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

by Amy Licence

  In May 1532, Henry ordered Catherine to leave the Manor of the More and move to Hatfield, in Hertfordshire, ‘a house much farther off than where she now is, and with bad accommodation. The queen is vexed, because the house belongs to the Bishop of Lincoln, who has been the principal promoter of these practices’ but, as Montfalconet pointed out to Charles, she was retaining her dignity: ‘The queen, although surrounded by vile persons devoted to the king, has never in any way given any occasion for slander, and even those who endeavour to damage her in the estimation of the king are struck with admiration for her virtue.’13 Hatfield had been built around a central courtyard in 1497 by John Morton, Bishop of Ely, with its impressive decorative red brickwork and banqueting hall, and would later be used as a home for Princess Mary and the rest of Henry’s children. In 1532, though, it represented the increasing isolation of a queen who was considered an inconvenience.

  That month, support for Catherine grew. It was said that ‘all love the queen’ and her supportive clergymen, including John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, ‘preached daily in her favour’, even though some ran the risk of arrest, with her chaplain Thomas Abel publishing a book, Invicta Veritas, in her favour, and Chancellor Thomas More resigning his position over Henry’s proposed supremacy over the Pope. Even Charles Brandon, the king’s closest companion and brother-in-law, whose wife’s dislike of Anne Boleyn was an open secret, declared that it was time for Henry to be talked out of his folly. The turning tide must have been uncomfortable for Anne. In July, she and Henry headed north on an extended hunting trip that included a five-day stay at Waltham, where the French ambassador accompanied Anne hunting and watching the deer run. Henry was concerned for their privacy, as later Privy Purse payments show 40s being paid ‘to the smith, for bolts and rings to the king’s chamber door all the time of the progress’.14 Was this more to repel potential intruders, or to keep the secret of what was going on within? Although ‘great preparations’ had been made, the trip was cut short and they returned to London. According to Chapuys, ‘some say the cause is that, in two or three places that he passed through, the people urged him to take back the queen, and the women insulted the Lady [Anne]’.15 Yet Henry and Anne were planning a far more significant conquest, in the form of Francis I.

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  Calais, 1532

  To bed them were they brought

  That night on his lady mild

  As God would, he gat a child

  But they of it wist nought.1

  On Sunday 1 September at Windsor, Anne Boleyn was created Marchioness of Pembroke. She was conveyed by a party of noblemen and the castle’s officers-at-arms into the king’s presence for the honour designed to prepare her for the trip to France. The whole process mirrored the rituals of the coronation. Anne’s cousin, Mary Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk and soon to become the wife of young Henry Fitzroy, carried the coronet and a crimson mantle lined with ermine. Anne wore a corresponding crimson surcoat with straight sleeves, also with ermine, and with her hair traditionally loose. She knelt before Henry to receive the patent of her creation and another of £1,000 a year. Then, no doubt exhilarated by the significance of her new status, she bade the king a dignified thanks and ‘returned to her chamber’.2

  It was important for Anne to look the part in France, to be accepted as Henry’s consort and, to this effect, new clothes and jewels were ordered for her wardrobe. Back in June, £4 had been paid for thirteen yards of black satin to make a cloak for Anne, with black velvet for edging and lining. A further thirteen yards of black satin went to make her a nightgown, at 8s a yard, with taffeta, buckram and velvet for its lining,3 and over sixteen yards of green damask were acquired for John Skut for her use, at the same price. Perhaps they planned their trip enjoying the suckets and marmalade brought to the king by a servant of Cromwell’s, or listening to the singing of the nightingales that had been given to them by George Boleyn.4 However, there were also a number of old jewels that Henry and Anne had in their sights.

  In late September, Catherine received a message from the Duke of Norfolk stating that Henry wished her to return her jewels, which were needed to adorn Anne for the coming visit. Her collection of gems included some state pieces, gifts from her husband and inheritances from other family members, but also some that she had brought with her from Spain. They were far more than just wealth; their possession was a critical indicator of status and a connection to her past, both as queen and the legacy of her parents; they were also heirlooms for her daughter. Catherine responded with righteous passion, refusing to ‘give up my jewels for such a wicked purpose as that of ornamenting a person who is the scandal of Christendom’. She would only relinquish them if Henry issued a direct order, so Henry did. A record dated 24 September shows a further removal of jewels from storage at Greenwich to the king at Hampton Court, including a gold chain, Spanish fashion, enamelled red, white and black; an excess of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls, sapphires and garnets were received by Cromwell a week later.5 It was another humiliation for Catherine in a long line of humiliations; she was permitted to keep a small gold cross that reputedly contained a shard of wood from the real cross, but the knowledge that her jewels had gone to her rival, who was about to be feasted and treated as a queen in France, must have made a bitter day indeed for her.

  Henry and Anne were excited about their forthcoming trip, which represented a significant recognition of Anne’s status in the eyes of Europe. Her acceptance by Francis as Henry’s consort, as Catherine’s replacement, would be a final step towards making her Queen of England, with a political and diplomatic role. If not exactly an old friend, Francis was well known to them both and his own understanding of the complexity of marital relations would ease Anne’s foreign debut. As Chapuys wrote, ‘the king seems never to have desired anything so much as this journey, for he does not care to talk of anything else. No one else wishes it except the lady, and the people talk of it in a strange fashion.’ It is understandable that the trip set tongues wagging, only twelve years after Henry had departed in pomp with Catherine by his side, yet the king’s excitement suggests that they may have intended this to be an important private step as well as a public one. If they had not already slept together by this point, this might have been the moment he, or they both, selected in advance of their trip; perhaps they went as far as to plan their wedding. Catherine believed they would take the opportunity to marry, although Chapuys thought it unlikely, as Anne would want it to be done by the book: ‘The queen was very much afraid that the king would marry the Lady at this meeting; but the Lady has assured some person in whom she trusts, that, even if the king wished, she would not consent, for she wishes it to be done here in the place where queens are wont to be married and crowned.’6

  One occurrence in the late summer might have removed the final barrier to their restraint. In August, Catherine’s staunch supporter Archbishop William Warham had died, leaving the See of Canterbury vacant. Henry’s choice for the job was the pro-Boleyn Reformist Thomas Cranmer. He was travelling through Italy as ambassador to Charles’ court when he received a letter on 1 October 1532, informing him that he had been appointed. He would have known what Henry’s expectations of him were. If the Pope would not give Henry the divorce wanted, he was resolved to break with Rome and head his own Church of England, where all such matters would be referred to his sympathetic appointees.

  While one barrier was removed, another potential problem arose. This was the moment that Mary Talbot, now Countess of Northumberland, chose to seek an end to her unhappy marriage to Henry Percy. Relations between the couple had broken down in the late 1520s, with both making allegations against the other ranging from unkindness and deception to the claims made by Mary’s father than Percy might attempt to poison his wife. The countess’s pretext for divorce was her husband’s pre-contract with Anne Boleyn, and, regardless of whether this was entirely privately motivated or was employed by the Aragon faction to prevent Henry from marrying Anne, it might undermi
ne any union he had with Anne in the same way that his grandfather Edward IV’s marriage had been. Henry could take no chances and summoned Percy to his presence to undergo a rigorous questioning, which the king himself led. The countess’s request was denied on the basis that there had been no pre-contract, to which Percy swore an oath, undermining his own chance of gaining freedom from a woman he had reluctantly wed. The couple lived apart after this, until Percy’s death finally freed Mary, who lived until 1572.

  On 10 October, Henry and Anne arrived at Dover and stayed overnight in the castle. Early the next morning they set sail in a ship named Swallow, arriving in Calais for an ‘honourable reception’. They were lodged at the Exchequer, where Henry and Catherine had stayed in 1520, and awaited the arrival of Francis. Dressed in a coat of riches, ‘in braids of gold laid loose on russet velvet and set with trefoils full of pearls and stones’, Henry met the equally gorgeous Francis, who had chosen a coat of crimson velvet with the gold lining pulled through the slashes. Anne remained behind in Calais, awaiting their return, with her thirty of her ladies, including her sister-in-law, Jane Boleyn, for company. In a twist of fate, Anne’s former admirer Thomas Wyatt was also present – perhaps somewhat reluctantly if his poem on the occasion is to be trusted – but he would have accompanied Henry rather than remained behind with Anne. Two weeks passed before the kings rode triumphantly back and Francis was lodged in the Inn of the Staple, in rooms hung with tissue and velvet, embroidered with flowers, where he dined on ‘all manner of flesh, fowl, spice, venison, both of fallow deer and red deer, and as for wine, they lacked none’.7 Francis sent Anne a diamond as a gift of friendship and welcome but his wife was less warm. The widowed French king had been married to Eleanor of Austria on 4 July 1530, a daughter of Philip the Handsome and Joanna and a niece of Catherine of Aragon. Although she had shared a schoolroom with Anne Boleyn in the household of Margaret of Savoy, Eleanor could not now accept her as her aunt’s replacement and declined to meet Anne at all during the visit. Another version of her absence has Henry refusing to meet her because of her background and his dislike of Spanish dress, but this would have been a considerable insult to a queen in her regnal country and it is unlikely that the rejection was on the English side, given Henry’s keenness to receive the blessing of Francis. Anne suggested that Francis’ sister, Marguerite of Angouleme, who she ‘ever hath entirely loved’, might attend in Eleanor’s place, but the new Queen of Navarre was ill and unable to travel.

  On Sunday 27 October, when the kings’ business was concluded, Anne finally made her international debut as Henry’s partner. That night, Francis came to dine with Henry in a chamber hung alternately with panels of silver and gold tissue, with seams covered with embroidered gold, full of pearls and gems. A cupboard with seven shelves displayed plate of gold and gilt, while white silver branches bore chains from which were hung wax lights. Three courses were served, totalling 150 dishes of ‘costly and pleasant’ food, with the meat dressed in the French style for Francis and in the English styles for Henry. Then, Anne entered the chamber with seven ladies, all masked, wearing crimson tinsel satin with cloth of silver ‘lying lose’ and caught up in gold laces. Every lady ‘took a lord’, with Anne partnering Francis, before her identity was revealed.8 After she removed her mask, the pair talked ‘for a space’ before the French king retired for the night.

  On 29 October, they bid farewell to Francis and prepared to leave Calais. The weather, though, was terrible, with storms making it dangerous to cross the channel and ‘such a winde, tempest and thunder that no man could conveniently stir in the streets of Calais’.9 Waiting for two weeks at the Exchequer in their fine rooms, linked by a connecting door, this may well have been the moment that Henry and Anne consummated their love. If they had not slept together before, this event had been eagerly anticipated for seven years and a lot was riding on it. If Anne had successfully held Henry at bay all that time, protecting the virginity she now yielded to her experienced lover, it must have signified that she felt certain of their future. They finally left Calais at midnight on 12 November and, after a terrible crossing, sailed into Dover early in the morning of 14 November, St Erkenwald’s Day. According to Hall and Sanders, they got married the same day, probably in the chapel or their apartments at Dover Castle.

  Two months later, when they suspected Anne was pregnant, another ceremony took place on 25 January 1533. This lessens the likelihood of the November wedding, which may have been suggested in order to provide retrospective evidence that their daughter had been conceived within wedlock rather than before it. The January ceremony was a private affair. Cranmer was unaware it had happened until two weeks later, so it was probably Rowland Lee who presided over it at York Place; he was promoted to Bishop of Coventry the following year. It was witnessed by Anne’s gentlewoman Anne Savage and Henry’s close companions Henry Norris and Thomas Heneage. This momentous step remained a secret from the nation for the time being, but the arrival of the child Anne conceived in late November or early December, would necessitate their love being displayed in the most public of forums.

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  Rise of the Falcon, 1533

  Behold and see the Falcon White

  How she beginneth her wings to spread

  And for our comfort to take her flight

  But where will she cease, as you do read?1

  On Thursday 29 May 1533, a flotilla of boats took to the Thames. The first bore the model of a huge dragon ‘continually moving and casting wild fire’ across the waves ‘and round it, terrible monsters and wild men casting fire, and making hideous noises’.2 The barge of the mayor followed it, at the head of a fleet of fifty others, hung with banners and gold and silk cloth, bearing dignitaries dressed in the scarlet and crimson robes of office. The sound of hundreds of tiny tinkling bells and the playing of musicians on each barge reached observers on the shore. On the left-hand side of the mayor stood a statue of Anne’s emblem of the white falcon, standing high on a mount, dressed in a gold crown and surrounded by red and white roses. In a long procession, they headed downriver towards Greenwich where they moored, played music and waited.

  At three o’clock, Anne appeared from the palace dressed in rich cloth of gold and accompanied by her retinue. She entered her barge and the noblemen accompanying her joined the procession in boats of their own to accompany her back along the Thames to the Tower, where they were met by a salute of guns. Henry was awaiting her at the waterside gate and greeted her with a ‘loving countenance’,3 before she turned and thanked the mayor and disappeared into the Tower. The following day, Friday, Henry created eighteen new Knights of the Bath, including Francis Weston and Henry Parker, brother of Jane, Anne’s sister-in-law. Anne had a day of rest before the ceremonies that would place her at centre of national focus, as Henry’s wife and the country’s new queen, began again. As she waited in the Tower, watching the hours pass, did she reflect upon the journey that had taken her to this point, from the moment she first attracted the king’s attention seven years before? Now she was six months pregnant with the heir he had longed for, a child she hoped would be the future King of England.

  On Saturday, Anne left the Tower to process through the streets of London to Westminster. Dressed in his crimson robes and the golden chains of his office, the mayor, Stephen Peacock, rode to greet her, with two footmen clad in red and white damask. The sheriffs rode ahead, along streets that would have been swept, cleaned and sanded, with the pressing crowds railed back on both sides. Next came a company of twelve Frenchmen dressed in blue and yellow velvet, in the employ of the ambassador, Jean de Dinteville, who was immortalised in Holbein’s famous memento mori picture that year. Two by two after them came gentlemen and knights, followed by Judges and Knights of the Bath in violet gowns and miniver-lined hoods, before the abbots, bishops, barons, earls, marquises, then Sir Thomas Audley as Lord Chancellor, Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord William Howard as deputy marshal during his brother’s absence in France and Charl
es Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, as high constable.

  Anne followed, in a vision of white. She sat in a litter of white cloth, pulled by two palfreys covered from head to toe in white damask, and wore a surcoat of white cloth of tissue, an ermine mantle and on her loose hair, a coif with a circlet of rich stones. Sixteen knights carried a canopy of gold cloth and bells above her head. Her ladies wore crimson velvet adorned with gold and tissue, their horses draped in gold. Four chariots followed, of red cloth of gold and white, carrying her female relations and more of her ladies. Thirty more gentlewomen followed and the procession was brought to a close by the guards at the rear.

  The first pageant awaited them at Fenchurch, where children dressed as merchants sang verses of welcome in English and French. At Gracechurch Corner, a mountain of white marble flowed with four streams running with Rhenish wine and Apollo and Calliope sat with four muses, playing music and praising Anne in epigrams. At Leadenhall, another mountain under a gold canopy was set with red and white roses, with a crowned falcon, and St Anne ‘made a goodly oration to the queen about the fruitfulness of St Anne … trusting that like fruit should come of her’.4 The three graces met them by the Conduit of Cornhill and the Cheap was hung with banners of arms and painted images of kings and queens were displayed. At the Cross, Anne was presented with a purse of gold containing a thousand marks, ‘which she thankfully accepted with many goodly words’.5 She received a golden ball from the figure of Mercury at the Little Conduit and wafers inscribed with welcome messages were showered down from St Paul’s Gate. Two hundred children recited verses, a male choir sung new ballads and melodious chimes sounded before they reached the final pageant of a tower with four turrets. Anne then retired to Westminster, where the hall was hung with arras and the windows freshly glazed. There, she was served with spices and subtleties, hippocras and wine, before retiring with her ladies to private rooms in Whitehall, where she was dressed, before heading back to spend the night with Henry.