Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  Like other women in power, she found that stress took a physical toll, and the times remained taxing. In 1534, religion was once again the problem. In the neighbouring German duchy of Westphalia, Anabaptists seized the town hall of Münster and declared the new Jerusalem, founded on common ownership and the equality of man. When they called on the faithful to join them, many in the Netherlands heeded the call and set out up the Rhine.

  Besieged by its expelled bishop, Münster fell only in June 1535, so it was against this background, and heightened Franco-Imperial tension, that Charles V finally agreed to something for which his sister Eleanor, Queen of France, had long been pleading: that, after many years apart, she and her sister Mary of Hungary might meet.

  In the summer of 1535 the two sisters met, at Cambrai, where Margaret of Austria and Louise of Savoy had faced each other just six years before. But this time Charles had decreed that no politics were to be discussed and though Eleanor came with a great retinue, at least some of whom surely hoped for diplomatic discussion, Mary unyieldingly followed her brother’s script.

  A sign of the changing times, perhaps? Or of very different personalities? Certainly no great results were achieved by this meeting at Cambrai.

  25

  ‘to doubt the end’

  England, 1536

  ‘Take great care to live well so that you have no reason to doubt the end, and so that you have the grace of God in this world and in the next’, Anne de Beaujeu had warned. The game of queens was played for high stakes, and could carry a deadly penalty. The first half of 1536 saw the death of not one but two English queens. Before the corn was ripe in the fields, Katherine of Aragon’s painful battle was ended and her rival Anne Boleyn had knelt in the straw of the scaffold to await the executioner’s sword.

  Like Katherine, Anne Boleyn had failed to produce another child. She probably miscarried in the summer of 1534 and possibly again in 1535. But Henry VIII’s concern over what was perceived to be her lack of fertility would pick up shocking speed in 1536.

  Katherine of Aragon died on 7 January, probably of cancer of the heart. She had been transferred sixty miles north, to Kimbolton in Huntingdonshire, where she continued the dismal practices she had followed in her previous place of imprisonment: having her meals prepared by the few old servants she trusted, for fear of poison, and refusing to leave her room. She eschewed the new servants Henry had put in place, whom she regarded as ‘guards and spies’. In the hours before she died she wrote a last letter to Henry – ‘My most dear lord, king and husband’ – urging him to prefer the ‘health and safeguard of your soul’ to worldly matters and to ‘the care and pampering of your body’.

  She said she pardoned him everything and prayed that God would do the same. ‘Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.’ The defiant signature was that of ‘Katherine the Queen’. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn celebrated the news of Katherine’s death with a party but Anne was acute enough quickly to realise that for her at least, the celebrations may have been premature.

  The evidence is contradictory as to whether Henry and Anne’s marriage was already in trouble or whether the events of 1536 came out of a clear blue sky. Was the marriage on the rocks? The imperial ambassador Chapuys reported it was, but he had, in a hopeful spirit, been saying that for years. There continued to be regular reports of the couple as ‘merry’, and if there were also stories of squalls that, certainly in the early days, had been the nature of their relationship. Even Chapuys admitted that some of their broils may have been mere ‘lovers’ quarrels’.

  It is possible that what attracted Henry in the mistress came to repel him in the wife. And if the king’s attraction faltered, Anne Boleyn, unlike Katherine of Aragon, had no ruling European family behind her. Anne de Beaujeu had written wisely: ‘Nor should you talk too much or too sharply, like many foolish and conceited women who want to attract attention and, to be more admired, speak boldly and in a flighty way . . .’

  Shortly before Katherine’s death Henry had said to Chapuys that if she died, Charles V would have no cause to trouble himself about English affairs. Crudely and callously put, perhaps, but it was true that Henry could now renew his relations with Charles without having to take Katherine back as part of the price. On the contrary, it was now the Francophile, intrusive Anne, rather than the wounded figure of Katherine, who stood in the way of a new imperial alliance.

  Anne Boleyn was as identified with the French interest as if she were indeed a Frenchwoman. After Anne’s death, Mary of Hungary, despite their childhood acquaintance at Mechelen, remarked that she had been a Frenchwoman and thus the Habsburgs’ enemy. And almost as though she had been a French princess, married off and then abandoned, like others in this story, she found herself caught between the two sides.

  France had long been ambivalent about the new situation in England. Henry VIII certainly believed François supported his search for an annulment, but France had proved unwilling to confront the pope to secure it. In 1535, Anne Boleyn had been shocked when France suggested a match between the officially illegitimate Mary and the dauphin, more so when it proved lukewarm about the marriage of the baby Elizabeth to even one of François’s younger sons. France’s mounting persecution of reformers, moreover, alienated Anne’s reforming friends.

  Anne thought she had a trump card to play: she was once again pregnant. But on 29 January 1536 – the day of Katherine of Aragon’s funeral – Anne Boleyn miscarried again, disastrously. She blamed it on the shock, five days before, of hearing that Henry had been injured in a joust. She had, as Chapuys reported ‘miscarried of her saviour’. ‘I see that God will not give me male children,’ Henry told her ominously, later adding to a male courtier that he had been ‘seduced by sortileges [enchantments]’ into the marriage.1

  No wonder Chapuys wrote to the emperor that Anne’s reaction to Katherine’s death had not been unmixed joy. She had, when she paused to think, begun to fear she would meet the ‘same end’. In mid-January she changed tack, or at least tactics, in regard to Katherine’s daughter, writing to those in Hatfield, where Mary had been transferred to join the baby Elizabeth’s household, that Mary should no longer be pressured to acknowledge Elizabeth as her superior in rank. She must have been aware that Henry was attracted to Jane Seymour, one of her ladies-in-waiting: a woman pale, passive, wholly English; a much more traditionally submissive model of femininity.

  But the signs were contradictory. And Anne Boleyn herself must have found them so. On 18 April Chapuys was persuaded, or manoeuvred, into doing what he had for so long avoided and acknowledging Anne, in her capacity as queen, as she passed through chapel – exchanging the ‘mutual reverences required by politeness’ as he put it – making Katherine’s daughter Mary ‘somewhat jealous’ when she heard. That King Henry should insist the ambassador of the emperor, Queen Katherine’s nephew, should acknowledge Katherine’s supplanter as England’s queen surely suggests that Henry was not at this moment actually intending to put Anne away. Although conversely, having won this point may have meant that his ego was no longer so closely tied to having Anne accepted.

  Henry VIII had come to doubt whether Anne Boleyn would give him a male heir, and he wanted Jane Seymour. But there was another chain of dissent. On 2 April 1536 Anne’s almoner, Skip, preached a sermon in front of the king’s councillors, describing how King Ahasuerus was almost persuaded to the massacre of the Jews by his evil counsellor Haman, and was saved from the deed only by his wife, Esther. At her coronation, Anne (like, ironically, Katherine) had been compared to Esther; and Haman could easily be identified as Thomas Cromwell.

  At the very end of Anne’s life Chapuys wrote of ‘the heretical doctrines and practices of the concubine – the principal cause of the spread of Lutheranism in this country’. But it is possible that reform was proceeding along lines she had not envisaged. In 1535, there had been a general inspection (‘visitation’) of the monasteries under Cromwell’s aegis, with some smaller institutio
ns scheduled for suppression. But it was obvious the process would pick up speed. And Anne may have clashed with Cromwell over where the proceeds of the dissolution of the monasteries should go: into education and social reform, as Anne wanted, or into the king’s coffers.

  However, the accusations made against Anne in the spring of 1536 were framed in terms of sexual misbehaviour. After Anne Boleyn’s death Lancelot de Carles, secretary to the French ambassador, said that Lady Worcester, a member of Anne’s household, herself accused of lax morality, had exclaimed in her defence that her own faults were nothing compared to those of the queen and that the queen had had carnal knowledge of her musician Mark Smeaton, of one of the king’s favourite gentleman Henry Norris and of her own brother, George.

  On 30 April Mark Smeaton was taken to Cromwell’s house for questioning and – possibly under torture or the threat of it – confessed to having three times had sex with the queen. Anne herself described a recent exchange of words which seemed to show him languishing after her; languishing, perhaps, in the tradition of the game of courtly love which, however, his lowly rank did not allow him to play. Other remarks she made to other men might seem to suggest the game of courtly love gone sour but the point is that Smeaton’s confession, true or false, put a new complexion on all subsequent inquiries, which would now operate from a presumption of Anne’s adultery.

  Henry was surely told of this. The Scottish reformer Alexander Ales later told Anne’s daughter Elizabeth that he remembered, after Smeaton’s confession, ‘your most religious mother carrying you, still a little baby, in her arms and entreating the most serene King, your father, from the open window . . . the faces and gestures of the speakers plainly showed that the King was angry’. The scene shows Anne and Henry in distress but surely still also in uncertainty. Henry decided to postpone his planned and imminent trip with Anne to Calais for a week but the jousts to celebrate May Day the next day were still to go ahead.

  Anne Boleyn must have sensed where she was vulnerable. Also on 30 April she begged Norris to swear before her chaplain that she ‘was a good woman’; a reaction to another incident capable of a deadly interpretation. Asking Norris, who was betrothed to marry one of her ladies, why he had not yet gone ahead with the match, Anne suggested a scandalous reason: that Norris hoped to marry Anne herself. ‘You look for dead men’s shoes; for if ought came to the king but good, you would look to have me.’ Under the Treason Act of 1534 words which intended harm to the king were treasonable.

  As Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn attended the May Day jousts at Greenwich. Henry still showed Norris every sign of favour. But when the king abruptly left the festivities, something at which ‘many men mused but most chiefly the queen’, the king began questioning Norris, promising him pardon if he would but speak the truth. Norris stoutly maintained his innocence but the next day he was taken to the Tower, where Smeaton was already being held, together with Anne’s brother George.

  Four others were also arrested, accused of adulterous relations with Anne, including her old admirer the poet Thomas Wyatt and Sir Francis Weston, a gentleman of the king’s privy chamber. Weston had been in a flirtation with a lady of Anne’s chamber but said that he loved another there better and, when she pressed him as to who, said ‘it is yourself’.

  ‘Thus, my daughter, whatever your age, guard against being deceived and remember what I told you before because you can be blamed even for something very slight . . .’ Anne de Beaujeu had warned.

  All this must have been running through Anne Boleyn’s head. She surely had some inkling of trouble ahead: in the last week of April she asked Matthew Parker, her chaplain, to have a special care of her daughter.2 But it was a stunning blow when, on 2 May, she was arrested, accused of having had sexual relations with Norris, Smeaton and one other. She said that ‘to be a Queen, and cruelly handled was never seen’, and hoped that the king was doing it only to ‘prove’ her; a regular trope of courtly love.

  Taken to the Tower, Anne asked if she would be placed in a dungeon. She was told that she would be housed in the royal lodgings she had used before her coronation. She fell to her knees, crying ‘Jesu have mercy on me.’ The indictment drawn up preparatory to the trials said that she ‘following daily her frail and carnal lust, did falsely and traitorously procure by base conversations and kisses, touchings, gifts, and other infamous incitations, divers of the King’s daily and familiar servants to be her adulterers and concubines’. More explicitly yet, she ‘procured her own natural brother to violate her, alluring him with her tongue in his mouth, and his tongue in hers, against the commands of Almighty God and all laws human and divine’. This was how a queen could be brought low; as Anne herself protested in a memorable image, with accusations she could only deny ‘without I should open my body’.

  On 12 May the four commoners actually charged were tried (Wyatt and another having been suspected but released). Smeaton again confessed his guilt and the others pleaded not guilty. They were, inevitably, all four sentenced to a traitor’s death. Three days later, on the 15th, Anne Boleyn and her brother George were each tried separately before a jury of their peers.

  She entered the Great Hall of the Tower of London ‘as though she were going to a great triumph’, an eyewitness wrote. In front of some two thousand spectators, she answered firmly ‘Not guilty’ to each charge. ‘She made so wise and discreet answers to all things laid against her, excusing herself with her words so clearly as though she had never been faulty to the same’, recorded the Windsor Herald Charles Wriothesley.

  When George Boleyn’s turn came, he both confused the issue and upped the stakes by reading aloud the accusation that had been written down for him: that he and Anne had laughed together over the king’s lack of virility. But inevitably, all twenty-six peers found them guilty. Anne’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, pronounced the sentence: that she should be burned or beheaded at the king’s pleasure. Two days later the five men were executed, and on the same day Anne’s marriage was annulled.

  On the 19th Anne Boleyn herself came to the block. In those agonising days in the Tower, she had cried out that her fate would be the death of her mother, the blood mother who figures so little in the stories of Anne. But otherwise she seemed, so the Lieutenant of the Tower reported, to have ‘much joy’ in death.

  Why did Anne Boleyn have to fall? At the time the obvious assumption was that she was guilty of the crimes with which she was charged. As one John Hussey wrote: ‘if all the books and chronicles . . . which against women hath been penned . . . since Adam and Eve, those same were, I think, verily nothing in comparison of that which hath been done and committed by Anne the Queen’. But Archbishop Cranmer, as the Scottish reformer Ales reported him, walking in the gardens of Lambeth Palace in the early hours before Anne’s execution, protested that, ‘She who has been the Queen of England upon earth will today become a Queen in Heaven.’

  One theory, of course, continues to be that Anne was guilty of adultery, if not quite as charged. But it has few subscribers, the more so for the demonstrable inaccuracy of much of the detail of the accusations, such as the fact that she and her supposed lovers were often not even in the same place on the alleged date. And also perhaps for the fact that Anne repeatedly swore to her innocence in the face of her death, ‘on peril of her soul’s damnation’.

  Anne Boleyn herself said that she ‘believed there were some other reason for which she was condemned than the cause alleged’. Another, far more palatable theory, sets her erstwhile ally Thomas Cromwell as the agent of her destruction. It is wholly credible that once Cromwell and Anne had fallen out, he feared for his safety if she remained in place; the more so if he, like so many, saw her as having engineered Wolsey’s fall.

  Yet another theory sees Cromwell as the tool of his royal master Henry VIII who – whether genuinely convinced of Anne’s guilt or cynically cruel enough merely to be seeking an excuse to be rid of her – ordered Cromwell to substantiate a case. Henry announced his betrothal to Jane Seymour t
he day after Anne’s death and married her with indecent haste. Even Chapuys, on 18 May, noted public anger that the king was so happy ‘since the arrest of the whore’. Here, essentially, is the great problem for historians of these years: that Henry appears as either mutt or monster.

  Perhaps there is a fourth, compromise position, which allows for an element of confusion – of self-deception, rather than deception by a third party – in the English king’s reaction. Perhaps Anne died for an idea; not an idea of the reformed religion but the old ideal of courtly love. The game she had learnt in the European courts, the game that permitted – demanded – a measure of freedom with the men around her. The game with which she had at first enchanted Henry, the game she had never learnt when not to play.

  Early in her queenship Anne’s chamberlain had written: ‘as for pastime in the queen’s chamber, [there] was never more. If any of you that be now departed have any ladies that ye thought favoured you and somewhat would mourn at parting of their servants, I can no wit perceive the same by their dancing . . .’ ‘Servants’ is the term from courtly love but perhaps by this late stage in the long courtly tradition, the term could only be used cynically.

  Anne Boleyn was not born to be a major player in that other game, the game of queens. She was a pawn ‘queened’, who had won for herself the right to move with a queen’s freedom. And if she had found that that freedom had definite limits, so had others, better-born than she. Katherine of Aragon had been born into queenly rank, daughter of the woman whose authority seemed to offer a lesson for the century. Yet she too had wound up in actual fear of her life and dying in a state which would have seemed absurd in her heyday.

  If Anne was in so many ways a transgressive figure, Katherine had played by the rules throughout her marriage, transgressing only in her refusal to end it quietly. Yet her fate, like Anne’s, served to show how conditional was a woman’s power, a woman’s privilege, in the first half of the sixteenth century. Conditional on a man’s will, conditional on not being betrayed, in any one of a number of senses, by the vulnerability of her body, whether exposed in terms of her chastity or of her fertility.