Sex with the Queen (15 page)

Anne led the fashions at Henry’s court, trading in the tight wrist-length sleeves for wide sleeves hanging down to the knee.

She rejected the unattractive peaked gable headdress for the lovely crescent-shaped French cap. Anne wore rich gowns of m e d i e v a l q u e e n s , t u d o r v i c t i m s 6 5

royal purple, a color reserved for royalty, embroidered with sil-ver and gold and studded with precious gems.

Her life as queen-in-all-but-name at the numerous Tudor royal palaces was luxurious. The magnificence of the king was manifested in his lodgings, apparel, barges, and coaches. Royal rooms were decorated with elegant tapestries in vivid colors, elaborately carved tables, and chairs upholstered in velvet. Anne sat in the queen’s chair of estate at royal events and presided over great feasts. Her huge four-poster bed boasted gold fringe from Venice and gold tassels from Florence. She accompanied the king as he went on his rounds to the various royal palaces—often thirty trips a year.

The court’s absence allowed the staff to clean out a residence, wash the walls of urine, sweep out the flea-ridden rushes on the floor, and allow the water supply in palace wells to build up.

Henry was one of the few premodern rulers who abhorred dirt.

He issued edicts prohibiting urinating in hallways and throwing food on floors. Peeing in the king’s cooking hearth was strictly forbidden. Palace officials painted large red crosses on outside walls that were frequent targets of urination in the hopes that no one would want to desecrate such a holy symbol. They were often disappointed.

Henry made sure his palaces had conduit systems, a spring-fed early type of plumbing which used lead pipes to bring water to kitchens, fountains, fishponds, and gardens and had the added value of flushing out the sewers beneath the palace. The royal family, and the most important courtiers, had running wa-ter in their own rooms, though it was not usually heated. Henry VIII’s bath at Hampton Court, however, had water piped in hot from a stove in the room next door. Despite Henry’s momentous efforts to achieve cleanliness, he was often pestered by fleas and lice, and he usually wore a piece of fur to bed in the hopes that the critters would jump on the fur and not on the king.

But the unprecedented cleanliness and luxury of Henry’s court were not enough for Anne. She had a political agenda. At Anne’s goading, Henry exiled his devoted wife to a drafty castle where she would die, and he publicly proclaimed his daughter, s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

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Princess Mary, a bastard. He then broke from the Catholic Church, putting to death all subjects who would not recognize him as head of the Church of England. He tossed monks and nuns into the streets and grabbed church properties for himself.

Time-honored political alliances were shattered, new ones were forged. Like a puppeteer, this not pretty daughter of the minor nobility held the strings to the kings and queens and cardinals of Europe, the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor and, by lifting a finger, made them dance.

Only after six years, when Henry’s divorce from Catherine was well under way and Anne the acknowledged fiancée, did she finally accept Henry into her bed. After so many years of waiting we can imagine the blessed release of that first night, the taste of her skin, the feel of his weight, the cries of pure delight in the dark. It was a providential coupling for England. Anne cleverly became pregnant immediately with the greatest monarch the na-tion would ever have. Desperate for a son, Henry wanted to make sure the prince Anne was carrying would be born within the sa-cred bonds of marriage, an undisputed legal heir. He secretly married Anne in January 1533.

A century after Henry VIII, the earl of Sandwich said, “He that doth get a wench with child and marries her afterward it is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap it upon his head.”17

Very soon after his second marriage, Henry must have felt as if he had indeed clapped such a hat upon his head. Anne Boleyn stubbornly gave him a princess—the future Queen Elizabeth—instead of a prince. Nor was the new queen popular with the En-glish people. There were so few cheers during Anne’s 1533

coronation that it resembled “a funeral rather than a pageant,”

wrote the Spanish ambassador.18

After her first miscarriage in 1534, Anne knew she was in trouble. Two pregnancies and no son. Henry became impatient; his small eyes narrowed when he looked at her. She tried to re-vert back to the role of mistress which she had played so well—sexual, scintillating, witty, despite her worry, despite her exhaustion. Yet often she cracked under the strain, letting loose a torrent of vitriol against the very man who had moved heaven m e d i e v a l q u e e n s , t u d o r v i c t i m s 6 7

and earth to place her on the throne. She hacked away at him with her sharp cleaving tongue, something which patient Queen Catherine had never done.

Thin and worn, her eyes feverishly bright, she looked older than her age. At court her sharp desperation, nervous nastiness, and sense of impending doom contrasted unpleasantly with plump sweet young things buzzing around her. And Anne no-ticed the king’s eye roving to
her
ladies-in-waiting. These ladies no longer hoped only to become the king’s mistress; they wanted to become queen. Anne had proven that a queen could easily be replaced; in her greatest victory were the seeds of her ultimate defeat.

But it was the men, after all, who proved more dangerous. On her scramble to the top Anne had alienated powerful courtiers.

Sensing Henry’s growing dislike of his queen, political factions sprang into action against her. Anne was a religious reformer; there were many at court who yearned to go back to the bosom of the old church and thought that with Anne removed, the king would be so inclined. Politically, Anne was pro-French; she had been raised at the French court and hated Spain, the native land and staunch supporter of Henry’s first wife, Queen Catherine.

But many at court wanted to drop the French alliance and form one with Spain.

There were those who wanted to remove Anne for reasons of pure personal greed. The cunning Seymour brothers, knowing of the king’s increasing interest in their plain sister Jane, saw riches and power coming their way as soon as Anne was gone.

Those who had been displaced from lucrative court positions by Anne’s powerful family joined the fracas.

Henry, who had waited seven years in a messy divorce from his first wife to marry Anne, was now heartily sick of her and im-patient to marry Jane Seymour. He wouldn’t tolerate another protracted divorce that raised questions about the legitimacy of future children. The easiest way to disencumber himself from Anne would be to charge her with a capital offense—adultery was always a good missile to sling at a queen—and have her executed.

The newly minted widower could then remarry immediately.

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Possibly there were more sinister forces at work than just Henry’s longing for an heir combined with Anne’s political en-emies. Some modern scholars believe that the fetus she delivered in January 1536 was deformed, the surest sign of God’s displea-sure in the sixteenth century. If this was true, Henry must have felt the accusing finger of God pointing straight at him. The king refused to accept the verdict; the deformed child could not have been his. Anne must have had a lover. Moreover, such abominations were Satan’s spawn. Anne must have been dab-bling in witchcraft.

That theory explains why some courtiers saw Anne holding Elizabeth, a perfectly formed child, up to Henry on the day be-fore her arrest, and arguing emotionally, perhaps trying to prove to him that she brought one well-formed child into the world and could produce another.

Accusations of adultery must always include the name of the lover, preferably a political enemy. Two Boleyn supporters con-trolled access to the king and would have to be neutralized im-mediately: Henry Norris—groom of the stool and gentleman of the privy chamber; and William Brereton—a leading gentleman of the privy chamber. While their titles sound humble, these men who handed the king his clothes or tidied up his rooms were immensely powerful. They had the royal ear and permitted or forbade entrée to the king’s apartments; it was, indeed, the highest honor to obtain such a position.

George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, Anne’s influential brother, would also have to be removed at the same fell stroke.

His wife, Lady Jane Rochford—perhaps revenging herself for his sexual neglect of her—helped the king’s case by testifying that she had seen indications of George’s sexual involvement with his sis-ter. Two other men—the young musician Mark Smeaton and Sir Francis Weston—had good looks to recommend them as proof of the queen’s lasciviousness.

But perhaps there was another reason to choose this particu-lar group of five. If the goal was to remove the Boleyn faction, why were the leaders, her uncle and father, not charged with in-cest as well? They were far more powerful than any of the five m e d i e v a l q u e e n s , t u d o r v i c t i m s 6 9

accused. Some scholars think that all of the accused may have been homosexual, a sin considered worthy of death and eternal damnation, and indeed there may be evidence that Anne’s brother and Mark Smeaton were involved with each other. Still in existence today is a book from the 1530s attacking the institu-tion of marriage with the names of George Boleyn and Mark S.