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

by Amy Licence

  If she was pregnant, Jane would have lost this child in June or July 1536. It must have happened in private, in her privy chambers and probably at night, when there were fewer witnesses. Miscarriages in the early months were not always recorded and may have been known to only a small circle of the queen’s ladies, such as when Catherine had lost a daughter at seven months in January 1510. The court had known nothing about the event then, so it could easily have known nothing of Jane’s in 1536, nor that there had even been a pregnancy to lose. It may have been the prompt for the king and queen to head off on progress through Kent, as a change of scene for Jane, although there is the chance that she miscarried while they were away. This shocking theory would rewrite Henry’s reputation for adultery, his marriage to Anne, Anne’s fall, Jane’s reputation and their marriage. It is difficult to know just how news of such a scandalous pregnancy would have been received at the English court or in the country in general, and further afield on the international stage. Henry had barely managed to stave off an Imperial invasion when he repudiated Catherine but Anne Boleyn had no such powerful relatives to avenge her fall. If a pregnancy had been announced in June 1536, it is hard to imagine just who would have been in a position to object or create a scene worse than that which had already been enacted between Henry, the Emperor and Rome.

  A miscarriage at this early stage would have been a dreadful blow to Henry after he had placed so much upon the survival of this child, as with Elizabeth in 1533. Worse still, it would have put Jane under intense pressure, perhaps also in a state of fear that she might prove as disposable as her predecessor if another courtly beauty was to catch her husband’s eye. There are no signs in the behaviour of either king or queen that support this outcome. Evidence does exist against the theory, though. Given the doubts of a number of onlookers that Jane would conceive and bear a child, coupled with what is known about her character, it seems far-fetched in the extreme. The truth of this theory will probably never be known, unless fresh evidence comes to light after almost five centuries; in the meantime, the story derives from historical fiction and is better left there in the absence of solid proof.

  However, Henry was to suffer a real loss that summer, the facts of which are documented and indisputable. That July, the king and queen were staying at Dover Castle when they received the terrible news of Henry Fitzroy’s death at the age of seventeen. In recent months, Henry Fitzroy had taken a more public role at court and on state occasions, even attending Anne’s execution. The king was proud of his son, now on the verge of adulthood and married, and his most likely successor in the event that no other male heir was conceived. As recently as early June the likelihood of him succeeding Henry was raised, in the light of Princess Elizabeth now being considered a bastard: ‘The Earl of Sussex in the Privy Council proposed to the king that as the princess was a bastard, as well as the Duke of Richmond, it would be right to prefer the male to the female; and as this opinion was not opposed by the king, it may be that some will hereafter favour it.’14 The young man was accustomed to staying at court and bidding his father goodnight as, during Anne’s imprisonment, this was the occasion when Henry gave his son his blessing and wept, saying that he and Princess Mary had escaped her attempts to poison them. Cruelly, though, the young man did fall ill within weeks of this conversation, reported as being ill that July. On the 23rd of the month, he died at St James’ Palace, possibly of tuberculosis. Henry was distraught. Having placed his hopes on the boy in spite of his illegitimacy, he was now without a son at all. Sharing his bed, Jane was aware of his expectations of her.

  A magnificent coronation ceremony was planned for Jane that October, to outstrip those of Henry’s previous wives, with Jane travelling from Greenwich to the Tower in a huge ship made in imitation of the Venetian Bucentaur, the state galley of the doge. Its latest incarnation, created in 1526, had two decks and forty-two oars, and bore a sculpture of Justice on the prow, sculptures of lions and a canopy of red and blue with gold stars. Although it never took place, a pageant planned in 1536 featured Jane’s badge garnished with her motto, ‘Bound to serve and obey’, along with a true love knot and a figure representing the Holy City being shown to St John, the stories of Adam and Eve, Martha and Mary Magdalene, as well as ‘cages with quick birds to be set in a meadow’.15 According to Thomas Wriothesley, the date was fixed for the Sunday before All Hallow’s Eve, so Sunday 29 October 1536. However, the events of that summer and autumn put the coronation on hold, as Henry’s religious reforms brought about the most significant threat to his rule yet: a full-scale rebellion in the north that would come to be known as the Pilgrimage of Grace.

  With the king occupied by the demands of the rebels and the uprisings that spread into the following year, all thought of Jane’s coronation was put to one side. However, she would never get to ride down the Thames in all the pomp that had been envisioned. By the time the rebel leaders had been brutally quashed, the queen had fallen pregnant.

  47

  A Prince at Last, 1537

  God save King Henry with all his power,

  And Prynce Edward, that goodly flowre

  With all his lordes of great honoure,

  Synge trolle on away, synge trolle on away.

  Heve and how, rombelowe, trolle on away.1

  Jane must have been very relieved to find that she was with child. The lives of her predecessors had been defined by their gynaecological histories, and as the months had passed without her conceiving, the court began to ask questions. Given Henry’s age, size and ulcerous leg, this was no real surprise; perhaps there was some truth in the claim raised at Anne’s trial that she had cast doubt on his ability to perform and the king’s own defiant response that he was ‘a man like any other’. This concern was echoed by Dr Ortiz, in a letter to the Empress in September 1536 when he wrote that no children were expected ‘on account of the complexion and disposition of the king’,2 and also by Chapuys, who wrote in October regarding Jane’s ‘coronation, which was to have taken place at the end of this month, is put off till next summer, and some doubt it will not take place at all’. This was immediately followed by the comment that ‘there is no appearance that she will have children’,3 suggesting a connection between the two statements. Although the Pilgrimage of Grace in the north had provided a valid enough reason for delay, it is not impossible that Jane’s coronation, the celebration of her as queen, was being put off until she had proved herself fertile.

  Jane had conceived early in January 1537, so she probably became aware of her condition within weeks, with her certainty growing through the month of February. Having watched two wives go through this process, Henry probably recognised the symptoms and called in the royal physicians to give their opinion. Many of her ladies were also mothers themselves and had seen Anne through her pregnancies. The queen’s condition was made public that April, being referred to in Parliamentary proceedings on the third of the month, when provision was being made for Mary and Elizabeth. Three days later, Sir William Eure wrote to Cromwell that the rumours of the pregnancy ‘gave the greatest possible satisfaction’, with all men ‘rejoicing’, and at the end of the month John Husee wrote, ‘Jesu send her a prince!’4 In May, Jane wore an open-laced gown to announce the child’s quickening at Hampton Court and special Masses were said in St Paul’s Cathedral for her good health and that of the child; the records make clear that she had inherited Anne’s dressmaker, John Scut, who would have known how to accommodate her growing belly in suitably regal style. Husee related in May that she would be ‘open laced with stomacher by Corpus Christi Day [10 June in 1537] at the farthest’.5 In the early stages of the pregnancy she developed a passion for quails, which were then out of season. Henry wrote to Lord Lisle in Calais in search of a supply, ordering the net to widen to Flanders if insufficient amounts could be found.

  The provision of quails for the pregnant queen was taken by the Lisle family as an important part of the negotiations to smooth the way of Anne Bassett into her household.
Husee wrote to Lady Lisle in May that Queen Jane was ‘content to take her at the later end of the progress when all heats and dangers of sickness be past’.6 A week later, Sir John Russell wrote to Anne’s father asking for some ‘fat quails’ ‘for the queen is very desirous to eat some but here be none to be gotten … I pray you in anywise that ye will send some with as much speed as may be possibly [sic] but they must be very fat.’7 Husee followed this with a letter to Lord Lisle, adding that ‘her Grace loveth [quails] very well, and longeth not a little for them’ and that Husee ‘looked hourly’ for Lisle’s answer regarding the order of two or three dozen birds that should be killed at Dover and ‘speedily conveyed’ to Hampton Court.8 When the first of a large consignment arrived at court that May, a dozen were roasted for the royal dinner and a further dozen for supper. The efforts of the Lisles to satisfy the queen’s pregnancy cravings did not go unnoticed, with the queen commenting in July, while eating the quails, that Lady Lisle should send Anne and her sister Catherine over from Calais, ‘for her Grace will first see them and know their manners, fashions and conditions, and take which of them shall like her Grace best’.9 Anne clearly impressed the queen more, as she was sworn in as Jane’s maid in mid-September.

  It was around this time that Hans Holbein completed a mural at Whitehall Palace that contained the portraits of Henry, Jane and Henry’s parents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Designed to demonstrate the dynasty’s lineage, the confidence of Henry’s pose suggests his anticipation of the birth of a son, as his astrologers predicted. It is likely that Jane’s pregnancy was, in fact, the reason for the work being commissioned. There is no direct reference to her condition in the picture, although this may well have been considered injudicious considering she was in the early stages and there was no guarantee she would carry the child to term. However, the pregnancy did proceed according to plan and the tradition of Henry’s wives lying in at Greenwich was broken when a suite of rooms was prepared for Jane at Hampton Court. Plans for a royal progress that summer were abandoned and Jane remained in the palace instead, to avoid an outbreak of the plague in London. It was still raging early in October when the Duke of Norfolk wrote to Thomas Cromwell that ‘the death’ was still ‘extremely sore’ in the capital and the ‘young folks’, traditionally the worst afflicted, were kept away from the palace gates. Jane had already entered her confinement by then, to await the onset of her labour.

  It was during these final weeks of Jane’s confinement that an interesting case arises in the State letters and papers for 28 September 1537 that may shed some further light on the question of Henry’s methods as a lover. In line with the common practice of highborn men taking lower-class mistresses, especially while their wives were sexually unavailable, one of the king’s amours was brought to the attention of the council when some gossip was reported within the sanctuary of Westminster. According to a Morris Bull, Henry had taken a passing fancy to a ‘wench’ of loose morals and claimed her for his own, in what appears to have become a longstanding arrangement, setting her up in some household or secret establishment. Bull explained that ‘there was one rode upon a fair gelding and a pretty wench behind him, and a king met them and plucked down her muffler and kissed her, and liked her so well that he took her from him … and so lived and kept her still in advowtry [adultery]’.10

  Upon questioning by the king’s councillors, the gossip divulged that the man upon the gelding was a William Webbe, who had lived with the ‘wench’ for two years and now cried vengeance upon the king. The incident had taken place near Eltham, and was witnessed by Kendal, a servant of the king, and the wife of one Robert Sharp of Westminster.11 The identity of the woman remains unknown, as does her future as Henry’s lover. If true, this incident, which only became known through the spread of a string of mutating rumours from one man to the next, exposes something of Henry’s methods and sense of entitlement. When it came to women he wanted, particularly lower-class women, he simply took what he wanted.

  On the morning of 12 October, Jane was finally delivered of a healthy son. It was the eve of St Edward’s Day, although the couple had already chosen this name in advance. Henry was not alone in his delight; celebrations were held all over the country and contemporary letter writers spoke of the ‘exceeding goodness’ and ‘strength of gladness’ they felt at the prince’s arrival. Hugh Latimer wrote that there was no less rejoicing than if John the Baptist had arrived!12 Initially, Jane appeared to be well. It was a personal triumph for her, having provided Henry with the son he had desired since he came to the throne twenty-eight years before. The birth had been arduous, lasting two days and three nights, but later reports that she had undergone a caesarean or that her limbs had been broken to allow for delivery were wildly exaggerated. She was in recovery when Edward was christened, three days later, in the chapel at Hampton Court, where she sat, wrapped in velvet and furs, to receive visitors in the waiting chamber. The baby’s sisters, Mary and the four-year-old Elizabeth, displaced by his arrival, played ceremonial roles as their brother was blessed and anointed.

  Jane would also have been pleased to hear, on 18 October, that Henry had elevated her brother Edward to the title of Earl of Hertford, while her younger brother Thomas was knighted.13 Plans were already being made for the queen’s churching when she fell ill a few days later, with one doctor reporting that ‘all this nyght she hath bene very syck’.14 Prayers were said for her at St Paul’s but, after briefly rallying, her condition rapidly deteriorated. Her end was different from Anne’s in every conceivable way: Sir Thomas Palmer wrote to Lord Lisle that ‘if good prayers can save her, she is not like to die, for never lady was so much plained with every man, rich and poor’.15 However, no amount of prayers could save the queen now.

  Six doctors were called in. Among them were William Butts, Henry’s chief ‘doctor of physic’ and one of the founders of his 1518 Royal College of Physicians, and George Owen, who would become chief physician to the newborn child. They witnessed the queen suffer a ‘natural laxe’, a heavy bleed, on the night of 23/24 October. Postpartum haemorrhaging could be caused by internal injury, perinatal tears or the retention of part of the placenta following delivery. The signs were so disturbing that her confessor had been called by eight that morning and, as anticipated, Jane died that day, at around midday. Writing to Cromwell, Norfolk urged him to keep a watchful eye on the king: ‘My good lord, I pray you to be here tomorrow early to comfort our good master, for as for our mistress there is no likelihood of her life, the more pity, and I fear she shall not be on lyve at the time ye shall read this. At viij at night, with the hand of[your] sorrowful friend, T. Norffolk.’16 But the king’s servant did more than comfort his master. Investigating her final days, Cromwell criticised the decision of those attending her ‘who suffered her to … eat such things as her fantasy in sickness called for’,17 although, by that point, her diet would have had little effect. Meanwhile, Henry wrote to Francis I, who had long promised to be godfather to any Prince of Wales, expressing his joy at the boy’s birth and the ‘bitterness of the death of her who has brought me this happiness’.18

  Jane’s case is an unusual one. Midwifery was usually left to women during this period but her status may have made her an exception. While medical manuals were written by men, for men, they dealt with an abstract, academic knowledge about the anatomical process. This was no substitute for the literally hands-on approach of women who had attended births for decades and accumulated practical knowledge from the previous generations of mothers, grandmothers and other relations from whom they learned their skill. Theirs was essentially an oral tradition, which remained behind closed doors. Perhaps it was Henry’s caution over the arrival of this child that led the usual gender relations in the birth room to be subverted. It is clear that Jane was attended by male doctors, whom protocol may have prevented from handling her body too roughly or intimately. An examination of the records that survive of her symptoms suggest that a fundamental error was made as a result of this lack
of practical experience. A midwife would have known the importance of ensuring that the placenta was removed whole, as even tiny pieces left in the womb could trigger fatal infections. Experienced female attendants would have employed a number of techniques to ensure it was expelled, from herbal drinks, massage and tourniquets to physical examinations. The timescale and nature of Jane’s decline strongly suggest that this did not happen.

  Detailed evidence survives in the State letters and papers about what happened to Jane’s body after her death. Henry put Norfolk and Sir William Paulet in charge of the funeral arrangements and ‘retired to a solitary place to pass his sorrows’, while he studied the arrangements made for the burial in 1503 of Elizabeth of York, the last queen consort to have died in office.19 Jane was first given to the wax chandler, who removed her entrails ‘with searing, balming, spicing, and trammeling in cloth’, before the plumber (literally a worker in lead) ‘leaded, soldered, and chested’ her and her entrails were honourably interred in St George’s Chapel, where the rest of her body would join them two weeks later.20 From Friday 26 October she lay in a hearse in the presence chamber at Hampton Court, surrounded by twenty-one tapers and her ladies, who had ‘put off their rich apparel’ and knelt during Mass in the morning and afternoon. A nightly watch was then kept over her body until the end of the month. On 1 November, the route to the chapel was hung in black cloth and Jane’s hearse was conveyed there, garnished with eight banner rolls. A train of mourners heard Mass again, saw the area censed and then departed to the queen’s chamber. The Masses, offerings and prayers continued for eleven days.21