The hammering and sawing had lasted most of the previous day, echoing through the cold air, a jarring note at odds with the sweeter tones of the cathedral bells of St Paul’s above. Now the people of London saw the tall wooden scaffold and began to gather, knowing that something unusual was about to take place. Before long, a small cavalcade arrived: led by guards in royal livery, two Observant friars, two monks, two priests, two laymen, and in the middle of these men a nun, were placed on the wooden platform where everybody could see them. John Salcot, Bishop of Bangor, mounted the stairs to the open-air pulpit known as St Paul’s Cross and began a lengthy sermon, recounting and embellishing their crimes. The sole woman, the nun, was at the centre of his wrath: she had, by her ‘feigned superstition’, the bishop declared, prevented sentence being reached on the royal divorce, and she and her accomplices had used ‘subtle, crafty and superstitious’ means to draw others to their cause, ‘to the intent to sow a secret murmur and grudge in the hearts of the king’s subjects against the majesty of our sovereign lord and all his proceedings’.1 Her ‘visions’ were nothing but malicious inventions, a sin against God and the king, and nobody who valued their lives and their faith should give her any credence. After this, the nun and the others were forced one by one to ‘confess’ to their crimes. That done, the guards stepped forward, and all of them were returned to the Tower. Everybody watching knew that it was unlikely they would leave it alive.
Thirty miles to the west amid the rolling Surrey hills, another woman heard the news and dread must have settled around her heart. Ambassador Chapuys might write scornfully of this ‘comedy’, ‘for it hardly deserves any other name’, but too well Gertrude Blount, Marchioness of Exeter knew that the affair of the nun was no laughing matter.2 The nun’s name was Elizabeth Barton. It was not only Gertrude who had thought she was a visionary, a mystic whose prophesies strongly defended traditional Catholic doctrine.3 Back in 1526, an ecclesiastical commission led by the late Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, had pronounced Barton’s revelations genuine. Her authority made sense within the Christian tradition of influential female mystics, which is perhaps why so many people were ready to accept her.4 After 1528, though, her visions became increasingly political, and she met three times with the king, eventually warning him against divorcing Catherine of Aragon and predicting his death within a month of doing so. From that moment she became a marked woman, a dangerously powerful opponent of Henry VIII’s Church sovereignty.
Like everyone else, Gertrude knew that any association with the nun was risky. A courtier by blood, she had joined her father William Blount, Lord Mountjoy in Queen Catherine of Aragon’s service in the early 1520s not long after her marriage to Henry Courtenay, then Earl of Devon and since Marquess of Exeter.5 She knew how quickly things could change and how dangerous it could be to be found on the wrong side of the divide, not least because she and her husband lived in continual negotiation of their royal blood. Henry Courtenay was King Henry’s first cousin. They’d grown up together, and Courtenay had always – so far – enjoyed royal favour. But his earliest memories were of his father in disgrace, executed as a traitor in 1502 for conspiring against King Henry VII from within his own privy chamber, and only a couple of years ago men from his affinity in Devon had made much of his lineage, calling him heir apparent to the throne. His claim to King Henry’s crown remained like an unquiet ghost in the back of the closet.6 Both Henry and Gertrude knew that they had to watch their step.
And yet both were deeply uneasy at the king’s divorce, and more so about the threat of new religion that Anne represented in many people’s minds. Gertrude was not prepared to parrot the party line as another colleague, Eleanor, Countess of Rutland would do: the case of the nun, Eleanor had written to her father, was one of ‘the most abominablest matters that I ever heard of in my life’.7 But nor would she throw caution entirely to the winds as her colleague Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk had done, declaring her views to anyone who would listen and getting herself dismissed from court. Gertrude was wilier than that. If she was to be of any use to the queen or to those who supported her she needed to stay at court, and that meant she needed to walk a careful path, to balance on a tightrope while appearing unconcerned. So she had attended Anne Boleyn’s coronation in June earlier that year, but she’d also stayed in close touch with Queen Catherine throughout 1532 and 1533.8 That September she had been made one of the godparents of Princess Elizabeth.9 Her position as one of the country’s highest-ranking peeresses made her an understandable choice, but godparenthood meant more than spiritual guidance for a child; it was designed to bind the natural and spiritual parents together too.10 For a royal baby, it was a chance for the king to signal royal favour and trust, or to attempt to solidify bonds of loyalty and service, to draw people to his cause. A sign of favour, perhaps; or was it a warning to the Courtenays that Henry would accept nothing less than complete submission to his will?
If the latter, it was one that Gertrude set quietly to one side. Only ten days after the christening she sent a message to Imperial ambassador Chapuys, Catherine of Aragon’s chief supporter, informing him of the movements of key court figures and the reasons behind certain recent council meetings. Relaying this to Emperor Charles V, Chapuys described Gertrude as ‘the sole consolation of the Queen and Princess’.11 Gertrude might publicly toe the line, but behind the scenes she was Chapuys’ chief informant.
This was risky, but not actively dangerous. Women could get away with all sorts of clandestine activity if it remained just that: clandestine, quiet, covert. Involvement with Elizabeth Barton, though, was a different proposition. Gertrude had been introduced to the nun through her association with the Observant friars, and must have been aware that she was not the only person of rank within the nun’s circle of influence. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself had said her theology was sound; initially at least, Barton must have seemed safe enough. But this would count for nothing now if the king had decided otherwise. Too well Gertrude knew what would happen. Now that Barton was under arrest, she’d be questioned for the names of her associates, and Gertrude had good reason to fear every messenger who arrived at her house in West Horsley.
The Friday after midsummer’s day in 1533, Gertrude had sent two of her servants to Barton, who was then lodged at Syon Abbey, asking her to come to her home in Surrey. They passed a gift to Barton: ‘a little book in form of a pair of tables with blank leaves’, which was a portable writing tablet, perhaps intended as encouragement to continue to write down her revelations.12 The abbess advised Barton to go, describing Gertrude as ‘an honourable woman’, and so she did, and she and Gertrude spoke privately the next morning. According to Barton’s testimony, Gertrude’s reasons for wanting to speak with her were nothing to do with national politics but were personal, and explicitly female. Gertrude thought that she might be pregnant, and she was afraid because she had had pregnancies end in stillbirth or miscarriage before. She asked Barton to pray to Our Lady ‘that she might have issue that would live’. During the conversation Barton mentioned the possibility of war, and Gertrude likewise asked her to pray for her husband that he would come through safely. He had been so sick at the time of the queen’s coronation that she was still worried for him, and said touchingly that ‘though her person was there, her heart was at home’.13
These are the concerns of a woman worried for the people she loved and for the child she bore, not a woman seeking maliciously to destroy the king’s sovereignty over the Church, or his recent marriage. And yet could the two be separated? By June 1533 Barton had already made several public, damning revelations about the future of Henry’s throne and even his life. She had, she claimed, seen the seat ready for him in hell should he go through with his marriage to Anne Boleyn. For Gertrude to seek out her advice in any context was to see, and choose to ignore, this fact; or even, considering the gift of the writing tablet, to encourage it. Catherine of Aragon herself knew that any contact with Barton was unwise because of the way in which it would be perceived by the king and his council. She refused point-blank to meet with or have any dealings at all with the nun. Chapuys therefore reported that though Catherine had no fear for herself, she did fear for Gertrude, and for others who had been ‘familiar’ with Barton.14
Gertrude might not have explicitly consulted Barton about anything other than personal issues, but she was in good company. The list of people who had contact with Barton is striking in terms of those who would, a little later, be clearly understood as pro-Catherine, and in many cases religiously conservative. And many of them were also women. Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, Lady Hussey, the dowager Countess of Derby; all had heard of the nun’s revelations.15 So far as the king was concerned, if you were pro-Catherine you were not only anti-Anne but anti-Henry, and that was a dangerous opinion indeed. On 25 November, a mere two days after Barton’s public penance, Gertrude received a letter. It would have arrived borne by a royal messenger, and this alone would have made her catch her breath. Sure enough, the letter was from the king, and it laid out her ‘abuse, lightness, and indiscreet offences’ committed in seeking the company of ‘that most unworthy subtle and deceptable woman called the holy maid of Kent’. However, it also contained a royal pardon.16
She sent for her secretary. She wrote to Thomas Cromwell, by this point the king’s official secretary, acknowledging receipt of the pardon, and her letter makes it clear that she had been waiting on tenterhooks for the sword of Damocles to fall since Barton’s arrest, if not before. She had been sick, she explained, ‘caused by my conceit that the king had been heavy lord to me’.17 She then composed a reply to the king himself, and sent a draft to Cromwell.18 It remains a masterclass in abject grovelling. She prostrated herself at his feet – a strong visual – asking him to ‘first and chiefly consider that I am a woman whose fragility and brittleness is such as most facilely, easily and lightly seduced and brought into abuse and light belief’. She had never given true credence to the nun’s prophecies; she simply hadn’t known any better. Her husband was furious with her, and she feared she might have lost his love forever. She was the ‘most sorrowful and heavy creature alive’ and she would never do such a thing again.19
She was following a cultural script. In theory, women were, and were understood to be, the weaker sex. They could not be considered responsible for their actions and impulses, nor held to the same high standards as men. As Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives wrote in 1520, ‘a Woman is a frail thing, and of weak discretion, and that may lightly be deceived’.20 Vives’ text, though, was a conduct book: a wish list of virtues to be inculcated into young girls, itself a tacit admission that these were not inherent characteristics. Letters like Gertrude’s show that women were well aware of this and weaponised their lesser status, writing themselves as objects of pity when it was in their interest to do so. A little later, Elizabethan noblewoman Mary Throckmorton even described this very process, explaining that she had answered a man’s letter ‘like a woman, very submissively’.21 Letters like these had a recognised format and conventions of politeness that must be followed. Using a secretary, rather than writing in one’s own hand, was a sign of respect towards one’s social betters. Gertrude wrote only her signature in her own hand, and this was placed deferentially to one side, a few lines below the rest of the writing.22 Petitionary letters demanded an appropriately obsequious salutation and sign-off: Gertrude finished by praying for ‘the prosperous conservation of the most noble and royal estate to your highness’s succession and posterity long to endure, which I shall not fail to do, my poor life enduring’.23
Gertrude was fortunate. Her sex, her rank and probably the fact that her husband was the king’s cousin meant that her life was not realistically in danger, else Henry would not have sent a pardon along with his upbraiding letter. She understood that written subservience was exactly what he wanted in return, and she gave him a stellar performance of feminine compliance. A warning, this time; but would it stem the swelling tide of female resistance?
The life of a lady-in-waiting was ever a balance between court service and country magnate, and for María de Salinas, Lady Willoughby these things became increasingly entwined during the 1530s. María was still ostensibly in Queen Catherine’s service, but records show that she was also busy elsewhere. While Gertrude wrote letters to ambassador Chapuys, in September 1533 María attended a wedding. Her only daughter Katherine was to marry her long-standing friend Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. This marriage caused many raised eyebrows. Katherine was fourteen to Suffolk’s forty-nine, and he had been in loco parentis as the owner of her wardship. There had, perhaps, been signs; Anne Boleyn’s 1531 jibe about him having slept ‘with his own daughter’ might have been an exaggeration, but there was rarely smoke without fire.24 While it wasn’t uncommon for young women to marry older men, and fourteen was an acceptable age for a noble girl to contract marriage, a thirty-five-year age gap was on the large side. Chapuys described Suffolk and Katherine’s marriage as ‘singular and strange’, not least because it occurred with such unseemly haste after the death of Suffolk’s previous wife.25 Katherine had grown up in their household. Originally, the plan had been for her to marry Suffolk’s eldest son Henry. Now, though, that plan was abandoned: now she was stepping straight into the still-warm shoes of her quasi-mother.
María, as Katherine’s mother, seems to have approved of the match, and perhaps had even encouraged it. Suffolk would be a good protector for Katherine’s estates. She may have been the more willing to push Katherine into Suffolk’s arms because the legal battle over those very estates had come to the fore once again. Wolsey’s fall at the end of 1529 had meant that no resolution had ever been reached on the Willoughby lands, and the new Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, took a little while to take stock of the situation. He seems to have asked for more information from both María and her obstreperous brother-in-law Sir Christopher Willoughby. She was only too happy to oblige, and entered the fray once more with a lengthy explanation of the dispute. María did not write in English herself, or at least there’s no surviving example of her doing so. But she could speak fluently now, and her feisty, sarcastic tone found its way through the drier phrases used by her lawyer as he took down her dictation. Sir Christopher had inveigled her husband out of extra money, she claimed, and then paid back a bond with that money. He might well, she said acerbically, ‘pay my lord with a feather of his own goose’; ‘but it is an old proverb, one beateth the bush and another taketh the bird’.26
Sir Thomas More tried to be fair. He felt that Sir Christopher did deserve more than Willoughby’s will had allowed. But More’s decrees, handed down with the full force of the law three times between 1529 and 1532, were not sufficient for either party.27 Soon there were additional lawsuits over detention of deeds and failure to deliver money when ordered.28 In Orford, the town in which Lord Willoughby had died, Sir Christopher even caused a riot among the locals when he turned up to mass on a February Sunday and insisted on keeping the people there for over an hour afterwards, trying to get them to acknowledge his title to the manor, ‘sometimes by flattery, sometimes harshness’. Eventually, local constable Richard Hunt told him wearily, ‘Sir, you say you do love us. Wherefore, if you do so as you say, we desire you not to hinder our liberties, for in so much as in time coming after my lady’s death this town shall be your inheritance.’29 María must have been wickedly pleased at this show of support from her tenants.
Managing this dispute took a considerable amount of her time. Nor could she count on her new son-in-law to be available to fight her corner when she needed him, for he had his own tightrope to walk. Suffolk was uneasy about the king’s divorce, but clearly felt that he had no choice but to do as the king asked him. He and María probably discussed the issue, for this was politics close to María’s heart too. In December 1533 he was instructed to go with some other councillors to Queen Catherine at Buckden in Huntingdonshire and to move her to another bishop’s palace at Somersham, just the other side of Huntingdon itself. They were also to inform her of her change in title from queen to princess dowager, and to get her servants to swear to a new oath naming her as such.30 Suffolk was not at all keen to do this, and he told María so: he ‘wished some mischief might happen to him to excuse himself from this journey’. He even ‘confessed on the sacrament’ before he left, worried about the danger to his soul from the task ahead. María, remaining at home with her daughter, Suffolk’s new wife Katherine, sent a message to ambassador Chapuys to tell him what was about to happen and about Suffolk’s unwillingness; perhaps she did not want Queen Catherine’s ‘party’ to see him as an enemy.31
Undoubtedly, Suffolk knew what sort of reception he could expect. In the great chamber, before all of her household, he told Catherine what was to happen and bore the brunt of her anger. She would rather be ‘hewn in pieces’ than be called princess dowager. She refused to move to Somersham, and she refused the service of anybody sworn to her as anything other than queen of England. Many of her servants, too, refused to take a new oath, claiming that since they were sworn to her as queen, ‘the second oath would be perjury’.32 This was a problem unique to the royal household. Usually servants took an oath only to one master or mistress. But the queen’s servants were explicitly sworn to the king as well, and now this was a problem: when the king and queen were openly at variance, which part of the oath should stand?
Chamberlain Lord Mountjoy – the father of Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter – soon wrote that the women in particular were loath to stop calling her queen.33 A list was made, probably at this time, of those who refused to take the new oath. Many were indeed women. Some, like Blanche Twyford and Margery Otwell, had been in Catherine’s service for over fifteen years. The list gives a sense of the reduced status of Catherine’s household, for those left in her service were distinctly un-aristocratic; the daughters of knights at best, and many not even that.34 Noblewomen who would willingly have served Catherine were not permitted to do so – the king would hardly want to promote the concept of a rival royal household – and those on the make were well aware that service with the new Queen Anne was a far more likely route to favour and promotion.
These women’s refusal to swear may not immediately have cost them their positions, for five months later, in May 1534, Chapuys was still reporting that ‘certain maids in waiting of the Queen’s, having refused to take the said oath, had been arrested and locked up in a room’.35 In June the king once again sent messengers ‘to make the ladies about her swear’, with instructions to remove those who would not; this was not carried out, as Chapuys observed wryly, because of ‘the difficulty of causing so many ladies to come to this capital against their will and by force’.36 Her household, it was reported, ‘regard less the King’s commandment’ than their mistress’s own wishes, a touching display of loyalty based more on a relationship built over decades of service than any particular oath.37 As was so often the case, royal servants had become an extension of royal will – just not the king’s royal will.
Suffolk, for his part, was frustrated, embarrassed and wished himself anywhere else on earth. No doubt María heard all about it when he got home. ‘We find this woman more obstinate than we can express,’ he wrote to Cromwell.38 On the day that Queen Catherine was due to move to Somersham she locked herself in her privy chamber and told them that if they wanted her to move, they would have to move her by force, something that the councillors, not surprisingly, baulked at. Princess Mary, too, was causing trouble. While Suffolk dealt with Catherine, the Duke of Norfolk had been sent to Mary to tell her that she was no longer a princess, and to remove her into her sister Princess Elizabeth’s service, neither of which Mary took well.39 Women might in theory be the weaker sex, but ‘this unbridled Spanish blood’, as Anne Boleyn put it in March 1534, had created formidable opponents.40 The divide between Anne and Catherine was becoming clearer and clearer. Balancing loyalties was harder and harder: María and the other ladies-in-waiting were finding that choices must be made.
By the end of 1533, Mary Howard was fully settled at court as one of her cousin Queen Anne Boleyn’s ladies-in-waiting. Mary’s marriage to Henry Fitzroy, the king’s illegitimate son, had gone ahead in November and so Mary was now the Duchess of Richmond at the age of only fourteen.41 She was, though, a married woman in name only. The couple were not to cohabit just yet. Fitzroy, too, was only fourteen, and the death of his uncle Prince Arthur back in 1502 had done nothing to allay royal fears about the potential ill-effects of too much ‘chamber work’ too soon. Fitzroy remained in London and Mary with the royal household, enjoying all that court culture had to offer.42
Both had had choices made for them. They were part of the new regime. Mary served Queen Anne along with many other Howard and Boleyn relatives. It was to be expected that a new queen would pack her household with family, her natural supporters in this world where patronage and kinship so often entwined. The king’s own mother, Elizabeth of York, had done just the same. Thus Queen Anne’s mother Elizabeth, Lady Boleyn, her sister Mary, the widowed Lady Carey, sister-in-law Jane, Viscountess Rochford, cousins Mary and Margaret Shelton and aunt Elizabeth, another Lady Boleyn, were all part of her regular household along with Mary Howard.43 Mary’s mother Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk, though, did not return to court and was never seen in Anne’s service. Her loyalties remained with Catherine of Aragon. In fact, few women are known to have served both queens, and those that did tended to be either Boleyn relations who had jumped ship or the wives of male household officers who stayed on between queens. Isabel, Lady Baynton, for example, was the wife of Edward Baynton, who served as vice-chamberlain to five of the six queens, and Margaret, Lady Coffin was the wife of Queen Anne’s master of the horse. While the ladies-in-waiting belonged to the queen’s privy chamber, her most personal service, the rest of the apparatus of the queen’s household – the cooks, stable boys, councillors and all of those whose job it was to keep the establishment running – remained largely intact, ready for a new queen to simply step neatly into her place in an already functioning machine. For a domestic-born consort like Anne Boleyn, who had not been raised to be queen, both this and her ready bulwark of support in the form of kin were godsends.
Mary and the other women were there to make Queen Anne look good, and they soon succeeded. Anne’s court was a place of dazzling beauty and sparkling wit, and her women were its lifeblood. After her coronation there was, perhaps, a sense that years of struggle had paid off, and the tension was released in a gush of high spirits. As Queen Anne’s vice-chamberlain Edward Baynton wrote to the queen’s brother only a week after the ceremony, ‘as for pastime in the queen’s chamber, [there] was never more. If any of you that be now departed have any ladies that ye thought favoured you and somewhat would mourn at parting of their servants, I can no whit perceive the same by their dancing and pastime they do use here.’44 For Mary and her friends, witty banter in the form of verse was a favourite amusement. In was not unusual for young men at court to profess to die for the love of one or other of the queen’s maids, and though Mary was now married she still joined in the delicious game of courtly love. Poetry was one of the more harmless ways in which to participate, and she regularly passed a blank manuscript notebook around her circle of friends, encouraging them to copy their favourite poems, make up new ones and write banter and riddles to one another in the margins. One can imagine Mary and her friends Mary Shelton and Lady Margaret Douglas, the king’s niece, poking fun as young courtier striplings tried to write their own original verse, sighing for love of a particular girl, pleading in rhyme for her to ‘ease me of my pain’, claiming to be ‘suffering in sorrow’ and ‘desiring in fear’. No need to guess, either, who was the object of affection in this poem; the first letter of each of the seven embarrassing stanzas spelled out ‘Sheltun’.45
The quarto-sized manuscript volume in which these lines appear was originally owned by Mary – her initials, MF, Mary Fitzroy, are stamped into the binding – and was passed to Margaret Douglas at some stage in the later 1530s or early 1540s. Through her family it ended up at Chatsworth House, the seat of the Earls of Devonshire, from whom it gained the name ‘the Devonshire Manuscript’. It now resides in the British Library as one of the only surviving examples of women’s involvement in the composition and circulation of poetry at the Tudor court.46 Though historically valued more for its many unique verses by poets Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, these three women – Mary Fitzroy, Margaret Douglas and Mary Shelton – were the core of its life as a working text in the 1530s, a fact that tells us a lot about the atmosphere of Queen Anne Boleyn’s court. Most of the poems had a distinctly cynical air. Next to the ‘Sheltun’ acrostic Margaret Douglas has written scornfully ‘forget this’; Mary Shelton’s own hand contradicts, adding ‘it is worthy’ underneath. Perhaps the lad’s suit was not so hopeless after all.
Love as a meaningless exercise, and the faithlessness of lovers, were central themes in poetry at this time, though used as a device to express a general mood of frustration with courtly life. Thomas Wyatt was a particular master of the jaded hack pose. No doubt they had a point – Anne’s court was not a calm place – but it was also clearly fashionable to be a cynic. Misogyny, too, was all the rage. A common parlour game at this time was to use verses to play a provocative game of attack and defence of women, and there are parts of this manuscript that suggest it was used to compile ammunition for such a purpose. The women, though, fought back: culturally aware, they copied stanzas from old masters like Chaucer and Hoccleve that indignantly defended the female perspective and pointed the finger instead at the ease with which men could ‘bring a woman to slanderous name’.47 They even repurposed lines to create their own original poems.
Poetry no doubt helped them to hone the skill of exchanging banter without going too far. While women like Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter were in the midst of a political balancing act, younger female courtiers like Mary Howard had an additional sort of tightrope to walk. Contemporaries outside the royal court routinely underappreciated the difficulty of a courtier’s job, but Mary and the others would have had to work hard to develop the necessary diverse skill set, and to reach the standard required by a Renaissance court. Mary needed to be able to converse appropriately with a wide variety of people; to dance, sing and ideally play musical instruments; to ride and hunt; and to be able to stay up late and get up early repeatedly without flagging. As the Italian Baldesar Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, written in 1528, explained, the female courtier also had to walk a continuous and precarious path of minute behavioural adjustments. She was there to entertain, to be witty and vivacious, but without crossing the line into indiscretion or perceptible loss of virtue.48 This was a consistently difficult judgement call.
Outside the court, noblewomen fell over themselves to compete for Queen Anne’s favour. This wasn’t because she personally was a source of attraction or cult of personality, but because she was the queen of England and patronage was part of her job. One of the most enthusiastic of these was Honor Grenville, Viscountess Lisle. By the 1530s Honor was the second wife of Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle, an illegitimate son of King Edward IV, and the couple lived in Calais by reason of Lisle’s position as Lord Deputy there.49 A woman of determined character and decided opinions, Honor was not about to let physical distance prevent her from being known at court. This was the only way in which she could realistically further the careers of her husband and children, and she set about it with gusto. Gifts of live animals seem to have been a particular specialism. In May 1534 she sent Anne a present of quails – to be eaten – and ‘your linnet that hung in your chamber’ – a songbird, not to be eaten.50
Sometimes the gift was unintentional. At the end of 1533 the king himself heard talk of a spaniel that the Lisles had given a friend, and took the dog for himself.51 Clearly their spaniels were popular. The next year chief minister Thomas Cromwell, on being offered a hawk, requested a spaniel instead.52 Alas, they had none left save Honor’s own pet, called Pourquoi, on account of the quizzical tilt of his head. At least Pourquoi, or ‘Purkoy’ as he was anglicised, did some good: Honor eventually gave him to courtier Sir Francis Bryan as a New Year’s gift, and the queen was so enamoured with him that she took him for herself, much as her husband had done earlier.53 By the end of 1534, though, he had met a calamitous end, having fallen out of a high window, and the queen had loved him so much that nobody dared to tell her until the king did so.54 No doubt Honor sympathised. She set her mind to evolving a new gift, a different pet for the queen. Catherine of Aragon had owned a pet monkey. Would Anne like one? Emphatically, Anne would not: ‘of a truth, Madam, the Queen loveth no such beasts nor can scant abide the sight of them’.55 Exotic and high-status monkeys might be, but Honor would have to think of another way to get the queen’s attention.
Queen Anne’s court was becoming a centre of culture, new learning and sparkling wit. It was also a place of intense pressure and accompanying anxiety, for all these things were empty frivolities unless she could also produce a son and heir. Her women knew the score as well as she did, and some of them at least would have been in her confidence as she tried to conceive, every month a rollercoaster of hope and disappointment. By April 1534 Queen Anne was visibly and publicly pregnant; in early July Henry postponed a face-to-face meeting with Francis I in France because she was afraid to cross the sea in her condition.56 And yet no baby appeared. This has sometimes been construed as a miscarriage, but medical historians suspect that she experienced pseudocyesis, a ‘phantom pregnancy’, where her body produced the signs and symptoms of pregnancy out of sheer psychological desperation.57
No doubt Anne’s women, too, thought that she was pregnant during 1534, and helped to care for her and to encourage and reassure her. Female companions could be a comfort to a queen in Anne’s position; but they were also a danger. As it often did towards the end of a wife’s pregnancy, the king’s eye went roving. Chapuys, ear to the ground as always, reported that Henry had ‘renewed and increased the love which he formerly bore to another very handsome young lady of this court’. Said young lady had, it was said, shown an attachment to Princess Mary, and the fickle court followed her lead.58 We don’t know who this ‘young lady’ was. Though Chapuys mentioned her several times, he never gave her name. But her attachment to Princess Mary, if true, suggests that in any case she was not someone with whom Queen Anne saw eye to eye.
As those around Queen Catherine had known, queens could do little when faced with a rival. Queen Anne’s sister-in-law Jane Parker, Viscountess Rochford knew this better than most. She had watched as Queen Catherine was supplanted by Anne herself. Perhaps she now determined that she could not let her cousin suffer the same fate; or perhaps Queen Anne demanded her sister’s help. Jane had been married to George Boleyn since 1526 but had no surviving children, and we do not know whether she had ever been pregnant at all. If anyone could understand Anne’s crushing anxiety in a society that valued women only for their reproductive ability, it was Jane. But she had to be careful. Queen Anne had already tried once to have her rival dismissed; the king had told her firmly to ‘consider where she came from’.59 The queen and her women knew all too well that another might tread in Queen Anne’s footsteps and supplant her in turn. In October 1534, Jane ‘joined in a conspiracy’ to find a way to remove the offending maid, ‘through quarrelling or otherwise’.60 The plot, however, went awry. Jane herself was temporarily rusticated by the king, and was still in exile two months later in December with no knowledge of when – or whether – she might be permitted to return.61 No matter how carefully ladies-in-waiting balanced their loyalties, nobody’s position was incontestable.