The Six Wives & Many Mistresses of Henry VIII: The Women's Stories

by Amy Licence

  The first letter is conventional enough, drawing on the usual motif of the pining lover, parted from the object of his desires and asking to be remembered by her. He hopes that absence will not lessen ‘her affection’, which would increase his pain, ‘of which absence produces enough’. Henry uses the imagery of astronomy, an accessible metaphor for courtly poetry, to remind Anne that although the sun might be distant, it is hotter; ‘so it is with our love, for by absence we are kept a distance from one another, and yet it retains its fervour’. But he is unsure of her feelings, adding ‘at least on my side, I hope the like on yours’. As he could not be with her, he sent a gift of his ‘picture set in bracelets … wishing myself in their place, if it should please you’.5

  Anne does not appear to have replied to Henry in full, or to have seen him in person, before the composition of the second letter. In the event that she received a gift of jewellery from the king, protocol dictated that she would have sent some grateful reply, possibly along formal lines. She probably composed a reply, which is now lost, which failed to satisfy him. ‘Since my parting from you,’ Henry wrote, ‘I have been told that the opinion in which I left you is totally changed.’ He had been informed that she would not come to court, with her mother ‘or in any other manner’, to which report ‘I cannot sufficiently marvel at’. Here, the voice of the king overrules that of the man. Even though Henry plays the lover, the tone of his ‘marvel’ subtly stresses her obligation and his failure to recall what he may have done to ‘offend’ her implies that he has, in fact, done no such thing. He believes he had done all he could to be of service and to please. It is not permissible for his declarations of love to have caused offence. Henry’s letters show him to be a master of the literary technique of litotes, the employment of negatives and the irony of understatement, to highlight the tension between what he might ask of Anne and what he might command. He continues by saying that her aloofness ‘seems a very poor return for the great love which I bear you’ and that he hoped she loved him ‘with as much affection as I hope you do … though this does not belong so much to the mistress as to the servant.’

  What this second letter makes clear, is that Anne needed to negotiate a fine line to walk with Henry. His use of phrases suggestive of the love that she should bear him juxtapose the context of sovereign and subject uncomfortably with that of man and woman. Had she received such a missive from Percy or Wyatt, Anne’s responses would have been more her own; from the king, they raised the question of just how much autonomy she really had in the relationship. With Henry switching between roles, as man and king, she had to work out just how much licence he was prepared to give her to rule him and where she needed to step back and submit to his authority, in the interests of herself and her family. Her lack of response and the coolness Henry complains of may well have been less the hard-headed manipulator that Sanders suggests, playing the long game to hook the king, than a confused young woman unsure how she should respond, or how she wanted to. Perhaps Anne stayed away from court and from Henry because this was too dangerous a game, one she initially did not want to play. Her king, though, was not going to allow her that choice.

  Henry wrote again, about the ‘uneasiness my doubts about your health gave’ him. The sweating sickness that terrified him had broken out afresh and a number of the royal servants had fallen sick, including George Boleyn. It appears that Anne was at court in Surrey, which might be a reference to Hampton Court, which Wolsey would formally make over to Henry in 1528 although it was frequently used as a venue by the king before then. By the time of writing, word had reached Henry that Anne had ‘as yet felt nothing’ in the way of illness and he reassured her that ‘few or no women have been taken ill’, so she should not be frightened ‘nor be too uneasy in our absence’. He advised her to ‘avoid the pestilence as much as you can’, but also that ‘we must sometimes submit to our misfortunes, for whoever will struggle against fate is generally but so much the farther from gaining his end’.6 For the time being, though, Anne continued to struggle against the fate that Henry was urging her towards.

  It is clear from Henry’s fourth letter than Anne had now sent him at least two replies. However, these had not put his mind at rest. Rather, he had been ‘turning [them] over in my mind’ in ‘great agony’, not knowing how to ‘interpret them’. Anne’s message must have been ambiguous; perhaps it was still clouded by doubt as she remained uncertain about how best to receive the king’s advances, ‘whether to my disadvantage, as you show in some places, or to my advantage, as I understand in some others’. He beseeched her ‘earnestly to let me know expressly your whole mind as to the love between us’. Henry’s demand could hardly be ignored, as ‘it is absolutely necessary for [him] to obtain this answer, having been for the whole year stricken by the dart of love’. This lengthy pursuit can hardly have been typical of the king’s conquests and his request, with its use of the term ‘necessary’, attempted to bring the waiting to a close. Then, however, he appeared to soften and give Anne a way out. He asked her to declare whether she only loved him with ‘an ordinary love’ or if she could ‘give up yourself body and heart to me’ and thus be worthy of the title of mistress. Henry’s promise that he would take Anne ‘for my only mistress, casting off all others besides you out of my thoughts and affections, and serve you only’7 echoed the marriage vow, and must have reminded Anne that she was dealing with a married man. Equally, Henry’s words are the most powerful evidence so far that he had, up to that point, had a number of mistresses. Perhaps they suggest that, until recently, he had been enjoying the attentions of more than one woman, all of whom he was now willing to cast off in Anne’s favour. At this point, something between them changed.

  Following the use of imagery, symbolism and metaphor in courtly play, Anne sent the king a gift with a coded message. The details of it only survive in Henry’s next letter, along with his ‘cordial’ thanks for ‘a present so beautiful nothing could be more so’. First, Anne sent a the conventional gift of a fine diamond. With it, though, was a statue made of silver, depicting a solitary damsel tossed inside a ship set on stormy seas; a metaphor for her internal struggles. She sent it with a letter, including ‘demonstrations of your affection’ and ‘beautiful mottoes … so cordially expressed’ that they obliged Henry ‘for ever to honour, love and serve you sincerely’. Anne had clearly given the reassurance the king had been seeking, but without the evidence of her letters it is impossible to know whether she did so willingly, or out of a sense of obligation after his relentless pressure. She was being asked to distinguish between her feelings for him as her monarch and as a man, weighed against whether or not she wanted to enter into a relationship with him. This might have been a straightforward question for Anne, or it may have been difficult. The length of his courtship before her capitulation suggests the latter.

  In response to her gift, Henry promised that ‘henceforward my heart shall be dedicated to you alone. I wish my person was too.’ It would appear that some kind of understanding had been reached, tantalisingly in private, or in a letter that does not survive, as the king then raised the first possibility of Anne becoming his wife. He hoped to be hers in person, assuring her that ‘God can do it, if He pleases, to whom I pray every day for that end’. This may date letter five in the sequence to the early months of 1527, when Henry first began to make legal enquiries about the validity of his marriage, or the end of 1526, when the idea may have germinated. For Anne, this was a glimpse of a dazzling future, the first exciting moment when it began to sink in that one day she really might become Queen of England.

  34

  Anticipation, 1527

  My trust alway in him did lie

  That knoweth what my thought intends

  Whereby I live the most happy.1

  Christmas 1526 was a colourful affair, with entertainments held at Greenwich and York Place. A ‘great plentie of victuals’ was served between the revels, masques and banquets, spiced wine was drunk, sweetmeats were cons
umed and the lamps blazed late into the night. The jousting began on 30 December, with the usual combatants dressed in their finery of velvet, tissue and cloth of gold, and no doubt Anne was watching Henry compete again on 3 January, when three hundred spears were broken during the course of the day. Yet there was something different about the festivities that year. Henry was good at concealing his feelings but as he danced, rode and feasted, those who were closest to him, including his gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, his grooms and close companions, may have noticed a change in his mood. The king had a secret.

  The night after the jousts ended, Henry took a small band of young gentlemen to Bridewell Palace where they donned masks before climbing into a barge on the river. Under cover of darkness, it took them to Wolsey’s residence of York Place, where the king dined with a ‘great compaignie of lords and ladies’. After the meal, much ‘good pastime’ was made, before the disguises were removed and the identities of the players revealed.2 Surely, with Wolsey’s connivance, Anne was among them, taking the opportunity to be with Henry away from the eyes of the main court. This may have been the point at which the king managed to overcome her reluctance to his suit and convince her that his intentions were serious. Equally, it might have been at the Shrovetide jousts that year, or the banquet in the queen’s chambers that followed. Either way, Henry had decided that his marriage was over. With the help of the Pope, Anne would become his new wife – but he was not yet ready to pull off the mask of his private life and reveal his true intentions to the world.

  On 17 May, Wolsey convened a secret ecclesiastical trial at York Place to investigate the validity of the royal match. The building was transformed from a place where masked dancers feasted and flirted to the legal arena in which Queen Catherine’s marriage would be examined and judged. It should have been a fairly simple, quick matter. There was the precedent of Louis XII’s first marriage, which had been annulled to allow him to make a better dynastic match. Only that March, the Pope had done the same for Henry’s own sister Margaret, who was released from her marriage to the Earl of Angus on the grounds of his earlier pre-contract with Lady Janet Douglas. The king had every reason to believe that Pope Clement would readily do in May what he had in March. The trial should really just be a formality.

  With Henry seated beside him, Wolsey began by raising Catherine’s first marriage to Arthur. If that union had been consummated after all, then the failure of the queen to bear healthy sons was explicable according to certain Biblical verses. His main justification was a passage from Leviticus (20:21) that condemns marriage to a brother’s wife as unclean and destined to remain barren: ‘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.’ Yet the Bible contradicts itself. A verse in Deuteronomy states that ‘the wife of the deceased shall not marry to another, but his brother shall take her and raise up seed for his brother’ (20:6), but Henry’s council advised him that Leviticus took precedence over Deuteronomy in canon law. Henry and Catherine were not exactly childless either, with the existence of Princess Mary, but this was conveniently circumvented by manipulation of the text, where ‘childless’ was substituted for lacking a male heir. As related by Hall, the issue was formally first ‘raised’, probably at Wolsey’s instigation, by the president of Paris during the negotiations for a match between Francis and Princess Mary. Concerned about her legitimacy, he ‘doubted whether the marriage between the king and [Mary’s] mother, being his brother’s wife, were good or no’.3 Thus, the future of Catherine’s daughter was being used as a pretext to undermine her past. Catherine must have been furious when she heard. The assembled clergy and lords met at York Place on two further occasions to debate the validity of Catherine’s marriage, before admitting on 31 May that they were unqualified to reach a decision. The next day, some devastating news arrived in England.

  The Pope would not be annulling any marriages in the near future. Hundreds of miles away, over thirty thousand mutinous Imperial soldiers had been left unpaid and unfed for weeks, during the war Charles had been waging against Francis. Partly inspired by their condition, and partly by a swell of anti-Catholic feeling, they attacked the walls of Rome and burst into the city on 6 May, embarking on a campaign of destruction, murder and pillage that would last for days. Symbolically, they ransacked the tomb of Julius II, the very pope who had issued the dispensation for Henry and Catherine back in 1503. By the time Henry’s secret court met, Pope Clement, on whom he was pinning his hopes, had been driven to flee to safety in the Castel Santangelo. Effectively, the Pope was now Charles’ prisoner. This made the Emperor the most powerful man in Europe. He was also a devoted nephew. Under different circumstances, Henry’s first marriage might have been quickly swept away, but the conjunction of these events on the European stage tied such a Gordian knot of diplomacy and legal wrangling that it would take years to unravel.

  At this stage, Wolsey was unaware of the new object of the king’s affections. Henry allowed his servant to believe that he was pursuing an annulment because of his religious doubts and that, at this stage, any remarriage was only theoretical. Soon after the trial, Wolsey departed for France. His joint missions were to work towards a European peace and negotiate a match with Princess Renee of France, daughter of Louis XII. The latter was a deliberate wild goose chase. When Henry applied to the Pope for a dispensation to remarry that August, Anne was not named, although the conditions did cover a woman related to him in the ‘first degree of affinity … from … forbidden wedlock’. This clause allowed him to wed a woman whose sister he had already ‘bedded’ and must have been phrased with Anne in mind. It is also a critical surviving source of our evidence for the king’s relationship with Mary Boleyn. The following month, Henry wrote to Wolsey, who was still in France, thanking him for his good service ‘which … cannot be by a kind master forgotten, of which fault I trust I shall never be accused, especially to you ward, which so laboriously do serve me’. He added that they had ‘never sent to the Pope since his captivity, and have no one resident there, lest the queen should anticipate us in our great matter’.4 Henry was trying to keep secrets from everyone: he may have succeeded in keeping Anne’s name out of things but his wife had too many loyal servants at court for his plans to remain hidden for long.

  Henry may have hoped that Catherine’s current preoccupation with her daughter’s future would blind her to his activities. Mary’s betrothal to Charles V had been abandoned with the breakdown in Anglo-Imperial relations in 1525 and the Emperor had gone on to marry his cousin Isabella of Portugal, who bore his first son, Phillip, a year later. It was a great disappointment for Catherine, who could not have predicted that the infant Philip would one day go on to marry her daughter. The broken alliance proved to be a significant turning point. It pushed Henry into the arms of the French, with the suggestion that Mary could become the second wife of Francis I. Catherine was aware of Francis’ reputation as a lover and, by this time, his syphilitic state may have been suspected among the European courts. Memories of Queen Claude, with her repeated pregnancies and early death, added to the concerned mother’s determination to resist the proposed match. By March 1527, matters had progressed as far as discussions about the dowry, whether the ceremony was to be held at Calais and the desirable age of the princess at the time, which was judged to be fourteen. As Mary had just passed her eleventh birthday, it meant that the wedding could go ahead in just three years.5

  Catherine was also aware that the marriage would sideline Mary in terms of the English succession. She probably suspected that it was with this in mind that the king was considering making Henry Fitzroy heir to the throne. Imperial ambassador Mendoza wrote to Charles on 18 March that ‘the King of England has here a natural son, whom he much wishes to make King of Ireland, bestowing upon him other large estates besides; that the king holds this son in such affection that he would show the same honour and regard to anyone entering into an alliance with him as with the princess, h
is daughter’.6 With Henry now secretly resolved to make Anne his wife, the plans he was proposing for Princess Mary and Henry Fitzroy make dynastic sense. Mary would make a suitable royal marriage outside the realm and, considering what had happened to Prince Arthur, Fitzroy would be Henry’s reserve heir until such time as Anne provided him with a new legitimate son. To secure the boy further in the world of international politics, a wife was currently being sought for him within the Danish royal family. Later the same month, Wolsey had approached Mendoza as Henry’s advocate regarding his son’s future, which was met with contempt by the ambassador: ‘The cardinal’s overtures to [Mendoza] respecting the king’s illegitimate son and the intention of conferring upon him the title of king, together with the proposal for his marriage, might be considered in the light of a joke, were it not that the cardinal’s presumption and folly are well known. Such proposals would be unworthy of an answer.’7 Listening to the various rumours leaking out of York Place, Catherine may have begun to consider Wolsey with similar contempt.

  That May, Henry was anticipating a quick conclusion to his first marriage when he hosted a huge joust and banquet to be held for the French ambassadors at Greenwich. Nicholas Carew, Robert Jerningham, Anthony Browne and Robert Harries acted as challengers, wearing costumes embroidered with the word ‘loyaltie’ and the motto that ‘by pen, pain nor treasure, truth shall not be violated’. Henry Courtenay and his men responded to their challenge, dressed in gold and silver set with images of mountains and olive branches, and the two sides ran ‘fair courses’ for two and a half hours in spite of the rain. A special banqueting house was built to Henry’s specifications on one side of the tilt yard. It was an impressive hundred feet long and thirty wide, but it seems ironic that Henry had proposed to Anne and been accepted while the dynastic symbols of the rose and pomegranate were still combined in its purple cloth roof. And it was Catherine, still keeping her mouth shut, who sat beside Henry under the ‘goodly’ cloth of estate, hung with the royal motto ‘dieu et mon droit’.