by G Lawrence
Margaret died in 1578 and was granted a royal funeral in Westminster Abbey. She lies in the same grave as her son, Charles. Margaret’s grandson, King James, went on to become King of England and Scotland.
Agnes Howard, nee Tilney, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk got in a lot of trouble when her ward, Catherine Howard, fell from grace. When Catherine’s pre-marital activities became known, lax guardianship was blamed, and Agnes came under fire. She protested that if there had been no offence since the marriage then Catherine had not committed adultery, but no one listened. Her step-son, Norfolk, was sent to her house to investigate, and found that Agnes had burned papers belonging to Dereham and his friends, although what these contained, we do not know. She was sent to the Tower and questioned. Later she admitted to have promoted Catherine to the King as a bride in full knowledge that she had been sexually active before marriage, and had persuaded Catherine to offer Dereham a place in her royal household. The position Dereham was offered at court is generally seen as a means to buy his silence.
Many of her family were also taken to the Tower, and lost property and money in the wake of Catherine’s fall. Agnes was not brought to trial, but she was sentenced to imprisonment and forfeiture of her lands, estates and goods.
Although the King was of a mind to convict her for treason, Agnes was released. She died in 1545 and is buried at Thetford Priory.
Nicholas Carewe fell out of favour in 1538 after responding with anger to something Henry VIII said, but the real reason was his support for Princess Mary. Cromwell had decided to move against his former allies, and presented letters to Henry, supposedly written by Carewe, showing that he had been involved in a plot to depose Henry and put Cardinal Reginald Pole (who had Plantagenet blood) on his throne instead. This became known as the Exeter Conspiracy.
Carewe was arrested and found guilty of high treason. He was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1539
Gertrude Courtenay was imprisoned in the Tower along with her husband and their son in 1538, suspected of involvement in the Exeter Conspiracy. Her husband was executed and Gertrude and her son remained in prison. She was released in 1540 and died somewhere around 1558.
Reginald Pole was made a Cardinal by Rome in late 1536, and published his tract defaming Henry as a heretic and adulterer. Pole was appointed by the Pope to lead a European offensive against Henry, and since Henry was at that time rather busy with the Pilgrimage of Grace, and other uprisings, he did not take well to this. Henry chose to take revenge on Pole’s family, since he could not reach the Cardinal himself.
Reginald Pole returned to England when Queen Mary took the throne, and became Archbishop of Canterbury. His involvement in the infamous Marian burnings is disputed, as he was known to be lenient towards heretics, but he does not appear to have done anything to stop them. He died, possibly of influenza, on the 17th of November 1558, a bare twelve hours after Queen Mary.
Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, once Katherine’s great friend and the governess of Princess Mary, was executed on trumped up charges of treason, ostensibly to do with a plot her son Reginald was involved in, but also, and more likely, because she was one of the last surviving Plantagenets. She was an old woman at the time of her death, and was confused and panicked at her execution. Her headsman was inexperienced, and hacked her to death, delivering blows to her arms, shoulders and neck, which led to agony and suffering. Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter, and Henry Pole, Baron Montague, were also arrested, tried, and executed for treason at the same time.
Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was constantly ill with ague, and his marriage was unhappy. He made the King his heir, for want of children, and in 1536 was created Lord President of the Council of the North and vice-regent of the Order of the Garter, perhaps for appearing at Anne’s trial as a jury member. His brothers and mother were deeply involved on the rebel side in the Pilgrimage of Grace, but Percy remained loyal to his King. The rebel leader, Robert Aske came to him and asked that he resign his command of the north, but Percy refused.
By early 1537, he was very ill. Percy died on the 29th of June, 1537 and was buried in Hackney church.
Anne’s daughter, of course, went on to become Queen of England. Elizabeth Tudor reigned for forty-five years, longer than any of her forebears, and is widely recognised as the greatest of the Tudor monarchs.
Elizabeth was born into a perilous world. Just a child of two and a half at the time of her mother’s death, she grew up in an uncertain time. Her brother, Edward, was born when she was four, and he took the place she was denied in the succession. Her childhood, whilst her father lived, was fairly happy, I believe. Henry accepted her as his daughter, and although she was labelled a bastard, she enjoyed his love and favour. Elizabeth was a remarkably precocious girl, who possessed a fierce intelligence and will to survive. She came to the throne as a young woman, and ruled well, if not always fairly. But she was a great deal more balanced and just than her father or siblings.
Elizabeth rewarded her Boleyn and Howard relatives when she came to the throne, as well as children of the men who fell with her mother, and this, combined with several other facts, such as Elizabeth wearing a necklace of Anne’s in the Whitehall Portrait, and the discovery of a ring upon her finger when she died, which bore twin portraits of Anne and Elizabeth, point me towards thinking that Elizabeth remembered her mother with a private, enduring love, and perhaps did not believe the accusations against her.
Elizabeth was not without fault; her reign saw England become involved not only with piracy on a breathtaking scale against Spain, but also in the slave trade. Despite slavery being illegal in England, Elizabeth sent men to plunder slaves from Spanish and Portuguese plantations, supposedly taking them to better owners, but in reality profiting from human misery. The slaves were not to be brought to England, but could be traded outside English waters without upsetting the law. English involvement with the slave trade was minimal at this stage, and after a disastrous mission led by John Hawkins, was largely abandoned in favour of piracy, only to emerge again in force about one hundred years later.
I may argue that slavery was already established, and even the Pope kept slaves, that Elizabeth’s part in the trade was lesser than that of Spain or Portugal, but England was still involved, and this should not be brushed over. Horrors were done in Ireland, too, which are much overlooked in English history. Queen Mary is remembered for all the ills she did, with any good being ignored, and Elizabeth for all the good she did, whilst the ills are brushed under a convenient carpet. But if we judge Mary harshly, we must judge Elizabeth in the same manner. Elizabeth did a great deal that was good, and should be remembered, but we should not forget the wrongs that were done.
What can be said of Elizabeth is that she took an England which, by the time she came to the throne, was impoverished and fragile, and made it strong. The idea of Empire was brought up in her time, and however much damage that ideal did to other countries, it made England a world power to be reckoned with.
As a person Elizabeth is hard to see, and she kept it that way. A precocious child became a hardened survivor and she learned early on that it was better to be obscure than frank, and hid many of her actions under a cloak of lies, courtly subterfuge and deft political manoeuvring. Elizabeth was a superb spin doctor, and always made the best of what she was handed. She was resourceful, witty, clever, and knew how to rule. She chose highly skilled men to serve her, and promoted the arts and education. It is a testament to her reign, that by the time she died, nearly 60% of the population was literate, compared to 15% at the start of her grandfather’s. Many of her methods were sneaky and underhand, but she was playing a dangerous game. Many wanted her deposed and replaced with a Catholic, and she was under almost constant threat of her life. Her religious settlement, forged after years of switching from Catholic to Protestant and back again under her siblings and father, was brought about to try to bring peace between the faiths. And she was remarkably tolerant in comparison to her siblings and fath
er. She executed traitors, but did not burn them for their faith, and often pardoned those who had plotted against her. In the early years of her reign, Catholics were left alone in England, and it was only when the Pope excommunicated her, effectively making all Catholics in England potential assassins, that she took any action against them as a whole.
During her reign, the infant beginnings of the British Secret Service were also born. Walsingham, her spymaster, and Cecil, her greatest and longest-lasting advisor, saw to this.
She famously never married. Elizabeth admitted that she hated the state, and said it was better to remain a virgin, and single, than become a wife. Elizabeth had witnessed first-hand what it was for a woman to be in the complete control of a husband, and she did not want to enter into any state that would imperil her life, her freedom or her power. Unlike many others, I think Elizabeth was a virgin, as she claimed. Her experiences of her father’s many unions, the fear of losing her power, the terrible example of the humiliation her sister Mary suffered when she failed to bear a child, and the early abuse she suffered at the hands of Thomas Seymour, I think convinced Elizabeth that it was safer to remain single.
Elizabeth died an old woman in March 1603. She was the last of the Tudors.
But not the last of the Boleyns… Although Anne’s direct line died out, Mary Boleyn’s did not. The house of Spencer, that of Princess Diana, is directly related to Mary Boleyn, as were notables of history such as William Churchill, Lord Nelson, Charles Darwin, P.G. Woodhouse, and Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York.
The Windsor Princes Harry and William carry Boleyn blood through their mother, but also their father. Queen Elizabeth II is related to Mary Boleyn though her mother, who was a direct descendant of Catherine Carey. The Boleyns, somewhat ironically therefore, still sit upon the throne of England, and will continue to do so, and if Catherine Carey was the daughter of Henry VIII, then so do the Tudors.
The past, at times, is not as far away as we think.
Changes Made in the Books to Historical Fact
I must note here that this book is historical fiction, and therefore not to be taken as a blueprint of that time. I try to stick to facts, but conversations, and various plots and subplots in this book, are based on theories I have developed after ten years of study.
One of the striking variations from fact is Anne’s visit to the Abbey of Syon. Anne did go there, and appeared to make an impression on the nuns, leading to a partial (although this is contested) submission to Henry as Supreme Head of the Church. I have no evidence that she made a deal with the nuns of Syon, but I think it is reasonable that since she had more success than the many, many delegations sent to Syon, she negotiated with them, and her propensity to uphold the Church, even against Henry, makes this a reasonable, in my eyes, supposition.
Anne suffers, in the book, from what we would now call PTSD in response to the deaths of her three children. There is no firm evidence of this, but PTSD can affect women in the aftermath of miscarriages, and Anne’s often erratic behaviour, such as high anxiety, irritability, and emotional outbursts, could be symptoms of PTSD. Often, the emotional and psychological effects of suffering three miscarriages are set aside as we concentrate on her terror of being abandoned by Henry. I think three losses, in such a short space of time, were likely to have adversely affected her.
With regards to her first lost son, and the failure to baptise him at birth, this was something I chose to include which cannot be proven, and is fairly unlikely. I chose to include this as it granted a way to introduce Anne questioning aspects of traditional faith, and it is a possibility, but midwives were trained to bless or baptise any part of the child which emerged from the mother, sometimes a hand or foot, if it was likely the child would die. The silence about her children I think was genuine. There is doubt about how many pregnancies she had, and therefore how many miscarriages/ premature births, but since they are barely recorded in court records, and were not publicly announced, I think it likely that Henry ordered them to not be spoken of, something that did not allow Anne time or opportunity to grieve or heal.
The identification of Mary Perrot as the Imperial Lady is based on supposition. In the book The Other Tudors, by Philippa Jones, Mary Perrot is identified as the mother of John Perrot, who was widely believed to be Henry’s son. The Imperial Lady was said to have been a woman Henry had had a previous affair with, and had resumed it later. No one actually knows who she was, as she is not named in sources, but I stitched together these scraps, and made Mary his mistress. The name of the parrot is just an invention of mine, much like the hapless hare for Chapuys, and in earlier books, the fat bat, for Wolsey. Joanna Dingley was thought to have been Henry’s mistress, and her daughter was possibly his child.
The part where Anne sits for Holbein, and he sketches her with fair hair, is based on a drawing which some think may be Anne, and some do not. The fair hair would seem to indicate it is not her. I put in a reason for why it might still be her, but admit this part was more to do with accentuating her sorrow about her child than it is based on real fact.
There is only slight evidence that Anne and her sister Mary reconciled after their argument about Mary’s marriage. I chose to include the idea so that Mary would not simply disappear from the books, as I was very fond of her, but also because Mary called her daughter Anne, and because there is disputed evidence that Anne sent Mary money and a golden cup. Anne Carey, Mary’s daughter, may not have lived, and may not have been called Anne, but there is some evidence to suggest she was. One could argue that Mary might have named her daughter after her sister to gain back favour, or it may have been out of genuine affection. I think the latter.
Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, was likely to have been involved in the demonstration in favour of Princess Mary, but was perhaps not held in the Tower. This situation has been disputed by so many historians that I chose to include a compromise; Jane was involved, was arrested, but her arrest was wiped from the Tower records. This last idea is my invention.
The pamphlets that were distributed about Henry and Jane Seymour after Anne’s arrest came from an unknown source. I chose to make Anne the author. She had links to a Southwark printing house, so I thought it not impossible. She also had the best motive. I think it was either her, or one of her faction, who set the order up.
The meeting between Chapuys, Cromwell and Henry at Easter in 1536 was not attended by Anne. I chose to place her there so that the encounter where Cromwell was berated by Henry, leading to him deciding to work against Anne for fear of his life, was done in the first person. She was not present.
Anne’s last letter to Henry in the Tower may be a fake. There are disputes about the handwriting, and the fact she called herself Anne Bullen, rather than other spellings of her name, or indeed instead of using her title of Queen, but recent studies have put forward suggestions that it was her work. The recklessness of the letter certainly suggests Anne’s hand to me. She was not always talented at hiding her emotions, even when she knew she was in danger.
In the Tower, I granted Anne a great deal of insight into her predicament and who was behind her arrest. Anne was a clever woman, and it is likely she understood Cromwell was behind her fall, but how far she understood Henry’s culpability was another matter.
In her trial, I added the accusation about Bridget Wingfield’s letter, that it was evidence of blackmail. This is actually a modern theory, and one I wanted to demonstrate was erroneous. That letter holds nothing firm in it that could be evidence that Bridget found out Anne was having affairs and blackmailed her. The reports that Bridget made a death-bed confession against her friend were brought up in court, although they are likely to be false.
As for the other books, I will not go into detail here, but I have a few points to make.
In La Petite Boulain, Anne’s early life and her time in Mechelen and France are described. I placed Anne at Henry’s coronation and the funeral of Prince Henry, as it is a possibility she was present, and also so I
could describe these events in detail. I tried to stick to what was known about her time in Mechelen and France, but most of the events in those sections are based on theories rather than facts.
Her relationship with Marguerite de Navarre is likely to have happened, but the depths of that relationship are unknown. Considering that Anne owned several of Marguerite’s books, spoke warmly of her in later life, and helped in the plan to free Bourbon, however, are points to indicate that they were indeed friends.
The attack on Anne in the gardens in France is fiction. There is no evidence it happened, but due to the French King slandering her later in life, despite her stout defence of her virginity whilst Henry pursued her, made me think that perhaps there was a reason beyond the political for his accusations.
Despite numerous suggestions and slanders that Anne was loose of morals, and had been the mistress of many a man before Henry, I think she was, as she protested, careful of her honour. Her upbringing was different to that of her sister and brother, and in Mechelen she was brought up with a set of ideals that valued courtly love, but resisted sex. I think that when Henry set his sights on her, her protestations that she could not become a man’s mistress were entirely genuine.