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

by Amy Licence

  What is most surprising is that none of Anne’s enemies, so far as we know, capitalised on this latest loss in order to claim that the marriage was invalid. It is not impossible that courtiers hostile to the Boleyns exploited the situation by forwarding other candidates for the king’s affections; Catherine still had a number of loyal vocal supporters in high places and had been a popular queen, and she was also seen as the figurehead for Orthodox Catholicism, the old alliance with Spain and the Emperor, as well as an advocate for centuries of English submission to the Pope. It was to be expected that there would be rumours of discontent against Anne, but they tended to voice the usual criticisms of the new queen on a moral and dynastic level; her miscarriage of summer 1534 is not mentioned. Perhaps this means it was not common knowledge. One of her most vocal opponents that year was another woman.

  In January 1534, an Act of Parliament had made it treason to ‘impugn’ the marriage of the king and queen, specifically to deal with Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, who had previously been welcome at Henry’s court on account of her prophetic abilities. Her harmless predictions had been amusing enough, and fitted a wider context of consulting astrologers, astronomers and mystics when it came to anticipating events such as the genders of royal children. In around 1532, though, Barton had taken to criticising the king’s great matter, predicting his imminent death and having visions of the place reserved for him in hell. Among other claims, she said she had been present, in spirit, in Calais to witness an angel refusing to administer the sacraments to Henry, as a clear sign of divine displeasure. She had crossed the line and her public profile was sufficiently high that it was necessary for harsh measures to be taken. The usual accusations of sexual immorality and mental instability were levelled against her, just as they had been with women of previous centuries whose unruly speech had threatened the legal or temporal order. Now, Barton would suffer the ultimate penalty for ‘impugning’ the marriage, by a law brought into place after her words were spoken.

  Barton had been arrested in the autumn of 1533 and, upon examination, a number of others were revealed as ready to preach her ‘revelations’ as soon as she received ‘notice from God that it was time’. The Act of Attainder was passed in January, enabling her to be condemned without trial and, automatically guilty, she was hanged at Tyburn on 20 April 1534. However, Henry soon had bigger fishes to fry. The Act of Attainder describing Barton’s treason had also named a number of her associates, including John Fisher and Thomas More, who Henry had never forgiven for their support of Catherine and the old faith. Fisher had been imprisoned at the time of Anne’s coronation but More had refused to attend and now produced evidence to show that he had advised Barton to stop meddling in state affairs. It was too little, too late; Henry had devised a new net in which to catch them. A week before Barton’s death, both men were asked to attend to sign the First Act of Succession, and later the Act of Supremacy. They refused and were sent to the Tower. Remaining steadfast in their beliefs, More and Fisher would lose their heads in June and July 1535 respectively.

  Although comments about the miscarriage of 1534 may not have survived, it is likely that any coolness between the king and queen was manipulated by hostile forces at court. With Anne hoping for a new pregnancy in the autumn of 1534, a rumour surfaced about Henry’s infidelity with a woman referred to as the Imperial Lady. Chapuys wrote that the king had ‘renewed and increased the love which he formerly bore to another very handsome young lady of his court’, at which Anne had reputedly ‘attempted to dismiss the damsel from her service’. Apparently, this had occasioned harsh words from the king about the queen’s position, with Henry cautioning her that ‘she ought to be satisfied with what he has done for her, for, were he to commence again, he would certainly not do as much; she ought to consider where she came from’. These words cannot be verified but, if true, they represent an ominous harshness in the relationship, quite a contrast to what Henry was offering in his letters to Anne of 1526–27, where he offered to put aside all others for her. Those letters represented an attempt to convince Anne that they would enjoy an exclusive and honest relationship, more like a modern companionate marriage based in romantic love. If Anne’s eyes had not been opened by then, they were in autumn 1534. Henry had not scrupled to be unfaithful to Catherine, even during her childbearing years, despite maintaining the fact that he was in love with her; Anne came to the bitter realisation that her marriage would be no different.

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  The Shelton Sisters, 1535

  Queen Anne, behold your servants, the Three Graces

  Giving unto your Grace faithful assistance

  With their most goodly amiable faces.1

  If Anne had attempted to dismiss the ‘Imperial Lady’ in the autumn of 1534, this woman must have been one of the ladies in her household. Chapuys’ account also includes the details that it was someone with whom Henry had a history, as he refers to the king increasing the love he had formerly borne, and adds that the lady’s sympathies leaned towards Rome and the cause of Princess Mary. Who exactly could this paramour have been? An examination of the women in Anne’s household dating from January 1534 allows the search to be narrowed down somewhat.

  Firstly, the lady in question would not have been Mary Boleyn, as this would certainly have been commented on at the time and Anne’s reaction would have been more specifically aimed. Henry’s affections for Mary appear to have already run their course, and he would not have been so foolish to resurrect the relationship that had necessitated a dispensation for his second marriage. In addition, Mary also made her own marriage for love in 1534, becoming the wife of William Stafford in a secret ceremony. The young Mary Howard, Henry’s daughter-in-law since her marriage to Henry Fitzroy, can also be ruled out, as can the child Mary Norris, son of Henry. Another of Anne’s ladies, Elizabeth Holland, was the mistress of Lord Howard for twenty years, commencing around this time, so she was also probably not the Imperial woman of 1534. Another woman who had been in Anne’s household since 1533 was Frances de Vere. Her pretty features were sketched by Holbein, but given that Anne helped arrange the girl’s marriage by overruling her parents’ wishes, it seems unlikely that Frances was the lady who incurred the queen’s wrath the year before. Likewise, Anne Savage had witnessed Henry and Anne’s marriage in 1533, and was heavily pregnant throughout the autumn of 1534, giving birth late that November, so she was not Henry’s amour. Jane Parker is an interesting case, as there had previously been a rumour of a Mistress Parker receiving the king’s attention, but Anne appears to have been close to her sister-in-law, displaying trust in her and asking for her assistance to remove the Imperial Lady from court.

  A number of Anne’s waiting women have the potential to have been the mystery woman of 1534, although there is nothing to link them directly to the king. Grace Newport had been married at the age of eight to Henry Parker, son of Lord Morley, and bore him a child in 1533. The Holbein picture usually identified as her leaves little doubt as to her personal charms. Anne Bray, Lady Cobham, would have been in her early thirties at this point and was frequently pregnant at this time, possibly delivering at least one child in 1533 and another in 1535, which would rule her out. She may also have been the Nan Cobham who later testified against Queen Anne and, if so, a quashed flirtation with Henry in 1534, between her pregnancies, might have provided a motive if motivation were required. Another woman of a similar age to the queen was Elizabeth Browne, Countess Worcester, whose debt of £100 to the queen was outstanding in 1536. She would also later testify against Anne, making more direct accusations about her infidelity, in attempt to divert attention away from her own illegitimate pregnancy. It is stretching supposition too far to speculate whether the child Elizabeth was carrying in 1536, at the time of Anne’s fall, was fathered by the king.

  Another possible candidate was Anne’s waiting woman Margaret Gamage. She was approaching twenty in 1534 and had been married for a year to William Howard. The ceremony had taken place at Whiteh
all, for which Henry mounted a mock sea battle on the Thames, although the festivities were tainted by tragedy when several were injured and at least one man drowned. Margaret is reputed to have supported Princess Mary and according to Eric Ives was sent to the Tower for it briefly in 1535, but there is nothing to link her to the king in a romantic sense, either during the Imperial Lady incident of 1534 or before. Then there is Mary Zouche, another sitter for Holbein, who is believed to have entered royal service in her late teens to escape the cruelty of her stepmother. Aged around twenty in 1535, she was favoured by Jane Seymour but her future, including her possible marital status, is uncertain. There is nothing either to link the king with Eleanor Paston, Countess of Rutland, already the mother of six children and approaching forty by 1534, or Margaret Stanley, who bore two children between her marriage in 1532 and her husband’s remarriage in 1537 after her death.

  Also in Anne’s household were two women who did become the object of the king’s affection: Margaret or Madge Shelton and Jane Seymour. But their day had not yet come. Jane certainly was sympathetic to Princess Mary, but the suggestion that Henry had previously shown interest in this mystery woman rules them out. That leaves one woman out of the queen’s retinue who appears to be the most likely candidate.

  Jane or Joan Ashley was born around 1517 and definitely served as a maid of honour to Anne and then to Jane Seymour, before marrying Peter Mewtas in 1537, when she was aged around twenty. A surviving Holbein chalk sketch of her depicts a typical courtly lady of the time, with open face, large eyes and narrow mouth. It also contains a separate sketch of her hands, placed to the right of her head, where a heart-shaped leaf is featured on one of her fingers, a device that also appears in her oval pendant. Frequently used at the time as a symbol to depict the colour green among German portraitists, and perhaps representing an emerald ring, could this image be a clue to her identity as the king’s secret lover in 1534? The ring, in the Tudor colour of green, may have been a gift to the seventeen-year-old unmarried Jane, whose favours Henry may have been seeking before her marriage. She bore her husband at least four children and outlived the king by a couple of years. No direct evidence survives that she was Henry’s lover, but her age and profile, plus the detail of the heart leaf, might fit the unknown lady of 1534. It is the sort of coded message that portraitists and poets employed to hint at their secret affections. Whether Jane had caught the eye of the king before 1534 is not known, unless she was the same woman referred to in Chapuys’ report of the previous autumn, whom Henry had pursued during Anne’s pregnancy.

  There is always the possibility that both of these reports were fabricated by the ambassador, whose intention was to present the Emperor with the news he wished to hear about Henry’s ‘concubine’. Having initially raised the matter in September, Chapuys repeated the story in December, although stating that the ‘king’s passion for the young lady’ was not a threat to Anne’s marriage, unless it was to increase. He reported that he had been told by a Squire of the Body that Anne had ‘addressed certain remonstrances’ to Henry, complaining that ‘the young lady in question did not treat her with due respect in words or deeds’.2 This may have arisen because of the Imperial Lady’s support for Princess Mary. Apparently she sent a message to the princess, stating herself to be a ‘true friend and devoted servant’ and telling her to ‘take good heart’, because ‘her tribulations will come to an end much sooner than she expected’.3 This sounds very much like a concerted effort to challenge Anne’s hold over Henry, with the ultimate aim of replacing her on the throne or ousting her, rather than an idle flirtation on the part of this unknown love. It suggests that her affair with Henry was politically motivated, perhaps encouraged by other orthodox Catholics, as a conscious plot against Anne.

  In the same month, Chapuys reported an occasion, passed on to him by Nicholas Carew, when Anne laughed at a banquet in front of French Admiral de Brion. When challenged, she admitted that her outburst was caused by Henry meeting with a lady and forgetting the time.4 This was surely less a laugh of amusement than of irony and despair. The Bishop of Tarbres, visiting England that October, formed an impression that Henry’s affairs were undermining his marriage, writing to Francis I that the king’s love for Anne was ‘less than it had been, and diminishes day by day, because he has new amours’.5 However, John Husee’s letter to Lord Lisle presents a different picture of Anne and Henry that Christmas, keeping ‘a great house’ and appointing a Lord of Misrule to oversee the festivities.6 Chapuys thought that Anne had enlisted the help of her sister-in-law, Jane Parker, to annoy Henry by quarrelling with the Imperial Lady, in the hopes that she would be sent away from court for the sake of a quiet life. The plan backfired, though, and it was Jane who was dismissed for a while. In the end, Anne had to be patient as the king’s affection for the mysterious woman soon ran its course. By the end of February the following year, the romance of the Imperial Lady was over. Henry had found himself a new love.

  On 25 February 1535, Chapuys recorded that ‘the young lady who was lately in the king’s favour is so no longer. There has succeeded to her place a cousin of the concubine, daughter of the present governess of the princess.’ At that point, Mary’s household at Hatfield was being run by Anne Shelton, née Boleyn, the sister of Sir Thomas Boleyn. Her two elder daughters, Margaret or Madge, and Mary, were among the gentlewomen of their cousin Anne’s household. Although only an image of Mary remains, sketched in three-quarters profile by Holbein, her elder sister Margaret was also reputedly a beauty. This reputation is often based in her likeness to Christina of Milan, whom Henry was desirous of marrying, but actually it is not clear which ‘Mistress Shelton’ was meant. It may well have been Mary. In fact, in December 1537, John Hutton wrote to Cromwell that Christina ‘resembleth much one Mistress Shelton, that sometime waited in the court of Queen Anne’ and a month later John Husee specifically named Mary as a candidate for Henry’s next wife. Margaret was sufficiently good looking to catch the eye of Sir Francis Weston and Sir Henry Norris, but it may have been her accomplished sister who attracted a more royal suitor.

  Margaret was reputedly the elder of Sir John and Anne Shelton’s children, born in 1510, with Mary arriving around five years later. However, the similarities between their names and the possible confusion over the abbreviation ‘Marg’, which could easily be read as Mary, has led historians to wonder which sister was the recipient of Henry’s advances, and whether he may have had affairs with both of them, or even if they were, in fact, the same person. It has been suggested also that Anne asked one of her cousins to divert Henry’s attention from the Imperial Lady, or from Jane Seymour, who was noticed by the king in 1535, but there is no evidence to support this theory, nor that Anne was particularly close to either Margaret or Mary. This idea is included as a note in a Shelton family history book dating from a later period. Both ladies, assuming there were two of them, were younger than Anne and unmarried when they joined her household. They appear to have been part of the circle of poets and courtiers engaged in writing the kind of symbolic love poetry that Thomas Wyatt composed about Anne. Anecdotes exist about the queen chiding a Mistress Shelton for doodling in a religious text, and that one or both of them contributed to an anthology of poetry known as the Devonshire Manuscript. This work, compiled by numerous authors over a period of several years, contains poems by leading courtiers such as Wyatt and Lord Howard, but around eighty items remain anonymous, or identified by initials alone, as well as copies of works of earlier medieval poets. It has been suggested that the collection was compiled primarily by women: Henry’s daughter-in-law Mary Howard, his niece Margaret Douglas and either Mary or Margaret Shelton. It also contains poems written in beautiful handwriting by the son of Margaret Douglas, the future husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, Henry, Lord Darnley.

  Mary Shelton is identified by most scholars as being the owner of the handwriting of six poems in the Devonshire Manuscript. They follow the conventional themes of love, loss and the need to conceal
the poet’s true feelings. One is a transcription of a poem by Edmund Knyvett, who had married Anne Shelton, sister of Mary and Margaret, in 1527. Another is a copy of an earlier poem, leaving four that are potentially Mary’s own compositions. One of these is a short lyric signed with Mary’s name and describes a lost love, which she yearns for and will rejoice when she has regained:

  A wel I hawe at other lost

  not as my nowen I do protest

  bot wan I hawe got that I hawe mest

  I shal regoys among the rest7

  One of the anonymous poems in her hand describes the need to conceal her feelings, ‘to counterfit a merry mood’, using the metaphor of wearing a cloak in rain, although this proves ultimately ineffective for the narrator. The same image appears in another of her works, where it is used ‘to cloke my greffe wer yt doth grow’ when her one-time friend has become her foe.8 Whether or not they relate to an affair Mary may have had with the king, or to the love affair she had with Thomas Clere, they illustrate the atmosphere of the inner circle of Anne’s court, of love games, poetry, innuendo and concealed affections, as well as the tension between public and private that would lead directly to the events that brought Anne’s reputation into question.