The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (36 page)

Read The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn Online

Authors: Eric Ives

PART III
 
ANNE THE QUEEN
 
13
 
A ROYAL MARRIAGE
 
A
MONG the relics of Henry VIII’s daughter Mary is a book of prayers where the page devoted to intercessions for women with child is said to be stained with tears.
1
In the later twentieth century the problem of childlessness attracts considerable attention in the Western world, but no pressure on the would-be mother today can match the peculiar strain on a sixteenth-century queen. Her essential function was to bear sons; otherwise she was a failure. Princesses of the blood were brought up to see this as their destiny. Anne Boleyn had won her way by education, personality and courage, but now she had to accept that success as an individual was unimportant against biological success or failure. Only one thing was now expected of her. Her stepdaughter Mary fiercely resented Anne and rejoiced at her discomfiture, but she too would come to know the private physiological hell of the childless Tudor wife. Anne had described children as ‘the greatest consolation in the world’, but the Spanish ambassador had the right of it when he wrote of Mary years later that ‘the queen’s lying-in is the foundation of everything.’
2
To have a son, one son - that was all that was necessary. Surely that was not too difficult in an age of large families; surely that could not be difficult with a husband like Henry, who at the time (and since) was recognized as a ‘fleshly’ man, fond of women, and a sexual predator.
3
All that might seem necessary was a healthy wife, and sons would arrive; Anne had only to lie back and do her duty for England. And when healthy sons did not arrive - as they had not arrived to Katherine before her - it was obvious where to place the blame. Yet this is wide of the mark. The popular idea that our ancestors reproduced themselves with the efficiency of some populations today is a fallacy. Even among the nobility, where birth rates and child survival rates were higher than among the general population, large families were by no means the rule, and there were many instances of childlessness or of couples that produced only daughters. Guaranteeing a male heir was no more possible than it has ever been. Nor was Henry as the popular image would have him. As well as the difficulties and hazards of conception and pregnancy in an age when medical knowledge and practice were more of a danger than a help, Anne had to contend with a husband who was anything but a good prospect for paternity.
The evidence that Henry VIII had sexual problems is, first of all, circumstantial. Between 1509 and 1547 he is known, or can be presumed, to have had sexual relations over some months or years with eight women - that is, his six wives and his two known mistresses, Elizabeth Blount and Mary Boleyn. Only four of the eight conceived, and we may note that the last time was at New Year 1537, when Henry was only 45.
4
As well as the poor record of conceptions, Henry’s partners had a poor record of maternal success. Setting aside Jane Seymour, who died after the birth of her one child, only three pregnancies produced a healthy infant, one each for Katherine of Aragon, Elizabeth Blount and Anne Boleyn. There were other pregnancies that ended in miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death. Anne herself had two miscarriages - that is, in two of her three known pregnancies. Katherine, her predecessor, had an even poorer record - five failures in six, and over a much longer period.
5
This case history raises the possibility that it was Henry and not his wives who was responsible for silence in the royal nursery. At a distance of some 500 years, deficiencies in fertility or genetic defects can be nothing more than suspicions, and the one thing which seems clear is that venereal disease was not to blame (as is sometimes suggested). The king’s medical history and the record of the medicines he was prescribed show quite clearly that he was never treated for syphilis, unlike, for instance, Francis I, who was heavily infected. The leg ulcer which periodically darkened Henry’s life from 1528, and is often assumed to be venereal, has been convincingly argued to be caused by osteomyelitis resulting from falls in the tiltyard.
6
We have, of course, to take into account the health and fertility of the women concerned. There is the evidence about the difficulty of Anne’s first pregnancy, and the five years’ delay between her agreement to marry Henry and the commencement of sexual relations in 1532, when she was over thirty, must have lessened her chances of successfully having children. But all the women could not have been bad risks. There is nothing in the history of Katherine of Aragon’s sisters to suggest a tendency to impaired childbearing; Mary Boleyn became pregnant as soon as she left Henry for her husband, William Carey; the same was true of Katherine Parr, when she married Thomas Seymour after the king’s death in 1547.
Whether or not Henry suffered from any congenital impairment, there is direct evidence to support the suggestion that he was, or became, partially impotent. In 1540 his divorce from Anne of Cleves was secured on the ground of the king’s sexual incapacity. Henry’s own deposition admitted his lack ‘of the will and power to consummate the same’, though he slept regularly with his fourth wife for several months.
7
But the blame was placed on his German bride’s lack of attractiveness (and allegedly suspect virginity), while concern for the obvious reflection on Henry led his doctors to pass on to the court (with some details decently veiled in Latin) the king’s assurance that he ‘thought himself able to do the act with other but not with her’.
8
The same problem had bedevilled the relationship with Anne Boleyn. At his trial in May 1536, George Boleyn was asked whether Anne had told his wife that the king was incapable of sexual intercourse, implying that he was unable to attain or sustain an erection (
le Roy n’estoit habile en cas de soy copuler avec femme et qu’il n’avoit ne vertu ne puissance
). Such a delicate question was handed to Rochford in writing, and the story was that it was reading the allegation out aloud which sealed his fate.
9
That is improbable, but the asking of such an amazing question is proof enough that doubts about the king’s vigour did circulate.
We can, indeed, take the matter a little further.
10
No hint of impotence had prevented Anne rapidly becoming pregnant in December 1532, and she was pregnant again just over a year later, three or four months after the birth of Elizabeth. But we have a most revealing insight into the way Henry’s mind worked in an interview with Chapuys in April 1533.
11
When the ambassador pointed out that a new wife to replace Katherine by no means guaranteed children, Henry asked excitedly, ‘Am I not a man like other men? Am I not? Am I not?’ The ambassador had, he declared, no reason at all to deny this - he was not privy to all the royal secrets (that is, that Anne was then four months pregnant). Quite obviously, Henry associated virility and sexual potency with having children. The birth of Elizabeth reassured him, as did the second pregnancy, and Chapuys noted in February 1534 that Henry was quite happy that he would have a son this time.
12
By April the queen’s condition was obvious, and Henry’s confidence is seen in the highly elaborate silver cradle which was ordered from his goldsmith, Cornelius Hayes, with Tudor roses, precious stones, gold-embroidered bedding and cloth-of-gold baby clothes.
13
All was well as late as July, and then tragedy struck.
14
Anne miscarried.
15
The secret of the disaster was so well kept that it was only on 23 September that Chapuys reported that the queen - or ‘the lady’, as he insisted on calling her - was not, after all, to have a child.
16
We have to remember that the ambassador had been out of touch with the court while it was on summer progress. Away from the public eye, with a smaller number of attendants than at other times and with both Anne and Henry desperate to conceal it, total discretion was achieved. But the damage had been done. The ominous reminder of Katherine’s history brought all Henry’s doubts flooding back. It is notorious that anxiety about virility can lead to a loss of sexual potency, and this is what seems to have happened with Henry. Perhaps, after all, he was not ‘like other men’. The confidence and stimulation of the new marriage was shattered, and it would be more than a year before Henry could make Anne pregnant again.
It is, perhaps, significant that it was after the miscarriage in the summer of 1534 that the first hints appear of a rift between Henry and Anne. Tradition regularly backdates these by a year, to the last weeks before Elizabeth was born. On 13 August 1533 Chapuys had reported that he saw signs of hope for Katherine in Henry’s long absence from Anne.
17
Even more dramatic, the imperial ambassador at Rome passed on to Charles V the story that the king’s loss of affection in the face of Anne Boleyn’s arrogance had led him to switch his attentions to someone else.
18
On 3 September Chapuys had remarked on how lucky Anne was to have received her magnificent state bed (for her presence chamber) two months previously, since:
Full of jealousy - and not without reason - she used words to the king which he did not like, and he told her that she must shut her eyes and endure, just like others who were worthier than she, and that she ought to know that he could humiliate her in only a moment longer that it had taken to exalt her!
 
After this, Henry refused to speak to her for two or three days.
19
The case looks ominous. Yet under scrutiny the story evaporates. The report from Rome of the alleged mistress is an error in dating by a modern editor: it belongs to the late autumn of 1534.
20
Several letters from different sources reported independently that in July and August 1533 the royal couple were in good health and enjoying life; Henry was in tearing high spirits at the thought of the baby.
21
As for Chapuys, he was reporting gossip. He was in London in August, so how could he know that Henry was neglecting Anne at Windsor? Furthermore, the ambassador himself tells us that when Henry specially summoned him to meet the king and his council, the meeting was away from the court, at Guildford, and was disguised as a hunting trip precisely to avoid causing Anne anxiety.
22
In any case, a second letter from Chapuys admitted that he had got things wrong.
23
His September report of Henry’s bitter remarks to Anne is also suspect. By that time Anne had ‘taken her chamber’, so the most the ambassador could have had to work on was a story about what had allegedly been overheard by an attendant during one of the king’s private visits. For a husband who, a few weeks before, had invented a hunting trip to protect his wife from anxiety, the speech as recorded seems inconsistent, to say the least. Perhaps in the discomfort of her late pregnancy Anne did make a scene, perhaps Henry’s own worry caused him to bite back - such an episode would be neither surprising nor significant. Or perhaps the whole was exaggerated by the wishful thinking of Katherine’s ally, the marchioness of Exeter, who was probably the ambassador’s informant.
24
Whatever occurred or did not occur, we need to note that Chapuys himself dismissed it as ‘a lovers quarrel’. So should we.
The rumours reaching the Low Countries via the Hanse merchants painted quite a different picture - not of a besotted king coming to his senses but of one who was more besotted than ever, constantly at his wife’s side and letting court discipline go to the dogs.
25
And that may be much nearer the truth. In late October 1533 Anne’s maids of honour were repeating Henry’s brazen remark that he loved the queen so much that he would beg alms from door to door rather than give her up. The two are still described as ‘merry’. Henry kept Anne, as always, in selective touch with diplomatic affairs, visited Elizabeth after the baby was given her own special establishment in December 1533, and gave the general impression of remaining firmly under his wife’s thumb. As the session of parliament due in January 1534 approached, Anne helped her husband to whip opinion into line, and Henry warned the marquis of Exeter that the least signs of disloyalty would cost him (and anyone else) his head.
26
So much for the 1533 rumours. The story that trouble arose between Henry VIII and Anne a year later is based, as are almost all the specific stories of friction between them, on Chapuys.
27
It was his report that the imperial ambassador at Rome was echoing, and the first notice of the affair is in the despatches sent to Brussels in late September. What Chapuys reported was that with the ending of his hope for a child, Henry had ‘renewed and increased the love that he had had previously towards another very beautiful maid of honour [
demoiselle de court
]’. Anne had responded by wanting to dismiss the girl, but Henry had been most upset and had informed her that ‘she had good reason to be content with what he had done for her, which he would not do again, if he were starting afresh, that she should remember where she had come from, and many other things.’
28
A fortnight later Chapuys had more to tell. George Boleyn’s wife had been forbidden the court because she had plotted with Anne to pick a quarrel with Henry’s new fancy and force her to withdraw.
29
Anne’s influence was wilting daily, and the rival was sending encouraging messages to Mary that her trials were nearly over. Many of the courtiers were encouraging Henry’s new interest, with the intention of separating him from Anne. The affair was still going on in December, when the king was again annoyed at Anne’s complaints, but by the end of February it was finished. In her place was Anne’s own cousin, Margaret Shelton, the daughter of the governess in charge of Elizabeth and Mary.
30

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