by Susan Bordo
A Perfect Storm
Consummation
IN JANUARY OF 1533, after years of negotiating, waiting, strategizing, trial and error, dramatic public confrontations, behind-the-scenes machinations, veiled threats, and outright tantrums from all concerned, Anne and Henry were married secretly—without the pope’s blessing. By now, Henry couldn’t care less, because with the aid of his new right-hand man, Thomas Cromwell, he was well on his way to supplanting papal authority with his own supremacy as head of the Church of England. Cromwell, like Wolsey (the son of a butcher), was a self-made man who understood that he could not rely on birth but had to use his own ingenuity to further his interests. It’s not surprising that Wolsey, in 1523, felt a kinship with Cromwell, and handpicked him from the ranks of young lawyers (by then Cromwell was a member of Parliament) to become his councilor and friend. But unlike Wolsey, who had been educated at Oxford—in those days, virtually a Catholic institution—Cromwell, whose beginnings were far rougher (his father, a Putney blacksmith, was often drunk and violent, and Cromwell left home at the age of fifteen), had a far less conventional “education,” roaming Europe, serving as a mercenary in the French army, clerking in Italy, trading in the Netherlands, and finally setting himself up as a lawyer in England at the age of twenty. He had no allegiance to the Catholic Church and relied less on diplomacy—Wolsey’s forte, which ultimately failed him—than what we would today call “thinking outside the box.” In the case of Henry’s “great matter,” this translated to ignoring the papacy rather than trying to win its seal of approval for the divorce.
Historians now speculate, calculating from Elizabeth’s birth, that Anne had finally slept with Henry in October during an extended trip to meet Francis and his court. The point of the trip was to gain French recognition of Anne as Henry’s future queen, and no expense—or humiliation of Katherine—was spared. Anne was given the title of Marquess of Pembroke to elevate her to noble status for the occasion, regal garments were fitted for her, and Henry sent a messenger to Katherine, requesting the return of the queen’s official jewels. Katherine, indignant, refused to allow her jewels to adorn the woman whom she called “the scandal of Christendom.”1 The request then quickly became an order. Henry could not, however, order Francis’s wife, Claude, or his sister, Marguerite, to come to Calais for the occasion; although they knew Anne from her years at the French court, she was still the king’s mistress, and—contrary to the common belief that the entire French court was a hotbed of sexual liaisons—they were both very proper when it came to sexual protocol. There is no indication that Anne was angry or hurt.
Once in Calais, Anne and Henry relaxed together for a week, and then, after Henry and Francis had met separately in Boulogne for four days, Henry returned to Calais with Francis for an extravagant reception organized in Francis’s honor. It included a dinner of 170 dishes, the firing of 3,000 guns, and a surprise appearance by Anne and six “gorgeously apparelled” masked ladies.2 Their costumes were “of strange fashion”—more Isadora Duncan than Tudor—loose, gold-laced overdresses of gold cloth with sashes of crimson and silver.3 But there is no evidence, contrary to The Tudors, that they performed a Salome-style seduction dance to the steady beat of drums. At the conclusion of the dance, each of the ladies chose a man to dance with and Anne, as she and Henry had planned, chose Francis. Then the masks were removed, and Francis recognized (perhaps only pretending to be surprised) that he was dancing with the “brunette Venus,” Anne.4 Anne and Francis then spent the better part of an hour in private conversation while the others danced. The Tudors, contributing to the mythology that Anne had been promiscuous in France, has Anne refer to “some things, perhaps, which Your Majesty knows about me which I would rather you kept secret and never mention to the king.”5 Francis, ever the gallant Frenchman, promises never to reveal her secrets, which, of course, “every beautiful woman must have.”6 That conversation is invented; we actually don’t know what Anne and Francis talked about.
In the days that followed, there was more overconsumption, more dancing, and some manly wrestling. Henry and Francis did not themselves engage in contests of physical one-upmanship, as they had years before at their meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold (in that match Henry lost to Francis and didn’t take it well), but watched others perform as their surrogates. By the time the French took their leave on October 29, a violent storm and unmanageable tides kept Henry’s party in Calais until November 12. There, in sumptuous adjoining suites, Henry and Anne privately celebrated what was already being trumpeted in England—news that was probably prearranged to be released in a timely fashion—as “the triumph at Calais and Boulogne.”7 When it was finally safe to leave, they took their time getting home; although they reached Dover by November 14, they arrived at Eltham only by November 24. Clearly, they were enjoying their quality time alone together. By the time they returned to London, it was very likely that Anne was already pregnant, although too early for her to know it.
By the date of her coronation on June 1, the pregnancy would have been impossible to hide—and probably difficult to endure through the elaborate four-day-long affair that began on May 29 and included a river procession (on the first day), court rituals (on the second), a road procession from the Tower through the City to Westminster (the third day), and the actual coronation and banquet on the fourth day. Then on June 2 there was a more general celebration, with jousts, balls, and “a goodly banquet in the queen’s chamber.”8 There are reports that the last months of Anne’s pregnancy were hard and possibly tenuous (which, given her later miscarriages, rings true). Yet she was expected, dressed in dazzling but undoubtedly uncomfortable regalia, to shine through it all—despite some notable snubs, such as the absence of Thomas More. Anne may have melted down privately—which would be understandable, considering that she was about six months pregnant. But her stamina was bolstered by the triumph of the occasion, which Henry had made sure would be as pronounced as possible. Naturally, hostile sources, such as Chapuys, reported that the coronation was as “sad and dismal” as a funeral, which seems almost as unlikely as Anne’s wearing a dress adorned with tongues pierced with nails. At the very least, the crowds would have been enjoying the free ale and food provided during the processions.
Anne and Henry: In Trouble from the Beginning?
Whether or not the people cheered, as the official report claims, or disrespectfully kept their hats on, as the Spanish Chronicle has it, the political, legal, and culture wars were entering the next stage. Anne’s enemies continued their vicious character attacks on Anne. Katherine remained stubbornly glued to her “rights.” Mary behaved either like an obsessively dutiful daughter or a spoiled brat (depending on your point of view) in refusing to acknowledge Anne as queen. And Henry exacerbated everything by insisting not only on recognition of his authority—which he had received from Parliament, in principle, by its acceptance of the Act of Appeals—but also that everyone pay homage to Anne and relinquish all allegiance to Katherine. As Ives points out, Henry even found time during the coronation “to issue a proclamation warning of the penalties of according royal honors to anyone but Anne.”9
Henry (through his man Cromwell) fought for his position through official documents and acts. Chapuys and others, at this stage, could only engage in negative gossip, the chief point of which was to keep the opposition’s hopes alive. It didn’t take long for him to begin predicting that the marriage was in trouble. Even during Anne’s pregnancy with Elizabeth, when hopes were presumably high for both Henry and Anne, Chapuys was quick to report any temper tantrums on Anne’s part and any indications of Henry’s impatience with her.
It’s true that it was not uncommon for Henry to graze when his queens were pregnant. No one knows for sure how many of these flirtations were innocent “courtly” play, and how many were actual physical involvements. We do know that he had sexual mistresses when he was married to Katherine, and now that any motive to remain chaste for Anne was gone—he’d won the prize,
and it was no longer necessary to play the devoted swain or to avoid possible pregnancies with other women—why should it be any different? On the other hand, he doesn’t seem to have been an especially sexually driven man, unlike the rapacious Francis. At the age of forty-one, he told Parliament that he was at an age when “the lust of man is not so quick as in lusty youth.”10 True, he was trying to assure Parliament that his “great matter” was not fueled by lust, but by principle. But still, the statement sounds more like the instrumental sharing of a biological reality that others in Parliament could identify with than an outright lie. And then, too, Anne apparently complained to her sister-in-law Lady Jane Rochford—fatally as it turned out, once treason had been redefined by Cromwell to include speech acts against the king—that the king was neither skilled nor virile.
Whether Henry’s affairs were physical or not, what seems hugely unlikely is that he would chastise Anne so harshly when she was so far along in her pregnancy, especially this long-awaited pregnancy, which all the stars and seers had predicted would result in a boy. Even during her final pregnancy, when hopes were not so high, he was careful with Anne. When she purportedly caught the king with Jane Seymour on his knee and “flew into a frenzy,” the king, “seeing his wife hysterical and fearing for their child, sent Jane out of the room and hastened to placate Anne. ‘Peace be, sweetheart, and all shall go well with thee,’ he soothed.”11 Although the reporters of this incident, too, are not very trustworthy (Weir says they came by way of a chain of reports, one passed on to the next, by various ladies at the court), this behavior sounds more like Henry’s modus operandi (utter some soothing words, as he did with Wolsey and Katherine, then do what you want) than a king who would risk upsetting a very pregnant wife.
Elizabeth was born on September 7, just a few days after Chapuys wrote Charles about the earlier quarrel, and here, too, Chapuys gives the event his own political spin, claiming that the birth of a daughter was “to the great regret both of him and the lady.”12 This reported reaction has been firmly installed—and embellished—in the popular mythology about Elizabeth’s birth, particularly in novels. Paul Rival: “A girl! . . . She heard the whispers of her attendants and Henry’s protests and thought to herself: ‘If only I could die!’”13 Norah Lofts: “It was a girl . . . [Anne] knew she had failed, and willed herself away, welcoming the enveloping darkness.”14 Philippa Gregory has an angry Anne pushing the baby away. “A girl. What good is a girl to us?”15 But historians, too, have played their part, often taking it as highly significant that prepared documents announcing the birth of a prince were hastily altered with an added “s.” Antonia Fraser says this “attests to the surprise and displeasure” caused by the birth.16 Surprise, yes. And undoubtedly disappointment. But was the birth of Elizabeth really the “heavy blow” that David Starkey claims?17
Eric Ives, the most careful of scholars, writes that there is “no evidence of the crushing psychological blow that some have supposed.”18 In an age when infant mortality was high, and especially after Katherine’s many miscarriages, the mere fact that Anne had given birth to a healthy child was cause for celebration. George Wyatt’s account, written during Elizabeth’s reign, reports that the king “expressed his joy for that fruit sprung of himself, and his yet more confirmed love towards [Anne].”19 Wyatt and Chapuys represent opposite ends of the anti-Anne/pro-Anne continuum, and perhaps neither represents it accurately. What makes the most sense, as Ives argues, is that there would have been both delight and disappointment. A healthy child had been born, and she was beautiful and “perfectly formed.”20 But Anne had promised Henry a son, the astrologers and physicians had predicted the child would be a boy, and a huge amount of PR had gone into trumpeting this prediction in justification for the break with Katherine and the marriage to Anne. Henry and Anne may have been personally thrilled with Elizabeth, but her birth represented a crack in the armor of their worldview and public face.
It’s interesting that although the notion that Anne was crushed by the birth of a daughter has stuck, it’s very rare that she is portrayed—as she is in The Other Boleyn Girl—as a cold mother. More commonly, in both fictional and nonfictional accounts, her disappointment is shown as melting in the warmth of the reality of her infant daughter. But post–Other Boleyn Girl, which has repopularized the Chapuys- inspired picture of Anne as selfish to the core, some historians have felt the need to remedy the view that Anne was indifferent to Elizabeth. Tracy Borman, from her 2009 Elizabeth’s Women:
She lavished affection upon Elizabeth and could hardly bear to be apart from her. When she returned to court after her confinement, she took her daughter with her. Courtiers looked on in astonishment as Anne carefully set the baby down on a velvet cushion next to her throne under the canopy of estate. It was highly unusual for a queen to keep her child with her: surely it ought to be bundled off to the royal nursery, as was customary?21
Anne also dressed the infant Elizabeth extravagantly in brightly colored velvet and satin, with satin caps of crimson or white “richly embroidered with gold.”22 No expense was spared, and no efforts. “A purple satin cap required boat journeys from Greenwich to London and back for a fitting and a further trip when the cap needed mending.”23 Although this could be attributed to Anne’s own vanity—treating her daughter as an extension of herself or as a new fashion accessory—even Starkey, who generally paints Anne as a self-interested schemer, admits that she “was immensely proud of her daughter and took an unusually close interest in her upbringing and welfare.”24 This is how the relationship is depicted in Anne of the Thousand Days and The Tudors, and despite The Other Boleyn Girl, it seems to have won the debate about Anne’s maternal instincts in the popular imagination.
Tracy Borman even claims (as do the Stricklands’ 1854 Lives of the Queens of England and Alison Weir’s 1991 The Six Wives of Henry VIII) that Anne wanted to breast-feed Elizabeth, which was unheard of for a noblewoman, let alone a queen. It’s impossible to verify this or definitively disprove it because Borman (along with Weir) provides no documentation; presumably, they got it from the Stricklands. But the Stricklands, in turn, got their information from Gregorio Leti, the Italian historian whose 1693 biography of Elizabeth was described by Starkey as a “fictionalised account.”25 On the other hand, Leti did consult English sources for his biography, he is often careful to provide several sides of an argument, and some of what he says about the birth does ring true. He almost certainly fabricated the notion, repeated by the Stricklands, that Henry forbade Anne’s breast-feeding Elizabeth because his own “rest would be broken by such an arrangement”26 rather than for the sake of propriety. But his argument that Anne wanted to breast-feed “pour se faire mieux valoir”27—to enhance her own value—does not sound like a very romantic “embellishment.”
In judging reports of Anne and Henry’s “despair” over Elizabeth, we have to consider the original source. In the same letter in which Chapuys tells Charles of Elizabeth’s birth, he reports that the new child “is to be called Mary, like the Princess; which title, I hear in many quarters, will be taken from the true Princess and given to her.”28 This (completely false) rumor pleases Chapuys enormously, for “defrauding the said Princess of her title” will “augment” the “indignation of the people, both small and great, which grows every day.”29 This, of course, was an “indignation” that Chapuys tried to inflame every chance he got, for he was well aware (as he tells Charles in the same letter) that it “may grow cool in time, so that it should be used in season.”30 It was also in his interest to convince Charles that, despite appearances, getting rid of Anne was still a real possibility. After Katherine died, his efforts to keep Katherine’s cause alive shifted to the restoration of Princess Mary’s claim to the throne, and his case against Anne became focused on her “plots” to murder Mary. As we’ll shortly see, he was also an active and eager reporter—and possibly a participant—of later matchmaking between the king and Jane Seymour, who Chapuys knew would support Mary’s claim.
Many historians, even today, take Chapuys at his word about the decline in Henry and Anne’s relationship. It’s become fairly standard fare to accept the narrative that after the marriage Anne became shrewish and arrogant and that by the time Anne’s fortunes begin to dramatically unravel in March of 1536, “the marriage had been ailing for some time.”31 There seems to have been a collective memory loss, after centuries of repetition, that all the reports of Anne’s increasingly “haughty” behavior have come down to us from the Venetian and Spanish rec- ords. These descriptions of Anne have to be treated skeptically, given their source. The details of the reports that Henry and Anne were in trouble from the beginning of the marriage invariably turned out to be rumors that, by virtue of their vacillating nature, show how flimsy the evidence is. In December 1533 Chapuys reported that despite the disappointment of Elizabeth’s birth, the king is “enthralled” with Anne, that she “has so enchanted and bewitched him that he will not dare say or do anything against her will and commands.”32 (Chapuys, of course, isn’t happy about this, which is the most compelling reason for believing him here. He was usually quick to report any loss of the king’s favor for Anne.) In September of 1534 the Count of Cifuentes wrote Charles that another ambassador had “heard in France that Ana Boulans had in some way or other incurred the Royal displeasure, and was rather in disgrace with the King, who was paying his court to another lady.”33 By October 3, Cifuentes had corrected himself, writing that the idea that Anne and the King were on bad terms was “a hoax.”34 However, in keeping with the vacillating rumors, a report on October 18 states that “the King no longer loved her as before. The King, moreover, was paying his court to another lady, and several lords in the kingdom were helping him that they might separate him from Anne’s company.”35