In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I (20 page)

By 1527, Anne had secured Henry’s attention, which she maintained by refusing to become his mistress. The following year, he told Cardinal Campeggio, the papal legate, that he had not had intercourse with Catherine for two years, although they shared a bed for the sakes of appearances. Was Henry, therefore, celibate for the entire six years, from 1526 until the end of 1532, when Anne finally succumbed? No doubt he was enthralled by her and their letters testify to their passion and a degree of intimacy but such a claim seems hard to believe. Barely months after their marriage, after Anne’s pregnancy was apparent, Henry was seeking out other women; did this king, with his reputation for a ‘lewd life’ and well-known love of women, really refrain from even the casual encounters with women of lower classes, with whom aristocratic men were expected to find relief? It seems implausible, yet few historians have questioned this. An episode at the end of September 1537, after Jane Seymour had entered her confinement, illustrates how Henry was prepared to initiate casual encounters with women who took his fancy. One William Webbe was out riding with his lover a month before, when the king came upon them, desired the woman, kissed her and ‘took her from him’ to live in ‘avowtry’ (adultery) where she remained.
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In 1592, a John Perrott claimed to be the son of Henry VIII, born in Pembrokeshire in November 1528, placing his conception in February. Despite Perrott’s resemblance to the king in appearance and temperament, the claim seems unlikely, as his mother Mary Berkeley spent that period of her life in Wales and the West, whilst Henry remained further east and had little chance to encounter her. However, the arguments that he cannot have fathered a child during this period due to his devotion to Anne must be reconsidered. Romantic, chaste devotion to a woman he hoped to make his wife would not necessarily preclude casual encounters for a king such as Henry, especially as the years passed with increasing frustration. Unfortunately, the nature of such liaisons, conducted in secrecy and of a short-term duration, leaves little trace in official surviving documentation; yet while many can be discredited, the sheer volume of rumours regarding his activities suggest he was very sexually active. The reports of other illegitimate children, such as Thomas Stucley, Richard Edwardes and a daughter named Ethelreda, all born in the late 1520s, indicates a possible lost oral tradition of the lusty king’s encounters.

Yet between 1526 and 1532, Anne denied Henry full consummation. A degree of physical intimacy is suggested by their letters but it is clear they stopped short of the final act, increasing his desire and frustration. Over the following years, a battle of wills between him and Catherine resulted in stalemate. As England’s anointed queen and Henry’s wife, Catherine would not make way for a younger, more fruitful rival and fought his attempts to dissolve the marriage on the grounds of her previous union with Arthur, insisting that the earlier match had remained unconsummated. The pair maintained a dignified public façade whilst fighting an increasingly desperate private battle. Catherine’s powerful European connections ensured continuing Papal hostility towards Henry’s pleas for divorce, and the Legatine court held at Blackfriars in 1529 under Cardinal Campeggio proved lengthy, obstructive and provided Catherine with a forum for dramatic displays of piety and wifely devotion. From 1531 onwards, though, the queen was banished from court and the presence of her husband and daughter, ending up in residence at Kimbolton Castle, Cambridgeshire, still protesting her rights as queen and refusing to compromise. Ultimately, Catherine was to prove the loser, as Henry’s split from Rome allowed him to put the matter of his marriage into English hands, while the Boleyns secured the appointment of the sympathetic Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury in October 1532. Shortly after this, Henry and Anne’s relationship was consummated and depending upon Elizabeth’s conception, suspicions of her pregnancy may have precipitated their secret marriage. A few sources suggest it occurred as early as November but better known is the second, formal ceremony conducted on 25 January 1533. Even this was a quiet, secret affair, officiated by Rowland Lee, future bishop of Coventry in a tower at York Place, witnessed by three of their close companions. By the time of her coronation, Anne was eagerly anticipating the birth of their son.

In the later stages of her pregnancy, Henry showered his new wife with gifts and ensured she was well provisioned as a queen. A week after her coronation, the keeper of the royal wardrobe, Edward Flowde, received a warrant to deliver various items for her use, a number of which must have been previously owned or used by Catherine. It sounded very much as if Anne was feathering her nest, making provisions for her lying-in. She was to receive a cloth of estate made of gold tissue, embroidered with children and the Tudor arms, chairs covered and fringed with gold and crimson velvet, Turkey carpets, woollen blankets and animal hides. The list included a pound of fine white thread for mending sheets and a pound of thick white thread for mending beds; she also received the hand brushes, hammers and hooks essential to maintain a large Tudor bed.
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Anne’s chambers at Greenwich were still a centre of activity though, as on 9 June, Sir Edward Baynton wrote to her brother George of the ‘dancing and pastime’ that went on there. On another occasion Henry bought Anne a black satin night gown edged with black velvet.

Henry was less generous to Catherine, though, informing her that the king could not have two wives and that she, the Dowager, widow of his brother Arthur, must desist from calling herself queen and hand over her jewels. There would be ‘danger’ if she attempted to contravene this, which would only ‘irritate’ the people against her, and her arrogance would compel Henry to punish her servants and ‘withdraw her affection from his daughter’.
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When his messengers attempted to deliver this commission, Catherine put on a powerful show of sympathy, refusing to rise from her pallet bed and insisting she was the king’s true wife and would not damn her soul by behaving otherwise: Henry had not reckoned with the fact that Catherine’s religion allowed her to obey a higher authority than his. He did not receive her resistance well but by this time, only weeks remained until the birth of his heir. Even the Pope’s sentence of excommunication could not detract from the impending event.

Elizabeth’s conception must have taken place sometime in early December, assuming that she was full term. This could suggest Anne was as much as six weeks pregnant at the time of the official marriage; at least she was two or three weeks gone; neither of which scenario would have allowed the couple to be certain conception had taken place. It is unlikely that the union was consummated before the autumn visit they made to France, so Anne had proved herself fertile, having fallen pregnant quickly and appearing to deliver on the promises that had kept Henry dangling for six years. Later advice was quite explicit regarding the sexual act. One French doctor’s manual advised that at the moment of conception a man would feel ‘extraordinary contentment’ in the company of his wife or a sort of ‘sucking or drawing at the end of his yard’, which when he withdrew, was not ‘over-moist’. The woman should experience a sort of ‘yawning or stretching’ in the womb or a ‘shaking and quivering’ as when she passed water, a chill in shoulders and back or a rumbling in the belly as the womb contracted. Within a few days, she should fall vomiting and spitting and disdaining of her meat, although this may not have afflicted every woman, as in February 1533, Anne hosted a sumptuous banquet for Henry, sitting symbolically on his right hand side and appearing to eat well. Into her second month, the manual claimed, her eyes may grow pale and wan and her eyeballs show less while the veins there would swell, then her breasts would grow hard with milk and her nipples prickle; they would be reddish if she carried a boy and blackish if it was a girl. Other diagnostic tools including mixing a woman’s urine with wine or making her drink rainwater at night, or honey and aniseed, which would bring pain to her stomach if she had conceived. If Anne and Henry followed contemporary advice on maternal nutrition and well-being, they would have ensured she resided in ‘good and well-tempered air’, not too hot, cold, dry or moist. She should not go out in any fogs or winds, especially winds from the South, which were considered especially harmful. Her diet may include meat and wine, with good long periods of rest at night, the better to digest it, for staying awake could engender disease in the foetus; prunes and sugared apples could alleviate discomfort as could broths made of borage, parsley, lettuce and patience. Linen or flax soaked in distillations made from calves’ or sheep’s heads, violet oil, sugar, aniseed and fennel were convenient and could be applied with discretion to sore areas. She should avoid riding in carriages, especially in the first three months, all forms of strenuous exercise and just as Elizabeth of York was advised, all loud noises, extremes of passion and distressing emotions. Bloodletting and purges were forbidden from the sixth month onwards, around the time of Anne’s coronation.

In childbearing terms, Anne Boleyn’s heritage looked promising. Her paternal grandmother Lady Margaret Butler had borne ten children, eight of which had survived infancy and her mother Elizabeth Howard was pregnant at least seven times, although only three of her children survived to adulthood. Mary Boleyn’s daughter Catherine Carey went on to have fifteen children with her husband Sir Francis Knollys, whilst her son provided another twelve grandchildren. Mary Boleyn’s granddaughter, Anne West, bore thirteen children, delivering on average every eighteen months between 1571 and 1592: only one died young and Anne lived to the age of fifty-three, when her youngest was sixteen. The family were indeed prolific and fecund; there was little in the new queen’s family tree to suggest that she would not be capable of bearing many healthy children of both genders. However, Anne’s most fertile years were spent in abstinence; from her mid-twenties to her early thirties, she held the king at a distance, when she was old enough to be married and have born several children. Apparently worried that she would never be wed, she is supposed to have spoken of her concerns that her time and youth would all be spent for nothing. She was old by Tudor standards when she conceived in December 1532 and after an interminable interval of fourteen years, Henry could finally anticipate the arrival of a legitimate male heir. At forty-one, he could no longer rely on his fading youth yet this new match had proved his ability to still father children.

Despite Catherine’s continued insistence of her royal status, the new marriage and pregnancy were made public in the spring of 1533: Anne reputedly dropped hints at her condition by stating aloud her craving for apples. The scandal rocked Europe; everyone was taking an interest in Anne’s pregnancy, yet the strain of it may already have been causing tensions in the marriage. Denied his wife’s favours in order to protect her growing foetus, Henry’s eye was straying according to Chapuys: he ‘shows himself in love with another lady and many nobles are assisting him in the affair. This unidentified woman, sometimes referred to as the ‘imperial lady’ or possibly Madge Shelton, with whom Henry was involved the following year, came to Anne’s attention. Her unqueenly protestations were met with savage retorts and threats. Chapuys claimed that on 3 September, days before she gave birth, Anne had cause to be jealous of Henry’s behaviour, for which he chided her to ‘shut her eyes and endure’ as more ‘worthy’ persons had, for it was in his power to ‘humble’ her as much as he had raised her, with the result that they had not spoken for several days.
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However, this is not necessarily trustworthy. Given Henry’s desire for a healthy male child, it is unlikely he would have risked Anne’s composure so close to the birth; Chapuys’ reports could be notoriously unreliable and he was clearly writing with sympathy for Catherine: Henry’s secretary Sir William Paget described him as lacking honesty or truth; ‘he is a great practiser [plotter], tale-telling, lying and flattering’.
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On the contrary, one witness wrote that the king and queen were in ‘good health and merry’. However, it must also have been a difficult time for Anne, knowing the extent of her unpopularity; that week Thomas Cromwell received reports of commoners speaking against her marriage, like the priest in Rye, against whom allegations of defamation were made only two days before Elizabeth’s arrival. In the same week, men in Flanders were reporting that Anne had been ‘brought to bed of a monster’, or that her child was dead; according to them, the king was abused by her and scarcely dared go out ‘for the rumour of the people’. Further rumours of discontent had reached Cromwell’s ears, as his scribe recorded in June, that some people in the realm ‘be not in their minds full pleased and content’ at the match.
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One anonymous writer in Rome predicted the child would be weak because of his father’s complexion and ‘habits of life’; it may suffer physical debilities because of his rampant sexual appetite
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while at the end of the month, an English priest named Gebbons was reported to have called the queen a whore and harlot and claimed many burnings at Smithfield would herald her downfall.
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Yet courtly preparations went ahead in spite of the possible marital discord. Margaret Beaufort’s arrangements for previous royal confinements changed hands; Catherine’s chamberlain was forced to hand over all the relevant papers to Cromwell, in an act of such bitter personal symbolism for the defeated queen and her triumphant rival. The lying-in chamber was prepared at Greenwich, along the same lines as those made ready for Catherine of Aragon, although at this turning point in the country’s religious history, it is unknown whether the full complement of images, crucifixes and icons were at hand. Anne’s sympathies lay firmly with the Reformed faith, yet the use of such icons in churches would not be fully banned until the reign of Edward VI. Catholic talismen may or may not have been present at her delivery and she may or may not have used them: Dr David Starkey is confident of their inclusion
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and Anne was known to use other superstitious charms and aides such as cramp rings and to request the presence of the sacrament during her incarceration. Her chambers probably contained an altar and religious texts even if she had rejected the images and relics of Catherine’s faith. The floor was carpeted and a false ceiling lined with tapestries. A special cupboard had been built to house the queen’s plate, an important mark of status replicated in lying-in chambers throughout the country, to house whatever the household could afford, from wood and pewter up to silver and gold. Some families even commissioned new ceremonial plate for the occasion, marked with images, dates and names. Henry’s physicians and astrologers had predicted a son; the Duke of Norfolk reported to Francis I that Henry was planning to christen him Henry or Edward and that elaborate tournaments and jousts had been planned. Some of Anne’s favourites were so confident of the baby’s sex that they had already sent to Flanders for horses on which to compete. Chapuys reported that one of the most ‘magnificent and gorgeous’ beds, once given in ransom for a Duke d’Alençon in 1515, had been removed from Henry’s treasure room in July as preparation for the birth, and the chamber walls were hung with tapestries depicting the life of St Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins.