The House of Tudor

by Alison Plowden

  The Suffolks were still in town, for although the Duke could ill afford the expense of a London season, he could not very well deny his wife the chance of a reunion with the sister she had not seen for thirteen years and they stayed on for a few weeks after Margaret’s arrival. The Queen of Scotland and the Duchess of Suffolk enjoyed some cosy hours together, reminiscing, swapping experiences and comparing and showing off their babies. But for the elder sister the contrast can only have been painful. Margaret, already regretting her impulsive second marriage and prematurely aged by illness, worry and disappointment, knew that sooner or later she would have to go back to the Scotland she hated to fight for her son’s future among the insolent, uncouth chieftains she hated still more; while Mary, the spoilt baby of the family, her beauty undimmed, was securely established in her own homeland and happily married to the man she loved - no one would ever take Mary’s babies away from her.

  The sisters had met with spontaneous pleasure and affection, but their ways had long since parted and they had little in common now apart from some childhood memories. A far deeper bond of friendship and shared experience existed between Mary and her sister-in-law. When, the following spring, Queen Catherine made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham to pray for a son, Mary went with her and afterwards the Suffolks entertained her ‘with such poor cheer as we could make her grace’.

  Mary gave birth to her second child that year - a daughter christened Frances, probably as a gesture to the King of France - and two years later another daughter, Eleanor, was born. But all Catherine’s prayers went unanswered. She miscarried again in the autumn of 1517 and in November 1518 she was delivered of another stillborn child, a girl. It was her last pregnancy.

  6: THE KING’S SECRET MATTER

  …when we remember our mortality and that we must die, then we think that all our doings in our lifetime are clearly defaced and worthy of no memory if we leave you in trouble at the time of our death.

  In the spring of 1519 Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary and the six years difference in their ages was now cruelly apparent. Constant childbearing had spread and thickened Catherine’s once slender waist and her lovely russet hair, so much admired by Edward Hall, had darkened to an indeterminate muddy brown. She had become a rather dumpy little woman, unshakeably dignified, formidably pious and increasingly preoccupied with the task of bringing up her precious daughter.

  As for Henry, his youthful love affair with his wife had long grown cold. Some people dated the beginning of his withdrawal from 15114, the year of Ferdinand’s third betrayal – and the year when rumours of divorce were circulating. Rumours were also circulating that the King of England had vented some of his rage against the King of Spain on his Spanish wife, but there is little hard evidence to support the gossipmongers and Catherine herself made it plain that she disapproved of her father’s behavior.

  If Henry was already beginning to turn away from her, the reason is more likely to be found in the rise of Thomas Wolsey. In this burly son of an Ipswich grazier, with his brilliant brain, his unlimited capacity for sheer hard work and his total commitment to his master’s interests, the King had found a councilor after his own heart and it was Wolsey’s opinions which counted now, Wolsey whose advice was sought on all matters foreign and domestic, Wolsey who enjoyed the King’s confidence. The Queen never liked or trusted the Cardinal Archbishop of York, but she never betrayed any personal resentment or jealousy of his steadily increasing influence over her husband.

  Catherine showed no sign of jealousy either when, in early in 1514, the King took one of her young maids of honour as his mistress. Not that there was anything remarkable in the King taking a mistress – indeed, by the standards of his day, Henry had been an unusually faithful husband. There may well have been some casual, temporary liaisons during the first five years of their marriage but it was not until the advent of Bessie Blount that the Queen had any acknowledged rival in her husband’s bed.

  We know very little about Bessie Blount. Catherine had first known the family, which came from Shropshire, in her Ludlow days. Bessie’s father, John Blount of Kinlet, was related to her Chamberlain, William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, and it was possibly due to him that Bessie got a place at Court. She was very young, certainly no more than fifteen, when she first caught the King’s eye and we are told that she was beautiful - ‘a fair damosel’ according to Hall’s Chronicle, who ‘in singing, dancing and in all goodly pastimes exceeded all other’. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, writing in the early seventeenth century, remarks (with a delightfully appropriate but unintentional pun) that Mistress Elizabeth Blount ‘was thought for her rare ornaments of nature and education to be the beauty and mistress-piece of her time.’ But the only really significant fact about Bessie Blount is that, in 1519, she bore the King ‘a goodly man child of beauty like to the father and mother’.

  The King acknowledged the infant with pride and pleasure and had him christened Henry, with Cardinal Wolsey once more a godfather. But Bessie Blount did not return to Court. ‘The mother of the King’s son’, as she was now officially styled, had retired on her laurels and a year or so later she reappears in the record comfortably established as the wife of Gilbert Tailbois, a gentleman of substance with estates in Lincolnshire. Her place in the royal bed was taken, for a time at least, by Mary Boleyn, an experienced young woman of rather doubtful reputation who had gone to France with Mary Tudor in 1514 and before that had been in the service of Margaret von Hapsburg, Governess of the Netherlands.

  The year 1525 is usually pin-pointed as the time when Henry first became seriously worried about the succession. On 18 June an investiture was held at Bridewell Palace and amongst those honoured were the King’s nephew, Henry Brandon, now nine years old, who became Earl of Lincoln; the King’s first cousin, Henry Courtenay, son of his aunt Katherine Plantagenet, who was raised to be Marquis of Exeter; and Sir Thomas Boleyn, created Viscount Rochford in recognition, it was supposed, of his daughter’s services. But by far the most significant of the titles handed out that Sunday morning were those bestowed on the King’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy.

  The six-year-old child had been brought over from Durham House in the Strand at about nine o’clock and taken to a private robing room to be dressed in the robes ‘that pertained to the state of an Earl’. He was escorted into the richly decorated Presence Chamber by the Earls of Oxford and Arundel and solemnly created Earl of Nottingham, his patent being read aloud by Master Thomas More. Then the trumpeters blew a fanfare and the new Earl ‘departed out of the King’s presence in like manner and form as he was brought into it’.

  A few minutes later he was brought back again, this time ‘apparelled in the robes pertaining to the state of a Duke’, supported by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and escorted by Garter King of Arms, the Marquis of Dorset and three earls who bore between them all the trappings of the ducal honour. The little boy stood stiff and uncomprehending as his father invested him with the mantle, the sword, the cap of estate and ducal coronet, before putting the gold rod into his hands. And thus, says a contemporary description of the event, ‘was he created Duke of Richmond and Somerset, and at the conclusion of the ceremonies he stood aside in the King’s presence above all the other peers of the realm’. A week later the Duke of Richmond was installed as a Knight of the Garter, and in July Letters Patent were issued creating him Lord High Admiral of England and Warden General of all the Marches towards Scotland.

  Not surprisingly the sudden elevation of Henry Fitzroy caused a flurry of interest, especially among the diplomatic corps. There was talk of a royal marriage for the new Duke; there was talk of a kingdom to be created for him in Ireland and it was freely speculated that this healthy, handsome child, who had already been granted quasi-royal status, might yet ‘be easily by the King’s means exalted to higher things’.

  Whatever the King’s future plans, he contented himself in 1525 with granting hi
s son an income of £4,ooo a year and setting up a princely establishment for him at Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire. The Warden General of the Scottish Marches set off to take up residence in his new domains in August, after bidding a formal farewell to the King at Hampton Court, Cardinal Wolsey’s splendid riverside mansion. The Cardinal had presented his godson with a horse litter ‘garnished with cloth of silver’, but the Duke soon got bored with travelling in it and demanded successfully to be allowed to ride his pony instead. The journey north, which occupied more than a month, took on very much the character of a royal progress and in the privacy of the little Court at Sheriff Hutton my lord of Richmond was usually addressed in royal style; but, as nothing was said officially about exalting him to higher things, international interest in the King of England’s bastard gradually faded.

  The affair had, however, caused a certain amount of unpleasantness within the family circle. The honours and attentions showered on Bessie Blount’s son had been too much for Queen Catherine’s self-control, and she had protested angrily at what looked like a deliberate insult to herself and her daughter. Catherine’s protests, though, did her no good and for the first time her husband turned on her, dismissing three of her Spanish ladies-in-waiting who were said to have encouraged her to criticize his actions. This, remarked a Venetian correspondent, was a strong measure, ‘but the Queen was obliged to submit and to have patience’.

  Catherine was obliged to submit, too, when Henry decided that the time had come for Princess Mary, now nine years old, to go to Ludlow to take up her duties as Princess of Wales. It was hard for the Queen, especially with her own gloomy memories of Ludlow, to face separation from her child, but she could take comfort from the fact that at least Mary was being treated with the consideration due to her father’s heiress. Ludlow Castle was repaired and re-decorated for her, and her household would be under the control of her mother’s old friend, Margaret Pole Countess of Salisbury.

  All the same, it was a sad autumn for Catherine. Her health was poor and she had long since had to give up all hope of bearing a living son. She was estranged from her husband, separated from her daughter and missing the little girl badly. Internationally, too, the outlook was bleak, for relations with Spain were once more severely strained. Looking back over her life in September 1525 the Queen of England could see only a depressing catalogue of failure - repeated failure to give the King a male heir, failure to keep the Anglo-Spanish alliance in being, the failure, in short, of the whole purpose of her marriage.

  But Henry came back to her. He no longer discussed his affairs with her and almost certainly he no longer slept with her, but there remained a bond of affection and respect, of shared experience and shared interests between them. They made up their quarrel and read Erasmus’ latest book together. The King resumed his habit of receiving visitors in his wife’s apartments and they kept Christmas together at Eltham, though with rather less indiscriminate hospitality than usual because of an outbreak of plague in London. Everything seemed to have settled back to normal and no one, least of all the Queen, could have guessed that this period of calm was the lull before the storm - the hurricane which was about to tear her world apart and destroy it forever.

  We do not know exactly when Henry was first seriously attracted by the younger sister of his discarded mistress Mary Boleyn. If we did, we should know a great deal more about the real origins of the King’s Great Matter. The fortunes of the Boleyn family, tenant farmers from Sail in Norfolk, had been founded in the fifteenth century by Geoffrey, a younger son who had come up to London in classic Dick Whittington style and risen to be Lord Mayor. His son, William, had climbed further up the social ladder by marrying into the noble Anglo-Irish family of Butler and William’s second son, Thomas, came to Court to make a career in the King’s service - one of the new men attracted by the new dynasty. Thomas had also acquired an aristocratic wife, Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the second Duke of Norfolk, and there were three surviving children of the marriage - George, Mary and Anne.

  In later years, when Anne Boleyn had become the most notorious woman in Europe, her lightest word, her every look and gesture were eagerly observed and reported, but very little is known about her early life. There is still some controversy over her date of birth, although William Camden, writing in her daughter’s lifetime, gives it categorically as 1507. Anne was probably born at Blickling in Norfolk, though tradition always connects her with Hever Castle, the Boleyns’ Kentish property, and she seems to have received most of her early education from Simonette, her French maid or governess. Later on, most likely in 1519 when her father was appointed ambassador, she went over to France to be ‘finished’ in the household of Queen Claude, François’ good dull wife, who maintained a school for young ladies at her Court.

  By the end of 1521 Anne was back in England. Her father used his growing influence to get her accepted as one of Queen Catherine’s maids of honour and she was present at the New Year Revels, wearing a dress of yellow satin and a caul of Venice gold. Thomas Boleyn was planning a match for his younger daughter with James Butler, one of her Irish kinsmen - a project which, for reasons connected with the political situation in Ireland, had the active support of the King and Cardinal Wolsey. But the negotiations made slow progress and Anne, a nubile and enterprising fifteen-year-old, began to look round for a husband on her own account. Her choice fell on Henry Percy, son and heir of the Earl of Northumberland. This rather slow-witted youth was attached to Wolsey’s entourage and ‘when it chanced the Lord Cardinal at any time to repair to the court, the Lord Percy would then resort for his pastime unto the Queen’s chamber and there would fall in dalliance among the Queen’s maidens, being at the last more conversant with Mistress Anne Boleyn than with any other.’

  The young people soon reached an understanding but as soon as rumours of a secret engagement reached Cardinal Wolsey, he took prompt and ruthless action to end it. He rated the unfortunate Percy in front of the servants of his chamber for so far forgetting himself and his position as to become entangled ‘with a foolish girl yonder in the court’, and ordered him ‘not once to resort to her company’ again on pain of his father’s and the King’s severe displeasure.

  George Cavendish, Wolsey’s gentleman usher, recording this episode in his biography of the Cardinal, believed that the King had ordered Wolsey to intervene because he had already conceived a secret passion for Anne. In view of later events, this must have seemed a reasonable assumption to Cavendish, writing with the benefit of hindsight, but there is, in fact, no evidence whatever that Henry had any amorous feelings tor Anne Boleyn as early as 1522 - a time when he was probably still sleeping with her elder sister. A less romantic but far more likely explanation is that the Cardinal had simply acted to prevent a young nobleman entrusted to his care from being trapped into matrimony by a scheming young woman of no particular family. As for Anne, she showed her furious disappointment so openly that she was sent home in disgrace and, as far as we know, did not return to Court until the end of 1525 or the early part of 1526.

  By this time the Butler marriage had finally fallen through and Anne, now in her nineteenth year, was still unbetrothed. There were apparently no other suitors under consideration and she had begun to amuse herself by flirting with Sir Thomas Wyatt, the witty, sophisticated courtier, diplomat and poet who was a neighbour of the Boleyns down in Kent. Wyatt, Like the King, was a married man and it seems probable that it was his obvious interest which first roused Henry to take notice of Anne. ‘Who list her hunt’, wrote Wyatt in a sonnet which may or may not refer to Anne Boleyn, but which could hardly be more apt;

  Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt.

  As well as I may spend his time in vain:

  And, graven with Diamonds, in letters plain

  There is written her fair neck round about:

  Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am;

  And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

  Whether or not Wyatt had s
pent his time entirely in vain (it was whispered later that Anne had not always been so hard to get), he was wise enough to abandon the chase as soon as Caesar set foot in the stirrup and by sometime in the summer of 1326 the field had been cleared for the most remarkable courtship in English history.

  No other woman in English history has ever aroused so much and such violent controversy as Anne Boleyn. In her own lifetime she was ‘the other woman’, the home-wrecker, the wicked stepmother; she was the concubine, la grande putain, the goggle-eyed whore, ‘that naughty pake Nan Bullen’. Succeeding generations have seen her as a wronged and virtuous Protestant heroine, as a helpless victim of circumstances, as a commonplace little gold-digger. It is virtually impossible now to find the real wom.an beneath all the passion and the politics, the prejudice and the special pleading, and often the seeker feels, like Wyatt, that he is trying to catch the wind in a net. She can only be glimpsed occasionally - defiant, tricky, ‘wild for to hold though [she] seems tame’ - and always there is that faint but unmistakable whiff of the feral, the untameable, wherever she has been.

  She was not conventionally beautiful, especially not by the standards of an age which admired blue-eyed, fair-skinned blondes. Anne’s dark brunette colouring earned her another of her nicknames, ‘the night crow’. She had thick, glossy black hair and fine dark eyes, which seem by all accounts to have been her best feature, but she was inclined to be flat-chested and her complexion is variously described as ‘sallow’ or ‘swarthy’, which sounds as if she had the rather greasy, coarse-textured skin which often goes with black hair and eyes. There were other blemishes, too. She is said to have had a projecting tooth, a rudimentary sixth finger on her right hand and a large mole or strawberry mark on her neck. But Anne was always clever at making the best of herself She dressed well and soon became a leader of fashion, being described as ‘the model and mirror of those at Court’. She sang, played the lute and was a graceful dancer. But, apart from the extra polish of her French education, she does not appear to have had any special accomplishments to mark her out from her contemporaries. She is said to have had a ready wit, but no examples of it have survived. She certainly had a venomous temper and a sharp tongue which made her many unnecessary enemies. It is not easy to define the secret of her undoubted fascination, but probably it lay partly in her general air of elegance and vivacity, and partly in that special quality of sexual magnetism which eludes description, defies portraiture and has little or nothing to do with physical beauty.