The Children of Henry VIII (15 page)

But Anne would shortly be on the defensive. When, in July 1534, she miscarried, it would take over a year for her to get pregnant again. Henry’s eye, meanwhile, started to rove. In October, George Boleyn’s wife Jane was rusticated from Court for colluding with Anne to secure the exile of an unidentified woman with whom the king was flirting.
²³
Whoever his amour was, Henry had dropped her by February 1535, but that was only because he was trying to seduce a girl known as ‘Madge’ Shelton. ‘Madge’ was almost certainly the nickname of Mary Shelton, the youngest daughter of Mary and Elizabeth’s joint custodians and Anne’s cousin, who took a leading part in the games of courtly love in the queen’s privy lodgings and was the muse of several of the ‘poets-as-lovers’ or ‘lovers-as-poets’ who offered to serve ladies and win their hearts.
²⁴

In late October 1535, Anne was at last pregnant, but, as was his old habit, this only seemed to encourage Henry’s dalliances. The previous month, he and Anne had stayed for five days with Sir John Seymour and his wife at Wolf Hall in Wiltshire at the end of six weeks of hunting and hawking in the Severn Valley in Gloucestershire. Jane, one of Sir John’s daughters who was 26, had served Katherine and then Anne as a gentlewoman. Her two brothers, Edward and Thomas, were ambitious, and in Edward’s case outstandingly able. The king did not fall in love with Jane at first sight—but soon he would be thinking constantly and wistfully of her, for unlike Anne, who was increasingly becoming waspish, sweetness was Jane’s trademark.
²⁵

When Katherine died at 2 p.m. on Friday, 7 January 1536, fortune briefly seemed to favour Anne. Henry rejoiced, and for several reasons. He had come to despise Katherine for her intransigence over the divorce, but more significantly her nephew, Charles V, was a pragmatist. Honour forbade him to treat with Henry or recognize Anne while his aunt was alive, but after her death he could—and did. The move coincided with a souring of relations with Francis for his reluctance to follow Henry’s lead and break with Rome. All the ships belonging to the English merchants had been seized at Bordeaux and Henry was furious.

At first Henry threatened to ally with Charles simply to pile the pressure on Francis, but gradually Cromwell won him round to the idea of switching sides for good.
²⁶
Charles, for his part, feared an imminent French attack on his position in Italy and so needed Henry as an ally to harry Francis in northern Europe.

Dressed from head to toe in yellow satin and sporting a white feather in his hat, Henry took Elizabeth to mass at Greenwich Palace on the Sunday after Katherine’s death, walking beside her in the procession ‘with trumpets and other great triumphs’. After dinner he danced with her in his arms, showing her off ‘first to one and then to another’ of his courtiers.
²⁷

Cromwell, never seriously in doubt that the Anglo-French alliance benefited only Francis, continued to strive for a
rapprochement
with Charles. With his eye on events in Rome rather than in Paris, he sought to tie the Holy Roman Emperor to Henry in ways that would ensure a papal excommunication of the English king would never be published, nor a Catholic invasion launched against him.
²⁸

Anne, meanwhile, looked at her most vulnerable. Her cutting remarks and dictatorial methods had breached the limits
of conventional gender roles, upsetting Court officials and her own family, notably Norfolk and his wife. Her vehement and outspoken opposition to Cromwell’s diplomacy and her proposals to divert the proceeds of the Dissolution of the Monasteries towards education and social reform rather than to cash reserves, which she made known by setting her chaplains to work on a preaching campaign in which Cromwell was pilloried, had turned the king’s chief minister into a powerful enemy. If that were not enough, her connections to the evangelical reformers were considered to be heretical.

Now Henry started to share his doubts about his second wife with a trusted Privy Chamber intimate. He had married her, he confided, while ‘seduced by witchcraft, and for that reason he considered it null.’ ‘This’, he added, ‘was evident because God did not permit them to have any male issue, and that he believed he might take another wife.’
²⁹

It was essential that Anne had a son—and quickly.

Instead, on 29 January, she miscarried. The foetus was about three and a half months old, ascertainably male.
³⁰
With another pregnancy failure and his eye on Jane Seymour, Henry’s confidence in his second marriage was shattered.

Anne, in desperation, cast the blame on a severe shock she had received five days earlier. While jousting at Greenwich, Henry had been unseated by an opponent, tumbling to the ground while fully armed with his horse on top of him. It was fright, Anne claimed, that had caused her to miscarry.

Except the timing seems wrong. Within two hours of his accident, Henry recovered consciousness. And when his servants had divested
him of his armour, he declared that he ‘had no hurt’. Certainly there was no brain damage and no serious injury was apparent at the time, although it would only be a year before rumours of trouble with his left leg started to seep out.
³¹
In the longer term, the consequences of hunting and jousting accidents like this would be severe, but at the time the general verdict was that Anne’s miscarriage was entirely due to ‘her utter inability to bear male children.’
³²

Of course, if the king were positive for the blood group antigen known as Kell and Anne—like Katherine before her—was negative, everything would fall into place. The couple could at most produce one living child successfully. Thereafter, the foetus would almost certainly be miscarried or stillborn, because of the rare genetic incompatibility between the blood groups of the parents. If so, this was as much Anne’s tragedy as Katherine’s (see
Chapter 1
).

Henry, however, had invested all his hopes in Anne’s giving him a son. He did not intend to tolerate failure. As the Spanish ambassador excitedly informed Charles, the king had spoken fewer than ten times to his wife in more than three months. When she miscarried, he merely said, ‘I see that God will not give me male children.’
³³

Anne hit back, rebuking Henry for his dalliances with other women. ‘The love she bore him’, she angrily insisted, ‘was far greater than that of the late Queen, so that her heart broke when she saw that he loved others.’
³⁴

Anne was only too well aware of his swiftly developing relationship with Jane Seymour. So far it was chaste, but soon the king would find Jane lodgings in the house of Sir Nicholas Carew, another of his Court intimates, at Beddington in Surrey, where he paid her regular night-time visits.
³⁵
Carew and Jane’s elder
brother coached her in her lines. She was to insinuate to Henry the invalidity of his marriage with Anne, and to resist his sexual advances until she was betrothed. Cromwell was deeply implicated in this
putsch
. It was simply a case of finding an opportunity to strike.

Cromwell’s chance came in late April. On Saturday the 29th, Anne was overheard quarrelling violently with Henry Norris, the chief gentleman of Henry’s Privy Chamber. Courtly banter in her apartments had got completely out of hand when Anne teased Norris over his relationship with ‘Madge’ Shelton, with whom he was having a fling. Since Norris was a widower, why had he not married her, Anne wanted to know? When Norris replied, ‘He would tarry a time’, the queen had petulantly retorted, ‘You look for dead men’s shoes, for if ought should come to the king but good, you would look to have me.’
³⁶

Norris, stunned by the folly of her tactless remark, at once declared that if the thought ever crossed his mind, ‘he would his head was off’. He knew that such trivial badinage was extremely dangerous if overheard, since it could be misconstrued as a plot to murder Henry.

And so it was. On Sunday, Henry and Anne had a furious row. The king made up his mind to ditch her during the May Day jousts at Greenwich, allowing Cromwell to orchestrate her trial for conspiring Henry’s death, an allegation he spiced up with charges of multiple adultery with Norris and three other courtiers, including a musician Mark Smeaton, and incest with her brother George. By raising such monstrous charges of depravity going back over three years, Henry could renounce his paternity of the miscarried foetus and secure his freedom, while Cromwell could eliminate his enemies in the Privy Chamber as the ‘violators’ of the queen.
³⁷

Norris and his fellow courtiers were tried and condemned on the 12th, Anne and George on the 15th. On the 17th, the alleged partners in Anne’s sexual crimes, including her brother, went to the block. On the same day, Cranmer pronounced Henry’s second marriage invalid. Two days later, Anne herself was executed, killed by a single blow of a sword in the French manner—an executioner was specially brought in from St Omer. Her head fell to the ground with her lips and eyes still moving.

The moment Henry heard that he was free, he was rowed straight to Jane ‘whom he had lodged a mile from him, in a house by the river’.
³⁸
On the same day, Cranmer issued a dispensation for their marriage, and on 30 May, in the queen’s oratory at the king’s new palace of Whitehall, the couple exchanged their vows.
³⁹

The following month, Parliament was recalled to debate the Second Act of Succession, which abrogated the claims to the succession derived from Henry’s earlier marriages and declared both his daughters illegitimate, even though the king would never deny his paternity. Now only Jane’s offspring would be able to claim the throne, unless perchance she predeceased Henry without bearing a son and he fathered one by another wife.
⁴⁰

Anne’s dramatic fall affected Henry’s children in radically different ways. Elizabeth was still much too young to appreciate the tragedy that had befallen her mother. At this stage in her upbringing, economy was her greatest enemy. She suddenly lost all the luxuries and fine clothes she had enjoyed with the money slipped by Anne to Lady Bryan. She also lost her royal title and privileges as Mary had before her.

But with Elizabeth degraded, Mary felt vindicated, for she had always regarded Anne as little better than a whore. Now at last, if only by virtue of age, she recovered precedence over her sibling in the joint household, currently settled mainly at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire.

Except her victory was brief. Because the pressure to submit to her own degradation, far from decreasing, was unexpectedly ratcheted up. Not only did her father decide not to restore her title, he also demanded, increasingly vindictively, that she should subscribe to the Acts of Supremacy and Succession and acknowledge that her parents’ marriage had been ‘by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful’.
⁴¹

To this end, Henry sent a high-level delegation of privy councillors to Hunsdon. Led by the Duke of Norfolk, they berated Mary with threats, saying menacingly that ‘If she was their daughter, they would beat her and knock her head so violently against the wall that they would make it as soft as baked apples.’
⁴²

When she refused to budge, Cromwell wrote disparagingly to her, ‘I think you the most obstinate woman that ever was, and I dare not open my lips to name you unless … you repent your ingratitude and are ready to do your duty. I have therefore sent you a book of articles to subscribe.’
⁴³

Once again Mary decided to appeal directly to her father, telling him she would ‘submit to him in all things next to God, humbly beseeching your highness to consider that I am but a woman, and your child, who hath committed her soul only to God, and her body to be ordered in this world as it shall stand with your pleasure.’
⁴⁴
It was a plea of desperation. And predictably it failed.

The heightened psychological pressure added a catalogue of neuralgia, insomnia and toothache to Mary’s menstrual complaints,
which now included amenorrhoea (absent periods) caused by stress.
⁴⁵
Soon she could bear the strain no longer. After taking counsel from the Spanish ambassador, who advised her that a concession made under compulsion could never be binding in conscience and that the pope would forgive her, she capitulated on 22 June, signing the articles without even reading them.
⁴⁶