The House of Tudor (21 page)

Catherine was obliged to submit, too, when Henry decided that the time had come for Princess Mary, now nine years old, to go to Ludlow to take up her duties as Princess of Wales. It was hard for the Queen, especially with her own gloomy memories of Ludlow, to face separation from her child, but she could take comfort from the fact that at least Mary was being treated with the consideration due to her father’s heiress. Ludlow Castle was repaired and re-decorated for her, and her household would be under the control of her mother’s old friend, Margaret Pole Countess of Salisbury.

All the same, it was a sad autumn for Catherine. Her health was poor and she had long since had to give up all hope of bearing a living son. She was estranged from her husband, separated from her daughter and missing the little girl badly. Internationally, too, the outlook was bleak, for relations with Spain were once more severely strained. Looking back over her life in September 1525 the Queen of England could see only a depressing catalogue of failure - repeated failure to give the King a male heir, failure to keep the Anglo-Spanish alliance in being, the failure, in short, of the whole purpose of her marriage.

But Henry came back to her. He no longer discussed his affairs with her and almost certainly he no longer slept with her, but there remained a bond of affection and respect, of shared experience and shared interests between them. They made up their quarrel and read Erasmus’ latest book together. The King resumed his habit of receiving visitors in his wife’s apartments and they kept Christmas together at Eltham, though with rather less indiscriminate hospitality than usual because of an outbreak of plague in London. Everything seemed to have settled back to normal and no one, least of all the Queen, could have guessed that this period of calm was the lull before the storm - the hurricane which was about to tear her world apart and destroy it forever.

We do not know exactly when Henry was first seriously attracted by the younger sister of his discarded mistress Mary Boleyn. If we did, we should know a great deal more about the real origins of the King’s Great Matter. The fortunes of the Boleyn family, tenant farmers from Sail in Norfolk, had been founded in the fifteenth century by Geoffrey, a younger son who had come up to London in classic Dick Whittington style and risen to be Lord Mayor. His son, William, had climbed further up the social ladder by marrying into the noble Anglo-Irish family of Butler and William’s second son, Thomas, came to Court to make a career in the King’s service - one of the new men attracted by the new dynasty. Thomas had also acquired an aristocratic wife, Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the second Duke of Norfolk, and there were three surviving children of the marriage - George, Mary and Anne.

In later years, when Anne Boleyn had become the most notorious woman in Europe, her lightest word, her every look and gesture were eagerly observed and reported, but very little is known about her early life. There is still some controversy over her date of birth, although William Camden, writing in her daughter’s lifetime, gives it categorically as 1507. Anne was probably born at Blickling in Norfolk, though tradition always connects her with Hever Castle, the Boleyns’ Kentish property, and she seems to have received most of her early education from Simonette, her French maid or governess. Later on, most likely in 1519 when her father was appointed ambassador, she went over to France to be ‘finished’ in the household of Queen Claude, François’ good dull wife, who maintained a school for young ladies at her Court.

By the end of 1521 Anne was back in England. Her father used his growing influence to get her accepted as one of Queen Catherine’s maids of honour and she was present at the New Year Revels, wearing a dress of yellow satin and a caul of Venice gold. Thomas Boleyn was planning a match for his younger daughter with James Butler, one of her Irish kinsmen - a project which, for reasons connected with the political situation in Ireland, had the active support of the King and Cardinal Wolsey. But the negotiations made slow progress and Anne, a nubile and enterprising fifteen-year-old, began to look round for a husband on her own account. Her choice fell on Henry Percy, son and heir of the Earl of Northumberland. This rather slow-witted youth was attached to Wolsey’s entourage and ‘when it chanced the Lord Cardinal at any time to repair to the court, the Lord Percy would then resort for his pastime unto the Queen’s chamber and there would fall in dalliance among the Queen’s maidens, being at the last more conversant with Mistress Anne Boleyn than with any other.’

The young people soon reached an understanding but as soon as rumours of a secret engagement reached Cardinal Wolsey, he took prompt and ruthless action to end it. He rated the unfortunate Percy in front of the servants of his chamber for so far forgetting himself and his position as to become entangled ‘with a foolish girl yonder in the court’, and ordered him ‘not once to resort to her company’ again on pain of his father’s and the King’s severe displeasure.

George Cavendish, Wolsey’s gentleman usher, recording this episode in his biography of the Cardinal, believed that the King had ordered Wolsey to intervene because he had already conceived a secret passion for Anne. In view of later events, this must have seemed a reasonable assumption to Cavendish, writing with the benefit of hindsight, but there is, in fact, no evidence whatever that Henry had any amorous feelings tor Anne Boleyn as early as 1522 - a time when he was probably still sleeping with her elder sister. A less romantic but far more likely explanation is that the Cardinal had simply acted to prevent a young nobleman entrusted to his care from being trapped into matrimony by a scheming young woman of no particular family. As for Anne, she showed her furious disappointment so openly that she was sent home in disgrace and, as far as we know, did not return to Court until the end of 1525 or the early part of 1526.

By this time the Butler marriage had finally fallen through and Anne, now in her nineteenth year, was still unbetrothed. There were apparently no other suitors under consideration and she had begun to amuse herself by flirting with Sir Thomas Wyatt, the witty, sophisticated courtier, diplomat and poet who was a neighbour of the Boleyns down in Kent. Wyatt, Like the King, was a married man and it seems probable that it was his obvious interest which first roused Henry to take notice of Anne. ‘Who list her hunt’, wrote Wyatt in a sonnet which may or may not refer to Anne Boleyn, but which could hardly be more apt;

Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt.

As well as I may spend his time in vain:

And, graven with Diamonds, in letters plain

There is written her fair neck round about:

Noli me tangere
, for Caesar’s I am;

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

Whether or not Wyatt had spent his time entirely in vain (it was whispered later that Anne had not always been so hard to get), he was wise enough to abandon the chase as soon as Caesar set foot in the stirrup and by sometime in the summer of 1326 the field had been cleared for the most remarkable courtship in English history.

No other woman in English history has ever aroused so much and such violent controversy as Anne Boleyn. In her own lifetime she was ‘the other woman’, the home-wrecker, the wicked stepmother; she was the concubine,
la grande putain
, the goggle-eyed whore, ‘that naughty pake Nan Bullen’. Succeeding generations have seen her as a wronged and virtuous Protestant heroine, as a helpless victim of circumstances, as a commonplace little gold-digger. It is virtually impossible now to find the real wom.an beneath all the passion and the politics, the prejudice and the special pleading, and often the seeker feels, like Wyatt, that he is trying to catch the wind in a net. She can only be glimpsed occasionally - defiant, tricky, ‘wild for to hold though [she] seems tame’ - and always there is that faint but unmistakable whiff of the feral, the untameable, wherever she has been.

She was not conventionally beautiful, especially not by the standards of an age which admired blue-eyed, fair-skinned blondes. Anne’s dark brunette colouring earned her another of her nicknames, ‘the night crow’. She had thick, glossy black hair and fine dark eyes, which seem by all accounts to have been her best feature, but she was inclined to be flat-chested and her complexion is variously described as ‘sallow’ or ‘swarthy’, which sounds as if she had the rather greasy, coarse-textured skin which often goes with black hair and eyes. There were other blemishes, too. She is said to have had a projecting tooth, a rudimentary sixth finger on her right hand and a large mole or strawberry mark on her neck. But Anne was always clever at making the best of herself She dressed well and soon became a leader of fashion, being described as ‘the model and mirror of those at Court’. She sang, played the lute and was a graceful dancer. But, apart from the extra polish of her French education, she does not appear to have had any special accomplishments to mark her out from her contemporaries. She is said to have had a ready wit, but no examples of it have survived. She certainly had a venomous temper and a sharp tongue which made her many unnecessary enemies. It is not easy to define the secret of her undoubted fascination, but probably it lay partly in her general air of elegance and vivacity, and partly in that special quality of sexual magnetism which eludes description, defies portraiture and has little or nothing to do with physical beauty.

It was not long, of course, before the whole Court knew that Mistress Anne Boleyn was the King’s latest fancy, but no one as yet ‘esteemed it other than an ordinary course of dalliance’; nor is there any reason to suppose that Henry himself was contemplating anything other than an ordinary course of dalliance - not, that is, until Anne made it clear that she had no intention of allowing him into her bed. This disobliging attitude may well have surprised the King, but from Anne’s point of view it was reasonable enough. Her sister Mary had received no very startling reward for her services, having been married off to William Carey, one of the King’s boon companions but otherwise of no particular consequence. Even Bessie Blount, who had given the King a son, had achieved no more than a respectable marriage. Anne, intelligent, ambitious and, since the Percy
débâcle
, with something of a chip on her shoulder, wanted to do better than that.

In spite of his highly-coloured reputation, Henry was no lecher and held, with perfect sincerity, strong moral views on female chastity. He could understand and respect Anne’s veto and, having satisfied himself that she was not to be enjoyed without marriage, he made up his mind to give her marriage. Just when this majestic decision was taken is yet another unanswered question. All we know for certain is that in May 1527 the King made the first moves in the divorce or, to be strictly accurate, the nullity suit which was to have such incalculable effects on the whole course of English life.

Henry based his case quite simply on the Old Testament text: ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing...they shall be childless.’ Henry had married his brother’s wife and they were childless, or as good as childless. This was obviously a sign of God’s displeasure and the King began to feel qualms of conscience, soon to develop into an unalterable conviction, that his marriage was against God’s law - that for the past eighteen years he and Catherine had been living together in incestuous adultery. Why else, after all, should the Almighty, who had always taken such a flattering interest in his affairs, deny him a male heir?

It IS generally accepted by serious historians that Henry’s desperate need for a son to succeed him was the spur which goaded him into seeking a divorce in the first place, the driving force which sustained him through the bitter legal battle that followed. Of course Henry wanted a son and his anxiety about the succession was to play an increasingly important part in the general conduct of his policy. (In the matter of the divorce, it provided an unexceptional excuse for some distinctly questionable proceedings.) But at the same time, it is worth remembering that in 1527 it was very nearly nine years since Catherine’s last pregnancy, six or seven years at least since Henry had known she would never have another child - a lapse of time which does not exactly promote an impression of desperation.

It is difficult, therefore, not to wonder whether, if Henry had never become infatuated with Anne Boleyn, we should ever have heard about that famous scruple which ‘pricked’ his conscience. His own subjects certainly wondered. ‘The common people’, wrote Edward Hall, ‘being ignorant of the truth and in especial women and others that favoured the Queen talked largely and said that the King would for his own pleasure have another wife.’ This sort of talk became so widespread that the King found it necessary to explain his position in a public statement made to the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London and various other notables at Bridewell Palace. Henry began by reminding his audience that throughout almost twenty years of his reign they had enjoyed a period of peace and prosperity, that he had protected them from ‘outward enemies’ and had never undertaken a foreign war without achieving victory and honour. ‘But’, he went on, ‘when we remember our mortality and that we must die, then we think that all our doings in our lifetime are clearly defaced and worthy of no memory if we leave you in trouble at the time of our death. For if our true heir be not known at the time of our death, see what mischief and trouble shall succeed to you and your children.’ It was perfectly true that it had pleased God to send him a fair daughter, but learned men were now telling him that Mary, begotten on his brother’s wife, was not his lawful daughter, that he was not lawfully married, but living ‘abominably and detestably in open adultery’. This fearful possibility daily and hourly troubled his conscience and oppressed his spirits. It was, on his word as a prince, the only reason why he had sought counsel from experts, so that the matter could be decided. He intended no disparagement of the Queen, a most excellent and virtuous woman. Henry would be grieved if he had to part from ‘so good a lady’, his loving companion for nearly twenty years, but he could not risk God’s continued displeasure or the danger of having no true heir of his body to inherit the realm.