In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I (23 page)

Once Anne had been identified as a viable target that following May, her enemies used every available anti-female insult to discredit her, from adultery and incest to witchcraft and murder. Her trial and those of her co-accused on the grounds of adultery and incest has long been discredited; Alison Weir has conclusively proved that the supposed dates of her illicit encounters fail to tally with her whereabouts at the time and even coincide with her period of lying-in or pregnancy. Her midwife Nan Cobham was questioned extensively, as were the women of her household, in an attempt to uncover irregular behaviour. Once Henry had decided she was going, whether he believed in her adultery or not, there was no turning back. With miscarriage and the birth of deformed children considered indicative of her poor morals, and as Tudor women were defined sexually and maternally, Anne’s femininity was attacked, using every means of justifying her sentence. Widespread misogyny was common during the sixteenth century. Those who transgressed clearly defined boundaries, such as overreaching commoners who married kings, were popular targets. Female inferiority was reinforced in every aspect of life, from the law courts to medicine, familial relations to lyrics, jokes and sayings. Women’s subordination and otherness from men permeated mass-market culture through sermons, manuals, treaties, popular literature, proverbs, folklore, charms, rhymes, song, ballads, anecdotes, jokes, superstition, seasonal crafts and customs, festivities, religious iconography, medicinal and herbal practices, emblem books, woodcuts for ballads and broadsheets, engravings and illustrations. They were considered to have a particular talent for being subversive: feminine intelligence was often presented proverbially as cunning: ‘women in mischief are wiser than men’, they were ‘necessary evils’ and, through intercourse and pregnancy, were ‘made perfect by men’; a woman was ‘the weaker vessel’, ‘the woe of man’ and ‘a man of straw was worth a woman of gold’. Popular culture identified them with noisy, silly geese, deceitful and insatiable cats, slippery eels, angry wasps and inflexible swine.

One common joke told how a Tudor man was asked why he had married a tiny woman and replied, ‘because of evils, the least was to be chosen’. Some pamphlets and chapbooks showed emblems of women lacking heads, in the sense of flawed intelligence but also decapitation as a symbol of the loss of power, the seat of wisdom, an inversion of patriarchal and therefore political power. Disobedience to a husband was small-scale treason, almost as threatening to society as uncontrolled sexuality: one pamphlet’s caption reads ‘a headless maid is the worst of all monsters’, punning on the unsanctioned loss of virginity and sexual appetite that conflicted with the notion of female submission. Assuming Anne’s trump card during her courtship was her virginity, later slanders of sexual lasciviousness highlight just how fragile and short-lived her main bargaining tool had been. Her appeal for Henry had partly lain in her denial and abstinence; as she refused to conform to the role of submissive wife, she was redefined in the terms of a sexual predator. The fear of female disobedience to male authority was apparent in popular maxims: ‘a woman does that which is forbidden her’, ‘women are always desirous of sovereignty’ and ‘all women are ambitious naturally’. The new queen represented the epitome of Tudor men’s most deep-rooted fears. Set within this context, the terminology of Anne Boleyn’s fall, with all its sexual and moral slurs, underlines a new truth about her condemnation. Her innocence in May 1536 was an irrelevance; by then, Henry had another wife and potential mother-of-an-heir in his sights. Anne’s fate turned on her inability to produce a male heir. Even with all the political and religious upheavals that were concurrent with her rise, Anne’s experiences as a mother, like Catherine’s, proved the defining factor of her life. Anne’s appeal to Henry was founded in fantasy; over the course of seven years of courtship, her attraction was rooted in the promise of her fertility. And as a woman, even a queen, she was vulnerable, a scapegoat of contemporary beliefs, which ultimately cost her her life. She was executed on 19 May 1536. As the Spanish Ambassador put it: ‘the entire future turns on the accouchement of the queen’.
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1536–1537

A Son at Last

Although I have no desire to put myself in this danger, yet being of the feminine gender I will pray with the others that God may keep us from it.
¹

Early one May morning, Anne Boleyn was led from the confinement of her rooms in the Tower of London towards the little green outside. There, a temporary scaffold had been erected, on the orders of Sir William Kyngston, Constable of the Tower, to ‘such a height that all present may see it’.
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Anne’s brother George, accused of incest, homosexuality and adultery, along with four other supposed co-conspirators, had met their deaths the day before; they must have been in Anne’s mind as she prepared to join them. The Venetian ambassador commented that she looked ‘exhausted and amazed’ and ‘kept looking behind her’ as if in disbelief, although John Hussee wrote that she died ‘boldly’.
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Dressed in a black damask gown and ermine mantle, she mounted the steps to stand before the crowd, which may have numbered as many as a thousand. She dispensed the traditional alms, made a speech putting herself in God’s hands and thanked her ladies for their service. Before her were ranged the familiar faces of courtiers, councillors and London officials, who had gathered three years previously to witness her coronation: now they had come to see the first public execution of a Queen of England. Anne knelt, blindfolded, and the hangman from Calais raised his sword.

Technically, her death was unnecessary, even if Henry believed in her guilt. Three days earlier, at Lambeth Palace, Cranmer had pronounced the royal marriage ‘null and void’. It was impossible, therefore, for Anne to have committed adultery if her union with the king had not been valid in the first place. This was not enough to save her life though, as Henry had previous experience of a wife who would not step aside; now he was keen to marry again. Even before Anne had been executed, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, nephew of Catherine of Aragon, was proposing the Infant of Portugal or the Duchess of Milan, as Henry’s third wife. The Queen of Hungary was also suggested but she was thought to be in ill health and not capable of bearing children. Approaching his forty-fifth birthday, still lacking a legitimate male heir, the possibility of securing his dynasty was apparently slipping away; yet these international brides did not merit the king’s consideration. He had already decided on his next queen, having discussed marriage with her before the sentence on Anne had been passed; her marked differences from her predecessor appearing more attractive as his relationship with Anne disintegrated. Jane Seymour was the daughter of John Seymour of Wulfhall, Wiltshire, a descendant of Edward III and distant cousin of both Henry and Anne. Chapuys described the prospective bride as aged over twenty-five, ‘of middle stature and no great beauty’, so fair as to be pale. She was ‘proud and haughty’ yet of ‘no great wit’ and was a great supporter of Princess Mary. Her appeal may have lain in her virginity, although Chapuys questioned this, as she was so advanced in years and had spent time at the licentious Tudor court. He punned on the possibility of her possessing a fine
enigme
, meaning a riddle or secret but also slang for the female genitals. According to Anne Boleyn, Henry had ‘neither vigour nor virtue’ in his sexual performance, so Chapuys concluded ‘he may make a condition in the marriage that she be a virgin, and when he has a mind to divorce her he will find enough of witnesses’.
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Other chroniclers confirmed this interpretation of her colouring and appearance, whilst some, like Polydore Vergil, found her ‘charming’ or considered the match had taken Henry from Hell to Heaven.

If Anne had contradicted conventional notions of feminine behaviour by overreaching her status and being proud and argumentative, Jane conformed. The 1534
A Treatise of the Nobilitie and Excellencye of Woman Kynde
, by German ‘magician’ Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, translated into English by David Clapham, described the females as delicate and pleasant, their flesh soft and tender, their colour fair and clear, the head comely and dressed with hair soft as silk. Like Jane, the ideal woman’s skin was white as milk and her eyes shone like crystals. Her voice would be small and shrill, her speech low and sweet. In movement, she was right and comely, her deportment and cheer were honest and commendable. This beauty was so superior to all other of God’s creatures, according to Agrippa, that the children of God took earthly women to be their wives. It was a description which would have pleased Henry, as God’s appointed representative on earth and Supreme Head of the Church of England since 1534. In contemporary terms, he had struck gold with Jane Seymour.

The shadow of the block hung over Jane and Henry’s wedding. Henry’s behaviour since Anne’s arrest had been giving rise to criticism, according to Chapuys: while his proposed union with Jane remained secret, he had been ‘banqueting with ladies’, returning after midnight by river and showing ‘extravagant joy’. These visits were probably made to Jane, whom he had established in a house by the river, 7 miles from court, facilitating regular visits and offering her the services of his own cook. Henry must have believed to some degree in Anne’s guilt or allowed himself to be convinced by a situation that suited his current need. He allegedly wept before Henry Fitzroy that his son had escaped her attempts to poison him, although ironically, Fitzroy was to die a month later. The callousness he displayed towards Anne was little different from that already shown towards Catherine of Aragon and his previously cherished daughter Mary: once a woman had been excluded from his favour, he was absolute and unyielding in his treatment of them. The willingness of Jane to enter into marriage in such circumstances has given rise to dichotomic historical interpretations of her as ruthlessly ambitious, or else as the passive pawn of her driven family. Tudor factional politics was brutal. Opportunities were seized in the wake of rivals’ falls from grace. David Starkey has commented on the seeming impossibility of the ‘plain Jane’ of Holbein’s portrait gaining her position as Henry’s queen without the driving force of her faction determined to bring Anne down.
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Jane was a means, not an end, to the pro-Mary group. Their success lay in their timing. Just as Anne had been, Jane was a player in a complex, heartless game, snatching the opportunity to rise that was borne out of the jaws of death. On the day of Anne’s execution, Cranmer issued a dispensation permitting Henry and Jane to marry in spite of their relation in the third degree: the following morning, Jane travelled secretly by barge to Henry’s lodgings, where they were betrothed. Five days later, rumours had already reached the Continent that he had taken another wife. Mary of Hungary wrote about the ease and speed of Anne’s replacement that ‘wives will hardly be well contented if such customs become general’.
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While speedy remarriage following the death of a spouse was relatively common in Tudor England, Henry’s record as a widower of eleven days can have rarely been beaten. The wedding ceremony was conducted by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, on 30 May, in the queen’s closet at York Place.

Jane first appeared as queen at Whitsun, which fell on 4 June. Her brother Edward was elevated to Viscount Beauchamp around the same time, receiving many properties, entitlements and lands. To celebrate, she may have worn some of the twenty-eight score (560) pearls that had been ordered to adorn her clothes or those embroidered into her kirtle, for which receipts were submitted at court ten days later.
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Henry intercepted her first conversation with an ambassador, claiming she would earn the title of ‘pacific’ as she was so peace-loving, while a few swift alterations transformed her personal badge from the inappropriate peacock to the self-sacrificing phoenix. Ultimately, as the device suggested, she would regenerate the Tudor dynasty at the cost of her own life. A pageant planned for early in the marriage featured Jane’s motto ‘bound to serve and obey’ among devices of true love knots, heavenly bodies, roses, olive trees, a lily among thorns and the well of life. Yet having married in speed, Henry was already experiencing doubts. That August, after famously asserting he was a man ‘like any other’, he confided to Chapuys that he was not convinced he would have any more children by the queen and was reported to have regretted not having seen two new beautiful women of the court before he had wed. That summer was spent in feasts and celebrations, whilst Henry hoped that Jane would fall pregnant; one witness reported seeing him put his hand on Jane’s belly saying ‘Edward, Edward’, months before Jane conceived. The imperative for a son was even more intense after the death of Henry Fitzroy from consumption that July; whilst he had lived, the possibility of his legitimization or inheritance of the throne acted as a safeguard against Henry’s failure to produce a male heir by any of his wives. Daily, he hoped to hear Jane confirm his hopes, yet the weeks passed. Perhaps it was desperation that prompted his last pilgrimage. Whilst in the process of investigating and suppressing the monasteries, with the destruction of hundreds of saints’ shrines, Henry undertook a journey along the Pilgrim’s Way across Kent’s North Downs, through Rochester and Sittingbourne, to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. With Jane, he prayed and left offerings to the very saint whose bones he would burn and name obliterate two years later. The programme of religious reforms in England was already so dramatic and destructive to centuries-old comforts and traditions, that the North rose in rebellion that autumn and Henry was much occupied by risings in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire which came closest to threatening his throne as any in his reign. Promising leniency to the ringleaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace, he later extracted a savage revenge of mass public hangings the following February. However, Henry must have soon believed himself vindicated in his reforms and suppressions as the queen had conceived a child and he was convinced it would be a son.