The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (58 page)

The Concubine’s Little Bastard

A
nne’s daughter Elizabeth was just two years and eight months old when her mother was put to death; she had been left at Greenwich during those dark days. Sarah Gristwood and Maria Perry have both raised the question of just how closely Elizabeth bonded with her mother: nourished by a wet nurse from birth, she was only three months old when she was removed from Anne’s care and assigned her own household at Hatfield, away from the court, which the little girl was rarely to attend during her infancy. Thereafter she lived under the constant care of her Lady Mistress, the capable and aristocratic Margaret Bourchier, Lady Bryan, whom Henry VIII made a baroness in her own right; and Anne had been merely an occasional visitor and a sender of costly gifts, never a constant presence in her child’s life. So there could not have been a close relationship between them, and in later life Elizabeth, using the royal plural, was to write that she was “more indebted to them that bringeth us up well than to our parents”—for her father was a similarly distant figure.

Yet that was the norm for royal and aristocratic children in the sixteenth century, and the Queen’s words should not be interpreted as a criticism. Thus it may well have been that Elizabeth’s “emotional life was unaffected by her mother’s misfortunes.”
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The loss of her mother—that remote figure—may have had less impact on her than we imagine, its
most vivid consequences perhaps the change in her status and the cessation of pretty gifts. What counted most was that Lady Bryan, now a venerable sixty-eight, remained at the center of the child’s world, an ever-constant, stable, and reassuring presence,
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while Katherine Champernowne (later Astley), who was to replace her as the mother figure in Elizabeth’s life, was already installed as one of her gentlewomen.
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During the weekend immediately following Anne’s execution, when the King moved to Hampton Court, he gave orders for his daughter to be taken from Greenwich to the nursery palace at Hunsdon in the care of Lady Bryan. There is often an assumption that Elizabeth was spurned by her father in the weeks after her mother’s death—indeed, it has been conjectured that he could not at that time bear to set eyes on her,
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and even that he grossly neglected her,
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for in August 1536, Lady Bryan had to beg Cromwell for new clothes to replace those that her charge had outgrown, revealing in the process that no one in Elizabeth’s household had received instructions as to her changed status:

Lady Bryan also mentioned disapprovingly that Elizabeth’s governor, Sir John Shelton, allowed the young child “to dine and sup every day at the board of estate,” from which it is clear that the little girl was still being treated as befit the daughter of a king. It is also clear that the recently widowed Lady Bryan feared that her own authority was being undermined. “A succorless and redeless [without advice] creature,” as she described herself, she was obviously concerned that she might be dismissed in the wake of her former mistress’s fall and the radical change in her
charge’s status, and begged Cromwell to “be good to my little lady and all hers.”
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Because it is evident that Elizabeth was still being treated as a princess, this wardrobe crisis probably resulted from a mere administrative lapse, the King (to whom all decisions relating to Elizabeth had been referred since her infancy) being away on his nuptial progress in August, or followed an unexpected growth spurt. It did not necessarily mean that Anne Boleyn’s fall had undermined Henry’s affection for their daughter,
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and there is no evidence that she was out of favor. At the end of June he gave orders for her household to be reorganized, allocating her thirty-two servants. Lady Bryan had told Cromwell she was sure the King would have much cause for pride in his daughter, “for she is as toward a child and as gentle of conditions as ever I knew any in my life, Jesu preserve Her Grace.”
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And on July 21, Lady Mary (now restored to favor through the good offices of Cromwell and Jane Seymour) had no compunction about writing to Henry from Hunsdon: “My sister Elizabeth is in good health, and such a child toward as I doubt not but Your Highness shall have cause to rejoice of in time coming.”
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When the King visited Mary at Hunsdon in August, he was probably reunited with Elizabeth too, and she was soon to be seen again at court, where the French Cardinal du Bellay observed that “the King is very affectionate to her [and] loves her very much.”
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Even so, that summer she was the subject of much conjecture in a court that was still seething with gossip and speculation about Anne Boleyn’s “abominable and detestable” crimes.
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Some of those tales undoubtedly concerned Elizabeth’s paternity.

Chapuys himself reported—with more relish than truth—that “the Archbishop of Canterbury declared by sentence that the Concubine’s daughter was the bastard of Mr. Norris, and not the King’s daughter,”
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as the indictment had implied. This mistaken assumption reflects the gossip to which the secret proceedings at Lambeth undoubtedly gave rise, suggesting that the true grounds for Cranmer’s annulment of Anne’s marriage to the King were never openly divulged, and were the subject of much speculation. Dr. Ortiz, the Emperor’s ambassador in Rome, had already predicted—prematurely, as it turned out: “It is intended to declare the child not to be the King’s.”
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It was claimed in the anonymous Portuguese letter written on June 10, 1536, that after Anne’s execution, “the council declared that the Queen’s
daughter was the child of her brother, and that she should be removed from her place [in the succession],”
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while in the Low Countries rumor even had it that Elizabeth was the result of a casual encounter between her mother and a peasant: “It is now said,” wrote Jean Hannaert of Lyons on June 2, “that her pretended daughter was taken from a poor man.”
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In England there was similar covert speculation.
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If Elizabeth were not the King’s daughter, then even the debased status of a royal bastard was not rightfully hers.
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It was almost certainly because of the gossip that Lady Bryan was informed in August that “it was the King’s pleasure that my Lady Elizabeth shall keep her chamber and not come abroad.”
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There is evidence that Lady Mary herself would take with her to the grave the belief that Mark Smeaton was Elizabeth’s real father. When her half sister was little, Mary played a mother’s part to her and clearly cherished her dearly, but as Elizabeth grew more like Anne Boleyn, Mary’s affections cooled, for every time she looked at her, she was reminded of the injuries, insults, and ignominy she and her mother had suffered at Anne Boleyn’s hands.
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As queen, when any sympathy for her half sister had soured and there remained only suspicion and resentment, Mary was heard to remark several times on the resemblance between Elizabeth and Mark Smeaton,
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and to say that Elizabeth’s morals were no more admirable than her mother’s had been. Shortly before her death, she confided to Bernardo de Fresneda, the confessor of her husband, King Philip II of Spain, that Elizabeth had “the face and countenance of Mark Smeaton, who was a very handsome man,” and thus “was neither her sister nor the daughter of King Henry.”
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Mary once sarcastically told Simon Renard, the Imperial ambassador, that Elizabeth was merely “the offspring of one of whose good fame he might have heard, and who had received her punishment.”
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It would have been anathema to Mary “to see the illegitimate child of a criminal who was punished as a public strumpet” inheriting the throne
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—a child, moreover, who had “a bewitching personality” and deplorable “characteristics in which she resembled her mother.”
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Thus Mary was perhaps deluding herself, since there is no evidence that Henry VIII ever doubted that Elizabeth was his daughter. As Alexander Aless told Elizabeth in 1559, citing it as proof of Anne Boleyn’s innocence, “Your father always acknowledged you as legitimate.” Doubtless she resembled him too greatly for there to be any doubt, something several people
would remark upon during the course of her life, among them those who observed that she looked more like him than Mary did; and one only has to look at the many portraits of Elizabeth I to see that she was her father’s daughter, in coloring and in profile. Moreover, he was to restore her to the succession in 1544, something he would never have done had he any doubts about her paternity.

We might wonder if Mary was truly able to recall what Smeaton had looked like. Prior to 1529 he was an obscure member of Cardinal Wolsey’s household, and even after he was preferred to the Privy Chamber that year, he was apparently regarded as relatively lowly and insignificant. Mary herself had been sent away from court in 1531, and did not return until some months after Smeaton’s execution, so even if she could remember him, she would not have laid eyes on him for five years. Possibly she was basing her assertions on the rumors circulating at that time, the speculation of others, or—which is most likely—malicious lies spread later by Elizabeth’s enemies in the hope of impugning her claim to the throne. Or perhaps it just was wishful thinking on Mary’s part, born of the vain hope of excluding Elizabeth from the succession.

There are some indications that Henry VIII was concerned lest Elizabeth showed signs of inheriting her mother’s coquettish character and morals, which in itself is further evidence that he believed in Anne’s guilt. He insisted that her household be staffed by “ancient and sad [i.e., sober, serious] persons,” and once turned down the application of a young gentlewoman in favor of that of one “of elder years,” grumbling that there were already too many young people around his daughter.
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He was perhaps remembering the youthful crowd who had laughed and flirted with Anne Boleyn in her privy chamber, with disastrous consequences. He saw to it too that Elizabeth’s rigorous education was framed so as to constrain her to the narrow paths of virtue, as well as to erudition, although this was by no means unusual at that time, women being universally regarded as morally weaker than men; yet this child, the daughter of so notorious a mother, would have been perceived as having more need of such instruction than most. It would be no exaggeration to say that in this respect Elizabeth would always bear the stigma of being Anne Boleyn’s child.

Yet that stain, and the taint of bastardy, would have been far outweighed by her being the daughter of the King. And there was little shame, in that period, in having a mother who had perished on the scaffold.
A Mantuan visitor to England was surprised to discover that “many persons, members of whose families have been hanged and quartered, are accustomed to boast of it.” It was, he learned, the mark of a gentleman to own such relations.
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We do not know when or how Elizabeth, a highly precocious little girl, discovered that her mother had “suffered by sword,”
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but that she immediately noticed the change in her status is apparent in her sharp comment, made very soon after Anne’s death, to Sir John Shelton, her governor and great-uncle: “Why Governor, how hath it, yesterday my Lady Princess, and today but my Lady Elizabeth?” As Tracy Borman has pointed out, this suggests that Elizabeth was not given any information to prepare her for her mother’s death or even informed of it, but found out what had happened only gradually; for surely the grim truth was too harrowing to be disclosed in graphic detail to such a young child. She was at Hunsdon with Mary when Lady Kingston visited on May 26, 1536, and presumably gave a firsthand account of Anne’s execution to the princess, but it is doubtful Elizabeth was allowed to overhear it. Most likely, she learned of the death of her mother in gradual stages from her kindly governesses, Lady Bryan and Katherine Champernowne.