The Six Wives & Many Mistresses of Henry VIII: The Women's Stories

by Amy Licence

  The verses needed to be written on clean paper too, with quires of paper royal costing 4d per quire, while the works were recorded on seven reams of inferior brown, at 12d per ream. It must have been a colourful affair. To mix their tints, the painters required ninety-eight pounds of verdigris green, 12d of white lead, 12d of red lead, 12d of Spanish white, 12d of ground black, over two gallons of pink, half an ounce of saffron, one pound of vermilion, 6s 8d of sap green, one pound of yellow ochre, bound by 22d worth of hens’ eggs, mixed in four dozen earthenware dishes. They used thirty-six pairs of scissors and four pairs of great shears, four pounds of bristles, 130 pounds of glue, eight pounds of gum Arabic, three gallons of vinegar for tempering green paint, a bottle of what flour for paste, eleven yards of satin, two ounces of red ribbon, twelve leaves of gold paper and six dozen of silver paper, all to make trees, bushes, branches, roses, rosemary, hawthorn, mulberries, panes of gold and stars. The work was begun on Friday 11 October and completed a month later, on 10 November.12

  Details of the ladies’ clothing for the occasion survives too, from the twenty-one ounces of flat gold of damask used by the tailor’s wife in Bowe Lane and her maidens, for piping eight cauls for the princess and the ladies, to the eight great cauls of Venice gold, bought from Elizabeth Phelype for the princess and the ladies; 14s was paid for the gold damask for piping the ladies’ cauls and 12d for six hair-wigs. A John Skut was rewarded 20s for making alterations to the women’s clothing. Other clothing expenses survive from the play. Almost thirty-seven yards of white sarsenet were made into a ‘train mantle’ for the actor or actress playing Lady Peace and wide Spanish sleeves for Quietness and Tranquility. Five crimson gowns with wide sleeves were made for the ladies and seven pieces of black buckram provided twelve mantles and eight more gowns. Some 3s 8d purchased red-and-white kersey hose (tights) lined with yellow and 8d bought sufficient narrow ribbon to make hair laces.13

  From this surviving account, it is clear just how much work went in behind the scenes to create the glittering façade of a single entertainment. It can provide a parallel with the main court, shining a light on a microcosm of the huge machinery of daily life in the royal palaces. With thousands of servants working behind the scenes in so many departments, Henry was at the apex of a vast and complex establishment; the corresponding cogs of his kitchen, or his privy chamber, were used to serving his daily needs from the moment he woke to the time he fell asleep at night and securing his safety and comfort all through the hours of darkness. It must have bred a sense of divine entitlement and privilege that led the king to confidently expect that all his wishes would as easily be met. However, he was soon to discover that, outside his kingdom, those who opposed his will were not prepared to be so accommodating.

  36

  Ménage à Trois, 1527–28

  It did not seem to me to be a time to guard myself

  against Love’s blows: so I went on

  confident, unsuspecting; from that, my troubles

  started, among the public sorrows.1

  In October 1527, Emperor Charles declared that he would support his aunt in her refusal to acquiesce to Henry’s request and demanded that Pope Clement took no further steps towards granting an annulment. Effectively, Charles had his uncle in checkmate. Wolsey had returned to England in September to find that another ambassador had been dispatched to Rome, and there was no sign of the warm welcoming committee he had expected. Worse still, when he met with Henry at Richmond to discuss his mission with the king in private, Anne Boleyn was the one to summon Wolsey to Henry’s presence and accompanied them into the closet for the duration of the interview. It was a sign to the cardinal that his influence over the king was slipping. Perhaps he recalled the occasion when he had forbidden Henry Percy to honour his betrothal to Anne and regretted that she was not now Countess of Northumberland. There was a powerful new player at court and Wolsey recognised that she was able to give Henry much that his old friend could not.

  The issue rumbled on into the New Year, with an uneasy triangle of Henry, Anne and Catherine under the same roof in their separate establishments at court yet meeting frequently in the public arena. Often the three dined together in the same hall. According to Cavendish, Catherine employed various methods to keep the lovers apart, ‘the oftener had her at cards with her, the rather that the king might have the less her company’, on which occasion Catherine reputedly uttered the ironic line that Anne had ‘good hap to stop at a king, but you are not like others, you will have all or none’.2 Again, time played to the queen’s advantage, allowing her to take advice, communicate further with Charles and prepare her case.

  Early in the New Year, though, news arrived in London that Clement had escaped from captivity, allowing him to act independently of the Emperor. Perhaps this, or Catherine’s stubbornness, acted as a catalyst. In February 1528, Wolsey applied for a commission to allow proceedings to go ahead for the trial in London, in order to appease Henry’s ‘troubled conscience’. In response, Catherine sought the advice of William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, Dr Henry Standish, Bishop of St Asaph’s, Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London and John Clerk, Bishop of Bath and Wells, ultimately, to defend her against the papal legate Henry had requested to hear his case.

  Catherine watched Anne closely. She had seen other rivals come and go before; younger, more beautiful women whose fertility was untested, who could dance all night with the king and compose poems and music. She knew that some of them had shared his bed but, by maintaining her position and devoting herself to God, she had preserved her dignity. That June, though, an enemy of a different kind made an appearance, which might have seemed like the answer to her prayers. The dreaded sweating sickness broke out again in London, and, while Henry and his wife left for the country, Anne sought the shelter of Hever. The disease was notorious for the swiftness by which it claimed its victims and the terrible nature of their suffering, which Catherine had experienced herself as a young woman at Ludlow. Slipping back into the old daily routine, with Catherine sewing Henry’s shirts and the two attending Mass and confession together, it may have seemed to the queen that the mistress was out of sight and out of mind. The public façade continued. Yet, as Henry’s letters indicate, he was still in regular contact with Anne, and was soon writing out of concern for her health, having heard ‘the most afflicting news’ and saying he would ‘gladly bear half your illness to make you well’. He sent her one of his own physicians and beseeched her to ‘be guided by his advice.’3

  When Anne fell ill with the sweat, it may have seemed to Catherine that divine judgement had been enacted upon her ex-servant for immorality. Such terrible epidemics, often claiming hundreds of lives apparently at random, could only be explained in the sixteenth-century mind as an act of God, as a reaction to sin. The queen would not have needed to look far to identify what that sin might be. Catherine must almost have held her breath in anticipation of the news. With her rival neatly removed, her marriage might even have a chance of recovery and the passage of a few years might even lessen the pain and erase the memory. But Anne did not die. God chose to answer the king’s prayers instead of the queen’s. By the end of the summer Anne had begun to recover, and, although he wanted to see her, Henry wrote that she knew ‘best what air doth best with you’ and that she should ‘do therein as best you like’.4 For the time being Anne stayed on at Hever, surrounded by its rolling Kent countryside, away from the pressure and judgement of the court.

  Anne survived the illness but her brother-in-law William Carey succumbed, dying on 22 June at his house of Plashey in Essex. Anne was granted the ‘custody of the lands of William Carye, deceased, during the minority of Henry Carye, his son and heir, with the wardship and marriage of the said heir’,5 but not of his sister Catherine, then aged fourteen. Carey’s death left Mary in considerable debt and Henry’s old fondness for her prompted him to write to Anne, asking their father to help as ‘it cannot stand with his honour, but that he
must needs take her his natural daughter now in her extreme necessity’.6 Meanwhile, the news was looking better for Anne on another front: the Pope had agreed that Wolsey might hear the case of Henry’s marriage in London, along with a second papal legate, to ensure fairness and accountability. The trial was on.

  The second cardinal was appointed that June. Henry wrote to inform Anne that Lorenzo Campeggio, ‘whom we most desire’, had recently arrived in Paris and was, therefore, expected to soon reach Calais, and then he would ‘enjoy that which I have so long longed for, to God’s pleasure and both our comforts’.7 The aged Campeggio, travelling slowly and suffering from terrible pain as the result of his gout, had reached Paris in mid-September, but had to be carried to Calais on a litter; he did not arrive in London until 8 October 1528, with the express purpose of finding a solution that would suit all parties and to delay proceedings as long as possible. At once, he took to his bed. In a subsequent letter to Anne, Henry was frustrated by the ‘unfeigned sickness of this well-willing legate’, which did ‘retard this access to your person’, but trusted that God would restore him to health and that Cardinal Campeggio could with ‘diligence recompense his demur’.8

  In the meantime, Henry arranged for them to meet midway between Hever and London at Beddington Place, the ‘fair house’ or ‘paradise of pleasure’9 of her cousin and Henry’s obliging courtier and friend Sir Nicholas Carew. Then it would have been surrounded by countryside but today only the great hall remains, sitting in the London borough of Sutton, as part of Carew Manor School. Between 10 and 14 November 1528, Henry and Anne were guests of Nicholas and Elizabeth, enjoying some rare privacy in the gardens, deer park and comfortable rooms before Henry returned to London and they were parted again. It had been a chance to reaffirm their mutual desire but there was still a long way to go before the king could call Anne his own. If Henry thought his wife would quietly accept his wishes and step aside, he had seriously underestimated her.

  On 24 October, Catherine and Campeggio finally met. Hoping to find an ally, the meeting would have been a disappointment for her once she realised the approach the cardinal was going to take. She resisted his attempts to persuade her to enter a convent, saying that she ‘intended to live and die in the state of matrimony, to which God had called her, that she would always remain of that opinion and that she would never change it’. Two days later she visited the cardinal at his lodgings at Bath Place, where he was again incapacitated. Henry had agreed to the pretext she offered of making a confession to Campeggio, but her words can hardly have been those he had hoped she would utter. Catherine ‘affirmed on her conscience that from her marriage with Prince Arthur … she had not slept in the same bed with him more than seven nights and that she remained as intact and uncorrupted as the day she left her mother’s womb’. As in the years of her widowhood, duress pushed Catherine to dramatic extremes, embracing the notion of martyrdom, claiming that ‘although she might be torn limb from limb, should compel her to alter this opinion; and that if after death she should return to life, rather than change it, she would prefer to die over again’.10 She was aware that she was not just fighting for herself, but for the future of her daughter too. Campeggio believed her.11

  Then, Catherine produced her trump card. The sons of a long-dead Spanish ambassador from her youth, Rodrigo Gonzalez de Puebla, had uncovered a crucial piece of evidence among his papers. It was a papal brief, a copy of the original dispensation that had been issued allowing Henry and Catherine to marry, which she now presented as irrefutable evidence that the marriage had been legitimate, as this paperwork even covered the eventuality that consummation had taken place. Thus, Henry’s scruples should be eradicated regarding the legality of the match, which Catherine maintained was unnecessary anyway, as no prohibitive affinity had been established between her and Arthur. On 7 November, the queen made a declaration in the presence of Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury who had married her to Henry, and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, to the effect that she had been a virgin on her marriage to Henry, rejecting the words that had been inserted in the brief to allow for the consummation of her first marriage. It was a formidable setback for Henry and Anne’s cause. The king’s response, the following month, was to follow through with a threat he had made earlier in the year and separate Catherine from her daughter.

  37

  The Blackfriars Trial, 1529

  O wavering and new fangled multitude! Is it not a wonder to

  consider the inconstant mutability of this uncertain world.1

  On 22 June 1529, Catherine of Aragon prepared to give the performance of her life. The setting was the Dominican monastery of Blackfriars, a complex of cloisters and religious buildings connected to the palace of Bridewell by a long gallery of over seventy metres. Summoned to appear before Wolsey and Campeggio, three weeks after the legantine court had been convened, she instructed her ladies to dress her with care and walked with dignity along the passage from the inner court into the packed hall. Having previously lodged a complaint to Rome about the legitimacy of the court, Catherine sat down before the audience to listen to the ‘scruples’ Henry claimed to have felt ‘from the beginning’ but had not raised for the ‘great love he had and has, for her’. Henry claimed to desire ‘more than anything else that their marriage should be declared valid’, and argued that the ‘queen’s request for the removal of the cause to Rome was unreasonable, considering the Emperor’s power there; whereas this country is perfectly secure for her, and she has had the choice of prelates and lawyers’.

  Catherine knew what she had to do. Rising from her seat, she knelt before Henry, addressing him only, appealing to him as her husband and as the only other person in the court of equal rank.

  ‘Sir,’ she began,

  I beseech you for all the love that hath been between us, and for the love of God, let me have justice. Take of me some pity and compassion, for I am a poor woman, and a stranger born out of your dominion. I have here no assured friends, and much less impartial counsel. Alas! Sir, wherein have I offended you, or what occasion of displeasure have I deserved? I have been to you a true, humble and obedient wife, ever comfortable to your will and pleasure, that never said or did any thing to the contrary thereof, being always well pleased and contented with all things wherein you had any delight or dalliance, whether it were in little or much. I never grudged in word or countenance, or showed a visage or spark of discontent. I loved all those whom ye loved, only for your sake, whether I had cause or no, and whether they were my friends or enemies. This twenty years or more I have been your true wife and by me ye have had divers children, although it hath pleased God to call them out of this world, which hath been no default in me. And when ye had me at first, I take God to my judge, I was a true maid, without touch of man, and whether it be true or no, I put it to your conscience. If there be any just cause by the law that ye can allege against me either of dishonesty or any other impediment to banish and put me from you, I am well content to depart to my great shame and dishonour and if there be none, then here, I most lowly beseech you, let me remain in my former estate and receive justice at your hands. The King your father … and my father, Ferdinand, King of Spain … thought then the marriage between you and me good and lawful. Therefore, it is a wonder to hear what new inventions are now invented against me, that never intended by honesty … I most humbly require you, in the way of charity and for the love of God, who is the just judge, to spare me the extremity of this new court, until I may be advised what way and order my friends in Spain will advise me to take. And if ye will not extend to me so much impartial favour, your pleasure then be fulfilled, and to God I commit my cause!2

  Henry attempted to raise Catherine from her knees twice but she would not move. Finally, she rose, curtseyed, and turned to walk straight out of the courtroom. An official called to her to return, but she responded that ‘it makes no matter, for it is no impartial court for me, therefore I will not tarry. Go on!’ With her head held high, she neve
r returned to the courtroom. Henry, moved, echoed that she had indeed ‘been to me as true, as obedient, and as conformable a wife as I could in my fantasy wish or desire. She hath all the virtuous qualities that ought to be in a woman of her dignity … she is also a noble woman born.’3 But he went on to outline his suspicions, after ‘all such male issue as I have received of the queen died incontinent after they were born, so that I doubt the punishment of God in that behalf’. He explained that he wished to ‘take another wife in case that my first copulation with this gentlewoman were not lawful, which I intend not for any carnal concupiscence, nor for any displeasure or mislike of the queen’s person or age, with whom I could be as well content to continue during my life, if our marriage may stand with God’s laws, as with any woman alive’.4

  The issue continued to be debated without resolution. In mid-July, Campeggio and Wolsey visited Catherine again to make one last attempt to convince her that she must retire from life and enter the convent of her choice, but they found her adamant. Receiving them in her rooms at Bridewell, the queen appeared with a skein of white thread about her neck, as she had been interrupted sewing with her ladies, ‘thinking full little of any such matter’ as the steps they urged her to take. She appealed to their better natures, claiming ‘I am a poor woman lacking both wit and understanding sufficiently to answer such approved wise men as ye be both, in so weighty a matter … I am a simple woman, destitute and barren of friendship and counsel here in a foreign region’.5 Yet Catherine was anything but a simple woman.

  Amid the heartbreak and uncertainty she was feeling, she threw herself into maintaining the legitimacy of her marriage and the justification of her position as Henry’s wife, Mary’s mother and her country’s representative of the Church of Rome. She would not deviate from this position for the rest of her life.