The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (6 page)

It is also possible that the King’s talk of sortileges may have sprung purely from crushing disappointment rather than premeditated conviction, for although Anne would eventually be charged with heinous crimes, she was never accused of witchcraft, although that may well have been implicit in one of the articles of her indictment. Yet if Henry truly believed her guilty of sorcery—that most feared and sacrilegious of crimes—why did he not proceed against her immediately? It would therefore appear that
the King spoke of witchcraft only in anger and frustration, or was bitterly casting about in his mind for any pretext to extricate himself from this unsatisfactory marriage.

There may be another explanation. According to Chapuys, Henry had confided his suspicion of witchcraft to an unnamed person, yet it was another anonymous person, someone high up in the court, who reported this to the Exeters (both partisans of Katherine and Mary), who in turn reported it to Chapuys. Thus the information that the ambassador received was fourthhand and came via two unnamed sources. It is not even clear if the person Henry allegedly spoke to actually told the high-ranking courtier what he had said, or if the courtier overheard Henry, or if the person to whom the King uttered those words was talking about what he had said. It is therefore possible that what Chapuys heard was somewhat garbled, or even made up; such information always had its price, and this was the kind of thing that both Exeter and the ambassador would have wanted to hear. Then again, what Henry said, or was supposed to have said, was so sensational that one might not expect those recounting it to get it substantially wrong.

Whether Henry sincerely believed that Anne had snared him by witchcraft—and aside from the fact that he seems now to have been convinced that she would never bear him an heir—there were good reasons for ending their marriage, the most compelling being his genuine fear that God was displeased by it. This fear has even been described by some writers as panic, upon which Anne’s enemies would no doubt try to turn to their advantage in the weeks to come. The King was perhaps wondering if severing himself from Anne would restore his credit with the Deity, put an end to much political opposition, pave the way for a new, uncontroversial and fruitful marriage, and provide a solution to the problem of the Lady Mary.
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He may already have had these factors in mind when he had made tentative inquiries about an annulment some time prior to Katherine’s death. Certainly, from the time of Anne’s miscarriage, many people believed that the King was planning to free himself from her.

It seemed poetic justice to some when, on the very day of Katherine’s funeral, Anne lost the son who would have ensured her safety. The Imperialists in Europe rejoiced when they heard what had befallen her: “This is news to thank God for,” Dr. Ortiz wrote. “Although the King has not
improved in consequence of his fall, it is a great mercy that his paramour miscarried of a son.”
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It may be that it was the stress of her insecure situation alone that caused Anne to miscarry,
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but her contemporaries believed there was more to it than that. There was rampant speculation at court. Chapuys reported on February 10 that “some think it was entirely owing to a defect in her constitution, and her utter inability to bear male children, others imagine that it was caused by the fear that the King would treat her as he treated his late Queen, which is not unlikely, considering his behavior toward a lady of the court named Mistress Seymour, to whom, as many say, he has lately made valuable presents.”
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Given that Henry had already set aside one wife in order to marry her maid-of-honor, there was every reason for Anne to worry that he might do it again, although Chapuys for some time was dismissive of rumors that Henry actually wanted to marry Jane.

When news of the Queen’s miscarriage spread, the rumors multiplied. On February 10, Chapuys also reported: “There are innumerable persons who consider that the Concubine is unable to conceive, and say that the daughter said to be hers and the abortion the other day are suppositious.”
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He meant that people thought Elizabeth to be a changeling, rather than the fruit of adultery; this was not the first, or the last, time that the blood of an English royal heir had been impugned—John of Gaunt’s political enemies had called him a changeling in the fourteenth century, and the Catholic James II’s son, Prince James Francis Edward Stuart, the so-called “warming pan baby,” would suffer the same calumny in the seventeenth century. In September 1534, Anne Boleyn had to admit to the King that her announcement of a pregnancy had been premature,
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so it is hardly surprising that those who had not seen the dead fetus did not believe in its existence. The Bishop of Faenza, in a letter to the Vatican, reported “that woman” had not been with child at all, and had much trouble concealing the fact, so “to keep up the deceit, she would allow no one to attend upon her but her sister.” (There is, however, no evidence that Anne’s sister, Mary Boleyn, was in attendance; she had been banished from court after an ill-advised marriage in 1534.) Soon, it was widely believed abroad that Anne had not been pregnant at all. Dr. Ortiz wrote on March 22 that “La Ana feared the King would leave her, and it was thought that the reason of her pretending the miscarriage of a son was that the King might not leave her, seeing that she conceived sons.”
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In 1989, Retha Warnicke put forward the startling theory that Anne’s fall came about for “the sole reason” that she had borne a deformed fetus, which in the Tudor period was associated with witchcraft, and that this raised in the King very real fears of God’s displeasure, and moved him to get rid of her. In 1585, the Jesuit Nicholas Sander, the source of so many unfounded calumnies about Anne Boleyn (including the assertion that she was Henry VIII’s own daughter), claimed that the fetus had been deformed and that Henry convinced himself that it was not his, yet there is no contemporary evidence for any of this; had it been, Chapuys would surely have found out about it, as he had clearly been asking questions and states that what Anne delivered on January 29 “seemed to be a male child;” he makes no mention of any deformity in his reports. On the contrary, Lancelot de Carles heard that Anne had miscarried “a beautiful son, born before term.”

That fetus would have been examined very closely to determine its sex and the fact that it was of about fifteen weeks’ gestation. And were there any abnormality, it would surely have been promptly used as evidence against Anne, for people then believed that deformity was a judgment of God on both parents, especially in cases where conception took place outside marriage; such evidence could have bolstered charges of adultery, and indeed incest, which was thought even more likely to be responsible for deformity.
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Warnicke attempted to reinterpret several sources in order to bolster her unfounded theory, but a closer reading and understanding of them shows that she was inferring far too imaginatively, and most historians
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have rightly discounted her findings. The lack of any evidence, and the fact that the birth of a deformed fetus was never used against Anne, effectively demolishes Warnicke’s arguments.

Yet Chapuys might have been right about Anne having a “defective constitution” and being unable to bear children, although the possible nature of her problem was unknown to sixteenth-century medical science, for it was not identified until 1940. Anne’s first pregnancy resulted in a healthy child, but her three subsequent pregnancies ended in stillbirths, one at full term. Could it be that she was one of the few women who are rhesus negative?

Problems can arise when a man’s blood is rhesus positive and his partner’s is rhesus negative. They do not occur in a first pregnancy, but during that labor, tiny amounts of the baby’s blood can cross the placenta into
the mother’s bloodstream, and if the baby is rhesus positive, the mother becomes sensitized to these harmful antibodies. In succeeding pregnancies, the mother’s antibodies will pass through the placenta into the baby’s blood and, recognizing it as “foreign,” will try to break down its red blood cells. Nowadays, the condition can be diagnosed and treated by blood tests and transfusions, but in Anne Boleyn’s day it would invariably have resulted in stillbirths. Worse still for Henry and Anne’s dynastic hopes, if she had this condition, she could never have borne another living child.

Anne had many enemies, at court and in the country at large. Mention has been made of Eustache Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador, who arrived in England in 1529 and afterward proved himself to be one of Katherine’s and Mary’s staunchest champions. Chapuys, now forty-six, was a cultivated and sophisticated native of Savoy, a canon lawyer by profession, a former ecclesiastical judge, a humanist and a friend of the great scholar Erasmus. He was able, astute, and unafraid to speak his mind. He spoke excellent French, Spanish, and Latin, but was less fluent in English, and when he first arrived in England, he had to rely on a secretary to translate for him. His command of the language had improved immeasurably over the seven years he was there, yet he still may not have fully understood English idioms, which might account for the occasional vagaries in his dispatches.

These dispatches are heavily prejudiced in favor of Katherine of Aragon and the Lady Mary. Chapuys deplored the way in which the former Queen and her daughter had been treated by the King and “this accursed Anne,” and he fought in their corner zealously, far exceeding his instructions from the first, and repeatedly urging his master to invade England in support of Katherine’s cause. Anne Boleyn was his bête noire. She had supplanted the Emperor’s aunt and cruelly treated the Lady Mary, Charles’s cousin, and in the eyes of the Imperialists she was nothing but a whore, a heretic, and an adventuress. Acting on Charles V’s orders and his own inclinations, Chapuys, who openly deplored Anne’s “abominable and incestuous marriage,” had never acknowledged her as queen. Chapuys’s stance made him a constant irritation to Henry VIII, and earned him both the distrust of the King’s advisers and the hatred of the Boleyn faction. It is no great surprise to find him writing, on February 17, 1536, that Anne “bears me no good will.”
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Chapuys’s diplomatic reports are among the most important sources for this crucial period, and for generations historians have relied heavily—and perhaps too trustingly—upon them. Henry’s secretary, Sir William Paget, had a poor opinion of the ambassador: “I never took [Chapuys] for a wide man, but for one that used to speak without respect of honesty or truth, so it might serve his turn. He is a great practicer, tale-telling, lying and flattering.” Paget, of course, was biased, but it is apparent that Chapuys did sometimes repeat gossip or rumor as fact, and saw himself as something of a crusader in the cause of Katherine and Mary, so was unable to view affairs from any other viewpoint. Despite being astute and observant, he sometimes unwittingly relied on information that was deliberately fed to him for political reasons. Moreover, being based around London, and with little knowledge of the further reaches of the realm, he vastly overestimated the lengths to which Henry’s subjects would go to uphold the cause of Katherine and Mary. For over a century modern historians have questioned the veracity of Chapuys’s testimony, and it has been suggested that he was not as close to events as has been hitherto thought, and was therefore an unreliable witness.

Yet that is not entirely true. Chapuys had a difficult role. He did not like England or the English, yet he was obliged to exercise his diplomatic talents in that kingdom during one of the most tumultuous periods of its history. It has been asserted that he rarely attended court functions, yet it is clear that he enjoyed frequent access to Henry VIII, and to his ministers, with whom he often dined; he also had numerous contacts and informants, many of them close to the King, and operated an efficient spy network in the royal household. He was not just an eyewitness to many of the events he describes, but a shrewd observer. Henry appears to have liked him, although Chapuys angered and irritated him at times; Henry even confided in the ambassador now and then, or deliberately fed him information. Theirs was a sparring relationship, given that the King was aware of the ambassador’s disapproval of many aspects of his policy, not least his marital adventures; but there was respect on both sides. The Boleyn faction, of course, hated Chapuys.

Although at this stage there was no cohesive anti-Boleyn faction, Chapuys’s hatred of Anne Boleyn was shared by many, both at court and in the kingdom at large. Those who would become his natural allies in his continuing
and relentless campaign to bring down Anne Boleyn and her faction were Sir Francis Bryan; Sir Nicholas Carew; the Seymours; members of the “White Rose” families who were descended from the Yorkist kings of England—most notably the Courtenays, led by the Marquess of Exeter, and the Poles, headed by Lord Montagu, whose brother Geoffrey would express the view that the King “had been caught in the snare of unlawful love with the Lady Anne”;
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the humanist courtier Sir Thomas Elyot, former ambassador to Charles V, friend to the late Sir Thomas More, and a secret sympathizer with Queen Katherine; Catholic right-wingers, who resented the reforming Anne and her supporters, and anyone else who cherished a secret sympathy for Katherine and for Mary, who was regarded by many as Henry’s rightful heir.
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And, of course, Mary herself.

The influential courtier Sir Francis Bryan had no good opinion of Anne, and was perhaps one of the first people to view Jane as a means of toppling her from her throne. The one-eyed Bryan was nicknamed by Cromwell “the Vicar of Hell;” the subjective Sander says he was called this on account of “his notorious impiety,” yet it may be that he earned this name because of his plotting against Anne Boleyn.
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He was no rake—as the nickname might suggest—but a Renaissance scholar and close friend of the King, and had long been a gentleman of the Privy Chamber. His mother, Margaret Bowdrier, Lady Bryan, who was half sister to Anne Boleyn’s mother, had been governess in turn to Lady Mary and Princess Elizabeth. Bryan, ever the pragmatist, had been one of the earliest supporters of his “cousin” Anne, and later a leading member of her faction, but had since come to hate and resent her.