Tudor_Passion. Manipulation. Murder. the Story of England's Most Notorious Royal Family

by Leanda de Lisle

  Fisher’s brush with death was still a subject of considerable interest when the princess Mary visited court the following month. Aged fifteen, Mary was just a few months younger than Margaret Douglas, petite and pretty, well proportioned with a beautiful complexion. She was devoted to her mother, with whom she stayed four or five days, but Mary loved her father too. Henry, in turn, was proud of his daughter and when he visited her household at Richmond in June they ‘made great cheer’. To foreign observers it seemed that her place as his heir remained secure and the Imperial and the Venetian ambassadors were convinced the marriage annulment would not take place while ‘the peers of the realm, both spiritual and temporal, and the people, are opposed to it’.14

  At court Henry’s once warm relationship with his younger sister, the French queen, had cooled over his love for his mistress. They had been the sole Tudor siblings after Arthur had died and Queen Margaret had left for Scotland; she had married, in Charles Brandon, his closest friend. But the French queen loathed having Anne, her former maid of honour, awarded a higher status than herself at court. ‘Difference . . . about precedency’, it was noted at the time, ‘breedeth many quarrels among women, who can better endure almost any kind of injury than to have such as are of meaner degree than themselves to take place before them.’15 Brandon tried to rake up stories from Anne’s past in an effort to break her hold on Henry. Anne responded with the ac cusation that Brandon was having ‘criminal intercourse with his own daughter’– he had two daughters by an earlier marriage, as well as two with the French queen (the eldest, Frances, was fourteen).16 Anne remained equally defiant of public opinion. The common sort called Anne Boleyn a ‘burnt arse whore’, but she had her servants’ livery coats embroidered with a new motto: ‘Ainsi sera: groigne qui groigne’ (So it will be: complain who will).17 And what would be was, of course, her marriage to Henry. He had made his decision.

  On 16 July, Henry rode off with Anne and left Katherine at Windsor without so much as a goodbye, never to see her again. While he and Anne hunted at Chertsey Abbey in Surrey, the princess Mary hurried to see her mother. Her presence that August helped Katherine ‘forget the pain of the king’s absence’, the Imperial ambassador believed. Mother and daughter remained together through the long summer, until Henry decided he wished to go hunting at Windsor and return to the castle. His bed and another for Anne Boleyn, each eleven feet square and with covers of gold and silver, remained in the castle even into the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when they became tourist attractions. Katherine was ordered to retire to a house called the More in Hertfordshire, whilst Mary was instructed to return to her household in Richmond. Her cousin Margaret accompanied the princess as her senior lady-in-waiting.18

  The warrants for the Master of the Wardrobe to supply cloth and liveries to Mary’s household that October include a long list for Margaret Douglas. There was a very expensive ‘gown of tinsel of 11 yards, a black velvet gown of 11yds, furred with powdered ermine [i.e. the white fur split and the black ermine tails sown in a regular pattern]; a gown of black damask, of 11yds; kirtles [outer petticoats] and sleeves of crimson satin, black velvet and black satin, of 7 yds’. There were also velvet shoes, and gloves, and more clothing for her servants, of tawny velvet and black satin.19 This was an indication of the high status of the princess she served, as well as her own.

  Margaret, who had first-hand experience of quarrelling parents, was a good companion for Mary. The princess also had the support, however, of a remarkable governess: Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, the only sister of the last male Plantagenet, Edward, Earl of Warwick, executed by Henry VII. Married as a girl to one of Margaret Beaufort’s half-nephews, the countess was one of the five wealthiest peers in England. As such she was a woman in a man’s role and she had a high opinion of what her sex was capable of: a view she imparted to the princess. Mary’s mother, as the daughter of a reigning queen, was similarly confident of a woman’s capacity for rule. But the shadows were lengthening over this Indian summer of Mary’s childhood. In Henry’s private rooms he had chosen a new collection of tapestries telling the classical story of Aeneas, obliged by divine intervention to leave his wife Dido and fulfill his destiny.20 Henry longed to seek his own great destiny, and a fresh mind was giving shape and direction to his ambitions: a former servant of Wolsey called Thomas Cromwell.

  The surviving portrait of Cromwell, dressed in black and with piggy eyes, gives no hint of the tremendous charm he could deploy. Like Wolsey, Cromwell came from humble origins (his alcoholic father was a tradesman from Putney), he had a phenomenal appetite for hard work, a sharp intellect and, in common with Anne Boleyn, he held strongly evangelical views on church reform, as well as supporting the supremacy of the king. On 15 May 1532 Cromwell successfully engineered a formal submission of the clergy to Henry as their overlord. This ended the independence of the church guaranteed in Magna Carta, and caused Henry’s Lord Chancellor, Thomas More, to resign the following day. Henry had picked More for the post precisely because he was a highly principled as well as a clever man. Henry was sure that in time More would be bound to see the virtue of his cause. But More had not: what he saw was that the supremacy, far from being a liberation from papal tyranny, left no appeal from the diktat of the king, even in matters of innermost conscience.

  The way was cleared for the break with Rome on the death of the old Archbishop of Canterbury in August. One of Anne’s evangelical allies amongst the clergy, Thomas Cranmer, was appointed in his place that winter. Cranmer could and would marry her to the king, she felt assured, and it was in the confident belief that she was to be queen at last that Anne began sleeping with Henry.21 They married privately, sometime before the end of February 1533, when she was already pregnant.22 It did not matter to Henry that he had not yet been granted his annulment. Henry believed his marriage to Anne was his first and only marriage, with the annulment of his non-marriage to Katherine a mere formality, and that would follow soon enough. On 7 April an Act in Restraint of Appeals was passed forbidding Katherine of Aragon, or anyone else, appealing to foreign tribunals. This was justified with a reference to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, arguing that ‘by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire’ governed by ‘one supreme head and king’. The Pope’s role as supreme judge on earth in matters spiritual concerning England was at an end, and the break with Rome made.

  Shortly afterwards Katherine was informed formally of the king’s marriage to Anne. She was further told that she was no longer to be called queen and that she was to be stripped of her servants. Katherine retorted that she would live as a beggar if needs be, but she would always be queen. At Richmond, Margaret Douglas remained in attendance on the princess Mary, who ‘was at first thoughtful’, and controlling her feelings as best she could, ‘seemed even to rejoice’ at the news. Although she was miserable to be forbidden any contact with her mother, Mary hoped that Anne’s triumph would be short-lived and she needed to be well placed in her father’s affections when that day came. Anne could yet lose her child, or even die in labour. After dinner Mary wrote to her father, who was delighted by her letter, ‘praising above all things the wisdom and prudence of his daughter’.23 Anne was less restrained with her feelings, boasting that she would soon have the princess for her maid, or married to ‘some varlet’, that is, someone base.24 The years of waiting, fearful that Henry would abandon her, had left Anne bitter. There was a new order in England and Anne was determined all should bow to it.

  On 23 May, when Cranmer at last pronounced Henry’s first marriage void, the preparations for the four-day ceremonies of Anne’s coronation had already begun. Her relations were to attend in force. It was a different story with the Tudor family. Henry’s elder sister, Queen Margaret, offered what support she could from Scotland (which was not much); her son James V, now ruling Scotland, disapproved of the breach with Rome, as he made clear in his letters. Hi
s half-sister Margaret Douglas remained with the princess Mary, who would not attend the coronation. Henry’s younger sister, the French queen, had endured poor health for some time, and also could not attend. Her daughters, Frances and Eleanor, remained with her, and although she sent him a final message of love, when she died in June the rumour was she had been killed by ‘the sorrow caused by the sight of her brother leaving his wife’.25 The final member of the Tudor family, Henry’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, was in France as part of Henry’s rapprochement with Francis I. Anne perceived Fitzroy as a possible threat to any children she might have and there was little love lost between them, so he was surely not too disappointed to miss the occasion.26 It meant, however, that not a single one of Henry’s Tudor blood relatives attended the ceremonies that began on 29 May.

  The first day was a river pageant, last seen at Elizabeth of York’s coronation over forty-five years earlier. Henry VII had used the occasion to re-engage Yorkist loyalties in the aftermath of the Battle of Stoke Field in 1487. Henry VIII also now needed to re-engage public loyalty – to his new marriage, his new queen, and their coming child. No expense had been spared, with 220 craft following the royal barges from Greenwich to the Tower; mechanical dragons belched smoke, musicians played, fireworks exploded, bells tinkled and flags fluttered as thousands lined the banks to watch the spectacle. At the Tower Henry was waiting to greet Anne.27 Even at forty-one he remained a handsome man. A Venetian described ‘a face like an angel’s, so fair it is; his head shorn like Cæsar’s’.28 As Anne disembarked he kissed her to the thunder of a thousand guns. She turned round to thank the mayor and citizens, before entering the Tower where Henry was to create eighteen Knights of the Bath the following day.

  Anne emerged from the Tower on the Saturday evening for the procession to Westminster, led by the new knights in their blue hoods. The roads had been gravelled to prevent the horses slipping and the weather was perfect. Anne was carried in a litter of white cloth of gold, drawn by white horses trapped in white damask, just as Katherine of Aragon had once been. Her surcoat was a glittering ‘tissue’, also of gold and white, as was her mantle, a cloak furred with ermine, while on her head she wore the coronet of gold crosses and fleurs-de-lys that had been ‘new made’ for Katherine in 1509.29 Her dark hair flowed loose as a symbol of her chastity.30 To make a procession so magnificent, with the streets hung with tapestry and rich cloths, all strata of society had been involved, and Henry hoped this, as well as the communal pleasure taken in witnessing it, was working its magic in binding his subjects to Anne. Yet hostile reports claimed that people did not take their hats off for her, and that the HA monogram of the new king and queen was everywhere mocked, with people pointing at it and laughing ‘Ha, ha!’31

  A story spread afterwards that Anne had worn a dress embroidered with tongues struck through with nails as a warning to those who would speak against her.32 Ordinary people had been arrested and whipped in public for this already, so the story reflected a justified sense of fear, and a warning. Later in the summer, two women, one heavily pregnant, were ‘beaten about Cheapside naked from the waist up with rods and their ears nailed to the Standard for because they said Queen Katherine was the true queen’.33 But Anne did have her supporters. England wanted a prince to avoid the dangers of violence and possible foreign invasion if there was a disputed succession. The memories of the terrible battles of the last century and the invasions from Burgundy by Edward IV, and from France by Henry VII, were not forgotten. It was a blessing to see Anne’s pregnancy so evident when she emerged from Westminster Abbey on Sunday following her coronation, wearing a crown and carrying two sceptres.34 For Anne the seven years of being the king’s mistress were over and the story of Anne the queen had begun.

  21

  THE TERROR BEGINS

  LESS THAN FOUR MONTHS FOLLOWING ANNE’S CORONATION THE christening of her daughter was held at Greenwich and was a splendid affair. It followed to the letter the rules Margaret Beaufort had laid down for such occasions. The church of Henry VII’s favourite order, the Observant Franciscans, was hung with the gold weaved tapestries called arras, and the silver font had a red silk canopy hung over it: a mark of the status of this ‘High and Mighty Princess of England’, the baby Elizabeth.

  The ceremonies began with a procession into the hall, led by the king’s cousin, Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter, a grandson of Edward IV and a favourite jousting companion.1 He carried a candle as a symbol of life and faith, which was lit at the moment of Elizabeth’s baptism, along with 500 torches held by the Yeomen of the Guard, filling the room with brilliant light. The princess had been named after the late queen, Elizabeth of York, but despite the grandeur of the ceremonies and the popularity of the name, the Imperial ambassador reported Elizabeth’s christening had been ‘like her mother’s coronation, very cold and disagreeable to the court and to the city, and there has been no thought of having the bonfires and rejoicings usual in such cases’.2

  Henry had believed that the birth of a son would offer evidence of divine approval for his actions. This had been denied him, while his royal cousin, Exeter, was amongst those who regretted the schism with Rome. A popular mystic called Elizabeth Barton, known as the ‘Holy Maid of Kent’, had told Henry to his face that if he married Anne ‘His Majesty should not be king of this Realm by the space of one month after, And in the reputation of God should not be king one day nor one hour’.3 Many had hoped, and prayed, that Henry would listen to Barton. Instead, a month after Elizabeth’s christening, Barton was arrested and those who had listened to her were at risk of accusations of treason. Letters from her former followers poured in to the king, begging forgiveness for having met her. They included one from Exeter’s wife, who was fortunate to be spared punishment.

  Henry was convinced that anyone who could not see that his first marriage was false must be evil in heart, and to demonstrate his determination to crush all opposition to his marriage he was now to turn on his seventeen-year-old daughter, Mary. Henry had decided that she was henceforth to be treated as a bastard. If he had had a son he might not have felt it necessary to make an issue of Mary’s status – she would have come second to a brother even if both were regarded as legitimate – but with two daughters he felt he could not have Mary, as the elder, treated as superior to Elizabeth, the child of his only ‘valid’ marriage. Mary was, therefore, degraded. Her servants were told to take her badges from their livery and replace them with the king’s, and she was informed she was no longer to be called princess.

  Mary, with all the courage and stubbornness of adolescence, continued nevertheless to use her title. She ignored threats of the king’s ‘high displeasure and punishment in law’ and even had the cheek to write to him expressing faux astonishment at the orders. Mary assured her father she trusted absolutely ‘that your grace was not privy to the same letter, as concerning the leaving out of the name of princess, for I doubt not in your goodness, that your grace does take me for his lawful daughter’.4 Henry realised he would have to break Mary, and to achieve that he first had to isolate her.

  In December Henry shut down Mary’s household, dismissing 160 servants, and her ten ladies- and gentlewomen-in-waiting. Her governess, the Countess of Salisbury, offered to pay for Mary’s household out of her own pocket, but was also sent packing. To add further insult to injury Mary learned that her senior lady-in-waiting, her cousin the eighteen-year-old Lady Margaret Douglas, was ordered to join Anne Boleyn’s household, while she was transferred to that of the princess Elizabeth at Hatfield.5 There, this grandchild of the heads of four royal houses found she had been placed under the care of Anne’s aunt, Lady Shelton, who was permitted to beat her if she continued to resist the king’s commands to accept her reduction in title. She was also to be treated at all times as inferior to her baby sister.

  As Mary wept in humiliation and anger in her rooms at Hatfield, her father was telling the French ambassador that if they wanted a marriage treaty they
should favour Margaret Douglas, his ‘niece, the daughter of the Queen of Scotland, whom he keeps with the queen his wife, and treats like a queen’s daughter’. The French ambassador duly noted that Margaret Douglas was ‘beautiful, and highly esteemed’, while saying of Mary, to judge by what Henry said of her, ‘he hates her thoroughly’.6

  There were those at court, however, who were now so angered by Henry’s marriage to Anne and the schism with Rome, that they wanted the Tudor dynasty brought to an end. ‘They refer to the case of Warwick [the Kingmaker], who chased away King Edward’, the Imperial ambassador informed Charles V, ‘and they say you have a better title than the present king, who only claims by his mother, who was declared by sentence of the Bishop of Bath a bastard, because Edward had espoused another wife before the mother of Elizabeth of York.’7 In short the king had no right to the throne through his Tudor father, but only through his mother, and that fell down if you believed Edward IV’s children were the bastards Richard III had claimed them to be.8