Game of Queens (31 page)

In the years ahead Marguerite of Navarre spent increasing amounts of time in the south, writing. Even Marguerite's husband, if the recollections attributed to her daughter are accurate [
see note on sources
], seems angrily to have warned her off her dangerous experiments of faith. Her prodigious output saw her turn increasingly to secular texts, albeit often with a moral or even a religious message under the surface. Crucially, almost none would be published in her lifetime.

 

In the Netherlands, Mary of Hungary, likewise in her earlier years accused of too much sympathy with Protestants, was rumoured to be a ‘
bonne luteriene
' (good Lutheran). She greatly admired the humanism of Erasmus, who wrote admiringly of her, and had also spent formative years in the Germanic circles where Luther's teachings were most in currency. When she became Queen of Hungary she aroused controversy by appointing the Lutheran Conrad Cordatus as her preacher; he then launched an attack on the papacy in front of the whole court.

In 1526 Luther had dedicated four psalms to Mary, having heard that she was, as he wrote, ‘inclined towards the Gospel', despite anything the ‘godless bishops' of Hungary could do to dissuade her. Her brother Ferdinand wrote to reprimand her but Mary wrote back that she couldn't control what Luther had to say, without, however, dissociating herself from the connection.

When the question of the Netherlands regency first arose, Mary had been anxious – for all her loudly professed aversion to the post – to reassure her other brother Charles V that she still held firmly to the family faith and would prove it by dismissing any possible Lutherans in her train. Charles, for his part, warned that he would send even his closest relative – parent, child, or sibling – to the stake rather than condone heresy. But perhaps in the end their attitude was not so dissimilar. For Charles, certainly, this was less a matter of conscience than of civic order. ‘By turning away from the Catholic faith, people will at the same time turn away from loyalty and obedience to their ruler,' he said.

Once in place in the Netherlands, Mary of Hungary proved a reasonably successful governor, making her court a centre of luxury and culture and eventually building a wonderful Renaissance palace at Binche as her home. Just as Mary and her sisters had themselves been raised by Margaret of Austria, so Mary continued the work, looking after those of her nieces who were already in Margaret's care. In 1533, when Christina of Denmark was, at the age of eleven, married to the Duke of Milan, her uncle Charles agreed she should immediately assume her wifely duties. But Mary, like Margaret before her, first protested and then stalled: ‘you may endanger her life, should she become pregnant before she is altogether a woman', Mary wrote. She begged her brother to forgive her for speaking out, but ‘my conscience and the love I bear the child compel me'. Forced to send Christina to Milan immediately after her twelfth birthday, Mary fell ill and asked to resign her post.

Like other women in power, she found that stress took a physical toll, and the times remained taxing. In 1534, religion was once again the problem. In the neighbouring German duchy of Westphalia, Anabaptists seized the town hall of Münster and declared the new Jerusalem, founded on common ownership and the equality of man. When they called on the faithful to join them, many in the Netherlands heeded the call and set out up the Rhine.

Besieged by its expelled bishop, Münster fell only in June 1535, so it was against this background, and heightened Franco-Imperial tension, that Charles V finally agreed to something for which his sister Eleanor, Queen of France, had long been pleading: that, after many years apart, she and her sister Mary of Hungary might meet.

In the summer of 1535 the two sisters met, at Cambrai, where Margaret of Austria and Louise of Savoy had faced each other just six years before. But this time Charles had decreed that no politics were to be discussed and though Eleanor came with a great retinue, at least some of whom surely hoped for diplomatic discussion, Mary unyieldingly followed her brother's script.

A sign of the changing times, perhaps? Or of very different personalities? Certainly no great results were achieved by
this
meeting at Cambrai.

25

‘to doubt the end'

England, 1536

‘Take great care to live well so that you have no reason to doubt the end, and so that you have the grace of God in this world and in the next', Anne de Beaujeu had warned. The game of queens was played for high stakes, and could carry a deadly penalty. The first half of 1536 saw the death of not one but two English queens. Before the corn was ripe in the fields, Katherine of Aragon's painful battle was ended and her rival Anne Boleyn had knelt in the straw of the scaffold to await the executioner's sword.

Like Katherine, Anne Boleyn had failed to produce another child. She probably miscarried in the summer of 1534 and possibly again in 1535. But Henry VIII's concern over what was perceived to be her lack of fertility would pick up shocking speed in 1536.

Katherine of Aragon died on 7 January, probably of cancer of the heart. She had been transferred sixty miles north, to Kimbolton in Huntingdonshire, where she continued the dismal practices she had followed in her previous place of imprisonment: having her meals prepared by the few old servants she trusted, for fear of poison, and refusing to leave her room. She eschewed the new servants Henry had put in place, whom she regarded as ‘guards and spies'. In the hours before she died she wrote a last letter to Henry – ‘My most dear lord, king and husband' – urging him to prefer the ‘health and safeguard of your soul' to worldly matters and to ‘the care and pampering of your body'.

She said she pardoned him everything and prayed that God would do the same. ‘Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.' The defiant signature was that of ‘Katherine the Queen'. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn celebrated the news of Katherine's death with a party but Anne was acute enough quickly to realise that for her at least, the celebrations may have been premature.

The evidence is contradictory as to whether Henry and Anne's marriage was already in trouble or whether the events of 1536 came out of a clear blue sky. Was the marriage on the rocks? The imperial ambassador Chapuys reported it was, but he had, in a hopeful spirit, been saying that for years. There continued to be regular reports of the couple as ‘merry', and if there were also stories of squalls that, certainly in the early days, had been the nature of their relationship. Even Chapuys admitted that some of their broils may have been mere ‘lovers' quarrels'.

It is possible that what attracted Henry in the mistress came to repel him in the wife. And if the king's attraction faltered, Anne Boleyn, unlike Katherine of Aragon, had no ruling European family behind her. Anne de Beaujeu had written wisely: ‘Nor should you talk too much or too sharply, like many foolish and conceited women who want to attract attention and, to be more admired, speak boldly and in a flighty way . . .'

Shortly before Katherine's death Henry had said to Chapuys that if she died, Charles V would have no cause to trouble himself about English affairs. Crudely and callously put, perhaps, but it was true that Henry could now renew his relations with Charles without having to take Katherine back as part of the price. On the contrary, it was now the Francophile, intrusive Anne, rather than the wounded figure of Katherine, who stood in the way of a new imperial alliance.

Anne Boleyn was as identified with the French interest as if she were indeed a Frenchwoman. After Anne's death, Mary of Hungary, despite their childhood acquaintance at Mechelen, remarked that she had been a Frenchwoman and thus the Habsburgs' enemy. And almost as though she had been a French princess, married off and then abandoned, like others in this story, she found herself caught between the two sides.

France had long been ambivalent about the new situation in England. Henry VIII certainly believed François supported his search for an annulment, but France had proved unwilling to confront the pope to secure it. In 1535, Anne Boleyn had been shocked when France suggested a match between the officially illegitimate Mary and the dauphin, more so when it proved lukewarm about the marriage of the baby Elizabeth to even one of François's younger sons. France's mounting persecution of reformers, moreover, alienated Anne's reforming friends.

Anne thought she had a trump card to play: she was once again pregnant. But on 29 January 1536 – the day of Katherine of Aragon's funeral – Anne Boleyn miscarried again, disastrously. She blamed it on the shock, five days before, of hearing that Henry had been injured in a joust. She had, as Chapuys reported ‘miscarried of her saviour'. ‘I see that God will not give me male children,' Henry told her ominously, later adding to a male courtier that he had been ‘seduced by sortileges [enchantments]' into the marriage.
¹

No wonder Chapuys wrote to the emperor that Anne's reaction to Katherine's death had not been unmixed joy. She had, when she paused to think, begun to fear she would meet the ‘same end'. In mid-January she changed tack, or at least tactics, in regard to Katherine's daughter, writing to those in Hatfield, where Mary had been transferred to join the baby Elizabeth's household, that Mary should no longer be pressured to acknowledge Elizabeth as her superior in rank. She must have been aware that Henry was attracted to Jane Seymour, one of her ladies-in-waiting: a woman pale, passive, wholly English; a much more traditionally submissive model of femininity.

But the signs were contradictory. And Anne Boleyn herself must have found them so. On 18 April Chapuys was persuaded, or manoeuvred, into doing what he had for so long avoided and acknowledging Anne, in her capacity as queen, as she passed through chapel – exchanging the ‘mutual reverences required by politeness' as he put it – making Katherine's daughter Mary ‘somewhat jealous' when she heard. That King Henry should insist the ambassador of the emperor, Queen Katherine's nephew, should acknowledge Katherine's supplanter as England's queen surely suggests that Henry was not at this moment actually intending to put Anne away. Although conversely, having won this point may have meant that his ego was no longer so closely tied to having Anne accepted.

Henry VIII had come to doubt whether Anne Boleyn would give him a male heir, and he wanted Jane Seymour. But there was another chain of dissent. On 2 April 1536 Anne's almoner, Skip, preached a sermon in front of the king's councillors, describing how King Ahasuerus was almost persuaded to the massacre of the Jews by his evil counsellor Haman, and was saved from the deed only by his wife, Esther. At her coronation, Anne (like, ironically, Katherine) had been compared to Esther; and Haman could easily be identified as Thomas Cromwell.

At the very end of Anne's life Chapuys wrote of ‘the heretical doctrines and practices of the concubine – the principal cause of the spread of Lutheranism in this country'. But it is possible that reform was proceeding along lines she had not envisaged. In 1535, there had been a general inspection (‘visitation') of the monasteries under Cromwell's aegis, with some smaller institutions scheduled for suppression. But it was obvious the process would pick up speed. And Anne may have clashed with Cromwell over where the proceeds of the dissolution of the monasteries should go: into education and social reform, as Anne wanted, or into the king's coffers.

However, the accusations made against Anne in the spring of 1536 were framed in terms of sexual misbehaviour. After Anne Boleyn's death Lancelot de Carles, secretary to the French ambassador, said that Lady Worcester, a member of Anne's household, herself accused of lax morality, had exclaimed in her defence that her own faults were nothing compared to those of the queen and that the queen had had carnal knowledge of her musician Mark Smeaton, of one of the king's favourite gentleman Henry Norris and of her own brother, George.

On 30 April Mark Smeaton was taken to Cromwell's house for questioning and – possibly under torture or the threat of it – confessed to having three times had sex with the queen. Anne herself described a recent exchange of words which seemed to show him languishing after her; languishing, perhaps, in the tradition of the game of courtly love which, however, his lowly rank did not allow him to play. Other remarks she made to other men might seem to suggest the game of courtly love gone sour but the point is that Smeaton's confession, true or false, put a new complexion on all subsequent inquiries, which would now operate from a presumption of Anne's adultery.

Henry was surely told of this. The Scottish reformer Alexander Ales later told Anne's daughter Elizabeth that he remembered, after Smeaton's confession, ‘your most religious mother carrying you, still a little baby, in her arms and entreating the most serene King, your father, from the open window . . . the faces and gestures of the speakers plainly showed that the King was angry'. The scene shows Anne and Henry in distress but surely still also in uncertainty. Henry decided to postpone his planned and imminent trip with Anne to Calais for a week but the jousts to celebrate May Day the next day were still to go ahead.

Anne Boleyn must have sensed where she was vulnerable. Also on 30 April she begged Norris to swear before her chaplain that she ‘was a good woman'; a reaction to another incident capable of a deadly interpretation. Asking Norris, who was betrothed to marry one of her ladies, why he had not yet gone ahead with the match, Anne suggested a scandalous reason: that Norris hoped to marry Anne herself. ‘You look for dead men's shoes; for if ought came to the king but good, you would look to have me.' Under the Treason Act of 1534 words which intended harm to the king were treasonable.