by Amy Licence
As well as the king’s increasing desire for privacy, the Eltham Ordinances shed light on the nature and composition of Catherine’s household at the point before her power and position began to be eroded. Wolsey provides a list of those ‘ordinary’ members of the queen’s establishment who were entitled to eat in her chamber. Her carver was Henry Semer, probably Henry Seymour, one of the less well-known brothers of the king’s third wife, then in his early twenties and, as yet, unmarried. Catherine’s sewers were Robert Warner and Nicholas Frogmorton, whose brother was her cup-bearer, Clement Frogmorton. These were probably from the Throckmorton family, the young sons of Sir George, who had served with Henry in France in 1513 and had been present at the Field of Cloth of Gold. Henry Webb was the gentleman usher of Catherine’s privy chamber. In addition, she had four gentlemen ushers and three gentlemen waiters. All of these men were entitled to draw a salary of £11 8s 1d and to have bouche of court. Catherine’s household contained an additional three servers of the chamber, who received a wage but no entitlement to be fed at her expense.6
Also well rewarded were those of the queen’s personal waged servants who received bouche of court and an allowance of meat. They included William Herper or Harper, her clerk of the court on £6 15s 3d, and her groom porter, William Uxenbridge, who drew eleven shillings. She had three men overseeing her robes, the yeoman Ralph Worsley on £4 11s 3d, the groom Thomas Firten on 11s and the page Arthur Belfield on 26s 8d. A similar triumvirate governed her beds. Yeoman of her beds was Edward Floyd on £4 16s 3d, his groom Thomas Neverell, or Neville, received 11s and the page Thomas Harrison got 26s 8d. Bouche of court was also granted to the queen’s laundress, for wood and lights.7 In addition, Catherine had twenty-two Yeomen of the Chamber, drawing a salary of £15 4s 2d, five grooms of the chamber who received £2 but no food and four pages who only got £1 6s 8d. A higher value was placed on her messenger, John Grove, whose reward was £4 2s 3d. Eight others were listed as having no manner of allowance within the queen’s household: her surveyor, auditor, attorney, solicitor, clerk of the council, clerk of the wardrobe, clerk of the closet and sergeant-at-arms.8
Arrangements were made for the provision of food, the ‘bouche of court’, for those entitled to eat in the queen’s chamber. Catherine herself made do with only one serving at breakfast, with two to be shared between her attendant ladies; this still came in at an annual cost of £70. Sitting in her chamber while she ate, her Lord Chamberlain, her vice-chamberlain and ‘other’ of her council shared one ‘mess’ or course. A further three messes were to be divided between her four chaplains, her ushers, waiter, sewers and a handful of other officials. Her ladies were granted seven messes to share and her maidservants only three.9 Described like this, the allowance of messes sounds a little meagre, but this is misleading as the ordinances also describe what constitutes a ‘mess’, giving a sense of the diet that Catherine and Henry were enjoying in 1525–26.
On a flesh day, the days in the religious calendar that did not observe a restricted diet, king and queen were amply served in the great hall with a two meals a day: dinner, which was at ten in the morning, and supper, at four. When they were not dining in the hall but in other places in the palace, the two daily meals were served at eleven and six.10 On the dinner menu were £16 worth of the finest white ‘cheat and manchett’ bread, pottage, beef, venison, mutton, young veal, swan, goose, capon, rabbits, carp, custard and fritters washed down with beer, ale and wine.11
Supper saw the arrival of more of the first-course staples: bread, beef, capon and rabbit; chicken, larks, sparrows or stewed lamb with mutton chunks; mutton or venison topped with cloves; pheasants, plover, cockerels or gulls, followed by oranges, quince and pippins, with the usual beer, ale and wine. The second course comprised kid, lamb or pigeon, partridge or quail, teal or pullets, rabbit or lark, venison and baked meats, butter and eggs, blancmange and fruits.12 On holy days, the main dishes were replaced by salmon, herring, crab, porpoise, pike, whiting, trout, eels, lobsters and, surprisingly, seals, which were deemed to be of the sea and therefore fish.13 The total cost of providing the two daily meals, with two courses, for the king and queen was calculated at £4 3s 4d a day, or £29 3s 4d a week, or £1,520 13s 4d annually.14 Whatever was left over was to be gathered by the almoner and distributed to the poor at the outer court gate.15
Separate diets or messes were drawn up for the Masters of the royal household, for the gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, clerks of the green cloth, the cofferer, the controller, the clerk of the kitchen and others, while the royal physicians and surgeons had a separate bill of fare. Those entitled to the queen’s board were fed an average dinner of bread and pottage, three different types of meat, green goose and capon, fritters and custard, followed by a similar second course, at a daily cost of 19s, with a two-course supper priced at 14s. The queen’s Lord Chamberlain and her gentlewomen were served with a daily diet worth 7s 4d, featuring fewer dishes and no sweets. The maids, servants and children ate only bread, ale, beef and veal on flesh days, with ling and other sea fish substituted on Friday and Saturday.16
In addition to meeting these demands, Wolsey estimated a further £113 6s 8d annually for the expenses incurred by grinding wheat and baking bread, £227 for the cellarage costs of storing and serving beer and wine, £713 6s 8d for spices and candles, £103 6s 8d for preparations, repair and maintenance in the kitchen, £163 6s 8d for salting, curing and storing food in the Accatry, £150 to transport and house poultry, £506 14s 3d for the scullery, £54 for making sauces, £516 3s 4d for contributions made by the woodyard, including rushes, plus alms, offerings and fees, making a total of £4,445 2s 6d.17 And this was only one additional department.
Yet while Wolsey was busy trimming down the king’s household in such exacting detail, his own wealth was expanding exponentially. Having carved himself a meteoric path to success by virtue of his own ability and desire to serve, the cardinal had accumulated properties and wealth that rivalled the king’s own. The most famous of these was the palace he built at Hampton, on the Thames, to the south-west of London, a site which he acquired from a religious foundation in 1514. Investing a huge sum of money, he had built up a Renaissance palace by around 1521, where he entertained the king on such a lavish scale that it gave rise to satire. John Skelton’s poem of 1523 depicts Wolsey presiding over the offices of the Chancery, Chequer and Star Chamber, dismissing dukes, earls, barons and lords and almost outshining Henry in his magnificence:
Why come ye not to court?
To which court?
To the king’s court,
Or to Hampton Court?
Nay, to the king’s court!
The King’s court
Should have excellence
But Hampton Court
Hath the pre-eminence,
And York’s Place,
With my Lord’s Grace!
To whose magnificence
Is all the confluence,
Suits and supplications,
Embassades of all nations.18
When the cardinal’s devoted servant and confidant George Cavendish wrote his detailed biography of his old master in the 1550s, he described the role the astute courtier took at Henry’s court:
The kyng was yong and lusty, disposed all to myrthe & pleasure and to followe his desire and appetyte no thyng myndyng to travell in the busy affayers of this Realme the whiche the Almosyner perseyved very well, toke vppon hyme therfore to disborden the kyng of so waytie a charge and troblesome busynes puttyng the kyng in Comfort that he shall not nede to spare any tyme of his pleasure for any busyness.
This was such a successful policy that Wolsey’s household swelled to require a staff of hundreds, including a Mr Cooke in his privy kitchen ‘that went daily in damask, satin or velvet, with a chain of gold about his neck’, footmen apparelled in ‘rich running coats’ and a keeper of his tents.19
Yet Wolsey’s popularity was beginning to turn. He had often incited criticism and dislike because of his background
, but in 1525 his new moneymaking scheme alienated the nobility further. When news arrived at court of the capture of Francis I at the Battle of Pavia, Henry saw an opportunity to seize the French throne. To raise the necessary funds, Wolsey devised the Amicable Grant, a ‘benevolence’ or ‘gift’ from the clergy and nobility to the king of between a sixth and tenth of their revenue. In the end, hostility to this plan ensured its failure, and Wolsey negotiated a peace treaty with Francis’ mother, Louise of Savoy, but he had made some powerful enemies along the way. Soon Wolsey and Catherine would both find themselves eclipsed by a more formidable enemy. The king was in love again.
33
Love Letters, 1526–27
Nothynge yerthly to me more desyrous
Than to beholde youre bewteouse countenaunce:
But, hatefull absens, to me so enuyous,
Though thou withdraw me from her by long dystaunce.1
Anne Boleyn’s royal suitor was undergoing a period of transition. The years 1524–26 had been a time of intense personal challenge for the king and queen, bringing them to the recognition that their relationship had permanently changed. Their hopes of another child had been dashed and the future path of the Tudor dynasty was uncertain. Henry was no longer the ‘green’ young man who had wooed women entirely for pleasure, as sexual adventures and playthings, as parallels for the hart he hunted in the forest, and outlets for his physical needs. After each previous romance he had returned to Catherine as his wife and equal, whose breeding and position meant that none of his paramours could really offer any competition. By 1526, those days were gone. Henry was thirty-five and his wife was forty. In these years, the king was facing some difficult decisions about his future.
Henry appears to have fallen in love with Anne by early February 1526. At the Greenwich Shrovetide jousts, he dressed in embroidered gold and silver bearing the device of a ‘mannes harte in a presse, with flames about it’, and the motto ‘declare, I dare not’. His opponents, headed by the king’s cousin Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, were dressed in green-and-red velvet decorated with burning hearts. Over this image was that of a woman’s hand ‘commyng out of a cloud, holdyng a garden water pot, which dropped silver drops on the harte’, giving relief. This symbolism revealed a new object of affection, the pain of concealed love and the remedy, which was within the reach of the right woman.
During the celebrations, Henry ‘did service’ to the queen and her ladies. This would have included Anne, to whom his cryptic message was directed. It is likely that, by this time, she was aware of his meaning. Equally Catherine may have seen the signs but not known the identity of her rival; it is impossible to know just how aware she was of the flirtations taking place in her household. However, the joust then took a violent and shocking turn. In an accident reminiscent of that Henry himself had endured in 1524, when a lance splintered against his helmet, Sir Francis Bryan was injured by the ‘chance shivering of the spere’.2 He lost an eye and would always wear a patch as a consequence. Such an accident would kill the French king Henri II in 1559. It was another reminder of the fragility of life and that death could strike at any time, even in the royal circle. If the king was to meet an untimely end, the realm would be left in the hands of a ten-year-old girl.
Henry’s embroidered motto may have stated that he dared not declare his love, but this was only in a public arena. He knew the queen was watching. In private, though, he did not hesitate to make his feelings plain. At some point early in 1526, he found an opportunity to speak to Anne alone, perhaps as she sewed costumes of silver and gold or sat reading in a garden or alcove; the scene has been imagined many times by historical novelists. He also ordered his goldsmiths to make four gold brooches that continued the motifs of desire and hope, using the visual symbols of hearts and hands, tongues and eyes, which poets like Wyatt deployed in verse. It was part of the playful romantic games of the age to send symbolic messages in gifts that represented some virtue or desire to be decoded by the recipient. Another method was to use the language of flowers, selecting particular blooms for a nosegays or bouquet. As Shakespeare reminds us in Hamlet, there was rosemary for remembrance, pansies for thoughts, daisies for unhappy love, violets for faithlessness. The royal wardrobe in 1532 included a range of such symbols once created as messages before having lost their context: eight separate legs made of silver, a silver hand, a tooth of silver and two silver breasts. Perhaps at some point they had been lovers’ tokens.
Placed in order, the four brooches Henry commissioned relate a narrative that makes a promise to Anne. There was a brooch of Venus and Cupid, another of a lady holding a heart in her hand, a third portraying a man lying in a lady’s lap and a fourth, which foreshadowed her future, of a lady holding a crown. Was Henry considering making Anne his wife as early as spring 1526? It is more likely at this stage that the crown was symbolic of Anne’s rule over Henry as a lover rather than making any specific promise, although that was only a year away.
The song ‘Greensleeves’, traditionally thought to have been written about Anne, includes lists of more of the type of gifts that the king may have sent to his lover in an attempt to persuade her to yield to him:
I bought thee kerchiefs for thy head,
That were wrought fine and gallantly;
I kept thee at both board and bed,
Which cost my purse well-favoredly.
I bought thee petticoats of the best,
The cloth so fine as it might be;
I gave thee jewels for thy chest,
And all this cost I spent on thee.
Thy smock of silk, both fair and white,
With gold embroidered gorgeously;
Thy petticoat of sendal right,
And these I bought thee gladly.
In the meantime, Henry continued to try and talk Anne into his bed. Vives describes the ways in which experienced men might woo and seduce innocent virgins:
He approaches smoothly and persuasively; first he praises the girl, says that he has been captured by her beauty, and last of all he says that he is perishing of his uncontrollable love. He is well aware of the vain minds of many women, who take singular pleasure in being praised. In this way the fowler deceives the bird with birdlime and the decoy’s cry. He calls you beautiful, charming, clever, eloquent, noble, and perhaps you are none of these things, but you like to hear those lies … He swears that he will die and even … that he is dying.3
Vives then cites the case of a ‘certain French girl [in] the retinue of those who accompanied Marguerite of Navarre’ who was tired of hearing men saying they were dying for love and replied to one, ‘Well, die and be done with it so that I can see some lover die of all those who say that they are going to die.’4 By 1524, Vives’ work was complete, dedicated to Catherine of Aragon and available in her household, so it is not impossible – in fact, it is more than likely – that it was read among her ladies. With Anne’s wit and experience of the courts of Europe, though, she is likely to have been more like the example of the French girl, far more sophisticated than the audience Vives addresses. Anne would have been aware of the warning that ‘your lover will deceive, either because he is used to deceiving or because this is the reward for an illicit love or because satiety of pleasure will persuade him to do so’. But Anne was no fool; she knew that accepting the advances of a married lover necessitated deception. She may not have been naïve, but she was human.
Exactly how welcome were Henry’s attentions, though? Assuming the birth date of 1501 is correct, Anne was approaching her mid-twenties; she had already seen two potential husbands disappear, and had been wooed by a married man who could not offer her a respectable future. In 1525–26, Anne was in no position to anticipate that Henry could offer her the ultimate prize of becoming his wife and it had probably not yet occurred to the king himself that this was a viable route. While his attentions were flattering, he was ultimately attempting to talk her into his bed, to yield up the virginity that she probably still retained. Henry was n
o longer the young romantic figure who had attracted such admiration and universal praise in his youth, yet nor had he become the obese invalid of his later years. He was older and wiser than he had been; an experienced lover who still retained much of his good looks, although they were tempered by maturity.
Seventeen love letters survive from Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn. Lodged in the Vatican archives, they were penned by a self-confessed reluctant writer at various points when they were apart between autumn 1526 and 1528. No replies from Anne survive. It is only possible to estimate her feelings by using the limited evidence of Henry’s responses. Equally, the nature and frequency of her replies is unknown, punctuated by the couple meeting in person at intervals. Between some of the letters, Henry and Anne had conversations and amorous encounters in palace gardens and secret corners of the court. We cannot know what passed between them then, although the letters leave some clues.
There are also problems of scholarship with the letters. The authenticity of some is still under dispute and some were written in French. Additionally, their uncertain dating has resulted in various acts of editorial resequencing. Even under such circumstances, though, these letters provide a valuable snapshot of the techniques Henry used to woo women; we can hear the voice of the king as lover, whispering his secret desires to Anne Boleyn, through a language of rhetorical devices, conventions and promises.
Much of Henry’s prose is romantic and tender, decorated by his drawings of hearts and coded initials, but it belies the true dynamic of their relationship. Professing himself her ‘loyal servant and friend’, the bombardment of Anne by passionate letters actually tells a more sinister story. Ultimately, did she really have a choice in the matter? By the letters’ internal evidence, she resisted him for over a year, frequently absenting herself from court and his presence. Henry’s presentation of the trope of courtly love, of the pursuit of the unattainable woman, is belied by his desire to make her his. At some point in 1527, the pretence of role play was dropped and he offered her the unprecedented position of his official mistress. She declined. Are these the records of a developing love affair, or the gradual wearing down of a woman’s resistance, who had no option but to submit to the demands of her king? Was Anne bullied into becoming Henry’s lover?