Mary Boleyn was probably born about 1499. She was therefore eight years younger than the king (whereas Queen Catherine was six years older than Henry). In 1514, when Henry VIII’s sister, Mary, married King Louis XII of France, the teenaged Mary Boleyn had been sent abroad with the princess as one of her attendants. She served for some time as a lady in waiting at the French court, where she seems to have gained both sexual experience and something of a reputation.
Following her return to England, in 1520 Mary Boleyn married Sir William Carey, a friend of the king and a member of the Privy Council. Nevertheless, for a Boleyn girl, descended from the earls of Ormonde, the dukes of Norfolk and ultimately from the royal house of Plantagenet, this marriage could be seen as a less than glittering match. Various reasons have been suggested as to why Mary married Carey, but the most likely explanation seems to be that her father was aware that Mary was flighty and he wanted to get her settled quickly before her French reputation caught up with her. Mary’s first child, Catherine Carey, was probably born in 1524 and, as we have seen, it is possible that Catherine was Henry VIII’s daughter. The fact that she was only a girl, coupled with her birth having been the possible product of a double adultery, are probably more than sufficient to explain why, if she was his daughter, Henry did nothing to recognise the little girl, who, after all, did have a legal father already in the person of her mother’s husband.
Henry’s relationship with Mary Boleyn seems to have ended in about 1525,31 and it was in the course of the next twelve months that the king began to show an interest in Mary’s younger sister, Anne. At the Shrove Tuesday joust on 20 February 1526 Henry VIII appeared in the guise of a tortured lover, with the motto ‘declare I dare not’. This probably marked the approximate start of his courtship of Anne.
Like her elder sister, Anne had completed her education abroad, at the courts of the Archduchess Margaret of Austria in the Low Countries, and subsequently at the French court. When she returned to her homeland it was said that no one would take her for an English woman. She seemed more like a French girl, having acquired a Continental ‘finish’ which made her stand out.
Anne’s first recorded appearance at the English court had been on Tuesday 4 March 1522, when she performed the part of ‘Perseverance’ in the court pageant for Shrove Tuesday – the last celebration before the start of the penitential season of Lent. Anne, then about 21 or 22 years of age, was not classically beautiful.32 No contemporary portrait of Anne survives, but she seems to have had a rather long face and neck and she was dark, with a sallow complexion, brown eyes and black or very dark brown hair. Later reports of a mark or mole on her neck and a slight deformity to one hand are impossible to verify.33 In 1522 she seems not to have made any immediate impression or impact on the king, who was then just beginning his relationship with her elder sister. It was not until four years later that we find evidence of the first signs of his interest in her.
Of course, Henry had no thoughts of marriage with Anne at this stage. His sexual relationship with Catherine of Aragon may have ended in the previous year. Nevertheless, at this time neither his marriage to Catherine nor the legitimacy of Mary, his daughter by the queen, seem to have been questioned by anyone. His intention as far as Anne Boleyn was concerned was simply that she should succeed her sister (and Elizabeth Blount) as his mistress.
Meanwhile, in June 1525 Henry Fitzroy, the king’s illegitimate son by Elizabeth Blount, had been promoted by being created Duke of Richmond and Somerset and appointed lieutenant of the North. In the same year the Princess Mary was appointed to head the council of the Welsh Marches, and a household was established for her at Ludlow Castle, where Edward V and Prince Arthur had both lived as Princes of Wales. In Mary’s case, although she was recognised as the heiress to the throne, she was not formally proclaimed Princess of Wales, since, as a girl, she was necessarily heiress presumptive rather than heiress apparent.
It was not until 1527 that Henry VIII began to voice doubts about the validity of his marriage to Catherine. The basis of his questioning was biblical. In the Old Testament (Leviticus 18, 1–19) a sexual relationship with the wife of a brother was forbidden. At the same time the book of Deuteronomy (21, 5) exhorted a man whose brother died childless to beget offspring for him by his widow. This apparent contradiction is probably explained by the different concepts of ‘wife’ and ‘widow’. Of course one should not seduce the wife of one’s brother while he was alive, but begetting children by her if he had died was another matter. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church regarded the widow of a brother as falling within the prohibited degrees. This meant that a brother’s widow could be married, but only with a papal dispensation like the one which had been granted by Pope Julius II in 1503–05 – allowing the marriage of Catherine and Henry irrespective of whether Catherine’s marriage to Arthur had ever been consummated.
In the spring of 1527, based on the fact that the children of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon had mostly died (and all the sons had died), Henry began to question whether his marriage was accursed. Did the pope actually have the requisite authority to set aside the rules in Leviticus?
At first the king put this question to Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop of York and Papal Legate, and to Archbishop Warham of Canterbury (5–6 April 1527). These churchmen were probably not surprised by this development. They well understood that the king’s failure to produce a living son and heir by Catherine of Aragon constituted a problem for England. Wolsey seems to have assumed that in due course, when suitable grounds had been found for setting aside the marriage with Catherine, Henry would choose a French princess to replace her as England’s queen and the mother of the future heir to the throne. The important thing, however, was to find a valid reason for quietly ending the marriage with Catherine. To this end, in May the consideration of the king’s case was adjourned sine die pending the seeking of expert opinions on the matter.
Meanwhile in June, perhaps unwisely, Henry himself discussed the matter directly with Catherine. The queen’s reaction was predictably furious. She told the king that she had been a virgin when she married him, and that he himself knew this perfectly well. On this basis, Catherine argued – both then and consistently thereafter – that their marriage was unquestionably valid. However, she completely failed to address – or even grasp – the issue which was preoccupying Henry and also the Papal court: namely the question of whether or not Pope Julius II had possessed the authority to grant a dispensation for a marriage between Henry VIII and his brother’s widow. Throughout the protracted matrimonial dispute which followed, Catherine seems to have consistently failed to understand that this question of papal authority to grant a dispensation was the key issue, for she never commented upon it, maintaining throughout her consistent claim that she had married Henry as a virgin bride.
After her interview with Henry, Catherine also wrote at once to her nephew, the Emperor Charles V, seeking his help. Since the Emperor’s troops were holding Rome and had the pope virtually imprisoned, Charles was, in one way, well placed to help his aunt and cause problems for the king. This was because at this stage Henry had no thought in his head of trying to circumvent papal authority. Indeed, in the summer of 1527 the king sent a request to Rome for a new papal bull which would permit him to marry a person to whom he was related in the first degree by either a legal or an illicit tie, provided that this person was not his brother’s widow. Clearly the king had Anne Boleyn in mind, and his request was a roundabout allusion to the fact that Mary Boleyn had previously been his mistress. Henry considered that he needed papal authorisation for a valid marriage to Anne because of his prior relationship with Mary Boleyn. He was also firmly of the belief, at this stage, that only papal authority could properly end his marriage with Catherine. It was only later that Henry was forced, by the lack of papal assistance, to take matters into his own hands. He probably did so reluctantly, and with nagging doubts about the validity of such a solution.
Meanwhile Anne Boleyn had been re
fusing to follow her sister into the royal bed as the king’s mistress. The strength of the king’s feelings for her is demonstrated by the seventeen surviving letters which he wrote to Anne in 1527 and 1528 (see chapter heading). It was Anne’s refusal to be his mistress, coupled with his own perception that he needed a new wife, who could produce a male heir to the throne, which finally encouraged Henry to see these two matters as having a single solution. Anne’s refusal and Henry’s offer of marriage superficially reflect the relationships of his grandfather, Edward IV, with Eleanor Talbot and Elizabeth Woodville. However, Henry intended, at first, to seek a different solution. Whereas Edward IV had opted for secret marriages, Henry wanted to act openly. At some stage in 1527 he therefore offered Anne marriage, and, following her acceptance of this proposal, the king formally applied for a papal dispensation which would set aside the diriment impediment which stood in the way of his marriage to Anne. However, matters progressed with frustrating slowness.
At first both Henry and Anne were happy to trust Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop of York and Chancellor of England. By 1529, however, Anne had decided that Wolsey was either not serious, or he was incapable of achieving the desired solution. She therefore helped to bring about the cardinal’s fall from power, and she began to suggest to Henry that authority over the Church in England belonged to him as king – a notion canvassed the previous year by William Tyndale in his book Obedience of a Christian Man. In the summer of 1531, Henry finally sent Catherine of Aragon – officially reduced to the rank of ‘Princess dowager of Wales’ – away from his court. The following year Anne, now convinced that Henry VIII did really intend to marry her, finally began to sleep with him. In September 1532 she was created Marchioness of Pembroke in her own right, with the remainder to her offspring, and this probably approximately marks the date at which the couple began their sexual relationship.
By December 1532, Anne Boleyn was pregnant. Of course, Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon had still not been annulled, either by the pope or by the English Church. However, urgent action was now essential. Although the king had sought to avoid – and had intended to avoid – a secret marriage with Anne, on a date in January 1533 which is not precisely known, secretly and privately, the couple married.34 Since the issue of Henry’s marriage to Catherine remained unresolved, the marriage to Anne was, of course, bigamous.
Although the marriage had been secret and private, Anne Boleyn was formally recognised as Queen of England on Holy Saturday 1533 (12 April). On 28 May 1533, four months after Henry’s marriage to Anne, the newly appointed Archbishop Cranmer, who had just succeeded Warham as archbishop of Canterbury,35 finally formally annulled the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon and declared the secret marriage of Henry and Anne to be valid. (Almost a year later, on 23 March 1534, the Papal court in Rome finally gave the opposite decision, and recognised Catherine of Aragon’s marriage to Henry VIII as valid.) On Sunday 1 June Anne was crowned queen in Westminster Abbey. Fourteen weeks later, on Sunday 7 September, she gave birth to a daughter (the future Queen Elizabeth I).
It has often been said that Anne’s failure to give Henry VIII a son immediately was a disaster for her and for their marriage, but in fact this seems not to have been so. In a very short time Anne was pregnant again. However, her miscarriage, in August 1534, was seen as a disaster. Moreover from this time onwards Henry seems to have begun to experience difficulties in his sexual relationship with Anne – possibly because he felt under such tremendous pressure to father an heir. At all events it was not until late in 1535 that Anne became pregnant for the third time.
Nevertheless, the popular notion that, having got Anne, Henry VIII then quickly lost interest in her seems to be unjustified. It is true that there were tensions in the relationship and it was sometimes stormy, but even as late as April 1536 the king was still making every effort to secure recognition for Anne as Queen of England from Catherine of Aragon’s nephew, Charles V. By this time there was no longer any case to fight on Catherine’s behalf, for she had died on the early afternoon of Friday 7 January 1536, at Kimbolton – possibly from cancer, though her doctor and other contemporary opinion believed that she had been slowly poisoned.36 Henry’s treatment of Catherine of Aragon had been unpopular, particularly with his female subjects. Moreover it was generally considered that whether or not his marriage to Catherine had been valid, their daughter, Mary, had been conceived in good faith and should not have been declared illegitimate. As a result, public opinion both in England and abroad tended to be against Anne Boleyn, who was scathingly castigated as a whore.
Anne Boleyn had a genuine and active interest in religion, and she was a Catholic (it would be quite wrong to think of her as a Protestant). Nevertheless, she was a reforming Catholic, with evangelical tendencies, and she encouraged the king to move in this direction. The final break with papal authority in Rome cannot be ascribed to Anne Boleyn. This came about rather as a result of Thomas Cromwell’s policies and was encapsulated in the first Act of Supremacy (1534). In fact Anne disapproved of Cromwell’s aim to close the English religious houses and confiscate their property for the royal treasury. She would have preferred reform of the religious houses, with an emphasis on education. Anne incited her almoner, John Skip, to preach against Cromwell’s policies in the Chapel Royal on Passion Sunday 1536. This was an embarrassment to Cromwell. The king’s attempt to persuade Charles V to recognise the Boleyn marriage in 1536 was another embarrassment to Cromwell, who had hoped that the king’s meeting with the imperial ambassador, Chapuys, would be used rather to switch English foreign policy from an alliance with France to an alliance with the emperor. As a result of these two incidents it was ultimately Cromwell (not Henry VIII) who decided that Anne Boleyn must go.
The minister made use of the rather free and easy court Anne Boleyn had created to manufacture evidence against her. On 30 April 1536 he arrested and interrogated Mark Smeaton, one of the court musicians. Probably by the use of torture, Cromwell extracted damning confessions from Smeaton, stating that Anne had been guilty of adultery with Smeaton himself and with others. With this confession Cromwell then confronted the king. Henry, ill-tempered since his recent jousting accident, reacted with predictable fury. Anne, her brother George and several others with whom she was accused of committing adultery were arrested and sent to the Tower of London. Rather cleverly, Archbishop Cranmer, who was an ally and supporter of Anne, was banned from the royal presence while the case against the queen was pursued, in order to ensure that the archbishop could do nothing to defend her.
Of course, the case against Anne Boleyn was a complete fabrication. Moreover, the argument that adultery by the queen was a treasonable offence was also a lie. Only later in Henry’s reign was legislation enacted to this effect. Nevertheless, the members of the grand jury which was to hear the indictments against Anne were carefully selected by Cromwell to ensure that the outcome would be the one he wanted. First her supposed lovers were tried and found guilty. Only then was the case against Anne herself heard. By this clever strategy it was possible to use the evidence of the earlier convictions to condemn Anne.
She maintained her innocence throughout, and on the last night of her life she swore twice on the Blessed Sacrament that she was not guilty of the charges. On 17 May – the day when her alleged lovers were all executed – Anne’s marriage to Henry VIII was annulled by Archbishop Cranmer. This was a strange and illogical action in one way, since, if she had never been validly married to the king, it is difficult to understand how Anne could possibly have committed adultery. Moreover the grounds for the annulment were the king’s prior relationship with Mary Boleyn, which everyone had known about all the time. However, the real issue here was neither truth nor credibility. The intention was merely to ensure that Anne Boleyn was finished completely and for ever.
Thus it was not as a queen but as a private person that Anne was executed on Tower Green on the morning of Friday 19 May, by an imported French executioner wielding a
sword rather than an axe. The marriage which Henry VIII had gone to such pains to contract had been written off in seconds, and the woman whose love he had so much desired had been cast aside without a word raised in her defence. Everything was done in a hurry. No one had even thought to provide a coffin, so Anne’s body was hastily tucked into a chest for arrows, and in this undignified container it was interred in a shallow, unmarked grave in the adjacent chapel royal of St Peter ad Vincula. Anne’s execution left Henry VIII completely free to marry whom he willed.
The legal points at issue in the case of Henry VIII’s relationships with Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn are complex. First, we should note in passing that Catherine of Aragon was at no time defending papal authority; in fact she was sidelining it. Her claim was that she had needed no dispensation to marry Henry VIII: that she had never really been married to his brother, Arthur, because that first ‘marriage’ had remained unconsummated. Obviously she felt strongly in the matter, and the case she presented was heartfelt, but she completely missed the key point. Catholic teaching on the point of canon law at issue here means that she did require a papal dispensation to marry Henry VIII, whether or not her marriage with Arthur had been consummated. Moreover, it is abundantly clear from their actions at the time that Catherine’s parents, Henry VII, Henry VIII and Pope Julius II all understood this and acted accordingly. Thus Catherine’s emotional protestations that she had been a virgin when she married Henry were sincere but completely irrelevant.
Royal Marriage Secrets Page 15
