The Six Wives & Many Mistresses of Henry VIII

by Amy Licence

  It was not until 2 January that an attempt was made on the castle. After Wyatt and his team had taken up their defensive positions inside, the attacking knights attempted to break in, digging their swords into the banks and climbing the walls until they were ‘out of brethe’, getting up again valiantly until they were overthrown and the attack was abandoned. The castle was attacked again on the following day, with stones being thrown that hurt some bystanders, then again on 5 January, until the king decided to lead the knights in person three days later. Dressed in cloth of silver and black velvet, he proved himself in the tournament, making ‘great strokes’.7 The metaphor of Henry’s power over that of his companions is a powerful one here, set against the backdrop of the unassailable castle, yet Hall does not relate whether or not the walls were finally broached. The focus seems to have shifted and the surrender was of far less interest than the chase. Historian David Starkey believes that Anne Boleyn was among the ladies taking part, watching the king perform his feats of skill and strength outside and Thomas Wyatt defending the white castle, with its connotations of purity and innocence. He dates Henry’s interest in Anne from this point, which seems entirely logical. Anne, though, was probably unaware at this point that she had made a royal conquest.

  Wyatt’s grandson, George, would later suggest that a love affair had developed between Anne and Thomas shortly before she attracted Henry’s attention, which must imply a date of late 1524 or early 1525, shortly before and during the performance of the Chasteau Blanche. Henry’s love letters to Anne include the detail that he had been ‘struck by the dart of love’ for a year, and internal evidence would place composition around 1526, moving his awakening interest in her back to 1525. This would support the notion that she was back at court in time for the Christmas celebrations, perhaps summoned to attend Queen Catherine during the Emperor’s visit. It is likely that her friendship with Wyatt was renewed at this point and may have developed into something more. The hostile Jesuit Sanders later went so far as to relate a scandalous account of the poet visiting Anne in her chamber and taking certain physical liberties with her before she fled upstairs at the summons of another lover, but it is so ridiculous as to be easily discounted. A story related by George Wyatt sounds more credible, in which the king recognised a ring or jewel Thomas had taken from Anne during courtship. Recognising the item and its symbolism, Henry declared that he had been deceived, at which point Wyatt realised he must abandon his pursuit, in favour of the king’s.

  The game of courtly love could be a minefield for young women. Vives outlines some of the difficulties in The Education of a Christian Woman, espousing the view of St Jerome that young innocents could fall prey to predatory men and the strong passions their attentions could raise: ‘From meetings and conversations with men, love affairs arise. In the midst of pleasures, banquets, dances, laughter and self-indulgences, Venus and her son Cupid reign supreme.’8 This was more literal than the author might have suspected, with the allegorical figures of love often being portrayed by actors in masks and plays at Henry’s court. ‘Such things attract and ensnare human minds,’ Vives continued,

  but especially those of young women, over which pleasure exercises an uncontrolled tyranny. Poor young girl, if you emerge from these encounters a captive prey! How much better it would have been to remain at home or to have broken the leg of a body rather than of the mind … although [love] burns with insatiable desire for pleasure, it wastes much time in suspicions, tears and complaints, it makes itself hateful.

  Love caused girls to ‘hate their parents and relatives because they stand in the way of their’ happiness. Citing biblical examples, Vives described how love was responsible for the fall of Troy, how it ‘drove mild-mannered David to expose the innocent Uriah to imminent danger so that he could freely possess Bathsheba. It drove Solomon, the wisest of kings, to madness, to the point of idolatry. It weakened Samson, it forced Medea to rend her brother limb from limb and kill her children. It led Catiline to slay his own son so that he could bring Orestilla into an empty house’.9 Soon the King of England himself might be added to such a list.

  Wyatt’s awareness of having been supplanted by a superior suitor appears to have inspired his best-known work, a Petrarchan sonnet that exposes the rivalries and darkness beneath the court’s glittering exterior. In typical Tudor style, he puns on the notion of his heart and the pursuit of the hart, which he realises has been in vain, and is now only able to follow the crowd of admirers, as she has been won by Caesar, or the king:

  Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,

  But as for me, hélas, I may no more.

  The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,

  I am of them that farthest cometh behind.

  Yet may I by no means my wearied mind

  Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore

  Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,

  Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.

  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.

  In spite of some of Wyatt’s more intimate poetry, there is no evidence that he and Anne were ever lovers, or even that she returned his affection before she was thus ‘collared’ by Henry. Sanders reported that Anne had lived an active sex life before arriving at court, sinning ‘first with her father’s butler and then with his chaplain’, before becoming the ‘royal mule’ of the King of France, but these slanders are spun out of the Jesuit’s desire to blacken the name of a woman who ‘embraced the heresy of Luther … but nevertheless did not cease to hear Mass with the Catholics’, which was ‘wrung from her by the custom of the king and the necessities of her own ambition’.10 Sanders also reported a scene where Wyatt confessed his adultery with Anne to Henry in these early days, warning the king away from entering a relationship with such a stained woman, but such a salacious anecdote overlooks the dynamic of the three participants. Writing during the reign of Mary I, Nicholas Harpsfield describes Wyatt dissuading Henry with the line that Anne was ‘not meet to be coupled with your grace’, which he claims came from a source close to Percy, implying that consummation had taken place with him, or Wyatt, or both, but that Henry did not believe him and dismissed it.

  The king would not have made such a wanton woman his second wife, with whom he wished to produce a legitimate heir for the kingdom. There was also Anne’s considerable faith to contend with, her awareness of humanist thinking and her understanding of the position of women which she had developed under the influence of Margaret of Savoy and Marguerite of Navarre; experiences that her sister had not absorbed. It was Anne’s faith, coupled with her future role, that lay behind these colourful stories; her stigmatisation as sexually voracious and deceptive fit the later Catholic dialogue about her position as a catalyst for the Reformation and the driving force behind Henry’s cruelty to his elder daughter. No genuine evidence for any scandalous behaviour or sexual activity survives for Anne’s early life, and had she indulged in any affairs similar to those of her sister it would have provided rich meat for her later detractors.

  The evidence in Wyatt’s poems suggests that his desire for Anne went unrequited, although this may not have prevented him from imagining it. Separating from his wife by the mid-1520s, citing her adultery and lies, he was to take mistresses of his own from among the court circuit and fathered at least one illegitimate child. One of his most famous poems gives a glimpse of the kind of transition from courtly entertainment to sex that signalled the shifting boundaries of intimate relations between ladies-in-waiting and their lovers:

  Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

  Twenty times better, but once in special

  In thin array after a pleasant guise,

  When her loose gown fro
m her shoulders did fall

  And she me caught in her arms long and small,

  Therewithal sweetly did me kiss,

  And softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this?

  But while the poem suggests a tone of easy licentiousness at court, Anne’s recent experiences, her awareness of her sister’s relationship with Henry and her own unmarried status caused her to tread a far more cautious path. Through the second half of 1524 and into the following spring Mary was pregnant and unavailable, then lying in for the customary month and recovering. At some point in 1525 Anne became aware that Henry was interested in her, initially as another mistress to share his bed, perhaps to bear him another bastard before being replaced by a younger, prettier face. She chose to resist.

  32

  A Vanishing World, 1525–26

  Why come ye not to court?

  To which court?

  To the king’s court

  Or Hampton Court?1

  By 1525, Henry’s coffers were feeling the strain of sixteen long years of partying. To save unnecessary expenses, Thomas Wolsey undertook a series of reforms of the royal household, which were published as the Eltham Ordinances in January 1526, after the palace where the idea was conceived. Although they were ultimately unsuccessful in reducing spending, the surviving document is invaluable in providing a record of Henry and Catherine’s household at the moment just before it began to disintegrate.

  Catherine’s world was about to crumble under her feet. For twenty-six years she had lived as a queen, with all the advantage and adulation of her court and country, dressed in luxurious cloths of gold and draped in jewels, living in the finest fairy-tale palaces, dining on the best the country had to offer, waited on hand and foot, at night and day, heading diplomatic missions abroad and being the envied wife of the dazzling, accomplished king. Yet there was another side to her life. Over the years, her personal relationship with Henry had grown increasingly stale as she turned a blind eye to his infidelities, even when they had been paraded in public under her nose. As two monarchs on the international stage, she and Henry had been a match of equals, able to discuss law, religion, poetry, history and politics, and Catherine’s regal dignity had reinforced her position at her husband’s side. Her only area of failing had been her inability to provide the country with the surviving male heir that Henry craved. Even as 1526 arrived, with the king freshly infatuated with a new love, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella could have been forgiven for thinking that her long years of service made her situation inviolable.

  The previous autumn, Catherine had opened up her establishment to the scrupulous eyes of her husband’s chief minister. Ever conscious of status, exactly what she thought of being scrutinised by a man of humble origins is unclear but, as ever, she complied with Henry’s wishes and laid the mechanics of her household bare for his pen to scratch out in ink. In minute detail, the ordinances list exactly who was fed what and when, how much money was allocated to each of the various household offices, where the supplies came from and at what cost. Not a single herring or a half-burned candle went unaccounted for.

  Wolsey’s observations mark the increasing privacy which Henry was creating for himself by developing a more exclusive set of inner rooms. Here, he and Catherine could retreat from the world, with protocol and a series of doors dictating who was allowed access to his person and when. The ordinances outline the timings for the king’s and queen’s ‘outward’ chambers, with the pages rising at seven, making up the fire and preparing the room. The esquires for the body were called for at eight, who then had to tidy away the nightclothes and wait outside the door to be summoned into the inner chambers, with the clothes the king was to wear. At the same time, a yeoman was to be present at the door, to admit only lords, knights, gentlemen, household officers and those of an honest disposition, reporting all doubtful cases to the Lord Chamberlain. If they were to perceive anyone unsavoury present in the king’s chamber, any ‘mean’ persons, they were to act to ‘expel and avoid them from the same’. If the king or queen chose to dine or sup outside the hall, then they would be fully attended by a specified number of servants and no others should be ‘suffered to tarry’ nearby. All servants, rascals, boys and other foes would be expelled from the place outside the doors and the area was to be kept clean, with no ‘ale, water, broken meat or other thing conveyed out of the king’s chamber be cast or remain there to the filthiness and annoyance’ of Henry, so that a ‘large passage to the queen’s chamber’ was created.2

  The final point about passage to the queen’s chamber is an interesting one. Following on from comments about cleaning up after meals, the implication is that Henry may wish to visit Catherine in the hours of the evening or night. Undoubtedly, the king was entitled to attend the queen for discussion and company, but there may have been a suggestion that Henry was still sharing Catherine’s bed at the time the ordinances were drafted, or else that he did not wish to contradict the belief that he was. Given the routine that accompanied his nocturnal visits, though, with the elaborate disrobing and preparations for the night, it was a process that would have involved a significant number of staff, both in the king’s and queen’s households, and those responsible for clearing and guarding the route along the way. The rituals for making the king’s bed also involved the constant fear of assassination, so, even at these most intimate moments, Henry would have been led to his wife’s chamber, while her maids quickly scurried away. The Eltham Ordinances capture their relationship in a moment of flux. With the queen’s women aware of the moment that she had ceased her menstruation, and Wolsey’s instructions regarding the passage to the queen’s chamber, it remains unclear exactly when Henry ceased visiting his wife’s bed. Most likely he visited less and less, as his attention drifted elsewhere and her erratic periods gradually slowed to a halt.

  Henry’s own privy chambers operated along lines designed to preserve his own secrecy. For the ‘quiet, rest, comfort and preservation of [his] health’, it was judged ‘convenient that the king’s highness have his privy chamber and inward lodgings reserved secret, at the pleasure of his grace, without the repair of any great multitude thereunto’. No one was to be admitted except those ‘his grace shall from time to time call for or command’.3 Apart from servants in their specific capacities as ushers or grooms, the exclusive guest list included the Marquess of Exeter, Henry Courtenay, a grandson of Edward IV and Henry’s cousin, who ‘hath been brought up as a child with his grace in his chamber’; then Sir William Tiler, Sir Thomas Cheyney, Sir Anthony Browne, Sir John Ruffell, Henry Norris and William Carey. Carey’s position as a gentleman waiter would have facilitated any arrangements for his wife, Mary, to meet with the king in secret while her husband obligingly turned a blind eye. Six grooms were named, including Sir William Brereton, along with the king’s barber, Pennye, and his page ‘young Weston’, Sir Francis Weston, then aged about fifteen.

  The days of the minions’ old intimacy and presumptuous behaviour towards the king were long gone. These men were charged to do Henry ‘humble, reverent, secret and lowly service about all such things as his pleasure shall be to depute and put them to do’. The grooms were not to be lodged in the king’s chamber, but were to be provided with their own accommodation and none was to ‘presume to enter, or be suffered to enter into his said privy chamber … under paine of incurring the king’s displeasure and looseing of their service’.4 The Eltham Ordinances made it possible for Henry to get up to whatever he wanted in his bedroom, with whomever he wanted, taking only a small and reliable handful of people into his trust. Bearing in mind the letter from Etiennette de Baume in 1514, describing how Henry referred to her as his page, it would have been possible for the king’s intimate servants to smuggle a disguised lover into his bedroom at the king’s request. The two grooms charged to sleep on pallet beds in his chamber could easily retire to the next room, as Catherine’s women did when Henry paid her a visit. Sir Henry Norris was given the ultimate control of the king’s privac
y, charged to prevent all the other named gentlemen from ‘presum[ing) to enter or follow his grace into the said bed chamber, or any other secret place, unless he shall be called … by his grace’.5 The old argument that if it was happening at court then people must have known about it is cast into a different light by these pieces of evidence.

  As Groom of the Stool, the privacy of Henry Norris’ position is obvious; he would literally stand guard while the king was on the toilet, yet by the extension of the concept of ‘privy’ and ‘privacy’ he was also well placed to facilitate the king on other intimate occasions. The ‘other secret places’ referred to in the Eltham Ordinances can cover the padded close stools for Henry’s use, his bedroom and other closets. A ‘closet’ was literally a room that could be closed, and was not necessarily of a specific size or function. In the early 1540s, the behaviour of Catherine Howard would prove that closets also could provide a location for an illicit romantic encounter. With Sir Henry Norris guarding the door, Henry’s privacy was guaranteed whatever he chose to do behind closed doors.

  Norris had been present at Henry’s court for at least a decade before the ordinances described him taking this important role. Possibly a relative of Richard III’s close friend and chamberlain Francis Lovell, his grandfather had fought at the Battle of Stoke Field and Norris himself was about a decade older than the king, having been born around 1482. He had been one of the original minions of 1517 but survived the cull and attended Henry at the Field of Cloth of Gold. At the time of the publication of the Eltham Ordinances he replaced Sir William Compton as the Groom of the Stool, a move which indicates his closeness to Henry. For at least ten years, Norris would be the king’s closest personal friend, the man in whom Henry could confide, who would have known his most intimate secrets.