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WHEN THE INFANT Princess Elizabeth awoke in her nursery on 20 May 1536, the landscape of her childhood was imperceptibly but irrevocably changed. Her mother, Queen Anne, had died the previous morning in the Tower precincts, her head struck from her body by the dancing blade of a French swordsman imported from Calais for the task. So many corpses, so many ghosts. Elizabeth’s path to the throne was littered with 150 years’ worth of bodies. Since 1400, when the two strands of the great Plantagenet dynasty which had ruled England since 1154 divided and turned against one another, the preoccupation of the English crown had been heirs. The childless Richard II (with whom Elizabeth was later to identify herself) lost his throne to Henry Bolingbroke, subsequently Henry IV. The death of his son Henry V, the second Lancastrian king, in 1422, left the nation under the nominal leadership of a tiny baby, inaugurating the second phase of the Wars of the Roses, the dynastic conflict which dominated English politics until Henry Tudor seized the throne from Richard III in 1485. With Henry’s accession and celebrated reunion of the two strands of the dynasty in his marriage to Elizabeth of York, the succession seemed assured, though it passed to another Duke of York, Henry VIII, rather than his elder brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales. It was hardly surprising, given this legacy of treachery, death, and devastating insecurity that when Henry married his brother’s widow, Katherine of Aragon, he should have been even more concerned than his ancestors with the getting of a male heir, yet this was the one thing which, in his view, God denied him. Henry’s struggles to release himself from his first marriage and wed Elizabeth’s mother, Anne, precipitated the greatest confessional schism Europe had yet seen and set England on the course to Protestant isolation which became such a self-declared part of the emerging nationalist identity of his daughter’s state.

Elizabeth was the product of that schism, and for two years, officially at least, she was his petted darling, the first child of that godly marriage which would people the courts of Europe with Tudor blood. Yet on 20 May 1536, all the small certainties of her world were severed. Historians have been arguing ever since about the effect this had on Elizabeth, but we cannot know how and when the two-year-old girl was informed of her mother’s death or what her reaction was. This has not prevented generations of writers from imaginatively constructing the consequences of Elizabeth’s loss, but statements such as “Unresolved grief continued through Elizabeth’s childhood . . . for Anne Boleyn’s name could not be mentioned without provoking a fearful reaction from Henry VIII. Such a situation often leads to excessive mourning reactions on occasions of loss and later melancholia,” are merely speculative and without authority, though not uninteresting.¹ That Elizabeth was nurturing a secret guilt at having fulfilled the desire of her Electra complex (the killing of her mother), that she was traumatized into evading marriage in later life, that she promoted a cult of her virginity in order to compensate for her inadequacy as a woman, that she needed to dominate and control those around her, have all been confidently and speciously attributed to the scars left by her mother’s execution. That Anne’s death had some effect on her daughter is reasonable; we simply do not know what that effect was, even if Elizabeth herself did.

This is not to say that Anne was not influential in her daughter’s life. Her trial, her execution, and the dissolution of her marriage invested her absence with a form of negative capability—an absence which has been understood as haunting her daughter’s life ever after. Two weeks before her death, the queen had written to Henry, begging him not to punish their daughter in his resentment against her, a plea which, given the declared illegality of their marriage, Henry had no choice but to ignore: the most significant aspect of Anne’s legacy to Elizabeth was the ambiguous status of her birth, the stain of illegitimacy which was to dog her well beyond her eventual accession to the throne. The comment of Elizabeth’s governess, Lady Bryan, on the sudden alteration in Elizabeth’s status—“As my lady Elizabeth is put from the degree she was in, and what degree she is at now I know not but by hearsay, I know not how to order her or myself ”—summed up a confusion which spread from the royal nursery across the courts of Europe. There was not one moment of Elizabeth’s entire life during which her status was unequivocally accepted. So while we can only surmise Elizabeth’s feelings towards Anne from a (very) limited record of her actions, Elizabeth’s refusal to accept her bastard status did at times invoke her mother, though in a symbolic or legalistic, rather than an emotional, fashion.

The very circumstances of Elizabeth’s birth have proved cause for debate. Was she “the most unwelcome royal daughter in English history” or the confirmation of God’s blessing on a controversial marriage which both parents nevertheless confidently believed, in 1533, would go on to produce sons?² On 26 August of that year, Anne had formally “taken to her chamber” at Greenwich to await the birth of her child, in a ceremony which closely followed that set out in the Ryalle Book for the delivery of Henry’s mother, Elizabeth of York. Elizabeth’s room had been decorated in blue arras cloth and gold fleur-de-lis, because any more complex decorative scheme was considered, according to the protocol, as “not convenient about Women in such case.”³ Anne selected tapestries featuring the story of Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, a prescient choice, while her bed, fitted with feather pillows and a crimson cover finished with ermine and gold edging, followed the model of her late mother-in-law. The bed was ceremonial as much as practical, functioning as a semi-throne, surmounted with a canopy of state embroidered with the crowns and arms of the royal couple. A pallet at the foot of the bed served for daytime use, and for the labor itself when the time came. Again following the precedent of fifteenth-century queens, the birthing chamber was furnished with two cradles, one upholstered and gilded to match the state bed, the second more simply carved in wood. The chamber also contained an altar and closet for Anne’s devotions. After hearing Mass, Anne entertained the court (though not the king) in her Great Chamber, where she was served with wine and spices as she had been at her coronation. Then she retired with her women to remain enclosed until the birth. The birthing chamber was a powerful feminine space, a reliquary of sacred mystery. This still entirely feminine world, where all the roles of the queen’s household were taken by women, became the tense, beating heart of the court. As Anne waited out the long weeks in those dim, stifling rooms, she at least seemed serene as to the ritual’s end. Anne had every intention of bringing forth a prince. The court doctors and astrologers had assured the royal couple that their child would be male, and letters (later hastily amended) had been prepared to announce the birth of Henry’s true heir.

How the queen passed her time during her seclusion is not known—herbal baths were popular for women in late pregnancy, and quiet diversions such as embroidery or reading aloud were recommended; one imagines that, like all heavily pregnant women, Anne simply longed for it to be over. Nor is it known whether Anne made use of the sacred girdle of Our Lady, which had been brought from Westminster Abbey in 1502 to lend succor to Elizabeth of York. Prayer was more or less the only painkiller on offer in this age of terrifyingly high maternal mortality, and birthing girdles, associated with various saints, had been used to encourage women in childbirth for centuries. Katherine of Aragon had used the Westminster girdle and had also lent it to her sister-in-law Margaret Tudor. The use of such a relic by Anne would certainly have been controversial, given the attitude of the government at this stage of the Henrician Reformation to relics, pilgrimages, and miracles, preaching on which was officially banned for a year in 1534, but there is an interesting possibility that Anne made use of a “Protestantised” holy symbol, an amulet roll. These were scrolls containing prayers or holy stories which acted as textual interpretations of physical relics such as the Westminster girdle, invoking the same mystical connections. While disdain for relics was a principle of the reformed religion, a certain latent power still attached to them.

After a reportedly difficult labor, Anne’s confinement ended shortly after three o’clock on 7 September. The nineteenth-century biographer Agnes Strickland has the queen announcing in a remarkably complete sentence for a woman who has just given birth that “Henceforth they may with reason call this the Chamber of Virgins, for a virgin is now born in it on the vigil of that auspicious day when the church commemorates the nativity of our beloved lady the Blessed Virgin Mary.” If Miss Strickland had known of the existence of the amulet roll, she might have been less sanguine, as Saint Julitta, the subject of Anne’s scroll, met her martyrdom without her head at the hand of the tyrant king of Tarsus.

Eustace Chapuys, ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, lost no time in pronouncing on the royal couple’s despair and fury at the birth of a princess, but then Chapuys, whose master was the nephew of Katherine of Aragon, loathed Anne Boleyn and everything associated with Henry’s second marriage. Despite his gloating, there is little contemporary evidence that Henry was more than conventionally disappointed by Elizabeth’s sex; indeed, he reassured Anne of his joy in the child and his love for them both. A celebratory Te Deum was sung at St. Paul’s, and two months after Elizabeth’s birth, Chapuys noted sourly that the king had been overheard by one of Anne’s ladies saying that he should sooner beg for his bread on doorsteps than lose his wife. Unarguably, though, Anne had failed in what had always been the primary task of queens, and the succession remained perilously uncertain.

The recall of Henry’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy to court shortly after Elizabeth’s birth has been interpreted as an exhibition of the king’s anxiety, of his need to prove that he could father sons, but the fourteen-year-old Fitzroy’s marriage on 28 November to Mary Howard, daughter of the third Duke of Norfolk, might equally be read as cementing a Boleyn triumph, as bringing the king’s offspring safely into the Boleyn/Howard power nexus now that he had a legal heir. The idea that Elizabeth’s birth was the beginning of the end for Anne is in no way borne out by contemporary reports. Between October 1533 and June 1534, five witnesses reported king and queen to be “merry” and in fine health.

Elizabeth’s christening, on 10 September 1533, also produced disparate accounts. Chapuys, gloating that the king’s mistress had borne him a bastard girl, claimed that the ceremony was “very cold and disagreeable, both to the court and the city,” while Edward Hall, the author of the 1542 Hall’s Chronicle, which describes the history of the union of the royal houses of Lancaster and York, dwelt on the magnificence of the ceremony in the friars’ church near Greenwich Palace, enumerating the dignitaries who attended and their roles, conjuring the image of the five hundred torches which accompanied the newly baptized princess back to her mother’s arms.⁴ The fact that neither of Elizabeth’s parents attended the ceremony was customary, and though Henry had cancelled the tournament planned for the birth of a prince, there was nothing lacking in the observances paid to a princess, from the Archbishop of Canterbury as godfather to the purple velvet stole in which the baby was wrapped.

Some writers have claimed that Queen Anne insisted on breastfeeding her daughter, others that “we know virtually nothing of how the new princess was cared for in the first weeks of her life.”⁵ In December, again according to royal convention, Elizabeth was removed to her own household at Hatfield in Hertfordshire, travelling through London in great and deliberately circuitous style so that the people could catch a glimpse of the new royal baby. (Chapuys reported with predictable distaste on the “pompous solemnity” of this journey, but then he also believed that Elizabeth had been sent to Norfolk.) That Anne was “heartbroken” at the severing of the “extremely close bond” she had forged with her daughter is, again, a matter of supposition.⁶ The “merriment” between Anne and Henry reported at court suggests that, whatever Anne’s private feelings may have been, she was not allowing them to show in public; moreover, her place was at the king’s side and, more importantly, in his bed, that she might conceive again as soon as possible. There is no reason to believe that Anne did not think it more suitable for her daughter to be raised in a quiet and orderly routine in the country, away from the pestilence of London, as had been the thinking and practice of generations of royal mothers before her.

And if Anne was unable to see her daughter often in person, Elizabeth’s household was a stronghold of Boleyn affinity. In charge were the queen’s aunt Lady Anne Shelton and her husband, Sir John, who served as steward, and Lady Margaret Bryan, who was half-sister to Anne Boleyn’s mother, Elizabeth Howard. After acting as a lady-in-waiting to Katherine of Aragon, Lady Bryan was given charge of Mary Tudor, with whom she remained five years, before Henry began planning to marry Anne. By now in her sixties, Lady Bryan was called out of retirement to care for Elizabeth, which suggests that Anne and Henry trusted her competence and experience, but her role also called for considerable diplomacy. To the horror of Chapuys, in October 1533, the king decided that Mary, now officially styled “the Lady Mary” in acknowledgement of her bastard status, should join her half-sister’s household. “The King, not satisfied with having taken away the name and title of Princess, has just given out that, in order to subdue the spirit of the Princess, he will deprive her of all her people,” choked the ambassador, adding that Mary had been reduced to the status of a “lady’s maid.” Mary’s arrival created a background of tension, status-mongering, and outright danger which pertained throughout her sister’s life. Even as a tiny baby, Elizabeth was not safe from politics.

Of course, Elizabeth could have known nothing of the schemes and disputes into which her household was plunged with the appearance of her furious, confused, and resentful teenage sibling. What is known of Lady Bryan’s parenting appears to have followed a sensible, thoughtful model, in keeping with the practices of her age, which nonetheless were being influenced by the exciting developments of the Renaissance new learning. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw a regeneration of interest in medicine and pediatrics, promoted by printing and the increased use of the vernacular, which allowed physicians to combine practical experience and classical learning in a new way. Numerous texts on child-rearing and the treatment of childhood diseases were published, particularly in Germany, one of which, Eucharius Rösslin’s Der Rosegarten, was the first “scientific” pediatric manual to be translated into English, in 1533 and 1540. Swaddling, wrapping babies in tight linen bands to encourage their limbs to grow straight, was widely practiced, but Rösslin took a daringly modern view: “Imagine what goes on in him [the baby] as he feels the touch of rough hands on his tender skin and is chafed with coarse woolen cloth or scratchy swaddling bands. What do you think it feels like to lie on a hard board covered with prickly straw?”⁷ Princess Elizabeth did not have to itch in scratchy bands or lie on straw, as Anne Boleyn provided suitably sumptuous clothes for her baby princess, including a gown of Russian velvet and embroidered purple satin sleeves, but Lady Bryan did follow some of the guidelines observed by Rösslin, such as weaning—late by modern standards—at two years on to pureed, sweetened food. She was concerned that Elizabeth, as a toddler, should not be allowed to sit up to table as it made her overexcited, and preferred her to stick to a plain, wholesome diet (which had little effect, as Elizabeth adored sweets all her life and ruined her teeth with them). We do not know whether Elizabeth possessed the latest fashionable baby accessory, a tricycle-like contraption which aided children in learning to walk, but she was taken for airings in the park and was apparently a physically lively, as well as an exceptionally mentally alert, child, “as goodly a child as hath been seen.”⁸ Lady Bryan wrote regularly to court with details of Elizabeth’s progress, and the child was visited quite frequently by her parents. Although her principal residence was Hatfield, Elizabeth was moved, again according to custom, between other royal residences to allow them to be cleaned and provisioned, a necessity given the size of her household. In addition to the Sheltons, Lady Bryan, and her first cofferer, William Cholmley, Elizabeth’s retinue was the equivalent of that of a great magnate, with about twenty “above stairs” offices, dispensed by her father, and a further one hundred servants’ posts. Her progress between Hatfield, Eltham, Hunsdon, Richmond, Greenwich, and Langley during her early childhood reflected the need for frequent changes of location.

It was a move to Eltham in March 1534 which provoked one of the emblematic moments of the conflict between Elizabeth’s sister and mother. From the start, Mary had proved absolutely intractable on the subject of Elizabeth’s status; on hearing the news that she was to remove to the princess’s household, she had remarked with considered disingenuousness that she wondered where, since the daughter of Anne Boleyn had no such title. When Mary refused point blank to enter the litter which was to carry her to Eltham unless she was given her own proper title, an infuriated Lady Shelton had her pushed into it by force and confiscated her jewels as punishment. Mary compounded her disobedience by complaining vociferously that she lived in daily fear of being poisoned by the “king’s mistress.” Never much of a politician, Mary could only take a martyred satisfaction in the humiliations her stubbornness provoked. Her treatment by “the concubine” was a much-vaunted scandal, but Anne Boleyn’s attitude to Mary was based as much upon fear as spite, and Mary knew it.

If Elizabeth was to be promoted, Mary must be reduced, and Anne understandably saw any leniency towards Katherine of Aragon’s daughter as undermining her own position. Anne’s bullying of Mary requires consideration, though, as much of the impetus to abase the princess came from Henry, with Anne being blamed (again following a model which had affected previous “foreign” queens whereby they were criticized for their husbands’ actions rather than condemn the king himself) for a policy which Henry believed to be necessary to reinforce the validity of his annulment of the Aragon marriage. Nevertheless, Chapuys reported in January 1534 that Anne was complaining to the king that Mary ought to be supervised more closely, fearing that Henry’s “easiness” would allow Mary to continue to use her title, which could not be permitted as it would disparage Elizabeth. Anne sent messengers, including Thomas Cromwell, to discourage Henry from seeing Mary, though the French ambassador claimed that the king’s eyes filled with tears as he spoke of his obstinate daughter. Anne instructed Lady Alice Clere, Mary’s custodian, to insist that Mary eat her breakfast at the common table, and that if Mary tried to use her title, to box her ears. The hapless Alice was also scolded by Anne’s brother Lord Rochford for treating Mary with “too much honesty and humanity.”⁹ At the time of the litter incident, Anne tried another tack, offering to intercede with the king if Mary could bring herself to some accommodation. Anne was invoking her queenly position here—intercession was an important traditional role in which queens could be the conduit for royal mercy—and Mary clearly grasped this, as she responded calmly that she knew of no queen in England but her mother, but if Madame de Boleyn would be so gracious as to speak to Henry, she would be suitably grateful. Anne was predictably infuriated by this superb insolence. According to Chapuys, she began plotting to eliminate Mary. Anne received some satisfaction during the Eltham visit when, in April, Elizabeth was exposed quite naked to the visiting party of the French ambassador. This might seem peculiar, but the physical examination of dynastic brides was nothing unusual—Edward III’s queen, Philippa of Hainault, had undergone such an examination, and at a far more embarrassing age—but in Elizabeth’s case, it was especially important, as deformity in children was attributed at the time to the sinful union of their parents. That Elizabeth should be proved flawless was encouraging, but Anne was troubled when it appeared that Elizabeth’s entry into the international marriage market was being overshadowed by her sister.

 

EUROPE IN THE first half of the sixteenth century was dominated politically by the two great powers of France and the Holy Roman Empire. In 1516, Charles V had succeeded to the Spanish crown, fol-lowed in 1519 by his election as Holy Roman Emperor, thus giving him control over a vast territory which stretched from Gibraltar to the north of Holland, effectively encircling the French dominions ruled since 1515 by François I. Although François never took Charles up on his offer to settle their differences in single combat, the two monarchs were almost incessantly in conflict, particularly, though by no means exclusively, over control of their respective territories on the Italian peninsula. While England could in no way compare in land, wealth, or military might with the two main players, her allegiance was useful to, and cultivated by, both, a counterweight in their endless tug of war. In the previous generation, Henry VII had sought to shore up his na-scent dynasty by forming an alliance with Spain in the form of Katherine of Aragon, and subsequent English policy, while subject to the endless complexities and feints of sixteenth-century diplomacy, had remained broadly pro-Hapsburg.

France was England’s traditional enemy, but the marriage of Henry VIII’s sister Mary to Louis XII of France in 1514 cemented an alliance with the French, which endured (despite Mary’s swift widowhood and the accession of François in 1515) for some seven years, yet war was again declared in 1522. Another peace treaty was signed in 1525, but Henry’s pursuit of the Boleyn marriage necessitated a change in his foreign policy. Imperial troops sacked Rome in 1527, and Pope Clement VII, whose consent to an annulment of the Aragon marriage Henry urgently needed, found himself the prisoner of Charles V, Katherine’s nephew. The Treaty of Cambrai in 1529, among François, the emperor, and the pope, secured an imperial-papal alliance, halted French campaigns in Italy, and left England isolated. Henry now deemed it politic to cultivate François’s support for his marriage to Anne, which François was initially prepared to offer, in order to stave off a threatening alliance with Charles. Thus the early 1530s saw some tentative collusion with England’s break from Rome—the French king had strong-armed the theology faculty of the Sorbonne into declaring Henry’s marriage with Katherine invalid in 1530, and in 1532, a defensive alliance had been agreed upon at meetings at Boulogne and Calais. However, the appearance of Elizabeth herself disrupted this cooperation. When Henry discovered Anne was pregnant in early 1533, he had little choice but to marry her immediately, lest his longed-for heir be tainted with illegitimacy. But François was furious when Henry pressed on so precipitately with the wedding. For his part, François had been dancing round the question of the English royal divorce, since he needed papal support for his own project of marrying his son to the pope’s niece Catherine de Medici, with the object of recovering French power on the Italian peninsula. By the time the Valois-Medici marriage took place, the two kings had resumed their usual quarrelsome relationship. François wanted an English alliance but was chary of losing papal support to join England in isolation if he gave his full sanction to the Boleyn marriage.

In October 1534, the French had received a proposition that they should formally acknowledge the validity of Henry and Anne’s union and recognize Elizabeth. In November, the Admiral of France, Philippe de Chabot, Comte de Brion, arrived with a proposal from François that Mary be betrothed to the dauphin. François thus sought to keep all his potential allies happy—joining the houses of Tudor and Valois while implying to Charles and the pope that Mary, not Elizabeth, was still the “right” heir. Henry initially treated the offer as a feint but eventually conceded that Mary might marry François’s third son, the Duke of Angoulême, with the proviso that the couple renounce any claim to the English crown. Better still, Henry suggested, if François would persuade the pope to revoke the sentence of excommunication against him, Angoulême could marry Elizabeth in return for Henry’s renunciation of his own ancient title to France and a significant parcel of land grants on the French coast. Brion showed no interest in a proposed visit to Elizabeth, instead asking Henry to proceed with the negotiations for Mary’s betrothal. Anne’s anger was hysterical. Usually a model of the controlled court lady, she embarrassed herself by bursting into screeching laughter at an entertainment held for Brion, which clearly offended the admiral.

Royal marriage brokering could be as graceful, precisely choreographed, and meaningless as a stately pavane, and the game being played here had little to do with the eventual marital disposal of either Elizabeth or Mary, and everything to do with the contentious status of Henry’s queen. Any hopes Anne might have had for the settlement of her daughter’s future dissipated when the marriage negotiations collapsed at an inconclusive summit in Calais, which Cromwell, who favored an alliance with the emperor, cried off.

In January 1536, two crucial events took place. First, Katherine of Aragon died at Kimbolton. Recognizing that she was ill with what modern assessments concur was cancer, she had written to Henry the previous month, commending “our daughter” Mary to him and “beseeching thou to be a good father unto her.” Henry’s reaction to the news was repulsive. He accompanied Elizabeth to Mass dressed in yellow, their progress marked “by trumpets and other great triumphs.”¹⁰ Anne was reportedly overjoyed, but her triumph did not last. On the day of Katherine’s funeral, she suffered a miscarriage. Reportedly, the fetus was male, and conventionally, the queen “miscarried of her savior.” Perhaps, though, it was not the child in her womb which had been protecting Anne but a dying woman in Cambridgeshire. As long as Katherine of Aragon lived, Henry could not repudiate his wife. When she died, “Anne’s shield had been removed.”¹¹

The idea that Anne’s miscarriage heralded her downfall has been widely canvassed, but there is little evidence that this was the case. As late as April 1536, Henry continued publicly to endorse his marriage. That Anne had indeed miscarried a male child is confirmed by Chapuys; the chronicler Charles Wriothesley, who described her as being “delivered of a male child before her time”; and the poet Lancelot de Carles, who confirmed that “she gave birth prematurely to a son.” None of these writers mentioned that the fetus was in any way deformed, and yet this supposition has gained considerable currency, based on a comment made fifty years later by an exiled Catholic writer, Nicholas Sander, who claimed that the queen had been delivered of a formless lump of flesh. Even these words are too imprecise to support the claim of some disability or deformity, and it would certainly be strange that Chapuys did not remark upon it at the time had this been the case. That a deformed child was evidence of Anne’s adultery in the king’s mind, or that she was believed to be a witch, have been inferred from the suggestion, but since there was no deformed child, the argument is circular. Had Anne’s pregnancy run to term, and had the boy lived, then of course the story of the queen, and the English succession, would be very different, but this does not mean that the miscarriage in itself precipitated Anne’s downfall.

In April 1536, Chapuys received orders from his master, Charles V, to finally recognize Anne at court, a gesture which was contrary to imperial policy since 1529. The emperor believed it was now more advantageous that Anne remain queen, since if the papal sentence against him was enforced, and Henry put aside his wife as a consequence, there was a risk that the king would remarry. Any subsequent offspring would take precedence over Mary, the imperialists’ preferred heir. Accordingly, the ambassador attended Mass, accompanied by Anne’s brother Lord Rochford, with whom he had exchanged pleasantries before an interview with the king. “As the king came during the offertory,” Chapuys reported,

 

There was a large gathering of people and part of them to see what expressions the concubine and I would make: she did so courteously enough, for I was just behind the door through which she entered, she turned round to do me the reverence comparable to that which I did her.¹²

 

Here was the subtlety of Renaissance statecraft, an exchange of bows which could pass as the merest civil gesture and yet which nevertheless signified an important change of policy. The encounter was obviously staged, as the crowd waiting in anticipation to see it shows, and it reflected the desire of the king to see his wife acknowledged and a reciprocal willingness on the part of the imperial ambassador to gratify him. Officially, Anne was clearly in favor, and so long as relations with the empire were concerned, would remain that way. Yet just over one month later, the queen was dead.

If the miscarriage is discounted, the sources of Anne Boleyn’s demise have been ascribed to the machinations of two, sometimes overlapping, forces—the “Aragonese” conservatives and Thomas Cromwell, a one-man faction all of his own. Henry himself hovers on the sidelines, a bloated tiger, ready to be soothed by pert little Jane Seymour’s purrings. Or, again, Henry wanted Anne dead and set his most capable minister to conspire it. That Cromwell orchestrated the charges against Anne, and their inevitable conclusion, is undoubted; why he did so remains a matter of dispute among eminent historians. Highly convincing reasonings have been produced on both sides to demonstrate that, in his own words, Cromwell was “a fantasiser et conspirer le dit affair” (imagined and contrived); his centrality in Anne’s trial and execution remains, whether she is considered guilty or the innocent victim of his machinations. It is the method of Cromwell’s elaboration of the charges of incest, adultery, and treason, though, which brings Anne’s influence on her daughter into focus.

It has been argued that, as queen, Elizabeth’s power was to some extent maintained by what has become known as the “cult of Elizabeth,” a practice of adoring and venerating the queen which blended the language of courtly love with that of religion, to present her as a semi-divine figure. “Courtly love” long predated the Renaissance but was very much a part of elite culture in the sixteenth century, revitalized by the influence and inclusion of the new humanist learning. In England, the tradition of courtly love is particularly associated with one earlier queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, but by the sixteenth century, the form promoted by Eleanor’s father, Guillaume IX of Aquitaine, had become a culture universal among the European ruling classes. Courtly love and its correlative, chivalry, provided a code of conduct which pertained from the battlefield to the “pastime” of the royal chamber. It was a highly complex, witty, stylized, exclusive, and sometimes subversive intellectual game in which both courtiers and kings aspired to produce the most subtle and ingenious forms of homage to their (often fictitious) lady loves.

This is the crucial element of courtly love—that it was a game, albeit a highly sophisticated one. The form of a swooning knight paying court to his impossible beloved was endlessly supple, a super-language in which anything might be said or, more deliciously, unsaid. Sexual favors were not the object (though they were often the consequence) of the game of love; well played, it could lead to preferment, patronage, an augmentation of status in the ruthless milieu of court politics, the production and distribution of such poetry mirroring the dynamic of the courtier’s life of endless waiting. It was also a means of free expression under a tyrannical system where to speak one’s mind could be to lose one’s head.

Anne’s court, like Elizabeth’s, was one of poetry, while the “cult of Elizabeth,” if such there was one, was based on a manipulation of the tropes of courtly love, of that culture of romantic literary chivalry which had played such a significant part in her parents’ courtship. And Anne Boleyn, until Cromwell decided to be literal rather than literary minded, was a mistress of the art. In one reading of Cromwell’s actions in 1536, it was courtly love which he used to bring Anne down, and it was Elizabeth’s appropriation of her mother’s practices, if not her errors, which enabled her so triumphantly to manipulate the mechanics of her mother’s disgrace into her own unique form of political glory.

In 1582, Elizabeth I wrote a poem on the departure of her last serious suitor, the Duke of Anjou:

 

I grieve and dare not show my discontent

I love and yet am forced to seem to hate. . . .

I am, and not, I freeze and yet am burned

Since from myself another self I turned.

 

Elizabeth is here demonstrating her own mastery of the conventions of courtly love. The piece is very much a performance in the accepted style. Paradoxes—“I freeze and yet am burned”—were characteristic of Renaissance poetry, known as “Petrarchan contraries” after the Italian humanist whose sonnets had brought perfection to the earlier troubadour form of courtly love, and which were influential all over Europe. Elizabeth may have been describing her own feelings in her poem, but her feelings are not really the point. Participating in the convention displayed the queen’s skill at literary composition; the fact that Elizabeth’s performance is highly derivative shows her ability to play the game of saying one thing—a tortured farewell to her last lover—while thinking another—a rather wistful good riddance, in Anjou’s case.

Anne’s ability to hold the king off for seven years is part of her legend. The brilliance of her strategy was to cast herself in the role of the courtly lady, requiring Henry to play the perfect knight. Henry was nothing if not dogged in the pursuit of all the roles in which he cast himself—philosopher-king, warrior, even husband—and “this persona of courtly lover . . . was fully formed in Henry and had been signaling . . . for an answering adept to come and lift its latch. In Anne, he had her. She was the mistress of Petrarchan contraries: her blowing hot and cold made the perfect environment for the king’s tender interest.”¹³

Once Henry had an idea in his mind, it was fixed. His minister Thomas Wolsey, who expertly managed the king for so long until he fell foul of that very certainty in the matter of the divorce, assessed his personality:

 

I have often kneeled before him . . . an hour or two to persuade him from his will and appetite, but I could never bring to pass to dissuade him therefrom. Therefore . . . I warn you be advised and assured what matter you put in his head, for ye shall never pull it out again.

 

What Anne did was put the idea of marriage, and only marriage, into that stubborn crowned head. Her virginity was not the obstacle to his passion; it was the incentive. Anne’s hymen became an instrument in Henry’s divorce. When Henry instructed Wolsey to convey his wishes to the English envoys in Rome, he was anxious to explain that he intended to divorce Katherine not out of lust for Anne but because his marriage was a sin in the sight of God. Anne’s “constant virginity” was an article in the case, both legally and within the terms which Anne and Henry constructed for their relationship—effectively, Anne was protected by the conventions of courtly love. Henry was not only anxious to prove his facility at the game of love to Anne, as his letters to her rather desperately show, but to the courts of Europe. By interpreting the role of courtly lady “to its utmost potential [Anne] became more powerful than any man.”¹⁴

How did Anne Boleyn acquire such skill? Certainly, she came from a family of courtiers. In 1514, her father, Thomas, had been sent as ambassador to the Archduchess Margaret, regent of the Netherlands, and his daughter Anne became one of eighteen ladies serving Margaret at Malines, in a household which included three future queens and the future Emperor Charles V. The magnificence and sophistication of the Burgundian court had greatly influenced those of two English monarchs, Edward IV and Henry VII, and would continue to be a model well into the sixteenth century, but Anne’s time there was relatively brief. She was present at the marriage of Henry’s sister Mary Tudor to Louis XII of France in October 1514, and after Louis’s death, Anne joined the entourage of the new queen of France, François I’s bride, Queen Claude, where she remained for seven years. When she returned to England, the combination of her own wit and attractiveness and the rare polish she had acquired abroad made her exceptional. Anne was an elegant dancer, beautifully dressed, an accomplished musician, and a fluent French speaker, but above all that, she was clever, indeed brilliant, expert at the flashing, flirtatious wordplay which relieved the claustrophobic tension of court life. Next to her, the English ladies, and their Spanish queen, looked like bumpkins.

As maîtresse-en-titre (if not in fact) and then as queen, Anne’s court was not quite the sober and earnest hive of virtue that William Latymer and John Foxe portrayed. Henry and Anne were reported on many occasions to be “very merry,” “pastime in the queen’s chamber was never more,” remarked her vice chamberlain.¹⁵ “Pastime” was the informal entertainment of the queen’s rooms—music, cards, perhaps dancing, storytelling, word games, poetry reading. The “pastime” was where gossip was whispered, where courtships were conducted in the candlelight, where the shafts of courtly wit darted and shone. Castiglione described the custom of “pastime” thus:

 

Among the other pleasant pastimes and music and dancing that continually were practiced, sometimes neat questions were proposed, sometimes ingenious games were devised . . . in which under various disguises the company disclosed their thoughts figuratively to whom they liked best.¹⁶

 

Sex was very much present, as a reality or a delectable mirage, depending on the accounts of Anne’s conduct one chooses to believe, but it was from this flirtatious atmosphere that Cromwell drew his weapons.

From this intense, intellectual, and sensual environment, Cromwell conjured the names of seven men who were to be accused of adultery with Anne. Mark Smeaton, her Flemish musician, the only low-born man among them, was also the only one who pleaded guilty. Smeaton, Henry Norris, Sir Francis Weston, William Brereton, and Anne’s brother, Elizabeth’s uncle Viscount Rochford, were executed. Sir Richard Page was exonerated of all charges. And Sir Thomas Wyatt went to the Tower but not the block. It was Wyatt who witnessed, as his biographer beautifully puts it, “a cataclysmic event, one of those gashes in history that tears, as Rilke said, the ‘till then from the ever since.’”¹⁷

Wyatt was an intimate member of Anne’s circle, and the most accomplished of its poets. His exquisite lyric to Anne, “Whoso List to Hunt,” leaves a perfect representation of the language of love and longing which surrounded that circle and which Cromwell spun so chaotically out of control. With hindsight, “Whoso List” reads as a fatal warning:

 

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,

But as for me, helas, I may no more.

The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,

I am of them that farthest cometh behind.

Yet may I by no means my wearied mind

Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore

Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore

Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.

Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,

As well as I may spend his time in vain.

And graven with diamonds in letters plain,

There is written her fair neck round about:

Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

 

It is Wyatt’s poetry which provides a fascinating key to the evidence which eventually indicted the queen.¹⁸ Wyatt was imprisoned in the upper bell tower on 8 May 1536, and the following day, Cromwell began to assemble the jury for the trial. What did Wyatt reveal that allowed Cromwell to act? Or, rather, why was Wyatt’s fate different from that of Norris, Brereton, Weston, Smeaton, and Rochford? He expected to die but instead found his sentence commuted to “honorable detention.”

A poem contained in the Devonshire manuscript of 1536–37, which collates numerous works by Wyatt and his fellow court poets, contains the verses:

 

There never was file half so well filed,

To file a file for every smith’s intent,

But I was made a filing instrument,

To frame other, while I was beguiled.

 

But reason hath at my folly smiled,

And pardoned me since that I me repent,

Of my lost years and time misspent,

For youth did me lead and falsehood guiled.

 

“File” is the key word, not “frame.” In the sixteenth century, it implied “dishonor” or “betray.” Wyatt’s poem is, in a sense, a confession. He talked, and his reward was the pardon for conduct, the youthful folly, of which he repented. Wyatt’s was not the only evidence, of course, which destroyed Anne, but the timing suggests that whatever he said “enabled Cromwell to draw up his indictment [and] muster his juries.”¹⁹ Wyatt’s words in the Tower were a good deal more precise than the elliptical subtleties which swirl through the poetry manuscripts. Yet poetry, curiously, occupied a significant place even at this moment of extremis. When Anne understood who her fellow prisoners were, she made a bad, hysterical joke. She knew precisely why her “lovers” had been selected, as players of the game of love at its highest, most ambiguously suggestive level. “They may well make pallets now,” she giggled, punning on ballade/pallet, from sonnet to straw. And among the more extraordinary charges levelled against the queen was that she had laughed at Henry’s verse-making, those earnest missives in which he sought to impress her with his own mastery of courtly love. In the account of Anne and her beaux sneering at the king’s verse, “which was made a great charge against them,” we hear the sniggers of the “pastime,” of mockery of a man whose pen was as limp as his prick (as Rochford suicidally affirmed at his trial). Wyatt’s biographer does not claim that Henry had Anne killed because she sniggered at his clumsiness with a couplet, but that Cromwell relied on “a deliberate misinterpretation of a private language” to spring his trap, which was supported in law by Smeaton’s confession and the Treason Act passed two years previously, which made speaking against the king a treasonous offence.

It was this private language, though, which Elizabeth manipulated so superlatively to her own ends. It is also perhaps Anne’s most significant legacy to her daughter. None of Thomas Wyatt’s poems were published during Anne’s lifetime, nor even in his own. But they were printed in Elizabeth’s, in 1557, the year before her accession. Tottel’s Miscellany contains ninety-six of Wyatt’s poems, alongside forty by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and the collection was the most widely disseminated and influential of the period. Here was the source of poetic inspiration for the courtiers who hymned Elizabeth, and for the other writers, including Shakespeare, who made the courtly sonnet the elastic, startling, finely wrought literary emblem of her age. The Miscellany is a direct linguistic link between Elizabeth’s court and Anne’s, an echoing connection between the two queens. At Elizabeth’s court, though, and in the wider culture around the queen, the language of courtly love was infused with religious veneration. Elizabeth became more than the “mistress” in service to whom the courtier-lover achieves both identity and reward; she made herself, within the perceptual model of the Reformation, into a divine being.