Mary Tudor (11 page)

Read Mary Tudor Online

Authors: Linda Porter

Anne was clearly in good company as Henry and his knights, at first repulsed with a shower of sweets and rosewater, eventually overcome the ladies’ reluctance by a barrage of fruit. She and her companions emerged from the castle and agreed to dance with their chivalrous pursuers before the audience and performers went off to an expensive banquet, and the young princess, perhaps, went off to bed. The occasion must have been an exciting one for a little girl, but for Anne it was, despite the significance of the underlying international politics, very much a reflection of her upbringing and its accompanying expectations. She was trained as a court entertainer and knew her place. She must look decorative, perform professionally in masques, dance well and hold her own in social conversation. Flirtatious behaviour with admiring gentlemen was perfectly in order, so long as the bounds of decency were not exceeded. After all, the idea was that one might become her husband. A princess had different standards and Mary’s husband, it was believed, would be grand indeed. Sexual attractiveness, even a pleasing personality, was not required by either party, despite the ritual exchange of portraits. It was all about power.
 
It is not possible to say when Henry VIII first noticed Anne Boleyn, though she evidently did not make an immediate conquest of him by her performance in the
Chateau Vert
. Her father he knew well and her sister he preferred to forget. In the years between Anne’s court debut and Princess Mary’s departure for the Welsh Marches, Henry had many other things on his mind. Chief of these, the one that would not go away - indeed, got worse with every passing year - was the succession. For although Mary never acknowledged it, and probably did not realise it at the time, her father had decided to end his marriage to Katherine of Aragon before he fell in love with Anne Boleyn. If it had not been Anne, it would have been someone else. Henry’s growing affection for Anne explains the timing of his moves to have his marriage to Katherine formally annulled, but it was not the prime motive. That motive had to do with power and security, just as in the marriage negotiations with Charles V, which never came to anything. Indeed, it could have been the realisation of just how difficult it was proving to find a match for Mary, young as she still was, which brought home to Henry the realities of a situation that he regarded with growing desperation.
In 1525 he was only 34 but his wife was 40 and it was obvious she would never have any more children.The future of his dynasty, and of England, lay with a girl of nine, unlikely to produce children before her mid-teens at the earliest.Who was to say they would be sons, even when they came? And if they were, would they be true heirs of England, or, more probably, foreign princes brought up outside the realm? Though he had himself acknowledged that Mary was England’s heir, Henry never fully convinced himself that she could succeed him as queen in her own right.There were too many uncertainties, and these concerns themselves weakened Henry’s own position. Eventually, there came a point when he told himself that matters must be addressed, that sending his illegitimate son off to the north of England and his daughter to the west was not the solution. Like all men of his time, Henry looked to God for explanations of his predicament and guidance for the way forward. Disquietingly, the Bible seemed to provide an answer that was not regarded as an impediment at the time of his accession. He had married his brother’s wife and the book of Leviticus said that this was unlawful. No wonder he and Katherine were never blessed with sons who lived.They had flagrantly disregarded God’s will and lived in sin all these years.
Once the light dawned, Henry saw a way out of his wider dilemma. It was not unheard of for monarchs to put aside their wives and in his case there was no alternative, as he had sinned. A papal dispensation would be needed and he still held Katherine personally in great esteem (in fact, he seems to have been rather cowed by her and was often left tongue-tied by her defiance in the face of his attempts to put her aside), but they were no longer having sexual relations and their different interests and outlooks meant that they had little in common. Now he must settle his account with God, his conscience and his country. He had every intention that Katherine would be well served and generously treated, but his priority was to find a new wife and beget male heirs. What this would mean for Mary was left studiously vague.The indications are that he evaded directly addressing the issue for as long as he could, as did those around him. A child born in what was, at the time, believed to be lawful wedlock was not necessarily illegitimate if the marriage was later found to be invalid. But his doubts about Mary’s viability as his heir were only too apparent.
 
At first, Henry’s reasons for ending his marriage were mostly negative. He was tired of Katherine, who could have no more children; his dynasty hung on the slim thread of a young girl’s life, and though she had been well prepared he could not bring himself to accept that Mary, alone, was his future. He had erred and God had shown his disfavour.Yet by the time that Henry and his daughter met in Oxfordshire in the late summer of 1526, Henry had a much more positive reason to turn from shifting anxieties to positive action. He had fallen for Anne Boleyn.
At first he seems to have noticed Anne because she was the object of courtly pursuit by the poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, one of Henry’s diplomats and companions. Perhaps it began as curiosity and a regal flexing of muscle, the desire to remind Wyatt that all those near to the king were there because he wanted their society but that it was all a game played by his rules. Wyatt must stand aside and make way for his monarch, an expert in the etiquette of courtly love and its progression to sexual surrender.The lady would surely succumb, just as her sister had done.
But the lady did not succumb, either to chivalric gestures and protestations, or to the less subtle signals that Henry would like to sleep with her. Anne was in her mid-twenties and still without a husband, despite various suitors being mentioned. She had seen what happened to her sister as the king’s mistress, married off to a cuckold of a husband to give her an air of respectability. Anne was not impressed. At first she rejected Henry, which only enflamed his ardour. Deciding that she must be worried about security and status, and also yearning for her lively, feisty company, Henry made it clear that he wanted Anne as
maîtresse en titre
. He envisioned this as a permanent arrangement, like the relationship between the king of France and his Françoise de Foix.
2
It would have been an impressive success for Anne Boleyn and her family, but she remained unpersuaded, preferring to absent herself from temptation and pressure at home in Hever.We do not know at what point she began to reciprocate Henry’s feelings, or which of them first thought of marriage as the only way their relationship could develop, but by the spring of 1527, not long after Mary’s marriage plans with the duke of Orléans had been deferred, Henry began to consult about an annulment of his own marriage. By the summer of that year, convinced at last that she could be Henry’s wife,Anne apparently agreed to marry him. From that point, events moved swiftly. At the end of August, Henry, having consulted with a number of advisers during an extended stay at the palace of New Hall in Essex (where, ironically, his daughter Mary later lived), decided to send an envoy to Rome to seek a papal dispensation for the annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. His mind was made up. He would put aside Katherine, his wife of 18 years, who was really no wife at all, and marry Anne Boleyn. With Anne, he could realistically hope to have male heirs. And he did not expect to have to wait long.
 
Seldom can hopes have been so comprehensively crushed, or with such momentous results. Convinced of the legal and theological strength of his case, Henry proceeded on the basis that Wolsey would establish a court to try the validity of his marriage. The court finding that Henry had, indeed, been unlawfully wedded to his brother’s widow all these years, the door would be opened for an annulment from the pope.Thus Rome would rubber-stamp a decision already made in England and Katherine, sidelined and not even officially informed of what was going on, would become the victim of a classic fait accompli. By the autumn it might all be over.
This scenario, however, was far too good to be true. It may have had an elegant simplicity but it overlooked the personality of the queen and the international context in which she was still a player. More crucially, it supposed that the Medici pope, Clement VII, would share Henry’s interpretation of canonical law. Events were soon to prove that whether he did or did not was largely irrelevant. Henry had also failed to appreciate the impact of continued instability in continental Europe. On 6 May 1527, before Wolsey’s court was even assembled, a mutinous and unpaid imperial army attacked Rome, pillaging and murdering in a manner reminiscent of barbarian hordes.The pope became the prisoner of the emperor. Charles V was a good Catholic and rather embarrassed by the orgy of looting and rape carried out by troops in his employ, but he did not much care for Italian popes. Now he had one under his control. In England his aunt, though no doubt suitably shocked by what had happened to the Holy City, knew that she had been given a breathing space and an opportunity to challenge her husband. Wolsey, meanwhile, could turn the information coming from Europe to his own advantage, since it seems likely that, privately, he was never fully persuaded of the arguments that the king wanted him to make. On the last day of May he pronounced that he could not proceed to judgement and referred matters to a learned group of churchmen and lawyers. Henry’s straightforward annulment was stopped in its tracks.
Katherine would have fought, in any case, but her opposition would have been muffled and far less effective. Excluded from the first steps to have her marriage annulled, she was not officially informed of Henry’s intentions until 22 June. The confrontation was painful, apparently for both of them. Henry confirmed his wife’s worst fears when he told her ‘they had been in mortal sin all the years they had lived together’. His conscience could abide it no longer. They must separate. He asked her to give thought to where she might like to retire. He must have hoped that she would see the futility of opposition, presenting his case with a terse finality that signified that he would not change his mind. He was her sovereign, and she must obey him. He could hardly have expected her to obey him as his wife, since he had just informed her that she was no such thing. Did he seriously believe that she would meekly disappear from the scene or that she would not challenge his arguments? Despite the strength of his personal beliefs, Henry’s interpretation of what the book of Leviticus had to say about marrying his brother’s widow was selective. Childlessness was the biblical penalty for a sinful union and Mary was clearly proof that, while the marriage had not been blessed with sons, it had produced one healthy offspring.

Other books

12 - Nine Men Dancing by Kate Sedley
Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Awakened by Walters, Ednah
Sweet Perdition by Cynthia Rayne
Yes by RJ Lawrence
Consider the Lily by Elizabeth Buchan
The Matter Is Life by J. California Cooper