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

by Amy Licence

  Verses for the occasion were composed by John Leland and Nicholas Udall, who produced the definitive poem celebrating Anne through the use of her falcon device:

  This White Falcon, No bird compare

  Rare and geason, May with this Falcon White.

  This bird shineth so bright; The virtues all,

  Of all that are, No man mortal,

  Of this bird can write. Excelleth she,

  No man earthly Most like a virgin bright:

  Enough truly And worthy is

  Can praise this Falcon White. To live in bliss

  Who will express Always this Falcon White.

  Great gentleness But now to take

  To be in any wight [man]; And use her make

  He will not miss, Is time, as troth is plight;

  But call him this That she may bring

  The gentle Falcon White. Fruit according

  This gentle bird For such a Falcon White.

  As white as curd And where by wrong,

  Shineth both day and night; She hath fleen long,

  Nor far nor near Uncertain where to light;

  Is any peer Herself repose

  Unto this Falcon White, Upon the Rose,

  Of body small. Now may this Falcon White.

  Of power regal, Whereon to rest,

  She is, and sharp of sight; And build her nest;

  Of courage hault GOD grant her, most of might!

  No manner fault That England may

  Is in this Falcon White, Rejoice always

  In chastity, In this same Falcon White

  The verse is conventional and formulaic, as would be expected, but its imagery highlights the qualities that Henry was most keen to see associated with his new queen in the popular imagination. By stressing the falcon’s, and by extension Anne’s, incomparability with any other mortal, the poem comments on her worthiness to rule beside Catherine, while the bird’s immortal virtue is a reminder that the Church had ruled in favour of her marriage, thus Anne was approved by God. The simile that she was white as curd, and therefore pure, and shone at day and night, suggests an attempt to present Anne’s chastity during her daily life and in Henry’s bed, ‘more like a virgin bright’ an irony that cannot have been lost on the crowd as the pregnant queen passed by. Anne had been ‘wronged so long’ regarding the king’s marriage to Catherine that she would now ‘herself repose upon the rose’, indicating the nature of relief, ease and intimacy in her relationship with Henry, and build a nest there for her fruit.

  Early the following morning, between eight and nine, Anne processed from Westminster Hall to the abbey on the traditional ray cloth, surrounded by the nobility and clergymen of England. She wore a surcoat and robe of purple velvet, with the jewelled circlet on her loose hair again and her long train carried by the Duchess of Norfolk. The ladies and gentlemen following were all clad in scarlet, powdered according to their degrees. Anne prostrated herself at the high altar before the waiting Cranmer, then being anointed on the head and breast and having the crown of St Edward briefly placed upon her head before it was substituted for a lighter one of her own. After hearing Mass, she made an offering at the shrine of Edward the Confessor before placing her right hand in that of her father and being led out to the sound of trumpets. The king himself watched the proceedings from a little closet, accessed by the cloisters.6 In a break with the usual tradition, the banquet that followed was held at the newly refurbished Whitehall, reputedly Anne’s favourite house, as it did not contain lodgings for Catherine.7 The new queen was served three courses, each of thirty dishes or over, served by the nobility of Henry’s court, including Sir Thomas Wyatt, who took the role of chief ewerer. Anne finally withdrew at six in the evening and the couple were reunited, to share their excitement and joy about the day’s proceedings and the forthcoming birth of their child.

  It must have been a dark day for Catherine. That March she had been moved to Ampthill in Bedfordshire, forty miles from London, to be out of sight, although not out of mind. Weeks before Anne’s coronation, she had been summoned by Thomas Cranmer to attend a court at Dunstable Priory, to be examined regarding her marriages to Arthur and Henry. Catherine had refused to attend. In her absence, the momentous step was taken that Henry, Anne and Catherine had been preoccupied with for so long: as head of the new Church of England, Cranmer fulfilled his king’s expectations and pronounced that Henry’s first marriage was null and void, making Anne his first legitimate wife. Contrary to the descriptions of popular history, Henry’s separation from Catherine was never a divorce; the marriage was annulled on the grounds that it was invalid from the start.

  Lord Mountjoy, Catherine’s chamberlain since 1512, was charged with the task of delivering the bad news to her. She was no longer to be referred to as queen, but must revert to the title of princess dowager, her status on the death of Arthur. Mountjoy was instructed to inform her that

  the king, finding his conscience violated, grudged, and grieved by that unlawful matrimony contracted between him and the Dowager, which was defined and determined by a great number of the most famous universities and clerks of Christendom ‘to be detestable, abominable, execrable, and directly against the laws of God and nature,’ was therefore lawfully divorced, and by advice of all his nobles, spiritual and temporal, and all the commons of his realm, was married to the lady Anne, who has been crowned Queen.

  As the king cannot have two wives he cannot permit the Dowager to persist in calling herself by the name of Queen, especially considering how benignantly and honourably she has been treated in the realm. She is to satisfy herself with the name of Dowager, as prescribed by the Act of Parliament, and must beware of the danger if she attempt to contravene it, which will only irritate the feelings of the people against her. If she be not persuaded by these arguments to avoid the king’s indignation, and relent from her vehement arrogancy, the king will be compelled to punish her servants, and withdraw her affection from his daughter. Finally, that as the marriage is irrevocable, and has passed the consent of Parliament, nothing that she can do will annul it, and she will only incur the displeasure of Almighty God and of the king.

  Catherine refused to comply. She insisted on still being referred to as queen and scribbled out any written references to her as dowager princess. A number of her staff supported her loyally, stating they had taken an oath to serve her as ‘queen’ and would be committing perjury if they now referred to her by another title.8 At the end of July, she was moved on again, from Ampthill to Buckden House in Cambridgeshire, but the local people gathered outside the house as she left, to cheer and encourage her. The loyal Chapuys painted rather a dramatic picture of the occasion – ‘they begged her with hot tears to set them to work and employ them in her service, as they were ready to die for the love of her’ – but there were other examples of support being publicly demonstrated for Catherine that summer. Across Henry’s palaces, the initials H and K were being rapidly cut away and replaced with the onomatopoeic H and A that Anne’s enemies found so risible. Buckden Towers was almost thirty miles north-east from Ampthill, representing a step further away from London, from the court and Princess Mary, who had been suffering from ill health for much of that year. While Catherine was separated from her own child, Anne was preparing to welcome hers. If she could bear a boy, the line of Tudor succession would be unquestionably settled and the Boleyns’ power inviolable. Writing to celebrate the coronation, John Leland requested that ‘heaven bless these nuptials and make her a fruitful mother of men-children. Fruitful Saint Anne bore three men, the offspring of her body … by her example, may you give us a race to maintain the Faith and the Throne.’9 As summer progressed, Anne waited for her son to arrive. Her coronation medal had carried the legend ‘the most happy’. And she probably was.

  A suite of rooms were prepared for Anne at Greenwich, hung with tapestries depicting the life of St Ursula, and the magnificent bed given in ransom for the Duc d’Alencon in 1515 was moved out of the royal treasury. With Char
les’ council discussing intervention by force and Pope Clement threatening to excommunicate Henry if he did not leave Anne and return to Catherine, Henry faced a potential international crisis. However, this was kept secret so that it ‘may not injure the Lady and endanger a miscarriage’. This also makes it seem unlikely that Henry and Anne quarrelled in the way that the hostile Chapuys reported, presenting the marriage on the verge of collapse after Anne discovered that Henry had been unfaithful. The king’s sharp response that she needed to keep her mouth shut, as her betters had done, may be an exaggeration but Henry’s infidelity is not completely impossible. If Anne had been a virgin until late autumn 1532, she must have conceived almost at once. Having anticipated their full sexual relationship for seven years, they quickly found themselves in the position of not being able to enjoy this for very long, as Anne’s pregnancy advanced. The unborn child, no matter how desired, put an end to their honeymoon period before it had run its course. On 26 August, Anne retired to her rooms and went into labour about ten days later. Chapuys wrote that ‘the king, believing in the report of his physicians and astrologers, that his Lady will certainly give him a male heir, has made up his mind to solemnize the event with a pageant and tournament’, and horses had been ordered from Flanders.10 Between three and four o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday 7 September, she was delivered of a healthy child. It was a girl.

  42

  A Familiar Story, 1533–34

  I saw a wound at first susceptible of cure

  But neglected, suffered the bane of long delay1

  The arrival of a daughter was a setback for Anne, but at least she had survived the process and proven to Henry that she was capable of bearing a healthy heir; all she had to do next was to provide Princess Elizabeth with a brother. Still, the mood of disappointment lingered at court. The celebratory jousts were cancelled and the paperwork announcing the birth was altered to reflect the child’s gender.

  Elizabeth’s christening was held at the Grey Friars’ church at Greenwich on 10 September, just three days after her birth. Anne did not attend, as she was still in confinement, recovering from the ordeal, so the arrangements were handed over to the princess’s godparents, Archbishop Cranmer and the Marquess of Exeter, the dowager Duchess of Norfolk and the dowager Marchioness of Dorset. Catherine had refused to give permission for the use of a piece of ‘rich and gorgeous’ ceremonial cloth that had been used at the christening of Princess Mary in 1516, on the grounds that it was her personal possession from Spain. This did little to prevent the pomp of the occasion, though, for which new cloths were ordered along with the silver font from Canterbury, hangings of arras and the formal procession of mayor, aldermen and nobility that accompanied Elizabeth as she was anointed with holy water and prayers said for her future. Then she was returned to her mother, who received her ‘joyfully’, ‘lying on her great French bed with the king at her side’.

  It was a less than happy time for Henry’s former wife. That December, in an attempt to break her will, Catherine was threatened with another move, this time from Buckden to Somersham Palace in Cambridgeshire. It was a place surrounded by fens and marshes, thought to be very unhealthy, which fed Catherine’s fears that her very life was in danger. Indeed, the records of disputes between the bishops of Ely and abbots of Ramsay regarding the site do describe the nearby Crowlodemoor and Hollode as ‘marshes’,2 which might explain the place’s rapid recent decline. The Tudor palace had been constructed on the site of an earlier manor with extensive gardens by James Stanley, Bishop of Ely, whose 1515 tomb records that ‘he builded Sommersome the byshoppe’s chief manor’. It quickly fell into disrepair after his death, though, and by 1520 the palace was in a state of disrepair bordering on the dangerous. The next incumbent, Bishop Nicholas West, described it as his ‘poor house at Somersham’ and in a letter to Wolsey said that he was so surrounded with water that he could not leave and no one could go to him without great danger except by boat. The banks were in ‘great danger of collapsing and five hundred men were working on them to prevent the low country there from being drowned, while a further hundred watched at night, in case the water should break through’.3 In 1533, an accumulation of building material at the property indicates that preparations were being made to patch over the problems in readiness for the royal arrival, but Catherine had other ideas.

  When Henry’s officials arrived to load her baggage and evict her, the ex-queen locked herself in her room and challenged them to break the door down and carry her away. This was a serious test of her strength and status – there was no guarantee that Henry’s servants would not carry out such an act of violence. Yet Catherine’s birth, her years as their queen and their respect for her prevailed. Waiting behind her locked door, she heard them ride away. It was a small victory, and rather a pyrrhic one; Catherine would never live at Somersham, but Henry was intent on breaking her by moving her to another, less convenient place. He soon settled on a new location, and this time his former wife was given no choice but to comply.

  In May 1534, Catherine was relocated from Buckden House to Kimbolton Castle in Cambridgeshire. This was a far less hazardous residence, even if it was not suitable for a woman of her status. Work in the 1480s had improved the original twelfth-century castle and in 1521 it was described as ‘a right goodly lodging contained in little room, within a moat well and compendiously trussed together in due and convenient proportion, one thing with another, with an inner court … lodgings and offices for keeping a duke’s house in stately manner’. However, like Somersham, the place desperately needed some essential repairs ‘by occasion of the old wall, the hall there well builded is likely to perish; and through the said castle is and will be great decay, by occasion there is no reparations done.’ Sir Richard Wingfield was granted the castle by Henry in 1522 and rebuilt the affected areas as well as adding to the building, allowing Leland to report that ‘the Castelle is double dyked and the building of it is … strong … [with] new fair lodgings and galleries upon the olde foundations of the Castelle’. Later inventories list a ‘great hall with screens, a long gallery, a chapel, dining room, drawing room, upper round chamber, lower round chamber, queen’s chamber, and many other rooms, a gatehouse, stables, the Castle Court, Dial Court, the Great Garden, and the Little fountain Garden’. The bedchamber and closet allocated to Catherine are reputed to have survived the castle’s later modernisation. With the former queen out of sight, Henry could anticipate the arrival of his next child by Anne. Aware of the impending arrival, it must have been a low point for Catherine, still separated from her daughter, the court and the majority of her servants and friends. As she had before, she found solace in her faith, clinging more closely to the very rituals of Catholicism that the failure of her marriage would undermine.

  Far away from Catherine’s seclusion, Anne was keen to see her daughter’s position secured and her longstanding connections with France led her to seek a match for Elizabeth with one of Francis I’s sons. The one-time suggestion of a French match for Princess Mary was long forgotten and the new royal baby was displayed in all her naked glory to the visiting ambassadors at Greenwich. Anne and Henry suggested Prince Charles, Duke d’Anglouleme, as a potential bridegroom, who was then aged twelve and reputed to be handsome, although smallpox had left him blind in one eye. Francis, however, seemed reluctant, beginning to veer away from the English alliance towards a union with the Emperor. This possibility was finally abandoned in 1535, and Anne interpreted it as the vote of no confidence in her queenship which it was probably intended to be. However, Francis had clearly learned something from Henry’s great matter, as when his second son, the fourteen-year-old Henry, had been married to Catherine de Medici in October 1533, Francis remained in their wedding chamber to ensure that the match was consummated. He is supposed to have commented, in a crude metaphor, that each had ‘shown valour in the joust’. Henry was offended by Francis’ increasing coolness but there were plenty of other potential husbands out there for Elizabeth, particula
rly once she was the sister of the future King of England.

  Anne’s second pregnancy is something of a mystery. At New Year 1534, her gift to Henry had been a ‘goodly gilt basin’ containing a fountain set with three naked women amid pearls, diamonds and rubies, with water flowing from their breasts. This overt symbol of fertility, a reminder of the main reason for their marriage, may have been coupled with the news that she had conceived, as rumours followed to this effect through the month of January. By early March the pregnancy was common knowledge, with preparations being made for a nursery at Eltham ‘against the coming of the prince’. This would suggest that the child had quickened by this point, to allow for Anne’s condition to be diagnosed with certainty, and pushes the moment of conception back into the previous November. With Anne’s churching taking place in early October, her menstrual cycle must have quickly returned as she conceived again within weeks.

  This rapid timescale is consistent with Catherine’s early conceptions and the protocol that prevented Anne from breastfeeding, with its contraceptive benefits. Through April to June she was reported as having a ‘goodly belly’, and by the summer Henry had declined the opportunity to visit France in anticipation of the child’s arrival. Yet no child came. There are no records of Anne entering confinement or the usual preparation of a suite at rooms, which would have been expected to take place at Greenwich. Nor are there any surviving reports of a miscarriage or stillbirth, although this is the most likely explanation of what happened.

  It remains uncertain just how far this second pregnancy progressed, although a November conception and August delivery would seem to fit the known evidence. With the final observation of Anne’s growing belly dating to June, though, it is surprising that preparations do not appear to have been made for her lying-in. Building work was taking place in the queen’s apartments at Hampton Court, but this appears to have been part of a scheme planned in 1533, to abandon the existing lodgings in favour of new ones on the same floor level. It would appear that Anne lost the child before the usual preparations began, which would usually be initiated around the seventh month. This would place her loss in late June or early in July. To Henry, this must have seemed worryingly close to the experiences of Catherine, who had lost children in the final trimester. Did he start to wonder whether God was as displeased with his second marriage as he had been with the king’s first? That summer the marriage was around eighteen months old, and even though Henry was turning forty-three and Anne was now in her early thirties there was still every chance of them having more children. Anne, though, must have been keen to fall pregnant for a third time. It must have seemed to her that, after all those years of waiting at Henry’s side, her tenure on the throne was being shaped, perhaps spoiled, by a desperate race to produce a son.