Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (11 page)

Current medical science recognizes the uterine or hydatidiform mole as an overgrowth of placental tissue or abnormal growth that develops from a nonviable, fertilized egg at the beginning of a pregnancy. Instead of the normal embryonic cell division that results in the development of a fetus, the placental material develops into a shapeless mass.
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In the early modern period, moles were seen as one of many possible aberrant or unsuccessful outcomes of pregnancy; they were also seen as a visible manifestation of women exercising reproductive powers without sufficient male influence. Defective or insufficient male seed, rather than being interpreted as a male weakness, becomes less responsible in the face of the threatening, self-sufficient, and excessively creative womb. As Calbi puts it, “illegitimate” or “monstrous” offspring “signify the disruption of a malecentered...economy of reproduction, inducing specific anxieties about the ‘work’ respectively carried out by the male and female reproductive fluids in the generation of offspring.”
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That Mary Tudor experienced a uterine mole is not clear. Her false pregnancy may or may not have involved an actual physical growth in her womb, but that she could be suspected of giving birth to a mole—or other aberrant creature—is what matters. Mary was a married queen regnant, not a wandering woman or a servant girl on the margins of society, and yet she was still open to speculation about monstrous or molar births, just like her subjects or her fairy tale counterparts who were similarly accused of delivering monstrous progeny. Indeed, it may be precisely because Mary was a ruling queen—and one who cautiously guarded her political power from her consort—that her reproductive body was so potentially dangerous.

She who had the power to rule over her male subjects could equally produce monstrosities.

What Mary was eager to share with Philip, if not her political authority, was desire, which also signaled transgression in light of monster and molar-birth theories. Though the queen was 11 years older than her consort, her attraction to Philip was no secret, in spite of his notorious reputation for womanizing. At the time of Mary and Philip’s marriage, Gomez reported that “the best one can say is that the King realizes fully that the marriage was made for no fleshly consideration, but in order to cure the disorders of this country, and to preserve the Low Countries.”
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The English clergy, who may have recognized that the marriage was one of unequal attraction, chose to promote an image of a chaste queen, who, they insisted, “never lusted after man...but she consented to take a husband...not for carnal pleasure, but only for the desire and love of posterity.”
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Yet evidence suggests that Mary was quite in love with Philip. After the wedding, Gomez commented: “He [Philip] treats the Queen very nicely, and well knows how to pass over the fact that she is no good from the point of view of fleshly sensuality.” On the other hand, Mary would “almost talk love-talk to him,” while Philip played the patient and gallant husband to his giddy, love-stricken wife.
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In her earlier address to Parliament on the subject of marriage, Mary had insisted on being able to choose a husband “to her liking.” To be forced otherwise, she said, “would be to cause her death, for if she were married against her will she would not live three months, and would have no children, wherefore the Speaker would be defeating his own ends.”
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Contrary to a publicly constructed representation of a queen “who never lusted after man,” Mary asserted control over the choice of a husband and then did not hide her attraction to him. That court and common gossip resorted to fairy-tale-like assumptions about moles, puppies, and marmots when the queen’s pregnancies failed to be realized suggests entrenched beliefs about the monstrous potential of the desiring female body outside the purview of male authority.

Anne Boleyn’s reproductive failures are also chilling since so much was gambled on her ability to produce a son. The background story has been told so often that it has acquired its own legendary familiarity: Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his queen consort of nearly 24 years; his second marriage to Anne; and his cataclysmic break with the Catholic Church were all precipitated by his unstoppable desire for a male heir to perpetuate the Tudor dynasty.

At the time of Anne’s coronation at the end of May 1533, she was almost six months pregnant, but the child born on September 7 was not the anticipated prince. Chapuys wrote to Charles V, “The King’s mistress was delivered of a girl, to the great disappointment and sorrow of the King, of the Lady herself, and of others of her party, and to the great shame and confusion of physicians, astrologers, wizards, and witches, all of whom affirmed that it would be a boy.”
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Chapuys’s conflation of “astrologers, wizards and witches” with the royal doctors, which could have been lifted from the pages of a fairy tale, reveals the mixture of superstition and science that early modern medicine comprised. As for “the great disappointment and sorrow of the king,” the royal couple’s reaction to the birth of a daughter may have been overstated by an unsympathetic ambassador, but Anne still remained under considerable pressure to produce a son. According to the Venetian ambassador Giustiniani, when Mary was born in 1516 Henry said, “If it was a daughter this time, by the grace of God sons will follow,”
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but there is no record, 17 years later, of such sanguine forgiveness of Anne’s reproductive failures. On the contrary, her inability to produce a son contributed heavily to—and some would say cost her—the loss of her throne and her life.

Anne was able to conceive again, two more times after Elizabeth’s birth, but both pregnancies failed. Sir John Dewhurst suggests that she only had “two pregnancies, one successful and one unsuccessful,” and that any other evidence of additional pregnancies must have referred to the kind of false pregnancy discussed in the previous chapter.
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Most scholars agree, however, that after Elizabeth’s birth Anne most likely became pregnant in early 1534 but around the end of June delivered a stillborn child. Anne conceived again a year later in the fall of 1535, but in late January of 1536 she miscarried.
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The fate of Anne Boleyn’s final pregnancy is what concerns us here. Retha Warnicke has proposed that this last “fetus...was born deformed, a tragedy constituting the sole reason for the king’s setting in motion the process that lead to Anne’s execution.”
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Warnicke’s argument, which she first made in 
The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn
and which she reaffirms in her most recent book, includes a consideration of early modern reproductive theories and attitudes toward monstrous births. Nicholas Sander, writing decades after Anne’s death, wrote of her final pregnancy: “The time had now come when Anne was to be again a mother, but she brought forth only a shapeless mass of flesh.”
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While Sander’s credibility on many matters has been questioned by scholars, including Warnicke, the reference to the “shapeless mass of flesh”—a term used to describe the uterine mole—rings familiar against the background of contemporary discussions of aberrant births. While not all scholars have endorsed Warnicke’s theory of the deformed fetus and some have rejected it outright, her hypothesis that Anne’s failed pregnancy—not factional politics and not infidelity—caused the queen’s demise is of interest here.

We cannot do justice to Warnicke’s painstaking argument in this
brief space, but she begins by asking why Henry would have his queen publicly charged with adultery with five men, beginning in October 1533, after Elizabeth’s birth, and ending in December 1535, just before the miscarriage: “the ten specific illicit sexual acts were dated during that period because Henry wanted to make it impossible to prove he had sired the fetus delivered in January 1536. Perhaps, then, the childbirth was irregular.”
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Two points that are critical to Warnicke’s argument center on the official information made available about Anne’s situation: first, knowledge of this miscarriage was made public, when news of most other royal miscarriages or failed pregnancies was minimized. Second, Henry seemed cavalier about having his queen’s alleged sexual infidelity publicly known at a time when cuckoldry was such an affront to one’s masculinity, but, Warnicke argues, “what an early modern man would deem worse than admitting multiple cuckoldry was acknowledging his wife’s miscarrying a deformed fetus.”
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As Warnicke acknowledges, this theory can only be speculative, as no actual mention of a deformed fetus has been discovered. Shortly after the miscarriage, Chapuys wrote that the queen had prematurely delivered “a child, who had the appearance of a male about three months and a half old, at which miscarriage the King has certainly shown great disappointment and sorrow.”
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Chapuys later reports that Henry complained, “God (he said) had well shown his displeasure at it by denying him male children.”
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Charles Wriothesley recorded, “Three daies before Candlemas, Queene Anne was brought a bedd and delivered of a man child, as it was said, afore her time.”
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Although these reports seem confident that the miscarried fetus was discernibly male, another report is more cynical: Dr. Pedro Ortiz, Charles’s ambassador in Rome, wrote to the Empress Isabella of Portugal, almost three months after the miscarriage, that it was believed “the reason of her [Anne’s] pretending the miscarriage of a son was that the King might not leave her, seeing that she conceived sons.”
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Even if it were pure gossip, Ortiz points to a common understanding that the queen felt substantial pressure to demonstrate her ability to bear sons.

We can only hazard explanations for Henry’s destructive reaction to Anne’s last pregnancy. Would the sex of the fetus have mattered? On the one hand, a male fetus may have indicated to Henry that Anne was capable of conceiving sons and could do so again; on the other hand, given that this was Anne’s third pregnancy, Henry may have been even more infuriated if the child was male and then miscarried, or even worse, deformed. What matters is the failure: the child was not brought to term. Anne’s need to prove that she could bring to term a healthy, well-formed child was just as important as proving that she was capable of conceiving sons. Warnicke cites a letter Alexander Alesius wrote to Elizabeth upon her accession, recalling a scene he witnessed near the time of Anne’s arrest:

“Never shall I forget the sorrow which I felt when I saw the most serene Queen, your most religious mother, carrying you, still a little baby, in her arms and entreating the most serene King, your father, in Greenwich Palace, from the open window of which he was looking into the courtyard...the faces and gestures of the speakers plainly showed that the King was angry.”

Warnicke reads this incident as Anne’s desperate attempt to remind the king of “her previous success in giving birth to a child so perfectly formed” that even Henry had displayed her naked to the French ambassadors.

Whether the fetus was deformed, which seems plausible, Henry—so eager to affirm his own siring capacity and so desperate for a son—wanted to distance himself from any form of failed pregnancy. In a culture that ascribed reproductive failures, especially aberrancies, to the female, Anne could have been blamed for imagined illicit sexual desire or even “self-insemination,” but these crimes would have been more difficult to prove, even in Henry’s fraudulent system of justice. Constructing a case against Anne based on actual sexual transgressions and the flouting of male authority must have made perverse sense, as dubious as the accusations are from our vantage point.

Our longing to know more about what actually happened at the queen’s childbed is as fruitless as any fairy-tale wish. Details about the childbirth experience are as elusive in the historical record as they are in the terse economy of the fairy-tale genre, but it is this very absence of clear information that allows for speculation and allegations.

David Cressy’s study of Agnes Bowker’s cat, the story of another early modern monstrous birth at the opposite end of the social hierarchy, offers another example that certain childbirth experiences can resist unequivocal explanation in spite of substantial evidence. In 1569, Agnes Bowker, a young woman from Leicestershire, claimed to have given birth to a cat. Extant testimony from midwives, local shopkeepers, magistrates, clerics, servants, and Bowker herself “touches a range of issues: normal and abnormal childbirth, gender relations and sexuality, monsters and the imagination...[and] exposes a variety of transgressions, violations, suspicious, and doubts.” But in total, the story of what actually happened to Agnes Bowker and her real or imagined offspring remains in the realms of “uncertainty, indeterminacy, and ambiguity, and the shifting grounds of bewilderment and wonder.”
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Likewise, the more we probe the suspicions and mystery surrounding the disastrous pregnancies of Mary Tudor and Anne Boleyn, the more we are faced with stubborn resistance surrounding their childbirth experiences. What is clear, however, is that these two queens suffered extraordinary pressure to deliver a healthy heir to a society that fearfully anticipated reproductive calamities and then invariably blamed the female body when they occurred. Any claims, from the fanciful to the rationally constructed, that either Mary or Anne delivered anything imperfect—a shapeless mass of flesh, a mole, a puppy, a marmot, a deformed fetus—remind us how deeply held were early modern fears and fascinations with monstrous births. Connections between the monstrous outcomes and their causes—weakened male capacity, excessive or inappropriate sexual desire, female autonomy—were part of common lore as well as of early modern medicine.

We return to the queens in fairy tales who deliver monstrous progeny and their transgressions begin to come into focus: they slept alone in their gardens, they may have had illicit dreams, and most egregiously, they conducted their reproductive process entirely within the female sphere. When pregnancies are not successful, such a condition allows for all of the blame to be directed to a female community and to be laid on the body of the queen while the king is left seeking an heir to his throne.