Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens - Jane Dunn

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winters to show her health to Henry VIII’s envoy. Elizabeth, however, was pronounced a healthy and anatomically perfect girl but her father’s demands were excessive and the marriage negotiations eventually came to nought.

      In a society used to dynastic marriages, brokered by diplomats, and public displays of affection bounded by the etiquette of courtly love, the love-struck middle-aged man was an unsettling sight. When that ageing man was a king, ordained by God, the uneasiness grew, for here was an all-powerful being in thrall to a woman, an omniscient monarch behaving like a fool. In Henry’s case, however, the obvious way to absolve that feeling of unseemliness in the spectator was to blame Anne. The harlot had somehow made him succumb to her wishes through the exercise of her powers, and those were most probably unnatural. Rumour abounded as to the nature of Anne’s hold over him.

      Gossip, rumour and innuendo are a powerful triad in any royal court when too much power, patronage and money circulates in a closed society of ambitious people with too little to do. In Henry’s court, life was made more treacherous by the sense of the nearness of death – through sudden illness, injury or an inexplicable eclipse from royal favour. At this point in his life, Henry was a sun king turned tyrant, and his whims could be fearsome. This ever-present threat of random violence was made more unnerving by the widespread belief in the supernatural, the practice of necromancy and the ready presence in everyday life of the devil. Rumour and speculation energized idle chatter, but too easily gained a life of its own: whispered puffballs had a habit of turning into stone-shod facts. When those rumours were of bewitchment and sexual depravity then the sixteenth-century victim of these accusations had little chance of restoring any reputation for virtue and probity. She had not much better odds of escaping with her life.

      The court was full also of the stories of Henry’s new mistresses, one even a cousin of Anne’s. There was talk of the king no longer in thrall to his wife, resentful of her temper, intelligence and assertiveness. The Venetian ambassador reported home that Henry ‘was already tired to satiety of this new Queen’.14 But the bitter accusations and estrangements were followed still by reconciliations with much merriment. Anne continued to view Catherine of Aragon’s existence as a threat and her daughter Mary, whose obstinacy and flagrant rudeness to her new stepmother – whose status she refused to acknowledge – was a constant thorn. Both were a continuing barrier to her own daughter’s inheritance and the further advancement of her ambitious family.

      A story, aimed at revealing Anne’s ruthlessness and malice, did the rounds of the court and diplomatic reports in the early summer of 1535. Anne was supposed to have paid a man to proclaim – to Thomas Cromwell and even to Henry himself – that he had had a revelation that the queen would not conceive again as long as Catherine and her daughter lived. Lives could hang on threads of trumped-up prophecy, divination and manipulative lies. And rumours could kill.

      But it was not just Anne’s appearance of sexual boldness which exercised her detractors; her strong evangelical leanings and active promotion of the reformed religion gained her some important enemies who were working always to find a way of diminishing, if not effacing, her influence on the king. Certainly her library was known for its inclusion of radical reform literature from the Continent and she was credited with introducing to Henry the polemical Obedience of a Christen Man by William Tyndale, a copy of whose English translation of the New Testament she owned soon after publication in 1534. All the chaplains she promoted to her service were evangelicals. According to Alesius, however, the interference in religious policy that focused the hostile forces against her was her instigation through Henry of the delegation sent to the German Lutheran princes in 1536. Before they had returned the trumped-up charges against her had been contrived.

      In fact, Henry’s ruthlessness towards the moral leaders of the opposition to his Reformation, specifically Sir Thomas More, his Lord Chancellor, and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was to shock the whole of Catholic Europe. Fisher, whom the pope provocatively had made a cardinal while he was imprisoned in the Tower, was the most bold and implacable of opponents and his downfall came when he refused to take the oath of succession, which placed Elizabeth as her father’s heir over Mary. Incarcerated in the Tower, both men were eventually executed in 1535, along with a number of other Catholic martyrs, as a result of a new treason act, which made ‘malicious’ denial of the king’s title punishable by death. The bluff and hearty Good King Hal had completed his metamorphosis into the paranoid tyrant of his later years. And Anne was blamed by many for the executions. It was even possible that Henry’s uneasiness at having destroyed More, once so close and admired a friend, meant he exorcised some of his guilt by blaming his wife for this too.

      In this atmosphere of alarm and fear, there was a short respite for Anne, for by the end of 1535 she was pregnant again. Despite the rumour, there was no indication that harm had been done to Catherine or her daughter to ensure this pregnancy. Quite soon, however, the divorced queen was mortally ill. Although her health had been failing for a long time, when Catherine finally died in January 1536 at the age of fifty, there were the inevitable rumours that Anne had succeeded at last in having her poisoned. This story was given some credence at the time by the news that when Catherine’s body was opened up they found her heart was ‘black and hideous to look at’ with a dark growth attached. Subsequent medical experts have stated this was much more likely to be a signature of the cancer which probably killed her.15 The royal lack of sympathy for Catherine was evident up to and beyond death. Right to the end, she and her daughter Mary had been forbidden to see each other, in an act of petty malice. And the news of her death after much suffering was greeted by the king without any show of guilt or sorrow.

      Anne and Henry celebrated in unseemly delight, with Anne – and possibly the king too – clothed from head to foot in yellow, more the symbolic colour of jealousy and betrayal than of mourning. Elizabeth, just over two years old, was taken to church in grand ceremonial ‘to the sound of trumpets’ and then, in her father’s embrace, shown off to his courtiers.16 Here was his legitimate heir, his actions proclaimed, although Henry still hoped to displace her with a son.

      This celebration of Elizabeth’s place in the succession, however, was to be short-lived. Rather than consolidating Anne’s position, Catherine’s death left the queen horribly exposed. While Catherine lived Henry would have found it very difficult to cast Anne off in order to marry for a third time. Now that protection was gone. There was a powerful argument, maintained by the conservative Catholic faction and which many in the general populace found sympathetic, that Henry’s marriage to Anne had never been legal and now, with his only true wife dead, he was an unencumbered widower who was free to marry again. But although the momentum was building inexorably against her, Anne still felt a certain optimism and relief: her new pregnancy brought hope. Her personal wheel of fortune she believed must have revolved by now. This time her body had to be nurturing a healthy boy. On this her fate, even her life, depended.

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