Game of Queens (24 page)

Meeting Eleanor, his future bride, François’s deportment was everything courtly but he had already made a secret declaration disavowing any promises made under duress. He had no intention of fulfilling the terms of the treaty. Nonetheless, on 17 March, by careful negotiation, two boats rowed towards each other across the border river of Bidassoa. On a barque moored in the middle they exchanged passengers: François travelling on to Bayonne where his mother, sister, and ministers were waiting, and his two small sons into Spain, to take their father’s place in captivity.

17

‘a true, loyal mistress and friend'

England, 1525–1527

Events in Europe, inevitably, had also their effect in England, and on two women close to Henry VIII. The first to feel it was Katherine of Aragon. Henry's first reaction to the news from Pavia early in 1525 was, of course, delight. His ally's victory was, Henry assumed, a fulfilment of the long-held dream: the rebirth of English power in France. An equally delighted Katherine of Aragon wrote to her nephew of her ‘great pleasure and content', reminding Charles V that her husband had been, she said, his ‘constant and faithful ally', and urging that ‘from the continuance of such friendship and alliance the best result may be anticipated'. But the rejoicing proved premature.

Instead, it quickly transpired that the new adjustment of power in Europe, with the Habsburg Charles so clearly in the ascendant over a humiliated France, meant that Henry had lost his precious, precarious position as the keeper of the balance. Charles no longer needed him (and was aware, moreover, that Henry had contributed neither men nor money to the victory from which he hoped such gains). That summer, Charles demanded that Henry's nine-year-old daughter, Mary, should either be sent to Spain, to be educated in the ways of the country in preparation for her marriage, or that he should be released from the contract. Mary's age was a part of the problem, as Charles was careful to explain. Not only was he, at twenty-five, eager to get on with fathering a family but an adult bride was (given the Habsburg proclivity for female regents) the best answer to his immediate problem: who should be his regent to govern Spain while he was absent in Italy?

Charles V now sought to marry his cousin, the well dowered 21-year-old Isabella of Portugal: ‘Were this marriage to take place, I could leave the Government here in the hands of the said Princess', he wrote to his brother Ferdinand. To Henry he explained: ‘my subjects are pressingly requesting me to marry a princess who may fill my place, and govern during my absence'. His marriage to Isabella took place the following year, in March 1526.

Henry VIII, of course, was never going to see the force of these arguments. His disenchantment with the Habsburg alliance, which Katherine represented, may explain what came next. If Mary was no longer to marry Charles, then the future of England could no longer be left in a son-in-law's hands. In June Henry created his illegitimate son (by Elizabeth Blount) Duke of Richmond; Richmond being a title with particular importance to the Tudor dynasty, since the young Henry VII had borne it. Now also nominally Lieutenant-General of the North, the boy was to be addressed henceforth in official documents as ‘the right high and noble prince Henry'.

Katherine of Aragon made her views clear; encouraged, so the Venetian ambassador reported, by three of her Spanish ladies. All she achieved was to provoke the king, who dismissed the ladies: ‘a strong measure', the Venetian admitted, ‘but the queen was obliged to submit and to have patience.' Inevitably there was speculation that Henry was planning to make the boy his heir but his intentions were far from clear. Just weeks later Princess Mary was sent to Ludlow as nominal Governor of Wales, with a household even grander than Richmond's, kitted out in her livery colours of blue and green, and with instructions from her father that she should be treated as to ‘so great a princess doth appertain'.

Ruling a miniature court as a small queen, she was to be educated in Latin and French ‘without fatigacion [sic] or weariness', to enjoy a diet ‘pure, well-prepared, dressed and served with comfortable, joyous and merry communication'. It must have been a grief to Katherine in one sense, to be deprived of her daughter's company: ‘the long absence of the King and you troubleth me', Katherine wrote to her daughter, but also an honour, surely.
¹

It is uncertain whether, with Katherine of Aragon's childbearing clearly at an end, Henry already contemplated setting her aside. But there was no thought of the shocking and controversial turn the king's marital career would next take. However, in the course of the summer peregrinations of 1525, Henry's interest in Anne Boleyn may have begun.

 

In the summer of 1525 Anne's sister Mary Boleyn became pregnant; whether by her husband William Carey or by Henry VIII it is impossible, now, to say. Either way, her pregnancy would have made Mary less attractive to Henry. One school of thought holds that her family effectively put Anne forward as an alternative, another female pawn who could be brought into play to ensure that the king's face still turned the Howard/Boleyn way. The exact nature of the mating dance that would soon be performed between several forces – dynastic necessity, Henry VIII's affections, Anne Boleyn's will and the impact of the new religion – remains one of the most debatable topics in history. Exact facts and precise chronology often cannot be found. But two things should perhaps be said.

First, the pattern of European events – Henry's turning away from things Spanish and towards things French – provided a context. There was widespread concern at Charles V's dominance and especially his pre-eminence in Italy where, in May 1526, an alarmed Pope Clement joined in a ‘Holy League' with France, Venice, Florence and Milan (a league which had England's tacit support) against the Holy Roman Emperor. Second, on a personal level, Henry's initial pursuit of Anne – his attempt to make her (in several different senses) his mistress – can be set within what you might call another European context: the long fantasy of courtly love.
²
This was enacted in the masques and tournaments, the game played out in poems and pageants: the cruel superior mistress and the yearning lover who must always obey. Born in the courts of Provence and finding its English apogee in the days of Eleanor of Aquitaine, it had enjoyed a late rebirth in the fifteenth century under the Burgundian aegis. Modelled on the devotion man owes to God and the service a feudal vassal owed his lord, courtly love might yet allow a measure of masculine violence at this later, more cynical, stage of its development, anyway. That is what lay behind Margaret of Austria's poetry, and behind the warnings Anne de Beaujeu had issued so clearly. But for better or for worse, this was the game which, significantly, those of Margaret of Austria's court loved to play. And Henry VIII too was besotted with all the games of chivalry.

It is possible that Henry Tudor's initial pursuit of Anne Boleyn had an element of competitiveness in it. Anne, fresh from the continent, would provide an arena in which to compete not only against his own courtiers but against the French king: a field of cloth of gold in her own person, you might say. (The trouble, in years ahead, would perhaps be that she tried to keep up that spirit of rivalry.) Just so did François compete with cronies like Bonnivet.

Early in 1526 Henry began to sound out opinion on his marriage but there is no reason to suppose this was directly connected to any approaches he may have made to Anne Boleyn. At the Shrovetide jousts in February 1526, Henry rode under the device ‘Declare I dare not', which has often been seen as an approach to Anne. But at the banquet which followed, in his role of gallant, he waited on Katherine. Many a queen (Katherine's mother among them) might be expected to tolerate her husband's infidelities, so long as he paid tribute to her position in public. ‘You owe [your husband] nothing less than compliance and obedience so that you do not provoke his folly; God and the world expects nothing less of you', Anne de Beaujeu had written.

Henry VIII's letters to Anne probably started slightly later that year.
*
In the first of them he describes himself three times as Anne's true servant, while she is the ‘mistress', in the controlling rather than the carnal sense; a distant unattainable star whose resistance only increased her desirability.

Henry's next letter repeats the theme: clearly Anne had protested her duty of service to the king. ‘Although it doth not appertain to a gentleman to take his lady in place of a servant, nevertheless, in compliance with your desires, I willingly grant it to you . . .' Another is more revealing. Its lengthy and closely reasoned argument is the more striking for the fact that Henry was notoriously reluctant, under normal circumstances, ever to write:

Debating with myself the contents of your letter, I have put myself in great distress, not knowing how to interpret them . . . praying you with all my heart that you will expressly certify me of your whole mind concerning the love between us two.

He has been now, he writes, ‘above one whole year struck with the dart of love, not being assured either of failure or of finding place in your heart and grounded affection'.

It is the last point, he says, that prevents him ‘from calling you my mistress, since if you do not love me in a way which is beyond common affection that name in no wise belongs to you, for it denotes a singular love, far removed from the common'. Henry had obviously started out by trying to have Anne Boleyn as his partner in just another affair; the kind of mistress Katherine of Aragon would have accepted, and the kind Mary Boleyn had been. But now he seems to be adjusting his offer:

If it shall please you to do me the office of a true, loyal mistress and friend and to give yourself up, body and soul, to me . . . I promise you that not only shall the name be given you, but that also I will take you for my only mistress, rejecting from thought and affection all others save yourself, to serve only you.

Though the double sense of mistress is confusing, Henry seems to be making the subtle, to modern eyes, but important difference of offering Anne the position of
maitresse en titre
.
³
Perhaps the offer was a tribute to Anne Boleyn's French years. The question was why she did not accept. But the experience of Marguerite of Navarre, and of Margaret of Austria before her, taught that a woman was not necessarily a winner if once she engaged in the
guerre d'amour
. Nor had Anne's sister Mary walked away with any great gains from the king's favour.

We cannot, in the nature of things, have any sure information as to when the relationship became sexual. The picture may be of seven long years' frustration, traditionally seen as being imposed by Anne but it has to be admitted as a possibility that they had sex at the start of the relationship, before marriage and legitimate children became the ultimate goal, and then later refrained; a restraint in this case at least as likely to be imposed by Henry. The answer to the perennial question – how they managed it? – may lie in the question of what we mean by sex. Or rather, what was considered sex in the realm of courtly love.

Courtly love permitted an extended experience of what we would call foreplay but which could be accepted as an alternative to full intercourse. A manual written for one of Eleanor of Aquitaine's daughters, by a monk, instructed that a lover might enjoy the embraces of his lady naked in a bed as long as ‘the final solace' was denied them. Indeed, given the patterns of late marriage (and only the most limited contraception) prevalent in sixteenth-century England, this seems to have been the practice well beyond courtly circles.

Courtly love, in essence adulterous, was never meant to end in marriage; it produced ecstasies but no heirs. This, ultimately, would be why the game had to end: it could not give Henry all he wanted. Again, we cannot know exactly when Henry's interest in Anne changed its focus; when the idea of marriage was first mooted between them but in the course of 1526 things took a serious turn.

By the December of that year Katherine of Aragon was isolated at court. When Charles V's new ambassador, Inigo de Mendoza, arrived he found it impossible to see Katherine, finally hearing from her that any interview would have to be arranged through Wolsey and conducted in his presence, and that the utmost discretion would have to be preserved. After their first meeting in the spring, Mendoza concluded that to seek another would merely ‘add further damage to what might be said' about the Spanish queen.

It was probably to celebrate the New Year of 1527 that Anne Boleyn sent Henry VIII a gift he received with delight. The ‘fine poésies' of the letter that came with it – the ‘too humble submission', as the lovesick king protested – have long since been lost but the message is still plain to see. The gift is a jewel, once hung with a diamond, representing a ship on which a damsel is borne above a stormy sea. The diamond is the heart; hard but steadfast, as the myths of courtly love had it, and the damsel was surely Anne, the giver. Was Henry to be her refuge from the storms of life? Even if it meant another woman, the king's loyal wife, would be cast adrift on the sea?

At some point Anne seems to have withdrawn herself to Hever. One of Henry's letters to her laments that she ‘will not come to court, neither with my lady your mother, and if you could, nor yet by any other way'. It may have been tactics, a strategic withdrawal on Anne's part, since Henry protests in wounded tones that he marvels at her decision, since he is sure he has committed no fault. (This may be a more complex statement than it seems: in courtly parlance the sinful lover was supposed to derive vicarious moral benefit from his mistress's virtue.) It was around Easter 1527 that the king informed Wolsey he had serious ‘scruples' about his marriage.