Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy

by Leslie Carroll

  According to the herald, Charles Wriothesley, Anne gave “wise and discreet answers” to her examiners, concealing her terror beneath a calm and regal demeanor. How much hope did she hold out for an acquittal? A princess of Spain had been powerless to fight Henry’s vast machine; dared the descendant of a lowly mercer—however much her family had risen over the past half century—expect to triumph where those of royal blood had failed?

  No one believed the charge of incest, and George Boleyn spoke so persuasively that an acquittal looked imminent. However, a note penned in French was read in open court, its contents attributed to George. According to the note, based upon a conversation with Anne, “the king was incapable of copulating with his wife, and he had neither skill nor virility [potency] .” Even though Anne—who had remained sexually faithful to Henry—had become pregnant four times in three years, by maligning the king’s mojo in open court George had sealed his death warrant.

  All four men accused of adultery with the queen were found guilty and sentenced to a traitor’s death—beheading, followed by castration, disembowelment, and quartering. However, in a fit of generosity, Henry commuted the sentence to a simple beheading, probably because he knew that the men were innocent—sacrificial lambs in the campaign to get rid of Anne.

  At the trials of the two peers, Anne and George, their uncle Norfolk read the sentence: the queen and her brother were to be burned at the stake, or executed, according to the king’s pleasure.

  Two days after the verdict, George Boleyn, Mark Smeaton, and the men of the Privy Chamber were beheaded on Tower Hill. But Henry allowed the corpses their dignity; the heads were not displayed on Tower Bridge, which was the customary punishment for dead traitors. Anne grew hourly more fearful that her turn would come at any moment.

  But before she was executed, Anne suffered another ignominy. She was stripped of her title as queen, and her marriage—after all the struggles to achieve it—was declared invalid. The Decree of Nullity was dated May 17, though it was not signed until June 10, and it would be another two weeks before both houses of Parliament subscribed to it. Henry had gotten his marriage to Anne annulled on the grounds that his affair with her sister, Mary, had placed them within the first degree of affinity, even though, in 1528—at Henry’s urging—the Pope had issued a special dispensation that set aside the subject of Henry’s affinity to Anne based on his romantic history with Mary Boleyn.

  But Henry had cleverly inserted into the 1534 Act of Supremacy that any existing papal dispensations would no longer be considered valid if they were contrary to Holy Scripture and the law of God. This phraseology was relied upon to justify the invalidity of Henry’s marriage to Anne as incestuous. Their daughter, Elizabeth, not yet three years old, was made a bastard by it.

  On May 18, Anne made a full confession to Cranmer, though she went to the block maintaining her love for Henry and her innocence of the crimes for which she had been convicted.

  As a final gesture of kindness to the woman he once called his “fresh young damsel,” Henry had spent £24 (roughly the equivalent of $14,400 in today’s currency) to hire the executioner from St Omer in Calais. This agent of death wielded a sword rather than an axe, ensuring a swifter and less painful demise.

  In a letter to Thomas Cromwell on May 19, 1536, the day of Anne’s execution, Sir William Kingston, Constable of the Tower, recorded his conversation with Anne when she heard the news. This morning she sent for me . . . and at my coming she said, “Mr. Kingston, I hear I shall not die afore noon, and I am very sorry therefore, for I thought to be dead by this time and past my pain.” I told her it should be no pain, it was so little. And then she said, “I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck,” and then put her hands about it, laughing heartily. I have seen many men and also women executed, and that they have been in great sorrow, and to my knowledge this lady has much joy in death.

  The time of the execution had been kept a secret so there wouldn’t be a tremendous crowd to witness her demise. The customary hour was dawn, but as noon approached, Anne grew increasingly anxious, eager to finally be put out of her misery. She had no idea that the delay was caused by the headsman’s being detained on the Dover Road. Because her executioner was stuck in traffic, Anne’s death had been postponed for a few hours, pending his arrival.

  Though she was to die as the Marquess of Pembroke, Anne looked every inch a queen as she walked to the block on Tower Hill wearing a red petticoat under a loose, dark gray gown of damask trimmed in fur. A mantle of ermine enveloped her slender shoulders. Her long chestnut hair was bound up under a simple white linen coif over which she wore a gabled head-dress in the English style, rather than one of the French half-moon caps she had introduced to Henry’s court fifteen years earlier.

  Witnesses described Anne’s steps as light, almost blithe. Perhaps she was relieved to be released from her mental torment, knowing there was nothing left for her in the temporal world.

  With all the buildup to Anne’s denouement, no one bothered to be sure that there was a coffin to receive her remains. Anne’s body and head were placed into an arrow chest that was close at hand and buried in an unmarked grave in the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, adjoining the Tower Green. Her skeleton was one of those identified in renovations of the chapel during the reign of Queen Victoria, so Anne’s final resting place is now marked in the marble floor.

  After the most famously protracted courtship in the world, Anne Boleyn had been queen for only a thousand days.

  She was not an easy person to like. Many times Anne seemed like the pushy power behind the throne when Henry was reluctant to pursue a thing to its conclusion. Yet Anne was as capable of being generous and compassionate as she was angry, vicious, and spiteful. She annually gave away £1,500 to the poor—over $1 million in today’s economy. But the average Renaissance Briton, perhaps even the recipients of her charitable largesse, remembered her instead as the trophy wife from hell who had seduced their sovereign and made him cast aside their beloved queen.

  As a result of her royal affair, Anne Boleyn’s legacy is enormous. By encouraging Henry to break with Rome and adopt some of the teachings of Luther and of Renaissance humanist theologians, she was arguably one of the most influential persons on the development of the Christian religion in western Europe.

  Anne was innocent of the charges for which she forfeited her head. But neither her bloodline nor her spirit perished on Tower Hill, for she left behind a daughter. Henry restored Elizabeth’s legitimate birthright three years before his death in the Succession Act of 1544. The redheaded princess would become England’s most venerated queen, and perhaps the greatest female monarch the world has ever known: Queen Elizabeth I.

  HENRY VIII and Jane Seymour (“Bound to Obey and Serve”) 1509-1537 Queen of England 1536-1537

  After the dragon, Henry wanted a doormat—but was Jane Seymour really that bland? Her conduct, first as a royal lady-in-waiting and later as a queen, indicates that she was more of a steel magnolia—a fragrant, seemingly fragile, ultrafeminine exterior concealing a tensile core.

  The Seymours were a respected family within the Tudor court, but their connections were nowhere near as powerful, nor their lineage as illustrious, as the Boleyns or the Howards. Sir John Seymour, Jane’s father, had served with Henry in France in 1513. Her mother, Margery Wentworth, was descended from Edward III. And Jane, the fifth child of ten, had been one of Anne Boleyn’s ladies-in-waiting, just as Anne was for Katherine of Aragon.

  Jane’s brother had been in service to the Spanish king and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and Jane herself had also been a lady-in-waiting to Katherine of Aragon, so it stands to reason that Eustache Chapuys, the imperial ambassador to Henry’s court, would have something nice to say about her. But the best the diplomat could manage was to describe Jane as being “of middling height and nobody thinks she has much beauty. Her complexion is so whitish that she may be called rather pale.”

  So, after two fiery and te
mperamental auburn-haired forces of nature, what did Henry see in this whey-faced woman with the washed-out blond locks and pointy little chin? The answer is obvious, actually. The king wanted peace and tranquility. He craved harmony, not just in his marriage but throughout his realm. And the modest and docile twenty-five-year-old Jane was the perfect antidote to his first two wives. So, okay, she was a drip and a pill, but that was the medicine the self-diagnosing Henry required. She was also likely as anyone else to produce sons. Her mother had given birth to ten children, so her fecundity pedigree was high.

  Yet this young woman knew how to play the hands that were dealt her. A speck on the palaces’ walnut-paneled walls until 1536, Jane had spent a lifetime observing and absorbing what to do and, more to the point, how not to behave around the king. She was clever enough to remain chaste in a court renowned for its flirtatious, if not outright licentious, behavior.

  Even Chapuys wasn’t certain Jane was as innocent as she appeared, remarking of her that “you may imagine whether being an Englishwoman and having been long at court, she would not hold it a sin to be a maid.”

  Although Jane was likely coached on how to massage the king-sized ego once his infatuation with her had begun, she was more than likely smarter than the average dishrag, and she was not without a certain degree of ambition for herself. She simply kept it better concealed than her black-eyed predecessor. Jane told the king what he wanted to hear and appeared to be everything he now sought in a consort. And Henry believed what he wanted to.

  Jane did have two patrons who were eager to advance their own agendas and saw in her the best means to achieve them. Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter, and Sir Nicholas Carew, Master of the Horse, who had bested Anne Boleyn’s brother for the Garter, staunchly supported the claims of Henry’s daughter Mary. Carew and the marchioness were convinced that Jane, who had always been passively sympathetic to the disinherited Mary’s plight, would repair the relationship between Henry and Mary. The result would be that the Catholic Mary would reacquire her rights of succession and perhaps even Henry’s Reformation would come to a grinding halt.

  It’s unfair to cite Henry’s passion and priapic urges as the only reason he so rapidly went from Anne to Jane. Once Anne was clearly destined for the history books, the king’s Privy Council began pressuring him to find another bride, and beget a male heir ASAP for the sake of the smooth succession of the realm.

  Jane was their choice as well. But Jane was proving not such an easy mark. Though she openly flirted with Henry, even to the point of sitting on his lap and accepting his presents of jewelry, she’d learned how to play hard-to-get from the best of them.

  Taking a leaf from Anne Boleyn’s courtship playbook, Jane made it clear to the king that if she was not to become his wife, she would have nothing to do with him. Pretty brave for the girl who was supposed to be the doormat. When Henry sent Jane a bag of gold sovereigns and what was presumably a passionate love letter, Jane’s reaction was swift and decisive. Acting as appalled as if Henry had left the money on the night-stand, in front of the king’s messenger she kissed the love letter, but pointedly left it unopened, returning it, along with the purse, begging the courier to remind the king that she was “a gentlewoman of fair and honorable lineage without reproach,” and modestly insisting that she had “nothing in the world but my honor, which for a thousand deaths I would not wound.”

  According to Chapuys, Jane asked the courier to convey to Henry that “if the king deigned to make her a present of money, she prayed it would be when God might send her a husband.”

  Henry got the point. And he relied upon his ever-faithful Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, to secure him a dispensation to marry Jane, because they were within the forbidden degree of affinity, as Jane’s grandmother was a cousin of Henry’s great-grandmother. Cranmer signed the dispensation on the same day as Anne Boleyn’s execution.

  Although Anne had been universally detested, Jane was not particularly admired by the average Briton. A love letter to her from Henry describes not only his feelings for her but those of lesser mortals: My dear friend and mistress,

  The bearer of these few lines from thy entirely devoted servant will deliver into thy fair hands a token of my true affection for thee, hoping you will keep it for ever in your sincere love for me. There is a ballad made lately of great derision against us; I pray you pay no manner of regard to it. I am not at present informed who is the setter forth of this malignant writing, but if he is found out, he shall straitly be punished for it. Hoping shortly to receive you into these arms, I end for the present

  Your own living servant and sovereign

  H.R.

  Although she wisely removed herself from public scrutiny while Anne’s trial was under way, as soon as the queen had been declared guilty, Jane permitted herself to be seen once again in the king’s presence. And on the afternoon of Anne’s execution, the two enjoyed a sumptuous meal amid much unrestricted canoodling. They were secretly betrothed the following day.

  On May 30, 1536, just eleven days after Anne’s death, Jane married Henry in the same manner as did his two previous spouses—in as private a ceremony as possible. They were wed quickly and quietly at Whitehall in the Queen’s Closet—though, ironically, there was no actual queen at the time.

  Henry was going through wives with such velocity that at the myriad royal demesnes, England’s laborers and artisans had not even finished replacing Katherine’s pomegranates of Granada with Anne’s Tudor roses and heraldic leopards. Now—instead of starting from scratch with newly made devices—a clever artisan might skillfully transform Anne’s leopards into Jane’s emblem of the panther. Jane’s other emblem was a castle, from which a flaming phoenix rose, code for the rebirth of Henry’s love life and his household as well as his realm—and of course for the son he desperately coveted after so much wifely failure. Not for nothing did the court call Jane Seymour “the Peacemaker,” a role she was ambitious to embrace and maintain, going to her grave with that legacy.

  The Seymour family did well for itself once Jane was anointed Henry’s chosen one. The celebrated court artist Hans Holbein designed jewelry and a golden cup for the new queen. Jane’s dowry (from the king to Jane, not from her father to the king) included 104 manors, 5 castles, and a number of forests, chases, and woodlands. And a week after the royal wedding, Jane’s brother Sir Edward Seymour was created Viscount Beauchamp. More blatantly ambitious than his sister, the new viscount harbored dreams of one day becoming regent if Jane should bear the increasingly ailing Henry a son.

  On June 4, Jane was proclaimed queen; three days later, the royal couple entered London by barge from Greenwich to Whitehall. The new queen was pasty-faced and lusterless, but her new bridegroom was a piggy-eyed, forty-five-year-old with a head “as bald as Caesar’s,” according to one contemporary report. Henry disguised his follicle issue by wearing hats. A beard hid his nonexistent chin. Actually, Henry had reached the life expectancy for Tudor times, and though he was balding, he was still relatively fit for a man of any age and era, though his waist was thirty-seven inches and his chest measurement a burly forty-five.

  As the months wore on, the plans for Jane’s grand coronation were postponed. The Exchequer insisted that the Treasury could ill afford it at the time. Henry claimed it was because the plague had returned to England that September, but the real reason may have been because he was waiting for her to be pregnant. Regardless of the lack of a formal coronation, Jane was still Henry’s queen consort.

  And Jane set to work making the role her own.

  The conservative new queen had some definite ideas about how the court ladies should dress, as well. The sexy “Frenchstyle” garments cut from opulent cloth that were so favored by her predecessor Anne Boleyn were not only discarded, they were banned. The delicate caps that showed more of a woman’s hair were to be replaced by the dowdy gabled headdresses that offered total coverage and transformed even the prettiest maiden into a homely matron. And speaking of
coverage—no more plunging square necklines à la Anne. As an antidote to the dreaded décolletage, Jane ordered her women to wear “chests”—dickie-like inserts—that served as modesty panels. The bright colors that had made Anne’s ladies resemble exotic birds of plumage were replaced by a somber palette of drab hues. Black was the new crimson, gold, and purple.

  In the political arena, Jane usually kept her mouth shut, but for a religious woman who did not embrace the new reform, Henry’s dissolution and destruction of the monasteries was too much. On bended knee, she pleaded with the king to restore the abbeys, but Henry growled at her to get up. The French ambassador reported, “He had often told her not to meddle with his affairs.” The issue was particularly sensitive for Henry because he had just crushed a rebellion that had begun in the north, demanding the restoration of Christ’s Church.

  A shiver probably went through Jane as Henry unleashed his temper full bore on his usually timid wife. Immediately chastened, if not entirely cowed, she never again interfered in matters of policy or state—except in one instance, but it was one where she knew she would eventually have more success. Jane was very aware that—issues of politics and religion aside—Henry really did love his children. She was also a devout Catholic (as was Henry’s firstborn, Mary) and had received no small degree of urging from Chapuys, the imperial ambassador, to see that Mary was restored to her father’s good graces.

  So Jane pressured Henry to reconcile with Mary, and even with little Elizabeth, but the new Act of Succession continued to shut out both of Henry’s daughters in favor of any sons Jane might bear.

  Mary was no happy camper. As if the depression, headaches, and menstrual problems the twenty-year-old princess endured (unsurprising given the ill-treatment she’d suffered since Katherine of Aragon’s fall from favor) had not been punishment enough, she was forced to sign documents averring that Henry was the true Head of the Church in England, and repudiating the Pope, disrespectfully referred to in the documents as “the Bishop of Rome.” And if she did not sign a paper acknowledging the invalidity of her mother’s marriage to the king and her own illegitimacy, she would be imprisoned in the Tower. To save her own skin, poor Mary was compelled to swallow her last shred of dignity and conscience in relinquishing her own birthright and declaring her bastardy.