XV

Adew, adew, my hartis lust!

Adew, my joy and my solace!

Wyth dowbyl sorow complayn I must

Untyl I dye, alas, alas!

Four days after Katherine died Lady Shelton went to Mary and, “most unceremoniously without the least preparation,” told her her mother was dead. It had been said at court that Henry might take this excuse to visit his daughter in person at last and bring her the sad news, or that he would at least send one of his principal courtiers, but he did neither. Chapuys was afraid that hearing of Katherine’s death might be too great a blow for Mary to bear, knowing how she “loved and cherished [her] as much, perhaps more than any daughter ever did.”

No one but Lady Shelton knew how Mary actually took the news, but by the evening of the day she heard it she was composed enough to request that Katherine’s physician and apothecary be allowed to visit her. The king refused at first, saying that if she was sick it was only the “natural affliction” of grief and nothing more serious, but at Chapuys’ urging he relented. What Mary wanted from the two men was not treatment but an account of Katherine’s last hours and of the manner of her death. Like everyone else she wanted to know for certain whether poison was involved, and since the doctor strongly suspected it he must have passed on these suspicions to Mary.¹

Closeted in her room, wearing her black mourning robe and veil, Mary spent the next weeks writing endless letters. Chapuys had given a consoling note to one of the waiting maids, telling her to pass it on to Mary once she had been officially informed of Katherine’s death, and Mary now answered it, eloquently and without bitterness. The ambassador had encouraged her to be brave and persistent, as Katherine had always been; Mary wrote back that she would try, at the same time preparing herself for whatever change in her own situation might come. As she looked out over the bleak winter landscape it was hard for Mary to imagine any but the darkest future as long as she stayed in England, and she felt again a strong desire to escape. Letters from the emperor and his sister made her long to be among her understanding relatives across the Channel, even though she hardly knew them. The letters were intended for Katherine, but arrived too late to be shown to her. Mary treasured them now, as she did the little gold cross with the relic that her mother had willed to her just before she died.

This legacy at least had been respected, but few of Katherine’s other wishes were carried out. She had wanted to be buried in a convent of the Observant friars, but as the order had been suppressed several years earlier this wish could not be fulfilled. As for her bequests, Henry weighed them carefully. He wanted to see for himself what her robes and furs were like before allowing Mary and the church to have them, and he later ordered Mary to give up even the gold cross that meant so much to her. At the same time he ordered one of the gentlemen of his chamber to take inventory of Katherine’s furnishings as queen, all of which had been stored away in the London palace of Baynard’s Castle ever since her imprisonment began. Her old beds, hangings, and cushions were still there, embroidered with the arms of England and Spain, along with the painted tables and brazier that bore her picture and Henry’s and their joint monogram. Everything had been preserved, even the smocks that she wore in childbed, the hangings for the nursery and the little cradle trimmed in yellow cloth of gold and crimson velvet. Few of these reminders of Katherine’s past interested Henry, but he did take her ivory chessmen and black velvet writing desk, while Anne helped herself to a money chest, an ivory stool and a beautiful horn drinking cup decorated with antique figures.²

It was certainly no comfort to Mary to hear that, on learning of her mother’s death, Henry organized a display of rejoicing calculated to impress on the representatives of foreign courts how great an obstacle to peace she had been. When he first heard the news Henry shouted “God be praised, now we are free from all suspicion of war!” and ordered entertainments and jousts to be prepared to celebrate England’s deliverance. The next day he dressed himself as gaily as possible, all in yellow from doublet to stockings, with a white feather in his yellow cap. He went to mass to a loud fanfare of trumpets, carrying Elizabeth in his arms, and then after dinner danced with the ladies of the court “like one transported with joy.” When the dancing ended he went off to the tiltyard and broke a dozen lances with a vigor he had not shown for years. Anne too was happy to hear that her old rival was dead, and generously rewarded the messenger who told her so, but she seemed troubled by the news as well, and did not take a central part in the rejoicings at Greenwich.

At the imperial court Chapuys’ dispatches describing Katherine’s last days were received with some dismay. The emperor put on black and wept, saying that he still could not understand how Henry could have left “so sage, virtuous and sainted a wife” for a whore.³ With his eight-year-old heir Philip at his side he heard a mass in Katherine’s honor, and announced to the ambassadors at his court that he believed she died like a saint. But if he blamed Henry for her death Charles did not hold a grudge. Within a few months he was welcoming the approaches of English diplomats eager to restore good relations, and was agreeing with them that, since Katherine no longer presented a problem, there was no reason why the old friendship between the Hapsburgs and the Tudors should not be restored. If this rapprochement confirmed Katherine’s former diplomatic significance it also showed just how little Mary counted in the game of continental politics. She might be useful to have at hand in marriage negotiations, or as a pretender installed by a rebel army, but Charles was not prepared to remain estranged from England over the issue of her disinheritance or ill treatment. It was Katherine, not Mary, whose rights had caused an upheaval in European diplomacy.

Katherine may have died like a saint but she was buried like a princess—to be precise, a princess dowager. An account of her burial arrangements referred to her as “the right excellent and noble Princess the Lady Katherine, Daughter to the right high and mighty Prince Ferdinand, late King of Castile, and late Wife to the noble and excellent prince Arthur, Brother to our Sovereign Lord King Henry the 8th.”⁴ When the body had been “seared, trammeled, leaded and chested with spices” it lay for some days under a canopy of state before being enclosed in a leaden coffin, and placed before the altar within a “burning chapel,” a display of dozens of wax candles kept alight in a blazing circle. Around the coffin were four crimson banners with the arms of England and Spain, and four great golden standards painted with the images of the Trinity, the virgin, St. Katherine and St. George. Wherever the arms of England appeared they were left ungilded, and the crown that surmounted them was the unclosed circlet of a princess, not the closed crown of a queen.

After more than two weeks the new mourning clothes were ready, and the mourning procession formed. Katherine’s niece Eleanor, daughter of Mary Tudor and Charles Brandon, was chief mourner; she and sixteen other ladies and fifty of Katherine’s serving women followed the hearse in slow stages to the abbey of Saltry, where another burning chapel was lit and the party rested overnight. Then, accompanied by forty-eight poor men in black hoods and robes carrying long torches, the company madethe final journey to the Benedictine abbey of Peterborough where Katherine was to be interred. Here, surrounded by a thousand candles, by banners of all the great ruling houses to which she was related—those of Spain, Aragon, Sicily, Portugal, and the Holy Roman Empire—and by the aristocratic arms of the house of Lancaster and the white scutcheon of Prince Arthur, Katherine received her final homage. Her symbol, the pomegranate, was represented in several pennons, and her device, “Humble et loyale,” was spelled out in huge golden letters around the walls.

Her humility and loyalty Henry could afford to celebrate, but not the principles she had maintained in life. Her funeral sermon was an assault on the pope and on her marriage, and the bishop who delivered it was persuaded to say, in exact contradiction of the truth, that on her deathbed Katherine had at last admitted that she had never been England’s rightful queen. The sermon satisfied the king’s conscience, but convinced no one else. All those who truly mourned Katherine knew better, and the six hundred poor women who were given black robes in which to mourn her more conspicuously prayed for her not as princess but as Queen Katherine as the coffin was placed at the lowest step of the high altar, a site unworthy of her place in their memory.⁵

Mary found the funeral arrangements such a dishonor that she advised Chapuys not to attend the ceremonial interment. Except for the controller Guildford, Anne’s great enemy, the courtiers judiciously stayed away. Henry found little to say about the affair except to complain about the cost of a memorial to be displayed in Katherine’s honor at St. Paul’s.⁶Beyond bewailing the expense, he could hardly be bothered with the trivia of his first wife’s funeral when all he could think of was how to rid himself of her successor. Anne had disappointed him again. On the day of Katherine’s burial she miscarried her child, and the midwives who pored over the tiny fetus declared it to be male. Henry showed “great distress” when he was told, and was quite uncivil to his anguished wife. The miscarriage gave substance to the long-standing rumor that since Elizabeth’s birth Anne had been incapable of bearing another child.

Anne tried to excuse her misfortune by saying that she lost the child through worry over the king. A few days earlier Henry had fallen heavily during a joust. He was mounted on a great warhorse, charging at an opponent in the tiltyard at Greenwich, when suddenly both horse and rider came crashing to the ground. For a terrible moment it looked as though the king was dead, but then his grooms saw that, though unconscious, he was breathing. He was senseless for more than two hours, and when he finally opened his eyes he found himself surrounded by churchmen and distraught courtiers. It was only after he was himself again that Anne was told what had happened, but she blamed the miscarriage on her shock at the news, and took the opportunity to blame Norfolk as well fortelling her too abruptly. With her waiting maids, though, she took quite a different tone. Seeing them in tears over the loss of her child Anne consoled them by saying that all was for the best, since she could now conceive her next child all the sooner. What was more, she added, the new one would be free from any possible taint of bastardy now that the king’s first wife was dead.⁷

Whatever Anne may have thought, Henry believed—or so he said—that her miscarriage was the result of malignant forces. Gertrude Blount got word to Chapuys that the king had told one of his intimates “in great confidence, and as it were in confession,” that he now understood that he had been seduced into marrying Anne against his will, by witchcraft.⁸Such a marriage was accursed, he said, and could not produce sons. Furthermore it ought to be considered invalid, and he confided that in his own mind he already believed himself free to take another wife.

Everyone, including Anne, knew the woman he had in mind. She was pale, shy Jane Seymour, a monumental contrast to Anne in every respect, and Henry had been showing her every attention and giving her “very large presents” for months. Anne made a final pitiful effort to win back her husband’s affection, telling him that “her heart broke when she saw he loved others,” but it was too late. The king hardly spoke to her any more, and spent all his time in the palace apartments of Edward Seymour, where he could meet Jane in her brother’s presence and avoid scandal.⁹

No one was more distressed over Anne’s miscarriage and disgrace than Lady Shelton. She saw at once that, if Mary realized Anne’s true situation, she would become ungovernable, and she sent her daughter and niece to try to find out from a woman whom Mary trusted, possibly Gertrude Blount, just how much Mary knew. If she had heard about the loss of the child, so much the worse, but “they would not for the world that she knew the rest.”¹⁰ In fact Mary’s relationship to Lady Shelton was already changing. Thanks in part to a steady stream of bribes from Chapuys, Anne’s aunt was allowing the ambassador’s servants to see Mary whenever they liked, even without the requisite order countersigned by the king, and there were other signs that her icy harshness was thawing.¹¹ Until now Lady Shelton had owed her place at court to Anne’s status, but if Anne fell she would need a new protector. There was talk that Mary might be restored to something like her former state, and the king might even decide to punish those he had told in the past to mistreat her. To guard against this possibility Lady Shelton was now hedging her bets.

Through Chapuys Mary too had heard the talk of “increasing her train and exalting her position,” and her father’s attitude seemed for the moment to be benevolent. He sent her a hundred crowns to distribute in alms, and he returned to her Katherine’s gold cross, having satisfied himself that it had no value beyond the relic of the true cross it was said to contain.¹² But Mary had no wish to wait for the rumored mending of her fortunes. Like Chapuys she had come to fear “the scorpion lurking under the honey,” and her desire to escape had only been heightened by Katherine’s death. The emperor’s agent had not been idle, and had made plans to get Mary safely to the coast. Transport: from there was still to be arranged, however, when she was moved suddenly to Hunsdon in Hertfordshire and the entire project had to be redesigned.

Hunsdon was badly situated for even the most ingenious escape scheme. It was forty miles by horseback from Gravesend, where Mary would embark for Flanders—a distance requiring several changes of mount and many extra horses and men. Beyond this, the escape party would have to ride through several large villages, where only a sizable armed bodyguard could prevent a hue and cry. The risk of discovery and capture was overwhelmingly great even if, as Mary thought, she was being guarded more lightly than ever. If they made it safely to the river their ship would be subject to repeated searches and the uncertain tides might delay them still further. Mary thought that, if she had a sleeping draught to give her women, she could let herself out of the house without interference, provided she could get past Lady Shelton’s window; once she reached the bottom of the garden it would be easy enough to open the gate—or break it if need be—and join the waiting horsemen on the other side.

Chapuys found the project far too hazardous and recommended waiting until after Easter, when Mary expected to be moved again. In April or May, with better weather and calmer seas, the chance of success would be far greater, and the king’s probable absence from the vicinity of London would only increase the odds.¹³ In the meantime he told Mary to continue in the semi-seclusion of mourning, and if approached by the king’s officers to beg them to leave her in peace with her grief. If pressed, he suggested she tell them she was thinking of entering a convent as soon as she reached full age, a startling and unprecedented move calculated to stun them into indecision and to give her time to prepare for flight in the spring.¹⁴

Before new escape plans could be made, however, Queen Anne’s tortured reign reached its dramatic conclusion. Throughout April Henry was actively looking for a way out of his marriage, hoping that one of his lawyers or theologians would discover a hidden impediment or a flaw in the original proceedings that would prove his union with Anne unlawful. Sensing the impending shift in influence from the Boleyns to the Seymours, the courtiers formed new alliances and began to tell tales on the Boleyns that they had up to now kept to themselves. That Henrypassed over George Boleyn for membership in the Order of the Garter late in April was very significant. The Garter was an honor held by very few men, and only when a member died could a new Garter knight be chosen. The death of the redoutable old Lord Abergavenny created an empty place, and Anne coveted it for her brother. Henry gave it to his Grand Esquire Nicholas Carew, who had recently become openly and stridently critical of the Boleyns and was advising Jane Seymour on how to advance her progress toward the throne.¹⁵

Carew and others of the king’s chamber sent word to Mary at about this time telling her to take heart, and boasting that all the Boleyns would soon be forced to “put water in their wine” and learn humility. Geoffrey Pole, a younger son of the countess of Salisbury and hotheaded opponent of Anne and her relatives, spread the word that Henry had asked the bishop of London whether some grounds could be found which would allow him to abandon his wife, and it appeared to be only a matter of time before Anne was, in the crude phrase of the courtiers, “dismounted” and another mare put in her place.

Anne’s spirits had been sinking since January. She was tormented by the gossip about Henry and Jane, and Henry did not spare his wife the sight of his demonstrative affection for his new love. She had to bear the sneers and contempt of all those she had sneered at and abused for so long, and their laughter as well. She was haunted too by an old prophecy that in her days a queen of England would be burned alive. In the early years of her involvement with Henry Anne had assumed that the queen of the prophecy would be Katherine, but now she dreaded that it might well refer to herself. She was badly frightened when a fire broke out in her bedchamber early in 1536, and her satisfaction at Katherine’s death was clouded by fears for her own life. Toward the end Anne seems to have conceived a mystical link between Katherine’s death and her own, and when she heard that the old queen was gone at last she grew increasingly morbid about her future.

When no flaw could be found in the legalities of the marriage Henry determined to rid himself of Anne on political grounds. Alleging that the misconduct of a queen, if it threatened her husband’s security, was treasonous, he ordered Cromwell, Norfolk and a commission of others to investigate her morals. What they found convinced the commissioners, and the twenty-six peers who ruled unanimously against her at her trial on May 15, that the queen was a flagrant adulteress who had conspired with at least one of her lovers against the king’s life. The specific charges against Anne were that she had been unfaithful to Henry with three of his courtiers (Henry Norris, Francis Weston and William Brereton) and with a musician named Mark Smeaton, that she was guilty of incest with her brother George, and that she and Norris had exchanged a vow tomarry after Henry’s death—taken by her accusers as proof of a conspiracy to assassinate the king. There were lesser charges as well: that Anne and Norris exchanged medals implicating her in Katherine’s death by poison; that she gave money to Weston (which she admitted); that she laughed at Henry’s clothes and person, and, with her brother, made fun of the ballads he wrote; and that “she showed in various ways she did not love the king but was tired of him.”¹⁶

The most sensational of the indictments brought against Anne and her alleged accomplices revealed the sordid undercurrent of recrimination and bizarre conjecture in sexual matters that had spread through the court during Anne’s reign. George Boleyn was charged with “having spread reports which called in question whether his sister’s daughter was the king’s child.” In other words, it was being said that Anne’s brother had accused his sister of conceiving Elizabeth by someone other than Henry. The accusation was odd in that according to some accounts George Boleyn was himself held to be Elizabeth’s father, but other evidence brought out during the trial made it more plausible. Among the statements George was asked to confirm or deny was that Anne had told her sister-in-law that Henry “was impotent, having neither vigor nor strength [for intercourse].”¹⁷ This accusation, which despite stern admonitions the accused read aloud, much to the embarrassment of the court, may have been true, at least when Anne said it, or it may have been her way of attacking the king where he was most vulnerable in a moment of spite. But the suggestion alone was enough to cause a great deal of talk, and every ambassadorial dispatch that left London that week noted it in full.

A final charge accused Anne of a unique form of theological promiscuity. Chapuys recorded that the most Protestant of the bishops taught Anne that “according to their sect, it was allowable for a woman to ask for aid in other quarters, even among her own relatives,” whenever her husband was incapable of satisfying her. This outrageous accusation brought even the church into complicity with the adulterous queen, and showed just how eager Henry was to discredit her.

He was not disappointed. Though both Anne and her brother defended themselves ably—the latter made such a good impression that at one point spectators wagered ten to one he would be acquitted—both were condemned, along with Anne’s four other alleged lovers, who had been tried separately. Anne was sentenced to be beheaded, the first English queen to die on the block for treason. She asked, as a final courtesy, that her head be neatly severed, as in French executions, with a sword.

The evidence at Anne’s trial consisted of little more than the bawdy whisperings of courtiers, yet what made it significant was the inescapable importance of the succession, and the aging king’s reluctant admission that he might die without leaving a legitimate son. His preoccupation with this problem led the men and women of his court to dwell on his sexual exploits, his married life and his potency with an exclusive fascination which at another court they would have reserved for their own. Anne Boleyn was in a sense a casualty of their collective preoccupation, and perhaps for this reason even her worst enemies found themselves in the end strangely disturbed by her fate and angry at the king for making such a spectacle of his relief at it.

During the two and a half weeks that Anne lay in the Tower Henry gave himself up to the carefree enjoyments of springtime. He banqueted every night in the company of beautiful women, danced lustily, drank until he could not stand, and then made his way back to the palace to the raucous accompaniment of shawms, drums and many choruses of tavern songs. Long after midnight the royal barge could be heard coming back to its mooring at Greenwich, with the king and his chamber singers bawling out songs from the stern, his voice booming loudest of all. The “skinny old hoyden” was out of the way at last, he told his companions with delight, and repeated again and again that Anne had been unfaithful to him with a hundred men, and had only kept his love through her spells and enchantments.¹⁸

On Friday, May 19, at eight in the morning, Anne was beheaded on Tower Green, before the great White Tower, by a swordsman from St. Omer. During her imprisonment she had joked about her coming execution, saying she would be known to posterity as Queen Lackhead, but in her hours of serious preparation for death she spoke often of Mary. Chapuys reported that she was genuinely remorseful about mistreating Mary and plotting her death. Charles V’s sister Mary, though, was cynical about the entire affair, and looked forward to the time when Henry, having tired of still a third wife, might order her to execution. “I think wives will hardly be well contented if such customs become general,” she wrote. As a vigorous and capable widow with no intention of remarrying, Mary of Hungary was in no danger from the precedent of Anne’s death, but she joined all women in hoping for deliverance. “Being of the feminine gender,” she wrote, “I will pray with the others that God may keep us from it.”¹⁹

Before the high altar at Peterborough the monks were reporting a miracle. The candles near the grave of Katherine of Aragon were lighting and extinguishing themselves of their own accord. The king was notified, and thirty men from his court arrived to witness the remarkable event. When they reported the sign to Henry he chose to interpret it as an occult confirmation, from the one she had wronged most grievously, of the justice of Anne’s execution. In some macabre way the king believed he was receiving permission from his first wife to carry out the ultimate punishment of his second.