Anne Basset had done it. As the family’s business agent would shortly write to her mother Lady Lisle, ‘Mistress Anne your daughter is sworn the Queen’s maid on Saturday last past.’1 There were many more details to add, specifics of money, clothing and lodging, but they must all have sat back for a moment and basked in the glow of success. To obtain a position in the queen’s household was not a task for the easily discouraged. This was why Anne’s older sister Katharine had been sent alongside her: it was never likely that there would be room for both as maids of honour, but Lady Lisle rightly thought that the more options presented to the queen, the more likely one would succeed.
For all that Anne was the younger sister, there never seems to have been much doubt that she would be the more successful. She was widely considered to be the ‘fairer’ out of herself and Katharine, and looks were an important qualification.2 Katharine was quiet, gentle and kind. She was very soon beloved by those who spent time with her, but she was not one to push herself forward, and her more reserved, sweeter nature was lost on the royal court. Anne was bolder, brighter, sparklier; her surviving letters show that she could be assertive, even selfish, but like her mother she was also quick-witted and determined. In 1536 she wrote apologetically to her mother to say that ‘I know well that I am very costly unto you, but it is not possible to do otherwise… one must do as others do.’3 Less obviously affectionate in writing than her sisters, sharply aware of what was needed in order to get on, Anne shone where it mattered. Once she had set her sights on something, she didn’t stop until she had achieved it.
The goal of court service had been a long time in the making. Anne’s mother – Honor Grenville, Viscountess Lisle, but always known as Lady Lisle – had been seeking court positions for Anne and Katharine, two of her daughters from her first marriage, since at least June 1536.4 Living in Calais had meant she was entirely reliant on others to send word of vacant positions, and then to seek out and make interest with courtiers who might put in a good word for her daughters. Much of this work had fallen on John Husee, who was employed as the Lisles’ business agent in London.
The family’s very geographical distance was part of the reason they were so keen to get the children into court positions. Governance was personal in Tudor England. The personality of the monarch, his likes and dislikes, his fancies and foibles, affected the patronage that was offered and the decisions that were made. To be near to him, therefore, was to be one step closer to your goals; to be out of sight was not only to be out of mind, but to open yourself to ‘back friends’, as the Duke of Norfolk frequently put it, people who might poison the king’s mind against you.5 Arthur, Lord Lisle was the king’s cousin and lord deputy of Calais, but neither of these things would save him if – God forbid – he found himself in a political crisis, and his conservative religious beliefs made him increasingly out of step with royal policy.6 That very fact may have made it more difficult for the Basset girls to enter Queen Jane’s household. In any case, though, recent events meant that female royal service probably felt less secure than it used to. Two queens consort had now been removed from office. Pledges of loyalty to a new mistress probably felt much less finite, since she might not last, and yet also more dangerous, for service might place women in danger by association. Not only this, but the once-distant prospect of becoming the next queen was now a threatening possibility, for this, too, had now happened twice. Yet for the moment Queen Jane was beloved by the king, and more to the point, she was pregnant with – she hoped – his son. The court was still the centre of politics, and service there was still a route to royal patronage, with the potential for influence and power. Competition for places in the queen’s service therefore remained fierce.
Things had not changed much since Queen Catherine of Aragon’s day. There was still a finite number of positions for women to serve the queen ‘in ordinary’, and that number was still between twenty and twenty-five. Teenage girls like Anne and Katharine Basset were competing for an even smaller number of places, because there were only ever six maids of honour at any given time. The key was to keep abreast of upcoming vacancies. Unless you could find out in advance who was leaving (usually to be married) and speak to the right people in time, the vacancy would have come and gone before it was even publicly known.7 Finding out who the ‘right people’ were was an undertaking in itself, but it was one to which John Husee was equal. It helped that the Lisles were well connected, specifically Lady Lisle. For it was not Lord Lisle’s contacts who mattered here; as Husee wrote to his mistress, ‘it is no meet suit for any man to move such matters, but only for such ladies and women as be your friends’.8 The best way to get a daughter into the queen’s household was to know those who were already there.
Lady Lisle’s niece Mary Arundell, who became the Countess of Sussex in January 1537, was one of the queen’s women, and that relationship provided a route to the patronage of other noblewomen in the queen’s household. Lady Lisle was able to cultivate the formidable Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury and kind, capable Eleanor Paston, Countess of Rutland.9 The Lisles had long been on friendly terms with Margery Horsman, who had moved seamlessly from Anne Boleyn to Jane Seymour’s service, and they were also in touch with William Coffin, the queen’s master of the horse, and his wife Margaret, who had been one of the women in the Tower with Queen Anne Boleyn and now served among Queen Jane’s gentlewomen.10 Husee used these existing links to make new contacts. Mr Coffin, for instance, told him that if labour were made to Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter, the cause ‘might there be sped’.11 In June 1536, though, Lady Lisle’s friends in England all thought Anne too young, at fifteen, to be one of the queen’s maids.12 Husee reported that ‘the Queen hath her whole determined number appointed’ already; he advised Lady Lisle to wait.13
In January 1537 Lady Lisle began to press Anne’s preferment with renewed energy, and not only Anne’s but her sister Katharine’s too. The game was one of complex strategy, with multiple routes espied, pursued and discarded bewilderingly swiftly. Ultimately she needed to find a way to place the girls in front of the queen, that they might be seen, judged and, with luck, selected for the next vacant space in the household. But one did not simply walk into the privy chamber. Husee himself could not enter that room unless bidden by the queen. What they needed, Husee reported, was to enter the service of a noblewoman who herself served the queen, so that they might be taken into the privy chamber in the course of that duty.14
Anne was settled quickly with Eleanor, Countess of Rutland.15 Katharine’s placement was more difficult. The queen’s sister-in-law Lady Beauchamp was suggested, but this came to nothing.16 Lady Lisle’s niece, the Countess of Sussex, was the obvious choice, but she would not take Katharine; ‘she saith that she hath three women already, which is one more than she is allowed’.17 It was true that numbers of servants were theoretically fixed according to social rank. The Eltham Ordinances of 1526 stated that a countess whose husband was also lodged in the court was permitted two beds for servants, increased to three if she were a widow or her husband did not lodge at court.18 This, though, was difficult to police, and Lady Sussex’s response to the Lisles suggests that one might get away with one extra servant, but that was the limit of the lord chamberlain’s goodwill.
Margery Horsman, now Margery Lister, promised that if her husband would agree, she would take Katharine into her own chamber, or put her with ‘young Mrs Norris’, and ‘bring her into the Queen’s chamber every day’.19 Then, though, a better option: Mr Coffin had spoken to the Duchess of Suffolk – Katherine Willoughby, she of the strong nerves and brave spirit who had gone north with her husband during the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion less than a year ago – and the duchess had agreed to take Katharine into her household when she came to court again, which would not be until all fear of plague was past. John Husee wrote to Lady Lisle in March 1537 with detailed instructions as to the letter of thanks she should send, only to be brought up short. Lady Lisle was not convinced that the duchess was the best guardian for Katharine. Husee went to some lengths to show Lady Lisle that everybody concerned thought that Katharine could ‘be nowhere better’.20 The root of Lady Lisle’s concern may have been the duchess’s increasingly reformist religious beliefs, set against Lady Lisle’s own conservatism, or it may simply have been that she was loath to trust her daughters to a woman only a few years older than they. Tantalisingly, on 25 April Husee reassured her that ‘the matter that your ladyship doth write of is not so much to be doubted; for the Duchess is both virtuous, wise and discreet’.21 No more information is forthcoming.
This was April 1537. Lady Rutland would not take Anne until after the summer progress, ‘when all heats and dangers of sicknesses be past’. In the meantime, they must have the correct clothes – Katharine would need ‘double gowns and kirtles of silk, and good attirements for her head and neck’ – and Lady Lisle should continue in her quest to secure the queen’s goodwill.22 Thus began the summer of the quails. Queen Jane was pregnant, and developed a craving for the small, plump gamebirds, which were considered a delicacy. The Lisles had lots of quails. The Calais countryside abounded with them. The king knew this, and wrote to Lord Lisle asking for some for the queen. Lady Lisle jumped at the opportunity, and soon baskets of fat quails were wending their way over the Channel to the queen’s dinner table along with prettily worded notes about Lady Lisle’s daughters and their desire to serve in the queen’s household.23 Gifts and tokens likewise flew back and forth between Lady Lisle and the many noblewomen whose influence she hoped might in turn inspire the queen. Husee’s letters began to sound like chequerolls of those she ought to thank, remember and reward.
The summer of 1537 was a particularly difficult time to seek such patronage. The queen’s pregnancy meant that she did not accompany the king on his usual summer progress. He was under orders never to be more than sixty miles away from her – though what anybody imagined he could have done had there been an emergency remains unclear – but this nevertheless meant that they spent more time apart than usual, and so it would have been harder to secure his consent for household appointments.24 Lady Lisle was herself pregnant, and took her chamber at some stage in June, a fact that may well have made her less attentive to business than usual.25 Plague, too, was still rife. Queen Jane was even more afraid of the sickness than the king, and he was rarely calm about any serious outbreak. Access to the court was forbidden for anybody who had been where there was sickness, which again made it more difficult to transact business as usual.26
Nevertheless, the wheel continued to turn. One July dinner time, Queen Jane, eating Lady Lisle’s quails, spoke to her two immediate attendants – the Countesses of Rutland and Sussex – about Lady Lisle, and was told about the two daughters seeking court positions. The countesses must have sung their praises despite never having met either of the girls, or else Queen Jane was in a magnanimous, quail-sated mood, because she agreed to take one of them into her household. Both must be sent: ‘her Grace will first see them and know their manners, fashions and conditions, and take which of them shall like her Grace best’ – i.e. which she liked better. The Countesses of Rutland and Sussex would each be temporarily responsible for a Basset girl, and then later, once the queen had taken her favourite, the other would go to the Duchess of Suffolk as planned.27
Months of machinations had paid off. Lady Lisle must have been thrilled, and the girls were surely excited. Now there were clothes to be bought, for though Husee said that ‘your ladyship shall not need to do much cost on them till time you know which of them her Grace will have’, both nevertheless needed ‘two honest changes… the one of satin, the other of damask’. The last page of his letter also took a tone calculated to strike sobriety into the most excited heart. For Husee did not like the royal court; it was, he reminded Lady Lisle, ‘full of pride, envy, indignation and mocking, scorning and derision’, and she must exhort the girls to be ‘sober, sad, wise and discreet and lowly above all things, and to be obedient… and to serve God and to be virtuous, for that is much regarded, to serve God well and to be sober of tongue’. It was a strong admonition to behave themselves, and though he hastened to add that they probably needed no such warning, he clearly felt it necessary to inject a note of caution.28
In July the queen had said to send the girls in six weeks. Her Majesty wanted to make the choice before she withdrew to her chamber to await the birth of her child. It was thought that that would be about Michaelmas, but the sooner they arrived the better because, Husee reported, there would shortly be a vacancy on account of Mistress Parr’s marriage: ‘it were good to have them in areadiness’.29 By 1 September he was urging Lady Lisle to send them as soon as possible, within fifteen days, because the queen intended to withdraw within twenty days. If the choice were not made before she did so, both girls would remain at Lady Lisle’s expense until the queen came out of confinement.30
They were duly sent, and received and feted by Lady Lisle’s friends – Lady Dudley, Husee told her, had been particularly kind to them.31 The Countesses of Sussex and Rutland, in whose retinues they were to be for the time being, immediately set about improving the girls’ wardrobes that they might appear to their best advantage before the queen. The two countesses lent, altered and gave away their own clothes freely, demonstrating how seriously they took their duty of care. Neither wanted the girls to embarrass their sponsors or their mother when they entered court society, and both appeared genuinely anxious that Anne and Katharine should do well.32
The queen was at Hampton Court, where she intended to take her chamber for the birth of her child. There, a fine new set of apartments were under construction for the queen, with views overlooking the river front and a chamber adjoining the king’s, so that he could enter his wife’s rooms without anybody knowing that he’d left his own apartments. Originally made for Queen Anne Boleyn, in 1537 the king decided he was not satisfied, and began building work there anew. By the autumn they still weren’t ready. Instead, Queen Jane occupied the old stacked lodgings in the middle of the palace, a courtyard to either side, her rooms on the floor above the king’s own.33 At least this meant that she and her ladies were somewhat lifted above the noise of the builders, and further away from the smell of the brick kilns in the park. They could also see who was coming or going. As Anne and Katharine Basset made their way through the gatehouse, perhaps the two countesses with them pointed out the windows of the queen’s chambers above. Attired in a mixture of their own and borrowed clothing – Anne wore a new velvet gable hood lent by the Countess of Sussex – the girls followed their sponsors up the stairs, through the watching chamber and presence chamber, and were waved into the queen’s privy chamber. There they were introduced to Her Majesty.34 It must have been a moment of tense excitement. Though the exact process is hidden from us, the outcome was unanimous. Anne, the younger, fairer, livelier Basset girl, was the successful candidate. She would enter the queen’s service as a maid of honour, while Katharine would remain with the Countess of Rutland until such time as the Duchess of Suffolk returned to the south.
Anne was probably sworn in there and then, either in the privy chamber itself or elsewhere in front of the queen’s chamberlain or vice-chamberlain. A customary fee was paid, and she would have been taken through the oath orally. Though the exact oath sworn by the queen’s women is not extant, enough survives to know that she would have sworn loyalty to both the queen and king, pledging to be ‘good’ and ‘true’ and ‘faithful’ and to be retained by no other, a part of the oath that was designed to protect against multiple allegiances.35 Anne was now part of the royal household.
Husee, businesslike as always, informed Lady Lisle that Anne ‘furnisheth the room of a yeoman-usher’, which meant that her position was equivalent to that of a yeoman usher in the king’s service, a nod, perhaps, to the somewhat confused reality of female service in the queen’s household.36 For all that there had been several ordinances relating to household service over the previous fifty years, none had said more than that the queen’s service should be ‘nigh like unto the King’s’, an impossibility where her female servants were concerned.37 For Anne, though, the matter was comparatively simple. As one of the six maids of honour, she received £10 a year, lodging, some basic clothing as livery and an allowance of food, fuel and light. She must have her own servant, and she would be nominally under the protection and management of the mother of the maids, who was there to supervise the six girls.38
In a manner reminiscent of boarding schools, Lady Lisle was promptly sent a list of things that Anne would need, as listed in ‘Mrs Pole’s book of reckoning’ – it’s possible that Mrs Pole was the mother of the maids at this time.39 Bedding was not supplied, and most of the list was clothing. The royal court was the place where fashion arrived first in the country. Since the role of the queen’s women was to be on display, it was important for them to keep abreast of the latest fashions, though English women held a reputation internationally for dowdy dress. France, where Anne Basset had spent most of her life so far, was usually the trendsetter where fashion was concerned, as indeed Queen Anne Boleyn had known.40 Now Queen Jane sought to make a change: Anne was to wear out her French clothing first, but then she would need new, English gowns. She needed a gable hood of velvet regardless. These were so named for the pointed arch at the front, like a gabled roof, the heavy, somewhat awkward structure made with wire and the hair covered by two wide ‘tubes’ of fabric hanging down the back. Though Husee thought ‘it became her nothing so well as the French hood’ – a smaller, lighter, rounder headpiece set further back so that the hair, combed flat and centre-parted, could be seen – gable hoods were the queen’s preference, and ‘the Queen’s pleasure must needs be fulfilled’.41
Hoods were only the finishing touch to an outfit in 1530s England. Winter was coming, and staying warm was a priority. Layers, then, were the key. Anne wore a linen smock or shift next to her skin, the collars and cuffs probably embroidered with ‘blackwork’, the style of embroidery brought from Spain by Queen Catherine of Aragon and her women and still all the rage in England. Over this she wore a bodice designed to flatten the chest and push her breasts up, creating a smooth silhouette for her kirtle, a dress designed to function as an under-gown. At court, this was usually worn with another gown on top so that only the front triangular panel of the kirtle was visible, elaborately decorated. Anne’s gowns would have been cut with a low, square neckline and a V-shaped neck at the back, sometimes filled in with another layer of fabric called a ‘partlet’. Her sleeves were attached separately, and she might also have worn a stomacher, an extra piece of decorative fabric for the front of her gown. Hose or stockings, made of finely woven woollen cloth and held up with garters, kept legs warm; flat-heeled slippers made of various fabrics went on her feet. Her gowns and sleeves would be lined with fur during the winter, and the whole was comparatively warm.42
Within weeks, the queen’s pleasure had taken a turn and Anne was no longer to wear her French-style gowns either. Now she needed ‘a bonnet or two, with frontlets and an edge of pearl, and a gown of black satin, and another of velvet… And further, she must have cloth for smocks and sleeves, for there is fault founded that their smocks are too coarse.’ Anne had already had made a new gown of russet worsted and black velvet, and Lady Sussex planned to turn her old gowns into kirtles.43 Though Anne wasn’t of high enough status to be wearing cloth of gold or silver, or the colour purple, nobody was going to waste perfectly good velvet if it could be reused elsewhere.44 Anne’s clothes were individually tailored, and would have fitted as perfectly as possible. Velvets and damasks, though, were heavy, and these clothes were not designed to mould to or move with the body. Women at court did not move with speed, and they needed help to get dressed and undressed. Their peripheral vision was restricted by the gable hood in particular, and the many layers of fabric over their ears might also have made it more difficult to hear.
Though Anne was destined to join the other maids of honour, Husee’s letters make it clear that she couldn’t do so immediately. Jane Ashley, whose place she was taking, had first to marry and depart. For the first few weeks Anne remained with the Countess of Sussex in her lodgings, which may have been a slightly gentler introduction to court life.45 Lady Lisle could rest awhile; it was up to Anne now to make her appointment bear fruit for her family.
Queen Jane, too, laboured to bring forth fruit, for her family, for her husband and for England. It had been a straightforward pregnancy and everybody hoped that it would be a boy. The pressure for Jane was unimaginable. What if she produced a girl, yet another useless princess in a country that so desperately needed an heir? Queens Catherine and Anne had not survived their lack of male progeny; would Jane?
On Sunday, 16 September, only a day after Anne Basset was sworn in as the new maid of honour, Queen Jane ‘took her chamber’, withdrawing from court to the sanctuary of her own apartments to await the birth of her child.46 Following tradition, the room in which the baby would arrive must be hung with rich tapestries on every wall, leaving only one window bare for light. There must be layers of carpets on the floor, a royal bed and a pallet bed on which the queen would actually give birth. The overall impression was one of softness, warmth, dark and muffled sound: a womb enclosing a womb.47 It was an odd time for sixteen-year-old Anne to begin court service. For the duration of the queen’s confinement, her world became exclusively female as her ladies-in-waiting took on the roles normally held by male officers. Her chambers would have been far quieter than usual, with none of the usual visits from the king and his gentlemen. Perhaps Anne had been inside her mother’s rooms during her lyings-in when she gave birth to Anne’s younger sister Mary, but she would only have been a small child. Now she saw how things were done among royalty.
Almost a month later, the queen went into labour. Hours passed and still the baby wouldn’t come. The birthing chamber was stifling. The thick hangings on the walls and ceiling let no heat escape, and the fire was kept stoked. Miles away in the city, friars, priests and city men processed solemnly to St Paul’s to pray for a safe delivery.48 Anne Basset, as a young and unmarried woman, would not have been with the queen in her chamber; no doubt she too spent much time in prayer. For the rest of the queen’s women at Hampton Court the world had narrowed to a single room, a bed, an exhausted woman’s blood and pain. Queen Jane laboured for two days and three long nights, her women watching over her in that hot, airless room. Finally, the baby was wrest from her exhausted body, and – joy! – it was a prince, a ‘man child’ born on the eve of St Edward the Confessor’s day.
There was national euphoria. Fires were lit all over the city of London, prayers of thanksgiving offered in every church.49 Three days later the baby was christened Edward in the chapel at Hampton Court, carried by Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter along a route marked out with barriers to keep back the crowds, all the way from his rooms on the first floor through the king’s chambers and the great hall, down the stairs, across the courtyard and into the chapel. Rich carpets marked the way to the font, raised on a dais to give the audience of courtiers and nobles the best possible view. After the ceremony the court retired to the queen’s chambers for wine and light refreshments, and to congratulate the king and queen on their achievement.50 Anne Basset, the queen’s newest maid of honour, attended the christening and the celebrations with wide eyes and a new gown of black velvet turned up with yellow satin.51 Plans were already afoot for the queen’s churching ceremony, in which she would be purified and welcomed back into society. Anne’s mother Lady Lisle was told that Anne would need yet another new gown.52 But within two days, Queen Jane was no longer sitting up in bed. She was feverish and had ‘an unnatural laxe’; the last rites were administered.53 Soon she was delirious. The prayers of her women, still watching over her, went unanswered. Just before midnight on 24 October 1537, Queen Jane died of childbed fever. She was not yet thirty.
The nation’s joy turned to sorrow. None took it heavier than the king, who retired to Westminster ‘and kept himself close and secret a great while’.54 Plans for the queen’s churching became plans for her funeral. Anne Basset’s gown of tawny velvet was changed for one of black.55 Early in the morning on Monday, 12 November, the corpse began its final journey. The queen was to be buried in St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle. For several days already her body had lain in the chapel at Hampton Court while formal masses were said for her soul. At each of these a senior noblewoman acted as chief mourner, but even the newest and least of Jane’s women had a role to play: on Tuesday, 6 November the chief mourner had been the Countess of Rutland, and Anne Basset bore her train.56
It was a long, slow ride to Windsor. Forty-nine noblewomen followed the hearse in chariots and on horseback, and more had ridden ahead in advance. Anne Basset was lucky. She had a place in the last chariot, and was likely warmer than those on horseback. In the pre-dawn darkness, the long, winding procession must have looked sinister, shapeless black figures illumined here and there by torches held aloft by footmen. After the days of mourning and the solemnity of the journey, the burial itself was comparatively brief. Offerings were made at the high altar by the highest-status mourners, and then the women respectfully withdrew and were given refreshments while the burial took place. Queen Jane was no more. Officially, the nation plunged into mourning. In London a death knell of bells was rung in every parish church from noon till six in the evening, with a ‘solemn dirige’ – part of the liturgy from the Office of the Dead – likewise sung in every church.57 The queen’s women, as part of the royal household, were part of the ritual of mourning; Anne Basset, her mother was informed, would need no more clothing ‘until her mourning gear be cast off’.58 The outward appearance, though, may not have been matched by inward grief. Anne had barely known her mistress. She had served her for only forty days. If there was no queen, there was no need of a queen’s household. Anne was out of a job.
The noblewomen of Queen Jane’s household went home to husbands and children, or to their dower estates, and the younger women to their parents or guardians. For Anne Basset, this presented a problem. Her family were in Calais. Nobody thought it would be very long until there was another queen, but she could not stay at court, and there was little time to make arrangements. Fortunately, kinship carried a strong sense of obligation, and Anne was taken in by her mother’s cousin the Countess of Sussex, in whose chambers she had been lodging at court. Lady Lisle’s response to this shows that it was done in something of a scramble. Only two days after Queen Jane’s burial she wrote to thank the countess for having Anne, assuring her that if Anne could not get a place in the next queen’s household ‘I shall not fail to send for her, and to recompense your charges, for I did not send them for that I would put you or any of my kin or friends to charge.’59
Anne, it seems, was not as grateful as her elders felt she ought to have been. When Husee wrote to Lady Lisle a month later, it was to reassure her that ‘by my lady Sussex’s report Mistress Anne is clearly altered, and in manner no fault can be found in her. So that I doubt not but that the worst is past, and from henceforth she will use herself as demurely and discreetly as the best of her fellows.’60 This sounds as though Anne had thrown her weight around in the countess’s household and had been told to learn her place. Perhaps she struggled to adapt to her new situation, feeling as though she’d been on the cusp of a glittering career only for it to be snatched away, leaving her languishing in the countryside, on sufferance in somebody else’s household.
No doubt she wasn’t the only one to feel this way. It was the beginning of a strange time. England had not been without a queen since 1509. Distraught though the king might be at Queen Jane’s death, he still had only one male heir and he of all people knew how important it was to produce a second – a ‘spare’ – as he himself had been. His duty was to marry again, and so within days his councillors were urging him – ‘peradventure not wisely, yet after mine accustomed manner plainly’, as the Duke of Norfolk wrote – to seek a new wife.61 The choice of a royal bride was not only an issue of domestic peace but of diplomacy, and religion was now an inextricable part of international relations. Such a decision could not be made without the input of the king’s council and of his ambassadors, and – indeed – of other sovereigns. Should the king marry ‘at home’, another domestic subject, a woman of his own nobility? Or should he marry abroad, perhaps a French duchess, a Spanish infanta or a Scandinavian princess? Everybody had an opinion. It was tantamount to throwing open a door to political faction and inviting it to make itself at home.
Some thought it likely that the king would continue what had become his usual pattern and take a former lady-in-waiting as his next bride. He may have had his eye on the possibilities, for in January 1538 John Husee reported that ‘the election lieth between Mistress Mary Shelton and Mistress Mary Skipwith’.62 Mary Shelton had been at court for some time. She was a cousin of the late Queen Anne Boleyn, and was good friends with the king’s niece Margaret Douglas and Mary Howard, Duchess of Richmond.63 Mary Skipwith was in fact Margaret, niece to one of the king’s gentlemen of the privy chamber, Sir Thomas Heneage. This piece of gossip is not repeated in any other surviving source, but that may simply mean that it was known only to those with inside access to the royal court; Husee warned Lord Lisle to ‘keep silence until the matter be surely known’.64 Mary Shelton was certainly on people’s minds during this time, which might be a symptom of the king’s own thoughts towards her. In December 1537 the recently widowed Christina, Princess of Denmark and Duchess of Milan, was described by ambassador John Hutton as resembling Mary Shelton, a comparison clearly meant to be flattering.65
Most people thought an alliance abroad would be preferable. Thomas Cromwell, still the king’s chief minister, certainly did not want another noble family raised up to the heights of the Seymours, who now stood closest to the throne as relatives of Prince Edward. Cromwell had recently yoked himself to their fortunes by marrying his son Gregory to the late queen’s sister Elizabeth, the widowed Lady Oughtrede, and the rise of another subject-queen would weaken the value of that alliance.66 The Duke of Norfolk would have loved to see yet another Howard girl on the throne, but he too thought it unlikely. He preferred the prospect of a French princess, partly because he was in receipt of a sizeable pension from the French king, and partly because the French were, naturally, friends of the Pope and would not promote further religious reform in England. Cromwell, conversely, favoured the Hapsburgs.67 King Henry himself appeared to agree that a foreign marriage was preferable. He was worried about France and Spain getting increasingly close to an alliance, which had long been something that England sought to disrupt and was now more dangerous than ever because of its potential to unite all of Catholic Europe. Nothing came of the rumour about Mistresses Mary Shelton and Margaret Skipwith. In fact, in the summer of 1538 the latter married George Tailboys, son of the king’s former mistress Bessie Blount, with some degree of haste and a special Act of Parliament to allow Tailboys – then a ward of the Crown – access to his inheritance before the age of majority, to allow the couple to begin married life at once. Perhaps it was convenient to have Mistress Skipwith safely bestowed elsewhere.68
1538 saw Henry attempting to play the French and the Spanish against each other at home and abroad. This ended in some embarrassment when, having thought the French princess Mary of Guise free for his taking, it was found that she had quietly and swiftly been married to Henry’s rival King James V of Scotland in the spring of 1538. Happily there remained Christina of Denmark, about whom Henry was enthusiastic; she was a good choice as bride even if she had not resembled Mary Shelton. But the negotiations proved complex. Henry wanted impossible things from Charles V, such as inclusion in any future peace treaty with France and a refusal to support the upcoming papal General Council, neither of which were remotely in Charles’s interests. Christina herself was worried about the prospect of becoming Henry’s fourth wife, ‘for her Council suspecteth that her great aunt was poisoned, that the second was put to death and the third lost for lack of keeping her child-bed’.69 Aside from his effect on his wives, Henry’s own life was not assured. In May it was reported that one of the old wounds on his leg had closed up, poisoning his blood, ‘so that he was sometime without speaking, black in the face, and in great danger’.70
In the meantime, the court was not entirely devoid of women. There was no queen, but the king had daughters, and the Lady Mary, though no longer princess, at least was of an age, at twenty-two, to take on some of the more female-oriented royal roles, in the same way as the king’s own younger sister had done after the death of their mother back in 1503. Lady Mary spent much of 1538 at court. Though she kept her usual attendants and does not seem to have augmented her salaried household, her surviving privy purse expenses and jewel inventory for these years do suggest that the country’s noblewomen used Mary’s court presence as something of a base for their own. The list of jewels that she gave away over these years reads as a roll call of elite women: the Countesses of Hertford, Sussex and Rutland, the Duchess of Suffolk, Lady Dudley. She acted as godmother to endless noble babies.71 At least one woman who had previously been in Queen Jane’s household was now paid for boat journeys by Lady Mary, suggesting that temporarily, at least, she had become part of Lady Mary’s establishment.72
All that young Anne Basset could do was to wait. The king had promised that she would ‘have her place whensoever the time shall come’.73 In February 1538, when it was thought that time might be soon, Anne asked her mother for an ‘edge of pearl’ to wear on her French hood, because she had had to return the one she had borrowed from the Countess of Sussex.74 In April the pearls arrived: but, John Husee wrote on her behalf, ‘six score is not enough, nor indeed they are not to be worn in the Queen’s service unless they might be set full’.75 Anne, desperate to be ready whenever the call to court should come, was impatient. Her mind on her own needs, as ever, she raged to her mother’s friend Thomas Warley, calling the pearls that Lady Lisle had sent ‘all rags’.76 Lady Lisle was furious. Children did not speak thus to their parents. Ambitious Anne might be, and like many teenagers desperate to keep up with her peers, but that did not mean that she could treat her mother with disrespect. It fell to Husee to make this clear, and he wrote that he had been ‘meetly plain’ with her; ‘I doubt not that ever she shall offend your ladyship in like case.’ He hoped that Lady Lisle would now forget it, ‘for she taketh the matter very heavily’.77 It was several letters, however, before Lady Lisle could be brought to forgive her impetuous daughter.
Mary Howard, dowager Duchess of Richmond, only a few years older than Anne Basset, also tried her parents’ patience during 1538. Her father-in-law the king still had not agreed to give her possession of her jointure estates now that his son Henry Fitzroy, her husband, was dead, and she consequently had no income. Living on her father the Duke of Norfolk’s charity, under his roof, was not what independent Mary had had in mind for her widowhood, and for all that she was only nineteen she was not prepared to let the matter rest in his hands any longer. On 2 January 1538 she wrote to Thomas Cromwell, not for the first time, but in insistent tones. Her husband had died a year and a half ago, she told him, and though her father had ‘many times’ promised to sue to the king for her nothing had come of this. She had asked him for permission to come to London and speak to the king herself, but ‘he hath made me so short an answer that I am more than half in despair’. Would Cromwell please help?78
Her letter did not divulge the means by which she sought to persuade her father to bring her to London, but his own letter to Cromwell a few months later in April made it clear that she was making his life a misery. ‘My daughter of Richmond’, he wrote, ‘doth continually with weeping and wailing cry out on me to have me give her licence to ride to London to sue for her cause, thinking that I have not effectually followed the same.’79 Norfolk was not a man with whom one could reason, and he had already disapprovingly labelled her ‘too wise for a woman’ for having consulted her own legal counsel about her situation. Perhaps emotional blackmail was a better weapon; or perhaps it was all she had left in her arsenal. Norfolk’s reluctance was, as ever, his fear of the king’s reaction. He asked Cromwell to ‘feel his Grace’s mind’.80 Cromwell replied that the king was content that Norfolk should bring Mary to court, and Mary herself wrote in ‘as hearty thanks as my poor heart can think’.81 Around Whitsuntide the journey was made, and thus began a complex negotiation between the men in Mary’s life. It was a delicate situation. The king did not want to pay Mary the money that he owed her; Norfolk did not want to pay for Mary either, and he did not want to annoy the king. Thus while he did indeed ask the king about her jointure, he also asked about a possible second marriage for her. It was a tidy solution to a difficult problem. If Mary remarried, the fact of her first marriage to the king’s son could be conveniently forgotten, and the question of her jointure with it. The king could simply settle a dowry upon her, a one-time payment, rather than having to hand over estates and lose that yearly income. He might then look more kindly upon Norfolk and the rest of the family.82
There were only two men that Norfolk thought suitable for his daughter, and the one he thought best was Sir Thomas Seymour, brother of the late Queen Jane and uncle to Prince Edward. He claimed that this was because Seymour was ‘so honestly admired by the King’s majesty’, and because he did not think it a good idea to marry Mary in ‘high blood or degree’.83 While it was true that the Seymours could not yet lay claim to the noble heritage of the Howards, as the family of the heir to the throne they were hardly nobodies, and the Howards were in any case parvenus themselves only a couple of generations back. Norfolk’s willingness to ally with the Seymour family shows how precarious he felt his own position in the king’s favour to be. The match, though, had advantages for the Seymours too, for Thomas Seymour would gain a bride of far higher status than he could otherwise look for. The king thought it an excellent idea, joking somewhat bawdily that Mary needed ‘one of such lust and youth as should be able to please her well at all points’.84 Seymour himself wanted Cromwell’s approval, and probably his business-minded approach to the financial negotiations. It was decided that Cromwell and Seymour would have a conversation within the next few days, because Mary was due to return to the country shortly and the king wanted the matter concluded before that time.85
Perhaps that conversation took place, and perhaps it did not. Nobody, it seems, had thought to consult Mary herself. Mary, intelligent, politically aware and decisive, was not at all willing to acquiesce. Within a fortnight her father Norfolk was on his way back to his estates in Suffolk. By August he was once again asking Cromwell to seek resolution of Mary’s jointure situation.86 Mary wrote to Cromwell herself, asking him the same thing.87 The marriage with Seymour died a quiet death, and since it is clear that all parties bar Mary had agreed to it, it’s highly likely that Mary herself placed a spanner in the works. That she, a girl of nineteen, dared to defy her father, Thomas Cromwell and the king in this way is extraordinary. Perhaps these great men began to feel like Anne Basset, whose court career was snatched away, or indeed like much of the rest of the English population, struggling in the midst of religious reform: nothing in this world could be relied upon any more.