by John Guy
Cromwell, never seriously in doubt that the Anglo-French alliance benefited only Francis, continued to strive for a rapprochement with Charles. With his eye on events in Rome rather than in Paris, he sought to tie the Holy Roman Emperor to Henry in ways that would ensure a papal excommunication of the English king would never be published, nor a Catholic invasion launched against him.28
Anne, meanwhile, looked at her most vulnerable. Her cutting remarks and dictatorial methods had breached the limits of conventional gender roles, upsetting Court officials and her own family, notably Norfolk and his wife. Her vehement and outspoken opposition to Cromwell’s diplomacy and her proposals to divert the proceeds of the Dissolution of the Monasteries towards education and social reform rather than to cash reserves, which she made known by setting her chaplains to work on a preaching campaign in which Cromwell was pilloried, had turned the king’s chief minister into a powerful enemy. If that were not enough, her connections to the evangelical reformers were considered to be heretical.
Now Henry started to share his doubts about his second wife with a trusted Privy Chamber intimate. He had married her, he confided, while ‘seduced by witchcraft, and for that reason he considered it null.’ ‘This’, he added, ‘was evident because God did not permit them to have any male issue, and that he believed he might take another wife.’29
It was essential that Anne had a son—and quickly.
Instead, on 29 January, she miscarried. The foetus was about three and a half months old, ascertainably male.30 With another pregnancy failure and his eye on Jane Seymour, Henry’s confidence in his second marriage was shattered.
Anne, in desperation, cast the blame on a severe shock she had received five days earlier. While jousting at Greenwich, Henry had been unseated by an opponent, tumbling to the ground while fully armed with his horse on top of him. It was fright, Anne claimed, that had caused her to miscarry.
Except the timing seems wrong. Within two hours of his accident, Henry recovered consciousness. And when his servants had divested him of his armour, he declared that he ‘had no hurt’. Certainly there was no brain damage and no serious injury was apparent at the time, although it would only be a year before rumours of trouble with his left leg started to seep out.31 In the longer term, the consequences of hunting and jousting accidents like this would be severe, but at the time the general verdict was that Anne’s miscarriage was entirely due to ‘her utter inability to bear male children.’32
Of course, if the king were positive for the blood group antigen known as Kell and Anne—like Katherine before her—was negative, everything would fall into place. The couple could at most produce one living child successfully. Thereafter, the foetus would almost certainly be miscarried or stillborn, because of the rare genetic incompatibility between the blood groups of the parents. If so, this was as much Anne’s tragedy as Katherine’s (see Chapter 1).
Henry, however, had invested all his hopes in Anne’s giving him a son. He did not intend to tolerate failure. As the Spanish ambassador excitedly informed Charles, the king had spoken fewer than ten times to his wife in more than three months. When she miscarried, he merely said, ‘I see that God will not give me male children.’33
Anne hit back, rebuking Henry for his dalliances with other women. ‘The love she bore him’, she angrily insisted, ‘was far greater than that of the late Queen, so that her heart broke when she saw that he loved others.’34
Anne was only too well aware of his swiftly developing relationship with Jane Seymour. So far it was chaste, but soon the king would find Jane lodgings in the house of Sir Nicholas Carew, another of his Court intimates, at Beddington in Surrey, where he paid her regular night-time visits.35 Carew and Jane’s elder brother coached her in her lines. She was to insinuate to Henry the invalidity of his marriage with Anne, and to resist his sexual advances until she was betrothed. Cromwell was deeply implicated in this putsch. It was simply a case of finding an opportunity to strike.
Cromwell’s chance came in late April. On Saturday the 29th, Anne was overheard quarrelling violently with Henry Norris, the chief gentleman of Henry’s Privy Chamber. Courtly banter in her apartments had got completely out of hand when Anne teased Norris over his relationship with ‘Madge’ Shelton, with whom he was having a fling. Since Norris was a widower, why had he not married her, Anne wanted to know? When Norris replied, ‘He would tarry a time’, the queen had petulantly retorted, ‘You look for dead men’s shoes, for if ought should come to the king but good, you would look to have me.’36
Norris, stunned by the folly of her tactless remark, at once declared that if the thought ever crossed his mind, ‘he would his head was off’. He knew that such trivial badinage was extremely dangerous if overheard, since it could be misconstrued as a plot to murder Henry.
And so it was. On Sunday, Henry and Anne had a furious row. The king made up his mind to ditch her during the May Day jousts at Greenwich, allowing Cromwell to orchestrate her trial for conspiring Henry’s death, an allegation he spiced up with charges of multiple adultery with Norris and three other courtiers, including a musician Mark Smeaton, and incest with her brother George. By raising such monstrous charges of depravity going back over three years, Henry could renounce his paternity of the miscarried foetus and secure his freedom, while Cromwell could eliminate his enemies in the Privy Chamber as the ‘violators’ of the queen.37
Norris and his fellow courtiers were tried and condemned on the 12th, Anne and George on the 15th. On the 17th, the alleged partners in Anne’s sexual crimes, including her brother, went to the block. On the same day, Cranmer pronounced Henry’s second marriage invalid. Two days later, Anne herself was executed, killed by a single blow of a sword in the French manner—an executioner was specially brought in from St Omer. Her head fell to the ground with her lips and eyes still moving.
The moment Henry heard that he was free, he was rowed straight to Jane ‘whom he had lodged a mile from him, in a house by the river’.38 On the same day, Cranmer issued a dispensation for their marriage, and on 30 May, in the queen’s oratory at the king’s new palace of Whitehall, the couple exchanged their vows.39
The following month, Parliament was recalled to debate the Second Act of Succession, which abrogated the claims to the succession derived from Henry’s earlier marriages and declared both his daughters illegitimate, even though the king would never deny his paternity. Now only Jane’s offspring would be able to claim the throne, unless perchance she predeceased Henry without bearing a son and he fathered one by another wife.40
Anne’s dramatic fall affected Henry’s children in radically different ways. Elizabeth was still much too young to appreciate the tragedy that had befallen her mother. At this stage in her upbringing, economy was her greatest enemy. She suddenly lost all the luxuries and fine clothes she had enjoyed with the money slipped by Anne to Lady Bryan. She also lost her royal title and privileges as Mary had before her.
But with Elizabeth degraded, Mary felt vindicated, for she had always regarded Anne as little better than a whore. Now at last, if only by virtue of age, she recovered precedence over her sibling in the joint household, currently settled mainly at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire.
Except her victory was brief. Because the pressure to submit to her own degradation, far from decreasing, was unexpectedly ratcheted up. Not only did her father decide not to restore her title, he also demanded, increasingly vindictively, that she should subscribe to the Acts of Supremacy and Succession and acknowledge that her parents’ marriage had been ‘by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful’.41
To this end, Henry sent a high-level delegation of privy councillors to Hunsdon. Led by the Duke of Norfolk, they berated Mary with threats, saying menacingly that ‘If she was their daughter, they would beat her and knock her head so violently against the wall that they would make it as soft as baked apples.’42
When she refused to budge, Cromwell wrote disparagingly to her, ‘I think you the most obstinate wom
an that ever was, and I dare not open my lips to name you unless … you repent your ingratitude and are ready to do your duty. I have therefore sent you a book of articles to subscribe.’43
Once again Mary decided to appeal directly to her father, telling him she would ‘submit to him in all things next to God, humbly beseeching your highness to consider that I am but a woman, and your child, who hath committed her soul only to God, and her body to be ordered in this world as it shall stand with your pleasure.’44 It was a plea of desperation. And predictably it failed.
The heightened psychological pressure added a catalogue of neuralgia, insomnia and toothache to Mary’s menstrual complaints, which now included amenorrhoea (absent periods) caused by stress.45 Soon she could bear the strain no longer. After taking counsel from the Spanish ambassador, who advised her that a concession made under compulsion could never be binding in conscience and that the pope would forgive her, she capitulated on 22 June, signing the articles without even reading them.46
Fitzroy, by comparison, quietly prospered after Anne’s execution, securing a grant of her luxurious riverside property, Baynard’s Castle, off Thames Street, as his London home, together with such lucrative sinecures as the posts of Warden of the Cinque Ports and Constable of Dover Castle.47
Then tragedy struck him down too. On or about 8 July, he was diagnosed with an illness strongly resembling severe bronchial pneumonia, leading to pleural empyema.48 Within a few days, he would have gone down with a recurring fever and chest pains, before regularly coughing up sputum that had a foul smell, quickly suffering the fatal infection of the lungs and other organs, such as the kidneys, accompanied by severe weight loss.
The verdict of his physicians was that he still had a few weeks to live.49 That proved highly optimistic, since on the 23rd, the teenager died in his privy apartments at St James’s Palace. Since he weakened so rapidly, some said he had been poisoned. More likely, his lungs or kidneys failed.50
Henry’s reaction is open to question, but the Duke of Norfolk, who was given the responsibility of arranging the funeral but was afterwards rebuked by the king for giving his son a dishonourable burial, was quite clear. His instructions had been to take care that the body was secretly interred at some distance from the capital. As the duke confided to Cromwell, ‘The king’s pleasure was that his body should be conveyed secretly in a close[d] cart unto Thetford [in Norfolk] … and there so buried.’51
Henry, it appears, had at first not wanted it generally known that he seemed unable to father a living son. Later, when second thoughts prevailed, Norfolk was the casualty of the king’s indecision. It was said he was to be sent to the Tower for allowing Fitzroy’s body to be wrapped in cloth rather than sealed in a lead coffin. At this, the duke was incredulous, exclaiming, ‘When I shall deserve to be there, Tottenham shall turn French!’52
FIGURE 8 The tomb of Henry Fitzroy, originally at Thetford Priory in Norfolk, and moved after the priory’s dissolution to the Church of St Michael, Framlingham, Suffolk.
But Henry, despite his rumblings of dissatisfaction, made no redress to his son. Provision of a suitable tomb was again left entirely to Norfolk, who constructed a remarkable and costly monument at Thetford Priory, replete with Italian classical motifs, that was clumsily moved after the dissolution of the priory to Framlingham Church, some forty miles away (see Figure 8).53
Mary’s reconciliation with her father became complete when she wrote ecstatically (if optimistically) to him, ‘I will never vary from that confession and submission I made to your highness.’ And she prayed God that he and Jane would shortly be blessed with a son.54 As her own gesture of conciliation, Jane had already taken the prudent step of writing affectionately to her stepdaughter. Mary thanked her warmly for a letter she found ‘no less full of motherly joy for my towardness of reconciliation than of most prudent counsel for my further proceeding therein.’55
On 6 July, Henry and Jane visited Hunsdon, staying there for three full days. Her father treated Mary with much of his old affection, ‘continually talking with her’. Jane presented her with a diamond, and Henry threw in a bag of gold and silver coins, ‘telling her to have no anxiety about money, for she should have as much as she could wish.’56 This was the prelude to the reorganization of the joint household, which was now restructured so as to have two separate ‘sides’—one each for the two half-sisters, and each with its own separate staff.
Mary’s side, as befitted her seniority, was the larger and more lavishly equipped. Some forty-two servants were appointed, including four gentlewomen, four gentlemen, two chamberers, a physician and a chaplain. Among these gentlewomen were two who would come to rank among Mary’s closest friends and remain with her for the rest of her life: Susan Tonge (Mrs Clarencius), a young widow, and Frances Baynham, who married Sir Henry Jerningham.57 While not on the scale of the princely household that the king’s elder daughter had been allocated by Wolsey in 1525, it dwarfed Elizabeth’s establishment, which was cut back to as little as seventeen servants.58
The disparity inevitably provoked more friction. Lady Bryan, Elizabeth’s governess, began quarrelling with Sir John Shelton over how the household’s meagre budget of £4,000 a year should be redistributed. A redoubtable woman, she wrote very forcefully to Cromwell in August to make quite sure that she had understood the new arrangements correctly and to air her grievances.59
Bryan was especially indignant at the fresh economies she was expected to make. She protested that, with Elizabeth growing fast, no suitable garments were available that would fit a 3-year-old, and there was no one to turn to. Sir John, she complained, was throwing his weight about, calling himself ‘master of this house’. ‘What fashion that shall be’, she fumed, ‘I cannot tell, for I have not seen it before’.
Shelton had objected to Elizabeth eating apart from the main household on grounds of cost, insisting that she leave her chamber at mealtimes and dine in the great hall at the ‘board of estate’. Bryan deemed it inappropriate for a child still so young to eat there. Dietary concerns apart, it would be impossible to stop her snatching ‘divers meats, fruits and wine’ that would be readily at hand, ‘which would be hard for me to refrain her grace from’. Elizabeth was ‘too young to correct [i.e. chastise] greatly’, not least because she was teething. Her sore mouth meant that Bryan felt obliged to allow her to have her own way more often than she usually did.60
Cromwell knew a determined woman when he saw one. Bryan was victorious, after which comparative harmony prevailed for over a year.61 This, not least, was because Mary, for several months at a time, now left the cloistered environment of Hunsdon and Hatfield to rejoin her father and stepmother at Court. Jane purposely went out of her way to be kind to her, inviting her to spend Christmas at Greenwich Palace with them, and in 1537 to accompany them on their summer progress, when they slowly wound their way from Hampton Court to Woking and Guildford, and from there to Easthampsted in Berkshire, before returning to Windsor Castle.62
With much of her old relationship with her father rebuilt, Mary visibly mellowed. To Jane she sent cucumbers, knowing how much she adored them. She even found it within herself to be kinder to Elizabeth, praising her in a letter to her father as ‘such a child toward, as I doubt not, but your highness shall have cause to rejoice of in time coming, as knoweth Almighty God.’63
By the time the Court reached Windsor, Jane was seven months pregnant. On Friday, 12 October 1537, she gave birth to a son at Hampton Court, who was named Edward after Henry’s distant ancestor, Edward III, through the Beaufort line. At the christening on the 15th in the newly redecorated Chapel Royal, Mary was godmother and the 4-year-old Elizabeth, carried in the procession by her step-uncle, Edward Seymour, bore the chrism.64
But on 23 October, the queen, who so far had shown no sign of postnatal complications, became ill from heavy bleeding. As the day passed, she rapidly worsened.65 At 8 p.m. on the 24th, after she was given the last rites, the Duke of Norfolk scribbled a note to Cromwell, summonin
g him to Hampton Court. ‘I pray you to be here tomorrow early to comfort our good master, for as for our mistress, there is no likelihood of her life, the more pity.’66
Jane died during the night and was buried in state at Windsor.67 But the infant flourished, and with Henry’s legitimate male heir safely in the nursery, the spotlight was off his daughters.
The Court spent Christmas in mourning for the queen, but its normal routine was restored by the spring, when the joint household of Mary and Elizabeth was further reorganized. The Sheltons were replaced by Lady Kingston, wife of Sir William Kingston, who had carried Mary’s train at Edward’s baptism and was one of her favourites.68 But the arrangement was temporary, since a year later Kingston was supplanted by Sir Edward and Lady Baynton.69
For Elizabeth, the major change was Lady Bryan’s transfer to serve as Edward’s governess in an independent princely household, up and running at Hampton Court in March 1538.70 In addition, senior male officers were appointed from the very outset, such was the child’s dynastic importance. Sir William Sidney was made chamberlain, Richard Cox (soon to be the boy’s almoner and later Dean of Christ Church, Oxford) was the tutor and Sir John Cornwallis was the steward.71
Elizabeth’s replacement governess was Blanche Herbert, Lady Troy, widow of Sir William Herbert of Troy Parva, who had once welcomed Henry VII to his house.72 To assist Troy, Cromwell appointed four gentlewomen, three gentlemen, two chamberers and a chaplain.73 One of these gentlewomen was Katherine Champernowne, nicknamed ‘Kat’, who in or about 1545 would marry John Ashley, Elizabeth’s second cousin* and a gentleman waiter in Prince Edward’s household, who would teach the boy to play the virginals when he was older. Another was Blanche Parry, whom her aunt, Lady Troy, had nominated.74 Both Kat and Blanche would stay with Elizabeth for the rest of their lives and each, in turn, would become her principal gentlewoman after her accession to the throne.