X
Who shall have my fayre lady?
Who but 1, who but 1, who but I,
Undir the levys grene?
On the last Thursday in May 1533 a flotilla of royal barges, boats and ships of all sizes assembled at Tower Wharf for the short trip down the Thames to Greenwich. Leading the procession was a swift foist full of ordnance, and mounted in its bow was a great red dragon belching flames into the water. Monsters and wild men disported themselves around the dragon, and behind it, in another foist, was a pageant of the queen’s device, a mount with a crowned white falcon standing on it surrounded by red and white roses. The barge of the Lord Mayor, Stephen Peacock, came next, followed by forty-eight barges supplied by his colleagues in the haberdashers’ company. Each was hung with tapestries and banners and pennons of the arms of the crafts in fine gold. Every barge was equipped with guns, “the one to hail the other triumphantly as the time did require,” and with musicians playing trumpets, shawms, flutes and drums in such harmony that they sounded like “a thing of another world.” They were going to Greenwich to greet Anne Boleyn, and to escort her to apartments at the Tower where she would be prepared for her coronation.
Anne was waiting at the palace in a bark painted with her colors and rigged with many banners. Another hundred vessels joined the parade for the trip back upriver, each fitted out with masts and rigging ornamented with taffeta flags and gold foil that shone brightly in the sun. All the little boats along the route joined in until the whole river was covered, and as the queen’s barge passed by all the great warships moored at Greenwich, Radcliff, and before St. Katharine’s shot their guns. The cannons at Limehouse and in the Tower itself gave out such a thunderous pounding that in the nearby foreigners’ quarter every pane of glass was broken andthe houses shook so violently it seemed as if they would come crashing down. The blaring of trumpets that cut through the booming guns as Anne stepped ashore at Tower Wharf gave the spectacle an apocalyptic air, and a Spaniard who described it all afterward wrote that “verily it seemed as if the world was coming to an end.”
Two days later Anne rode in procession through the city, preceded by the great nobles, judges, abbots and ambassadors. The newly created Knights of the Bath rode together in their hooded blue gowns, and the French merchants, their horses trapped in violet taffeta with white crosses, wore doublets of violet velvet with one sleeve in Anne’s colors. Anne rode in a litter covered inside and out with white satin and drawn by two palfreys in white damask. Her surcoat and mantle were of white cloth of tissue, the mantle furred with ermines. Her hair hung loose down her back, and on her head she wore a coif with a jeweled circlet. Constables in velvet and silk marched with the procession, using their great staves to keep the crowds from snatching at the finery, while from every window along the route of march people leaned down to wave and shout to the celebrities as they passed. Following Anne were the principal women of the court: the chief married noblewomen in cloth of gold on horseback, the dowager marchioness of Dorset and Anne’s grandmother, the dowager duchess of Norfolk, in litters, twelve unmarried ladies on horseback in gowns of crimson velvet, and several dozen lesser gentlewomen in black velvet. At the rear came the royal guard, in new embroidered coats of goldsmith’s work.
Tapestries, carpets and rich cloths of scarlet and cloth of gold were hung from every house and shop, and at each of the stages on the traditional procession route the queen was saluted by pageantry and music. Choirs of children sang ballads in her honor, and at the conduit in Fleet Street was a group of “such several solemn instruments that it seemed to be an heavenly noise, and was much regarded and praised.” At Grace-church, Apollo and his Nine Muses sat on the mount of Parnassus and recited verses to Anne, playing their instruments in accompaniment, and at Leadenhall another group of performers presented an elaborate pageant written by Nicholas Udall, in which a white falcon, representing Anne, lighted on the Tudor rosebush and was crowned by an angel, while St. Anne looked on. At Cornhill she was saluted as worthier than the Three Graces, here called Hearty Gladness, Stable Honour and Continual Success; at the lesser conduit in Cheap a play with music depicted the Judgment of Paris, with the golden apple for the fairest of goddesses and mortals awarded to Anne. Here her nobility, virtue and beauty were praised in verse:
Queen Anne so gent,
Anne excellent
In nobleness!
Of ladies all,
You principal
Should win this ball
Of worthiness!
Passing beauty
And chastity,
With high degree,
And great riches;
So coupled be
In unity,
That chief are ye
In worthiness,1
The mocking reference to Anne’s chastity—she was six months pregnant at the time of her coronation—was not lost on the people who lined the streets to watch Henry’s new wife pass. They called her “a strong harlot” and “a goggle-eyed whore,” and one man was heard to declare that he was neither fool nor sinner enough to ever take “that whore Nan Bullen to be queen.” She was already pregnant when Henry finally married her, earlier in the year, and Katherine at least believed they had been living as husband and wife for much longer.
There had been no official papal annulment of the marriage to Katherine. Instead, spurred toward a conclusive settlement by Anne’s pregnancy, Parliament declared that all ecclesiastical cases were hereafter to be settled in England, without appeal to Rome or anywhere else. This enabled the convocation of the clergy of southern England, early in April, to declare Henry and Katherine’s marriage invalid, and to make his marriage to Anne, already celebrated in January, a legal and binding union.
But the Londoners who had greeted Katherine on her coronation progress through the city nearly twenty-five years earlier and still loved her could not find it in their hearts to wish Anne well. Not ten people in the crowd called out “God save the queen!” an eyewitness wrote; instead they pointed to the royal initials H and A painted and stitched into the decorations along the parade route and read them as “Ha ha!” Katherine’s partisans seized on every imperfection in Anne’s appearance as if it were a monstrosity. She wore her dress high up around her throat as if to hide a goiter; the crownlike wreath she wore emphasized the scrofulous scars on her neck; seen from the right angle, the ears of the mule behind her appeared to project from her head “like two sharp horns, making many people laugh.”
The solemnity of Anne’s coronation on June I did nothing to discour age these jibes, and both before and after their marriage Anne was a source of considerable embarrassment and inconvenience to the king. During the summer of 1532 he took her with him on what was to be an extensive hunting trip to the north, and as his custom was he passed through village after village to show himself to the people and to receive their acclaim. This time, though, for the first three or four days of his journey he met with only shouts of derision and criticism. Anne was roundly hooted and hissed, and the villagers shouted to the king to take back his true wife Katherine. These insults spoiled Henry’s anticipation for the hunt, and he and Anne abruptly returned to London.2
Justices and magistrates were ordered to take severe action against anyone speaking against the king or Anne. In a country town a sixty-nine-year-old Derbyshire soldier, “sore bruised” in Henry’s early wars, said in a conversation with a vicar and two others that he could not believe the king would forsake “so noble a lady, so high born, and so gracious” as Katherine to marry another woman; a few months later he found himself a prisoner in the Marshalsea.3 All the crafts and guilds assembled in their halls in London were enjoined to say nothing injurious to the king’s dignity, and to prevent their journeymen and servants and, “a more difficult task, their own wives,” from insulting Anne. As the day of the coronation approached, cash rewards were offered to anyone bringing “talkers and slanderers” to the notice of the royal officials, and proclamations ordered the suppression of “fond books, ballads, rhymes and other lewd treatises” disparaging Henry’s second marriage.4 But it was impossible, as the Lord Mayor remarked on the day of Anne’s progress, “to restrain the people’s hearts, and even the king didn’t know how to do it,” and when at a public sermon shortly after the marriage the congregation was asked to pray for Anne’s health and welfare, nearly all who were present left the church “in high displeasure and with sad countenances” without waiting for the rest of the sermon.5
Within the court the factions supporting Katherine and Anne had recently come to blows. Henry’s sister Mary had affronted Anne by her “opprobrious language.” To avenge the insult, Anne’s uncle Norfolk ordered twenty of his men to assassinate Brandon’s chief followers in the sanctuary of Westminster. Brandon and many of the courtiers were so outraged that they were preparing to invade the sanctuary and drag out the murderers by force. Henry restrained them, but it was only fear of his anger that kept even larger brawls from occurring.
Meanwhile Anne’s enemies had found a subtler way to assault both her peace of mind and her influence with the king. Anne had gained her power because of the king’s weakness for women; she could lose it in the same way. Young girls, noblemen’s daughters, arrived at court every month to take up residence as waiting maids. The king flirted with themall, and from time to time singled out one for special favor. In 1532 he was said to be “courting” one of these ladies, and was “very much in love” with her. The anti-Boleyn faction gave him every encouragement and help in this new affair, much to Anne’s displeasure, but the new love could not compete with Henry’s abiding infatuation for his “sweetheart.”6 The disgruntled courtiers had to admit Anne’s strength, and consoled themselves by making mean references to her disfigured hand. Growing out of the nail of one of her fingers was another, superfluous nail—possibly the stub of an extra finger. It was so slight a blemish that she could easily keep it covered with the tip of the next finger, but all those who hated Anne made much of it, as they did of her every defect and failing.7
After seven years of Anne’s perilous coquetry Henry was no more blind to her faults than he was entirely faithful to her, but when she told him she was pregnant he forgot everything else in his delight at the prospect of a son. For Henry, this was the climactic event, the ultimate conclusion to the long wranglings of the divorce. All the plans, expectations and celebrations which had greeted the arrival of the New Year’s boy so long ago were now to be revived. Those who for decades had predicted only disaster for England in the absence of a legitimate male heir would be confounded at last. To provide a suitable setting for the birth of his son Henry ordered that the most beautiful bed he owned, “the most magnificent and gorgeous that could be thought of,” be brought from his treasure room to the room where the queen was to be delivered. As Anne’s time drew near, physicians and astrologers were called in to confirm Henry’s hopes about the child’s sex, and armed with their assurances that it would be male Henry proclaimed a splendid tournament to be held soon after the birth. Expecting that the arrival of Anne’s son would silence her detractors once and for all, her relatives and friends prepared to make a triumphant showing at the tournament, and sent to Flanders for the best horses they could find.
Two events, one merely bizarre, the other slightly ominous, marred the final weeks of Anne’s pregnancy. The first was the remarriage, for the fourth time, of Charles Brandon. His wife had died toward the end of June, and barely six weeks after her interment the following month he had taken a new bride, a girl of fourteen. Like the Princess Mary she had a Spanish mother—she was the daughter of one of Katherine’s former waiting women—and was very pretty, but apart from the scandalous difference in the ages of the bride and groom what made the match virtually unprecedented was that the girl was betrothed to Brandon’s ten-year-old son.
At about the same time Henry indulged his passion for one of the court ladies—her name is not recorded—and took her as his mistress.Anne’s coronation was barely over when their amours began, and in her extreme jealousy Anne “made use of certain words which he very much disliked.” Pregnant though she was, the king did not spare her in his angry reply. She had no right to complain, he snapped. She must simply “shut her eyes and endure as those who were better than herself had done”—a pointed reference to long-suffering Katherine—and would do well to bear in mind who it was that had exalted her to the status of queen. He threatened her with the painful truth that “he could at any time lower her as much as he had raised her,” and resumed his amorous pastimes with a vengeance. Much “coldness and grumbling” between the spouses followed these remarks. Both Henry and Anne were headstrong and inclined to be moody, and now that they were married Anne had surrendered some of her leverage in an argument. Henry reportedly did not speak to Anne at all for two or three days, and she seems to have entered her month-long confinement without the comfort of a reconciliation.8
Her child was born at midafternoon on September 7. To her intense regret it was a girl, Henry swore and sulked, but did not despair. The child was healthy enough, and when the first disappointment had passed he realized there was every reason to think the next one would be a son.
It was at first proposed that the girl be named Mary. She would be taking the former princess’ place as heir to the throne; why not let her take Mary’s name as well? No more unambiguous symbol for the supplanting of one daughter by the other could have been devised, but for some reason the idea was discarded. Mary’s downgrading in rank, though, was made almost brutally clear within moments after her half-sister’s birth. As soon as the midwives were certain the child was liveborn and breathing, a herald proclaimed to the courtiers in the adjoining chamber that the old princess of Wales was no longer to be considered such, and as if to finalize her degradation the badges bearing her device worn on the coats of her servingmen were ripped from their sleeves and replaced by the king’s arms. At the christening of the new baby, who was called Elizabeth, a herald again proclaimed her to be princess and rightful heiress of England, and Chapuys, who reported these events to Charles V, added the current rumor that Mary’s household and allowance were soon to be greatly reduced. “May God in his infinite mercy,” he added, “prevent a still worse treatment!”
Chapuys, Mary and Katherine had all seen the blow coming. There had never been any real question that, in the ambassador’s phrase, “as soon as Anne sets her foot firmly in the stirrup” she would take from both women the last vestiges of their dignity. Anne had been threatening Katherine for years, swearing she would rather see Katherine hanged than acknowledge her rank as queen.9 As soon as she took Katherine’s place as Henry’s wife Anne lost no time in using her new-found authority to take her revenge. As queen, Anne needed her own barge. She took the one that had been Katherine’s, and ordered Katherine’s arms removed from it and “rather ignominiously torn off and cut to pieces.”10 Anne already possessed nearly everything else of value that had once belonged to her rival; all that remained was to remove her person from the vicinity of the court, reduce her establishment, and change her title.
In July of 1533 Katherine was moved to Buckden in Huntingdonshire, to an old brick palace from Henry VII’s time that loomed forlornly over the great fens. The palace was strong and easily defended, and in a location so remote and thinly inhabited that it made an effective prison. Katherine was allowed to take with her her Spanish ladies in waiting and her faithful Spanish officers—Felipez, head of the household, the physician De la Sa and his apothecary, the chaplain Jorge de Ateca, bishop of Llandaff. But she was under strict guard, and more cut off than ever before from news of Mary and of those who were still trying to help her.
Ever since the second marriage was made public, Chapuys had been urging Katherine to save herself by escaping, with the emperor’s help. Within England, he told her, there were many “people of quality” who were ready to come to her defense with money and the rudiments of an army. All they needed was encouragement from Charles V or possibly from the Scots, since the people were so angry at the king’s treatment of her that they would aid any army organized to restore her to the throne by force. No king, not even Richard III, was ever hated so thoroughly as Henry now was, these potential rebels insisted. Now was the time to put an end to his wicked treatment of his rightful wife and daughter.11 But though she realized the danger she was in, Katherine was determined to stay in England. Otherwise, as she told Chapuys, she would be “sinning against law and against the king.” What was more, she would be running away from what, in her mind at least, was the most significant question of conscience yet to arise.
With the judgment of the clerical convocation that Henry’s first marriage was invalid, Katherine lost her claim to the title of queen under English law. She received word that from now on she would be known as “the old dowager princess,” the title she merited as Prince Arthur’s widow.12 She ignored the change, continuing to sign herself as “Katherine the queen” and crossing out the title “princess dowager” wherever she saw it written. After three months of resistance Henry sent orders to those he had placed in charge of Katherine to accuse her of “arrogance, selfishness, and inordinate vainglory” in refusing to abandon a title that was no longer hers, and telling her that stubbornness over this issuewould assuredly lead to civil war and disputes over the succession. “Much blood would be spilt,” they were to say, and “the kingdom totally destroyed,” and the king’s conscience would be “greatly troubled.” If Katherine acquiesced, she would be honorably treated; if she did not, she would feel his displeasure, not only against her but against her friends and companions, and her daughter.
Without hesitation Katherine answered that, despite all pretended judgments to the contrary, she was Henry’s true wife, and would never be known by any other title than queen. There was no arrogance or vainglory in her attitude, she said, “for she would certainly take greater glory in being called the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella than the greatest queen in the world against her own conscience.”13 The evocation of Isabella was pointed and appropriate. Henry was overheard to admit more than once that he feared Katherine would imitate her famous mother and take the field against him. The image of the, heroic crusader queen, riding armed into battle, still lived to trouble the musings of the powerful king of England nearly thirty years after her death.
Mary too was immediately affected by Anne’s official designation as queen. On one terrible day she was informed, first, that her parents’ marriage had been, once and for all, pronounced invalid and second, that Henry and Anne were now man and wife. At the same time she was told that she could no longer communicate with the princess dowager either through intermediaries or in writing. Despite the panic she must have felt at these announcements, Mary remained outwardly thoughtful and composed, and seemed “even to rejoice” at the news of Henry’s marriage. She sat down right away and wrote the king a letter which, when he read it later, made him “marvellously content and pleased, praising above all things the wisdom and prudence of the princess.”14
Henry’s pleasure in Mary was always a source of extreme annoyance to Anne, as was the obvious affection the people had for her. When Mary traveled from one residence to another shortly after Anne’s coronation the villagers came to see her and to cheer her as they did Katherine. “As much rejoicing went on as if God Almighty had come down from heaven,” Anne complained, and she planned to punish both the princess and the people who stood behind her.15 Anne boasted that she intended to make Mary wait on her as a maid of honor in her royal household, and that, once she was installed in this position, Anne might perhaps “give her too much dinner on some occasion”—that is, poison her—or “marry her to some varlet.”16
No threat was as dangerous, though, as the tacit threat of her unborn child. Shortly before Elizabeth’s birth Katherine wrote Mary a letter which shows clearly how fateful she saw Mary’s situation to be and how she advised her to face it. “Daughter,” she wrote, “I heard such tidingsthis day that I do perceive (if it be true) the time is very near when Almighty God will provide for you.” The “tidings” concerned Anne’s menacing remarks, coupled with the nearness of her expected delivery. Anne’s child would make Mary superfluous, and therefore expendable; to protect the succession rights of his new heir Henry might yield to Anne’s pressure and order the princess killed.
Knowing this might be the last letter Mary received from her, Kath-erine poured into it all the love and encouragement she could put into words. Her overriding message was that of the Christian martyrs she had come to resemble: the message of cheerfulness and rejoicing in the face of danger. “I would God, good daughter, that you did know with how good a heart I write this letter unto you. I never did write one with a better.” She told Mary what Vives had said to her long before, that tragedy and persecution are signs of divine favor and that “we never come to the kingdom of heaven but by troubles.” Whatever happens is God’s will, no matter how men and women deceive themselves that it is their own, she wrote, and this too should be cause for rejoicing, even if his will means suffering and death. “Agree to his pleasure with a merry heart,” Kather-ine told Mary, secure in the “sure armor” of his commandments and with faith that “he will not suffer you to perish if you beware to offend him.” What she meant was not that God would preserve Mary’s life but that he would spare her the eternal death of hell; she might be killed, but she would know everlasting life beyond the grave. The final words of the letter were a resigned yet scornful acknowledgment that, for both mother and daughter, the end seemed near. “And now you shall begin, and by likelihood I shall follow. I set not a rush by it, for when they have done the utmost they can, then I am sure of amendment.”17
Katherine’s morbid cheerfulness was echoed in the little book she sent to Mary along with her letter. It was an edition of the letters of St. Jerome to Paula and Eustochium, a classic of Christian asceticism for women. In many ways these letters rounded out the education Mary had been receiving since she was a young girl. The treatises Vives wrote for her in childhood were drawn largely from these and other letters of St. Jerome outlining an ideal of female behavior that was not unlike the rule of a professed nun. Now, as Katherine tried to prepare Mary for the greatest danger she ever had to face, she could think of no better examples for her to follow than those of the sheltered, prudish women Jerome described, who shunned all men, feared every sensual impulse they felt, and prayed that they might be rid of their youth and beauty so that they could devote themselves fully to God. Jerome’s letters were exhortations to imitate the stolid asceticism of young Roman women who shrouded themselves in garments that “reminded them of the tomb” and wore out their lives in ascetic disciplines.
One story must have made a strong impression on seventeen-year-old Mary. It described the holy life of Blesilla, a Roman girl of about Mary’s age who when her husband died so starved and exhausted herself with fasting and prayers that within a few months she had followed him to the grave. Jerome’s theme was the never ending battle of spirit against flesh, Christian self-discipline against the overripe sensuality of the Roman world. Mary’s battle was to be, like Katherine’s, a conflict of mental endurance, pitting the strength of her individual conscience against the shame of disobedience and the fear of death. But Jerome’s rousing persuasion to fight the good fight was filled with biblical exhortations well suited to inspire Mary nonetheless. “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the trouble which haunteth thee in darkness; nor for the demon and his attacks at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.”18 And in her isolation Mary must have found comfort in Elisha’s words: “Fear not, for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.”19
The popular view of Mary’s circumstances was far different from Katherine’s. To the country people who knew of her chiefly through songs and the stories of travelers, Mary’s life was that of a fairytale heroine, full of romance and peril yet veiled in unreality. Thus the villagers of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire were quite prepared to believe the story of an eighteen-year-old girl who impersonated the princess in the northern counties toward the end of 1533. The girl, Mary Baynton, called herself Lady Mary and told how she had been “put forth into the broad world to shift for her living” by her father, and went from house to house asking alms. To those who took pity on her and welcomed her as if she really were the princess she told a curious story. As a little girl, she said, she had been with her aunt Mary while the latter was in her bath, reading. Looking up from her book her aunt had said to her, “Niece Mary, I am right sorry for you, for I see here that your fortune is very hard; you must go a-begging once in your life, either in your youth or in your age.” “And therefore,” Mary Baynton told her fascinated listeners, “I take it upon me now, in my youth.” And telling them she intended to take ship to join the emperor over the sea, she took the coins they offered and went on to the next town.
As the real Mary Tudor read and reread her mother’s letter and the exhortations of Jerome in her room at Beaulieu, many a Lincolnshire housewife took comfort in the misguided thought that she had helped to speed the princess to safety in Flanders.