Authors: Linda Porter
Mary Tudor (10 page)
Yet the disaster that would overturn her world had been creeping up on Mary for some time; its origins went as far back as 1522. In that year, the year of the princess’s engagement to Charles V and the emperor’s memorable visit to London, the daughter of an English knight and diplomat made a sensational debut at the English court. Her sophistication, wit and sexuality immediately made her the centre of attention. In Katherine of Aragon’s rather staid circle of ladies and maids of honour, there was nothing like this newcomer at all. She had been educated as a European gentlewoman in the courts of Burgundy and France, but her charisma was all her own. Her name was Anne Boleyn, and when she eventually caught the king’s eye, the course of English history, and of Mary’s life, was changed.
PART TWO
The Rejected Princess
1528-47
1528-47
Chapter Three
The Queen and the Concubine
‘I say I am his lawful wife, and to him lawfully married.’
A
nne Boleyn is English history’s most famous ‘other woman’, and before he became a wife-murderer, when he was still full of longing and the romance of unfulfilled love, Henry VIII wrote her a series of beautiful letters. No Renaissance monarch could have better expressed the journey from the stylised amours of courtly love to the passion of real emotion: ‘The proofs of your affection are such,’ he wrote at the beginning of 1527, ‘the fine poesies of the letters so warmly couched, that they constrain me ever truly to honour, love and serve you, praying that you will continue in the same firm and constant purpose, ensuring you, for my part, that I will the rather go beyond than make reciproque, if loyalty of heart, the desire to do you pleasure, even with my whole heart root, may serve to advance it.’
1
nne Boleyn is English history’s most famous ‘other woman’, and before he became a wife-murderer, when he was still full of longing and the romance of unfulfilled love, Henry VIII wrote her a series of beautiful letters. No Renaissance monarch could have better expressed the journey from the stylised amours of courtly love to the passion of real emotion: ‘The proofs of your affection are such,’ he wrote at the beginning of 1527, ‘the fine poesies of the letters so warmly couched, that they constrain me ever truly to honour, love and serve you, praying that you will continue in the same firm and constant purpose, ensuring you, for my part, that I will the rather go beyond than make reciproque, if loyalty of heart, the desire to do you pleasure, even with my whole heart root, may serve to advance it.’
1
The extraordinary woman who prompted such proofs of her monarch’s devotion was a tall, dark-eyed brunette, attractive but not really beautiful, with an oval, almost sculpted face and long, elegant fingers. Henry’s former mistress, Bessie Blount, despite a name which conjures up the image of a plump housewife, was said to be considerably better looking. Anne’s figure was trim rather than voluptuous and contemporaries were critical of her lack of embonpoint, though it does not seem to have bothered Henry.What she possessed in abundance was presence, and she was well aware of the effect that she had on men.Today we would describe her as charismatic and sexy; she was the sort of person who stood out in a gathering because of her personality and social skills.The style of her dress, her deportment, her repartee, her sense of fun, all underpinned by a keen intelligence, gave her an edgy distinctiveness. This was no mean achievement in a fiercely competitive setting, where ladies who wanted to make good marriages vied with each other for attention. Henry’s court was a difficult place for women who got it wrong. Though Katherine of Aragon might be increasingly devoted to things of the spirit, her husband’s courtiers were largely pursuing personal power and fleshly pleasures, and who better to provide the latter than the young ladies paraded by anxious parents in court society. A daughter could be as much a key to worldly success as a son, but the pitfalls if she succumbed too soon to the temptations of the steamy atmosphere of court life were very evident to Anne Boleyn. Her elder sister Mary had a reputation, on both sides of the Channel, for sleeping with anyone. A brief period as Henry’s mistress had seen Mary fade into obscurity and had not materially advanced her family’s prospects. Widowed young, she settled down and married for love, without seeking permission. She was relieved to be away from court, with all its hypocrisy and intrigue. Only the passage of time would show that Mary was actually the more fortunate of the two sisters.
Anne continues to divide opinion, nearly five hundred years after the obscene charade of her downfall.To her enemies, she was nothing more than an upstart schemer, an alluring opportunist who seduced the king from the affections of his lawful wife, bastardised and ill treated his daughter and opened the floodgates for the tide of new religious ideas to sweep over England. She was characterised as an outspoken, self-serving shrew who failed to produce a male heir, could not hold the king’s affections, and got her comeuppance. Many thought it richly deserved but others, who had known her well, thought of her as a highly intelligent woman with an enquiring mind, genuinely committed to religious debate and the study of the scriptures in English.They pointed to her interest in education and the poor and the higher standards of behaviour among the ladies of her court, a contrast to the decadence from which she had emerged.
Fascination with Anne Boleyn has never gone away, but the scholarship of the last two decades means that we know a great deal more about her tempestuous life and can make more balanced judgements about her role. In fact, Anne was of good birth and closely related to both the Howards, who, as dukes of Norfolk, were the premier aristocrats of England, and to the earls of Ormonde, the top echelon of the Anglo-Irish nobility. Born in Norfolk, she certainly spent some of her childhood at the Boleyn family’s mansion at Hever in Kent, but she was no country girl with artificial airs and graces beyond her station. Her father, Sir Thomas Boleyn, was one of the most able diplomats of his day. A fluent French-speaker, he was highly regarded by Margaret of Austria, regent of the Low Countries, and by Francis I of France. It was Sir Thomas’s standing with these rulers which enabled him to give his younger daughter an advantage over her potential rivals in England, by sending her to their courts to be educated and ‘finished’ as the perfect female courtier. So Anne began her notorious career as very much part of the establishment, though with the secret weapon of an exotic continental gloss.
Yet to her denigrators, she came to represent alienation - of a king from his queen, of a country and its Church from the rest of Christendom, of a father from his daughter.To the imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, struggling to support his master’s suffering, humiliated aunt and cousin, she had no redeeming features. Mostly, he refused even to name her, as if denying her identity might in some way minimise her power and the wrong she had done.To him she was merely ‘the Concubine’, a disgraceful appendage to Henry’s life unworthy of individual recognition.
In Anne’s path, some political careers stumbled and were lost while others prospered. The king’s long-serving chief minister, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who had orchestrated Princess Mary’s time in the Welsh Marches, could not persuade the pope to free his master from Katherine of Aragon, and was dismissed. Meanwhile, Anne’s family and those who had supported her received honours and titles, and Thomas Cromwell, one of Wolsey’s men, stepped out of the shadows to implement the dismantling of the English Church. Even at the time, Anne was seen as a catalyst for changes in English society. These might, indeed probably would, have happened without Anne, since they mirrored convulsions shaking Europe as a whole, but her own personality and interests influenced the direction that England took. For six long years this redoubtable woman was at Henry’s side, as neither wife nor mistress, encouraging, cajoling, complaining, wheeling and dealing, but never, ever contemplating defeat. She had committed to him as wholeheartedly as he committed to her. She would be England’s queen, not a royal mistress, whatever the cost. And the cost, in money, prestige and international uncertainty, was high indeed, even if the ultimate rewards of sole authority in religious matters in England and the financial subservience of the English Church to Henry were worth the battle. It was a struggle with one major winner - the king - and many losers. And chief among these losers were Katherine of Aragon and her daughter, the princess Mary, who was to become Anne’s mortal enemy.
Nobody had a more lasting impact on Mary than Anne Boleyn. Like Chapuys, Mary would not even pronounce her name - ‘that woman’ was how she described her, and we can almost see the shudder when she uttered the words.Yet there was much more to their mutual enmity than mere personal hatred. Anne had a profound effect on Mary’s relationships with her father and mother and on her own view of who she was. Her physical health and emotional well-being never fully recovered from the strain of the break-up of her parents’ marriage and the anguish that followed. In exploring what happened through Mary’s eyes, it is possible to learn a great deal about the woman she became.
In other circumstances, Mary and Anne might have respected each other and even been companions, at least in the sense that favoured ladies-in-waiting were part of the inner circle around queens and princesses, close enough to be a comforting presence in their daily lives. The two women shared a love of music and dancing and a taste for the latest fashions. Both liked display and creating an effect in public, though Mary would have expected to be noticed by virtue of who she was, while Anne needed to work harder, using her training and wits. Anne had to entertain while Mary expected to be entertained. They were well-educated ladies, but to different ends, and Anne Boleyn had a far wider frame of reference than Mary. Growing up in Margaret of Austria’s court at Mechelen in the Low Countries, she had been developed under the direction of one of the most cultured women of the early 16th century. From there she went to join the entourage of Henry’s sister, Mary, during her brief reign as queen consort of Louis XII of France. For reasons that are not clear, Anne stayed on in France after Louis’s death and joined the household of Queen Claude, the 15-year-old wife of the new king, Francis I. For the better part of seven years she was one of Claude’s ladies, supporting her through annual pregnancies in the pleasant surroundings of the Loire chateaux. Francis used the delicate Claude as breeding stock but otherwise largely ignored her. His behaviour could not have left Anne, who was the same age as the queen, in any doubts about the basic expectations of the queenly role, but this does not seem to have been a deterrent in her own life.
So Anne, unlike Mary, knew about other countries and their customs first hand. She spoke French because she had lived there, rather than having been taught it by a schoolmaster in a quiet room in an English palace. And she had a far better idea of the ebb and flow of influence at court, the shifting allegiances and factions in which friends could become foes in a very short space of time. Flexible and intuitive, a natural manipulator, she simply knew more about the world than Mary did. And she was 15 years older.Yet when it came to confrontation, Anne found Mary an implacable opponent.
Mary probably saw Anne for the first time during the pageants given in honour of the imperial ambassadors who had come to finalise the details of the treaty of marriage between herself and Charles V, in early March 1522. It is unlikely she took especial interest in her.Why should she have noticed one among many of the pretty ladies who entertained the diplomats, when she herself, a six-year-old princess gorgeously bejewelled and attired, was the centre of attention? Yet the occasion was important for Anne, her first public performance at Henry’s court, and one for which she was well prepared. She was one of eight ladies, each representing a female virtue, who played in an entertainment known as the
Chateau Vert
. There is no modern equivalent of this piece of theatre, which was a spectacle without words, relying on lavish display and expenditure and evidently some degree of forward planning and rehearsal but not really calling for any acting ability. Anne would have known the plot, if it can be called that, already, since the
Chateau Vert
(a specially constructed wooden castle, painted green) was one of a number of standard masques involving imperilled ladies requiring rescue by chivalric forces, in this case led by the king himself. The performance took place after supper (which was eaten early, around five in the afternoon, in Tudor times) and the princess Mary would have watched as her aunt, known for ever after her few months in France as ‘The French Queen’, took a starring role representing Beauty, one of the eight qualities of the perfect mistress. Anne Boleyn was Perseverance, her sister Mary, Kindness, her future sister-in-law, Jane Parker, was Constancy (peculiarly inapt, in view of the role she would play in the downfall of two of Henry’s wives, Anne herself and Katherine Howard), and Gertrude, countess of Devonshire, a close friend of Katherine of Aragon, appropriately took the part of Honour.
Chateau Vert
. There is no modern equivalent of this piece of theatre, which was a spectacle without words, relying on lavish display and expenditure and evidently some degree of forward planning and rehearsal but not really calling for any acting ability. Anne would have known the plot, if it can be called that, already, since the
Chateau Vert
(a specially constructed wooden castle, painted green) was one of a number of standard masques involving imperilled ladies requiring rescue by chivalric forces, in this case led by the king himself. The performance took place after supper (which was eaten early, around five in the afternoon, in Tudor times) and the princess Mary would have watched as her aunt, known for ever after her few months in France as ‘The French Queen’, took a starring role representing Beauty, one of the eight qualities of the perfect mistress. Anne Boleyn was Perseverance, her sister Mary, Kindness, her future sister-in-law, Jane Parker, was Constancy (peculiarly inapt, in view of the role she would play in the downfall of two of Henry’s wives, Anne herself and Katherine Howard), and Gertrude, countess of Devonshire, a close friend of Katherine of Aragon, appropriately took the part of Honour.
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