George Wyatt probably wrote this account in the later 1590s, in which case he was retelling a conversation from ten or twenty years before, in which a woman in her eighties recalled events in her youth.
4
It is not surprising, therefore, to find inconsistencies. He suggests that the king’s interest in Anne was secret, whereas the story needs Wyatt to perceive instantly both the identity and the significance of Anne’s ring; Thomas then recognizes that the king was ‘bent on pleasure’ — engaging in courtly competition — only for the story to require the king to be immediately in earnest; Anne’s response, however, is still in the language of courtly love, explaining to one favoured gallant that a rival has not also been given a token by her. These inconsistencies all disappear if the story in placed earlier in time, with Henry, Wyatt and, probably, other courtiers vying with one another for Anne’s attention. We may also note on this reading that while the king’s reaction might suggest that he was getting more deeply involved, Wyatt’s implies that he has already decided that he is not going to succeed with Anne. And he said that in such circumstances he favoured what might today be called a laid-back style.
5
How exact Anne Zouche’s story was we do not know, but it does establish what the court remembered: Henry arriving on the scene as a competitor in the game of courtly flirtation. Furthermore, although Wyatt says that Henry was testing Anne’s virtue ‘by those things his kingly majesty and means could bring to the battery’, the simple construction is that his initial intention was to sleep with her. Two developments were, in fact, at work concurrently — the move to divorce Katherine of Aragon, and Henry’s growing involvement with Anne — and initially and for a long time they were quite separate. The rejection of Katherine had begun in 1524 when Henry gave up sleeping with her, although he had clearly been drifting away for some years.
6
She was 39 and had not conceived in seven years. Moreover, time had cruelly destroyed both her petite beauty and her gentle good spirits - she was thick of body and dull of appearance, and apart from passionate concern for Mary, her one child, only duty drew Katherine from religious observances to the frivolities of court life. With no hope of children if he slept with her, nothing made Henry wish to.
7
The situation was, of course, hardly novel, and although there is reason to doubt the king’s famed sexual prowess, from time to time he had solaced himself in the manner of monarchs of his day by taking a mistress - most recently Mary Carey. But with the final recognition that he would have no son by Katherine, Henry’s position changed. Occasional illicit pleasure was now no longer enough; if Henry - and the country — were to have a son to succeed him, he had to marry again. Already he was over 30.
When it was that Henry VIII reached the conclusion that Katherine must go, we do not know.
8
There are stories that he was thinking of a divorce as early as 1522, but the actual date was probably after June 1525, when he brought his one illegitimate child, Henry Fitzroy, out of obscurity and created him duke of Richmond (a title resonant of his own father, Henry VII), and gave the boy precedence over everyone except any legitimate son the king might have.
9
This was widely recognized as a portent for the future, and the Venetian ambassador - who reported that Richmond had actually been legitimized — was quick to observe that Queen Katherine had been deeply offended and that three of her ladies had been dismissed from the court for supporting her.
10
Any thought of ousting the legitimate Mary in favour of the illegitimate Richmond involved extreme risk, and within the next eighteen months Henry turned to a more conventional answer, a decree of nullity. Popes were always sensitive to the special matrimonial problems of monarchs, assuming plausible rationalization could be offered, and Henry had discovered what he thought was irrefutable proof that his marriage with Katherine was defective and invalid in canon law. This conviction depended for its compelling force on the clear application to his position of a threat in the Bible: ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing ... he shall be without children’ [Leviticus 20: 21]. Henry
had
married the wife of his brother Arthur and Henry and Katherine
were
childless. They had had sons, but all of them had died.
11
The appropriateness of the text was psychologically overwhelming, and never thereafter did conviction desert the king. God had spoken directly to his condition; as a devout Christian Henry had no option but to obey, contract a legal (indeed, a first) marriage, and a son would be the reward. Post-Freudian scepticism may smile, but the vital point is that Henry believed. Armed with his certainty, by April 1527 he was consulting his advisers, and on 17 May took the first formal (and secret) steps to divorce his wife.
12
Where did Anne Boleyn fit in? The one certain date we have is the end of August 1527, when the king applied to the pope for the dispensation to allow him to marry again. Anne is not identified by name, but as well as raising the case we have noted of a woman previously contracted in marriage, the draft dispensation also covered a woman who was related to the king in the ‘first degree of affinity... from ... forbidden wedlock’ (that is, the sister of a previous mistress, in this case Mary Carey).
13
The development of the relationship between Anne and Henry is chronicled in the unique series of seventeen love letters which the king wrote to her.
14
They fall into four groups. The first three letters belong to the period when Henry was trying to turn the conventions of courtly romance into something more serious. The earliest accompanied the gift of a buck which the king had killed the evening before, and chides his ‘mistress’ for neither keeping her promise to write nor replying to his earlier letter; it concludes: ‘Written with the hand of your servant, who oft and again wishes you [were here] instead of your brother — H.R.’
15
The next letter is more serious:
Although it doth not appertain to a gentleman to take his lady in place of a servant, nevertheless, in compliance with your desires, I willingly grant it to you, if thereby you can find yourself less unthankfully bestowed in the place by you chosen than you have been in the place given by me. Thanking you right heartily for that it pleaseth you still to hold me in some remembrance.
Clearly, Anne was being chary of the king’s attentions. It was her place to be the servant, and the king had to capitulate in the hope that the relationship could continue at least on that basis.
The next letter was written after an interval, and is the most important of the three.
17
It shows a Henry who is confused by his continued feelings and by the signals he was receiving from Anne:
Debating with myself the contents of your letter, I have put myself in great distress, not knowing how to interpret them, whether to my disadvantage, as in some places is shown, or to advantage, as in others I understand them; praying you with all my heart that you will expressly certify me of your whole mind concerning the love between us two. For of necessity I must ensure me of this answer having been now above one whole year struck with the dart of love, not being assured either of failure or of finding place in your heart and grounded affection. Which last point has kept me for some little time from calling you my mistress, since if you do not love me in a way which is beyond common affection that name in no wise belongs to you, for it denotes a singular love, far removed from the common.
After more than a year, Henry now insisted on a straight answer:
If it shall please you to do me the office of a true, loyal mistress and friend and to give yourself up, body and soul, to me who will be and have been your loyal servant (if by your severity you do not forbid me), I promise you that not only shall the name be given you, but that also I will take you for my only mistress, rejecting from thought and affection all others save yourself, to serve you only.
What was Henry asking and offering? Clearly more than a conventional courtly love pose but certainly not marriage. He appears to be offering a recognized permanent liaison, perhaps like the French
maîtresse en titre.
Francis I, after all, had had Françoise de Foix and was even at that moment (though Henry probably had yet to hear of it) fixing his interest with the woman who was to be his companion for the rest of his life, Anne d’Heilly, later duchesse d’Etampes.
18
Why should Henry VIII not have his Anne Boleyn?
In the next four letters the relationship has moved on, yet not quite in the direction Henry proposed. He had asked for an answer to his offer either in writing or in person, but when they met something in Anne’s response caused him to rush matters and deeply offend her. How he ‘committed fault’ — whether by becoming too ardent or by demanding unconditional acceptance of a place in his bed - is not clear. Anne, we are told,
fell down upon her knees saying, ‘I think your majesty, most noble and worthy king, speaketh these words in mirth to prove me, without intent of defiling your princely self, who I find thinks nothing less than of such wickedness which would justly procure the hatred of God and of your good queen against us ... I have already given my maidenhead into my husband’s hands.
Such a story seems at first sight too proper to be true, but it is told by writers hostile to Anne who are forced to turn it to her discredit by suggesting that she, ‘having had crafty counsel, did thus overreach the king with show of modesty.’ Given that and George Wyatt’s hints of something similar, we may well suspect a basis in fact.
19
Yet whatever the detail, Henry thought he had patched matters up before Anne retired to her parents’ home, but a subsequent silence drove the king to write again:
Since I parted with you I have been advised that the opinion in which I left you is now altogether changed, and that you will not come to court, neither with my lady your mother, and if you could, nor yet by any other way [the proprieties have suddenly begun to matter] the which report being true I cannot enough marvel at, seeing that I am well assured I have never since that time committed fault.
And if he knew Anne was, in fact, staying away deliberately: ‘I could do none other than lament me of my ill fortune, abating by little and little my so great folly.‘
20
‘My so great folly’ is a highly perceptive remark from a man not given to much self-analysis. Moralists have frowned on such letters from a man already married (and on Anne for entertaining them), even implying something gross in middle age so obviously losing its head. But charity demands that we recognize the genuineness of the king’s passion; from a person who hated writing as much as Henry did, such letters are in themselves a remarkable testimony. For the first time in his life he was having to build a relationship with a woman who had not been provided by the diplomatic marriage agency or whistled up by the
droit de seigneur.
What is less easy to interpret is Anne’s position. Not only did she play at courtly love with Henry, she was undoubtedly attracted to him. It was a heady experience to have at your feet someone as magnificent as Henry VIII, but there was more than that: we must not forget that she kept his letters. Yet despite this, it seems certain that she did refuse to sleep with Henry and instead kept away from court, precisely what morality demanded. Surely the relationship should then have withered. Only one thing can explain why it did not: the king’s realization that he could not live without Anne, and therefore she, rather than some foreign princess, would have to be the wife to replace Katherine.
The prospect of marriage transformed Anne’s hitherto distinctly muted response to Henry’s ardour. She signified her surrender by sending a gift — the word the king used for it was
‘une étrenne’.
It was one of those trinkets concealing a meaning that Tudor people loved — a ship with a woman on board and with a (presumably) pendant diamond. The message was transparent. For centuries the ship had been a symbol of protection — the ark which rescued Noah from the destroying deluge; the diamond - as the
Roman de la Rose
had said — spoke of a ‘heart as hard as diamond, steadfast and nothing pliant’.
21
Anne was saying ‘yes’.
Henry reacted with delight:
For so beautiful a gift, and so exceeding (taking it in all), I thank you right cordially; not alone for the fair diamond and the ship in which the solitary damsel is tossed about, but chiefly for the good intent and too-humble submission vouchsafed in this by your kindness; considering well that by occasion to merit it would not a little perplex me, if I were not aided therein by your great benevolence and goodwill, for the which I have sought, do seek, and shall always seek by all services to me possible there to remain, in the which my hope hath set up his everlasting rest, saying
aut illic aut nullibi
[either here or nowhere].
The proofs of your affection are such, the fine poesies of the letters so warmly couched, that they constrain me ever truly to honour, love and serve you, praying that you will continue in this same firm and constant purpose, ensuring you, for my part, that I will the rather go beyond than make
reciproque
[equivalent response], if loyalty or heart, the desire to do you pleasure, even with my whole heart root, may serve to advance it.