ‘unprofitable mass of flesh, without shape or form, clinging to the inside of the womb’, either conforming to the windy type, watery or a collection of the humours. There were some living and some dead molas, thought to occur when the man’s seed was weak, barren or imperfect; or that it had been choked through the abundance of menstrual blood.
Yet there was a mystery surrounding the process, a misogynistic fear of feminine territory that manifested itself in the abhorrence of potential disaster, or the birth of ‘monsters’. The short-lived child born by Alice Rospin of Little Clacton in August 1552 was described in the parish register as ‘Creature’, in the absence of a given name, perhaps descriptive of its unformed status. Eamon Duffy unearthed similar cases in Morebath in 1564, when the same record was made one of James Goodman’s twin sons in the birthing room, who did not survive36 and that of William Morrse in 1560. London diarist Henry Machyn recorded the news of a ‘monster birth’ at Middleton Stony, Oxfordshire in 1552: of ‘forme and shape as you have sene and hard … both the for parts and hynder partes of the same … sam chylderyn havyng ii heds, ii bodys, iiii arms, iiii hands, with one bely, on navel … they have ii legs with ii fett on syd, and on the odur syd, on leg with ii fett’.37 They lived only nineteen days. Often, the emerging child’s head – or indeed any visible part of their anatomy – was baptised before birth and the gender observed, as was the case when a baby was stuck or clearly failing. ‘Monsters’ were often perceived as punishments for a couple’s indulgence in lewd practices or at forbidden times such as Lent; one of the few supposed indicators of sexual practice within marriage.
What women feared most, possibly even more than the death that promised eternal salvation to the faithful, was the production of a ‘monster’. The early Elizabethan period in particular saw a flurry of pamphlets reporting on such births, which today would be classified as conjoined twins or genetic abnormalities. While the Tudors were not unsympathetic to these children as individuals, many of whom were short-lived, they interpreted their birth as a divine signal of disapproval, directed towards the parents for immorality or more worryingly, towards the state. Abnormal births were interpreted within the tradition of misrule and the subversion of the natural world order, portending catastrophes just as comets and social transgressions did. Prayers existed against the prevention of such occasions and customs forbade certain behaviours in expectant women, such as looking upon deformed and terrifying creatures, which could affect the development of the foetus. Such a birth could not remain concealed; communal networks would ensure the spread of news until its fame became national, upon which the parents could expect scrutiny and censure. Popular news sheets and medical manuals contained sensational illustrations of abnormal birth: at least twelve pamphlets survive from the Elizabethan period alone but these represent a fraction of the total probable output. The most famous cases were the conjoined twins of Herne in 1565 and Swanburne in 1566 and the child born with folds of flesh about its neck, in Surrey, also in 1566, judged to be God’s criticism of the fashions of the day. Multiple births were seen as a divine infliction: the female narrator of a ballad criticised a woman who came begging at her door with twins as having lived a lewd life; many believed that twins were conceived through intercourse during an existing pregnancy:
Thou are some strumpet sure I know,
And spends thy days in shame
And stained sure thy marriage bed
With spots of black defame.38
Ironically, the wealthy but currently infertile narrator was punished for her cruelty towards the beggar woman by bearing 365 children: ‘was by the hand of God most strangely punished, by sending her as many children at one birth, as there are daies in the year.’39
To return to Anne’s story: even if the deformed foetus theory was true, it would have been prohibitively difficult to fully investigate the circumstances under which she had conceived without opening the question of Henry’s responsibility for creating the supposed monster. Cromwell later admitted much of the evidence gathered could not be used; some may have related to Henry and Anne’s sexual practices. At his trial, George Boleyn was accused of having spread rumours that the premature child had not been fathered by Henry as well as having criticised the king’s prowess with his sister. However, no word was mentioned at the time of the foetus’s appearance. Assuming the mola theory to be a later attempt to discredit Anne, it was still important that blame should not be attached to the king for her misdelivery, especially as her pattern of gynaecological failures was beginning to look very much like that of Catherine. The common factor was Henry; therefore, the miscarriage in January 1536 needed to be attributed to another father.
Once Anne had been identified as a viable target that following May, her enemies used every available anti-female insult to discredit her, from adultery and incest to witchcraft and murder. Her
trial and those of her co-accused on the grounds of adultery and incest has long been discredited; Alison Weir has conclusively proved that the supposed dates of her illicit encounters fail to tally with her whereabouts at the time and even coincide with her period of lying-in or pregnancy. Her midwife Nan Cobham was questioned extensively, as were the women of her household, in an attempt to uncover irregular behaviour. Once Henry had decided she was going, whether he believed in her adultery or not, there was no turning back. With miscarriage and the birth of deformed children considered indicative of her poor morals, and as Tudor women were defined sexually and maternally, Anne’s femininity was attacked, using every means of justifying her sentence. Widespread misogyny was common during the sixteenth century. Those who transgressed clearly defined boundaries, such as overreaching commoners who married kings, were popular targets. Female inferiority was reinforced in every aspect of life, from the law courts to medicine, familial relations to lyrics, jokes and sayings. Women’s subordination and otherness from men permeated mass-market culture through sermons, manuals, treaties, popular literature, proverbs, folklore, charms, rhymes, song, ballads, anecdotes, jokes, superstition, seasonal crafts and customs, festivities, religious iconography, medicinal and herbal practices, emblem books, woodcuts for ballads and broadsheets, engravings and illustrations. They were considered to have a particular talent for being subversive: feminine intelligence was often presented proverbially as cunning: ‘women in mischief are wiser than men’, they were ‘necessary evils’ and, through intercourse and pregnancy, were ‘made perfect by men’; a woman was ‘the weaker vessel’, ‘the woe of man’ and ‘a man of straw was worth a woman of gold’. Popular culture identified them with noisy, silly geese, deceitful and insatiable cats, slippery eels, angry wasps and inflexible swine.
One common joke told how a Tudor man was asked why he had married a tiny woman and replied, ‘because of evils, the least was to be chosen’. Some pamphlets and chapbooks showed emblems of women lacking heads, in the sense of flawed intelligence but also decapitation as a symbol of the loss of power, the seat of wisdom, an inversion of patriarchal and therefore political power. Disobedience to a husband was small-scale treason, almost as threatening to society as uncontrolled sexuality: one pamphlet’s caption reads ‘a headless maid is the worst of all monsters’, punning on the unsanctioned loss of virginity and sexual appetite that conflicted with the notion of female submission. Assuming Anne’s trump card during her courtship was her virginity, later slanders of sexual lasciviousness highlight just how fragile and short-lived her main bargaining tool had been. Her appeal for Henry had partly lain in her denial and abstinence; as she refused to conform to the role of submissive wife, she was redefined in the terms of a sexual predator. The fear of female disobedience to male authority was apparent in popular maxims: ‘a woman does that which is forbidden her’, ‘women are always desirous of sovereignty’ and ‘all women are ambitious naturally’. The new queen represented the epitome of Tudor men’s most deep-rooted fears. Set within this context, the terminology of Anne Boleyn’s fall, with all its sexual and moral slurs, underlines a new truth about her condemnation. Her innocence in May 1536 was an irrelevance; by then, Henry had another wife and potential mother-of-an-heir in his sights. Anne’s fate turned on her inability to produce a male heir. Even with all the political and religious upheavals that were concurrent with her rise, Anne’s experiences as a mother, like Catherine’s, proved the defining factor of her life. Anne’s appeal to Henry was founded in fantasy; over the course of seven years of courtship, her attraction was rooted in the promise of her fertility. And as a woman, even a queen, she was vulnerable, a scapegoat of contemporary beliefs, which ultimately cost her her life. She was executed on 19 May 1536. As the Spanish Ambassador put it: ‘the entire future turns on the accouchement of the queen’.40
7
Jane Seymour & Edward
1536–1537
A Son at Last
Although I have no desire to put myself in this danger, yet being of the feminine gender I will pray with the others that God may keep us from it.1
Early one May morning, Anne Boleyn was led from the confinement of her rooms in the Tower of London towards the little green outside. There, a temporary scaffold had been erected, on the orders of Sir William Kyngston, Constable of the Tower, to ‘such a height that all present may see it’.2 Anne’s brother George, accused of incest, homosexuality and adultery, along with four other supposed co-conspirators, had met their deaths the day before; they must have been in Anne’s mind as she prepared to join them. The Venetian ambassador commented that she looked ‘exhausted and amazed’ and ‘kept looking behind her’ as if in disbelief, although John Hussee wrote that she died ‘boldly’.3 Dressed in a black damask gown and ermine mantle, she mounted the steps to stand before the crowd, which may have numbered as many as a thousand. She dispensed the traditional alms, made a speech putting herself in God’s hands and thanked her ladies for their service. Before her were ranged the familiar faces of courtiers, councillors and London officials, who had gathered three years previously to witness her coronation: now they had come to see the first public execution of a Queen of England. Anne knelt, blindfolded, and the hangman from Calais raised his sword.
Technically, her death was unnecessary, even if Henry believed in her guilt. Three days earlier, at Lambeth Palace, Cranmer had pronounced the royal marriage ‘null and void’. It was impossible, therefore, for Anne to have committed adultery if her union with the king had not been valid in the first place. This was not enough to save her life though, as Henry had previous experience of a wife who would not step aside; now he was keen to marry again. Even before Anne had been executed, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, nephew of Catherine of Aragon, was proposing the Infant of Portugal or the Duchess of Milan, as Henry’s third wife. The Queen of Hungary was also suggested but she was thought to be in ill health and not capable of bearing children. Approaching his forty-fifth birthday, still lacking a legitimate male heir, the possibility of securing his dynasty was apparently slipping away; yet these international brides did not merit the king’s consideration. He had already decided on his next queen, having discussed marriage with her before the sentence on Anne had been passed; her marked differences from her predecessor appearing more attractive as his relationship with Anne disintegrated. Jane Seymour was the daughter of John Seymour of Wulfhall, Wiltshire, a descendant of Edward III and distant cousin of both Henry and Anne. Chapuys described the prospective bride as aged over twenty-five, ‘of middle stature and no great beauty’, so fair as to be pale. She was ‘proud and haughty’ yet of ‘no great wit’ and was a great supporter of Princess Mary. Her appeal may have lain in her virginity, although Chapuys questioned this, as she was so advanced in years and had spent time at the licentious Tudor court. He punned on the possibility of her possessing a fine enigme, meaning a riddle or secret but also slang for the female genitals. According to Anne Boleyn, Henry had ‘neither vigour nor virtue’ in his sexual performance, so Chapuys concluded ‘he may make a condition in the marriage that she be a virgin, and when he has a mind to divorce her he will find enough of witnesses’.4 Other chroniclers confirmed this interpretation of her colouring and appearance, whilst some, like Polydore Vergil, found her ‘charming’ or considered the match had taken Henry from Hell to Heaven.
If Anne had contradicted conventional notions of feminine behaviour by overreaching her status and being proud and argumentative, Jane conformed. The 1534 A Treatise of the Nobilitie and Excellencye of Woman Kynde, by German ‘magician’ Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, translated into English by David Clapham, described the females as delicate and pleasant, their flesh soft and tender, their colour fair and clear, the head comely and dressed with hair soft as silk. Like Jane, the ideal woman’s skin was white as milk and her eyes shone like crystals. Her voice would be small and shrill, her speech low and sweet. In movement, she was right and comely, her deportment and cheer were honest and comme
ndable. This beauty was so superior to all other of God’s creatures, according to Agrippa, that the children of God took earthly women to be their wives. It was a description which would have pleased Henry, as God’s appointed representative on earth and Supreme Head of the Church of England since 1534. In contemporary terms, he had struck gold with Jane Seymour.
The shadow of the block hung over Jane and Henry’s wedding. Henry’s behaviour since Anne’s arrest had been giving rise to criticism, according to Chapuys: while his proposed union with Jane remained secret, he had been ‘banqueting with ladies’, returning after midnight by river and showing ‘extravagant joy’. These visits were probably made to Jane, whom he had established in a house by the river, 7 miles from court, facilitating regular visits and offering her the services of his own cook. Henry must have believed to some degree in Anne’s guilt or allowed himself to be convinced by a situation that suited his current need. He allegedly wept before Henry Fitzroy that his son had escaped her attempts to poison him, although ironically, Fitzroy was to die a month later. The callousness he displayed towards Anne was little different from that already shown towards Catherine of Aragon and his previously cherished daughter Mary: once a woman had been excluded from his favour, he was absolute and unyielding in his treatment of them. The willingness of Jane to enter into marriage in such circumstances has given rise to dichotomic historical interpretations of her as ruthlessly ambitious, or else as the passive pawn of her driven family. Tudor factional politics was brutal. Opportunities were seized in the wake of rivals’ falls from grace. David Starkey has commented on the seeming impossibility of the ‘plain Jane’ of Holbein’s portrait gaining her position as Henry’s queen without the driving force of her faction determined to bring Anne down.5 Jane was a means, not an end, to the pro-Mary group. Their success lay in their timing. Just as Anne had been, Jane was a player in a complex, heartless game, snatching the opportunity to rise that was borne out of the jaws of death. On the day of Anne’s execution, Cranmer issued a dispensation permitting Henry and Jane to marry in spite of their relation in the third degree: the following morning, Jane travelled secretly by barge to Henry’s lodgings, where they were betrothed. Five days later, rumours had already reached the Continent that he had taken another wife. Mary of Hungary wrote about the ease and speed of Anne’s replacement that ‘wives will hardly be well contented if such customs become general’.6 While speedy remarriage following the death of a spouse was relatively common in Tudor England, Henry’s record as a widower of eleven days can have rarely been beaten. The wedding ceremony was conducted by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, on 30 May, in the queen’s closet at York Place.
