In July of 1531, Henry saw Katherine of Aragon for the last time. The king had demoted her to the rank of Princess Dowager, though for the rest of her life she refused to be addressed as such, declaring that she was still Henry’s wife and England’s true queen. Referring to Anne as “the scandal of Christendom,” Katherine lived out her days in various royal demesnes, each one draftier than the last, struggling to maintain the modest household Henry permitted her. Even so, she was almost always in arrears.
That same month, after a contretemps between arrogant mistress and disgraced queen, Anne was seen wearing the royal jewels. It was a signal to the people of England that she wasn’t going anywhere but up, and it was only a matter of time before they would have to kneel to her.
Anne’s behavior had gotten out of control. Chapuys reported in one of his dispatches to Charles V, “She is becoming more arrogant every day, using words in authority towards the king of which he has several times complained to the Duke of Norfolk, saying she was not like the Queen, who never in her life used ill words to him.”
In 1532, plans were under way for a continental summit meeting between Henry and François I, but for Anne to be able to accompany Henry as his consort at the celebrations surrounding the diplomatic mission, she would have to be a person of rank. So on September 1, Henry bestowed a title on his mistress, creating Anne Marquess of Pembroke, using the male form of address for the title, a common custom in Tudor times. The honor also included five manor houses throughout the realm, to add to the pair of manors in Middlesex that Henry had given Anne earlier that year, and an additional patent settling lands worth £1,000 a year on her (close to $730,000 in today’s currency).
But even with her new title, because they were not married Lady Pembroke would have to meet up with the king in Calais after the official diplomatic mission had been concluded. Still, Anne made the best of it, and at François’s court she was treated like the prodigal daughter. François himself gave her an enormous diamond as an official gift. And she had a retinue of English noblewomen at her beck and call that included her sister, Mary—and a mild-mannered blonde named Jane Seymour.
Anne danced the first dance with the French king, a message to everyone in the ballroom that regardless of her official status, she was the First Woman of rank from the English court. Henry was so proud of her that he ran about the room pulling all the masks off the ladies’ faces, so that everyone could see his lover partnered by the king of France.
Following the festivities, while most of their attendants returned to England, Anne and Henry spent a fortnight in Calais enjoying a romantic idyll that resembled a honeymoon. Rumors abounded that the couple exchanged vows. And finally—finally—Anne surrendered her body to Henry and they made love for the first time since the king’s infatuation with her had sparked nearly seven years earlier. We can only hope that it wasn’t a letdown for either lover.
Regardless of whether their coupling was enjoyable, it was certainly fruitful, for by the end of the first week of December 1532, when she was about thirty-two, Anne was pregnant.
She and Henry were secretly wed on St. Paul’s day, January 25, 1533. The king lied outright to Dr. Rowland Lee, who officiated at their wedding, claiming that he had a document from the Pope giving him permission to marry again—though he refused to produce it. Actually, Henry was not yet legally divorced according to the Church of Rome, but in his mind he had never been legally married to Katherine, and therefore, he was a bachelor and free to wed whomsoever he chose.
By mid-February, the queen-to-be felt the urge to flaunt her condition, announcing in company that she had “a fearsome and unquenchable longing to eat apples.” Henry remarked that it was a sure sign Anne was pregnant, to which Anne responded she “was sure [she] was not.” A silvery peal of laughter issued from her lips and she returned to her room without another word. Eyewitnesses were shocked by her lack of discretion.
On April 12, Easter Sunday, Anne appeared for the first time as Queen of England. “All the world is astonished at it, and even those who take her part do not know whether to laugh or to cry,” wrote Chapuys.
On May 28, from a gallery in Lambeth Palace, Archbishop Cranmer—having reached his formal decision on the Great Matter, with the assent of the learned divines of the court, that Henry’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon was “null and absolutely void,” and “contrary to divine law”—publicly declared Henry’s marriage to Anne “good and valid.” Anne was now Henry’s legal bride and the child she carried in her womb would be legitimate. But Katherine’s daughter, Princess Mary, was declared a bastard, and would henceforth be referred to as the Lady Mary.
Cranmer was about to crown the king’s pregnant new wife, but he wasn’t altogether comfortable about it, despite the fact that he and Anne were England’s keenest supporters of Reform. As archbishop, he was technically the Pope’s legate and not the king’s servant; therefore, Cranmer felt obligated to threaten Henry with excommunication if the monarch didn’t “put away” Katherine—who still considered herself Henry’s wife and queen. There could not be two wives and queens; that much was clear.
So Henry shoved a history-making law through Parliament called the Act of Restraint of Appeals, which proclaimed England “an empire governed by one supreme head and king,” who answered to no one but God for his actions. It was also made an act of treason to write or speak against his marriage to Anne, and all adult males were compelled to uphold it.
Anne’s household now numbered two hundred retainers and attendants, liveried in her chosen colors of purple and blue embroidered with the motto “La plus heureuse” (the most happy).
Preparations then began in earnest for the four-day coronation celebration. At last, Anne Boleyn would receive what had been more than six years in the making. On May 29, 1533, she sailed in state up the Thames from Greenwich in a richly appointed barge, accompanied by a flotilla of fifty other vessels. Cloth of gold adorned her burgeoning figure. At the Tower of London, Henry greeted her with great pomp and the royal couple spent the next two nights celebrating under its battlements.
Unfortunately for Anne, during her progress through the City, the pageantry was marred by the official banners that lined the streets, emblazoning the entwined initials of the monarch and his new queen consort. “HA HA,” they read, and the public loved the unintentional joke on Anne. But she made a beautiful picture, her chestnut hair cascading down her back in the manner of medieval queens and virgin brides. Her crimson brocaded gown was encrusted with precious stones, the pearls she wore about her neck “larger than chick peas.”
On June 1, Whitsuntide, the six-months-pregnant Anne was crowned queen at Westminster Abbey, the folds of her gown cleverly concealing her condition. According to tradition, the king did not attend the coronation. Greeting Anne afterward at Westminster, Henry asked her, “How liked you the City, sweetheart?”
The new queen replied, “Sir, the City itself was well enow, but I saw so many caps on heads and heard few tongues.”
This jibes with Chapuys’s assessment of the mood in the streets, as he noted that it was so far from being jubilant that it was funereal.
After that, it was all downhill.
On July 11, Pope Clement issued a Bull declaring void Archbishop Cranmer’s verdict on Henry’s first marriage. His Holiness demanded that Henry put Anne away, adding that any child of theirs would be deemed illegitimate. The Pope also excommunicated Henry, but by then the king was past caring. A Pope’s will had no validity to the newly appointed Head of the Church in England.
Yet after Anne had endured so much and waited so long to realize her ambition, the royal honeymoon was short-lived. Henry was already experiencing buyer’s remorse. And his little blue eyes had begun to stray.
The heavily pregnant new queen, with her sharp tongue and shrewish temper, was not a pleasant companion; and of course Henry had to find outlets for gratifying his lust without endangering the health of the son he hoped she was carrying. Anne found hers
elf unable to control or contain her jealousy over Henry’s little infatuations and dalliances with her ladies-in-waiting; she may well have feared that one of Henry’s flings might displace (or worse, replace) her. “Coldness and grumbling” characterized their arguments. When Anne complained about his infidelities, using “certain words” that Henry disliked, he advised her to shut her eyes and endure as those who were her betters had done, reminding his new wife that he could “lower her as much as he had raised her.”
Henry had confided to François I that he had to have a son “for the quiet repose and tranquility of our realm.” However, at three p.m. on September 7, 1533, Anne gave birth to a flame-haired daughter, who the monarchs named Elizabeth after both of their mothers. Henry could not conceal his displeasure at the birth of a girl. Nor, at the outset, could Anne. After all those years of struggle and sacrifice, the risks Henry had taken to reform the religion, the lives that had been ruined so that Anne could become his queen, the best she could do was bear a girl.
They both knew that she had “failed,” though Anne would in short order become so devoted to Elizabeth that she breast-fed the baby herself, scandalizing the court. But Henry canceled the joust and the other grand celebrations that had been set to take place upon the birth of his son. He had been so sure Anne would give him a boy that the formal documents had been drawn up with the word “Prince” on them. All that was lacking was the insertion of the heir’s name and date of birth. Henry seethed as “ss” was added to every announcement.
In March 1534, Pope Clement finally concluded that Henry’s marriage to Katherine had indeed been valid—no surprise to anyone by then. He died that September, by which time Anne was several months pregnant again, her “goodly belly” a subject of discussion since April 27.
Henry was now forty-three years old, and Anne was in her mid-thirties. To their mutual consternation, she miscarried. Anne was pregnant again by October 1535, though her condition did not deter Henry from paying a visit early in the month to the Seymour family at their home of Wulfhall. There, Sir John Seymour made certain that his demure and modest daughter, Jane, fell under the royal gaze as much as possible. It was not long before Henry gave Jane a miniature portrait of himself, which she ostentatiously wore about her throat at court. Anne was so infuriated by Jane’s impudence that she ripped the chain from her neck.
At the end of December, Henry received the news that Katherine lay dangerously ill, but he refused to see her. In her final days, she wrote one last letter to the king averring her everlasting passion for him, poignantly ending with the words, “Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.”
The letter was signed “Katherine the Queen.”
On January 7, 1536, just days after her fiftieth birthday, the cancerous tumor on Katherine’s heart claimed her life. On learning of the former queen’s demise, Anne and Henry donned yellow garments, a color of rejoicing in England, but the traditional color of mourning in Spain. Katherine of Aragon was buried with modest pomp at Peterborough. Not until the twentieth century did her resting place receive the honors it deserved, when Mary of Teck, the queen consort of George V, ordered the symbols of queenship to be displayed over Katherine’s tomb. The two banners bearing the royal arms of England and Spain hang there still.
Anne miscarried a male fetus said to be fifteen weeks old on the day of Katherine’s funeral, blaming it on two incidents that had caused her great anxiety—catching her husband with Jane Seymour (who evidently wasn’t particularly modest) on his lap, and the jousting accident he suffered on the day of her miscarriage. Henry had lain unconscious for two hours, and naturally Anne feared for his life and for her own future, should the king die of his injuries.
But Henry wasn’t buying either reason. Utterly insensitive to Anne’s grief at losing another baby, he lamented, “I see God will not give me male children,” leaving his fragile wife devastated and terrified of losing his love.
Anne had good reason to despair. For Henry was already beginning to map out a more fertile pasture. In April, the king was very indiscreetly boasting to his ambassador in France that God might yet see fit to “send us heirs male,” averring, “You do not know all my secrets.”
If Anne ever gave birth to a boy, her enemies knew her power over Henry would be nearly invincible. Timing was everything. She had to go—and sooner rather than later. After Anne’s miscarriage in 1536, the anti-Boleyn and pro-Seymour factions at court coalesced, convening to determine the best way of getting rid of Anne to make way for Jane. Thomas Cromwell, once Cardinal Wolsey’s trusted secretary and now Henry’s Chief Minister, made the point that there were international matters just as pressing as Henry’s need for a son. France and Spain were now at war, and England stood to gain much from an alliance with Spain. But for obvious reasons, Henry’s marriage to Anne was a stumbling block to any negotiations. Why would Spain’s king, Charles V, aid the man who had dumped his sainted aunt for the French-bred hussy?
It had therefore become not just biologically but politically expedient for Henry to eliminate Anne.
As the Seymours were moved into apartments at Greenwich, and a pro-Seymour courtier was made a Knight of the Garter in preference to Anne’s brother, George (now Viscount Rochford, after the death of their father), Anne felt it all slipping away, everything she had clawed and scratched and waited for with her last fiber of patience. Her only “crime” was that she had failed to give Henry a son.
On April 24, 1536, at Cromwell’s prompting, the king signed a document appointing a committee to investigate Anne’s possibly treasonous activities. It was not difficult to find people cheerfully willing to testify to Anne’s innate lasciviousness. In fact, Anne’s own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, even as he reaped the benefits of her favor, called her “la grande putain” (the great whore).
On April 30, a court musician and dancer named Mark Smeaton was arrested on the grounds that he had committed adultery with the queen. After being put to the rack the hapless Smeaton confessed to the blatant lie.
The following day three men of Henry’s Privy Chamber were arrested, also charged with having bedded Anne. It was a travesty of justice, for Henry knew these knights, Sir Francis Weston, Sir Henry Norris, and Sir William Brereton, too well to ever suspect them of treachery. The witch hunt was well under way.
Hoping something would stick, Henry saw to it that Anne was charged with so many treasonous acts that it would have been impossible for the council not to have convicted her of at least one of them. Anne was even accused of sleeping with her own brother, a charge made by George’s jealous wife, Lady Rochford, a lady of Anne’s bedchamber. She thought her husband spent far too much time in his sister’s company, and therefore accused the Boleyn siblings of “undue familiarity.”
Cromwell had been a tremendous supporter of Anne’s during the Great Matter, but had jumped to a safer barge when he saw that hers was sinking. He became one of the prime architects of Anne’s downfall, and her bitterest enemy during her final days. Cromwell hoped that the charge of incest would suitably shock and appall the council, with its titillating allegations of Anne’s “alluring [George] with her tongue in [his] mouth and his tongue in hers.”
The anti-Boleyn machine banked on the assumption that people who swallowed that story would believe anything. This was the grotesque version of Anne Boleyn they wished to perpetrate and disseminate—the “goggle-eyed whore” with the gross cyst on her neck, moles all over her body, six fingers on one hand, and three breasts.
And if people didn’t believe that Anne and George were lovers, they might credit some of the other allegations—that she had conspired to kill the king, Queen Katherine, the Lady Mary, and Henry’s illegitimate son by Bessie Blount, Henry Fitzroy. Many times Anne had in fact angrily urged Henry to execute his first wife and their daughter for treason, but he had never entertained her suggestion.
The indictment against Anne stated that “she, following daily her frail and carnal lust, did fal
sely and traitorously procure by base conversations and kisses, touchings, gifts, and other infamous incitations, divers of the king’s daily and familiar servants to be her adulterers and concubines.”
Anne was arrested on May 2, 1536, on the charges of adultery, incest, and conspiracy to kill the king.
During her imprisonment in the Tower, Anne’s every word and movement were jotted down by the wardresses who had been entrusted with watching her, in the hope that the queen might say something to implicate herself and give Henry legitimate proof of her infidelity or other treasonous act. Throughout her confinement, she suffered violent mood swings, veering wildly from laughter to remorse to boastfulness to tears.
And because Henry refused to see her, on May 6, 1536, Anne wrote him a letter, in which she begged him not to dishonor their daughter, Elizabeth, and asserted her loyalty and innocence: . . . let me receive an open trial, for my truth shall fear no open shames; then shall you see either mine innocence cleared, your suspicions and conscience satisfied, the ignominy and slander of the world stopped, or my guilt openly declared. So that . . . Your Grace may be at liberty, both before God and man, not only to execute worthy punishment on me, as an unfaithful wife, but to follow your affection already settled on that party Mistress Seymour. . . . But if you have already determined . . . that not only my death, but an infamous slander, must bring you to the joying of your desired happiness, then I desire of God that He will pardon your great sin herein. . . .
Anne’s trial began on May 15 in the Great Hall of the Tower of London. Her brother was to be judged by the same council of peers. Two thousand spectators watched the circus from purpose-built stands. The Duke of Norfolk presided over the proceedings as High Steward, while Anne’s former sweetheart, Henry Percy, now the Earl of Northumberland, was impelled by his rank to sit on the peer council. But Percy was dying and the exigencies of his illness did not permit him to remain for the verdict. Possibly, he was unable to witness the sham trial of the woman he had once adored.
Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy Page 8