The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (60 page)
From the distance of the twenty-first century, it is hard to believe that England was in any real danger of isolation and invasion, or that Henry would be unable to avoid the entanglements of Francis I. Yet at the time the confusions, and the readiness of each power to take opportunist advantage of every other, did produce real anxiety. Matters were made more opaque by the universal passion for disinformation and by the existence within each country of divided counsels. In France there was a war party and a peace party, and in England two policies competed — either to rely on France or to seek an accommodation with the emperor. Henry, with Anne’s strong support, believed that he ought to be able to depend on French self-interest, though so long as Francis insisted on maintaining close relations with the pope and refused English advice to follow down the road of royal supremacy, the king never felt he could quite trust his ‘brother’ as he once had. This doubt about France explains why, in October, Anne was anxious to interest the French envoys in a match with Elizabeth, why Francis I’s recovery from a severe illness in November was marked in London by an ostentatious show of relief, and why Anne’s overture to Marguerite of Navarre in September was followed up in November and December by exploration from both sides.
20
Cromwell, by contrast, seems to have been much readier to consider doing a deal with the emperor, even though he was aware of imperial protests at the treatment of Katherine and Mary, and probably guessed at Charles’ reluctance to come to terms so long as Anne Boleyn usurped his aunt’s place as queen.
21
Henry, for the same reason, found it hard to discuss the emperor with Chapuys without losing his temper.
22
The opening of the new year brought further dramatic developments. On 7 January, Katherine of Aragon died at Kimbolton Castle, on the edge of the Fens. She had suddenly and somewhat unexpectedly gone downhill at the end of December, and her death was greeted at court by an outburst of relief and enthusiasm for the Boleyn marriage, which gives the lie to later historians who suggest that Anne was already living on borrowed time. She gave the messenger who brought the news to Greenwich a handsome present. Her father and brother made it clear that only one more thing was needed — for Mary to go the way of her mother. Henry cried, ‘God be praised that we are free from all suspicion of war!’ He would now have the advantage over the French, who would have to toe his line or risk an English alliance with Charles, ‘now that the real cause of our enmity no longer exists’. The next day, Sunday, the king and queen appeared in joyful yellow from top to toe, and Elizabeth was triumphantly paraded to church. After dinner Henry went down into the Great Hall, where the ladies of the court were dancing, with his sixteen-month-old daughter in his arms, showing her off to one and another. After several days of such paternal enthusiasm, he evidently decided that something more masculine was called for, and the tiltyard was soon busy with his favourite form of self-exhibition.
23
Even though, as is possible, he paid public court there to Jane Seymour, Anne could be sure that Elizabeth and her unborn child were the true centre of Henry’s interest, while she was herself now, for the first time, sole queen of England.
Eustace Chapuys took all this as a personal insult. His grief for Katherine was genuine and his sympathy for Mary all the more real because instructions had recently arrived from Charles, dampening all prospects of imperial support for a rising against Henry and Anne.
24
In January Francis I had intervened in the duchy of Savoy, which had been quickly overrun in what was an obvious preliminary to renewed hostilities over Milan. For the foreseeable future, Italy would be the imperial priority and England even more of a sideshow than usual. The end of the month, however, brought the ambassador comfort. Rumours began to reach him of Anne exhibiting signs of distress, afraid that she might go the same way as Katherine.
25
Chapuys, however, was clearly right to express caution about a story that made sense only if Anne believed the nonsense that Henry would abandon not only her but the child in her womb.
The likeliest explanation for the tale is that once again Anne’s pregnancy was proving difficult, and it was death, not divorce, that she feared. And death came very near. On 24 January the king’s horse fell heavily in the tiltyard at Greenwich, knocking Henry unconscious for two hours.
26
For a big man wearing nearly a hundredweight of armour to be thrown from a moving horse of, perhaps, seventeen hands high was no laughing matter — still less if the horse, as it may have done, also rolled on him.
The king must still have been suffering the after-effects when death came for real. On 29 January Anne miscarried. The immediate details appear in Chapuys’ despatch of 10 February.
27
He reported that the ‘child had the appearance of a male about three months and a half old’. A note made privately by Charles Wriothesley, Windsor Herald, agreed that it had been ‘a man child’ but gave the date as 30 January and was very specific about the length of gestation, saying that Anne ‘said that she had reckoned herself at that time but fifteen weeks gone with child’.
28
This we may well credit since Wriothesley’s post gave him a ready entrée to the court, and his cousin Thomas was clerk of the signet and close to Cromwell. The sex of the baby, however, may have been guesswork; the gender of a foetus cannot, it seems, be determined much before seventeen weeks. In any case, even if Anne’s calculations were wrong, how reliable would amateur diagnosis by the queen’s normal attendants have been, especially since Tudor households did not enjoy the clinical conditions of modern medicine? Experienced midwives are unlikely to have been on hand so early in Anne’s pregnancy.
29
In Elizabeth’s reign, the story in Catholic circles was that Anne had miscarried of ‘a shapeless mass of flesh’, but the person who popularized the tale was the Catholic propagandist in exile, Nicholas Sander.
30
Of course, it is in theory possible that Sander was passing on knowledge long concealed by the recusant community, but there is not a shred of evidence direct or circumstantial to substantiate such heroic self-censorship. No deformed foetus was mentioned at the time or later in Henry’s reign, despite Anne’s disgrace. In Mary’s reign, when there was every motive and opportunity to blacken Anne, the substantial anti-Boleyn material which appeared in England said nothing. Nor was any such report known to the more raffish European Catholic sources nor to William Thomas, a Protestant writer hostile to Anne. Lacking all corroboration, the appearance of the story forty years after the event must be dismissed as a Sander promotion designed to support his description of Anne as a misshapen monster. It is as little worthy of credence as his assertion that Henry VIII was Anne’s father.
The deformed foetus story would not merit a moment’s consideration apart from a mountain of fantasy that has been built on it. In particular, it has been conjectured that the true explanation for Anne’s subsequent rejection lies in the sixteenth-century superstition that deformity in a baby was a sign of sexual misbehaviour by a parent.
31
Given a deformed foetus in January 1536, Henry’s delicate conscience would need to be absolved from any such suspicion and a cover story provided to stop possible gossip. Therefore an alternative parentage for the lost child had to be invented and hence the accusation that Anne had committed adultery with five lovers. This is historical ‘Newspeak’! Common sense would ask why, having gone to all that trouble to shift responsibility, no one ever mentioned the deformed foetus, either when moves against Anne were beginning, or after her arrest or at her trial or subsequently. A cover story which held for 450 years but had been unnecessary in the first place invites more than a raised eyebrow. In history, evidence matters, not invention, and no evidence whatsoever supports the alleged deformity. To claim otherwise is, in the words of Jennifer Loach, ‘wishful thinking’.
32
In any case, far from protecting Henry’s reputation, accusing Anne of adultery opened him up to contempt. The reaction of the parson of Freshwater was to say: ‘Lo, whilst the king and his council were busy to put down abbeys and pull away the right of Holy Church, he was made a cuckold at home.’
33
Some sixteenth-century moralists did associate witches with monstrous births, so fantasizing about a ‘deformed foetus’ has led to historians speculating about a link between Anne’s fall and an accusation of witchcraft.
34
Here, at first sight, there does appear to be some evidence. According to Chapuys, the Exeters reported that Henry had said to a courtier (in absolute secrecy) that he had ‘made this marriage seduced and constrained by sortileges and for this reason he held the said marriage void and that God had demonstrated this in not allowing them to have male heirs and that he considered that he could take another.’
35
What should we make of this? Quite conceivably Henry’s remark may have been no more than bluster - after all, he would later weep and say that Anne had had intercourse with a hundred men and had planned to poison the duke of Richmond and the Princess Mary!
36
More significant, Exeter did not at that time know the reason for Henry’s remark, nor did he himself hear Henry’s comment.
37
What we have is Chapuys’ report in French of what he had understood of whatever a messenger had conveyed by word of mouth of a report from the Exeters of what the marquis and his wife said they had been told by ‘ung des principaux de court’ of what Henry had said to him, presumably in English.
38
Thus, did Henry use the term ‘sortilege’, or was the word provided
en route?
Even if Henry did use the noun, since its primary English meaning was ‘divination’ and since Henry spoke in the same breath of male heirs, the simple construction is that he was referring to the premarital predictions that union with Anne would produce sons. Less commonly, the word ‘sortilege’ could be used for occult practices, but in usual parlance ‘bewitched’ meant no more than ‘deceived’ — as in Tyndale’s 1526 New Testament: ‘Oh foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?’
39
In any case, alleging witchcraft was a commonplace excuse for foolish male behaviour. Chapuys himself had written of Anne and Henry in 1533 that, ‘This accursed lady has so enchanted and bewitched him that he will not dare to do anything against her will.’
40
Fifty years earlier, Richard III had attributed Edward IV’s unsuitable match with Elizabeth Woodville, a widow far his social inferior, to the sorcery and witchcraft of Elizabeth and her mother.
41
And once again, evidence - or rather, the lack of it — settles the matter. No accusation that she had dabbled in the black arts was ever levelled against Anne.
To less conspiracy-prone scholars, Anne’s loss of a child in January 1536 has seemed the turning-point to tragedy. Persuaded by the fate she met in May that Henry had long tired of his second wife, they conclude that she ‘had miscarried of her saviour’.
42
Setting hindsight aside, the evidence suggests something different. The loss — and above all the loss of a son — was a huge psychological blow to Henry. Childlessness had revealed the wrongfulness of his marriage to Katherine; was it now condemning his union with Anne? As reported, his immediate reaction rings all too true: by denying him sons, God had shown that the marriage with Anne must be void. Old fears were now out in force, and Henry’s mind was full of them when, still shaken by his own recent brush with mortality, he saw Anne for the first time after her miscarriage.
Chapuys’ despatches again provide the only contemporary insight into what took place. His letter of 10 February reported that Anne was blaming the miscarriage on Norfolk frightening her with the news of the king’s accident, but that general opinion put the real cause down to either ‘the concubine‘s’ inability to bear children or a fear of her fate now that the king was paying so much attention to Jane Seymour.
43
Just over a fortnight later he amplified the story.
44
Henry had spoken to Anne only ten times in the last three months. His only remark to her about the miscarriage was to repeat, ‘I see that God will not give me male children,’ and when he left her he said, as if in spite, ‘When you are up I will speak to you.’ Anne, in turn, had hit back. She told Henry that she had miscarried partly because of the shock of his accident, but also because she was heartbroken whenever he paid attention to another woman; her feelings for him were much stronger than Katherine’s had ever been. These remarks upset Henry for a long time and at Shrovetide he went to stay at Whitehall by himself instead of celebrating with Anne at Greenwich, whereas previously he could not leave her for an hour.
Not all of this is true. The point about Henry ignoring Anne for three months cannot be correct. Chapuys had forgotten his own report of the king’s behaviour after Katherine’s death. The significance he placed on their being apart at Shrovetide is equally contradictory. Either the separation was as ominous as he claimed, or the couple had been estranged for months — it is hard to believe both. The gloss the ambassador put on the king’s departure to Whitehall can in any case be queried. Shrovetide 1536 coincided with the key stages of the final session of the Reformation Parliament. The bill to dissolve the monasteries was on the point of being put into the Lords and, even more important, five days before Shrovetide, the final dispositions had been made to achieve victory in the king’s five-year campaign, fought against bitter resistance, to secure legislation restoring his feudal rights. Henry needed to be on the spot. If, as is likely, Anne was still convalescent, necessarily he had to go to Westminster alone.
45
We must remember, too, that Chapuys was equally ready to tell the absurd story (also spread by Francis I) that there had never been a pregnancy to miscarry.
46
It had simply been an attempt by Anne (with the help of her sister Mary) to deceive Henry into believing that she could conceive. Women prisoners did try to cheat the gallows by claiming to be
enceinte,
but Anne could only have hastened disaster by such a trick; it would have invited exactly the collapse of confidence the king had displayed in 1534, and had now experienced again. And why should Anne end the deception at fifteen weeks while the king was still interested in Jane Seymour?