What should be made of all this? The conventional interpretation is that the marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn was breaking or had broken up. Descriptions of Anne after her fall are projected back to present Henry as a king whose life was made ‘hell’ by a ‘barren, old and ill-natured baggage’. ‘Importunity’ (nagging) and ‘cursedness’ had destroyed every vestige of the king’s great passion. Henry, the great lover, was looking elsewhere.
31
Yet the facts do not justify such a picture. We have to remember the tainted sources of so much of Chapuys’ information - the story of the king’s annoyance at Anne’s complaints in December 1534 came from her enemy Carewe.
32
The ambassador could also get things wrong, as he himself recognized. His pleasure on New Year’s Day 1535 that even such a Boleyn partisan as the earl of Northumberland was turning against the regime had changed to doubt within the month.
33
His earliest mention of the alleged 1534 romance carried the warning not to attach too much importance to it, since Henry was so fickle and Anne knew how to manage him. Even in the last weeks of her life, when she faced the threat of Jane Seymour, Chapuys would still be sceptical.
There are also reasons why we should be sceptical. Who was this new flame in 1534? Some have supposed that she was Jane Seymour, but there is nothing to support this, and when Jane does appear on the scene there is no reference to any earlier affair with Henry. How are we to understand the arrival of Margaret Shelton? This has been variously interpreted as a deliberate piece of procuring by Anne in order to supplant her anonymous rival, or by Norfolk to supplant Anne, from whom he was now estranged. And why does Margaret Shelton suddenly drop out of the limelight? Another problem is the role of Lady Rochford, who is otherwise known as Anne’s enemy. As to the reference that the king was renewing a
previous
relationship, that too becomes mysterious with the redating of the supposed 1533 Rome despatch, unless we see a connection with Chapuys’ cryptic remark in 1533 that Anne’s jealousy was ‘not without reason’.
A far more likely explanation for the evidence than the ‘irretrievable breakdown of marriage’ is, in fact, suggested by Chapuys’ own description. The relationship between Henry and this new lady was first of all a limited one; it would be significant, he said, only if it lasted and if it became warmer than it had been. And what that limitation was he indicated by describing the girl as ‘the damsel whom the king has been accustomed to serve’. ‘Accustomed to serve’ - this is the language of chivalry. What Henry had done was to offer his knightly service to a new ‘mistress’ for the game of courtly love. As in the case of Anne Boleyn herself, this could sometimes lead to a genuine relationship, but Chapuys is clear that in this case it did not do so, nor when the king’s interest turned to Madge Shelton. Indeed, it is easy to see why an amour which remained superficial should attract a man anxious to appear a terror with the women, but deeply uncertain of his capacities.
Henry was probably doing no more than substitute ‘a lady to serve’ while his wife was recovering from the miscarriage, but it is nevertheless obvious why Anne would object to Henry’s gallantry. She had for six years been Henry’s ‘sovereign lady’; she had been the adored mistress. How could she accept the new situation and see Henry become the ‘servant’ of another woman? And she must have suspected, as we do, that Henry would not have relegated her to conventional treatment as queen if she had had a son. It was not, however, a mere matter of pride or hurt feelings, or of failure to adjust to her new position. Henry might well get annoyed at such over-sensitiveness: he was behaving as the rules said a king should behave, so why could not she? There had never been any rivalry between Katherine and the ladies whose praises Henry had sung over the years, who had danced with him, who had played the game of flirtation with him; she was the queen and her place at the head of the court and of society was hers by incontestable right. Anne, however, knew that her right to that title was contested. She could not take for granted the protection of recognized status; she still had to compete for and win the king’s favour. She was in the contradictory position of being expected to behave as a queen, but having to continue to challenge as a mistress.
The place that Anne occupied was flawed in another way. She was now a wife and mother. Convention - and Henry was nothing if not conventional - dictated that she should now take a subservient role, neither disputing with nor presuming to criticize her husband. Once the honeymoon period was over, the husband was expected to find his concerns in the masculine world; he was certainly not expected to live in his wife’s pocket. One of the worst things that Flemish rumour could say about Henry was that he did just this and let the court go to the devil. Anne, however, as we have seen, was that Tudor rarity, the self-made woman. She was where she was by virtue of her own abilities and what she had made of herself, not by virtue of wealth or family.
34
It was asking a great deal of her, after so many years, to abandon the formula that had brought her the most amazing success.
There was one thing more. However complicated the motivation, however we gloss the phrase, Henry and Anne were lovers. In an outburst against the new regime, a Colchester monk had declared with contempt that when the two had been at Calais in 1532, Anne had followed Henry round like a dog.
35
Certainly they quarrelled, and not simply on Chapuys’ evidence. The Venetian ambassador reported in June 1535 that Henry had had more than enough of his new queen.
36
The alleged remark of 1534 that he could reduce Anne as rapidly as he had raised her makes sense only if Henry was blazingly angry at the time, for at the very same moment he had Cromwell hard at work drafting the statute which would vest the succession to the Crown in the children of the Boleyn marriage. If he said it, he certainly did not mean it. As Chapuys had said of the friction between Henry and Anne over the new ‘mistress’, these were lovers’ quarrels and not much notice should be taken of them. If some of them were provoked by Anne’s natural resentment at the king’s shallow gallantries to other ladies, at other times the queen could laugh about such flirtations. She nearly caused an international incident at a banquet on 1 December 1533 by bursting into laughter when she was talking to the French ambassador. Offended, he had asked, ‘How now, Madam! Are you amusing yourself at my expense or what?’ Trying to mollify him, Anne explained that Henry had gone to bring another guest for her to entertain, and an important one, but on the way he had met a lady and the errand had gone completely out of his head.
37
In the relationship between Henry and his second wife, storm followed sunshine, sunshine followed storm. A fortnight after the Venetian report that Henry was satiated with her, the returning French ambassador told Paris that she was very much in charge.
38
In an ultimate sense, the problems of Henry and Anne arose from the fact that there was emotion in the relationship. Occasionally even Chapuys’ hostile spin cannot disguise the intimacy. On St John’s Eve 1535, Henry went to see a pageant and so enjoyed it that he sent Anne a message suggesting that she must see the next performance on St Peter’s Eve, five days later.
39
The conventions of the day, of courtly love, of sovereign and consort, were simply not capable of accommodating the fierce passions which united Anne Boleyn and Henry Tudor.
40
The tensions within the marriage were undoubtedly made worse by external problems. The most immediate was Katherine’s daughter, Mary. Aged 17 at the time of the second marriage, she was adamant in refusing to recognize Anne and her child, despite her father’s determination that she should do so. Though Katherine helped to inspire Mary, Henry could largely ignore his ex-wife. Relegation to a modest establishment away from court was a proper fate for a princess dowager, and Katherine was not one who would, so he believed, ever plot against him. Mary, on the other hand, was undeniably part of the royal family. Intelligent, gifted, not unattractive and of a winning disposition, popularity made her adherence more important and her opposition more dangerous. Disloyalty to Henry did not seem like disloyalty when it was thought to be support for the rightful heir, and increasingly Mary became the focus for all dislike of Anne and everything she appeared to represent.
Henry saw Mary’s behaviour as a straightforward case of disobedience and, despite his obvious affection for her, put increasing pressure on his daughter to conform.
41
She lost her royal style and her household; she was forced as ‘a bastard’ to join the household of the ‘legitimate’ Elizabeth and give her half-sister precedence at all times, under the oversight of Elizabeth’s governess, Anne Shelton, who was Anne’s aunt. Mary was kept away from her mother, isolated from her former friends and servants, and deliberately slighted and ignored by Henry. The result was a head-on clash with a Tudor obstinacy as great as his own, but at the cost of permanent damage to Mary. The story is not pleasant to modern reading, although what was questioned at the time - and not only by her committed supporters - was not so much the treatment meted out for her disobedience as the unfairness of it. According to Chapuys, when Norfolk and Rochford rebuked Anne Shelton for being too lenient with Mary - the family must not fail the king - Anne’s aunt replied that even if Mary was the bastard daughter of a poor gentleman she would deserve respect and kindness because of the girl she was.
42
Henry disagreed. He was determined to break his daughter’s will. It was Anne Boleyn, however, who got the blame. To believe it was her fault made it much easier for Charles V to keep up some civil relationship with Henry, much easier for Mary (and Katherine) to resist pressure. Her father could not really know; he was not to blame; it was the harpy who had her claws in him. When Anne was dead Mary discovered the truth, and the abasement which Henry exacted scarred her for life.
This is not to say that Anne was guiltless. Chapuys’ letters are full of her railing against Mary and of her lurid threats to curb ‘her proud Spanish blood’.
43
But much though the ambassador warned of poison and worse, Anne was ranting, not thinking. There is an obvious ring of truth in his story that, assuming she would be regent if, as expected, Henry went to Calais to meet Francis I again, Anne swore to seize that chance to put Mary to death. When her brother pointed out, very simply, that this would anger the king, she retorted that she did not care, even if she was burned for doing it.
44
So Anne’s language was violent and threatening, but this sprang not from malevolence but from self-defence. For Henry, Mary was a disobedient child. For Anne, she was much more. Her obstinacy was an insult, a denial of Anne’s own identity and integrity. If Katherine’s marriage was valid, then she, Anne, was a whore. And there was an added twist. In canon law - and this fact was widely appreciated at court - a child born to a couple who at the time were apparently lawfully married, remained legitimate even if it was subsequently found that the union had been invalid.
45
If anyone had, as the lawyers put it, been conceived ‘in good faith’, that person was Mary, and by refusing to recognize the priority of Elizabeth she was in effect asserting her own claim to be the heir to the throne.
46
For Anne, therefore, the negative policy of disciplining Mary and excluding her from court was a defeat; every day that she withheld the positive endorsement of Anne’s title made the queen’s weakness more obvious. Active conformity alone would do. Anne knew that the stakes could not be higher: ‘She is my death, and I am hers.’
47
Mary was certainly frustrating to deal with, and this is a further reason for Anne’s outbursts and her support for harsh treatment. On three distinct occasions Anne put out feelers for a better relationship. In February or March 1534, when on a visit to Elizabeth, she offered to welcome Mary if she would accept her as queen, and to reconcile her with her father.
48
Mary’s response was that she knew no queen but her mother, but that if the king’s mistress would intercede with her father she would be grateful. Even after this offensiveness Anne tried again, before leaving the house in high dudgeon, vowing to repress such impudence. It was perhaps a few months later, when the two half-sisters were at Eltham, that Anne and Mary found themselves in the palace chapel together.
49
An attendant, either out of kindness or in order to see the fun, or as part of a deliberate plot to set Anne up, told her that Mary had acknowledged her before leaving. The queen immediately sent a message to the princess apologizing for not noticing, saying that ‘she desires that this may be an entrance of friendly correspondence, which your grace shall find completely to be embraced on her part.’ Mary’s reply could not have been ruder. From the publicity of her dinner table she declared that the queen could not possibly have sent the message; she was ‘so far from this place’. The messenger should have said ‘the Lady Anne Boleyn, for I can acknowledge no other queen but my mother, nor esteem them my friends who are not hers.’ Her curtsey, she explained piously, had been made to the altar, ‘to her maker and mine’. The story has a good pedigree, but it is a late one, and we may doubt whether even Mary dared to be that offensive. But even allowing considerable discount, Anne would still have been justified in being offended.
It is not surprising to find after this that Anne left Mary to reflect for eighteen months before trying again, but with Katherine on her deathbed and Anne certain that she was pregnant again, Lady Shelton was instructed to press once more the queen’s desire to be kind.
50
This was followed, after the old queen had died, by a message that if Mary would obey the king she would find Anne a second mother, and be asked for minimal courtesies only. When Mary replied discouragingly that she would obey her father as far as honour and conscience allowed, Anne tried to frighten and warn her at the same time. She wrote a letter to Anne Shelton, which was left ‘by accident’ in Mary’s oratory where she read it, as clearly she was expected to do. Efforts to persuade Mary were, Anne wrote, to cease; they had been an attempt to save the girl from her own folly, not because Anne needed her acquiescence. One may think that only partly true, but there is no doubt of the chilling realism of Anne’s warning of what would happen to Mary if, as she expected, the child she was carrying was a son: ‘I have daily experience that the king’s wisdom is such as not to esteem her repentance of her rudeness and unnatural obstinacy when she has no choice.’ This was only literal truth, as anyone knew who was familiar with Henry’s behaviour towards those who had offended him but sought mercy too late.
51
Mary took a copy of the letter for Chapuys, restored the original to its place and ignored the warning.