Tudor Queens of England (21 page)

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sent to escort her. Never having seen an ocean-going ship before she was more than a little awed.

Henry meanwhile, his curiosity at last stimulated, decided on a quixotic gesture. He would intercept her in disguise on her journey through Kent. On 1 January 1540 an anonymous group of English gentlemen invaded the Princess’s apartments in the bishop’s palace at Rochester, claiming to bear a New Year gift from the King. Anne had not the slightest idea what to do. She spoke no English, or French, and probably feared that she was about to be abducted. Henry, who was one of the group, was profoundly disappointed. He had probably expected the kind of witty improvization that he would have got from Anne Boleyn, or the young Catherine and not this lumpish bewilderment. Realizing his mistake, the King withdrew and returned in his own proper person, with his companions abasing themselves in case any misunderstanding should persist. This time Anne could not fail to realize who he was, and somewhat numbly ‘humbled herself ’. They embraced and Henry withdrew but the damage had been done. Anne had appeared as a plain and rather stupid young woman, quite unable to rise to the unexpected. Henry returned to Greenwich, observing curtly ‘I like her not’

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From this low point it was downhill all the way. Anne was received with formal splendour at Shooter’s Hill, presented with magnifi cent jewels and royal robes, and married to the King at Greenwich on Twelfth Night, 6 January, but none of this persuaded Henry to fi nd her acceptable. Since he had fi rst set eyes on her he had not ceased to complain, he was putting his head into a yoke, he had not been ‘well handled’ by his advisers and so on. A last minute attempt was made to fi nd a loophole in the agreement, but there was none. For the sake of public honesty the marriage had to go ahead, even although the Cleves alliance was by this time irrelevant.

Poor Anne could do nothing right. The Germans were ‘beggarly knaves’ – she was a heretic who would lead the King astray (which was not true), and she did not look the part. Cromwell did his best to soothe his master’s anxieties, and hoped for the best. However (not surprisingly) the wedding night was a fi asco. Anne was so innocent that she had not the faintest idea what was supposed to happen, and was not at all disconcerted when Henry failed to perform. ‘At this rate’, one of her English ladies observed, ‘it will be a long time before we have a Duke of York’.

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Henry, typically, blamed his impotence upon her lack of physical attractiveness – her breasts were the wrong shape, and so on. He even doubted that she was a virgin, which in the circumstances was ridiculous. Anne must have been aware of the chill that surrounded her splendour, but seems to have had no inkling of the reason for it. For the time being the public life of the court proceeded without disruption. The King and Queen proceeded by barge from

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Greenwich to Westminster on 4 February, and a thousand rounds of ordnance were fi red from the Tower in greeting. The Queen’s household numbered nearly 130 men and women, including a number of German ladies and aristocratic English girls, one of whom was Catherine Howard. In April the parliament confi rmed the Queen’s dower lands. Anne was not crowned but that would not have been expected immediately in any case and superfi cially all appeared to be well. However, below the surface, there was furious paddling. Most of this concerns the fall of Thomas Cromwell and need not concern us here, except insofar as one of the charges brought against him was that he had manoeuvred the King into the Cleves marriage against his will, which was plausible but untrue. Henry had known perfectly well what he was doing even if he had come to dislike it. More relevantly, attempts were made to get the King off the hook by resurrecting the matter of Anne’s pre-contract, but that proved to be impossible. Finally it was decided to proceed on the grounds of non-consummation, which was undeniable if humiliating. The archbishop’s court secretly pronounced on this issue towards the end of June – a decision of which Anne seems to have been completely unaware. On 24 June the Queen went to Richmond, and there, on the following day, she was visited by the King’s commissioners who informed her that her marriage to Henry was invalid.

The message was carefully delivered through an interpreter and was received with extraordinary composure. Anne may not have known what non-consummation meant, but she seems to have been hugely relieved at being discharged of a responsibility that she had found to be beyond her. She declared herself to be content with whatever the King might decide and signed her letter of submission ‘Anna, daughter of Cleves’. If Anne had decided to fi ght in the manner of Catherine, she could have made life very diffi cult for the King. She could have rejected the verdict of a schismatical ecclesiastical Court and insisted upon her contractual rights but she chose to do none of these things. Instead she accepted a generous settlement of lands worth about £3,000 a year – some three-quarters of her jointure – and decided to stay in England. The Duke her brother may have been chagrined at her rejection but in fact he had lost nothing and it may be signifi cant that he made no attempt to insist on her return to Cleves. Anne never married but she remained on the fringes of the Court, becoming friendly with both Mary and Elizabeth, although she appears to have been upset by Catherine Parr’s evangelical associations. After Henry’s death she made a rather half-hearted attempt to have her marriage annulment overturned in order to claim the full jointure of a Queen Dowager but did not persist when Edward’s council proved to be unsympathetic. In her later years she turned her household into a kind of miniature Rhenish court and her German servants 112

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occasionally caused problems. She had no sympathy with Edward’s Protestant regime but (unlike Mary) it treated her with kid gloves. She returned to court at the beginning of Mary’s reign, and died after a long illness at Chelsea Manor on 16 July 1557, at the age of 42.

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As a Queen, Anne had been a non-event, and as a person she seems to have been better known for her good nature and charm than for any particular intelligence, wit, or talent. In the reign of Henry VIII, she was a diplomatic footnote, and is remembered best for her quite spectacular ignorance of matters sexual. The only remarkable thing about her encounter with Henry is that, in spite of his extensive experience with at least half a dozen women, he seems not to have known whether she was a virgin or not.

6

The Domestic Queens: Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour

and Catherine Parr

Apart from the brief and disastrous experiment with Anne of Cleves, after 1527 Henry VIII found all his wives in England. They were chosen for different reasons at different stages of his career but each was his own subject and therefore did not have to be bargained for with any neighbouring dynasty. This did not usually correspond with the advice of his Council, which was conventionally inclined to marry the King for diplomatic reasons, but Henry knew his own mind in such matters, and (Anne of Cleves again excepted), always pleased himself. Anne Boleyn was by far the most signifi cant politically because the campaign needed to secure her forced the King into radical ecclesiastical courses and her fall shook the establishment to its foundations. Jane was signifi cant for quite a different reason, because she was the mother of his son, and perhaps the best loved of all his consorts. By the time that he married the second Catherine in 1543, Henry was physically a spent force, and the erstwhile Lady Latimer is best known as the nurse who coped with an increasingly irritable and irascible husband and gave him what little peace his divided and self-interested court could afford.

Anne was born in about 1501, and was the younger daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn and his wife Elizabeth Howard, the sister of Thomas Earl of Surrey and subsequently Duke of Norfolk. Sir Thomas was a knight of good lineage and his wife came from one of the best noble houses in England.

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He was also a diplomat and a courtier of infl uence who, in 1513, managed to secure for his younger daughter a coveted position at the Court of Margaret of Austria, the Regent of the Low Countries. That he chose to give Anne such a training rather than her older sibling Mary is signifi cant. The following year Mary was to accompany the Princess her namesake when the latter was offered to Louis XII on the altar of matrimony, but Anne was clearly the brighter, and considered to be the more teachable. Margaret was choosy about who she would accept and her willingness to receive Anne is similarly a great complement to the child. The language of the court at Mechelen was French, and Margaret was meticulous, both in chaperoning her young charges and in providing them 114

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with a sophisticated education. Anne remained in that stimulating environment for over a year, before joining her sister in Paris by 5 November 1514, the date on which Mary was crowned Queen of France. When Louis died, the older Boleyn girl returned, as we have seen, to England, but Anne remained in France, transferring her service to the new queen, Claude, who was a girl not much older than herself. While Mary Boleyn was catching the King’s eye and sharing his bed, her younger sister remained in France, acting, it would appear, as an interpreter for the numerous English missions that visited the French Court at this time, including one led by her own father. Queen Claude was of a retiring nature and was almost constantly pregnant, so not very much is known of Anne’s exposure to the King’s household, which travelled around with him, but she is thought to have met and been infl uenced by the King’s sister, Margaret of Angouleme. She attended Queen Claude to the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520 – which was something of a Boleyn family reunion – and became an accomplished dancer and musician. When eventually in November 1521 Anglo-French relations had deteriorated to such an extent that war was in prospect, Sir Thomas brought his younger daughter home. By then she was 20 and, as one contemporary put it,

‘more French than English’. She was also a poised and self-assured courtier – and an accomplished fl irt in the best Gallic tradition.

As might be expected, her marriage had been under discussion in England without reference to her own wishes. Both Wolsey and the Earl of Surrey were keen to marry her to James Butler, who was about three years her junior, as a means of resolving an ongoing dispute between the Butlers and the Boleyns over the Earldom of Ormond. James was living in Wolsey’s household at the time, as something between a guest and a hostage, and as late as October 1521 the Cardinal, then in Calais, wrote to the King: ‘I shall, at my return to your presence, devise with your Grace how the marriage betwixt him and Sir Thomas Boleyn’s daughter may be brought to pass … for the perfecting of which marriage I shall endeavour myself at my return, with all effect.’

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The marriage never took place, probably for reasons which had more to do with Irish politics than with anything that happened in England, but it is also possible that someone asked Anne, who proved less than enthusiastic. It seems that for some time after her return to England she was thought of as being betrothed in some sense to James Butler, but no formal engagement was ever made. She was, of course, much sought after but, rather surprisingly, there seem to have been no real negotiations. The story of her entanglement with Lord Henry Percy, the son of the Earl of Northumberland, is both late and problematic. It is told by George Cavendish, who dates it to a time after the King had become seriously interested, which would be some time in 1527. However, the fi fth Earl,

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who features prominently in the story, died in May of that year; so it is possible that the events narrated occurred in 1526, or that Cavendish’s elderly memory was at fault in some other way. The fact is that for all her obvious allure, she was still available at the age of 25 or 26, when her game of courtly love with Henry started to become real. It looks as though Sir Thomas, already the father of one royal mistress, was well aware of the King’s increasingly vulnerable state of mind over his marriage, and was plotting the eventual outcome. However, there is not a shred of evidence that anything so purposeful was going on. When Anne returned to England, it was to a position in the Privy Chamber of the Queen. By the beginning of 1522, Catherine’s days of power were long since passed, but for an appointment of this kind her decision would still have been required, so it is reasonable to suppose that she had no idea that she was setting up a rival for herself. However, the appointment did mean that Anne was in regular attendance at the Court, and available to take part in its festivities. The fi rst recorded occasion upon which she did that was when she appeared in the character of Perseverance in the defence of the Chateau Verte on 1 March. This involved elaborate dressing up, and a mimic battle in the best Burgundian tradition. Henry led the assault on the chateau, which symbolized female coyness or reluctance, and (of course) won a great victory, which was symbolized by an elaborate dance.

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Anne’s appearance at this stage of her career was described or recollected later by many writers, who differ according to whether they regarded her with favour or not, but in certain respects they are in agreement. She was no dazzling beauty but had an electrifying sexuality: ‘Very eloquent and gracious, and reasonably good looking’ one contemporary who knew her well wrote, although he was a priest who would hardly have commented upon her allure. Probably the fairest description comes from a Venetian diplomat who was at the English court at the time: ‘Not one of the handsomest women in the world, she is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, a bosom not much raised, and eyes which are black and beautiful …’
4 I
t was not, however, her appearance that attracted men; in the words of Eric Ives, ‘she radiated se
x’5, and H
enry was not the only male to be captivated. Apart from young Henry Percy, who bitterly rued his father’s hostile intervention, Sir Thomas Wyatt equally found her almost irresistible, and had to be warned off by an infatuated monarc
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