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

by Amy Licence

  In 1535, one of the king’s former mistresses created a new scandal. Back at court in the household of her sister, Mary Boleyn’s secret marriage to William Stafford could no longer be concealed as her pregnancy began to show. As the queen’s sister, her marriage to a man of lower status was an unforgivable move, casting shame on the king and eliminating Mary as a valuable marital commodity. Mary was cut off from her furious family and forced to leave, a ‘poor banished creature’ who approached Cromwell for assistance. ‘Love overcame reason,’ she wrote, regarding her marriage to Stafford. ‘For my part I saw so much honesty in him, that I loved him as well as he did me … [I] could never have had one that should have loved [me better] though I might have had a greater man of birth and a higher.’ She would rather ‘beg my bread with him than be the greatest queen in Christendom’. Her family were ‘so cruel against us’, and she felt she was ‘never like to recover her grace’s favour’, that she threw herself on Cromwell’s mercy. The king had little patience with his former lover’s disgrace and Anne would run out of time before she could be reconciled with her sister. Ironically, in a sense, it would be Mary who ended up as ‘the most happy’ of all her immediate Boleyn family, escaping the brutal downfall of her siblings, married to a man she loved, who loved her in return, and living out her final years at Rochford Hall, in Essex, before her death in 1543.

  Back at court, the king’s attention was drawn by his mistresses of the present rather than the past. Any relationship Mary or Margaret Shelton had with Henry was brief. They were a pleasant diversion of six months’ duration at the most, by which point his interest in Jane Seymour had begun to develop. Anne’s own relationship had established a precedent, whereby an attractive and unmarried woman in the queen’s employ might win the hand of the king and the nation’s crown. Such a thing had been unthinkable within living memory before her rise, but Anne’s meteoric success opened the door for her ladies to do the same; now the Margaret or Mary Sheltons and the Jane Seymours could aspire to much more than Mary Boleyn or Bessie Blount had. Anne was fully aware of this. Just as she had carved out her own career, the new queen was, to an extent, the author of her own demise. It was her playful courtliness and magnetic sexuality that had attracted Henry, which also gave him ammunition to rid himself of her once he had determined to marry again. When, in April 1536, Anne joked with Sir Henry Norris that the marriage he hoped to enter with Margaret was being delayed because he preferred Anne and ‘looked for dead men’s shoes’, courtly flirtation crossed the line into treasonous talk and precipitated her own fall.

  PART SIX

  Jane Seymour

  44

  Death of a Queen, January 1536

  Thou couldst desire no earthly thing,

  But still thou hadst it readily.

  Thy music still to play and sing;

  And yet thou wouldst not love me.1

  During the summer of 1535, Henry and Anne went on annual progress out of the claustrophobic court during the warmest summer months, which were also the most dangerous for the spread of illness and disease. Leaving Windsor early in July, they passed through Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, staying at the houses of courtiers and leading noble families of the day before arriving on 3 September at Wulf Hall in Wiltshire. There, they were received by Sir John Seymour, a Knight of the Body and Groom of the Bedchamber, and his wife Margery Wentworth, who had borne him six surviving children, who entertained the royal party for around a week. This destination may have been chosen by Henry for more than its size and convenience, its large courtyard, chapel, long gallery and picturesque gardens; he may have visited in order to see the home of the woman with whom he was falling in love.

  Jane Seymour had been born at Wulf Hall in 1507 or 1508 and raised as a Catholic noblewoman, with the emphasis of her upbringing placed more on practical accomplishments than the European reformers’ texts and disputes that had formed Anne’s education. This was not her only difference to the queen. Pale where Anne was dark, quiet where she was outspoken, modest where she was ambitious and demure where she was flirtatious, Jane’s appeal lay precisely in the very fact that she was opposite of Henry’s second wife. She may have come to court to serve Catherine as early as 1526 and therefore witnessed the breakdown of the royal marriage and Anne’s ascendancy at first hand, from the start. However, the exact date of her arrival is unknown. For a number of years, Jane had escaped the king’s attention and his growing interest coincided with an unfolding sequence of events that had already placed the royal marriage under pressure. What made her more successful than the Imperial Lady or the Shelton sisters was that she was in the right place at the right time. As Henry would come to see over the next nine months, she offered a complete contrast to the woman with whom he was becoming rapidly disillusioned. Jane might have been Anne’s opposite but, by refusing to become his mistress and returning his gift of a purse of coins, she showed that she could also master Anne’s methods. When the court returned to London in October, it seems that Henry was not considering Jane as more than a fling, or flirtation, hardly a wife or new queen. He already had one of those and she was expecting his child. In the autumn and winter of 1535, Anne’s throne was still secure.

  Different writers provide widely varying pictures of Anne’s household while she was queen. The hostile account by the orthodox Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria, presents her at the head of a court steeped in frivolity, in ‘masques, dancing, plays and such corporeal delights, in which she had a special grace, temptations to carnal pleasures and inventions to disgrace such and ruin them who were renowned for virtue’. No doubt there was a continuation of those festivities to which the court had been accustomed since Henry’s succession in 1509, but Anne was hardly the corrupting moral force Dormer portrays. Those of her letters that survive from her period of queenship relate mostly to the reformed faith, as she attempted to advance those sympathetic to the new thinking. Writing to the magistrates of Bristol in 1535, she recommended her candidate for his ‘right good learning … virtue and good demeanor’, writing that his ‘good life and spiritual conversation’ would promote charitable order, concord and unity for the benefit of the city.2 The same year she wrote from King’s Langley to Cromwell, asking for his assistance in promoting Robert Power to the position of abbot at Wallryale, and also writing to the Abbot of St Mary’s, York, in favour of John Eldmer, bachelor of divinity, ‘of good learning, sad demeanor and virtuous governance’.3

  Anne’s ladies may have been dancing but she also required them to hear divine service daily and is reputed to have presented them all with devotional books of prayer and psalms.4 For her own use, Anne owned a copy of Tyndale’s translation of the scriptures, inscribed with ‘Anna Regina Angliae’, and Miles Coverdale’s 1535 translated English Bible, which had been dedicated to ‘the most victorious Prynce and our most gracious sovereign Lorde, Kynge Henry the eight [and] your dearest just wife and most virtuous Pryncesse, Quene Anne’. She also appointed her household chaplains from among those who favoured studying the Bible in English, including William Betts and Matthew Parker. According to Hugh Latimer, she visited nuns at Syon Abbey and questioned their use of the Bible in Latin. Although the country had not strictly divided into the dichotomic ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’, still being very much differing branches of the same faith, Anne’s inclinations and patronage make her position as a reformer, a member of the ‘new faith’, very clear. Thus, she represented a very different force, religiously and culturally, to her predecessor and this is one of the reasons why she polarised opinion among her contemporaries.

  At Kimbolton Castle, Catherine’s health was rapidly deteriorating. She had been ill in the early part of 1535, begging Chapuys to intervene with Henry to permit Mary to visit her, whom she had not seen in a long time. Henry refused the request but did allow their daughter to move closer, to Hundson, which was thirty miles from Catherine and conveniently further away from the court. Henry was hoping they would be out of sight and out of m
ind. Early in 1536, Catherine rallied a little, allowing Chapuys to believe that she would recover, before rapidly declining after 2 January. Yet she had already written out a list of her final wishes, about her burial and provision for her servants, which she handed to the ambassador before he left. Her last letter to Henry, dictated on the morning of 7 January, was dignified and restrained, but remained steadfast to the belief that she was his lawful wife and that he had committed sin in the eyes of God:

  My most dear lord, king and husband,

  The hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I owe you forceth me, my case being such, to commend myself to you, and to put you in remembrance with a few words of the health and safeguard of your soul which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and pampering of your body, for the which you have cast me into many miseries and yourself into many troubles.

  For my part, I pardon you everything, and I wish to devoutly pray God that He will pardon you also. For the rest, I commend unto you our daughter Mary, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired. I entreat you also, on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage portions, which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants I solicit the wages due them, and a year more, lest they be unprovided for.

  Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.

  Catherine’s final wish of seeing Henry again came too late, even if he had been minded to set out at once for Kimbolton. Four and a half years since their last meeting, Catherine can hardly have expected a deathbed reconciliation, although the years she had spent at his side as his queen and love may have led her to hope. It was a desperately sad ending for Catherine, for all she had been and what she had represented. After receiving the last rites, she died at two in the afternoon of the same day, at the age of fifty. A post-mortem examination carried out that evening revealed the most likely cause of her death: her heart was covered over by a black growth. This gave rise to the rumour of poisoning but today is understood to be a symptom of cancer.

  The news reached London the following day. It would have come as a relief to Anne, although the significance of Catherine’s death went far beyond what she may have anticipated. Finally free of her longstanding rival, she was now the only Queen of England, lifting the threat of Imperial invasion and the Pope’s insistence that Henry’s first marriage was valid. However, while Catherine had been alive, she had provided an essential safeguard to Anne’s position, as any desire Henry may have entertained to divorce her would have necessitated his return to his first wife. Henry’s feelings over Catherine’s death were more complex than is indicated by the anecdote of him dressing from head to toe in yellow and dancing. Yellow was the colour of mourning for the royal family of Spain and Henry’s mind was certainly on mourning rituals. Within days he had appointed the principal mourners for her funeral, issuing them with instructions, yards of black cloth and linen for their heads and faces,5 although he insisted that a hearse was not suitable, as Catherine was the ‘princess dowager’, not a queen.6 Even Chapuys admitted the change in his mood from dancing with ‘great demonstrations of joy’ to a quieter subsidence, which sent him out into the tilt yard. A pregnant Anne may be forgiven for having thought that her most formidable opponent was now out of the way, as she could not have foreseen that Catherine’s downfall would pave the way for hers. Within months, Henry had already lined up his next queen.

  Yet Anne may have grieved for the loss of her former mistress, or realised what her death represented. One source informed Chapuys that Catherine’s death had indeed plunged Anne into uncertainty, for although she had shown joy on hearing the news and gave a ‘handsome present to the messenger’, since then she ‘frequently wept, fearing that they might do with her as with the good queen’. He had also heard that Henry ‘had said to someone in great confidence, and as it were in confession, that he had made this marriage while seduced by witchcraft, and for this reason he considered it null’.7 Henry appears to have been reflecting on his experiences with Catherine and come to the conclusion ‘that this was evident because God did not permit them to have any male issue, and that he believed that he might take another wife, which he gave to understand that he had some wish to do’.8 Although the ambassador’s reports are coloured by his desire to please Charles, this revelation foreshadows the allegations that would be levelled at Anne in May and could explain Anne’s distress at Henry’s developing relationship with Jane Seymour. It was always a volatile relationship and it is impossible to know just how secure Anne felt at her husband’s side.

  Her position appeared less certain following an accident that January. Henry was taking part in a joust at Greenwich when he lost his seating, slipped from the saddle and the horse fell on top of him. He was lucky not to have been killed but the blow left him unconscious for two hours. During that time, while the court waited to hear his fate, rumours must have been flying about the succession. Everyone from the Privy Council down would have to choose whether they were going to back the eighteen-year-old Princess Mary or the infant Elizabeth. It was a scenario that might descend into civil war, or at least the factional infighting that could oust the Boleyns and their supporters. Henry’s doctors watched over him. The shock of the news, insensitively delivered by Norfolk, may have had caused Anne to miscarry. This would be her explanation of what happened five days later. An alternative theory is that she interrupted Henry with Jane Seymour sitting on his knee and became hysterical despite his advice to ‘peace be sweetheart and all will be well’. But all was not well.

  Catherine’s funeral took place on 29 January at Peterborough Cathedral. Her coffin was brought into the mourning chapel, which was hung with eighteen banners to illustrate her many connections with the ruling houses of Europe. The chief mourner was Eleanor Brandon, Henry’s niece, and the king himself was represented by Sir William Paulet. On the same day, Anne suffered a miscarriage. The child had the appearance of being a male, of about three and a half months’ development. Later Catholic writers would claim the foetus showed signs of deformity, which was seen at the time as the result of sexual immorality, but there is no contemporary evidence for this. As Chapuys wrote, she had ‘miscarried of her saviour’.

  But just how far did Anne’s miscarriage of 1536 really seal her fate? Historians have interpreted the months of February to April in very different ways and, as Anne herself said that year, ‘if any person will meddle with my cause, I require them to judge the best’. However, seeking the truth almost five hundred years later, amid the extremes of rumour and slander, is a difficult task. Many questions remain unanswered, as well as the sequence of events that determined Henry’s thinking. Although the events are inextricably linked, it is unclear which came first out of his desire to rid himself of Anne and his perception of Jane as a potential new queen. On one hand, the pattern of the queen’s childbearing was starting to look uncomfortably familiar and the king is alleged to have stated that God would give him no more children by her in the aftermath of her loss. At a secret meeting with Cromwell that spring, Chapuys raised the question of another marriage, as Henry had ‘hitherto been disappointed of male issue and … knows quite well that this marriage will never be held as lawful’. Cromwell admitted that Henry was ‘still inclined to pay attention to the ladies’ but hoped that he would ‘henceforth live honourably and chastely, continuing in his present marriage’. At this point, Cromwell concealed a smile behind his hand. This may have been conscious irony, as he was aware of cracks in the marriage, or a comment on the likelihood of Henry living chaste; equally he may have taken pleasure in feeding Chapuys the opposite information to that which he clearly wanted to hear. For the time being, the king’s intentions towards Anne and Jane remained secret.

  A turning point appears to have been reached in the third week of April. Henry had granted Sir Thomas Boleyn rights to the town of King’s Lynn and its lands as recently as 14 April, so it was unusual that, on 23 April, George Boleyn
was passed over in the ceremony of Knights of the Garter. Ominously, his role was given to Nicholas Carew, of the Catholic Aragon faction. The following day, Henry signed a commission presented by Cromwell to investigate ‘unknown treasonable conspiracies’ although, according to hostile witness Geoffrey Pole, he had already sought advice from Bishop Stokesley regarding a divorce from Anne. Apparently the answer given was that adultery was the easiest method.9 By this point, Edward Seymour was appointed a gentleman of the Privy Chamber and he and Jane were lodged in Cromwell’s old rooms at Greenwich, which connected with Henry’s by a secret corridor.10 On the other hand, arrangements went ahead for Henry and Anne to visit France in early summer, creating the outward appearance that the marriage was not in trouble. Also, on 25 April, the king informed his ambassador in Rome that he was opposing Charles’ latest demands, due to the ‘likelihood and appearance that God will send us heirs male … through our most dear and entirely beloved wife, the queen’.11 The sands may have shifted, but, as late as the last week in April, Henry’s mind was still not made up.

  Until it was, the blonde, demure Jane played queen-in-waiting. She would not have long to wait. Jane’s rise was due to Henry’s fondness for her, although, as some have suggested, she may have been tutored or schooled in behaviour that would attract and retain his interest. The Seymours were clearly on the rise, with Jane’s brother Edward appointed to the Privy Chamber on 3 March, and by April it appeared that cordial relations between Anne and Cromwell had broken down forever when he allied himself with the Seymours, recognising that either he or Anne would fall. Combining forces with Nicholas Carew, who knew Henry’s private passions of old, they may have selected Jane with the specific purpose of replacing Anne. Chapuys clearly thought so. However, as a virtuous Christian woman in the Vives model, Jane would have understood exactly what was required to maintain her virtue, even if this did serve to inflame the desire of her royal suitor. Whether she passively received Henry’s wooing or was groomed for the job of the next queen, she achieved it because it was what Henry wanted; no servant, courtier or mistress could have brought about such a coup against his will.