Yet, she was arrested, found guilty and executed. Why? I would argue that the fifth possible scenario (see page 75) describes what actually happened – that neither Henry nor Cromwell malevolently condemned Anne for their own ends, but that Anne’s apparent guilt, despite her actual innocence, convinced Henry that she deserved to die.
Let us return to Henry. In all the writing about Anne’s fall, Henry’s behaviour has never been adequately explained. Eric Ives is the most upfront about this, arguing that ‘all discussion of the fall of Anne Boleyn ends in the ultimate unresolvable paradox of Tudor history: Henry VIII’s psychology’. We have seen that Henry pushed and pursued the investigation up until the time of his interview with Norris but, persuaded of Anne’s guilt, he then changed his behaviour dramatically. Firstly, he became ‘morbidly concerned’ about the execution plans, including the making of the scaffolds and the ordering of the French executioner from Calais, who used a sword and could behead a person while they knelt. The executioner charged a large fee of £23 6s 8d for his work. Henry wanted to ensure Anne was removed quickly and cleanly and it seems that he channelled his vengeance into practical arrangements for her death. Secondly, he displayed his sense of betrayal in an exaggerated, tragicomedic manner. The evening of the day Anne was taken to the Tower, his (illegitimate) teenage son Henry Fitzroy, the Duke of Richmond, came to say goodnight to his father and Henry wept over him, saying that he and the princess Mary ‘were greatly bound to God for having escaped the hands of that accursed whore, who had determined to poison them’. While Anne was in the Tower, Henry was heard saying that he believed that ‘upwards of 100 gentlemen’ had known her carnally. He also composed a tragedy, that he wrote out in a little book, carried with him and offered for people to read, and, on Ascension Day, he ostentatiously wore white for mourning. This behaviour displays Henry’s enormous capacity for hyperbolic self-pity and how quickly his view of Anne had polarized. Finally, he went out of his way to celebrate and step up his relationship with Jane Seymour in a way that seemed flagrant and scandalous to observers. He was reported as ‘going about banqueting with ladies, sometimes remaining after midnight and returning by river’. He lodged Jane within a mile of his palace and provided cooks and officers of the royal household to serve her. On 18 May, Chapuys wrote, ‘already it sounds ill in the ears of the people, that the King, having received such ignominy, has shown himself more glad than ever since the arrest of the whore’ and further ‘you never saw a prince or husband show or wear his (cuckold’s) horns more patiently and lightly than this one does’. Waiting the two and a half weeks between Anne’s arrest and execution apparently grated on Henry: ‘I think the King feels the time long that it is not done already’. As soon as Anne was dead, Cranmer, at the king’s behest, issued a dispensation for Jane and Henry to marry and they were betrothed on 20 May just one day after Anne’s execution and married ten days later. Why such a rush? Charles V’s simple statement that ‘the king is of an amorous complexion’ (or its various reiterations since) will not do as an explanation.26
Two contemporary comments provide a clue. Cranmer, in his letter to the king concerning his disbelief at Anne’s guilt, wrote that he could not ‘deny but your grace hath great causes… of lamentable heaviness; and also, that… your grace’s honour of every part is so highly touched’, before rushing on to undo these words by disingenuously assuring Henry, ‘if the reports of the Queen be true, they are only to her dishonour, not yours’. A similar sentiment was expressed by a European observer, the reformer Philipp Melancthon, when he wrote, ‘see how dreadfully this calamity will dishonour the King’. Honour, as we have seen, was chiefly a measure of one’s ability to conform to the ideals demanded of one’s gender. For a man, it meant exerting masculinity, imposing patriarchy, controlling the women in one’s household, maintaining a good reputation and demonstrating physical and sexual prowess. Chiefly, it meant controlling the morality of the women under his care and, specifically, their sexual morality. That Henry had been unable to do this denoted two things: it was evidence of Henry’s inability as a man and as a monarch. Contemporary thought made a clear link between a man’s sexual potency and his wife’s fidelity – men who were cuckolded were those whose ‘lack of sexual dominance led their wives to adultery’. ‘To be a man’, writes Lyndal Roper, ‘was to have the power to take a woman.’ Anne’s very behaviour, if assumed to be true, testified to the king’s lack of manliness, and as if this weren’t enough, Anne and Rochford’s ridicule of the king on this very matter drove the point home. It was not something that went unnoticed in the kingdom. Sir Nicholas Porter, the parson of Freshwater, was reported to have said in 1538, ‘Lo, while the King and his Council were busy to put down abbeys and pull away the right of Holy Church, he was made cuckold at home.’ There was also a strong connection in the popular mind between impotency and old age – the image of ‘Old Adam’ whose feeble old body could not satisfy his vigorous young wife was a constant refrain in the ballads found in contemporary broadsides. There were huge repercussions if such a failure were found in a king. Early modern thinking linked the governance of a house with the governance of a realm; as John Dod and Robert Cleaver wrote in 1612, ‘it is impossible for a man to understand how to govern the commonwealth, that doth not know how to rule his own house’. Any woman’s adultery, but especially that of a queen, upset the social order and gender hierarchy upon which society was based. Cranmer was right the first time – Henry’s honour was ‘highly touched’ by Anne’s apparent adultery. This also explains why Henry felt the need to cavort himself with ladies and increase the pace of his relationship with Jane Seymour, marrying her so quickly. It wasn’t just, as Alesius later hypothesized, that he was ‘openly insulting’ Anne: in the light of Anne’s devastating assault on his masculinity, Henry did it to restore the patriarchal order and to prove his manhood.27
CHAPTER 8
A Dearth of Heirs
There was a final sub-plot in the events touching Henry VIII’s honour in 1536. It is well known that Henry had long sought a legitimate male son and heir. Mary was the only surviving child of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, who had otherwise suffered five miscarriages, still-births and cot deaths, including the death of a celebrated prince named after his father, who lived for less than eight weeks in 1511. Anne Boleyn had promised him sons – and it had been prophesied that she would have them – but she too had borne him a daughter and miscarried of a son.
Henry did, of course, already have a son. But he was illegitimate. Born to Henry’s mistress Elizabeth Blount in June 1519, the boy was named Henry Fitzroy, a name that announced his parentage. He was openly acknowledged by Henry; Thomas Wolsey was even godfather at his christening. In 1525, the boy, aged six, had been ennobled, and made first, Earl of Nottingham and then Duke of Richmond and Somerset. There were only two other dukes in England at this time, and Richmond’s double dukedom made him the highest-ranking peer in the country. His additional Somerset title particularly suggested that Henry VIII was smoothing the path towards legitimating his son, as John Beaufort, a royal bastard who had been legitimated in the late fourteenth century, had been the Earl of Somerset. Being illegitimate did not mean that he lived remote and apart from the king. His recent biographer, Beverley A. Murphy, has argued that a letter from the royal nurse implies Richmond was part of the royal nursery, and he was often at court after 1530. Observers commented on the closeness of the father-son relationship. In 1530, the French ambassador, John Joachim, Seigneur de Vaux, remarked on Richmond’s good looks and the fondness of the king for his son, ‘a most handsome, urbane and learned young gentleman, very dear to the King on account of his figure, discretion and good manners… he is certainly a wonderful lad for his age’. Arrangements continued to be those appropriate to a king’s son: an early marriage was arranged for Richmond with the daughter of the one of the highest-ranking peers, the Duke of Norfolk (uncle to Anne Boleyn). In 1532, Henry presented Richmond to the king of France. Richmond was also dep
loyed on occasion to represent the king, playing host at a feast in November 1534 in honour of a visiting French admiral and attending, in the king’s place, the execution of three Carthusian monks who had refused to swear the oath accepting the king’s royal supremacy and marriage to Anne Boleyn in May 1535. Richmond’s resemblance to the king – he had the same red hair – helped remind onlookers of his line of descent. The Venetian ambassador commented in 1531 on Richmond ‘so much does he resemble his father’.1
By June 1536, after Elizabeth was bastardized in late May, all Henry’s children were illegitimate and unable, therefore, to inherit the throne. Henry was in a worse position than he had ever been and this was compounded in June. At the same time that Cromwell was assuring Chapuys that Henry was thinking of making Mary his heir, Henry insisted that Mary should submit to swearing an oath that acknowledged Henry as ‘Supreme Head in Earth, under Christ of the Church of England’. In addition, she was also to swear that the marriage between Henry and Mary’s mother had been ‘by God’s law, and man’s law, incestuous and unlawful’. In other words, Mary was required to declare her own bastardy. The document suggests she resisted doing this. Mary had signed her name after declaring the king’s position as Supreme Head, as if to write no more, but then was evidently induced to write a further paragraph proclaiming her parents’ marriage invalid, under which she signed again. Henry’s decision to press for this declaration after years of allowing Mary not to subscribe to this position relates almost certainly to the strength of his conviction about his rightful position as Supreme Head and his desire to assert his pre-eminence anew (as he did in other ways at this time, see chapter 11), in light of the humiliating betrayal and bruising damage he had just suffered. This accords with Henry’s behaviour when Mary initially refused to sign – he grew ‘desperate with anger’ and swore ‘in a great passion’ that if she did not, she and several others would suffer for it. One other, and not mutually exclusive, possibility is that Henry had started to reconsider his options. Chapuys reported in early June that there had been a provocative suggestion made by Robert Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, who had ‘stated the other day in the Privy Council in the King’s presence, that, considering the Princess was a bastard, as well as the Duke of Richmond, it was advisable to prefer the male to the female for the succession to the Crown.’ Chapuys worried that ‘this opinion of the Earl not having been contradicted by the King might hereafter gain ground and have adherents’. Chapuys certainly interpreted the timing of Henry’s insistence as evidence that Henry was gearing up to legitimate Richmond and wanted Mary’s status to be indisputable. In mid-June, threatened with legal proceedings against her if she didn’t conform, Mary signed.2
Until such time as Jane bore children, the next-in-line to the throne was now James V of Scotland. His sister (and therefore, second in line to the throne) was Henry’s niece, Margaret Douglas, daughter of Henry’s elder sister, also called Margaret. In June 1536, it was discovered that Margaret Douglas had secretly married the Duke of Norfolk’s younger brother, Lord Thomas Howard. For one so close to the throne to marry without consulting the king was sheer folly, possibly even high treason. It suggested, as the act of parliament concerning the attainder of Lord Thomas stated, that ‘the said Lord Thomas falsely, craftily and traitorously hath imagined and compassed, that in case our said Sovereign Lord should die without heirs of his body, which God defend, that then the said Lord Thomas by reason of marriage in so high a blood… should aspire… to the Dignity of the said Imperial Crown of this Realm’. Henry ‘was very much annoyed at his niece’s marriage’ and in July, both Margaret and Thomas Howard were sent to the Tower. Lord Thomas was sentenced to execution (he, in fact, died in the Tower on 31 October 1537), but Margaret was excused death, largely, Chapuys thought, as the marriage had not been consummated, but also perhaps because her mother pleaded with her brother, the king, for mercy.3
With three illegitimate children and a future possible heir in the Tower, the situation seemed hardly able to get any worse. But it did. In early July, Richmond fell ill, and on 23 July 1536, Henry’s beloved and only son died of tuberculosis. At this point, Jane Seymour was not even pregnant, and a month later, Henry would indicate his doubt whether she would conceive. The timing could not have been worse – earlier in July, parliament had passed an act which, for the first time, did not confine the succession to the legitimate line but allowed Henry to designate whomever he liked as his successor. The act had not named a successor, for fear that if ‘such person… should be so named, (they) might happen to take great heart and courage, and by presumption fall into inobedience and rebellion’, a clause that spoke of Henry’s growing fear of betrayal. It is possible that this new act had deliberately opened up the succession and with it the possibility that Richmond could one day inherit the throne. If it had, the king’s hopes and intentions would only have intensified his grief at his son’s death.4
Henry reacted strangely to the news. He initially ordered the Duke of Norfolk, Richmond’s father-in-law, to arrange a secret funeral. This was done at Thetford Priory in Norfolk according to the king’s instructions, as Chapuys observed: ‘Richmond, whom the King had certainly intended to succeed to the Crown, after being dead eight days, has been secretly carried in a wagon, covered with straw, without any company except two persons clothed in green, who followed at a distance.’ The two persons were George and Richard Cotton, who had been governor and comptroller of Richmond’s household. Only three other people attended the funeral: Norfolk, Richmond’s brother-in-law, the Earl of Surrey and his widow. Such a quiet, guarded affair was a hardly a fitting funeral for a duke of this rank, let alone the son of a king. It was as if Henry wanted ‘to sweep the whole thing under the carpet’. Within days though, Henry had written to Norfolk reproaching him for not having buried Richmond honourably. Such contradictory behaviour suggests that Henry was experiencing a mixture of denial, confusion and deep grief.5
CHAPTER 9
Masculinity and Image
In 1536, Hans Holbein the younger painted a new portrait of Henry VIII. This painting, conserved in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in Madrid, is the only surviving picture of Henry VIII universally agreed to be by Holbein himself. It marked a departure from previous representations of the king. This was partly simply a result of Holbein’s extraordinary talent and his astonishing and innovative technique of representing his sitters with almost photographic realism. Yet, the painting is also remarkable because of the characteristics that it appears to give Henry VIII: strong, ultra-masculine qualities that were even more forcefully deployed in a full-length portrait of Henry VIII painted by Holbein a year later. Although the Holbein original of this full-length representation – a wall mural at Whitehall Palace – was destroyed in the late seventeenth century, multiple copies of it mean that it now is the primary image through which we imagine and identify Henry VIII. As a result, the qualities with which it imbues Henry are ones that we now associate with him. The process of creating a picture is a complex thing – how much the finished result depends on the painter, or, in this case, the sitter and patron cannot be known – but it is probable that Henry VIII had something to say about how he was depicted. The production of these pictures, which conveyed strength and virility so hot on the heels of the events of early 1536, and the attribution of qualities so far from those being associated with Henry VIII at that moment, suggest that the themes of these portraits were influenced by the events of 1536. Perhaps they can be seen as a reaction to the challenge that 1536 had presented to Henry VIII’s sense of his own masculinity.
The Thyssen Portrait
Holbein had first visited England between 1526 and 1528 and in this period produced several portraits for Thomas More and his family. He returned in 1532 and at some point between 1532 and 1537 was employed by Henry VIII. In September 1536, Holbein’s friend, Nicolas Bourbon, described him in a letter as the ‘royal painter’ and, although the royal account books for May 1531 to January 1538 are lost
, we can see that from 1538, Holbein received a salary of £30 a year, which was paid quarterly.1
The Thyssen portrait was probably painted after the execution of Anne Boleyn on 19 May 1536 and Henry’s engagement to Jane Seymour the next day. It is small: 28 by 20 cm, but its size belies its power. It shows Henry VIII almost looming out of the small frame. Against a vibrant blue background, the king is pictured with his face turned to a three-quarter angle and his eyes looking back to the viewer. His chest appears vast, so much so that his shoulders do not even fit in the picture, and the image is made more overpowering by the opulence and finery of his clothing and jewellery. Such magnificent clothing contrasts with the smooth and realistic structure of Henry’s broad face: the high cheekbones, the strong jaw emphasized by his clipped beard, the small, piercing eyes with their heavy lids, his long nose and tight, pursed lips. It is not a wholly flattering depiction. But, rather than showing a handsome, softened image as in, for example, Joos van Cleve’s imagined portrait of Henry VIII in 1535, Holbein’s image imbues Henry with a certain severity, steeliness and power. This forceful sense of mastery and potency was undoubtedly Holbein’s goal. One commentator epitomized the picture when he wrote that ‘the unbridled vitality of this ruler can be tangibly felt’.2
It is a striking image in a way few earlier pictures of Henry were. In the portrait of Henry painted in the 1520s, he is shown as a round-shouldered insipid youth. In Lucas Horenbout’s miniatures, Henry is wan, anemic and insubstantial. In sharp contrast, the Henry of Holbein’s 1536 portrait has been transformed into a force to be reckoned with. Here, he appears magnificent, powerful, potent, strong, fierce and calmly terrifying. It was a remarkable new image of the king. It also is not too great a stretch of the imagination to conclude that as far as portraits were concerned, after this point, this representation became the ‘officially sanctioned image’ of Henry VIII. This new image wasn’t intended for propaganda in the modern sense of the word – it was not designed to be seen by vast numbers of people – but it was to be seen by those people who mattered, and it was intended to communicate certain ideas about the king’s character. Holbein’s ability to attribute character through his paintings can be seen by comparing the Thyssen with Holbein’s portrait of Jane Seymour, also painted in 1536. While Henry’s shoulders and upper arms do not make it into the picture, in order to emphasize his grandeur, practically all of Jane’s voluminous sleeves do. She might also be ornately bejewelled but her positioning, stance and expression mean that, in comparison to Henry’s steely power, she looks petite, demure and submissive.3
1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII Page 8