Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  It is possible that Henry Tudor’s initial pursuit of Anne Boleyn had an element of competitiveness in it. Anne, fresh from the continent, would provide an arena in which to compete not only against his own courtiers but against the French king: a field of cloth of gold in her own person, you might say. (The trouble, in years ahead, would perhaps be that she tried to keep up that spirit of rivalry.) Just so did François compete with cronies like Bonnivet.

  Early in 1526 Henry began to sound out opinion on his marriage but there is no reason to suppose this was directly connected to any approaches he may have made to Anne Boleyn. At the Shrovetide jousts in February 1526, Henry rode under the device ‘Declare I dare not’, which has often been seen as an approach to Anne. But at the banquet which followed, in his role of gallant, he waited on Katherine. Many a queen (Katherine’s mother among them) might be expected to tolerate her husband’s infidelities, so long as he paid tribute to her position in public. ‘You owe [your husband] nothing less than compliance and obedience so that you do not provoke his folly; God and the world expects nothing less of you’, Anne de Beaujeu had written.

  Henry VIII’s letters to Anne probably started slightly later that year.* In the first of them he describes himself three times as Anne’s true servant, while she is the ‘mistress’, in the controlling rather than the carnal sense; a distant unattainable star whose resistance only increased her desirability.

  Henry’s next letter repeats the theme: clearly Anne had protested her duty of service to the king. ‘Although it doth not appertain to a gentleman to take his lady in place of a servant, nevertheless, in compliance with your desires, I willingly grant it to you . . .’ Another is more revealing. Its lengthy and closely reasoned argument is the more striking for the fact that Henry was notoriously reluctant, under normal circumstances, ever to write:

  Debating with myself the contents of your letter, I have put myself in great distress, not knowing how to interpret them . . . praying you with all my heart that you will expressly certify me of your whole mind concerning the love between us two.

  He has been now, he writes, ‘above one whole year struck with the dart of love, not being assured either of failure or of finding place in your heart and grounded affection’.

  It is the last point, he says, that prevents him ‘from calling you my mistress, since if you do not love me in a way which is beyond common affection that name in no wise belongs to you, for it denotes a singular love, far removed from the common’. Henry had obviously started out by trying to have Anne Boleyn as his partner in just another affair; the kind of mistress Katherine of Aragon would have accepted, and the kind Mary Boleyn had been. But now he seems to be adjusting his offer:

  If it shall please you to do me the office of a true, loyal mistress and friend and to give yourself up, body and soul, to me . . . I promise you that not only shall the name be given you, but that also I will take you for my only mistress, rejecting from thought and affection all others save yourself, to serve only you.

  Though the double sense of mistress is confusing, Henry seems to be making the subtle, to modern eyes, but important difference of offering Anne the position of maitresse en titre.3 Perhaps the offer was a tribute to Anne Boleyn’s French years. The question was why she did not accept. But the experience of Marguerite of Navarre, and of Margaret of Austria before her, taught that a woman was not necessarily a winner if once she engaged in the guerre d’amour. Nor had Anne’s sister Mary walked away with any great gains from the king’s favour.

  We cannot, in the nature of things, have any sure information as to when the relationship became sexual. The picture may be of seven long years’ frustration, traditionally seen as being imposed by Anne but it has to be admitted as a possibility that they had sex at the start of the relationship, before marriage and legitimate children became the ultimate goal, and then later refrained; a restraint in this case at least as likely to be imposed by Henry. The answer to the perennial question – how they managed it? – may lie in the question of what we mean by sex. Or rather, what was considered sex in the realm of courtly love.

  Courtly love permitted an extended experience of what we would call foreplay but which could be accepted as an alternative to full intercourse. A manual written for one of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s daughters, by a monk, instructed that a lover might enjoy the embraces of his lady naked in a bed as long as ‘the final solace’ was denied them. Indeed, given the patterns of late marriage (and only the most limited contraception) prevalent in sixteenth-century England, this seems to have been the practice well beyond courtly circles.

  Courtly love, in essence adulterous, was never meant to end in marriage; it produced ecstasies but no heirs. This, ultimately, would be why the game had to end: it could not give Henry all he wanted. Again, we cannot know exactly when Henry’s interest in Anne changed its focus; when the idea of marriage was first mooted between them but in the course of 1526 things took a serious turn.

  By the December of that year Katherine of Aragon was isolated at court. When Charles V’s new ambassador, Inigo de Mendoza, arrived he found it impossible to see Katherine, finally hearing from her that any interview would have to be arranged through Wolsey and conducted in his presence, and that the utmost discretion would have to be preserved. After their first meeting in the spring, Mendoza concluded that to seek another would merely ‘add further damage to what might be said’ about the Spanish queen.

  It was probably to celebrate the New Year of 1527 that Anne Boleyn sent Henry VIII a gift he received with delight. The ‘fine poésies’ of the letter that came with it – the ‘too humble submission’, as the lovesick king protested – have long since been lost but the message is still plain to see. The gift is a jewel, once hung with a diamond, representing a ship on which a damsel is borne above a stormy sea. The diamond is the heart; hard but steadfast, as the myths of courtly love had it, and the damsel was surely Anne, the giver. Was Henry to be her refuge from the storms of life? Even if it meant another woman, the king’s loyal wife, would be cast adrift on the sea?

  At some point Anne seems to have withdrawn herself to Hever. One of Henry’s letters to her laments that she ‘will not come to court, neither with my lady your mother, and if you could, nor yet by any other way’. It may have been tactics, a strategic withdrawal on Anne’s part, since Henry protests in wounded tones that he marvels at her decision, since he is sure he has committed no fault. (This may be a more complex statement than it seems: in courtly parlance the sinful lover was supposed to derive vicarious moral benefit from his mistress’s virtue.) It was around Easter 1527 that the king informed Wolsey he had serious ‘scruples’ about his marriage.

  Conversely, however, Princess Mary was brought back from Ludlow, to be displayed as a suitable bride for one of King François’s sons. (The match would be the less welcome to Katherine of Aragon, it was reported, for the fact the French king’s mother was ‘a terrible woman’.) Curiously, Anne Boleyn played a part in entertaining the French envoys, dancing with the king while the French ambassador danced with Mary. If it were a snub to Katherine of Aragon’s Spanish affections, it was also a sign Mary was still publicly seen as England’s princess. But the end of April saw the Treaty of Westminster, an alliance made between England and France against Katherine’s nephew.

  In May 1527 Wolsey – surely by arrangement with his king – summoned Henry VIII to appear before an ecclesiastical court, to discuss matters affecting the ‘tranquillity of consciences’. The court was held in the greatest secrecy at Wolsey’s residence but Katherine was not wholly ignorant of it. ‘Spanish ladies spy well’, as Francis Bryan, a kinsman of Anne Boleyn’s, once said. The day after the first meeting of Wolsey’s inquiry, Charles V’s ambassador de Mendoza was able to report on it, adding that ‘though the queen herself has not ventured, and does not venture, to speak to me on the subject, that all her hope rests, after God, on your imperial highness’. She was communicating with Mendoza through a third party ‘who pre
tended not to come from her, though I suspect he came with her consent’.

  Two different strands of debate were raised about the validity of the king’s original marriage contract: the theological interpretation of the Bible and the validity of the dispensation granted for Henry to marry Katherine at the beginning of the century; a dispensation so hedged around by the parents, Ferdinand and Isabella and Henry VII, as to leave several anomalies.

  In the book of Leviticus, the Bible says: ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he has uncovered his brother’s nakedness. They shall be childless’, which, Henry was easily persuaded to believe, meant without male child. Although the book of Deuteronomy conversely urged that a man had a positive duty to marry his deceased brother’s widow (‘and raise up seed for his brother’), much of the debate centred on the question of to what degree Katherine had really been Henry’s brother’s wife; on whether she and Arthur had consummated their relationship. But Katherine was in any case unlikely to be impressed by Henry’s suggestion that their marriage was incestuous and therefore cursed. Just recently, in 1525, her niece Catalina had married King João of Portugal – whose father Manuel had married one of Catalina’s sisters, and two of her aunts.

  Henry and Wolsey must, however, have had real hopes of papal sanction for the ending of his inconvenient marriage. Earlier in the spring of 1527 Clement had finally granted Margaret Tudor an annulment, while her sister Mary’s husband Charles Brandon had received two. Events, however, were to overtake them, and in the most dramatic way. The proceedings of the inquiry were abruptly broken off when news filtered through of what was happening in that European bearpit, Italy.

  In the pursuance of Charles V’s Italian wars, the peninsula was now overrun not only by Spanish troops but by the emperor’s unpaid German mercenaries and the French traitor Bourbon’s men. Advancing southwards into the Papal States, on 6 May the famished furious soldiers surged into Rome itself, forcing the pope to flee and committing, in the words of Spain’s own diplomat, ‘unparalleled atrocities’. The slaughter raged for more than ten days, and it has been estimated that as many as twenty thousand died; eight thousand on the first day alone. Nuns were raped, St Peter’s sacked and unburied corpses piled high in the streets.

  Katherine of Aragon had been prophetically accurate to say that ‘all her hope’ rested on her nephew Charles V. After the sack of Rome the emperor held the pope’s fate in his hands. How likely was the pope to give a judgement against Katherine, the emperor’s aunt?

  Forced to act on his own initiative, on 22 June Henry VIII at last confronted Katherine and told her he wanted a formal separation. Katherine’s reaction was an outburst of tears, followed by the steadfast denial that her marriage with Arthur had been consummated. This, the physical rather than the legal, was to remain the bedrock of her case. If Anne Boleyn’s story was now openly political, Katherine’s body was a battleground. Wolsey sent instructions that his representative should tell the pope of ‘certain diseases in the queen defying all remedy, for which, as well as for other causes, the king will never again live with her as a wife’.

  That summer of 1527, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn agreed to marry, as evinced by the terms in which, in September, a dispensation was requested from Rome. Henry sought permission ‘to marry a woman with whose sister he had already had sexual intercourse’ (presumably Anne’s sister Mary) or ‘one with whom he had himself had sexual intercourse’. This second proviso begs the question of whether Anne had indeed preserved her chastity as rigorously as is usually supposed, or whether she and Henry had in the early days consummated their relationship, only to pull back when the question of marriage, and with it the legitimacy of any child Anne might bear, arose.

  In September Wolsey, returning from a mission abroad, found himself effectively summoned by Anne into the king’s presence; a sign of how power was shifting. In October Henry asked Thomas More, who was rising rapidly as a politician and administrator, respected for his ethical principles as well as his sharp legal brain, his opinion on the passage in Leviticus. In November, he invited a number of scholars to Hampton Court.

  Wolsey had been pressing the pope to help Henry, and Clement had been persuaded to issue a somewhat anomalous document: permission for Henry to marry Anne if his marriage to Katherine were dissolved, without saying how that goal might be attained. In February 1528 new envoys were sent towards Rome, with instructions to call, on their way, on Anne, who had withdrawn to Hever.

  The last two years had seen dramatic changes in the positions of Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. Anne had now to be regarded as the king’s future bride. But there was a danger.

  The rules of the new chess declared that a lowly pawn, winning through to the enemy’s back row, might itself become a queen, with all the powers that implied. But half a century earlier, a Catalan poem, ‘Scachs d’Amor’ (Chess Game of Love), had made a stipulation. No pawn could be ‘queened’ until the queen of its colour had been taken: there could not be two white, or two black, queens at one time.4

  * None of Henry VIII’s letters to Anne Boleyn are dated, nor is there any agreement among historians as to their chronology [see note on sources]. None of Anne’s letters to him survive.

  18

  New pieces on the board

  Scotland, the Netherlands, Hungary, Italy, France, 1526–1528

  In England a new phase of the story had begun. But the last years of the 1520s were something of a turning point for everyone. Some actors would leave the stage, while others waited in the wings for a new act of the play.

  In Scotland two rescue attempts in 1526 failed to get the young James V out of his stepfather Angus’s hold but in June 1528 James escaped. Colourful stories made a legend of it: the boy-king getting his custodian drunk, dressing as a groom, and galloping away to Stirling where his mother was waiting to raise the drawbridge once he was safe inside. With Angus and his cohorts forbidden to come near his person, at sixteen he would begin ruling in reality.

  He was younger than François I had been when he inherited France but Margaret Tudor was no Louise of Savoy. On 3 March that year Margaret had married her young lover, Henry Stewart, whom James created Lord Methven ‘for the great love that he bore to his dearest mother’. (Margaret’s brother Henry VIII, by contrast, would continue – with sublime disregard for the proverb about pots and kettles – to call Margaret ‘a shame and disgrace to all her family’.)

  James V gave his mother his blessing. What he withheld was power. While Margaret’s third marriage came to prove her unhappiest yet, she would have comparatively little political influence in the years immediately ahead. From the end of the 1520s, Margaret Tudor’s would be largely a personal, rather than a political, story.

  However, in each of the great European dynasties, new pieces were appearing on the board. In 1526, Charles V had married his cousin Isabella of Portugal. In the same year his widowed sister Eleanor, another of Margaret of Austria’s nieces, became engaged to François during his captivity, although the marriage did not immediately take place. And 1526 also brought momentous change for another of Charles V’s siblings, and evidence that the pattern of European power would soon be changing under the pressure of a new threat.

  Mary ‘of Hungary’, as she would come to be known, the fifth child of Philip of Burgundy and his Spanish wife Juana, had been betrothed while in her cradle to Louis Jagiellon, the eldest son of the Hungarian king. At first raised at Margaret of Austria’s Mechelen court, Mary was sent to the court of her grandfather Maximilian in Vienna before she was ten years old. There, she lived in company with the Hungarian king’s daughter, who was herself betrothed to Mary’s brother Ferdinand. The double alliance was intended to secure the Habsburg interest in the extensive kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia, which were especially important as Europe’s frontier with the Turks.

  In 1521 Mary went to Hungary as its queen, and within three years the teenager had won considerable influence, placing herself at th
e head of one of the great political factions. This was, however, a turbulent kingdom. The Hungarian nobility were in a perpetual state of warfare with each other, with their peasantry and with the Ottoman Turks under the great Suleiman. In 1526, Suleiman broke through the Hungarian frontier; at the Battle of Mohacs at the end of August the Hungarian army was devastated and Mary’s husband was killed.

  Mary sent urgently for her brother Ferdinand (who claimed Hungary through his wife) but instead of travelling to her side, Ferdinand appointed her as his regent in Hungary.1 Mary kept the throne for Ferdinand, engineering his election as King of Hungary in the teeth of any rival. By the time he arrived a year later she had, however, already asked for, and been refused, leave to resign her regency. This lack of appetite for power was to be a characteristic of her next few decades, which were permeated by the ever-growing Ottoman threat.

  Another of Margaret of Austria’s nieces, Isabella, was also unlucky in her spouse. Married to Christian of Denmark, Isabella had arrived in that country to find any place she might have hoped to occupy taken by her husband’s Dutch-born mistress and her mother. Moreover Christian (‘Christian the Tyrant’ as he was known in Sweden, over which he also briefly reigned) was not a man who could make the friends needed for success in the elective monarchy of Denmark and Norway. In January 1523, he was deposed by his uncle Frederick. In 1531 he attempted to regain his throne, was captured, and eventually ended his life a prisoner. Isabella and the children she had borne him were taken back into the care of her family.