Anne Boleyn: Henry VIII's Obsession (23 page)
Anne’s treatment of Mary stemmed from fear for her daughter, as her treatment of Catherine was due to fear for herself. In the early years of her marriage, Anne was determined to bring Mary to heel and, once it became clear that the humiliation of being moved to Elizabeth’s household had not worked, Anne tried to befriend Mary instead. In March 1534, during a visit to Elizabeth, Anne sent a message to Mary, asking her to visit her and offering to be the means of reconciliation between Mary and her father, assuring her that she would be as well or even better treated than she ever had been before. The price for Mary of Anne’s offer was an acknowledgment that she was illegitimate and that her parents had never been married, something that she would eventually acknowledge, but not during Anne’s lifetime. Mary replied saying that there was no queen in England except her mother, but that she would be grateful if the king’s mistress would intercede with him for her. Anne was furious at the response and, after threatening Mary, ranted that she ‘intended to bring down the pride of this unbridled Spanish blood’.
That Anne would have been kind towards her stepdaughter if Mary would only acknowledge her illegitimacy is clear from another incident recorded in the
Life of Jane Dormer,
who was a friend of Mary’s. According to Jane Dormer, Anne and Mary once found themselves attending mass together at Eltham whilst Anne was visiting her daughter. At the end of the service, Mary made a low curtsey. When Anne returned to her rooms, one of her ladies told her excitedly that Mary had made reverence to her as they left the chapel. This was what Anne had always hoped for and she replied that ‘if we had seen it, we would have done as much to her’. Anne then sent a message of friendship to Mary, saying:
‘The queen salutes your grace with much affection and craves pardon, understanding that at your parting from the oratory, you made a courtesy to her, which if she had seen, she would have answered you with the like, and she desires that this may be an entrance of friendly correspondence, which your grace shall find completely to be embraced on her part’.
Upon receiving the message, Mary answered that the queen, her mother, could not have sent her this message as she was not present in the house. Mary then stated that her reverence had been made to the altar and certainly not to Lady Anne Boleyn. Anne railed against her stepdaughter when she heard this, as she often did when she received word of Mary’s defiance.
Catherine and Mary’s great supporter, Chapuys, believed that Anne was trying to kill both Catherine and Mary. He heard a rumour that Anne had paid someone to claim that they had had a revelation from God that she would not conceive a son whilst the two women lived and that Catherine and Mary were ‘rebels and traitresses deserving death’. According to Chapuys’ report on 11 February 1534 he had heard a rumour that Anne had told the Earl of Northumberland (her former suitor, Henry Percy), that she was determined to poison Mary. In June of that same year he also heard that:
‘The king’s concubine has said more than once, and with great assurance, that when the king has crossed the sea, and she remains gouvernante, as she will be, she will use her authority to put the said Princess to death, either by hunger or otherwise. On Rochford, her brother, telling her this would anger the king, she said she did not care even if she were burned alive for it after’.
This seems more to be evidence of the fiery Anne’s inability to control her temper than any deliberate plot to murder Mary and there is no evidence that she ever sought to actually kill Henry’s daughter and his ex-wife. Anne may have wished them dead, but that is a very different proposition from actually attempting murder. Also, the simple fact is that Mary survived Anne, and Catherine lived until 1536. If Anne had wanted to poison either woman, it would have been a simple matter to do so. They were annoyances and she hated them, but Anne was no murderess.
Catherine and Mary were not the only members of Anne’s extended family who caused her irritation during 1534 and, in the summer of that year, Anne’s sister, Mary Boleyn, appeared at court visibly pregnant and announced that she had secretly married one of her servants, the lowly William Stafford. Anne felt that she had been elevated to the head of the Boleyn family by her marriage and was furious that her sister had thrown herself away so cheaply and without consulting her. Anne immediately ordered that her sister should be banished from the court, cutting Mary off from all financial support. Anne and Mary Boleyn were never close but Mary was shocked by her sister’s reaction. Finding herself destitute, she wrote to Cromwell, asking him to intercede with her sister for her:
‘And good master secretary, sue for us to the king’s highness, and beseech his highness that it will please him of his goodness to speak to the queen’s grace for us, for I perceive her grace is so highly displeased with us both, that, without the king to be so good lord to us as to sue for us, we are never like to recover her grace’s favour, which is too heavy to bear. For God’s sake help us, for we have now been married a quarter of a year, I thank God, and too late now to recall that again. But if I were at my liberty and I might choose, I assure you, master secretary, I had rather beg my bread with him than be the greatest queen christened. And I beseech you, good master secretary, pray my lord and father and my lady to be good to us, and let us have their blessings, and my husband their good-will. Also, I pray my lord Norfolk and my brother to be good to us. I dare not write to them, they are so cruel against me’.
Anne was furious that Mary, a Boleyn, should have so little ambition. Anne may also have been angered by Mary’s defiance in her letter and by her assertion that she would rather beg for a living than change places with her sister. In the summer of 1534 Mary’s pregnancy may also have been offensive to her sister and it was around this time that Anne lost her own second child.
Anne would have known as soon as Elizabeth was born that she was expected to quickly conceive another child and, by December 1533, she would have begun to suspect that she was pregnant. Both Anne and Henry must have been ecstatic and Anne confidently expected that it would be a boy this time. Anne’s pregnancy progressed well and, by April 1534, she was visibly pregnant. As with her first pregnancy, Anne could not resist flaunting her expanding figure and she knew that it was a constant reproach to Catherine. By July, Anne would have been expecting the birth of her child imminently and when it was suggested that Henry should cross to France to meet with the French king, Anne sent her brother to France to request that the meeting should be postponed until after the birth so that she could attend.
Anne was not to bear her longed for son in the summer of 1534 and, at some point, she miscarried or gave birth to a stillborn child. Sources are silent on the fate of Anne’s second pregnancy and it was probably a girl. Anne was devastated and Henry angry that she had once again failed to produce a son and this time there was not even a living daughter as compensation. To make matters worse for Anne, when she emerged from her sick bed, she was confronted with the news that Henry had once again taken a mistress. By late September there were rumours that Henry had fallen in love with another lady and Anne angrily confronted the king as she had done before. Henry reacted furiously, telling Anne that ‘she had good reason to be content with what he had done for her, which he would not do now if the thing were to begin and that she should consider from what she had come’.
Anne was horrified with Henry’s comments and she recognised them as a reference to the insecurity of her position. Without a son, Anne was as vulnerable as Catherine of Aragon had been and her security entirely depended on the lessening love of the king. Anne decided to take action against Henry’s new mistress to ensure that she did not remain her rival and she conspired with her sister-in-law, Lady Rochford, to attempt to have Henry’s mistress banished from the court. No details of this conspiracy survive but it probably involved Lady Rochford making some complaint against the mistress or picking a quarrel with her. Regardless of how their plan worked, it failed, and Anne was horrified to find that it was Lady Rochford who was banished from the court and not her husband’s mistress.
Henry’s affair with his mistress continued for the rest of 1534 and Anne must have felt desperate as she watched her influence over the king begin to slip away. Henry had always been faithful to Anne before their marriage, but he certainly had no intention of remaining faithful afterwards. Anne found it impossible to simply sit back and pretend not to notice his affairs as Catherine had done before her. Anne spent the last months of 1534 and the first half of 1535 in a near hysterical state of anxiety as Henry strayed from her and month after month she found that she had failed to conceive. In January 1535, Anne gave a clear demonstration of the stress she was under when, while sitting with the French ambassador at a banquet, she suddenly burst out laughing. The ambassador:
‘Was much annoyed, and knitting his eyebrows, said “How is that madam; are you mocking me?” Upon which, the lady, after somewhat restraining her laughter, made her excuses, saying “I could not help laughing at the king’s proposition of introducing your secretary to me, for whilst he was looking out for him he happened to meet a lady, who was the cause of his forgetting everything”’.
Anne was always subject to fits of laughter when she came under stress and she must have felt that Henry was slipping from her grasp.
As Anne’s star began to wane, her stepdaughter, Mary’s, rose and members of Henry’s court began to pay secret visits to her when they should have been paying their respects to Elizabeth. It was also telling that, when Elizabeth’s establishment moved to another house, Mary was provided with a litter of velvet which matched that of her younger half-sister. Previously, Mary’s lower status had been signified by the provision of a litter of leather. Anne also found that her supporters began to drift away from her and, in late 1534, she finally broke completely with the Duke of Norfolk, unleashing her anger and stress on her uncle. While Norfolk might once have been prepared to take abuse from his fiery niece, he would no longer stand for it, calling Anne a great whore as he left the room.
By spring 1535, Anne was alone at court and vulnerable. Many people around her had been alienated by her temper and others were paying court to her stepdaughter or to the king’s mistress. Anne’s influence over Henry was also almost non-existent, but she was still able to cling on to the knowledge that, although he was not faithful to her and his obsession had gone, she was his wife and he was as publicly committed to their marriage as he had always been. Anne knew that she had to win Henry back and that she had to conceive a son and, as her enemy Chapuys pointed out, this was entirely possible. Anne, like no other, ‘knows well how to manage him’.
NO MORE BOYS BY HER
Anne began 1535 in a weakened position. Her miscarriage in the summer of 1534 had been a blow and her failure to conceive again must have been a grave concern. Henry had risked a great deal for his marriage to Anne and both knew that it could not be thrown away lightly, whatever Henry’s personal feelings towards his wife. Anne knew just how dependent she was on Henry and she worked hard to ensure that she remained the most important woman in his life, even if she also had to accept that he had mistresses. By the summer of 1535 there had been a reconciliation between the couple, helped in no small part by a demonstration by Henry of his belief in their marriage in June and July 1535.
John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester and Sir Thomas More had been sent to the Tower for their refusal to take the oath of succession back in 1534. With the exception of Catherine and Mary, Fisher and More were the most high profile people in England to refuse the oath and, as a result, Henry attempted to convince them, first through reasoning and then through increasingly harsh imprisonment. Fisher had always been a great supporter of Catherine and neither Henry nor Anne can have thought it likely that the old man would change his opinions. They may however have hoped that More would be more malleable and it is clear that, unlike Fisher, he did not actively oppose Anne’s marriage, writing to Cromwell that ‘so am I he that among others his Grace’s faithful subjects, his Highness being in possession of his marriage and this noble woman really anointed queen, neither murmur at it nor dispute upon it, nor never did nor will’. More’s quarrel was never with Anne nor her marriage, but his scruples about taking the oath recognising the king as the head of the Church amounted to the same thing for both Anne and Henry.
Fisher was tried for treason at Westminster on 17 June 1535 and sentenced to death. Both Anne and Henry must have felt the sentence was vindicated when word reached them that Fisher had been made a cardinal by the new Pope, Paul III, and that his cardinal’s hat was on its way to England. On hearing the news, Henry commented dryly ‘well, let the Pope send him a hatt when he will, but I will so provide that when soever it commeth he shall weare it on his shoulders for head shall he have none to sett it on’. For Anne, Fisher had always been her enemy and she was unconcerned when he was executed on Tower Hill on 22 June 1535 and his head set on London Bridge. More followed Fisher to the scaffold on 6 July 1535. The executions of Fisher and More were, for Anne, a public statement by Henry of his commitment to their marriage and the royal supremacy over the Church that the marriage had ushered in. Even if Henry loved Anne less in summer 1535, Anne knew that he was still committed to her and he would remain so, if only she could bear him a son.
Anne and Henry became reconciled with each other in the summer of 1535 after a difficult year following Anne’s second pregnancy. Anne had come to accept Henry’s infidelities as a certainty, even if she could never fully ignore them as Catherine had done. For Henry, the deaths of Fisher and More and the public statement of commitment to his marriage that they made may also have reawakened his interest in Anne. At the very least, Henry still desperately needed a legitimate son and Anne, as his wife, was the only person who could provide him with this. Both Anne and Henry would have suspected that this might take some time and, according to accounts of Anne’s trial, for all Henry’s eye for women, he was often incapable of performing the sexual act with his wife. In spite of this, both Anne and Henry went off on their summer and autumn progress in good spirits, hopeful for the future.