The Children of Henry VIII (13 page)

Spurred on by Anne, Henry also turned his venom on to Katherine in a renewed attempt to persuade her to enter a nunnery, but she remained defiant. In August 1531, she was exiled to The More, Wolsey’s former house in Hertfordshire, while Mary stayed at Richmond with Henry. Katherine would never see her husband again.

And Anne made quite sure that the queen would never again set eyes on her beloved daughter either.
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The pressure took its toll on Mary, who could not keep food down.
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Now 15, she had to cope with the onset of puberty as well as stress, suffering menstrual difficulties besides feverish illnesses and bouts of depression and insomnia.
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Henry allowed Katherine’s physician to attend her, but when Mary begged him to let her visit her mother, the king refused—at Anne’s insistence.
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Henry, meanwhile, hunted with Anne, who rode pillion with him through the countryside to the amazement of gawping villagers.
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And to reassure her that she really would soon be queen, he remodelled the privy apartments at several of the principal royal palaces with her tastes and comforts uniquely in mind.

At Hampton Court, an entirely fresh range of lodgings was begun at astronomical cost. At York Place, Wolsey’s London home, which Henry had seized along with all the former minister’s other property and turned into the palace of Whitehall, similar additions and improvements were made.
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Anne was given Hanworth, where boxes, cupboards, desks, chests, tables, doors and other joinery were fitted out for her, and some of the exterior walls and chimneys redecorated in the latest and most fashionable Italian style.
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Even the royal lodgings at the Tower of London were rebuilt in readiness for the ceremonies on the eve of her anticipated coronation.
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In May 1532, Thomas More resigned as Lord Chancellor after losing out to Thomas Cromwell in a parliamentary battle to defend the Church from Henry’s predations. At the time More resigned, Henry promised to respect his former secretary’s conscience, but under pressure from Anne he broke his promise three years later, putting him on trial for his life and executing him.

For Katherine, More’s resignation was a disaster, since Cromwell—Wolsey’s old fixer and solicitor, who filled the vacuum—was allied to the Boleyns. He was not yet the king’s chief minister, but would soon make himself indispensable.

The turning point in the divorce campaign was a rendezvous at Boulogne between Henry and Francis I the following October, arranged as the sequel to the ratification of a new Treaty of Mutual Aid between the two kings.
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Anne, whom Henry made Marquis of Pembroke in her own right at a ceremony at Windsor Castle in readiness for the visit, accompanied Henry as far as Calais, where he escorted her to mass and everywhere else as if she was already queen.
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After the two kings talked at Boulogne, they returned to Calais, where Francis was lodged in splendour at the Staple Hall. There, after supper on the 27th, Anne partnered Francis in a spectacular masque, a supreme recognition of her status as a future queen and a public demonstration of what she and Henry believed to be the French king’s promise to back their case at Rome.

Henry’s ambassador at the Vatican, Gregorio Casale, also attended the summit as an observer. And to make quite sure that a divorce would soon be granted, Henry allocated him another 3,000 ducats from the pensions he and Wolsey had been granted by France over the years, so that he could bribe the cardinals into submission. If necessary, Casale was even empowered to throw in an English bishopric or two.
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So confident of success were Anne and Henry after the summit that she at last agreed to sleep with him, either at Calais or on their leisurely journey home. A mutual exchange of vows took place in November, and by December Anne was pregnant.
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Henry was at last galvanized into action, and on 24 or 25 January 1533 the couple were secretly (and bigamously) married at Greenwich Palace.
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As soon as the writs for a new session of Parliament could be issued, Cromwell set about drafting an Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome, which passed in April. This prohibited all appeals on whatever grounds from the church courts to the pope, stopping Katherine in her tracks.

And when Henry gave his royal assent to this legislation, he finally made his break with the past.

While Parliament debated the Act of Appeals, the bishops ruled Katherine’s marriage to be unlawful. On 23 May, Cranmer—whom Henry rewarded with the archbishopric of Canterbury—annulled it and pronounced Anne’s marriage valid. Her coronation festivities began on 19 May and lasted more than a fortnight.
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And unlike Katherine, who had been crowned with Queen Edith’s crown, Anne was anointed with holy oil and chrism and then crowned with St Edward’s crown—the one reserved for kings, not for consorts. She even sat on St Edward’s chair while she was crowned, the chair kept for sovereigns.
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Now pregnant with the child that Henry felt certain would be a son, she believed she had won. For according to canon law, a second marriage contracted during annulment proceedings was valid if the first marriage was subsequently dissolved. Likewise, if a child was conceived outside wedlock, the baby was legitimate in the eyes of the Church
if a lawful marriage between the parents was solemnized before he or she was born.

Since English secular law differed in several crucial respects from canon law over illegitimacy and inheritance, Cromwell over the next eighteen months steered further measures through Parliament, guaranteeing that the succession would pass to Anne’s children, first to her male issue, and if there were none surviving to her ‘issue female’. These acts also ensured that Henry’s second marriage would be judged lawful both by Parliament and the courts, and they provided that anyone who denied the validity of his marriage to Anne or the legitimacy of their children would be tried for treason. Soon another act would declare that the king, not the pope, was Supreme Head of the Church of England.
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Anne’s baby was born shortly after 3 p.m. on Sunday, 7 September 1533 at Henry’s favourite palace of Greenwich. Edward and Henry had already been mooted as the child’s names and dozens of open letters to the nobility and leading gentry announcing the ‘deliverance and bringing forth of a prince’ were prepared from stock lists in the office of the queen’s secretary.

When the news broke that the child was female, all these documents had to be altered one by one.
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They still managed to go out on the day of the birth as Anne had intended. But because insufficient space had been left between the words to cram in more than one extra literal, ‘princess’ had to be spelled with only one ‘s’.

To celebrate,
Te Deum
was sung in the Chapel Royal and at St Paul’s, but the customary bonfires in London to mark a royal birth were few and far between.
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Preparations then began for the christening three days later. For the moment Henry continued to follow the
Royal Book
. For while Anne’s failure to produce a son was a crushing blow, something he had never dreamed could
happen to him, he was still infatuated by his new queen and standing by her.

The baptism, therefore, was meant to be a very public event—the two French ambassadors were the guests of honour. But Henry cancelled the two-day tournament he had originally been planning, for only a son was worthy of that.

Charles V’s ambassador, meanwhile, gloated in triumph over the royal couple’s discomfort. He enraged Anne by refusing to attend the baptism, telling anyone who would listen that her child was a ‘bastard’ and mocking the physicians and astrologers who had predicted a boy.
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The christening was held at the Franciscan friary church at Greenwich, where Henry had himself been baptized. The mayor and aldermen of London led the procession from the great hall of the palace in their scarlet robes, followed by the king’s councillors, the gentleman and children of the Chapel, and then the barons, bishops and earls. Next came the Earl of Essex, the Marquises of Exeter and Dorset carrying the taper and salt to be used at the service, followed by Mary Howard, the Duke of Norfolk’s younger daughter, who bore the chrism. Finally, Agnes Howard, one of the godmothers, carried the baby enveloped in purple cloth of gold with a long train lined with ermine.

Since protocol prevented kings from attending their children’s baptisms and a newly delivered woman was forbidden by canon law from entering a church until she had been ritually purified, the Duke of Norfolk, Anne’s uncle, presided. The christening itself was performed by John Stokesley, bishop of London, who named the child Elizabeth after Henry’s own mother whom he still greatly revered.

Once the baptism was over, the esquires and yeomen who lined the side-aisles lit their torches. The sudden blaze of light was the
cue for a herald to cry out, ‘God of his infinite goodness send prosperous life and long to the high and mighty Princess of England, Elizabeth’.

The trumpets blew, after which Archbishop Cranmer, who was the baby’s godfather, carried her to the high altar, where he confirmed her. The procession then made its way back to the palace, where gifts were offered to the queen and the child, and a message came from Henry ordering sweet wine and comfits to be served.
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In December 1533, Henry decided that Elizabeth should be sent with her nurse to a recently appropriated royal manor at Hatfield in Hertfordshire, some twenty-five miles north of London. Put in charge of her nursery was the inveterate Lady Bryan, whom Henry recalled to royal service as his daughter’s first governess.
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Elizabeth travelled to Hatfield in a horse litter, lodging overnight at Elsings in Enfield, Middlesex, a palatial manor house once belonging to the wealthy courtier Sir Thomas Lovell, who bequeathed it to the Earl of Rutland. Both Hatfield and Enfield were places Elizabeth would come to know well and to love. In 1539, when Henry decided that he wanted Elsings mainly for his children’s use, the earl surrendered it to him in exchange for a generous grant of ex-monastic lands in the Midlands.

Although now separated from her daughter, Anne took the closest possible interest in her welfare, ordering her the most fashionable and expensive clothes and already worrying that she should receive the best possible education as befitted an heir to the throne.
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She often came to visit her, either on her own or with Henry, and wrote regularly to Lady Bryan.