by Emily Hahn
But it didn’t clear the way, for Henry VII was not sure he couldn’t do better for his son this time. For eight years he wavered, never quite committing himself, scheming with his confidant Wolsey, the chaplain, and changing his mind with every wind that blew on Catherine’s sails. Sometimes her prospects of power-inheritance brightened, sometimes they dimmed. Her position at court was intolerable, but she had to tolerate it nevertheless. In the meantime, the prince was growing up, cheerfully accepting the possibility that he might one day marry Catherine. There was no reason not to be cheerful: he found no lack of amusement during the interim of bachelorhood.
Poor Catherine could wish for no happier way out of her embarrassment than to be married to Henry, or indeed to anybody. As things were, her father-in-law snubbed her, Ferdinand never sent her any money, and the court neglected her. Any woman’s lot was pretty miserable in the sixteenth century, but even lower-class women were better off than were princesses. According to all reports but Thomas More’s, Catherine was no beauty. Stocky and fair, with a broad blond face and pale blue eyes, she was passable—just a nice, eligible girl.
The eligibility happened to outweigh other considerations at the time Henry VII died, and so Henry VIII, amiably enough, married her at last.
For a long time things went well for Catherine. In marrying the King she had fulfilled her destiny as she had been taught to do, but after a while people began to wonder what was to come next. There were grave disappointments. Though the Queen conceived readily enough, she had miscarriages almost as readily. The first boy she bore alive managed to go on living only six weeks. She did produce one baby, Mary, who survived, but Mary was only a daughter, and the much-desired sons did not live. It seemed gravely dangerous that England might be governed by a queen. Elizabeth had not yet been born to prove how effective a queen can be.
Everyone knew, and often cheerfully referred to the fact, that the King had syphilis, but they did not know enough to link up cause and effect regarding all those stillborn boys. Barrenness or Catherine’s kind of ill luck was always assumed to be the woman’s fault. However, Henry didn’t reproach Catherine. At that time he had good manners toward his wife. He was jovially certain with each pregnancy that it would be all right this time, and that a healthy boy would be born. He was jovial even when Mary was born and survived; if he and Catherine could produce a daughter, he said, they could yet produce a son as well. Besides, the baby, female though it was, was still a baby: it disproved all the clucking old women who had begun to recall the Leviticus business about a man’s brother’s nakedness and the curse of childlessness. Henry was glad and eager to disprove all that, until he met Anne Boleyn.
He was to marry four women after Anne, but she is the one we all remember. That is because she made the most trouble and was the woman for whom he quarreled with the Pope. We remember her as well for being the prettiest, with the most character. It wasn’t a very nice one, but it was vivid.
The story need not be told again in all its detail; it is probably as well known as any in history how Henry suddenly realized he had been living in sin with his brother’s wife for eighteen years, and how he insisted it was his conscience and not his lust after Anne Boleyn that made it imperative he be divorced, and how the Church stood firm in refusing. Henry would probably have let matters drift there, for his nature was not capable of sustaining long-drawn bouts, and he had gone to bed with his girl anyway. But Anne Boleyn pushed him farther and farther; she would not allow him to back down.
She was a determined and very confident young woman. Knowing how Henry was later to develop, we in our superior knowledge are sometimes appalled by her presumption. She was not only very sure of herself; she was fond of her royal lover, though not fervently in love, as she had been with young Percy. Henry was still attractive. The world must have appeared all her own property. The disease of swelled-headedness afflicted Anne Boleyn just as it did Henry himself, and for a long time it looked as if her estimate of her own value was correct.
Anne and England believed that for love of her the King deserted Wolsey, who died of it. For love of her Catherine was set aside and her solemn marriage denounced as if it had never existed. For love of her, Henry split with the Papist Church and robbed its possessions wherever he could lay hands on them, and in time set up his own church. So thought Anne Boleyn in her simple, direct, sixteenth-century way. Actually, it was only his own desire Henry loved, as Anne was to find out. And so, in sorrow and violence and trickery and terror, the Church of England was born.
“What laws have been enacted, what noble and ancient monasteries overthrown and defaced … how many famous and notable clerks have suffered death, what charitable foundations were perverted from the relief of the poor unto profane uses.… If eyes be not blind men may see, if ears be not stopped they may hear, and if pity be not exiled they may lament the sequel of this pernicious and inordinate carnal love. The plague whereof is not ceased (although this love lasted but a while).” Cavendish wrote this in his Life and Death of Thomas Wolsey.
Everyone who had nothing to gain by the sack of the monasteries felt the same way, and blamed the proceedings, not on the King—it would have been impious and dangerous to do that—but on the object of his “pernicious and inordinate carnal love.” The people remained disinclined to accept Henry’s own version of his nobility of spirit, his conscientious scruples. His arguments seemed all the more muddled in the face of the well-known fact that for five years he had been enjoying an affair with Anne’s older sister Mary Carey before he transferred his affections. There was something in the Bible against a man lying with women who were sisters, just as there was against a woman having relations with men who were brothers. People couldn’t, then, subscribe wholeheartedly to Henry’s arguments against the spiritual authorities. Like Anne, they were simple and direct; they blamed it all on her.
Cynically they watched her grab Wolsey’s magnificent house and all the other property she could get. Sympathetically they watched Queen Catherine, proud and stubborn, retiring from the world. Flashing and preening herself, the dark-eyed Anne queened it at Hampton Court. It was too much, even for a people not yet Puritan. They did not love Anne Boleyn.
Yet I think she must have been lovable; gay and pretty and laughing. The relentless spite with which she pursued her enemies did not dim her black eyes nor dull her glistening hair. She was sure of herself at first, so sure that she pitted herself cheerfully against the almighty Church; so sure that as soon as she thought herself pregnant, long before the marriage had taken place—which was bigamous at best, insisted the Pope—she blurted the news to Wyatt, openly, in the hearing of everyone. She was triumphant. It would be a boy. It was sure to be a boy.
In the last long weeks before she was delivered, however, even cocky Anne grew nervous and jealous, as women do. She accused Henry of infidelity. Then, to her amazement, he gave her full warning of what was to come. For the first time he turned nasty.
“You close your eyes, as your betters did before you! You ought to know that it is in my power in a single instant to lower you further than I raised you up!”
Perhaps she felt a chill. I think she did; she was very intelligent.
I have said that Henry had the usual masculine faults, magnified by his position. One of them was a surplus of conventionality. Henry was a very conventional man; that is why he kept marrying his mistresses, and losing interest in them when they became wives. He was like the man in the case history who could make love only in brothels, or that other man who was unable to have his wife unless she first took off her wedding ring. Without the conflict of sin versus duty, Henry had little urge. Anne, as soon as she was his by law, even though it was a law he happened to have made himself, became just another wife.
Then on top of all that, she outraged him by giving birth to a daughter.
It was very thoughtless of her, Henry could not help but feel, a typically selfish thing for a wife to do. As befitted a king, he forgave her, but he
had been badly used and he could not forget it. The golden bowl was broken. Mildly at first, and then with increasing sharpness, that conscience of his began to ache. He was, after all, a conventional man. Should he have married this woman? Was it legal?
God, who never let him down, soon gave him a sign. Anne’s next pregnancy ended prematurely, with a stillborn boy, just about the time that Henry fell in love with Jane Seymour. Obviously a change was indicated. Opportunely, miraculously, Heaven Itself working through the agency of Cromwell, it was discovered that Anne had committed the treasonous crime of infidelity. And not only once, and not only with one lover. There had been three ordinary lovers, with her own brother thrown in to give the proceedings that added dash of horror and disgust which is necessary when a queen is to be killed. They were all promptly thrown into the Tower, Queen and lovers alike.
Whatever else one can say about Henry VIII, he gave his people circuses. Here was something they could chew on in lieu of bread for a long time to come. Anne the wicked sorceress, the merciless dethroner of queens, was come to this, and it served her jolly well right.
Still, it was not so easily dismissed a matter that a queen’s head had been cut off, and when the thing was done and everyone had subsided, there came a natural uneasy revulsion. People had to reassure themselves. She was awful, they reflected. Which may account for the persistence of the rumor, even today, that Anne really did all those things she was convicted for. Plenty of people believe it. One modern writer has gone so far as to explain Anne’s “nymphomania” as a post-puerperal frenzy of some sort.
I simply cannot understand this belief. Look at the facts! Look at Henry’s record! He had never wanted for lackeys willing to swear themselves black in the face telling lies for him. That delicate conscience of his kept him from telling lies for himself, but as he was King it wasn’t really necessary that he do it. He had Cromwell to think up Anne’s crimes, Cranmer to condemn them, and men-at-arms to carry out his just commands, once the framework was established. Most exquisite dispensation of all, he need not give direct orders; he need not know anything about it. He could face his Lord shining with virtue on the Day of Judgment—not that the Lord would ever be impertinent enough to insist upon judging Henry VIII!
That is the first and most glaringly obvious reason for questioning the case against Anne Boleyn. The second one lies in Anne’s character. It was, I repeat, not a nice character, but it wasn’t weakly foolish. On the contrary, she had played her game with amazing deftness, outguessing the most astute politician at court. Nor was her feat a flash in the pan. She campaigned for years without taking one seriously false step. She knew the material she had to work with; she knew men. Admittedly she became overweening in her first pride, but that self-confidence soon suffered a severe blow when Henry began to snarl at her within a mere five months of their marriage. She knew what that meant. She knew, too, that he was having affairs. After the birth of Elizabeth, she went so far as to try to pick out his mistresses for him, selecting people she could trust. She was aware of Jane Seymour, after he met Jane, and the threat the new infatuation implied. Anne was chastened long before the deadly crisis. Only an imbecile would have dared take the risk of a love affair under these conditions, let alone several love affairs, and Anne was no imbecile.
The third and last argument is that her accusers in their zeal outdid themselves. Had they settled for one lover, the easily intimidated “base-born” Mark Smeaton, we might have believed it. He was a dancer and musician; musicians were traditionally suspect because they were always hanging around the women, armed with the sentimental appeal of sweet song. Anne was a neglected wife and all that. Mark Smeaton was just possible.… But the accusers piled on the agony well beyond him. The tale of two more lovers, which she allegedly switched around night by night with monotonous regularity, begins to strain credulity. And then to cap it all they brought out that old chestnut about incest with her brother George. Incest was the thing unimaginative people always thought of when they wanted to smear others. It was the great crime; it was the conventional shocker; it was handed down from the ancient Greeks and so, they felt, it must be good. And so they put it into Anne’s dossier.
No, no, one feels like saying to the historians, don’t give me that. What do you take me for?
They were not all so silly in Anne’s day. Unpopular as she was, some of the people resented what had happened to her, knowing why. An inn that stood on Boleyn land took for its sign, “The Bullen Butchered,” and not for some time did the proprietors moderate it to “The Bull and Butcher.”
Anyone who thinks Anne Boleyn guilty of the crimes she was killed for simply wants to believe it for his own pleasure, or else because of that long-standing, widespread, nitwitted conviction that once a woman is no better than she should be, she is bound to do anything and everything. Not that all this matters now to Anne Boleyn, who died with dignity four hundred years ago. She was a bad girl, but she died better than had the whimpering Wolsey, whom she had helped to kill.
Henry’s sentimental career thereafter becomes just a bit tiresome, like the long roster of marriages which characterize a film star’s life. We remember Jane Seymour chiefly because she was neither killed off nor divorced, but tactfully managed to die after giving birth to Edward. Anne of Cleves was an awkward mistake and hardly counts. Henry found her so unattractive that he couldn’t consummate the marriage, and the well-oiled divorce went through with more speed than Reno’s litigation could provide today.
But Katheryn Howard provides a break in the monotony, as one might expect from a cousin of Anne Boleyn. Pretty—at least so we are told, though her portrait makes her look like a very plain abbess—light and vivacious, and much younger than Henry, she married him because it seemed to the Howards such a good thing. By that time any wife with sense would have realized that her chances of survival were slim, but Katheryn didn’t have much sense. As for the crimes of treasonable infidelity with which she was taxed, unlike her cousin Anne Boleyn she actually committed them. She was in love with her kinsman Culpepper, as she had been in love before with other pretty boys. She slept with Culpepper as she had slept with others. She loved him. Artlessly, she said so at the execution block. Unnatural wench, her mind was not on herself when she died. We cannot say as much for the others.
“I would rather have had him for a husband than be mistress of the world, but sin blinded me and greed of grandeur; and since mine is the fault, mine also is the suffering, and my great sorrow is that Culpeper should have had to die through me.… I die a Queen, but I would rather die the wife of Culpeper. God have mercy on my soul.”
Poor, pretty child. Through her very lack of desire to wound, she gave Henry the most exquisite torture he had ever experienced. Betrayed, cuckolded, and, worst of all, forgotten! He, the magnificent Henry VIII! He had cut off her head, but he could not cut that memory out of his heart. Of all the tears Henry shed in his emotional life, these were the most sincere and painful. Not only herself, but three other wives were avenged. I don’t think we have ever given Katheryn Howard enough credit.
We could go on to the next Queen, the third Catherine and sixth wife, Katharine Parr, but I prefer to take leave of Henry like this, sobbing his heart out for lost pride. It is a scene to remember. It moderates my feelings when I look at the mouth in Holbein’s portrait.
The Warrior Queen
Nzinga
Our code of morals is what we, or our ancestors, or a combination of the two, have made it. Such as it is, we come by it honestly. We may not always like it, but we are used to it and would scarcely attempt to meddle with the main outlines. People who depart from it are called immoral, as if there were only one possible code, that which we accept. We don’t admit that these others have a code at all. When they cling to their own stubborn notions, therefore, we call them not only immoral but unnatural.
It is unnatural, we feel, for a man to have relations with his sister, as every Ptolemy did in Egypt. We believe this firmly, and in
voke a mysterious thing called “instinct” when we need help in convincing unbelievers. There are a few things that we have changed our minds about, as a matter of fact: until a recent act of Parliament, for example, it was unnatural for a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister. It was also, of course, illegal.
“I could not look my wife’s sister in the face without blushing, when I go home tonight,” thundered a furiously shocked M.P., “were I to vote against keeping this law.”
Yet all of a sudden it has become all right for an Englishman to marry his deceased wife’s sister, and people everywhere, M.P.s included, look their sisters-in-law in the face without blushing.
Nevertheless, we have not gone completely mad on reform. Far from it. Some taboos are still retained, and they don’t look shaky. It is still immoral, and presumably will continue to be so, for a man to own more than one wife at a time. It is even more immoral for a woman to own a lot of husbands simultaneously; we do not approve of that at all.
Because of limited space and time I hardly dare begin to discuss the myriad non-sexual aspects of morality, but we can mention a few. There is our strange predeliction, for example, for the truth. Perhaps we don’t always tell it, but we know we ought to. Representatives of other civilizations distress us when they tell lies. First we are dismayed at their whoppers, and then we become righteously indignant. And there are other things we do not always see eye to eye about when we encounter foreign tribes. There are the food taboos. Some people are disgusted because we eat oysters, and other people disgust us because they eat human flesh. We cannot let these differences pass with a tolerant shrug. We become shocked; we cling to our morality, blindly faithful.
This, I am sure, is as it should be. Some virtues can go too far, and tolerance, possibly, is one of them, though to be quite frank, I have yet to see that particular virtue carried to excess. Sometimes, thinking of the rigors life held for the early Christian explorers, I feel wrung with pity. Think of the emotions of Portuguese adventurers, faced with the new spaces and races they discovered! They have always been a proud, assured, inflexible people, easily shocked. Yet it was they who first made the discovery which still can render us so uncomfortable, centuries later, that the world is full of human beings who don’t subscribe to our moral code. Their horrified protests ring out with sincere anguish, even today, when we unlock the archives. But the Portuguese did not sit back and accept these differences in any impotent spirit of tolerance. They grasped the nettle and set to work, teaching the one true code. Nothing discouraged them, and in the end they usually had their reward, even against tremendous odds. Such a triumph was won in East Africa, early in the seventeenth century, and this is how it happened.