Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire

by Leslie Carroll

  Carefully coached by her family and by others who wished to see the dousing of the Boleyn-Howard dynasty’s star and the end of the English Reformation, Jane was taught how to massage the king-sized ego once Henry’s infatuation with her had begun. However, she kept her ambition to be queen well concealed. She told the king what he wanted to hear and appeared to be everything he now sought in a consort. Her handlers also taught her how to disparage Anne in the king’s presence and insidiously poison Henry’s mind regarding the validity of their marriage. However, great care was taken to ensure that Jane always tarnished her royal rival in the company of other Seymour team members so that her clique would appear to be the instigators while the insipid Jane simply parroted her agreement.

  Behind the scenes Jane had 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, were convinced that Jane, who had always been passively sympathetic to the disinherited Mary, would repair the relationship between Henry and his daughter. Carew and the marchioness were Catholics who hoped that Jane’s intervention would result in the Lady Mary regaining her rights of succession, with the bonus that perhaps 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 to ensure the smooth succession of the realm. Jane was the council’s first choice, but she 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, it’s ironic that she had learned how to play hard-to-get from the best of them—Anne Boleyn herself.

  According to Ambassador Chapuys’s report of February 10, 1536, Henry gave “great presents” to Jane after Anne Boleyn’s miscarriage. And when Henry subsequently sent Jane a bag of gold sovereigns accompanied by what was presumably a passionate love letter, her reaction was swift and decisive. Jane acted as appalled as if Henry had left the money on the nightstand. On April 1, the ambassador wrote that she kissed the love letter, but pointedly left it unopened and fell to her knees before the king’s messenger, “begging him to tell the king that she was a well-born damsel, the daughter of good and honorable parents, without blame or reproach of any kind; there was no treasure in this world that she valued as much as her honor, and on no account would she lose it even if she were to die a thousand deaths. That if the king wished to make her a present of money, she requested him to reserve it for such a time as God would be pleased to send her some advantageous marriage.”

  Taking a leaf from Anne Boleyn’s courtship playbook, Jane had clearly decided “not in any wise to give in to the king’s fancy unless he makes her his queen.” Henry got the point. In fact, it increased his respect for the bland blonde. And he relied upon his ever-faithful Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer to secure him a dispensation to marry Jane; because her grandmother was a cousin of Henry’s great-grandmother, they were related within the forbidden degree of affinity. Cranmer signed the dispensation on May 19, the same day as Anne Boleyn’s execution. That afternoon, Jane and Henry recommenced the public displays of affection they’d discreetly refrained from during Anne’s trial and enjoyed a sumptuous meal amid much unrestricted canoodling. They were secretly betrothed the following day.

  Henry and the Catholic factions adored her, but Jane was not particularly admired by the average Briton. A love letter 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 loving servant and sovereign

  H.R.

  On May 30, 1536, just eleven days after Anne’s death, Jane and Henry wed quickly and quietly at Whitehall in the Queen’s Closet. Jane immediately became known at court as “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. Jane’s dower properties included 104 manors, five 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, and three days later the royal couple entered London by barge from Greenwich to Whitehall. The new queen was pasty-faced and lusterless, but her husband was a piggy-eyed, forty-five-year-old with a head “as bald as Caesar’s,” according to one contemporary report. Henry had taken to disguising his follicle issue by wearing hats. A beard hid his non-existent chin.

  Despite the lack of a formal coronation, Jane was still Henry’s queen consort. And she set to work making the role her own. For starters, the conservative new queen had some definite ideas about how the court ladies should dress. Jane banned the opulently sexy “French style” wardrobe and accessories that were favored by her predecessor, Anne Boleyn. Instead, women were to wear dowdy gabled caps and a somber palette of drab-hued gowns, filling in their plunging necklines with “chests”—dickie-like inserts—that served as modesty panels.

  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 according to an English correspondent of the era Henry growled at her to get up, unleashing his temper full bore as he advised her to “attend to other things, reminding her that the last Queen had died in consequence of meddling too much in state 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.

  Immediately chastened, if not entirely cowed, Jane 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. So she 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.

  In early January 1537, Jane got pregnant. Yet it was pointedly noted that she had not become enceinte during the first six months of her marriage—which says more about the forty-six-year-old king’s potency issues than Jane’s fecundity. To support this conjecture, on August 12, 1536, less than three months after the royal wedding, Henry had confided to Chapuys that he was feeling old and doubted he should sire any children with the queen.

  Jane gave birth to Henry’s miracle child—the much desired son, whom he nicknamed “God’s imp”—on October 12, 1537, in the wee hours of the morning at Hampton Court. After twenty-eight years of rule, the monarch finally had his heir. The boy was named Edward after his great-great-grandfather and because he was born on the eve of the saint’s feast day. Henry’s infant son was placed in his arms, and witnesses reported that the king wept to see him.

  Just three days later, wrapped in velvet and fur, a game but hopelessly fatigued Jane forced herself to attend her son’s lavish christening in Hampton Court Chapel. She remained on her feet for nearly the entire day, receiving the compliments of th
e hundreds of guests who were permitted to witness the ceremony and take part in the celebrations afterward, which dragged on into the wee hours of the next morning. The following week Jane’s family was granted additional honors. On October 18, the tiny Edward was proclaimed Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, and Earl of Carnarvon.

  But the exertion of childbirth and the exigencies of playing hostess when her body was utterly exhausted contributed to Jane’s swift demise. She fell ill within a day or two of giving birth, possibly due to a tear in her perineum that became infected, owing to the general ignorance of and inattention to hygiene. Jane developed puerperal, or childbed, fever, which turned into septicemia and eventually led to delirium. An alternative medical opinion hypothesizes that Jane had retained parts of the placenta within her uterus, which led to a catastrophic hemorrhage, septicemia, and death. Proponents of this theory cite the fact that Edward’s birth was attended by a team of male physicians who, according to decorum and custom, never examined Jane physically; the men may have paid more attention to the fact that Henry finally had an heir than to ministering to the boy’s mother—whereas an experienced midwife, had she been in the room, would have made sure the afterbirth was expelled and seen to it that Jane was immediately cleaned up and good to go.

  The king placed the blame for Jane’s illness “through the fault of those that were about her, who suffered her to take great cold and to eat things that her fantasy in sickness called for.” Twelve days after giving birth, on October 24, at eight a.m., Jane’s confessor was summoned. After receiving extreme unction, she died shortly before midnight, at all of twenty-eight years old.

  The inconsolable king ordered the churches to be draped in black and wore full black mourning for three months. On November 8, 1537, Jane’s body was taken in great pomp and solemnity to Windsor and interred four days later in St. George’s Chapel, the only one of Henry’s six queens to be buried there. A decade later the dying Henry requested that he be entombed beside her. Jane’s chief mourner was Princess Mary, restored to her father’s affections, thanks to the queen’s assiduous campaigning.

  Jane Seymour’s epitaph, inscribed in Latin, translates roughly to: Here lies Jane, a phoenix

  Who died in giving another phoenix birth.

  Let her be mourned, for birds like these

  Are rare indeed.

  Their son, Edward, Prince of Wales ascended the throne on his father’s death in 1547 to become Edward VI. However, his reign was brief; in 1553 Edward died at the age of fifteen. Although he was consumptive, some scholars believe that he may have suffered other illnesses, such as measles and smallpox, which hastened his demise.

  Edward’s premature death sparked civil strife between Catholics and Protestants. As his two half sisters had been delegitimized and Henry VIII’s will had stipulated that the succession pass to the heirs of his younger sister, Mary, it was Jane Grey, Mary Tudor’s granddaughter, who became England’s next monarch, queen for all of nine days.

  HENRY VIII

  and

  ANNE OF CLEVES

  (“GOD SEND ME WELL TO KEEP”)

  1515-1557

  married 1540

  “When he comes to bed he kisses me and taketh me by the hand and biddeth me ‘Goodnight sweetheart’; and in the morning kisses me and biddeth me ‘Farewell, darling. ’ Is this not enough?”

  —Anne of Cleves, on her sex life with Henry VIII

  HENRY VIII’S THIRD WIFE, THE TWENTY-EIGHT-YEAR- old Jane Seymour, had died of puerperal fever at midnight on October 24, 1537, twelve days after giving birth to Henry’s coveted male heir, Prince Edward.

  Although he grieved for Jane immensely, practically martyring her memory, the king acknowledged that he still needed to propagate the proverbial “spare”; barely a month after Jane’s death his ambassadors drew up a list of eligible continental beauties and went about the business of making inquiries.

  Fully aware of Henry’s penchant for violently ridding himself of unwanted spouses, his first few choices for Wife Number Four wriggled out of consideration by claiming precontracts of marriage elsewhere, or by reminding the king’s emissaries that they were related to his first wife, Katherine of Aragon. Gorgeous sixteen-year-old Christina, the Danish-descended Duchess of Milan, wittily insisted that if God had given her two heads she would willingly risk one to marry the King of England, but as she only had one . . .

  The search finally came down to Anne and Amelia, the two younger sisters of Wilhelm, Duke of Cleves, an independent duchy in the western region of Germany known as Westphalia, bordering the Netherlands. Ever since Henry’s 1534 Act of Supremacy had proclaimed him Supreme Head of the Church in England, his kingdom stood dangerously isolated as Europe’s lone Protestant superpower. Evangelical reformers, particularly Henry’s chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, viewed an alliance with one of the German duchies as a way to strengthen England’s commitment to the reformed religion. The Duke of Cleves was a Lutheran; his affiliation with England might counterbalance the amity between the powerful Catholic kingdoms of France and Spain by providing a Protestant partnership on the Continent. Cleves would benefit by the match by securing England’s martial might, should the forces of the Holy Roman Empire consider an invasion.

  But Henry, being Henry and always in love with Love, insisted that he would wed no woman who was not to his physical liking.

  So, early in 1539, the English ambassador Christopher Mont was dispatched to Cleves with two sets of instructions: the official ones from Henry that were more of a formal sounding-out of the viability of a Cleves marriage, and the secret ones from Cromwell, which specifically ordered Mont to get the lowdown on Anne, the elder of the two available Cleves girls, instructing him to report back on “her shape, stature, and complexion.” If Mont determined that “she might be likened unto His Majesty,” then he was authorized to suggest a royal marriage to the Saxon ministry.

  His mission was a success. Mont reported back to Cromwell that “Everyman praiseth the beauty of the said lady, as well as for the face, as for the whole body, above all other ladies excellent” and “she excelleth as far as the Duchess [of Milan, Christina of Denmark] as the golden sun excelleth the moon.”

  By March, England was involved in direct negotiations with Cleves for a marriage between Henry and either Anne or her younger sister, Amelia. Henry’s delegation—the Ambassador to Cleves, Nicholas Wotton, known as “Little Dr. Wotton,” and his companion Mr. Beard, a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber—were much annoyed that they were unable to return immediate eyewitness descriptions of the two young women, having only barely glimpsed them in their elaborate German court dress. “We had not seen them, for to see but a part of their faces, and that under such monstrous habit and apparel was no sight, neither of the faces nor of their persons,” complained Beard and Wotton. But the Germans were unapologetic. Olisleger, the Cleves minister, retorted, “Would you see them naked?”

  The months dragged on.

  After Beard was able to return to England with a favorable report, in July he was dispatched to Germany once more, this time in the company of the King’s Painter, Hans Holbein. The following month, Holbein began his portraits of Anne and Amelia.

  Although Henry had yet to receive a comprehensive physical description of the women, by this time it was considered a fait accompli that he would espouse one of them. Henry did have a preference, however. The king’s forty-eight-year-old rather immense gut told him that the older of the two sisters, the twenty-three-year-old Anne, would make a more appropriate wife and companion.

  Meanwhile, Wotton was befriending the girls’ mother, Maria, the better to learn about their upbringing. Anne had spent her life in the ducal court at Düsseldorf, “brought up with the Lady Duchess her mother and . . . never from her elbow.” In other words, she was sheltered. And her accomplishments extended primarily to the domestic arts, such as needlework. She read and wrote in her own language, but lacked French and Latin, and evidently was devoid of such intellectual pursuits
as avid reading and musical talent, which were so prized in Henry’s sophisticated court. “They take it here in Germany for a rebuke and an occasion of lightness that great ladies should be learned or have any knowledge of music,” Wotton reported. By those standards, Anne Boleyn would have been an überslut for her intellect alone.

  However, Anne of Cleves was not without her merits. “Her wit is so good that no doubt she will in a short space learn the English tongue, whenever she putteth her mind to it,” concluded Wotton.

  Another positive, “which appeareth plainly in the gravity of her face,” according to ambassador Christopher Mont, was that Anne was also free of the perceived German exuberance or “the good cheer” that accompanied her countrymen and -women’s passion for food and drink. She was judged to be loyal and gentle, quiet, and despite her extremely modest education, not at all a dullard.

  In early September 1539, shortly after Holbein had returned with his two portraits, an embassy from Cleves set off for England to conclude the necessary nuptial negotiations. The German embassy arrived in England on September 18, and on October 4, the marriage treaty was signed.

  The bride and groom had yet to meet.

  A week later, having traveled overland from Düsseldorf in a horse-drawn cart covered with cloth of gold, Anne arrived in Calais, which was then an English continental stronghold. But heavy winds prevented her party from crossing the Channel, so she spent the next two weeks learning popular English card games, which she evidently played with some skill, despite the language barrier. Anne won many plaudits from Henry’s courtiers, and her goodness, gentleness, and willingness “to serve and please” were also applauded by Anne Bassett, who became one of the new queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Surely from these descriptions of her character, Henry must have expected the second coming of Jane Seymour.