It was a big moment. Mary Howard, cousin to Anne Boleyn, was making her court debut, and they could hardly have chosen an occasion with higher stakes or more pressure. The Lady Anne was about to be created Marquess of Pembroke: not marchioness, the wife of a marquess, but marquess, the male title, in her own right. It was an unprecedented move for a woman in her situation and it made the king’s marital intentions all the clearer. Mary had been chosen to bear Anne’s new regalia, the mantel and coronet of a peeress, even though at thirteen she was very young for such a visible and responsible role.1 But there were good reasons for this and they were not lost on any of those watching. Mary was the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, and the betrothed of the king’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy. She was a visual reminder of the close relationship between the Howards and the Tudors. Her presence made it evident that the powerful Howard dynasty saw Anne’s bid for the throne as a family matter, and had thrown its weight behind her.2
Perhaps the more senior women helped her to get ready, their experience settling her nerves. She made sure she had Anne’s red mantel securely across her left arm, its heavy velvet folds held tightly against her bodice so that it couldn’t fall, gripping the coronet in her right hand, and praying that she would not trip, or drop something, or – heaven forbid – faint. The court was at Windsor, and the route they had to walk was probably not a long one. We don’t know precisely where Anne was lodged but by this point the king rarely kept her far from his own rooms, and the investiture almost certainly happened in his presence chamber.3 The little cavalcade entered the room and processed up its length, where Anne, dressed in red, her long, dark hair loosed like a blanket around her shoulders, kneeled before the king. The Bishop of Winchester read out the patent of her creation, and then Mary had to hand the mantel up to the king so he could place it around Anne’s shoulders, and then the coronet, which he placed upon her gleaming head. It was done, and Mary’s sore left arm, no doubt aching from the weight of the mantel, had been worth it: she had made no mistakes.
This was a strange time to be a woman in service at court. The story of Anne’s rise, of Queen Catherine’s diminishment, of the political machinations and religious changes that made this possible is well known, but it isn’t usually seen from the perspective of the women beside them who witnessed it. The past year had been one of deepening divides and developing strategies, moves upon counter-moves, diplomacy and subtext and household microaggressions that echoed louder than Henry and Anne’s stormiest argument. On 14 July 1531 Henry and Catherine saw one another for the last time. They, plus Anne, had been at Windsor. On that day, Henry and Anne rode off to start the customary summer progress, leaving Catherine behind and neglecting even to inform her of the fact. Her messages were received with poor grace; Henry told her not to send any more.4
Instead, the queen and her ladies were sent to The More in Hertfordshire.5 This house had belonged to Cardinal Wolsey, an ill-omen, perhaps, if they chose to see it that way; Wolsey, disgraced after his failure to secure the king an annulment, had died on his way south to London to stand trial for treason in November 1530. Queen Catherine initially continued to live and to be treated in the style that befitted her status. A Venetian visitor to The More in August 1531 reported that she had a household of about 200, with thirty ‘maids of honour’ – that ubiquitous and useful term – standing around the table and about fifty ‘doing its service’.6 By September, though, Imperial ambassador Chapuys was warning that some of her maids had been dismissed.7 Even earlier than this, the queen herself was anxious about the future, more so than she admitted in her spirited replies to the weary relay of royal councillors sent to her by the king. At Easter she countermanded a new gentleman usher’s recruitment and wrote to him herself to apologise, saying that she preferred to take no more servants until she was ‘more in quiet than currently’.8 She would not repeat the poverty-stricken years of her widowhood where she struggled to support her household.
By this point in 1531 the king had given up on his attempts to wrangle an annulment out of the Vatican, and even for papal permission to have the case tried in England.9 Henry had, in fact, been threatening papal jurisdiction in England for some time. Finally, in February 1531, he had himself declared Supreme Head of the English Church. His ministers inveigled the clergy into accepting this ‘so far as the law of Christ allows’, a feat of semantic gymnastics that saved both Henry’s face and everybody else’s consciences, but left questions as to how or even whether this authority could be upheld in a legal court.10 Less than a month later a new diplomatic alliance, the Schmalkaldic League, was formed among northern European states who were sympathetic to Martin Luther’s ‘new learning’. Though Henry was not, and never would be, Lutheran he was undeniably interested in their anti-papal stance and the potential advantages of an alliance. The feeling, apparently, was mutual; 1531 saw no fewer than five English embassies sent north to explore this.11
Henry may, too, have been interested in some of their less revolutionary ideas. Anne Boleyn certainly was, and so were some of her women. Books of questionable legality had been making their way into England for some years, and among these was William Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man. Anne managed to get her hands on this text shortly after its publication in Antwerp in 1528.12 She had recently been given her own lodgings separate from the rest of the queen’s maids, and probably increased her own number of ladies.13 Having read Tyndale’s book, she lent it to one of her women, young Anne Gainsford. Gainsford was being courted by equerry George Zouche and, in the time-honoured inexplicable way of young men seeking attention, he thought it would be funny to steal the book from her. He was sufficiently dense to be caught reading it by the dean of the chapel royal, who immediately confiscated the book and reported him to the cardinal. Mistress Gainsford then had to admit this to Lady Anne, who was not angry but went straight to the king and asked for her book back. This granted, she then presented it to him and entreated him to read it, which he did, and ‘delighted in it’. Thus new ideas were slowly but surely trickling through the royal household.
From Rome, English policy looked confused, adrift. In September 1531 Imperial ambassador Miguel Mai was contemptuous, telling Emperor Charles V that he had always thought that the English had ‘recourse to evasions and villanies’ and that he ‘thanked God they did not know what to ask for, as they are now asking for what has been refused thirty times’.14 This, though, was deliberate. The English were now pursuing a Janus-faced policy: nominally seeking remedy from Rome but deliberately creating delay, while they also began the creation of an internal framework by which this and other cases might be dealt with in England, subject only to English jurisdiction.15 This took time. The king might want to break with Rome altogether, but many of his nobles and the common people of England were some way behind him. Personnel, too, had been tricky. After Wolsey’s fall in 1529, the Duke of Norfolk had shouldered much of the administrative burden of the ‘great matter’, but, as his wife Duchess Elizabeth no doubt could have told us, he was not a man of sufficient subtlety of mind to even begin to step into the cardinal’s shoes.16 Somebody else, however, was. Those in service at court began more and more to notice that the king favoured a short man, heading towards stoutness, dark-haired, keen-eyed, blunt in speech and manner and quietly, alarmingly efficient. Though he didn’t begin to gain significant office until early in 1533, those with their eyes and ears open did well to befriend Thomas Cromwell at the beginning of his meteoric rise.
If things were in flux politically and diplomatically, so were they in the royal court. Anne Boleyn didn’t yet have a household commensurate with the status of a queen even as she behaved like one, living at court with the king while Queen Catherine remained elsewhere. The trappings of queenship did not belong to the individual but to the office. Anne might now be a marquess, but she was not yet a queen. Tracking the development of her household, and the group of women who served her, is no easy task. Like all noblewomen in court service, Anne would have had a few female servants even before she caught the eye of the king. The first time that women are explicitly described in a written source as being ‘with the Lady Anne’ is the New Year gift list for 1532, where the king gave gifts to five women so described.17 Listed at the end of the rest of the women, under the status of ‘gentlewomen’, several of them are identifiable. At the top of the list was Anne Savage, the daughter of Sir John Savage of Rocksavage in Cheshire, whose family had a history of Crown service and links to the Brereton family, also courtiers at this time. Savage was later described by a family servant as ‘a lady of masculine spirit, over-powerful with her husband, seldom at rest with herself’, and, if true, one can see how she and Anne Boleyn might have enjoyed one another’s company.18 Anne Joscelyn is trickier to pin down, but was one of the Joscelyns of Hyde Hall in Sawbridgeworth, Essex, either by birth or by marriage, and thus likewise had connections to the royal court.19 ‘Margery’, listed without surname, may be Margery Horsman, who continued in Anne’s service even after her later marriage to Michael Lister; Jane Ashley went on to marry Peter Mewtas. Mistress Wriothesley, given no forename, may have been Jane Cheney, who married Thomas Wriothesley, later Earl of Southampton, at some point before 1533. Service with the king’s wife-in-waiting was an oddly liminal position for anybody to be in, and it’s not surprising that those listed here were relatives of men in lower-level court service but were not yet themselves of significant status. That several went on to make impressive marriages and careers that outlasted that of their mistress, however, shows how far service with the queen could carry girls like these.
Christmas 1531 was a time of ‘no mirth’ without the queen and her ladies.20 Though Anne herself was gradually gaining the accoutrements of queenship – income, clothing and property – clearly her household wasn’t yet a satisfactory replacement for Queen Catherine’s. It’s easy to think of Anne and Queen Catherine, and the women around them, in competition. But Anne had just as much reason as Catherine to be anxious about her future, hanging on the whims and feuds of men. While Catherine may have begun to feel like she was reliving the nightmare of her early years in England, Anne’s bad dream was just beginning. Around this time Anne Gainsford (she who was responsible for the loss of Anne’s copy of Tyndale) was horrified when her mistress beckoned to her and showed her a piece of hate mail she had received: a poison pen drawing of herself beheaded, ‘pronouncing certain destruction if she married the king’. Gainsford, unnerved, told her friend, ‘If I thought it true, though he were an emperor, I would not myself marry him with that condition.’ Anne, perhaps joking, perhaps grimly, responded that she was resolved to have him ‘whatsoever might become of me’.21
Not everybody was happy to see Anne’s star rise. The king’s sister Mary, Duchess of Suffolk and queen dowager of France, was initially loath to speak up, but by the early 1530s was clear in her disapproval and not too shy to say so. She knew Anne. Anne had been part of Mary’s retinue in France when she had first gone to marry the French king in 1514, and they had danced together in masques in London. But she knew and loved Queen Catherine more, and she remembered how infatuated her brother had been in 1509.22 In June 1531 Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador, reported shrewdly that ‘the said Duke of Suffolk and his wife would, if they dared, oppose this second marriage of the king with all their force’.23 Anne knew this. Suffolk had allegedly had the temerity to question her honour. A month later she hit back, accusing Suffolk of having slept with his own daughter; by this she meant his young ward Katherine Willoughby, daughter of María de Salinas, Lady Willoughby, who remained by Queen Catherine’s side.24 Katherine was only twelve, and destined for Suffolk’s son Henry. The idea that she could tempt Suffolk away from Mary, his wife, was a crude insult to both of them.
Tensions and tempers continued to escalate. Mary used ‘opprobrious language’ against Anne, and their feud was taken up by their menfolk: in 1532 Suffolk’s man Sir William Pennington duelled at Westminster with the Duke of Norfolk’s adherent Richard Southwell, a clash that ended in Pennington’s death. His body was found inside the Westminster sanctuary, and the incident was swiftly cast as murder by Pennington’s supporters.25 The official legal write-up ignored these allegiances, laying the cause of the brawl at the feet of a lawsuit between the pair. But their fight was a microcosm of bigger political alignments. ‘The whole Court was in uproar,’ Venetian ambassador Carlo Capello wrote, with Suffolk himself ready to march into Westminster and forcibly drag out Southwell and his followers.26 Small wonder that this was not repeated in the legal documents and that the affair was generally hushed up by Thomas Cromwell; the king did not want his future wife’s sexual honour debated in a court of law, particularly not when his sister had levied the unpleasant accusation. While popular conduct books might airily dismiss women’s words as unworthy of male attention, here they had set the whole court aflame and even caused a man’s death.
A great blast of gunfire rent the air. The ladies, their ears protected by the hoods they customarily wore, must nevertheless have been half deafened even streets away in the Exchequer palace. Only in Calais would such a display occur; only in Calais was there a garrison of soldiers ready and waiting to fire a salute ‘with guns and all other instruments’ to mark the return of the kings to the city. If she had looked out of the window, Jane Parker, Viscountess Rochford, might have seen the rows of soldiers in blue and red uniforms lining one side of the narrow street, serving-men in tawny on the other, an honour guard for King Henry to return to his lodging.27
The ladies had been kicking their heels in Calais while the king went to Boulogne for a formal meeting with the French king, Francis I. This was not ideal, and it hadn’t been the original intention. Henry had wanted to meet Francis to gain his support for his annulment and remarriage, and to reaffirm their alliance against Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Wives often accompanied men on diplomatic assignments, but Henry wanted to take Anne Boleyn with him. In October 1532, however, Anne wasn’t his wife, and she wasn’t a queen. How could Queen Eleanor of France, herself a niece of Queen Catherine of England, behave as though Anne was remotely her equal? Sensibly, nobody seems to have suggested that she do so. Marguerite of Angoulême, a princess of France and Queen of Navarre, was proposed instead; but at the last minute she pleaded ill-health.28
It was a humiliating blow, for now Anne could only tag along like a spare part. Jane knew that Anne had been waiting for this trip since the summer. Beset by women ‘hooting and hissing’ at her wherever she and the king went on their summer progress, she had even turned back early, preferring to sink her energy into her preparations to wow the French.29 Some thought that Anne and the king planned to marry while in France. Ambassador Chapuys reported in cipher that ‘she considers herself so sure of success that not later than a week ago she wrote a letter to her principal friend and favourite here, whom she holds as sister and companion, bidding her get ready against this journey and interview, where, she says, that which she has been so long wishing for will be accomplished’.30
Perhaps this ‘principal friend’, as close as a sister, was Jane. Jane was in fact Anne’s sister-in-law. The two had been maids of honour together since the early 1520s, and no doubt Jane had known her future husband, Anne’s brother George, now Viscount Rochford, well too. Their families were neighbours on the borders of East Anglia. George was ambitious, well educated, a poet, and likely to grow closer to the king. He was also a son and heir set to inherit his father’s estate. Jane’s family, the Parkers, Barons Morley, were courtiers too and people of culture; her parents had been in the service of the king’s grandmother Lady Margaret Beaufort, and her father Henry was a well-known translator. While it probably wasn’t a love match, their union served both sides, and so Jane and George had married sometime in 1525.31 Both had continued to serve at court, and as Anne rose, Jane – a Boleyn, now – rose with her. At some stage Jane must have been quietly transferred from the queen’s household to Anne’s service. Her star was firmly yoked to the Boleyns, and Jane was too much a courtier not to play the hand she had been dealt. Thus in October 1532 she was in Calais, with Anne and several more of their relations, smelling gunpowder and awaiting the king’s return.
No fuss was openly made about France’s lack of enthusiasm for meeting with Anne herself, but the lack of a formal audience may have meant she could not take as large a retinue as she had apparently intended.32 Jane was one of only a handful of noblewomen to travel with Anne, and she must have known what was planned. On the evening of Sunday, 27 October, a little over two weeks after their arrival in France, Henry hosted the French king at a banquet. No expense was spared. The room itself glittered, the light of a hundred candles catching on the cloth of silver, goldsmith’s work, jewels and pearls with which the walls were hung. At one end was a cupboard ‘seven stages high’ full of gold plate; the candelabra branches were silver and silver gilt. Plate was routinely used to magnify the effect of candles, the only source of light on an October evening, but this was quite literally dazzling, and the food was yet to come. The French king was served French-style, King Henry ‘after the English fashion’: three courses, each with upwards of forty different dishes.33 While the kings consumed their bodyweight in meat, Jane and the rest of the women were busy dressing. They had costumes of cloth of gold and silver and crimson tinsel satin, panels of cloth loosely tied together with gold laces, and masks upon their faces. Following Anne, Jane and the six others slipped into the chamber. They selected dancing companions from among the men by prior arrangement, perhaps deliberately cultivating the jealousy of those left unchosen, for there were no other women present. Jane and the others were literally showing King Francis what he had missed by excluding Anne from the summit. After a little dancing, King Henry went further; he removed their masks ‘so that the ladies’ beauties were showed’.34
Their looks, though, were only part of their charm. Of the six women present, four were Anne’s own relations: Jane, of course, but also her sister Mary Boleyn, Lady Carey and two cousins, themselves sisters, Elizabeth Howard, Lady Fitzwalter and Dorothy Howard, Countess of Derby.35 Jane, of course, was a courtier, and had more or less grown up at the royal court, as had Mary Boleyn. The others, though, weren’t career courtiers in the same way. How could they be? Queen Catherine still had a household full of ladies-in-waiting; Anne could not yet benefit from their expertise. During the summer the Venetian ambassador had reported that the Duchess of Norfolk and the king’s own sister Mary, the queen dowager of France, would be part of Anne’s train, but this was almost certainly wishful thinking since Mary, at least, flatly disobeyed her brother’s order that his nobles bring their wives and ‘adamantly refused to go’.36 In the event, Anne once again fell back on her own family, the Howards, and once again was left without any noblewoman higher than the rank of countess to attend her. It was true that neither of the Howard sisters had a particular connection to Queen Catherine. Their presence might indeed have been meant to show that that the Howard dynasty, the Duke of Norfolk himself – historically a friend of the French – supported Anne. To anyone who knew the English aristocracy, though, it must have been clear that they were something of a let-down, a ‘making do’ in the face of opposition.
Nevertheless, the banquet was a success. King Francis had spent some time talking with Anne after the dancing and she had surely impressed him. It was time to go home, but the weather had other ideas. Violent storms blew up all along the coast. Ships were blown back into Calais harbour ‘in great jeopardy’. In Holland the tide breached the coastal defences; in Antwerp the water rose three feet above the wharf.37 The English party were storm-stayed. Amid the wind and the rain they could not stir out of doors, and Jane and the rest of the royal party were trapped in the Exchequer. No doubt they amused themselves as best they could with singing, dancing, gambling and conversation. For Anne and Henry it must have been more serendipitous than otherwise. They could spend time together amid a much-reduced establishment. Jane must have wondered whether they were discussing marriage. She and her husband George had not managed to have any children, and surely Jane could sympathise with the royal anxiety regarding the succession. But there was no point in Anne birthing a bastard, and evidence suggests she and Henry had not yet consummated their five-year relationship.38
Tucked up safe from the raging storm in Calais, they decided now was the moment to change this. But they needed some formal sign. Edward Hall’s Chronicle tells us that ‘The king, after his return, married privily the lady Anne Boleyn, on St Erkenwald’s day, which marriage was kept so secret, that very few knew it.’39 St Erkenwald’s day was 14 November, the day that they arrived back at Dover. If there was some sort of secret marriage, or more likely a binding pre-contract ceremony, this would explain Princess Elizabeth’s arrival the following September. Now the family relationship between Anne and the women attending her in Calais served its purpose: kin kept secrets. If Jane knew what had happened, she did not tell.
A pre-contract ceremony in November 1532 was sufficient to allow Anne and Henry to commence sleeping together, but it was not enough for them to declare themselves fully wed. On 25 January 1533, therefore, Anne Savage, now Lady Berkeley, found herself standing demurely behind her mistress Anne Boleyn in a small chapel closet in the newly refurbished Palace of Whitehall. Whitehall had previously been called York Place, owned by Wolsey as Archbishop of York, but had come to the king’s hands in 1529 and been swiftly renamed. Not only was it conveniently centrally located, but as a former bishop’s palace it had no queen’s apartments, and thus Anne and Henry could stay there without Queen Catherine. Almost immediately they began to plan a grand refurbishment.40 Anne and Henry had walked through the unfinished rooms, poring over plans and consulting craftsmen together, and maybe Anne Savage had watched them do this, close enough to Anne to count as chaperone, far enough away that the couple could feel alone.
Now she watched them promise themselves to one another.41 The marriage was so secret that it took a little time for anybody to report it. Even Chapuys, who invariably heard everything sooner or later, did not know about it for another month.42 By this time there were rumours that Anne was pregnant, and it was becoming clearer by the day that the divorce would be settled somehow.43 There had not yet been any mass movement of ladies-in-waiting from Queen Catherine to Anne, but there were signs that this might yet occur. On Holy Saturday, the day before Easter Sunday, Mary Howard, having proven herself at the ceremony for Anne’s creation as marquess the previous September, took her place behind Anne once again. This time they were to process publicly to mass in the chapel royal at Greenwich as the king and queen always did on this day: it was an official usurpation of Queen Catherine’s position, replacing her with Anne, and everybody understood that this was a sign of an impending change in her status.44 She wore ‘a gorgeous suit of tissue’, ‘loaded with diamonds and other precious stones’. This time Mary bore Anne’s train. Her fair colouring, chestnut hair just glimpsed underneath her velvet hood, and demure, downcast eyes made a striking contrast with Anne’s olive skin and dramatic, black-eyed gaze. Other women followed them in procession, and Chapuys thought that they were treated with ‘the same or perhaps greater’ ceremonies than those ordinarily used for a queen.45 Sure enough, he also reported around the same time that Anne’s household was formally appointed, which meant that her ladies-in-waiting were chosen and given lodging and bouche of court if they were not already in receipt of these.46 Frustratingly, no complete list survives from this time to tell us who they were, but both Jane, Viscountess Rochford and Mary Howard must have been among them. On this Holy Saturday, the preacher in the chapel royal not only included Anne in his prayers but formally prayed for her as queen of England. The shift had occurred. According to Chapuys, ‘even those who support her party do not know whether to laugh or cry at it’.47
They did not have long to decide. Coronation rumours already abounded, and Mary surely knew that if such a thing came to pass she would be given a prominent role in Anne’s immediate entourage. Yet her burgeoning court career placed her in a difficult position. Her mother Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk was openly, vocally and immovably loyal to Queen Catherine. She was not likely to approve of her daughter entering Anne’s household, and yet they both knew that it was not Mary’s own choice to make. She was only fifteen; it was for her parents to decide where she should live, and her betrothal to the king’s son made the new queen’s household the most obvious place. No doubt her father the Duke of Norfolk did not want her with her mother, imbibing the duchess’s stubborn loyalties and implacable defiance against the inevitable. If Mary were to survive in this world, she must learn to be politically flexible.
Celebratory gun salutes had not stopped firing since Queen Anne and her ladies took to the queen’s barge at Greenwich to travel by water to the Tower, ready for the procession the next morning.48 Mary Howard was one of these ladies, heading out on the water in the bright sunshine. For months Mary would have heard that Anne was unpopular in the city and with ordinary people, that she could not go abroad for fear of being mobbed, that she was cat-called and insulted. One would not have known it from the throng of boats on the river and spectators on the banks. Every guild in the city had launched a barge, banners flying in the fresh breeze, the ordinary river traffic quite unable to find a clear route through the ships decked out in gold cloth, sparkling in the sunshine reflected off the murky waters of the Thames. It was late May 1533, and Anne was finally to be crowned queen.
Mary must have begun to feel like a veteran of large royal ceremonies; there had been so many since she began her court career. This, though, was the biggest yet. Coronations happened rarely, perhaps only once a generation, and this one had a particularly interesting flavour. The king’s annulment had been hastily pronounced by Thomas Cranmer, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, only six days previously, and there had not yet been any reaction from Rome.49 Catherine of Aragon was no longer queen but ‘princess dowager’, a title that so enraged her that she tore her pen through the page in a single furious stroke whenever it was used in letters addressed to her. Anne’s coronation, though, had not depended on the annulment, just as her marriage had not. One could not plan a coronation in six days. Stages were built, cloth ordered, appointments chosen and guild pageants planned and rehearsed far in advance of the planned date of 1 June. Henry, clearly, was going to marry a new wife and have her crowned whether the Church was in agreement or no.50
Like all royal ceremony, coronations were governed by ordinance based on precedent, and there were rarely any surprises. It was important that it be so. Any deviation might be read as de-legitimising Anne and Henry’s marriage and the succession of their future heirs. She and her ladies, therefore, travelled in Catherine of Aragon’s royal barge and followed the precise ceremonies that she had done at her coronation in 1509, dressed in the same crimson velvet trimmed with ermine.51 Mary Howard was too young to have witnessed Catherine’s coronation and would only have understood Anne’s on its own terms. Her grandmother Agnes, dowager Duchess of Norfolk, though, a widow in her fifties, must have watched with cynical interest even as she played her own part, carrying Anne’s train.52 For all the meticulous adherence to precedence, there was a strained quality to the familiar ceremonies.
Anne’s coronation is often read with hindsight as a herald of the mood of religious reform that would shortly envelop England, but to do this is to misunderstand the thrust of the ceremony. People found it jarring not because it was a sign of religious change but because it was self-consciously otherwise. The choice of Whitsunday, the second-most important festival of the Church calendar after Easter, was an attempt to entwine Anne’s elevation with the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles, associated with the foundation of the first Catholic Church and ‘true’ faith, ramming home the legitimacy of her queenship. Anne’s coronation can therefore be read not as an attempt to showcase a new religion but a means of emphasising Henry’s recently declared supremacy over the old one, and this must have felt uncomfortable to many of those who felt that Anne’s queenship was a divine ill and not a divine right.53
Was Mary aware of this, walking behind Anne’s litter on the gravelled streets, too warm in velvet and ermine, trying to remember to smile and laugh and pay attention to the pageants? Did she notice, as one writer claimed to, an ominous silence in pockets of the watching crowds, a mocking of the monarchs’ initials, ‘HA’, set up on every street corner?54 A coronation ceremony was supposed to reinforce a sense of spiritual destiny, a sense that Anne was chosen by God to be queen: a body royal, as well as a body natural. How did that sit with the women who had lived with her, shared a bed with her, helped her lace up her gowns, watched as the king singled her out to flirt with – a girl no better than themselves?
Some did not even try to get past this. Mary’s mother Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk, was no more reconciled to her niece’s position and utterly refused to attend the coronation at all, ‘from the love she bore to the previous Queen’.55 The Duke of Suffolk was there, his six-foot frame impossible to miss, but his wife, the king’s sister Mary, queen dowager of France, was not, and nor was María de Salinas, Lady Willoughby, Queen Catherine’s loyal Spanish friend. Mary had some excuse. She was dangerously ill. She had had several bouts of a recurring sickness since 1518, and on 25 June 1533, between seven and eight of the clock in the morning in Suffolk’s house at Westhorpe, she died, aged only thirty-seven.56 Her death was framed by some as a reaction to Anne’s coronation; one chronicler thought that she died from grief, ‘the sorrow caused by the sight of her brother leaving his wife’.57
It must have been tempting to see the two events in juxtaposition, the old giving way to the new. The national mourning at Mary’s passing was widespread, more so than any joy at Anne’s coronation. The French, in view of Mary’s position as queen dowager of France, sent a sizeable delegation to her funeral at Bury St Edmund’s, and she was described as ‘beloved in the country and by the common people of this town’.58 The king ordered requiem masses to be sung in Westminster on 9 and 10 July, but did not order the court to appear in mourning, which might have been construed by some as a sign of disfavour.59 María, Lady Willoughby had not attended Queen Anne’s coronation, but she made no demur at travelling to Bury St Edmunds for Mary’s funeral. Her own daughter Katherine, now fourteen years old – the same age as Mary Howard – had been raised by the dowager queen of France at Westhorpe. Mother and daughter dressed in black alongside the rest of the Brandon women to perform the elaborate processional ceremonies and offerings as mourners.60 Both, though, must have been anxious. With no woman at the head of the Suffolk household, with Queen Catherine diminished and Queen Anne on the throne, what would happen to Katherine now?