The Anne Boleyn Collection II: Anne Boleyn & the Boleyn Family (18 page)

Let us consider the evidence for Anne's pregnancies...

September 1533

We know that Anne was heavily pregnant at her coronation on 1st June 1533 and that she gave birth to a healthy baby girl on 7th September 1533, the future Elizabeth I. There is no evidence of a pregnancy before this time, so that's pregnancy number one.

January 1534

On 28th January 1534, the imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, commented that "Anne Boleyn is now pregnant and in condition to have more children."
⁵
For Chapuys to have known that Anne was pregnant, Anne and the King must have been sure of her pregnancy. This means she must have conceived soon after her churching; Anne obviously did not suffer with fertility issues.

The next mention of this pregnancy is in a letter dated 27th April 1534 from George Taylor, Anne Boleyn's receiver-general, to Lady Lisle, in which he says that "The Queen hath a goodly belly, praying our Lord to send us a prince".
⁶
There is further evidence of this pregnancy; in July 1534, Anne's brother George, Lord Rochford, was sent on a diplomatic mission to France to ask for the postponement of a meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I because of Anne's condition. Anne was described as "being so far gone with child she could not cross the sea with the King".
⁷
Chapuys backs this up in a letter dated the 27th July, where he refers to the King delaying his meeting with the French King because "the lady de Boulans (Anne Boleyn) wishes to be present, which is impossible on account of her condition".
⁸
If, for example, Anne was twelve weeks pregnant when Chapuys reported it on 28th January, her baby would have been due around 12th August. This would have made her very heavily pregnant in July 1534, hence her being described as "being so far gone". The frustrating thing is that we don't know what happened to this pregnancy. There is no mention of Anne taking to her chamber, having a late miscarriage, premature birth or stillbirth. There is just Chapuys' report on 27th September 1534:

"Since the King began to doubt whether his lady was enceinte or not, he has renewed and increased the love he formerly had for a beautiful damsel of the court".
⁹

Chapuys doesn't say that Anne had a miscarriage or stillbirth; he merely writes of Henry no longer believing Anne to be pregnant. Now, it is not clear whether this is Chapuys' reading of the situation or whether it is him passing on a fact. It may well be that Anne gave birth to a stillborn baby and that the news was hushed up. However, this seems unlikely since ambassadors and Tudor chroniclers recorded Catherine of Aragon's stillbirths and miscarriages when this situation arose. I find it hard to believe that Anne could have faked a pregnancy, when she would have been dressed and bathed by her ladies, and would have had her sheets examined for menstrual blood. Perhaps she experienced a false (phantom) pregnancy (pseudocyesis). The symptoms of a false pregnancy, which can last months, are the same as pregnancy: the cessation of menstrual periods, a swollen abdomen, enlarged and tender breasts, nipple changes and even the production of milk. They also include feeling of the baby moving, morning sickness and weight gain. There would have been no way for Anne to differentiate between a real pregnancy and a false one; Catherine of Aragon and Mary I both suffered false pregnancies which fooled their doctors.

It is not known exactly what causes a false pregnancy, but one factor is thought to be an intense desire to get pregnant. Although Eric Ives believes that Anne "had no reason to be under stress at this date, having produced a healthy female child eight months earlier",
¹⁰
I have to respectfully disagree. Anne was under immense pressure. It was her duty to provide Henry with a son and heir, that was that. Henry had got over the disappointment of Elizabeth's gender because of the hope of a prince to come; now Anne had to provide that prince. That was pressure! Ives argues that Anne must have miscarried, rather than having a stillbirth, because there is no evidence of her taking her chamber. However, in medical terms the loss of a baby after 24 weeks is termed a stillbirth, and Anne must have been over 24 weeks pregnant in the July. It is odd that there was no mention of such a tragedy.

None of this explains Chapuys' comment in the September about Henry now doubting that Anne was pregnant. Perhaps Chapuys was not kept 'in the loop', or perhaps Anne's miscarriage or stillbirth was hushed up. It is impossible to know. Henry may well have wanted to keep it quiet rather than having to admit that Anne's pregnancy had ended in tragedy like so many of Catherine's.

1535

The only evidence for a pregnancy in 1535 is a sentence from a letter written by Sir William Kingston to Lord Lisle on 24th June 1535. Kingston wrote:

"No news here worth writing. The King and Queen are well, and her Grace has a fair belly as I have seen".
¹¹

Sir John Dewhurst,
¹²
believes that there is actually an error in the dating of this letter because Kingston asks to be remembered to "Master Porter", Sir Christopher Garneys, who actually died in 1534. It is likely, therefore, that the letter was written in either June 1533 or June 1534, and that Anne was not pregnant in 1535.

1. Figure 19
   - Queen Anne Boleyn, from "The Tower From Within"
   

29th January 1536 – Anne's Final Pregnancy

The majority of historians and authors believe that Anne Boleyn's final pregnancy ended with a miscarriage on 29th January 1536, the day of Catherine of Aragon's burial and a few days after Henry VIII suffered a serious jousting accident. There are five main pieces of contemporary evidence for the miscarriage: a letter written by Eustace Chapuys, the imperial ambassador; the individual chronicles of Charles Wriothesley, Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed; and the poem by Lancelot de Carles, secretary to the French ambassador:

1. 1. "On the day of the interment [Catherine of Aragon's funeral] the Concubine had an abortion which seemed to be a male child which she had not borne 3½ months, at which the King has shown great distress. The said concubine wished to lay the blame on the duke of Norfolk, whom she hates, saying he frightened her by bringing the news of the fall the King had six days before. But it is well known that is not the cause, for it was told her in a way that she should not be alarmed or attach much importance to it. Some think it was owing to her own incapacity to bear children, others to a fear that the King would treat her like the late Queen, especially considering the treatment shown to a lady of the Court, named Mistress Semel, to whom, as many say, he has lately made great presents."
   ¹³
   Eustace Chapuys to Charles V, 10th February 1536.
   
2. 2. "And in February folowyng was quene Anne brought a bedde of a childe before her tyme, whiche was born dead."
   ¹⁴
   Edward Hall
   
3. 3. "This yeare also, three daies before Candlemas, Queene Anne was brought a bedd and delivered of a man chield, as it was said, afore her tyme, for she said that she had reckoned herself at that tyme but fiftene weekes gonne with chield…"
   ¹⁵
   Charles Wriothesley
   
4. 4. "The nine and twentith of Januarie queen Anne was delivered of a child before hir time, which was borne dead."
   ¹⁶
   Raphael Holinshed
   

In his "Poème sur la Mort d'Anne Boleyn", Lancelot de Carles, writes:

"Adoncq le Roy, s'en allant a la chasse,Cheut de cheval rudement en la place,Dont bien cuydoit que pur ceste adventure Il dust payer le tribut de nature:Quant la Royne eut la nouvelle entendue,Peu s'en faillut qu'el ne chuet estendue Morte d'ennuy, tant que fort offensa Son ventre plain et son fruict advança,Et enfanta ung beau filz avant terme,Qui nasquit mort dont versa mainte lerme."
¹⁷

Here, de Carles is saying that the news of Henry VIII's jousting accident caused Anne to collapse, landing on her stomach, and that this caused her to give birth "avant terme", prematurely, to "ung beau filz", a beautiful son, who was born dead.

All five sources state that Anne miscarried her baby, and three of them state that it was a boy. Wriothesley goes on to put forward the idea that the miscarriage was caused by Anne suffering shock at the news of Henry VIII's jousting accident, as does Chapuys. The dates differ, with Chapuys and Holinshed stating that the miscarriage happened on 29th January, Wriothesley saying the 30th January, Hall saying February and de Carles stating that it happened after Henry VIII's jousting accident. However, I think we can safely assume that it happened at the end of January.

In Philippa Gregory's novel,
The Other Boleyn Girl
, Anne Boleyn miscarries "a baby horridly malformed, with a spine flayed open and a huge head, twice as large as the spindly little body".
¹⁸
Now, obviously this is just a novel, but Gregory used the work of historian Retha Warnicke as a source and Warnicke believes that Anne did miscarry a deformed foetus. In both
The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn
and her essay
Sexual Heresy at the Court of
Henry VIII
, Warnicke puts forward the idea that Anne's miscarriage was a factor in her downfall because it was "no ordinary miscarriage"
¹⁹
and that it was "an unforgivable act".
²⁰
According to Warnicke, the foetus was deformed; this was seen as an evil omen and a sign that Anne had committed illicit sexual acts or been involved in witchcraft. Warnicke believes this because:

• • Anne was charged with committing incest with her brother, George, who Warnicke believes to have been Mark Smeaton's lover.
  
• • Anne was charged with adultery with Smeaton, Norris, Brereton and Weston, who Warnicke believes to have been "suspected of having violated the Buggery Statute" and who "were known for their licentious behaviour."
  ²¹
  
• • There seems to have been a delay between the miscarriage and the news being announced, showing that there was something odd about it. Chapuys did not report it until 10th February 1536.
  
• • From late January 1536 Henry VIII councillors took steps to protect the King's honour "by leaking erroneous information about his consort before the public announcement of her miscarriage."
  ²²
  Warnicke believes that they did this so that the 'sin' would be seen as Anne's, and not that of the King.
  

In my own reading on pregnancy and childbirth in Tudor times,
^23
24
however, I have learned that deformities, or things like birthmarks, were actually thought to have been caused by things the mother had seen during pregnancy, rather than by the parents necessarily having committed a sexual sin. These were superstitious times.

The only source, anyway, for Anne miscarrying a deformed foetus is Nicholas Sander, a Catholic recusant writing in the reign of Anne's daughter, Elizabeth I. His book
De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani
was published in 1585; in 1877 it was translated from Latin into English by David Lewis as "Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism". In the English translation, Sander's record of Anne's miscarriage reads:

"The time had now come when Anne was to be again a mother, but she brought forth only a shapeless mass of flesh."
²⁵

Sander went on to write about how Anne blamed Henry VIII for the miscarriage, crying "See, how well I must be since the day I caught that abandoned woman Jane sitting on your knees". However, Sander did not attempt to explain the "shapeless mass" or to give any more details. I'm sure that if he had thought it was important and suggestive of sin or witchcraft, then he would have mentioned it. Sander is the only source that describes Anne's baby in this way, and he was writing much later (he wasn't born until ca.1530). As Eric Ives pointed out, "no deformed foetus was mentioned at the time or later in Henry's reign, despite Anne's disgrace"; nor was it mentioned in Mary I's reign "when there was every motive and opportunity to blacken Anne".
²⁶
Ives concluded that "it is as little worthy of credence as his assertion that Henry VIII was Anne's father"; I agree wholeheartedly. Sander, as a Catholic exile, had every reason to blacken the name of Elizabeth I and her mother, and he had no first hand knowledge of events that had happened in 1536.