by John Guy
And unlike Katherine, who had been crowned with Queen Edith’s crown, Anne was anointed with holy oil and chrism and then crowned with St Edward’s crown—the one reserved for kings, not for consorts. She even sat on St Edward’s chair while she was crowned, the chair kept for sovereigns.52 Now pregnant with the child that Henry felt certain would be a son, she believed she had won. For according to canon law, a second marriage contracted during annulment proceedings was valid if the first marriage was subsequently dissolved. Likewise, if a child was conceived outside wedlock, the baby was legitimate in the eyes of the Church if a lawful marriage between the parents was solemnized before he or she was born.
Since English secular law differed in several crucial respects from canon law over illegitimacy and inheritance, Cromwell over the next eighteen months steered further measures through Parliament, guaranteeing that the succession would pass to Anne’s children, first to her male issue, and if there were none surviving to her ‘issue female’. These acts also ensured that Henry’s second marriage would be judged lawful both by Parliament and the courts, and they provided that anyone who denied the validity of his marriage to Anne or the legitimacy of their children would be tried for treason. Soon another act would declare that the king, not the pope, was Supreme Head of the Church of England.53
Anne’s baby was born shortly after 3 p.m. on Sunday, 7 September 1533 at Henry’s favourite palace of Greenwich. Edward and Henry had already been mooted as the child’s names and dozens of open letters to the nobility and leading gentry announcing the ‘deliverance and bringing forth of a prince’ were prepared from stock lists in the office of the queen’s secretary.
When the news broke that the child was female, all these documents had to be altered one by one.54 They still managed to go out on the day of the birth as Anne had intended. But because insufficient space had been left between the words to cram in more than one extra literal, ‘princess’ had to be spelled with only one ‘s’.
To celebrate, Te Deum was sung in the Chapel Royal and at St Paul’s, but the customary bonfires in London to mark a royal birth were few and far between.55 Preparations then began for the christening three days later. For the moment Henry continued to follow the Royal Book. For while Anne’s failure to produce a son was a crushing blow, something he had never dreamed could happen to him, he was still infatuated by his new queen and standing by her.
The baptism, therefore, was meant to be a very public event—the two French ambassadors were the guests of honour. But Henry cancelled the two-day tournament he had originally been planning, for only a son was worthy of that.
Charles V’s ambassador, meanwhile, gloated in triumph over the royal couple’s discomfort. He enraged Anne by refusing to attend the baptism, telling anyone who would listen that her child was a ‘bastard’ and mocking the physicians and astrologers who had predicted a boy.56
The christening was held at the Franciscan friary church at Greenwich, where Henry had himself been baptized. The mayor and aldermen of London led the procession from the great hall of the palace in their scarlet robes, followed by the king’s councillors, the gentleman and children of the Chapel, and then the barons, bishops and earls. Next came the Earl of Essex, the Marquises of Exeter and Dorset carrying the taper and salt to be used at the service, followed by Mary Howard, the Duke of Norfolk’s younger daughter, who bore the chrism. Finally, Agnes Howard, one of the godmothers, carried the baby enveloped in purple cloth of gold with a long train lined with ermine.
Since protocol prevented kings from attending their children’s baptisms and a newly delivered woman was forbidden by canon law from entering a church until she had been ritually purified, the Duke of Norfolk, Anne’s uncle, presided. The christening itself was performed by John Stokesley, bishop of London, who named the child Elizabeth after Henry’s own mother whom he still greatly revered.
Once the baptism was over, the esquires and yeomen who lined the side-aisles lit their torches. The sudden blaze of light was the cue for a herald to cry out, ‘God of his infinite goodness send prosperous life and long to the high and mighty Princess of England, Elizabeth’.
The trumpets blew, after which Archbishop Cranmer, who was the baby’s godfather, carried her to the high altar, where he confirmed her. The procession then made its way back to the palace, where gifts were offered to the queen and the child, and a message came from Henry ordering sweet wine and comfits to be served.57
In December 1533, Henry decided that Elizabeth should be sent with her nurse to a recently appropriated royal manor at Hatfield in Hertfordshire, some twenty-five miles north of London. Put in charge of her nursery was the inveterate Lady Bryan, whom Henry recalled to royal service as his daughter’s first governess.58
Elizabeth travelled to Hatfield in a horse litter, lodging overnight at Elsings in Enfield, Middlesex, a palatial manor house once belonging to the wealthy courtier Sir Thomas Lovell, who bequeathed it to the Earl of Rutland. Both Hatfield and Enfield were places Elizabeth would come to know well and to love. In 1539, when Henry decided that he wanted Elsings mainly for his children’s use, the earl surrendered it to him in exchange for a generous grant of ex-monastic lands in the Midlands.
Although now separated from her daughter, Anne took the closest possible interest in her welfare, ordering her the most fashionable and expensive clothes and already worrying that she should receive the best possible education as befitted an heir to the throne.59 She often came to visit her, either on her own or with Henry, and wrote regularly to Lady Bryan.
FIGURE 7 The Old Palace at Hatfield in Hertfordshire, which Henry VIII had appropriated by 1533 chiefly for the use of his children, and which he formally acquired in 1538. Elizabeth secured the house for herself in 1549 and it became her main home until her accession.
In March 1534, for instance, she came to see Elizabeth at Hatfield.60 In April, she and Henry rode the five miles from Greenwich to visit her while she was staying nearby at Eltham, the king’s own childhood home that had just been refurbished. As Sir William Kingston, who accompanied the royal party, cheerfully observes, Elizabeth was ‘as goodly a child as hath been seen, and her grace is much in the king’s favour.’61 The following October, Anne travelled in the royal barge from Hampton Court to see her daughter at Richmond, attended by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and several ladies of the Court.62
In the early months of 1535, Elizabeth lived at Court for five weeks ‘with divers of her servants.’63 This gave her mother an opportunity for more extended contact. Yet to Anne’s dismay, her parental role would be restricted just as Katherine’s had been. Convention dictated that her child’s upbringing was to be over-seen by Henry and the Privy Council, not herself. When, for instance, Lady Bryan sought Cromwell’s permission to have the infant weaned at the age of twenty-five months, he forwarded her request to Henry, who instructed Sir William Paulet, comptroller of the royal household, to approve it. In a letter to Cromwell, Paulet tactfully observes that permission had been granted by ‘his grace, with the assent of the queen’s grace.’64 But Anne had only been asked to confirm what Henry had already decided.
This issue swiftly evaporated when compared to the problems caused by the king’s other daughter, Mary. Suddenly confronted after Elizabeth’s birth by a rival for her father’s affection and, even worse, excluded from her place in the succession by one of Cromwell’s acts of Parliament, she now became as defiant as her mother and just as obstinate as her father.
A family feud was about to begin.
CHAPTER 5
A Family Feud
MARY’S feud with her father and half-sister began even before the herald cried out Elizabeth’s title as ‘Princess of England’ at her baptism. The seeds were sown three weeks earlier when Thomas Cromwell ordered Margaret Pole, still Mary’s governess, to surrender the elder princess’s jewels and plate to his messenger. Pole indignantly refused, demanding Henry’s written orders. Lord Hussey, Mary’s chamberlain, who was caught in the middle,
exclaimed to Cromwell in frustration, ‘Would to God that the king and you did know and see what I have had to do here of late!’1
Mary was determined to retain her royal privileges.2 She had been psychologically stunned when, the moment Elizabeth’s birth was announced, the same herald strode in his ceremonial robes to the gatehouse of Greenwich Palace to proclaim that she had been stripped of her royal title. Once this proclamation was made, the livery badges worn by her servants ‘were instantly removed and replaced by the king’s escutcheon’.3
Then living at her father’s palace of New Hall in Essex, Mary was sick with worry as to what she should do if Henry called Pole’s bluff as she knew he would. ‘Speak you few words and meddle nothing’ was Katherine’s advice.4 But however hard she tried, Mary found it difficult to follow. Uninvited, she tried to deflect the coming storm by writing to her father, ‘saying that she would as long as she lived obey his commands, but that she really could not renounce the titles, rights and privileges which God, Nature and her own parents had given her.’5
The response was at first an ominous silence. Then, in October, Henry ordered Mary to move immediately from New Hall, a place she adored, to a ‘very wretched’ manor house nearby. And in November and December he dismantled her household, dismissing her attendants one by one, beginning with Pole.6
Katherine’s supporters blamed Anne—it was simply to please her, they murmured, that Mary was to be demoted. It was even said that she would be shut up in a nunnery or forced to marry a nonentity.7 And when Henry gave New Hall and its park to Anne’s brother George and his wife Jane as their new country estate, it seemed that such fears might prove all too true.8
For Mary, the ensuing years would be harrowing. To teach her a lesson in obedience, her father decided that—at the age of almost 18—she should go and live with Elizabeth in her nursery as an inferior person to her half-sister. Humiliatingly, he created a joint household for his two daughters, with precedence given to Elizabeth.9
Sir John Shelton and his wife, Lady Anne, were put in overall charge. Once more, Henry’s new queen seemed to be behind the move, since Anne Shelton was her paternal aunt. How far the Sheltons themselves were happy with the decision may be questioned. The joint household would prove to be an awkward and inconvenient structure. Many times would the Sheltons find themselves trapped in the middle of endless rows between Mary, who was meant to be a subordinate but had no governess appointed, and Lady Bryan, Elizabeth’s governess, who was expected to exercise authority on behalf of her young charge.10
Mary’s health soon buckled under the strain. When first sent in disgrace to Hatfield, she kept to her room and wept continually. In retaliation, Henry ordered that no food or drink should be served to her there and that her best clothes should be given away to punish her.11
In March 1534, after a more than usually abrasive confrontation with Anne conducted through intermediaries, Mary had a breakdown so disturbing that a seriously worried Henry had to relent as far as sending his own physician, Dr William Butts, to attend her.12
Butts’s diagnosis was that Mary was suffering a fresh bout of the menstrual problems she had endured at the onset of puberty. A more conspiratorial theory circulating at Henry’s Court was that Anne—who had urged the king to ‘put down that proud Spanish blood’ by beating Mary into submission—had attempted to poison her.13
Forced to live like a cuckoo in her half-sister’s nest, Mary snubbed her at every opportunity. When Elizabeth began to toddle, Mary would not walk by her side. And whenever they were taken out somewhere, Mary demanded to ride separately, preferably in front. She refused point-blank to share a horse litter with her sibling, and if she was forced to do so by the Sheltons, she vociferously protested.14 She also always expected to sit in the best seat in the royal barge.15
Anne was so incensed with Mary that, one day losing her temper completely, she threatened to kill her if Henry ever went abroad.16
Towards Fitzroy, Anne’s animosity would be less aggressive but equally detrimental, even though he did little or nothing to earn it. Just as Mary had been recalled from Wales, the king’s illegitimate son had been recalled from Yorkshire shortly before Wolsey’s fall. No longer did Henry consider the marginal improvements in efficiency and reliability achieved by the two regional councils sufficient to justify the prodigious expense of coupling them to his children’s households.
And with Fitzroy back at Court where everyone could see him, Anne—fearing him as a potential rival for any child she might have—arranged for her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, to take over his upbringing. In particular, she asked the duke to begin negotiations for the 10-year-old boy’s betrothal to one of the duke’s own daughters, so that he would cease to be available for a royal match.17
Since Fitzroy was so often at Court, he needed company, and at Anne’s instigation, Norfolk made his own eldest son, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, the boy’s constant companion. Three years older than Fitzroy, the young earl was a brilliant student and linguist as well as a fine horseman trained in the skills and ideals of chivalry. The king considered him to be a perfect role model, and in November 1532, when his son was 13, he sent the pair off to France, ostensibly to improve their French and to attend the marriage of Henry, Duke of Orléans to the pope’s niece, Catherine de’ Medici.18
In reality, Fitzroy was sent to boost his father’s ego by showing himself off to the European powers as the living proof of Henry’s ability to father a healthy son. Warmly received at the French Court, the youth was quartered in the Dauphin’s lodgings and took his meals with the prince.
During the winter months, Fitzroy and Surrey stayed in Paris, but in the spring of 1533 they travelled with Francis I to Fontainebleau and on to Lyons, and then to Toulouse and Montpellier. There, in August, they made ready to witness the spectacular entertainments planned to greet Francis and the pope as the prelude to de’ Medici’s wedding.
But when news reached England that Pope Clement had finally passed judgment in Katherine’s suit, declaring Henry’s separation from his first wife to be unlawful and threatening him with a decree of excommunication, the two teenagers were recalled in haste.19
Anne’s hostility towards Fitzroy crystallized after his return: it was said that in a tantrum she threatened to poison him too.20 Her New Year’s gifts to him were paltry and meant to insult him. She constantly badgered Henry to marry him off, until he yielded and obtained the necessary dispensation from the Church. On 26 November 1533, Fitzroy duly exchanged his vows with Mary Howard, Surrey’s younger sister and one of Anne’s most favoured gentlewomen, who had carried the chrism at Elizabeth’s baptism. Both partners were still just 14.21
Since the young couple agreed at the outset that their union would not be consummated, it could hardly have been a love match. This was a far cry from the nuptials of de’ Medici and the Duke of Orléans, who by coincidence were also both 14 and who, after their wedding feast, were led by Queen Eleanor to a sumptuously decorated bridal chamber, where they enjoyed uninhibited sex watched by Francis, who declared ‘each had shown valour in the joust.’22
But Anne would shortly be on the defensive. When, in July 1534, she miscarried, it would take over a year for her to get pregnant again. Henry’s eye, meanwhile, started to rove. In October, George Boleyn’s wife Jane was rusticated from Court for colluding with Anne to secure the exile of an unidentified woman with whom the king was flirting.23 Whoever his amour was, Henry had dropped her by February 1535, but that was only because he was trying to seduce a girl known as ‘Madge’ Shelton. ‘Madge’ was almost certainly the nickname of Mary Shelton, the youngest daughter of Mary and Elizabeth’s joint custodians and Anne’s cousin, who took a leading part in the games of courtly love in the queen’s privy lodgings and was the muse of several of the ‘poets-as-lovers’ or ‘lovers-as-poets’ who offered to serve ladies and win their hearts.24
In late October 1535, Anne was at last pregnant, but, as was his old habit, this only seemed to encourag
e Henry’s dalliances. The previous month, he and Anne had stayed for five days with Sir John Seymour and his wife at Wolf Hall in Wiltshire at the end of six weeks of hunting and hawking in the Severn Valley in Gloucestershire. Jane, one of Sir John’s daughters who was 26, had served Katherine and then Anne as a gentlewoman. Her two brothers, Edward and Thomas, were ambitious, and in Edward’s case outstandingly able. The king did not fall in love with Jane at first sight—but soon he would be thinking constantly and wistfully of her, for unlike Anne, who was increasingly becoming waspish, sweetness was Jane’s trademark.25
When Katherine died at 2 p.m. on Friday, 7 January 1536, fortune briefly seemed to favour Anne. Henry rejoiced, and for several reasons. He had come to despise Katherine for her intransigence over the divorce, but more significantly her nephew, Charles V, was a pragmatist. Honour forbade him to treat with Henry or recognize Anne while his aunt was alive, but after her death he could—and did. The move coincided with a souring of relations with Francis for his reluctance to follow Henry’s lead and break with Rome. All the ships belonging to the English merchants had been seized at Bordeaux and Henry was furious.
At first Henry threatened to ally with Charles simply to pile the pressure on Francis, but gradually Cromwell won him round to the idea of switching sides for good.26 Charles, for his part, feared an imminent French attack on his position in Italy and so needed Henry as an ally to harry Francis in northern Europe.
Dressed from head to toe in yellow satin and sporting a white feather in his hat, Henry took Elizabeth to mass at Greenwich Palace on the Sunday after Katherine’s death, walking beside her in the procession ‘with trumpets and other great triumphs’. After dinner he danced with her in his arms, showing her off ‘first to one and then to another’ of his courtiers.27