Six Wives of Henry VIII

by Alison Weir

  Nor was her domestic life particularly congenial. She could not have failed to guess the reason for the promotion of Sir Thomas Boleyn to the peerage as Viscount Rochford in 1525, just the latest in a string of honours accorded to a man who had been one of Henry's favourite courtiers since 1511. Yet this latest honour had undoubtedly been bestowed as a reward for services rendered to the King by Boleyn's elder daughter Mary, who had for some time been Henry's mistress. As usual, the affair was conducted discreetly, and for this reason it is impossible to pinpoint when it began or ended. Mary Boleyn had married William Carey, a gentleman of the King's household, in February 1520; the King attended their wedding, offering 65. 8d.in the chapel. Mary accompanied Queen Katherine to the Field of Cloth of Gold later that year. Henry had just discarded Elizabeth Blount, and it would not be fanciful to conclude that Mary Boleyn was the reason why he did so. In 1533, Mary's son, Henry Carey, who had been born around 1524, would claim he was 'our sovereign lord the King's son', but Henry never acknowledged him as such, which should be taken as conclusive evidence that the boy was William Carey's, for the King had been eager enough to acknowledge Henry FitzRoy as his own.

  Mary Boleyn had spent some time at the French court, which was far more licentious than Henry's, in the train of Henry's sister the Duchess of Suffolk and had succumbed early on to the temptations there, becoming so easy with her favours that the papal nuncio called her 'a very great and infamous whore'. King Francis himself boasted of having 'ridden her', and fondly referred to her as 'my hackney'. This may have been the reason why her father removed her from the French court and brought her back to England. It seems likely that her affair with Henry VIII began around 1519-20, and that it was still continuing in 1523, when Henry named one of his ships theMary Boleyn.The relationship seems to have ended in 1525, or thereabouts.

  By then, the Queen was known to be incapable of having any more children and, while Henry still displayed affection for her and there was no obvious breach between them, he had reached the stage where he was prepared to go to any lengths to have an heir. Of course, he already had a son, Henry FitzRoy, who was now six years old and much resembled his father in looks. It was therefore in Henry's mind to have the boy declared legitimate by Act of Parliament and name him his heir; he even contemplated marrying him to his half-sister Mary. There was, of course, no precedent in English history for the succession devolving upon a bastard son, and no way of knowing if the King's subjects would accept FitzRoy as the lawful successor to his father, but Henry was desperate. It is highly significant that, as soon as it was confirmed that the Queen was 'past the ways of women', FitzRoy was brought to court to receive a host of honours, having the royal dukedoms of Richmond and Somerset conferred upon him in 1525, being admitted to the Order of the Garter and appointed Lord High Admiral. From then on, he was 'well brought up like a prince's child' and 'furnished to keep the state of a great prince', and it was quickly understood that he might 'easily, and by the King's means, be exalted to higher things'.

  Queen Katherine was deeply offended by FitzRoy's ennoblement, which amounted, in her view, to a public snub on Henry's part. For once, she could not hide her disapproval, and the Venetian ambassador clearly perceived she was resentful and 'dissatisfied'. However, she was in no position to complain, and was 'obliged to submit and have patience', a virtue of which she was to need vast reserves in the years to come.

  In the summer of 1526, Francis I, released from captivity, offered himself as a husband for the Princess Mary, Queen Claude having died in 1524. Henry was enthusiastic, as was Wolsey, who expected some hostility from the Queen but discounted it as unimportant, not rating her influence very highly. Yet from December 1526, Katherine was not to be entirely isolated in England, for in that month there arrived at court the new Spanish ambassador, Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, a man of very astute judgement and deep integrity, who was to prove a loyal and gallant friend to Queen Katherine. He quickly summed up the situation in England, and guessed that the Queen was very unhappy. In his opinion, 'the principal cause of her misfortune is that she identifies herself entirely with the Emperor's interests.' After the arrival of Mendoza, Katherine's life is better documented, and from this date the Calendar of State Papers relating to Spain is full of information about her life.

  What was immediately apparent to Mendoza was that Katherine was kept in isolation on purpose, and that Wolsey was taking care to be present whenever the new ambassador had an audience with the Queen, having no desire to let her unburden her troubles into the ear of a Spaniard. Hence Katherine found it very difficult to pass any messages or information to Charles V, although one letter did reach him, in which she bewailed the fact that she had not heard from him in two years; 'such are my affection and readiness for your service that I deserve better treatment.' Yet Wolsey's spies were everywhere, and letters were intercepted; Charles might not after all have been at fault.

  In the spring of 1527, Francis sent an embassy to England headed by Gabriel de Grammont, Bishop of Tarbes, to discuss the forthcoming betrothal of the Princess Mary to Francis himself or one of his sons. There were the usual jousts and banquets in honour of the visitors, then the two parties settled down to business. It came as something of a bombshell when the Bishop of Tarbes suddenly began questioning the legitimacy of the Princess and 'whether the marriage between the King and her mother, being his brother's wife, were good or no'. As a result of the Bishop's queries, negotiations were suspended for a short while, during which time Wolsey apparently managed to reassure him that Mary had indeed been born in lawful wedlock. Then talks resumed without further complications.

  The envoys also saw the Queen, who made some pointed and rather hostile remarks about King Francis, and they left with the correct impression that there was only one alliance that would satisfy Katherine, and that would not be with France. She would, they felt, have done 'anything in her power to preserve the old alliance between Spain and England', but however strong her desire to do so, 'her means for carrying it out are small'.

  The new marriage treaty, which provided for the marriage of Mary Tudor to Francis I or his second son the Duke of Orleans, was ratified by Henry VIII in May 1527 - Francis shortly afterwards became betrothed to the Emperor's sister Eleanor, and Henry of Orleans was substituted as the bridegroom. At the banquet and ball which followed, Queen Katherine put on a brave face, watching her husband and daughter dancing together. At one point, Henry, anxious to display Mary's charms to the Frenchmen, pulled off the jewelled garland she wore on her head and let fall 'a profusion of fair tresses, as beautiful as ever seen on human head'.

  The festivities were brought to an abrupt end, however, by news of the sacking of Rome on 6 May by the unfed and unpaid mercenary troops of the Emperor, who was then campaigning in Italy. Lacking a commander, they surged into the eternal city and unleashed an orgy of violence and murder that went on for several days; details of the atrocities they committed shocked even that brutal age. The Pope was forced to take refuge in the Castel St Angelo, where he soon afterwards found himself a virtual prisoner of the Emperor. Charles had not been personally responsible for the sack of Rome, and was as appalled as anyone else by it, but he was not averse to having the Pope in his power.

  The sack of Rome was to have far-reaching consequences for Henry and Katherine. Their marriage had failed, for many reasons. On a personal level, the age gap seemed wider than ever, and there had long ago been a divergence of interests. With the French alliance newly signed, it no longer seemed desirable for the King to have a Spanish queen. More importantly, Katherine had failed in her crucial duty, that of bearing an heir. But, above all, the King, for some years past - or so he later claimed - had, when reading the Bible, turned again and again to the passage in chapter 20 of the Book of Leviticus, which warned of the severe penalty inflicted by God on a man who married his brother's widow: 'And if a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother's nakedness; they shall be chi
ldless.' To Henry's mind he was as good as childless, lacking a male heir, and years of worrying whether the prohibition in Leviticus applied to his own marriage had by now crystallised into the conviction that indeed it did. He and Katherine had offended against the law of God by their incestuous marriage and, because of this, God, in His wrath, had denied them sons. By the spring of 1527, the King was 'troubled in his conscience' about this; the more he studied the matter, the more clearly it appeared to him that he had broken a divine law, and that something must be done to rectify the situation.

  Just how long the King's conscience had been troubling him we do not know. In 1527, he declared he had had doubts about his marriage 'for some years past', though there is no mention of the matter in contemporary records before May of that year. It is likely that these doubts first became serious around 1524, when Katherine went through the menopause and Henry ceased to have sexual relations with her; but they could have been in the King's mind as far back as 1521, for in that year he quoted the critical verses from Leviticus in his treatise against Luther, an indication that he was already aware of a possible impediment to his marriage. At the same time, Dr John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln, became the King's lord almoner (or confessor), and it was to him that Henry first confided his doubts; Wolsey's secretary, George Cavendish, confirms this in his biography of his master, quoting Henry as saying he himself 'moved first in the matter, in confession to my lord of Lincoln, my ghostly father'. Longland later bore this out, revealing that for a time he and Henry had waged a spiritual battle over the issue. 'The King never left urging me until he had won me to give my consent,' declared the Bishop in later years.

  By 1524, Henry's conscience had become tender as far as his marriage was concerned; although he no longer desired his wife, and may have found sex distasteful because of the mysterious female ailment she suffered, these were not the only reasons why he decided to cease having intercourse with her. He had persuaded himself that their marriage was incestuous, and that any sexual congress would be a sin. Nevertheless, it was not until three years later that he resolved to act upon his doubts and seek an annulment of his marriage.

  Two separate factors combined in the spring of 1527 to provoke the King to action. One was the questioning by the Bishop of Tarbes of the Princess Mary's legitimacy, which only served to compound Henry's own doubts. Nor was this the first time that the validity of his union with Katherine had been questioned. Others, among them his own father and the conservative William Warham, now Archbishop of Canterbury, had spoken out about it as far back as 1502. Henry VII, however, had inclined to the view that the law as laid down in Leviticus only applied where the first marriage had been consummated, and he had been satisfied that Arthur had left Katherine a virgin. However, as a precaution, Ferdinand and Isabella had insisted that the Bull of Dispensation issued by Pope Julius II in 1503 provided for the marriage of Katherine and Henry, even in the event of her first marriage having been consummated.

  For Henry VIII, Katherine's virgin state when she came to his bed was not the issue to be disputed, although he did his best to cast doubts upon it. Katherine, on the other hand, would come to see it as the crux of the matter, for, to her understanding, Leviticus only applied when the first marriage had been consummated, and hers had not. Henry, of course, must have known this, and realised that for his case to succeed he had to take his stand on the Levitical law applying whether the marriage had been consummated or not. Here he was treading on dangerous ground, for of course the dispensation of 1503 permitting his marriage to Katherine had had precedents, notably in the case of Katherine's own sisters, Isabella and Maria, who were married in turn to the same King of Portugal. What Henry VIII was really questioning, therefore, was the power of the Pope to dispense at all in such a case as his. This was not immediately apparent as the central issue in the affair, but it would soon become so, and then the shock waves would reverberate around Europe, for to question the Pope's authority, which all good Catholics believed was invested in him by Christ, was tantamount to heresy. Yet the European climate was ripe for it: for two centuries the papacy had been recognised as corrupt, and was held in disrepute by those who argued the need for reform of a church riddled with abuses, not all of them followers of Luther. Given this, it is not perhaps surprising to find a devout Catholic, as Henry undoubtedly then was, calling the Pope's authority into question over a matter of canon law.

  The other factor spurring the King into action in the spring of 1527 was that he was, by a fortuitious coincidence, passionately in love for the first time in his life, and wished to remarry. This has often - and erroneously - been understood to have been the real basis for the King's doubts of conscience, which has tended to trivialise the whole issue. In fact, Henry VIII did, desperately, need a male heir; his wife of eighteen years was now barren. His concern for the succession and the future of his kingdom was sincere and genuine. He had been questioning the validity of his marriage for several years, long before he had fallen in love with this latest mistress. Moreover, he and the Queen had had little in common for years. It was a sensible decision, therefore, to consider applying for the annulment of his marriage and taking another wife who could bear him children. Falling in love was merely the final spur to action.

  Like all the others, this latest affair was conducted in the strictest secrecy, yet Henry was hinting at it in courtly fashion from the beginning of 1526, when, on Shrove Tuesday, at a joust held at Greenwich, he appeared in the lists decked in a splendid outfit of cloth of gold and silver, on which was embroidered in gold the deviceDeclare je nos('Declare I dare not'), which was surmounted by a man's heart engulfed in flames, typical of the symbolism so beloved by the Tudor court. The King's affair with Mary Boleyn had ended, probably in the previous year, so this pretty conceit could only mean that he had found someone else. The Queen was by now used to his infidelities, and probably attached little significance to this evidence of a new one.

  In May 1527, the affair was still going on, although the identity of the chosen lady was still a well-kept secret. Yet Henry could not resist dropping hints, for he was now completely enslaved by her, and wanted the world to know it. One evening, he entertained the court with a poignant song he had written that told of the heart's torment when spurned by the beloved:

  The eagle's force subdues each bird that flies;

  What metal can resist the flaming fire?

  Doth not the sun dazzle the clearest eyes,

  And melt the ice, and make the frost retire?

  The hardest stones are pierced through with tools,

  The wisest are with princes made but fools.

  Few present were aware to whom the song was addressed, nor guessed that she was probably present at the banquet in her official capacity as one of the Queen's maids of honour. Nor did anyone realise that this love affair, which had now been gathering momentum for more than fifteen months, was to be the most significant of them all. For the King was passionately, abjectly in love, a novel experience for him. Even more novel was the fact that the object of his desire was holding herself tantalisingly aloof, and would not even agree to being named his mistress in the courtly sense. This was surprising indeed in an age when it was considered almost honourable, and was at least lucrative, to become the mistress - in the sexual sense even - of a king. Yet this lady was keeping him firmly at arm's length and loudly proclaiming her virtue, which of course only served further to inflame the King's passion. She would have marriage, and the crown of England, or nothing. Her name was Anne Boleyn.

  Part II

  'The Great Matter'

  7

  Mistress Anne

  The story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn began with passion and ended with a bloody death. At its outset, Henry VIII was still a youthful ruler much praised by his contemporaries; by the time it ended he had degenerated into a ruthless tyrant, feared by his subjects, vilified throughout most of Europe, and capable of sending the woman he had so passionately loved to her execution.


  Throughout those years, Henry's motives remained clear, even though he was fast gaining a reputation for keeping his own counsel and being excessively secretive. Anne Boleyn, conversely, is an enigma. Her biographers, both before and after her death, were never impartial. On the one hand, we have the Jezebel portrayed by hostile Catholic writers, the 'Concubine' who would use any means at her disposal to ensnare a king and be rid of his wife and child, and who would not stop at adultery or incest to provide her husband with a son and so save her own skin. This violent hostility towards Anne Boleyn began in her own lifetime, and when she was beheaded in 1536 there were few who did not believe her to be guilty of at least some of the crimes attributed to her. The Spanish ambassador, who detested her, referred to her at this time as 'the English Messalina or Agrippina', and Reginald Pole, the son of the Princess Mary's former governess, openly called Anne 'a Jezebel and a sorceress'. In many ways, Anne was her own worst enemy: she attracted the enmity of Catholics because she openly espoused the cause of church reform, and was widely, but erroneously, reputed to be a Lutheran. She was also indiscreet, arrogant, vindictive in her treatment of her enemies, and given to abrupt mood swings. Although there is very little evidence that she was ever promiscuous, she was regarded as immoral from the first simply because she was the 'other woman' in the King's life. Her enemies, and they were many, thought her a she- devil, a tigress, and - according to a later Catholic source - the 'author of all the mischief that was befalling the realm'.