In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I (22 page)

Anne appeared to conceive again only weeks after Elizabeth’s birth. That Christmas, her gift to Henry was a fertility symbol; a gold fountain flanked by three naked women whose nipples flowed with water; rumours of a new pregnancy were already circulating the court by the new year, reaching Chapuys by February.
²⁷
Two months later, orders were being given to the court goldsmith, Cornelius Hayes, for an elaborate silver cradle decorated with Tudor roses and precious stones; he had probably executed a similar design for Elizabeth in 1533, having received a part payment that June, of a considerable £300. Arrangements were also made for the provision of gold embroidered bedding and baby clothes made from cloth-of-gold. On 27 April, a George Taylor was able to write from Greenwich to Lady Lisle that the queen ‘hath a goodly belly, praying our Lord to send us a prince’
²⁸
and a planned trip to Calais that August was intended to take place after the birth, as Anne was ‘so farre gon with childe’;
²⁹
witnesses saw the queen making merry at Hampton Court as late as 26 June. A possible conception date in November would have led Anne to anticipate lying-in that August, so the pregnancy must have been considerably advanced by the summer. But nothing happened. There was no move to enter confinement, no baby arrived and the matter was mysteriously dropped. By September, rumours were circulating that she had never been pregnant at all. No official records were made of her lying-in or miscarriage, while unsubstantiated gossip hinted at the delivery of a premature son while the court was on progress at the end of June. It is possible that had Anne lost a child following a visible pregnancy; her enemies would have made much of the matter, even if it was handled with the utmost discretion. Although the king sounded confident when ordering the cradle in April, that summer’s silence suggests this was a false alarm. One modern suggestion that she was actually pregnant twice during this period, miscarrying in April and in the summer barely allows time for Anne to realise her condition.
³⁰
That September, Chapuys reported that she was ‘not to have a child after all’, which sounds more like a mistake than a miscarriage. Perhaps, like Catherine, she had experienced an infection or other symptoms of illness that were misinterpreted. Professor Dewhurst supports the theory of pseudocyesis or phantom pregnancy, with physical symptoms stemming from Anne’s desire to prove her fertility, as does Muriel St Clair Byrne, who identified a similar condition in Honor Lisle in 1536–37.
³¹
It is unlikely the shame and disappointment of a miscarriage at eight months and the threat of king’s wrath would have been enough to silence the most vitriolic wagging tongues. It seems that a mistake had been made. For Henry, the situation felt alarmingly familiar.

In Tudor times, a miscarriage was often called a shift, a slipping away or mischance, and was considered an act of God in the most literal sense; a judgement or punishment passed on the morality and sexual practices of the parents. It could be used to refer to premature stillbirth whilst today, it is a specific term used only to refer to the ‘expulsion of a foetus before twenty-eight weeks of pregnancy’.
³²
Physicians considered a miscarried child was either too weak, sickly or large or that the mother was either undernourished or had too much ‘fullness and moistness’. The danger signs were milk running out of the breasts or the nipples changing colour or looseness in the belly, back and groin pain; to prevent this, a woman must eat well and rest; occasionally she should be bled or purged, must be merry and not fret, and anoint her navel with mixture of red wine, roses, coral and cinnamon. Interestingly though, it was not until after the death of the final Tudor, Elizabeth, that patterns of miscarriages were observed as having some physiological connection. In 1612, Guillemeau wrote in
The Happie Deliverie of Women
; ‘those that have been delivered once before their time, for the most part, they miscarry with the rest of their children about the same time’. Henry VIII may have indeed observed the start of a pattern repeating itself, as did the explanation he could not put aside. In his view, Anne’s failure to produce a son, just like Catherine’s, was a condemnation of his marriage by God.

It is possible, as a few historians suggest, that Anne had a third pregnancy in the summer of 1535, which again ended in miscarriage, but consensus appears to support the idea that she did not conceive again until autumn 1535. The previous year had been difficult, with Henry’s attentions again straying to an unnamed lady whose loyalties lay with Catherine of Aragon and Mary, but by December 1534, Chapuys was forced to admit this affair was not serious and the royal pair were again reconciled. That summer, Anne accompanied Henry on his progress through the Severn Valley and Hampshire; in early September, they visited Wulfhall, home of the Seymours, and in late October when they returned to Windsor, she was pregnant; the royal pair were described by onlookers as being ‘merry’. At this time, Henry stopped being clean shaven and adopted a beard permanently; in the Tudor psyche this is an important indicator of sexual prowess, with facial hair being equated with the production of sperm and may have paralleled his desire to successfully father a male child. In the same month a John Horwode sent a ‘book of physicke for the queen’ via Thomas Cromwell, in hope of some financial recompense but it was unlikely to relate to her new condition. Chapuys wrote that Henry was still dominated by Anne, claiming she governed everything and he was unable to contradict her, yet this was again, an exaggeration, as his next claim that Henry was almost ‘utterly ruined’ suggests. In the same month, the Spanish Dr Ortiz cited Anne as saying that Princess Mary was her death and she was her’s, referring to Anne as the ‘wench’. Yet neither of these hostile sources knew what the queen was beginning to hope: that this time, she would bear a son and secure her own future. The mood that Christmas must have been one of optimism.

At the end of December, news of Catherine’s failing health reached court. It was clear from the doctors’ reports that she would not live long; she was in the final stages of what was probably cancer, suffering from pain in her stomach, had lost all her strength, and couldn’t eat or drink. When she died on 6 January 1536, Henry and Anne’s choice to dress in yellow was considered callous by many at the time and since: Anne was to justify this by claiming it was the Spanish colour of mourning. Other sources claimed they wore regal purple. However, Catherine’s death removed a vital safeguard to the new queen’s position; while she had lived, if Henry had chosen to separate from Anne, foreign and religious expectations were that he would return to his first wife. With Catherine out of the way however, any rupture in the new marriage might precipitate Anne’s replacement and the queen was already aware of a serious rival on the horizon. On the day of Catherine’s funeral, 29 January, Anne went into premature labour and miscarried a son of about fifteen weeks. Chapuys later reported that she laid the blame with ‘the duke of Norfolk, whom she hates, saying he frightened her by bringing the news of the fall the King had six days before’ or that she was afraid of being cast aside like her predecessor, whilst other voices at court began to doubt her ability to bear children. He named a Mistress ‘Semel’ or Seymour, to whom Henry had lately given many presents.
³³
By January, Jane Seymour was already the king’s favourite and accounts of Anne discovering her sitting on his knee may have precipitated her loss. The
Life of Jane Dormer
, a later Catholic biography of one of Elizabeth’s waiting women, describes frequent scenes of conflict between the two women, ranging from ‘scratching and bye-blows between the queen and her maid’, to the incident where Anne supposedly snatched a portrait of the king which Jane wore about her neck.
³⁴
The impending sense of history repeating itself cannot have helped her composure or pregnancy. With hindsight, this loss was to prove a turning point for Anne, a sign to Henry that this marriage, like that to Catherine, was flawed in God’s eyes. Stunned, he told her on her lying-in bed that he would speak with her when she was up. In a phrase commonly repeated by twentieth-century historians, Anne had ‘miscarried of her saviour’ and Henry went to spend Shrovetide alone at Whitehall.

At three and a half months, the miscarried foetus would have been partially developed, about the size of an avocado or goose egg. Later hostile sources sought to justify Anne’s later fall by claiming it had some physical defect or deformity but this was not mentioned at the time, nor during her trial and appears to be what Eric Ives calls historical ‘newspeak’
³⁵
or later Catholic defamation. The key to these rumours lies in the contemporary belief that a child’s healthy appearance was God’s comment on the sexual morality of its parents: Martin Luther wrote that birth of deformed children was a personal criticism and political omen. Contemporary medicine identified varying types of deformed or malformed foetuses, called a mola, false conception or moon calf. The false conception was a lump of flesh gathered together like a bird’s gizzard, usually expelled between the second and fourth month. A mola could exist in the womb for longer; up to a year or in extreme cases, even as long as a woman lives. It was an ‘unprofitable mass of flesh, without shape or form, clinging to the inside of the womb’, either conforming to the windy type, watery or a collection of the humours. There were some living and some dead molas, thought to occur when the man’s seed was weak, barren or imperfect; or that it had been choked through the abundance of menstrual blood.

Yet there was a mystery surrounding the process, a misogynistic fear of feminine territory that manifested itself in the abhorrence of potential disaster, or the birth of ‘monsters’. The short-lived child born by Alice Rospin of Little Clacton in August 1552 was described in the parish register as ‘Creature’, in the absence of a given name, perhaps descriptive of its unformed status. Eamon Duffy unearthed similar cases in Morebath in 1564, when the same record was made one of James Goodman’s twin sons in the birthing room, who did not survive
³⁶
and that of William Morrse in 1560. London diarist Henry Machyn recorded the news of a ‘monster birth’ at Middleton Stony, Oxfordshire in 1552: of ‘forme and shape as you have sene and hard … both the for parts and hynder partes of the same … sam chylderyn havyng ii heds, ii bodys, iiii arms, iiii hands, with one bely, on navel … they have ii legs with ii fett on syd, and on the odur syd, on leg with ii fett’.
³⁷
They lived only nineteen days. Often, the emerging child’s head – or indeed any visible part of their anatomy – was baptised before birth and the gender observed, as was the case when a baby was stuck or clearly failing. ‘Monsters’ were often perceived as punishments for a couple’s indulgence in lewd practices or at forbidden times such as Lent; one of the few supposed indicators of sexual practice within marriage.

What women feared most, possibly even more than the death that promised eternal salvation to the faithful, was the production of a ‘monster’. The early Elizabethan period in particular saw a flurry of pamphlets reporting on such births, which today would be classified as conjoined twins or genetic abnormalities. While the Tudors were not unsympathetic to these children as individuals, many of whom were short-lived, they interpreted their birth as a divine signal of disapproval, directed towards the parents for immorality or more worryingly, towards the state. Abnormal births were interpreted within the tradition of misrule and the subversion of the natural world order, portending catastrophes just as comets and social transgressions did. Prayers existed against the prevention of such occasions and customs forbade certain behaviours in expectant women, such as looking upon deformed and terrifying creatures, which could affect the development of the foetus. Such a birth could not remain concealed; communal networks would ensure the spread of news until its fame became national, upon which the parents could expect scrutiny and censure. Popular news sheets and medical manuals contained sensational illustrations of abnormal birth: at least twelve pamphlets survive from the Elizabethan period alone but these represent a fraction of the total probable output. The most famous cases were the conjoined twins of Herne in 1565 and Swanburne in 1566 and the child born with folds of flesh about its neck, in Surrey, also in 1566, judged to be God’s criticism of the fashions of the day. Multiple births were seen as a divine infliction: the female narrator of a ballad criticised a woman who came begging at her door with twins as having lived a lewd life; many believed that twins were conceived through intercourse during an existing pregnancy:

Thou are some strumpet sure I know,
And spends thy days in shame
And stained sure thy marriage bed
With spots of black defame.
³⁸

Ironically, the wealthy but currently infertile narrator was punished for her cruelty towards the beggar woman by bearing 365 children: ‘was by the hand of God most strangely punished, by sending her as many children at one birth, as there are daies in the year.’
³⁹

To return to Anne’s story: even if the deformed foetus theory was true, it would have been prohibitively difficult to fully investigate the circumstances under which she had conceived without opening the question of Henry’s responsibility for creating the supposed monster. Cromwell later admitted much of the evidence gathered could not be used; some may have related to Henry and Anne’s sexual practices. At his trial, George Boleyn was accused of having spread rumours that the premature child had not been fathered by Henry as well as having criticised the king’s prowess with his sister. However, no word was mentioned at the time of the foetus’s appearance. Assuming the mola theory to be a later attempt to discredit Anne, it was still important that blame should not be attached to the king for her misdelivery, especially as her pattern of gynaecological failures was beginning to look very much like that of Catherine. The common factor was Henry; therefore, the miscarriage in January 1536 needed to be attributed to another father.