Curiously, Eleanor’s death, which the king must have greeted with some relief, and which she herself seems almost to have been prepared for,80 appears in many other ways to have been unexpected. Her sister and executrix, the Duchess of Norfolk, was out of the country at the time, as were all Eleanor’s closest living relatives.81 As a result, the necessary legal processes following Eleanor’s death were not, in fact, started until two weeks later, when Elizabeth Talbot returned to England.
Probably the Duchess of Norfolk could not have refused Edward IV’s command to accompany Margaret of York to Flanders. However, she stayed away for several weeks. She sailed from Margate with the king’s sister on Thursday 23 June, was present at the exchange of vows between Margaret and Charles the Bold on Monday 27 June, and attended all the wedding festivities. On 30 June, while her sister Eleanor was dying in England, the Duchess of Norfolk was still in the Low Countries. She only set off to return to England on Wednesday 13 July.82
Eleanor probably died at East Hall, the old manor house at Kenninghall, which her sister held in dower. Writing in the sixteenth century, John Leland recalled a local tradition which probably relates to Eleanor’s demise:
There apperith at Keninghaule not far from the Duke of Northfolkes new place a grete mote, withyn the cumpace whereof there was sumtyme a fair place, and there the saying is that there lay a Quene or sum grete lady, and there dyed.83
The Duchess of Norfolk buried her sister in the choir of the Whitefriars’ Church in Norwich. This church stood just across the River Wensum from Norwich Cathedral. The site now comprises premises owned by the firm of Jarrolds. Almost nothing is left of the Friary today, but one surviving medieval archway bears a modern plaque, commemorating Eleanor’s burial. Eleanor’s tomb could still be seen in the priory ruins in the seventeenth century, but all trace of it has long since vanished. However, bones which may be Eleanor’s were excavated from the priory site in 1958. They are now preserved in a nice, clean cardboard box in the storerooms of Norwich Castle Museum.84
As for Elizabeth Woodville, eclipsed and demoted from the rank of queen during the reign of Richard III in favour of Eleanor Talbot, she subsequently found herself restored to her former rank by Henry VII. For very good reasons of his own the new king wished to marry Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of Edward IV, and her mother’s namesake. It was Henry’s aim to present his consort to the country as the heiress of the house of York, and for this it was essential that her mother should have been Edward IV’s true wife. Hence Elizabeth Woodville was publicly re-enthroned. At the same time, and for the same reason, Eleanor Talbot was carefully written out of history. And just in case anyone remembered the complicated story of Edward IV’s bigamous secret marriages, Henry’s historians invented the lie that Edward IV had been alleged to have married Elizabeth Wayte (Lucy), but that this story had been disproved.
For about two years Elizabeth Woodville’s luck seemed to be in. She found herself back at court as the mother of the new queen consort, and the prospective grandmother of the new ruling dynasty. Sadly, her luck did not last. In 1487, when Henry VII was facing a threat to his throne from someone who may have been (or have claimed to be) one of Elizabeth Woodville’s sons by Edward IV,85 Henry urgently needed to get her out of the way. He could not risk her seeing – and perhaps identifying – the pretender. She was therefore disgraced and deprived of her dower lands. Left with only a small pension, she retired to Bermondsey Abbey. Thus, ironically, Elizabeth Woodville came closer to being a nun than Eleanor Talbot had ever been!
Despite a brief fantasy that she might become Queen of Scotland, Elizabeth spent the remaining five years of her life at the abbey, dying there in more or less complete poverty in April 1492. She had nothing to leave her children but her blessings. At her own request her body was buried at Windsor, on the north side of the altar of St George’s Chapel, in the same tomb as Edward IV. Thus, in one sense, Elizabeth Woodville was buried as a queen. Yet her wooden coffin was so cheap that it fell to pieces completely in the damp Windsor soil, leaving virtually nothing to be found, four hundred years later, by the late eighteenth-century antiquarians who explored the tomb. Moreover, the accounts of Elizabeth’s funeral make very sad reading. The entire event was such a pitiful exercise in penny-pinching on the part of her son-in-law, Henry VII, that even second-hand candles were used.86
10
THE INFANTA AND
THE NYGHT CROWE1
* * *
Debating with myself the contents of your letters, I have put myself in great distress, not knowing how to interpret them; … praying you with all my heart that you will expressly certify me of your whole mind concerning the love between us two. For of necessity I must ensure me of this answer, having been now above one whole year struck with the dart of love.
Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn, 1527
* * *
[She] asked the king … to consider carefully that she was a gentlewoman born of good and honourable parents and with an unsullied reputation. She had no greater treasure than her honour which she would rather die a thousand times than tarnish.
Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic; Henry VIII, vol. X, p. 2452
* * *
The concubine’s little bastard, Elizabeth, will be excluded from the succession.
E. Chapuys (Imperial Ambassador to England), 1536
* * *
Henry VIII, the grandson of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, is famous for having had six wives. Sad to say, however, in sober fact this claim to fame is nonsense. Two of Henry’s ‘marriages’ – to Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn – overlapped, and since it was no more permissible in the sixteenth century than it is today to have two wives at the same time, it is instantly apparent that at best only one of these two marriages can have been valid.
Books and television series that focus on ‘the six wives’ can be chronologically very misleading. To allot equal chapters or episodes to each of the six women with whom Henry celebrated weddings would seem to imply that his relationships with them were all of equal duration. In fact, however, the ‘marriage’ to Catherine of Aragon – which, in modern terms, nearly made it to a silver wedding anniversary – by itself lasted ten years longer than all the other five ‘marriages’ put together. Or to look at things in a slightly different way, Henry knew Catherine of Aragon for a total of thirty-five years. He knew Anne Boleyn for at least ten years (though his marriage to her lasted only three years). On the other hand he knew both Jane Seymour and Catherine Howard for perhaps two years at the most. His second longest marital relationship was with Catherine Parr. That lasted for about four years. The ‘marriage’ to Anne of Cleves lasted merely a matter of months. In terms of their time duration, Henry’s most important royal relationships were undoubtedly those with Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, and these two relationships were also of overwhelming importance in other ways.
However, like other members of the ‘Tudor’ dynasty, Henry VIII had a great talent for rewriting history to suit himself. In point of fact, after various vicissitudes, the king’s own ultimate judgement (for what that is worth) was that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn were both invalid. Certainly both marriages were annulled in England,3 and the annulment of a marriage means, not that it is terminated, but rather that it is declared never to have existed at all. If the annulments of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn were legal, that would reduce the number of Henry VIII’s wives to a maximum of four.
If we pursue this course, we can reduce the number of Henry’s wives even further. His marriage to Anne of Cleves, never consummated, was also annulled. Moreover, one must take account of the fact that Henry’s love-match with Catherine Howard was likewise finally annulled, so that Catherine, like her cousin Anne Boleyn, went to the block not as Queen of England, but as a private lady.4 Thus we can see that Henry VIII may only have had two legal wives. Indeed, this was actually the king’s own view of the ma
tter. At the end of his reign Henry himself stated quite clearly that he had only made two valid marriages – with Jane Seymour and with Catherine Parr – since all his other ‘marriages’ had by that time been ruled to be null and void.
In this chapter, however, we shall not be considering the king’s last four marital experiments in any detail. This is because we are exploring secret and bigamous royal marriages. It was only Henry’s involvement with Anne Boleyn which resulted in a secret and potentially bigamous marriage. None of his subsequent putative marriages was secret, or raised issues of royal bigamy.5 Because there is a question of bigamy in respect of Anne Boleyn, we must also consider the question of the king’s relationship with Catherine of Aragon. Of course, Henry’s connection with Catherine of Aragon was neither secret nor bigamous – though it may have been open to question in another respect.
Like his grandfather, Edward IV, Henry VIII does not really seem to have had huge numbers of documented extra-marital relationships. His childhood and youth were strictly controlled, and after he became king, although there certainly were mistresses, these never circulated in large numbers simultaneously. Henry VIII is also like his grandfather Edward IV in another respect. For it is a curious fact that, like Edward, Henry too produced very few royal bastards – at least, if one excludes his children by Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, all of whom were later officially designated as bastards! Later reports that Anne Boleyn herself was Henry’s bastard daughter can certainly be discounted. In fact, apart from his children by Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, the only officially recognised bastard of Henry VIII was Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the king’s son by Elizabeth Blount.
On the surface, the importance which Henry himself gave to Richmond appears to make it unlikely that other bastard children of the king would have been left completely unacknowledged. Mary Boleyn (Anne Boleyn’s elder sister) was undoubtedly the king’s mistress for a time, and Henry’s paternity of Mary’s two Carey children has sometimes been alleged. However, the fact that the king himself did not give any official recognition to either of these two children makes his blood relationship with them questionable.
On the other hand, Mary Boleyn’s children were born under somewhat different circumstances than Elizabeth Blount’s son. Elizabeth had been unmarried when she bore the Duke of Richmond, so that her son was not the product of a double adultery and his mother had no husband to assume the role of the child’s legal father.6 Mary Boleyn’s marital situation was not the same. In 1520 – probably before she became the king’s mistress – she married Sir William Carey.7 Her daughter, Catherine Carey, was not born until 1524, and her son Henry Carey, in 1526. Thus both of Mary’s children had a ready-made legal father on hand to assume responsibility for them. It is possible that Catherine Carey was, in fact, the king’s child. However, unlike Richmond she was merely a daughter. That fact, coupled with the probable double adultery which might have led to her conception, may account for her lack of recognition.
The paternity of Catherine’s younger brother, Henry Carey, is even more doubtful. But even if he really was the king’s son, the fact that Henry VIII had by the time of Henry Carey’s birth commenced his relationship with the boy’s aunt, Anne Boleyn, may have been enough to deter royal recognition, since Henry VIII was certainly aware that his relationship with Mary Boleyn jeopardised his chances of contracting a legal marriage with Mary’s younger sister Anne (see below).
The overall reputation of Henry VIII is an interesting historical phenomenon which needs careful perusal. Henry was a revolting man who treated women selfishly and sometimes cruelly. He was a major vandal who destroyed many works of art and much of England’s cultural heritage for selfish motives, including his own financial gain. He was a well-educated man who, however, used his education cynically for his own ends. In short, as a person there is really nothing much to recommend him. Yet despite all this he has somehow managed to acquire the somewhat cuddly image of ‘Bluff King Hal’. Given the very extensive evidence against him, probably only a tyrannical dictator who wrote his own version of history could have achieved this, and indeed, the ‘Tudor’ propaganda machine was a powerful government tool in the sixteenth century.
It is not, perhaps, surprising that part of the self-image which Henry VIII sought to disseminate was that of a macho man for whom women fell easily. Of course, a number of women did fall in with his wishes, but this could well have been merely because of the political power which he exerted. No doubt some of his women – mistresses and ‘wives’ – were at times afraid of him, and they may have given in to his wishes for this reason. Others would have been interested in what they could get out of a relationship with the King of England, and may have been happy to risk succumbing to Henry’s advances for this reason, rather than because they found his conversation delightful, his personality charming, his physique handsome or his sexual attraction irresistible.
In fact, the evidence regarding Henry VIII as a sexual being is somewhat equivocal. He failed to father a large number of children. Moreover, the male children he did engender were all defective and died young – in some cases very young indeed. Thus all of Catherine of Aragon’s sons died in infancy, while Edward VI never made it to full adulthood, and even the Duke of Richmond died before managing to father any children of his own.
On whom should we blame Henry’s failure to engender living sons by Catherine of Aragon? It can hardly have been the queen’s fault, since as we shall see, during the first ten years of her ‘marriage’ with Henry, Catherine of Aragon was pregnant on at least six occasions. Obviously the queen was fertile. Equally obviously the king was also fertile and was fulfilling his conjugal duties. Since Catherine even carried most of her foetuses to term, and more than once successfully gave birth to a live child, it may have been merely a mixture of bad luck and lack of hygiene that brought about the couple’s failure to produce more living heirs.
However, in the last ten years of his life Henry VIII fathered no children at all. His marriage with Anne of Cleves was never consummated. The king himself gave evidence to this effect as part of the proceedings for the annulment of the marriage. It is also unclear whether Henry ever really had a sexual relationship with either Catherine Howard or Catherine Parr. In fact, Henry’s last provable act of sexual intercourse took place in 1537. Interestingly, this was only a short time after the death of Anne Boleyn, who may have encountered difficulties of her own in her sexual relationship with Henry, since she is reported to have stated that he was impotent.8 Yet during their relatively short marriage, Anne, like Catherine before her, seems to have had fairly regular pregnancies – perhaps three of them in three years. So initially, from a sexual point of view, her ‘marriage’ to Henry must have been successful. As we shall shortly see, however, an important event which took place in 1536 may have changed things dramatically for Henry towards the end of his relationship with Anne Boleyn.
Overall, the evidence now available makes Henry VIII’s sexual activity in later life somewhat questionable. Indeed, after the age of about 45 the king’s sex-life seems to have become nearly non-existent. Some writers have sought to explain this by suggesting that Henry had contracted some sexually transmitted disease, possibly syphilis. However, there is no record of syphilis symptoms in Henry’s medical record, nor is there any record from his doctors that they prescribed the standard sixteenth-century syphilis treatment of mercury. In reality, therefore, the evidence for Henry having syphilis is nil.9 It is, perhaps, more likely that the king suffered from some form of erectile dysfunction in later life. This could have been psychologically based, or the result of ageing, or caused by the general ill-health which the king suffered during the last ten or eleven years of his life as a result of an accident (see below). Recent research has suggested that Henry may also have suffered from late onset diabetes during this period.
Much is known about Henry VIII’s medical history. His father and brother both died of tuberculosis, but Henry VIII escaped t
his disease. In 1514 he had an attack of smallpox, but he was a healthy young man at that time, and he survived with no apparent lasting ill effects. An attack of malaria in 1521 was more debilitating, because of course, an initial dose of malaria results in a recurring cycle of attacks of fever every few years for the rest of the patient’s life. Later, a serious jousting accident in 1524, when the king forgot to close his visor, nearly cost him an eye. He was lucky. Nevertheless, the lance blow to his head left the king suffering subsequently from serious migraines. Later still there was a tennis injury to his leg and foot in 1527, following which the king began to suffer from a varicose ulcer.
The key fact, however, is that in January 1536 Henry was unhorsed in a tournament and was very seriously injured. He seems to have been unconscious for two hours after the accident, and his life was thought to be in danger for a time. Although Anne Boleyn had conceived three times by the king, and was actually pregnant at the time of his accident, the shock of the news caused her to miscarry, and she had no subsequent pregnancies. The jousting accident, which, among other things, seriously exacerbated the effects of the king’s leg ulcer, is thought by modern medical researchers to have been the cause of Henry’s obesity, his later general ill-health and his mood-swings.10 It is, perhaps, significant that, following this accident, the king is reported to have accused Anne Boleyn of using witchcraft against him, while she began to cast aspersions on his sexual potency.
Royal Marriage Secrets Page 13
