The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (59 page)

But the subject seems to have remained taboo. The shocking details of Anne’s crimes—adultery, incest, murder, and the suspicion of witchcraft—were perhaps seen as too shameful to be openly discussed, let alone with her child. And given the dearth of surviving comments on her fate, it is possible that some people felt it was too dangerous or politically compromising to express an opinion. As has been demonstrated, the evidence we have suggests that most accepted the official line. So Elizabeth may have grown up to an awareness that there was a dark and dreadful mystery about her mother’s fate that needed to be unraveled.

It would appear that Henry VIII himself, in giving orders that the child keep to her chamber when rumors about her paternity were rife, was determined to keep her in innocence as to what happened to her mother for as long as possible, and spare her the gruesome details. Tellingly, when in 1549 her stepfather, Admiral Thomas Seymour (who had tried to seduce her when she was a mere adolescent), informed one of Elizabeth’s servants that he was going to Boulogne, which the English pronounced “Boleyn,” he added, “No word of Boleyn!”
²⁸
This is all at variance with
the assertion that the child Elizabeth was probably subjected to a barrage of propaganda about her bastardy and the wickedness of her mother;
²⁹
given the way in which Anne Boleyn’s name, initials, and images had been speedily and thoroughly obliterated, and that the King was rarely heard to refer to her again, the theory that after 1536 she was a subject best avoided seems more credible.

For all the silence, however, Anne’s terrible end, and the awareness that her father had ordered her mother’s execution, however justified, must have overshadowed Elizabeth’s childhood. Over the years, guarded revelations, gossip, rumor and innuendo, picked up from any number of sources, and the growing awareness of her bastard status, must have caused the maturing Elizabeth recurring distress and enduring insecurities, and certainly affected her emotional development. Her painful awareness of her mother’s fate was probably one of the factors that prompted her decision never to marry. Another was almost certainly the execution of her father’s fifth wife, Katherine Howard, in 1542, on charges of immorality that must have awakened painful thoughts of Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth was only eight then, but it was around this time that she announced to young Robert Dudley (who would recall this many years later, when he was Earl of Leicester and hoping to marry her himself), “I will never marry.” Thomas Seymour’s shocking, and ultimately fatal, attempts to seduce the adolescent Elizabeth would have left their mark; he too may have seen her as easy game, her mother’s daughter.

Elizabeth herself tried more than once to explain her aversion to marriage, an aversion she made clear to Archbishop Parker in 1559 when “she took occasion to speak in bitterness of the holy estate of matrimony;” indeed, she spoke so vehemently that Parker afterward told her minister, William Cecil, he “was in a horror to hear her.”
³⁰
In 1561 she would tell a Scots envoy that the marital conflicts and disasters within her own family—she did not mention Anne Boleyn specifically—had led to her conviction that wedlock was an insecure state: “Some say that this marriage was unlawful, some that one was a bastard, some other, to and fro, as they favored or misliked. So many doubts of marriage was in all hands that I stand [in] awe myself to enter into marriage fearing the controversy.”
³¹
She was referring no doubt to her father’s matrimonial career and to the disputed marriages of both his sisters. Four years later, in conversation with a French diplomat, Elizabeth expressed the fear that, were
she to marry, her husband might “carry out some evil wish, if he had one,”
³²
and later still she once burst out that she “hated the idea of marriage every day more, for reasons which she would not divulge to a twin soul, if she had one, much less to a living creature.”
³³

There were doubtless other repercussions too. Her tendency, in later life, to shy away from unpalatable facts and to fence around them—witness her prevarication over the death warrant of Mary, Queen of Scots—may also have had its roots in the traumas of her early childhood. She cannot have failed to draw comparisons between Anne Boleyn and the condemned Mary, and with others sentenced to beheading, including her cousin, Thomas Howard, the fourth Duke of Norfolk; and her reluctance to send Mary and Norfolk to the block may have had a lot to do with her awareness of what happened to her mother, as well as to her own near brush with the headsman in 1554.

It cannot have been easy for the twenty-year-old Elizabeth, imprisoned in 1554 in the Tower by Mary I on suspicion of treason, and expecting daily to be summoned to the scaffold, to be incarcerated for three months in those same rooms in the Queen’s lodgings that Anne Boleyn had occupied prior to her condemnation in 1536; in fact, we might conclude that Mary, who must have known where Anne had been held, deliberately intended that Elizabeth should suffer this added refinement to her punishment. And Elizabeth’s permitted perambulations took her along the wall walk, which overlooked the scaffold before the House of Ordnance, a scaffold built for the deposed nine-days queen, Lady Jane Grey, on the exact place where Anne Boleyn had perished, and on which Anne’s daughter might yet meet her end. Years later, when she was queen, Elizabeth revealed to a French nobleman that the prospect of the axe cleaving into her neck had been so terrible to her during those anxious days that she resolved to ask that a French swordsman be sent for, to dispatch her as her mother had been dispatched.
³⁴

Elizabeth cannot but have thought of Anne when she came to the Tower in triumph, prior to her coronation in January 1559,
³⁵
and again when she passed through a triumphal arch in Gracechurch Street during her state progress through the City of London to Westminster, for above her, as part of one of the pageants mounted in her honor, the “Pageant of the Roses,” the citizens had erected life-sized figures, seated together for the first time in twenty-three years, of “King Henry the Eighth with a
white and red rose in front of him, with the pomegranate [the symbol of their fortuitous fertility] between them, and Queen Anne Boleyn, mother of the present Queen, with a gold crown on the head and a gilt scepter, and in front of her small branches of little roses [and] the coat of arms and device of the same Queen.”
³⁶
Above them both was the figure of Elizabeth, “seen in majesty.” The lightweight crown that Elizabeth wore after her coronation may have been the one made for Anne Boleyn in 1533.
³⁷
There must have been many such reminders of her mother.

Elizabeth had been brought up to idolize Henry VIII, and clearly revered his memory, often referring to him with pride, and styling him “Her Majesty’s dearest father” in official documents. She grew to maturity believing that he had always loved her, whatever he had thought of her mother, and that it was because of her close resemblance to him that he ordered she be reared as a king’s daughter, rather than as the dubious offspring of a traitor, and left well provided for at his death.
³⁸
“She prides herself on her father and glories in him,” observed a Venetian envoy after she had ascended the throne in 1558.
³⁹
When she rode in state through London before her coronation in 1559 and a man in the crowd cried, “Remember old King Henry the Eighth!” she was seen to smile delightedly.
⁴⁰
She seems to have borne Henry no grudge for his treatment of her mother, regarding him as much the victim of conspiracy as Anne; and in all her long life, she rarely referred to Anne Boleyn.
⁴¹

This reticence is perhaps understandable, given the conspiracy of silence about Anne that probably blighted Elizabeth’s formative years. It has been said—incorrectly—that we do not know whether she believed her mother to have been wrongly convicted.
⁴²
Unlike her half sister Mary I, when Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, she did not have the annulment of her parents marriage reversed by Parliament, and there was no official push to rehabilitate Anne Boleyn’s reputation. There was much discussion about this at the time, and the decision not to repeal the 1536 Act of Succession was finally made on the advice of Sir Nicholas Bacon, then Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, who pointed out that as Elizabeth was lawful heiress to the throne under the terms of the Act of Succession of 1544 and Henry VIII’s will, there was no point in reviving the heated controversies about the validity of her parents’ marriage, Anne’s fall, and her own legitimacy. This made sense because Elizabeth’s hold on the throne was still tenuous and there were many who already regarded
her as a bastard, a heretic, and a usurper. Instead Parliament merely drew up a statute confirming her title—sparsely worded compared with that of Mary I—passed another act confirming her as Anne Boleyn’s sole heiress and enabling her to inherit her mother’s property, forfeited on Anne’s conviction for treason.
⁴³

Several writers have regarded as significant Elizabeth’s failure to translate her mother’s remains to a more honorable resting place, as James I was to do for his mother, the executed Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1612, when he had her body moved from Peterborough Cathedral to Westminster Abbey. Yet it is almost certain that if the idea of moving Anne ever occurred to her, Elizabeth left it alone for the reasons Sir Nicholas Bacon had cited. It was just not advisable to revive old controversies and the dreadful events of 1536, and her presence at the reinterment of Anne Boleyn would have been the equivalent of making a provocative public statement that might impugn her father’s memory and her own status. There was also the problem of the funeral rite, for Anne had died in the Catholic faith. Moreover, she was already buried in a royal chapel, so Elizabeth may have felt that, for many good reasons, she was better left there undisturbed.

In 1572, in the wake of her excommunication by the Pope, Elizabeth commanded Matthew Parker, now Archbishop of Canterbury, to search out the 1528 papal bull of dispensation, authorizing her parents’ marriage. She chose not to publish it, but kept it at hand in case it became desirable to produce it as the basis for proclaiming herself legitimate in the eyes of the Roman as well as the English Church.

There can be little doubt as to Elizabeth’s true opinion of the woman who had given birth to her. There are many clues. As early as
cd
. 1544-45 she was painted, age about ten or eleven, in a state portrait of Henry VIII and his family, wearing—astonishingly—one of Anne Boleyn’s initial pendants, proclaiming to all posterity that she was her mother’s daughter—and this, presumably, with the King’s sanction. Thirty years later, around 1575, she commissioned a gold ring bearing the initial E in diamonds and R for Regina in blue enamel; it opened to reveal miniature enameled reliefs of herself and Anne Boleyn. Thereafter, she wore this ring constantly, and it was only removed from her finger at her death, when it was taken to her successor, James VI of Scotland, as proof of her demise. The ring is now at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country retreat, primary
evidence that Elizabeth kept her mother’s image secretly with her for much of her adult life, and privately honored her memory.
⁴⁴

In 1553, when her sister Mary ascended the throne, Elizabeth candidly intimated to Simon Renard, the Spanish ambassador, that the Queen was hostile toward her because of the injuries she and her mother had been dealt by Anne Boleyn. Clearly Elizabeth was well informed. Foreign envoys also attributed Mary’s increasing hostility to the fact that Elizabeth was Anne’s daughter: “She still resents the injuries inflicted on Queen Katherine, her lady mother, by the machinations of Anne Boleyn,” Renard observed. Later in Mary’s reign, Elizabeth, in a more bullish mood, openly—and rashly—voiced her opinion, to various people, that she was as legitimate as her sister, and of equal rank in blood as a daughter of Henry VIII. Her mother, she declared—ignoring the fact that she herself had been conceived out of wedlock—would never have cohabited with him “unless by way of marriage with the authority of the Church and the intervention of the Primate of England.” She had acted in good faith according to her conscience, and lived and died in the Church that had declared her marriage valid, all of which rendered her blameless and her daughter legitimate.
⁴⁵
There was evidently no doubt in Elizabeth’s mind that Anne had been a virtuous woman.

As queen, Elizabeth adopted Anne Boleyn’s motto,
“Semper eadem”
(Always the same), and her badge of a crowned white falcon perched on a tree stump flowering with Tudor roses, which she had stamped on the bindings of her books. She may have felt that the tree stump, innocuous enough in her mother’s day, had become symbolic of Anne being cut down before her time.
⁴⁶
She owned a set of virginals bearing the Boleyn arms, which had probably once belonged to Anne; they are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Elizabeth openly prided herself on being “the most English woman of the kingdom,” and given that the Tudors came from Welsh stock, she must have been paying a discreet tribute to her mother’s ancestry.
⁴⁷

She would do much—subject to their merits—for some of her relatives on her mother’s side, notably the Careys: she created her cousin Henry Carey as Lord Hunsdon and Captain of the Gentlemen Pensioners, the sovereign’s personal guard; and she was grief-stricken when his sister Katherine, a gentlewoman of the Queen’s Privy Chamber and wife to Sir Francis Knollys, died in 1569, for they had been very close. Both
Henry and Katherine would have been able privately to tell Elizabeth many things about her mother, who was their aunt and whom they knew in childhood. Katherine, as has been noted, may even have attended upon Anne in the Tower.