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

by Amy Licence

  As other twain that doth before appear;

  But yet no doubt but they friends thee lament

  And other hear their piteous cry and moan.

  So doth eah heart for thee likewise relent

  That thou givest cause thus to be dead and gone.

  Ah! Mark, what moan should I for thee make more,

  Since that thy death thou hast deserved best,

  Save only that mine eye is forced sore

  With piteous plaint to moan thee with the rest?

  A time thou haddest above thy poor degree,

  The fall whereof thy friends may well bemoan:

  A rotten twig upon so high a tree

  Hath slipped thy hold, and thou art dead and gone.

  And thus farewell each one in hearty wise!

  The axe is home, your heads be in the street;

  The trickling tears doth fall so from my eyes

  I scarce may write, my paper is so wet.

  But what can hope when death hath played his part,

  Though nature’s course will thus lament and moan?

  Leave sobs therefore, and every Christian heart

  Pray for the souls of those be dead and gone.

  Despite the best efforts of historian G. W. Bernard8 to suggest Anne probably committed adultery, most modern historians are of the belief that she was guilty of little more than indiscretion. She exploited the flirtatious traditions of courtly love to make suggestive remarks to at least one male companion, Sir Henry Norris, insinuating that he was in love with her and hoped to marry her if she was widowed. Imagining, or ‘encompassing’ the king’s death was, in fact, treasonous at the time. It was poorly judged but if Anne had retained Henry’s support then it would probably never have come to light, or she could have explained it away as a misguided convention. Most damning in terms of the adultery charge were the comments made by her lady-in-waiting Lady Worcester, who cast aspersions on the queen when her own immorality was exposed. Technically, a queen’s adultery was also considered treason, as it threatened the line of succession. However, various slanders had been levelled against Anne before but with Henry’s support she could ride them out. Henry either knew these allegations were not true but saw them as a means to an end or chose to believe them because they suited his purpose.

  Various explanations have been put forward for Henry’s brutality, but what lay at the heart of this was his sense of autocracy. Anne Boleyn had been his project, from the moment he had spotted her at court and desired her to his heaping titles and gifts upon her, from the rules and hearts he had broken to her magnificent coronation. She may have exploited his desire for her, but ultimately any power she held over him had been by his permission. It had been an elaborate game of love played according to courtly conventions, and when Anne failed to produce a male heir Henry had tired of it. The notion that Anne wielded any sort of real control in the relationship was an illusion that he had granted her out of genuine affection. At court he had been her defender, her loyal knight and protector. His repudiation of her in 1536 was based in his belief of her ingratitude, her gynaecological failing and a personal desire for revenge.

  Henry was ruthless in his personal relationships. His treatment of Catherine, Wolsey, More and Cromwell, show a similar behavioural pattern. Once-beloved favourites were rejected suddenly, almost overnight, being sent away from court with little warning, never to be seen again. Once he had made up his mind, he never went back. He could no longer tolerate their existence and had a need to close a door upon them. As a king, he could close the ultimate door without any judicial reprisals. The greater the love he had felt for them, the greater the suffering he needed to inflict upon them. Without resorting to modern psychology to diagnose a sixteenth-century king, it appears that Henry had a need to punish Anne, to exact a complete revenge on her that owed less to her reputed crimes than to his own monocracy. Thus, as he had dictated the path of her rise, he had to end it decisively. He had controlled and shaped her as a mistress and queen; she was his subject, his plaything, and he could not resist imposing the ultimate authority when he had tired of the game.

  46

  Queen Jane, 1536–37

  Here take thy queene, our King Harry

  And love her as thy life

  For never had a king in Cfhristentyne

  A truer and fairer wife.1

  Anne’s replacement, Jane Seymour, had led a sheltered life in the Wiltshire countryside. Her mother, Margery Wentworth, was a descendant of Edward III but she had married into a family of the minor gentry, with her husband Sir John holding various minor positions at court. Jane was her mother’s seventh child and her eldest daughter, with three surviving brothers arriving before her and two sisters to follow. Her upbringing typified a traditional pre-Reformation girlhood, shying away from the sort of intellectual pursuits and European sophistication that had transformed Anne from a docile, demure country girl into a figure who could hold her own on the international stage. There is no evidence to support the claim made by the full-length portrait of Jane on display at Versailles that she was a maid of honour in the French court of Mary Tudor, as she would have been far too young; nor can it be inferred that she finished her education under Queen Claude, along with Anne and Mary Boleyn. In contrast, Jane stayed at home. Steeped in Catholicism, schooled by her mother on the virtues of wifely skills and talents, Jane was prepared to become the wife of a Knight Banneret, or similar position, just like her sister Elizabeth, who had married Sir Anthony Ughtred before 1531. Chapuys described Jane as not having a ‘great wit, but she may have good understanding’. While Anne had broken the mould when it came to the accomplishments of her gender, Jane conformed to it perfectly.

  It may have been the marriage of her younger sister in the late 1520s that had prompted Jane or her parents to send her to court, perhaps in search of a husband of her own.2 It has been suggested that Jane had already been through a broken betrothal by the time she came to court, but in this eventuality Henry would surely have sought legal confirmation that she was now free to marry. She was following a family precedent by travelling to London as Margery had served Catherine of Aragon in the early days of her marriage, and this connection, as well as her father’s position as Knight of the Body, helped place her daughter in the queen’s household. When that establishment began to fracture, dividing loyalties between those who supported Catherine and those who supported Anne, Jane would have remained firmly in the former camp, with her orthodox faith, her family connection to Catherine and the years she had seen Princess Mary growing up at court. Watching the process by which Anne became queen, Jane witnessed an unfolding drama on which it would have been impossible for her not to have held an opinion. In 1535, when she transferred to Anne’s household, according to Jane Dormer, she had observed exactly how a mistress could make the transition to the throne and, although she shared a great-grandmother with Anne, Jane probably had little love for the reformist and ambitious Boleyns. A conversation reported by Chapuys indicates the sort of approach favoured towards Henry and his daughter, by the woman the ambassador came to call the ‘pacifier’ or peacemaker:

  I hear that, even before the arrest of the Concubine, the king, speaking with Mistress Jane Semel [sic] of their future marriage, the latter suggested that the Princess should be replaced in her former position; and the king told her she was a fool, and ought to solicit the advancement of the children they would have between them, and not any others. She replied that in asking for the restoration of the Princess she conceived she was seeking the rest and tranquillity of the king, herself, her future children, and the whole realm; for, without that, neither your Majesty nor this people would ever be content.

  When Henry fell in love with Jane she was in her late twenties, ‘of middle stature and no great beauty, so fair that one would call her rather pale than otherwise’.3 Chapuys wondered how Jane had managed to keep her virginity intact amid the reputedly licentious court, but there is no gossip to connect her with an
y other man and there may be some truth in the ambassador’s cynical comment that ‘he may make a condition in the marriage that she be a virgin, and when he has a mind to divorce her he will find enough of witnesses’. Chapuys also crudely punned on the possibility of her possessing a grand ‘enigmé’, usually meaning a secret or riddle but also contemporary slang for the female genitals.4 Yet there is no doubt that Jane’s purity and untarnished record counted in her favour. It was to preserve her from scandal that might have arisen at the time of Anne’s fall, and to ‘cover his affection’ for her, that Henry moved Jane out of the court to Carew Manor in Beddington Park, Croydon, the family seat of Nicholas Carew. With the matter privately decided between them, Henry’s public actions were quite different, however.

  Stating in public that he had ‘no desire in the world to get married again unless he is constrained by his subjects to do so’, Henry was enjoying a brief moment of freedom. Chapuys reported how he was ‘banqueting with ladies, sometimes remaining after midnight, and returning by the river’ and had lately dined with ‘several ladies in the house of the Bishop of Carlisle’, where he had shown an ‘extravagant joy’ and claimed to have written a tragedy about himself and Anne.5 The day after Anne’s execution, the French ambassador offered him the hand of the Princess Madeleine, the young and beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter of Francis I, but Henry replied that she was too young for him and ‘he had had too much experience of French bringing up and manners’.6 Yet, despite his protestations, he had become engaged on the very same day.

  Jane had been brought from Beddington to More’s old house at Chelsea on 14 May and ‘splendidly served by the king’s cook and other officers’ as well as being ‘splendidly dressed’.7 Five days later, on Anne’s death, a dispensation had been issued by Thomas Cranmer to allow Henry and Jane to marry without the need to publish their banns, despite being related in the third degree of affinity. The betrothal took place on 20 May and the wedding was solemnised in the queen’s closet at York Place. Hearing of the match, Princess Mary, who had resisted Anne’s few attempts at reconciliation, wrote from Hundson to her father, congratulating him on his new marriage, at which she ‘rejoiced’, and asked to be allowed to come to court to serve Jane, as well as praying to ‘God to send you a prince’.8 No doubt Henry was praying for the same but, eleven days after Anne’s death, was he possibly regretting the speed at which he had replaced one woman with another? That summer, while placing his hand on Jane’s belly and saying, ‘Edward, Edward’, although she was not yet pregnant, Henry confided to Chapuys that he was not certain that the queen would provide him with children, adding that he had recently seen two beautiful new women arrive at court and wished he had waited a little before remarrying.

  Might these two women have come from Jane’s own household? There had been some continuity from Anne’s court, with several ladies transferring their allegiance from one queen to another, including Mary Zouche, Eleanor Paston, Mary Brandon, Mary Norris, Margery Horsman, Jane Ashley and even George Boleyn’s widow, Jane Parker, but the comment suggests they were newcomers whose arrival was timed with the establishment of the new queen’s household. The two beauties are unlikely to have been the Bassett sisters, Anne and Catherine, the stepdaughters of his uncle Arthur Plantagenet, Lord Lisle. Still in their teens, the pair had applied to become part of Jane’s household, only to be told they were too young: Anne was given a place in 1537 but Catherine was at a slightly further remove from the queen when she joined the retinue of Eleanor Paston, Countess of Rutland. One of the two would become Henry’s mistress later but they had not yet left Calais for England, firmly ruling them out at this stage.

  However, a letter written by John Husee to their mother, Lady Lisle, on 25 May 1536 suggests a Bassett family connection for the two mysterious beauties, who may have been their cousins: ‘Your ladyship hath two nieces with the queen, which are daughters unto Mr Arundell.’9 Lady Lisle’s sister Jane did indeed marry a Sir John Arundel of Trerice and bore him a daughter, Mary, who may be referred to here; he also had two daughters, Elizabeth and Jane, from his first marriage, but she had died by this point, as her widowed husband Sir Richard Edgecombe took a second wife in 1535. Born in or before 1507, Jane would have been at least thirty when she took up at place in the new queen’s household. However, Lady Lisle’s other sister, Philippa, took Sir John’s brother as her second husband, marrying Humphrey Arundel sometime after 1509, allowing plenty of time for her to produce two daughters of suitable age before she died in 1524. Of all the possible Arundel nieces of Lady Lisle, it seems most likely that the half-sisters Jane and Mary are being referred to by Husee and, given the timing, providing strong possible identities for the women who drew the king’s admiration. For the moment, though, Henry had a new wife to whom he must attend.

  There seems to be no reason to doubt that Jane was a virgin on her wedding night. Awaiting the arrival of her new husband at York Place, on the night of 30 May, she was not old enough to have seen the youthful bridegroom of 1509 who sped to Catherine of Aragon’s chamber, fleet of foot and with a beauty that was celebrated across Europe. With Jane stripped down to her nightgown, pale and untouched, her ladies melted away as Henry approached. He was hardly love’s young dream, with his expanding girth and ulcerated leg, but he was the king, and that counted for a lot. As Thomas More once wrote, ‘The king has a special way of making every man feel that he is enjoying his special favour … just as the London wives pray before the image of Our Lady … till each of them believes it is smiling upon her.’ No doubt it was true for women too. Asserting that he was a ‘man like any other’, in spite of his age and the lack of ability that Anne had hinted at, Henry was an experienced lover. Now he consummated his marriage to Jane in the hope that, like his previous wives, she would quickly fall pregnant.

  Assuming that Henry had not resolved to marry Jane until spring 1536, although he may have been involved with her since the previous year, it had been a very swift journey from maid of honour to queen. As Philip Melanchthon wrote, ‘What a great change has suddenly been made.’10 Jane must have felt it too. Only eleven days had elapsed between Anne’s death and Henry sharing the bed of his new wife. Now she was quickly established in her new role, expected to pick up where Anne had left off, almost to fill her shoes, although in a very different style. On 3 June, Sir John Russell wrote from to Lord Lisle that Jane’s servants had been sworn in on the day that the king and queen returned to Greenwich, with Jane and her ladies in ‘the great barge’. He clearly approved of Henry’s choice, assuring Lisle that ‘she is as gentle a lady as ever I knew, and as fair a queen as any in Christendom. The king hath come out of hell into heaven for the gentleness in this and the cursedness and the unhappiness in the other. You would do well to write to the king again that you rejoice he is so well matched with so gracious a woman as is reported.’11

  Jane made her public debut at Henry’s side at Whitsun, 4 June, when her brother Edward was elevated to Viscount Beauchamp. According to Thomas Wriothesley, she was proclaimed queen with a great train of ladies after her, attended Mass and dined in her presence chamber under the cloth of estate. Chapuys, though, stated that she was quickly overwhelmed and needed to be ‘rescued’. After he had addressed Jane, Henry, ‘who in the meantime had been talking with the ladies of the court, approached us, and began making excuses for the queen, saying that I was the first ambassador to whom she had spoken; she was not used to that sort of reception’.12 Jane was certainly not bred for the limelight as Catherine had been, or as experienced and poised as Anne; she had no parallel experience to the years Catherine had spent as Arthur’s widow, observing the mechanisms of the court from within, or the long years of courtship by which Anne had grown accustomed to Henry as a man and lover. The new queen was rushed into position in a matter of weeks. On 7 June she attended a water pageant held in her honour on the Thames outside York Place, sharing Henry’s barge as part of a great procession saluted by guns. As they sailed past the Tower, streame
rs and banners were hung from the walls and more musicians saluted them as they passed under London Bridge. The following day, Cranmer, still reeling in shock over Anne’s demise according to his letter to Henry,13 declared that the king’s previous two marriages had been unlawful. She had then been married to Henry for a week.

  Another reason for Henry’s marriage to Jane has been suggested by some historical writers, one which raises a mind-blowing possibility. At least one novelist has suggested that Jane was pregnant at the time of her marriage, having conceived as a result of an affair with the king in spring 1536. This may have occurred in February, after his disappointment arising from Anne’s miscarriage and during a possible period of estrangement that had arisen between the king and queen. Jane would have suspected her condition by March or early April, which would explain Henry’s sudden need to remove Anne and place Jane on the throne in order to legitimise her child. He had married Anne when she was pregnant, an event which had proved the catalyst for his wedding of January 1533, and the removal of Jane from court during the process may have been to conceal her symptoms. Suddenly, the timescale of events in 1536 appear in a very different light.

  This theory would mean that Jane would be expecting to deliver her child in mid-autumn. She would have been three or four months pregnant at the time of her marriage and still perhaps able to conceal this fact under her clothes. The lack of other evidence is not necessarily conclusive, as the precedent of Bessie Blount’s pregnancy and delivery establishes the degree to which such an event might be covered up. It may also offer a different explanation as to why Jane appeared nervous before Chapuys in early June 1536 and needed to be rescued, in case her condition might be determined by hostile witnesses. Obviously, if Henry had impregnated Jane during his marriage to Anne, and ordered the removal and death of his queen in order for the unborn child to be legitimate, the damage to his reputation would have been serious. It seems that any pregnancy was kept secret until such a time that it could no longer be concealed, at which point the drastic steps of May 1536 could no longer be reversed. But then, there was nothing. Just like Anne’s miscarriage or stillbirth in the summer of 1534, a veil of silence descends.