The Children of Henry VIII (11 page)

Within two years she would be able to translate the prayer of St Thomas Aquinas from Latin into English well enough to win plaudits from Lord Morley, a noted scholar and translator. ‘I do well remember’, he later wrote in the front of a New Year’s gift to her, ‘that scant you were come to twelve years of age, but that you were so ripe in the Latin tongue … that your grace not only could perfectly read, write and construe Latin, but furthermore translate any hard thing of the Latin in to our English tongue.’
⁵⁵

To improve Mary’s French conversation, Wolsey assigned her an experienced French tutor, the Fleming Giles Duwes. A lutenist and a fluent French speaker who doubled as a royal librarian, Duwes had previously been Prince Arthur’s ‘schoolmaster for the French tongue’ and Henry’s own lute teacher. Sent by Wolsey to join the princess at Ludlow as a gentleman-waiter along with his wife, Duwes possessed a renowned collection of music books and
instruments, including clavichords, virginals and regals (small portable organs), all of which Mary was allowed to play.
⁵⁶

As the author of a French grammar that would be published in 1533,
An Introductory for to Learn, to Read, to Pronounce and to Speak French Truly
, a work most valuable for its advice on pronunciation and glossary of useful words, Duwes set out the manner ‘by the which I have so taught and do teach daily’. If this was indeed how Mary learned to speak French, she would have begun by practising how vowels should be pronounced, then (as in Latin) how to distinguish and use nouns, pronouns, adverbs and participles, and finally how to use and conjugate verbs.

Once the basics were mastered, Duwes expected his pupils to begin to converse, starting by learning model texts by heart. In a number of these, Mary would engage in polite conversation with fictive messengers sent by her father or another foreign prince, who brought a gift or news for her. Other set texts included mock ‘letters’ addressed to her by her officials at Ludlow, along with poems and sample ‘conversations’ on topics with which she was generally familiar, such as ‘the ceremonies of the mass’. Finally, Mary was to speak her lines from the scripts of model ‘dialogues’ after learning them by heart, usually on topics chosen from moral philosophy.
⁵⁷

By April 1527, the 16-year-old Mary had been recalled from Ludlow to Greenwich, where she was visited by French ambassadors as a central plank of one of Henry and Wolsey’s many plans during these years to negotiate another pan-European peace accord. Charles V had released Francis I from captivity in Madrid, but part of the price was that the French king should marry Eleanor, the
Dowager Queen of Portugal, Charles’s sister.
⁵⁸
To counter the threat of a Franco-imperial dynastic alliance, Wolsey boldly proposed that Mary should marry Francis instead. Only if Charles agreed to bind himself to a fresh Treaty of Universal Peace, he argued, should Henry stand by idle if Francis married Eleanor, and if such a marriage took place, then to ensure that England was not isolated from the new European order, Mary should marry the French Dauphin and Fitzroy be betrothed to Eleanor’s daughter, the Infanta Maria of Portugal.
⁵⁹

On St George’s Day (23 April), according to an account of the visit now in Paris, Henry led the French ambassadors into the great hall at the palace, where Katherine and Mary were waiting to greet them. The king then asked them to speak to Mary in French, Latin and Italian, ‘in all which languages she answered them’. She then played proficiently on the virginals.
⁶⁰

Just how skilled Mary really was in Italian is open to doubt.
⁶¹
Other visitors believed she had little more than a smattering, picked up from her mother’s servants. A similar uncertainty surrounds her mastery of Spanish, a language she is known to have spoken, but in which she was never completely fluent, despite learning the basics from her mother. And, unlike in Fitzroy’s case, Henry never provided his daughter with a Greek teacher.
⁶²

After weeks of diplomatic haggling, a treaty with France was finally agreed by which Mary would marry either Francis himself or (more likely) his second son, Henry, Duke of Orléans, then a child of 7.
⁶³
But the treaty still had to be ratified, and by the time it was, the princess’s world had started to implode. Long before the time of the French ambassadors’ visit, Henry and Katherine were mainly living apart. Soon after Mary had departed with her entourage for Ludlow in 1525, her mother was complaining to
her, ‘I am in that case that the long absence of the king and you troubleth me.’
⁶⁴

Worse was to come. Soon Henry would completely dismiss Fitzroy from his thoughts, something which in other circumstances would have caused Katherine’s heart to rejoice. No longer would her fears that her husband’s illegitimate son could oust her daughter from her rightful place in the succession appear justified.

But the reason devastated her. Henry had concluded that his marriage to Katherine was not simply in trouble; he decided that it was ‘incestuous’ and invalid. That explains why Fitzroy was so suddenly dropped from his agenda. Bizarre as it may sound to modern ears, by canon law an illegitimate child could not inherit from a parent living with a wife or husband in an incestuous marriage. In a few special cases, the children of princes were exceptions, but in no circumstances could an exception apply if the
father’s
marriage was incestuous—even though the child was by his mistress—because the father was an ‘unnatural’ person living in sin in defiance of God.
⁶⁵

A crisis in Katherine’s relationship with Henry was about to begin, and all his children would be casualties.

H
ENRY
fell in love with Anne Boleyn during 1526. As with Elizabeth Blount, he finished his affair with Mary Carey as soon as he knew she was pregnant. Since Mary’s son was born on 4 March 1526, this must have been by the late summer of 1525, when Henry travelled around the south-east for several months with a few chosen intimates, restlessly moving between his houses and hunting lodges, rarely staying at any of them for more than a week.
¹
The child was christened Henry, and inevitably Katherine’s supporters darkly insinuated that he was the king’s and not William Carey’s, but no proof exists.
²
Henry never acknowledged the boy, and if the younger Carey knew he had royal blood in his veins, he took the secret to the grave.

The king’s new love’s looks were surprisingly unconventional. As the Venetian ambassador observed, ‘Madame Anne is not one of the handsomest women in the world; she is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the English king’s great appetite,
and her eyes, which are black and beautiful.’
³
A natural brunette with an unremarkable figure, she lacked the pale, translucent beauty and blonde hair then in vogue. One of her protégés, when asked to compare her to Elizabeth Blount, said that Anne was ‘very eloquent and gracious, and reasonably good looking’, but Blount was prettier.
⁴

What Anne had in spades was French
chic
together with wit, vivacity, intelligence and a quick tongue—all combined with a sophistication gained through her nine years of training at the Court of Margaret of Burgundy, Charles V’s aunt, and afterwards in France as a gentlewoman attending first on Henry’s younger sister and then Queen Claude, wife of Francis I.

Not that Anne had lacked suitors since her return from Paris in 1521 to become one of Katherine’s gentlewomen. The poet Thomas Wyatt—married at 15 on his father’s decree to a woman he detested—started wooing her within the accepted limits of courtly love, only to find himself emotionally smitten. Another suitor, Henry Percy, heir to the vast northern earldom of Northumberland, was a more realistic proposition. He first encountered Anne around 1522 when, as one of Wolsey’s servants, he resorted ‘for his pastime unto the queen’s chamber and there would fall in dalliance among the queen’s maidens’. Soon he found himself ‘more conversant with Mistress Anne Boleyn than with any other’ and the couple considered themselves betrothed.
⁵

Percy’s father, however, had very different plans. His son, he decided, would marry Mary Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury’s daughter, a far better catch than Anne. But if Wolsey’s gentleman-usher and earliest biographer, George Cavendish, is to be believed, it was the cardinal who finally ended the betrothal, acting on Henry’s orders—he ‘practised nothing in the matter, but it was the
king’s only device’.
⁶
And the anecdote rings true, because Percy reluctantly married Mary Talbot somewhere between the summer of 1525 and September 1526, so the chronology fits.
⁷

Anne ‘smoked’ at Wolsey’s interference, ‘for all this while she knew nothing of the king’s intended purpose’.
⁸
Henry’s courtship, therefore, had not yet begun. But when it did, he was quickly besotted. He bombarded Anne with gifts and wrote her love letters, seventeen of which have survived and are kept in the Vatican Library, perhaps filched from Anne’s cabinet around the time of her fall by one of Katherine’s sympathizers and secretly kept within the Catholic community until they could be taken to Rome.
⁹

In these extraordinary outpourings Henry calls Anne his ‘darling’, his ‘own sweetheart’, the woman he ‘esteems’ most in the whole world.
¹⁰
Her prolonged absence, he insists, will be ‘intolerable’.
¹¹
And in an ironic role reversal, he casts himself as her ‘true servant’, gently chiding her for not writing to him as she has promised, for, he says, ‘it has not pleased you to remember the promise you made me when I was last with you—that is, to hear good news from you.’
¹²
He sends a gift of a buck he has killed himself, ‘hoping that when you eat of it you may think of the hunter’.
¹³
He even sends her what he says is the ‘nearest thing’ to himself: his ‘picture set in bracelets’ and with a ‘device’, possibly based upon their intertwined initials.
¹⁴

But Anne, who was clearly flattered but probably not in love with the king, refused to submit like her sister. ‘Since my parting from you’, Henry then writes, ‘I have been told that the opinion in which I left you is totally changed’. This, he declares, will be ‘a very poor return for the great love which I bear to you’. He cannot understand why, if she loves him, it is not ‘a little irksome’ to her ‘to keep me at a distance’. His letter unsubtly hints that his patience
is limited. Anne needs to decide, for if she ‘voluntarily’ sought their separation, Henry ‘could do no other than mourn my ill-fortune, and by degrees abate my great folly’.
¹⁵

Since all of Anne’s replies are lost, what she said to Henry can only be conjectured. She must have continued her delaying tactics, since the king tried again. He has been, he says, ‘for above a whole year stricken with the dart of love, and not yet sure whether I shall fail or find a place in your heart and affection’.
¹⁶
Does Anne love him ‘with an ordinary love’ or a ‘singular love’? He demands to ‘know expressly your whole mind as to the love between us two.’ If she will surrender herself ‘both body and heart’ to him, she will be his ‘only mistress’; he will think of no one else and ‘serve’ her alone. So desperate is he for an answer that if she does not want to reply in writing, he is ready to go wherever she wishes to ‘have it by word of mouth’.
¹⁷

At last Anne yielded, but ambiguously. She wrote to Henry, probably at the beginning of 1527, enclosing a New Year’s gift.
¹⁸
This must have taken a good deal of careful planning, involving her ambitious father, Sir Thomas Boleyn, whom Henry had made Viscount Rochford on the same day as he had ennobled Fitzroy. Anne’s gift was an expensive jewel, a ship set with a ‘fine diamond’ in which a ‘solitary damsel is tossed about’. As the means to convey a message, it was brilliantly choreographed and Henry instantly grasped its ‘fine interpretation’. Anne, the damsel, was safe in the ship just as she was safe in his arms.
¹⁹
Since she could not herself have afforded such an item, her father must have agreed to buy it for her. And a payment is indeed recorded in her father’s accounts to Cornelius Hayes, ‘the king’s goldsmith’.
²⁰
Although too small to pay for the whole gift, it might well have been a first instalment.