‘Grudge who will, but none deny …’
Henry spent the summer of 1526 travelling around the country with his court, and enjoyed spending time at his new palace at Grafton. Sixty-two years earlier, a momentous event had happened nearby. A beautiful woman, Elizabeth Woodville, had refused to become the mistress of Edward IV – so at Grafton, Edward had made her his wife. Henry may have thought of his grandparents as he spent time there, especially as he much resembled Edward IV both in looks and in personality; we can but wonder if their example inspired him to propose to Anne Boleyn. If it did, it should not have. Despite their happy marriage and many children, after Edward IV’s death, doubts about the legitimacy of this union led to civil war.
Henry seems to have been attracted to Anne Boleyn from 1525 or 1526; in one of his letters he says that he was ‘struck with the dart of love’ for Anne for over a year and yet he still did not know if she was interested but by 1527 she had agreed to marry him. Henry showed everyone that he had a new courtly love in February 1526, when he jousted with the motto ‘Declare I dare not’ and an emblem which showed a heart in a press, and on fire.1 Why would Henry be worried about declaring his feelings? This may have been because he had just finished his relationship with her sister.
In 1526 Henry wrote letters to his sister Margaret extolling his hatred of divorce and declaring that her soul was in danger of damnation. His hypocrisy is obvious, as he was soon petitioning the Pope for an annulment himself. Margaret Tudor was allowed to annul her marriage to the earl of Angus on the grounds that he had a previous precontract. She soon married her lover, Henry Stewart, Lord Methven. Henry had a much better case for annulment than his sister but this did not guarantee success. When his other sister, Mary, secretly married the duke of Suffolk, Henry accepted them back into the country on condition that they paid him cripplingly large fines for the rest of their lives. As far as he was concerned, they were just using marriage to satisfy their lust.
Henry told Parliament during the Blackfriars trial that he was not annulling his marriage to satisfy his desire for another woman, ‘for I am forty-one years old, at which age the lust of man is not so quick as in lusty youth’.2 He had enjoyed his youth, spent time with many lovers, but he was now ready to settle down with the love of his life. He was still an impressive and attractive man at this stage, although ‘bald like Caesar’, according to the Venetian ambassador. The English were hopeful that he could have sons but they were not prepared for the popular Queen Katherine to be discarded against her will in order to make this happen. In his own mind, Henry was obeying his conscience and correcting the mistake he had made in living with Katherine all these years – the succession was only a small part of the bigger picture for him, once he had convinced himself of the righteousness of his position.
Hall reported that: ‘The common people, being ignorant of the truth and in especial women and others that favoured the Queen, talked largely and said that the King would for his own pleasure have another wife.’ For them, this could set a dangerous precedent, putting ideas in the head of every man who would prefer to discard his middle-aged wife for a younger woman. There is even a report of women daring to shout ‘Back to your wife!’ at the king as he passed them.3 The men were more pragmatic; it was women who hated ‘the concubine’ and everything she represented.
Anne Boleyn was the determined younger woman who had got her claws into good Queen Katherine’s husband – she was every married woman’s worst nightmare and to some devout adherents of the Roman Catholic Church, she was the Devil incarnate who had led Bluff King Hal astray. Eustace Chapuys wrote to Charles V that the public’s feelings about Henry’s treatment of Queen Katherine were so strong they would be happy to join an uprising against him. Henry agreed, reportedly saying that
The Lady Katherine is a proud, stubborn woman of very high courage. Had she taken it into her head to act, she could easily have mustered an army and waged war against me as fiercely as ever her mother did in Spain.4
Henry still felt the desperate need for a legitimate son. The Tudor line was not secure – it is only with the benefit of hindsight that we see the Wars of the Roses as ending in 1485. Henry nearly died in two accidents, while hunting and jousting, in 1524 and 1536, and some of his Yorkist cousins still posed a threat. Had he died then, with only one or two young daughters to succeed him, it is likely that one of their male cousins would have sought the throne, perhaps marrying the young Princess Mary or Elizabeth, or perhaps his daughters would have shared the fate of the Princes in the Tower. It would also have left England open to invasion from Scotland for centuries to come, because the Scottish king’s claim was best after Princess Mary’s – and she was only a young girl. The annulment has been put down to a midlife crisis, but it was a complex issue. Henry’s health was declining from this time onwards and he must have been aware of his own mortality. In 1527 the problem with his sore leg – probably a varicose ulcer – began, which was to plague him for the rest of his life.5 By 1531 he was suffering from insomnia.6
Lust for his mistress was only one motivation, but it was a strong one. The most pragmatic decision would have been to marry a French or Spanish princess, forming an alliance and receiving a big dowry. He could then have married someone who was younger; Anne Boleyn was approximately twenty-six when he first proposed and thirty-three when they married. This was considered old to bear a first child. Out of his love for her, he risked his kingdom; not just by the annulment, or by the dissolution of the monasteries, but by not arranging an alliance with another power, based on a second marriage, which could have helped support him against the Pope and the emperor.
But he had chosen Anne and her position at court was developing in a way that her sister’s and Bessie Blount’s had not. Mistresses were often used as intermediaries to the king. Cavendish wrote that it was
judged, by and by, through all the court, of every man, that she [Anne], being in such favour with the king, might work mysteries with the king and obtain any suit of him for her friend.7
Anne would have been petitioned by courtiers, offered gifts, flattered, in the hope that a request for something coming from her would have more success than if they were to ask themselves. She could use this to win influential aristocrats to her cause; those who allied themselves with her now would gain the gratitude of the king and the future queen. There was little to be gained by siding with the ageing Katherine, who was now an inconvenient embarrassment in the eyes of any ambitious person.
There were accusations that Anne Boleyn was quite low-born, the product of an upstart family of merchants. In fact, her pedigree was similar to most of the upper class – a mixture of ancestors who were already nobles and those who became aristocrats by exceptional ability or cunning. Her great-grandfather, Geoffrey Boleyn, is the basis for these slurs. He was a merchant and an alderman who become lord mayor of London. He then married the daughter and co-heiress of Lord Hoo and their son married the co-heiress of an Irish earl, Margaret Butler. Their son was Thomas Boleyn, Anne’s father, who married into the well-established Howard family. As Ives points out so well:
Anne’s great-grandparents were (apart from Geoffrey) a duke, an earl, the granddaughter of an earl, the daughter of one baron, the daughter of another, and an esquire and his wife. Anne Boleyn came, in fact, from the same sort of background as the majority of the Tudor upper class. Indeed, she was better born than Henry VIII’s three other English wives; marrying her did not, as has been unkindly said of Jane Seymour, give the king ‘one brother-in-law who bore the name of Smith, and another whose grandfather was a blacksmith at Putney’.8
Anne Boleyn was a woman who attracted slander, but the wildest rumour about her was that she was Henry’s daughter. As conspiracy theories go, this is a particularly fanciful one. Not only would Henry have been ten when Anne was born but there is nothing to prove that Henry ever had an affair with Lady Boleyn. This rumour was being spread around the time of the annulment, when Henry’s subjects, in particular the women, were prepared to repeat any malicious slur about the other woman in the royal marriage.
Sander alleged that this was not only true but also that it was well known at court. His story was that when Henry was ‘visiting’ Elizabeth Boleyn, he had fallen in love with her daughters, first Mary and then Anne. He insisted that Mary Boleyn took Katherine of Aragon’s side during the ‘Great Matter’ and she planned to ‘assert it publicly’ that Henry was Anne’s father.9 Sander, as with his other yarns, has nothing to corroborate this. We should accept Henry’s words, when he was asked about the rumours that he had been the lover of both Boleyn sisters and their mother – ‘Never with the mother’.10
For a long time it was believed that Anne had been born around 1507, when Henry was sixteen. This would at least have made the accusation of incest more likely, but at this age Henry was being kept away from the bad influences of court by his father; he did not have the freedom to chase an attractive, older lady-in-waiting, especially one who had been busy for eight years having a child a year, and so is unlikely to have seemed an attractive prospect to a young prince. There could have been an affair later on, but it is highly unlikely. This rumour probably arose from the convention of so many different spellings and pronunciations for one person’s name. Elizabeth’s surname was written as Bullen, Boullant and Boleyn; it would have been easy for someone to confuse Elizabeth Blount with Elizabeth Boullant, and spread the rumour that it was Anne’s mother who had been the king’s mistress. Compounding this, it may have been known that Henry had previously conducted an affair with a Mistress Boleyn, and the mother could easily have been confused with her daughter Mary – gossip that he had relationships with two sisters could easily be expanded to include the mother.
In 1513 Anne Boleyn was appointed as a maid of honour to the most powerful woman in Europe, Margaret, regent of the Netherlands. Margaret was also archduchess of Austria, a Hapsburg princess and the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian and Mary of Burgundy. She was the aunt and guardian of Charles V, who was only a year older than Anne. Within three years, he would become the king of Spain and in 1519, while still a teenager, Charles was elected the Holy Roman Emperor and controlled vast swaths of Europe. Margaret’s court would have been a very exciting place to be.
This formidable woman reigned over a court that was the model of chivalry and sophistication; she was clever, religious and capable. This year cannot have failed to have a profound effect on the way young Anne saw the position of women in society. The Burgundian court was that which all other European courts aped, with the best dances and entertainments; the country had a tradition of patronising the arts. Henry VIII was much more interested in adopting these practices than his father had been.
Anne was then twelve, the minimum age to be a maid of honour. From 1512 to August 1514, Thomas Boleyn was a diplomat in Brussels. He must have had good relations with Margaret of Austria to be able to secure such a sought-after post for his young daughter. Margaret was known to be strict with her maids of honour and they were not allowed to spend their time gossiping and flirting with the men of the court. Studying, reading, religion and the maintenance of personal and family honour were requirements of Margaret’s ladies, and so Anne, at a time where she was beginning puberty, was carefully observed at all times. Courtly love was widespread in Burgundy, but it had clearly to be courtly love, with no hint of physical contact.
Anne was probably chosen to go to Burgundy ahead of Mary because she was a bright child and considered more likely to cope well abroad, or Mary may have been ill or had an offer elsewhere. But it was unusual for the younger daughter to be offered such an opportunity. In a letter from Anne at the Burgundian court to her father in 1513, she wrote: ‘I understand from your letter that you wish for me to be a woman of honest reputation when I come to court.’11 From the information we have on the Boleyn sisters as adults, it seems that Anne kept to this, and it is likely that she was the more promising of the two from a very early age.
Anne impressed Margaret. The regent wrote to Thomas Boleyn: ‘I find her so bright and pleasant for her young age, that I am more beholden to you for sending her to me than you are to me.’12 But when Princess Mary left England to marry Louis XII, Henry VIII requested that Thomas Boleyn’s French-speaking daughter became Mary Tudor’s maid of honour. A surviving letter from Thomas asks Margaret to release Anne. This permission may not have been readily granted; Anne seems to have taken longer to get there than the party who travelled directly from England.
The only definite proof we have that Anne did go to France in 1514 and not at a later date is from the French ambassador, de Carles, who knew Anne well. He wrote in 1536 that: ‘I am well aware that Anne Boullant first came from this country when Mary [Tudor] left to go to join the king in France to bring about the alliance of the two sovereigns.’13 Margaret may have dragged her heels over sending Anne to France – her family’s enemy – to attend on the marriage of the English princess who had been promised to her nephew; therefore only one Boleyn girl, ‘Marie Boleyn’, is shown on the original records.
Mary Boleyn’s reputation and experiences at the French court have already been documented here. Anne seems to have behaved herself well and managed to remain at the French court long after the death of Louis XII. At first she was kept, along with her sister, as a maid of honour to the new queen, Francis’s wife Claude. Her father, as ambassador, had influence at the French court and managed to arrange these positions. Claude was a shy and devout fifteen-year-old, who had little influence on the tone of the court. Serving as her maid of honour would have been a more sedate existence than serving Mary, the French queen, had been.
Louise of Savoy, Francis’s mother, ran the government while her son was busy enjoying himself. The Boleyn sisters would have seen clearly that strong women could control a country, as long as they could control the king. At some point before 1521, Anne was transferred into the service of the Duchesse d’Alençon, King Francis’s sister.14 Throughout her time there, she was learning the skills and grace that would wow the English court on her return.
In France, she developed an impression of what it meant to be a royal mistress. There were those, like her sister Mary, who were discarded quickly and laughed at by the courtiers. And then there was Françoise de Foix. Françoise maintained the upper hand with Francis I, insisting on taking other lovers and arguing with him publicly. By playing harder to get than the other women at court, Françoise held him in thrall for ten years. This was from 1518 to 1528 – including some of the time Anne Boleyn was at court and throughout the beginning of her relationship with Henry. Although there were aspects of Françoise’s position she had no desire to emulate, Anne may have admired how this woman kept the interest of the lecherous Francis for so long.
During the time of Mary Tudor’s marriage to King Louis, the French court had been a constant round of festivities. Men and women would have mixed at these celebrations, and love affairs would have developed. But when Louis died, the way the court was organised changed. The constantly pregnant Queen Claude kept her household very separate from her husbands, although the men and women of the two establishments socialised frequently. Here Anne would have spent most of the time with the other ladies.
In June 1520 Anne was probably at the Field of the Cloth of Gold as Queen Claude’s attendant. On the English side, her parents were definitely there with several attendants, and George and Mary would almost certainly have been among their number. Thomas Boleyn ended his term as ambassador to France shortly beforehand. Anne returned to England, at her father’s request, in 1521. Relations were then bad between France and England, and most English people in Paris left around the same time. But this was not why Anne was recalled; she was then of an age to marry. Her father had just married off one daughter, and he and the king had a suitable man in mind for Anne – James Butler.
Butler was at court as a member of Wolsey’s household. But it was another of the cardinal’s noblemen that Anne was interested in marrying: Henry Percy, heir to the earl of Northumberland. Cavendish wrote that:
When it chanced the Lord Cardinal at any time to repair to the Court, the Lord Percy would then resort for his pastime unto the Queen’s chamber, and there would fall in dalliance among the Queen’s maidens, being at the last more conversant with Mistress Anne Boleyn than with any other; so that there grew secret love between them that at length they were ensured together, intending to marry.
The romance with Percy was brought to an abrupt end. Wolsey berated Percy saying: ‘I marvel not a little at your peevish folly, that thou wouldst entangle thyself with a foolish girl.’15
We do not know if Anne truly loved Henry Percy, but we know that she wished to marry him. For this sophisticated lady-in-waiting, being countess of Northumberland would have been preferable to being countess of Ormonde in tribal Ireland. But it was also expected that children, even when they reached adulthood, would obey their parents. This was a very important part of English culture and the Christian faith. Percy and Anne did not know better than their elders and would have to do as they were told.
According to Cavendish, who was writing thirty years after these events, this marriage was prevented because from 1522, when Henry was probably involved with Mary Boleyn, he was secretly in love with Anne. Kings of England rarely had affairs with the wives of people with titles and lineages as grand as the Percys, so Henry may have been attempting to end this match to save a scandal later on. Yet this is unlikely; the earl would have been extremely angry if his eldest son had married beneath him. Henry Percy was already betrothed to Mary Talbot and the king, the earl and the cardinal were united against this love match.
Anne’s marriage to James Butler was important, as the Boleyns and Butlers were arguing over the earldom of Ormonde. The Boleyns had the better claim, but the Butlers were based in Ireland. The Butlers had allegedly decided that it would have to be defended by force and they had been speaking to other Anglo-Irish nobles, requesting assistance. The marriage would solve a problem that could spiral out of control in a territory in which no English king ever fully felt secure. There is nothing else to suggest that Henry was interested in Anne before 1526.
Anne had arrived in England a polished product after living at the two most sophisticated courts in Europe and she could easily arrange another match. At the English court there was a galaxy of stars, but only one sun, and all revolved around him. It would have appeared glamorous, even to Anne. However, people still threw the contents of their chamberpots out of their windows, or even on the floor in palace corridors. Churches and castles suffered from this as well as more humble dwellings, and apprentice and aristocrat alike were guilty of it. People were simply used to the dirt and the smell.
There were around 100,000 Londoners during Henry’s reign. Theirs was a growing, bustling city without room for its entire people and the constant incoming chancers looking to make their fortune. It was dirty, messy and crowded in the slums, yet was, in many ways, similar to the palaces of the royal family. Courtiers’ clothes would often be grubby but great effort and time had been put into making them opulent and ornate. They rarely washed, seldom cleaned their clothes and hardly ever washed their hair or cleaned their teeth, if at all. The palaces, much like their inhabitants, were brightly coloured and ostentatiously decorated, but filthy.
After time at the Burgundian court and seven years in France, Anne appeared to the court as an exotic French mademoiselle. Anne’s reputation may have been damaged by her sister’s, but around the time she arrived at court, her sister was the king’s mistress, which could open doors for the family. Anne was first mentioned at court on 1 March 1522, in a masque, although she had probably become a maid of honour a year before. She was described as skilled at singing and dancing;16 her position in the entertainments was assured. In the masque, The Assault on the Castle of Virtue, Anne was dressed in white satin and a gold headdress to play ‘Perseverance’. The eight women defended the castle while the men tried to bombard them into surrender by pelting them with fruit. The women eventually acquiesced and they danced with the men, who were, of course, the king and his closest friends. This seems to have been almost prophetic; the masque was about a man desiring a woman who was determined to hold out, but eventually gave in.
Descriptions of Anne’s appearance and personality varied from one extreme to the other. The Venetian ambassador, who had little reason to be biased, described her thus:
Madam Anne is not one of the handsomest women in the world; she is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact nothing but the English king’s great appetite, and her eyes, which are black and beautiful.17
This is probably a fair description. She knew how ‘to use [her eyes] with effect’.18 Anne Boleyn was a woman not classically beautiful, but very alluring –the king was not the only man to notice her. Sander showed his bias by describing her as
rather tall of stature, with black hair and an oval face of sallow complexion, as if troubled with jaundice. She had a projecting tooth under the upper lip, and on her right hand, six fingers. There was a large wen under her chin, and therefore, to hide its ugliness, she wore a high dress covering her throat … She was handsome to look at.19
This bizarre description was written by a man who was only nine when she died; there is no evidence that Anne ‘wore a high dress’, which was not fashionable at this time. Her portraits show that she did not usually cover her neck. Often the accusations of witchcraft marred people’s descriptions of her – how else could she have made good King Henry forsake his devoted wife and the Pope?
George Wyatt described Anne’s ‘beauty [as] not so whitely as clear and fresh’. This was at a time when paleness was an important attribute; women would begin to paint their faces white and pencil in blue veins during the reign of Anne Boleyn’s daughter. Sallow skin was meant to be a sign that the woman would not be as pleasant or as obedient as a fair-skinned woman.20 It could simply be that Anne had an olive complexion, which would now be considered attractive. She is said to have had long black hair, and been graceful at the courtly pastimes of dancing and playing musical instruments; ‘albeit in beauty she is to many inferior, but for behaviour, manners, attire and tongue she excelled them all, for she had been brought up in France.’21 ‘No one would have taken her to be English by her manners, but a native-born Frenchwoman.’ She was also reportedly clever, witty and ambitious. Anne was a woman who belonged at the court. She loved the celebrations, the power and politics, the flirting. Anne was not considered as beautiful as Bessie Blount or her own sister Mary, but her confidence and wittiness were seductive to many.
By 1527 it was common knowledge that Anne was Henry’s latest love interest, but so far there was little to show that she would be any different from his former mistresses. Yet Anne was refusing to become his lover and Henry was a king who was not used to being denied anything. He therefore wanted her even more and could not bear it that Anne denied him. We cannot know if her rejection was calculated or sincere. That it inflamed Henry’s interest is unsurprising; what is astonishing is how far he went to attain her.
There are some Catholic sources that suggest that Anne was not eager to be Henry’s mistress – and they would be the most likely to accuse her of targeting the king. These sources, and George Wyatt, assert that Katherine tried to protect her pretty maid of honour from the monarch’s amorous advances. Wyatt wrote that Katherine went about this by constantly playing cards with Anne in order to expose the malformation on one of Anne’s nails; this is hardly likely. However, Henry had not been especially generous to his former lovers and Anne may have been bold enough to reject him simply because she was not tempted by the offer. He worked hard to win her round, giving her diamonds and rubies, bracelets and brooches and gems arranged into lovers’ knots and hearts. There is a long list of the presents that Henry showered on Anne in 1527, which were far more than a mere mistress might expect. In this year, her father was given the earldom of Ormonde which he had been disputing for several years. Plain Mistress Anne was now Lady Anne.
Henry went to mass three times a day and often five times on holy days. He was a man of conscience – and he believed that his conscience was God speaking directly to him. He was a man who liked all things in his life to be legal and above board, including sex. His conscience just conveniently reflected what he already wanted to do. He repressed and executed others for following their consciences, but he was God’s representative in England – he would always believe himself in the right. And his conscience was telling him that Anne Boleyn should be more than his paramour.
Henry now believed that Katherine of Aragon, like Bessie Blount and Mary Boleyn, had been his mistress, and that he had really been a bachelor his whole life. That the king had lived in sin with his brother’s widow was the cause of the outbreaks of plague and other catastrophes in England during the mid-1520s. Everything that happened in the kingdom was a judgement from God, and as God’s favourite Englishman, Henry felt that they were mainly judgements on himself and those around him.
He still respected Katherine and basked in her admiration. He saw her as an adviser, companion and friend, and perhaps something of a mother figure. Certainly he did not see her as a lover, and the couple had grown apart since he had worn her colours in the jousts. More importantly, she could not give him what he wanted. He therefore chose to thrust aside the woman who had been so good to him, just as he would later discard Wolsey, More, Boleyn, Norris, Cromwell, Carew and many others to whom he had once been close.
He finally told his wife of eighteen years his feelings. Henry seems to have believed that Katherine would accept his decision and live a religious life, as it was little different to the routine she then followed. Katherine had become increasingly pious, and her life was a constant round of masses and prayers. As far as he was concerned, she was no longer sexually desirable and could not have more children; she was fit only for a convent. Her marriage to his brother meant their marriage had been unlawful from the start. By this, Henry showed he did not understand the woman who had been his consort for so long.
The king gave his ministers the impression that he had no real wish to remarry, but that he might wed a French princess for the sake of the realm. His true intentions are made obvious by his correspondence; from the beginning of the process, it was Anne Boleyn he wished to marry. In September 1527 Henry applied for a dispensation to overcome all impediments caused by ‘affinity arising from ex illicito coitu [illicit sex] in any degree, even in the first’.22 ‘In the first degree’ could only refer to Anne’s mother or her sister. The Pope granted this within three months. This further confirms that Henry did have an affair with Mary Boleyn, and proves his hypocrisy in discarding Katherine on the same grounds; by this request, he was acknowledging that, under Church law, Anne Boleyn was his sister.
The Tudors still needed to bolster what could be seen as an upstart dynasty with careful marriages – not by marrying the daughter of a viscount. If the annulment was so Henry could produce a legitimate son and heir, then one conceived by a foreign princess would have had higher status. If the annulment was not accepted by the Stuarts – and it was not – then James V and his descendants would always be seen as alternative monarchs. For a king to choose to marry one of his subjects for love, and Henry did this four times, was extremely unusual, even if they were noblewomen.
Some historians have come to the conclusion that in 1528 Henry had ten mistresses. However, the likelihood at this time is that he was living chastely, faithful to the beguiling Anne Boleyn. This rumour comes only from a misreading of the list of his New Year’s presents. It was expected that Henry would give gifts to all the court. He gave to ‘thirty-three noble ladies’ and ‘ten mistresses’. By the term ‘mistress’ he was showing they were gentlewomen, rather than noblewomen. The word did not then have an exclusively sexualised meaning.
Anne Boleyn was firmly in possession of Henry’s heart at this point. In July 1528 the abbess of Wilton died. An abbess held an important and potentially lucrative position, and at Wilton Abbey there were many women who belonged to the gentry. The nuns were meant to elect a successor from amongst themselves, but in reality it was decided by a patron of the convent, such as the king or an important noble. Wolsey told them to elect their prioress, Lady Isabel Jordan. However, the sister of William Carey, Dame Eleanor Carey, was also a nun at the abbey and Anne was asked to intercede with Henry for the position. This was normal procedure, but it was also a test of the political influence of Henry’s sweetheart versus his chief minister.
It emerged that Dame Eleanor had two children by two different priests and had recently been the mistress of Lord Broke’s servant. It is unlikely that she had chosen the religious life herself – her family probably lacked a dowry for her. The Carey family then tried to obtain the post for Eleanor’s elder sister, but there seem to have been skeletons in her closet too. Henry wrote to Anne Boleyn that:
Though there is not any evident case proved against [the elder Carey sister] … I have done that neither of them shall have it, whereby the house shall be better reformed (whereof I ensure you it had much need).23
It cannot have done the Carey family’s reputation much good to have the king and cardinal investigating their relatives’ scandals. Neither Anne nor Wolsey got their way; Henry had shown that it was he who was in control.
Anne was spending every moment in Henry’s company from 1528 onwards, while she was at court, but she would not consummate the relationship. She was often at Hever between 1527 and 1531, and this seems to have helped keep Henry’s interest. But Katherine was still the queen, despite Henry’s wishes. Katherine apparently
showed (to Mistress Anne, nor to the King) [not] any spark or kind of grudge or displeasure … [The Queen] dissembled the same, having Mistress Anne in more estimation for the King’s sake.24
She dealt with the situation with incredible dignity, and showed that she saw Anne in the same category as Anne Stafford and Bessie Blount – women who entertained the king and to whom she would be civil, but not as a threat to an anointed queen.
On 12 May 1528 Henry’s close friend, the duke of Suffolk, received a belated papal dispensation for the annulment of his marriage to Margaret Mortimer. He had married twice since he had left Margaret in 1507, once to Anne Browne, who had died, and then to Henry’s sister, Mary, the French queen. Suffolk’s dispensation had been granted on very similar grounds to the king’s. Henry probably saw this as a sign that his annulment would be equally easy to obtain and so he was prepared to bide his time. He continued to treat Katherine with respect. Then an event occurred which led many to think that Henry’s actions had displeased God – sweating sickness spread through the country.
Sweating sickness had been introduced to England in 1485, the year the Tudors took power. It intensified during the summer months and the court was dismissed, with Henry taking a small number of servants and moving around various locations in the countryside, far from London where many were perishing. He had good reason to panic. The French ambassador wrote of the sweat:
One has a little pain in the head and heart. Suddenly a sweat breaks out and a physician is useless, for whether you wrap yourself up much or little, in four hours, sometimes in two or three, you are despatched without languishing.25
This is an exaggeration; most people survived it. It was known as ‘the English plague’ to foreigners as it recurred so regularly in England. Henry, always terrified of illness, fled from place to place until the outbreak had died down, leaving both Katherine and Anne behind him.
Several of the king’s courtiers died during this outbreak, including Sir William Compton, his close friend and the lover of his ex-mistress, Anne Stafford, and Sir William Carey, Mary Boleyn’s husband. Mary and her two children were left destitute, and she was pregnant with her third child. It seems that Mary had not returned to her husband at the end of her affair with Henry as a faithful wife. The king thought that when William Carey died, Mary was pregnant by another man.26 Anne Boleyn, her brother, her father and her uncle, the duke of Norfolk, were also afflicted, although they recovered – was this God’s judgement on the Boleyns and Henry himself? When William Carey died, there were many debts to be sorted. Henry wrote to Anne:
As to your sister’s matter, I have caused Walter Weltze to write to my Lord [Thomas Boleyn] mine own mind therein … for surely whatsoever is said it cannot so stand with his honour but that he must needs take her his natural daughter now in her extreme necessity.27
Anne had evidently asked for Henry’s help, but Henry offered no assistance. Thomas Boleyn is not thought to have been being miserly with his daughter; he was extremely ill and in danger of dying of the sweat himself. Anne stepped in and arranged for Mary to receive a pension of £100 to pay these debts off – Mary had been reduced to pawning her jewellery. Anne was the best advocate anyone at court could have had if they wished to wring concessions from the king.
1. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p.707
2. Cit. Denny, Anne Boleyn, p.227
3. CSP, Spanish, IV, pt. II, p.487
4. Cit. Plowden, Tudor Women, p.67
5. McNalty, Henry VIII: A Difficult Patient, p.67
6. Ibid.
7. Cavendish, The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, p.35; cit. Ives, Anne Boleyn, p.121
8. Ives, Anne Boleyn, p.4
9. Sander, Rise and Growth of Anglican Schism, pp.32–3
10. L&P, VI, no.923; VIII, nos.565, 567, L&P, XII, no.952
11. Paget, ‘The Youth of Anne Boleyn’, BIHR, 55, 1981, pp.163–4
12. Cit. Lindsey, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII, p.50
13. Ascoli, L’Opinion, lines 37–42; cit. Ives, Anne Boleyn, p.34
14. Herbert of Cherbury, Herbert’s Autobiography and History of England under Henry VIII, Ward, Lock and Co., 1881, p.157 and p.218
15. Cavendish, The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, p.30
16. CSP, Venetian, IV, p.485
17. Plowden, The Young Elizabeth, p.25
18. De Carles, p.234; cit. Fraser, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, p.151
19. Sander, Rise and Growth of Anglican Schism, p.25
20. Fraser, Love and Louis XIV, p.30
21. George Wyatt, p.143
22. Cit. Carlton, Royal Mistresses, p.35
23. Gairdner and Motta, The Draft Dispensation, (EHR), p.544
24. Byrne (ed.), The Letters of King Henry VIII, p.75
25. Cavendish, The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, p.35
26. Cit. Mattingly, Catherine of Aragon, p.191, (Du Bellay, French ambassador)
27. Byrne (ed.), The Letters of King Henry VIII, (June 1528), p.71
28. L&P, IV, no.4410