Game of Queens (32 page)

As Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn attended the May Day jousts at Greenwich. Henry still showed Norris every sign of favour. But when the king abruptly left the festivities, something at which ‘many men mused but most chiefly the queen', the king began questioning Norris, promising him pardon if he would but speak the truth. Norris stoutly maintained his innocence but the next day he was taken to the Tower, where Smeaton was already being held, together with Anne's brother George.

Four others were also arrested, accused of adulterous relations with Anne, including her old admirer the poet Thomas Wyatt and Sir Francis Weston, a gentleman of the king's privy chamber. Weston had been in a flirtation with a lady of Anne's chamber but said that he loved another there better and, when she pressed him as to who, said ‘it is yourself'.

‘Thus, my daughter, whatever your age, guard against being deceived and remember what I told you before because you can be blamed even for something very slight . . .' Anne de Beaujeu had warned.

All this must have been running through Anne Boleyn's head. She surely had some inkling of trouble ahead: in the last week of April she asked Matthew Parker, her chaplain, to have a special care of her daughter.
²
But it was a stunning blow when, on 2 May, she was arrested, accused of having had sexual relations with Norris, Smeaton and one other. She said that ‘to be a Queen, and cruelly handled was never seen', and hoped that the king was doing it only to ‘prove' her; a regular trope of courtly love.

Taken to the Tower, Anne asked if she would be placed in a dungeon. She was told that she would be housed in the royal lodgings she had used before her coronation. She fell to her knees, crying ‘Jesu have mercy on me.' The indictment drawn up preparatory to the trials said that she ‘following daily her frail and carnal lust, did falsely and traitorously procure by base conversations and kisses, touchings, gifts, and other infamous incitations, divers of the King's daily and familiar servants to be her adulterers and concubines'. More explicitly yet, she ‘procured her own natural brother to violate her, alluring him with her tongue in his mouth, and his tongue in hers, against the commands of Almighty God and all laws human and divine'. This was how a queen could be brought low; as Anne herself protested in a memorable image, with accusations she could only deny ‘without I should open my body'.

On 12 May the four commoners actually charged were tried (Wyatt and another having been suspected but released). Smeaton again confessed his guilt and the others pleaded not guilty. They were, inevitably, all four sentenced to a traitor's death. Three days later, on the 15th, Anne Boleyn and her brother George were each tried separately before a jury of their peers.

She entered the Great Hall of the Tower of London ‘as though she were going to a great triumph', an eyewitness wrote. In front of some two thousand spectators, she answered firmly ‘Not guilty' to each charge. ‘She made so wise and discreet answers to all things laid against her, excusing herself with her words so clearly as though she had never been faulty to the same', recorded the Windsor Herald Charles Wriothesley.

When George Boleyn's turn came, he both confused the issue and upped the stakes by reading aloud the accusation that had been written down for him: that he and Anne had laughed together over the king's lack of virility. But inevitably, all twenty-six peers found them guilty. Anne's uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, pronounced the sentence: that she should be burned or beheaded at the king's pleasure. Two days later the five men were executed, and on the same day Anne's marriage was annulled.

On the 19th Anne Boleyn herself came to the block. In those agonising days in the Tower, she had cried out that her fate would be the death of her mother, the blood mother who figures so little in the stories of Anne. But otherwise she seemed, so the Lieutenant of the Tower reported, to have ‘much joy' in death.

 

Why did Anne Boleyn have to fall? At the time the obvious assumption was that she was guilty of the crimes with which she was charged. As one John Hussey wrote: ‘if all the books and chronicles . . . which against women hath been penned . . . since Adam and Eve, those same were, I think, verily nothing in comparison of that which hath been done and committed by Anne the Queen'. But Archbishop Cranmer, as the Scottish reformer Ales reported him, walking in the gardens of Lambeth Palace in the early hours before Anne's execution, protested that, ‘She who has been the Queen of England upon earth will today become a Queen in Heaven.'

One theory, of course, continues to be that Anne was guilty of adultery, if not quite as charged. But it has few subscribers, the more so for the demonstrable inaccuracy of much of the detail of the accusations, such as the fact that she and her supposed lovers were often not even in the same place on the alleged date. And also perhaps for the fact that Anne repeatedly swore to her innocence in the face of her death, ‘on peril of her soul's damnation'.

Anne Boleyn herself said that she ‘believed there were some other reason for which she was condemned than the cause alleged'. Another, far more palatable theory, sets her erstwhile ally Thomas Cromwell as the agent of her destruction. It is wholly credible that once Cromwell and Anne had fallen out, he feared for his safety if she remained in place; the more so if he, like so many, saw her as having engineered Wolsey's fall.

Yet another theory sees Cromwell as the tool of his royal master Henry VIII who – whether genuinely convinced of Anne's guilt or cynically cruel enough merely to be seeking an excuse to be rid of her – ordered Cromwell to substantiate a case. Henry announced his betrothal to Jane Seymour the day after Anne's death and married her with indecent haste. Even Chapuys, on 18 May, noted public anger that the king was so happy ‘since the arrest of the whore'. Here, essentially, is the great problem for historians of these years: that Henry appears as either mutt or monster.

Perhaps there is a fourth, compromise position, which allows for an element of confusion – of self-deception, rather than deception by a third party – in the English king's reaction. Perhaps Anne died for an idea; not an idea of the reformed religion but the old ideal of courtly love. The game she had learnt in the European courts, the game that permitted – demanded – a measure of freedom with the men around her. The game with which she had at first enchanted Henry, the game she had never learnt when
not
to play.

Early in her queenship Anne's chamberlain had written: ‘as for pastime in the queen's chamber, [there] was never more. If any of you that be now departed have any ladies that ye thought favoured you and somewhat would mourn at parting of their servants, I can no wit perceive the same by their dancing . . .' ‘Servants' is the term from courtly love but perhaps by this late stage in the long courtly tradition, the term could only be used cynically.

Anne Boleyn was not born to be a major player in that other game, the game of queens. She was a pawn ‘queened', who had won for herself the right to move with a queen's freedom. And if she had found that that freedom had definite limits, so had others, better-born than she. Katherine of Aragon had been born into queenly rank, daughter of the woman whose authority seemed to offer a lesson for the century. Yet she too had wound up in actual fear of her life and dying in a state which would have seemed absurd in her heyday.

If Anne was in so many ways a transgressive figure, Katherine had played by the rules throughout her marriage, transgressing only in her refusal to end it quietly. Yet her fate, like Anne's, served to show how conditional was a woman's power, a woman's privilege, in the first half of the sixteenth century. Conditional on a man's will, conditional on not being betrayed, in any one of a number of senses, by the vulnerability of her body, whether exposed in terms of her chastity or of her fertility.

Anne Boleyn's rise to queenship revealed the powers of the role but also its ultimate vulnerability. On the chess board the queen had assumed new powers and yet the safety or otherwise of the king was still all that mattered, ultimately. In the years ahead St Teresa of Avila, in
The Way of Perfection
, would use the chess queen as her model for humility, because of her commitment to her lord.

These decades saw a number of women exercise great authority. But with the sole exception of Isabella of Castile, all had exercised it conditionally: in the temporary absence or incapacity of a son, nephew, husband or brother. This made palatable a woman's exercise of power. In the latter half of the century a new set of female monarchs – queens regnant, not regent – would present a new set of challenges, different not just quantitatively but qualitatively.

 

In England, both Henry VIII's daughters had now been declared bastards, by the new Second Act of Succession. Bastards like Bessie Blount's son, Richmond. As Chapuys reported, it might well have been decided that a male bastard trumped a female one. But on 23 July, Richmond died.
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‘Illegitimate' though they might now be, time would not leave the Tudor sisters Mary and Elizabeth in obscurity. They carried their mothers' rivalry and, as religious divides continued to harden, their mothers' religious legacies into the second half of the sixteenth century.

France too, in the summer months of 1536, saw the unexpected death of the dauphin, its heir. Contemporaries suspected, surely wrongly, that the emperor had had him poisoned; other suspicions lighted on Catherine de Medici, more so since the servant suspected of doing the deed was an Italian who had come to France in her retinue. This left François's second son Henri as the new heir, and meant that Catherine de Medici, formerly the disregarded wife of a mere younger son, was now the future Queen of France. Truly, a new generation was on the way.

PART IV

1537–1553

My lord Gaspar shall not find me an admirable man, but I will find you a wife or daughter or sister of equal and sometimes greater merit.

The Book of the Courtier,
Baldassare Castiglione, 1528

26

Daughters in jeopardy

England, Scotland, 1537–1543

The middle years of the sixteenth century represent something of a hiatus in the story of powerful queens or regents. Across France and Spain, and in England, women resumed their traditional place behind a powerful man. There were two notable exceptions: Scotland and the Netherlands. Coincidentally or otherwise, these were also among the lands where in these decades the Reformation battle was fought most fervently.

In England these years represent the gap between the deaths of Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn and the accession of Katherine’s daughter Mary. Henry VIII’s marital adventures continued with the birth of his son Edward, and the death of Jane Seymour, in October 1537; his marriage to and divorce from Anne of Cleves in 1540, followed hard by his marriage to Katherine Howard (Anne Boleyn’s kinswoman) and Katherine’s downfall and execution in 1542.

The tales of all Henry’s wives are among British history’s most dramatic personal stories. But if they offer a lesson in this context it is, if anything, how disposable royal women could be. Henry’s third, fourth, and fifth wives showed no sign of being active players in the political story.

What of his daughters? Elizabeth was a toddler, not yet three, when her mother died in 1536. For all her noted precocity, she was a child during all her father’s lifetime and not required to make any particular accommodation with his policies. But for Mary Tudor, turning twenty when her mother died, it would be a different story.

The Act of Succession passed in the summer of 1536 decreed that the throne should go only to Henry VIII’s children by Jane Seymour or any subsequent wife. Elizabeth Tudor, like Mary, was ‘illegitimate . . . and utterly foreclosed, excluded and banned to claim, challenge or demand any inheritance as lawful heir’.

If they were bastards, they were royal bastards: Mary stood as godmother at the new Prince Edward’s christening, while Elizabeth (herself still so small she had to be carried) held up the end of his christening gown. And when the baby Edward in his turn was sent away from the court for his own health and safety, it was to join his sisters in Hertfordshire, with Mary as pseudo-parent in a communal royal nursery.

At Hatfield, Hunsdon, Ashridge and Hertford Castle Elizabeth began to be educated in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish and even Flemish; in history and geography, astronomy and mathematics, as well as dancing and riding, music and embroidery. A fine humanist education, of the sort that might be given to a boy. Elizabeth was not given any specific training for the throne, of the sort that had briefly been given to Mary at Ludlow but then, as a female bastard, why should she?

The problem was to know what future could be planned for Henry’s discredited daughters. Even Henry’s council noted that the girls were unlikely to be marriageable abroad unless they were made ‘of some estimation’ at home. But first, in Mary’s case, came the question of submission to her father’s authority.

Hard on the heels of Katherine of Aragon’s death, Henry’s men came to Mary, demanding that she sign a document declaring her acceptance that her parents’ marriage had never been valid; that it ‘was by God’s law and Man’s law incestuous and unlawful’. They had often before tried to wring such an acceptance from both mother and daughter; but now the mother was gone.