LITMIR.BIZ

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so did all the ladies of the bedchamber; she did kiss her brother and write to him of her pregnancy but then, as Alesius pointed out, ‘it is a usual custom throughout the whole of Britain that ladies married and unmarried, even the most coy, kiss not only a brother, but any honourable person, even in public’.²²

      However one piece of evidence was of terrific moment and had also the ring of authenticity. Anne was accused of making an unguarded comment to her sister-in-law, Lady Rochford, who had subsequently become a hostile witness against her husband and queen. The rash female confidence was: ‘que le Roy n’estait habile en cas de soy copuler avec femme, et qu’il n’avait ni vertu ni puissance’ [that the king has not the ability to make love to a woman, for he has neither the vigour nor the potency].

      This was so sensitive an area of discussion that when Lord Rochford at his trial was asked to comment on this statement he was handed a piece of paper with the words written down rather than have them broadcast to the packed court. (He inadvertently – or otherwise – read them out loud.) To cast aspersions on Henry’s virility was bad enough. To say such things about a king so wilful in his drive for a son and heir, and so ruthless in his actions to achieve that, was dangerous in the extreme. And the danger was doubly reflexive against Anne, for a powerful man’s impotence was readily blamed on the woman. Perhaps the words of the indictment against Anne, that due to her activities ‘certain harms and perils have befallen the royal body’, referred implicitly to that dreaded loss of virility which may well have periodically affected the king.

      So the net closed in around the queen. She was almost certainly innocent of the gross charges brought against her, as were the men chosen as luckless tools in her downfall. The evidence produced against them was barely plausible let alone proof of anything more than acquaintanceship and, in Lord Rochford’s case, fraternal affection. Pride, reckless indiscretion and ill luck were Anne’s undoing at the hands of a king with absolute power, his fickle heart and tyrannical nature in harness to a fanatic pursuit of a male heir.

      There was one poignant glimpse of the baby Elizabeth, only two and a half years old, being held up to her father by a distraught Anne for the last time. In his letter to Elizabeth on her accession, Alesius wrote: ‘Never shall I forget the sorrow which I felt when I saw the most serene Queen, your most religious mother, carrying you, still a little baby, in her arms and entreating the most serene King, your father, in Greenwich Palace, from the open window of which he was looking into the courtyard … the faces and gestures of the speakers plainly showed that the King was angry.’²³ Anne must have been dispatched immediately to the Tower for just as Alesius arrived in London from Greenwich the cannon thundered out, heralding the imprisonment of a person of the nobility or higher.

      Having collapsed in hysterical terror when first imprisoned, Anne recovered her composure to impress even her enemies at her trial. On 19 May 1536 she was beheaded. As a special dispensation a swordsman was imported from France so that her execution was effected not by an axe on the block but by a sword. His dexterity was so great that Anne appeared unaware of the moment of death and those present thought the whole process looked more like sleight of hand than the gruesome butchery it so often became. Her arrest, trial and execution had all taken place within seventeen days. Three days before she died, the final humiliation was delivered by Archbishop Cranmer, her fair-weather friend. He had managed to elicit from Anne some statement that could be used to nullify her marriage to the king, possibly concerning the contractual status of her previous engagement to Lord Henry Percy. So Anne went to her death, still a young woman but technically no longer a queen.

      The baby princess’s future also was in the balance. Although she too was to be threatened with a traitor’s death eighteen years later, at this time she was not in peril. Elizabeth’s own status, however, was inextricably bound up with her mother’s and just as the legality of Anne’s marriage was denied, so too was her daughter’s legitimacy. Two months after her mother’s execution, an act removing her from the succession stated she was ‘illegitimate … excluded and banned to claim, challenge or demand any inheritance as lawful heir … to [the king] by lineal descent’. From being the much-vaunted Princess Elizabeth, for a time sole heir to her father’s crown, she now became just Lady Elizabeth, with no clear place in the Tudor succession. Significantly, given the sexual charges against her mother, there was never any occasion when Henry chose to doubt the fact that Elizabeth was his true daughter.

      Although largely oblivious at the time, for she was not yet three years old and living in a separate household, Elizabeth’s subsequent demeanour and expectations were affected fundamentally by the legacy of Anne’s spectacular fall from favour, her execution for treason and subsequent vilification for obscene acts and rumours of evil. Of all Henry’s wives, her own mother, Anne Boleyn, was to attract the most attention and opprobrium during her lifetime and the most scandalous stories in the centuries which followed. Lurid tales of incest and witchcraft grew with the telling. And witchery was strongly believed to be passed to subsequent generations as a hereditary taint: people born of ‘bad and wicked parents’ were deemed likely to be witches themselves.²⁴ This was a damnation that would fuel her daughter’s enemies and echo in unexpected ways down the years.

      But even more damaging to Elizabeth’s confidence was her disputed legitimacy and shifting status as one of her father’s heirs – or not – as his own dynastic struggles continued. Even as a small child she appeared to be conscious of her demotion. When the new queen, Jane Seymour, recalled the Princess Mary to court in the spring of 1537, the three-and-a-half-year-old Elizabeth was reputed to have said to the governor of her household: ‘How haps it, Governor, yesterday my Lady Princess, and today but my Lady Elizabeth?’ This insecurity would become a lasting strain in her life, played upon and exacerbated by the indubitable claims on the English throne of her cousin and rival Mary Queen of Scots.

      Prior to Mary’s birth and the beginning of her own lifelong competition for the English throne, her father, James V of Scotland, was already locked into a futile arm-wrestling with his uncle and neighbour Henry VIII, both conducting raids and counter-raids of the border lands between their two kingdoms. Although James had managed to wrong-foot his uncle in the marriage stakes by winning the hand of Mary’s mother, Mary of Guise, from under Henry’s nose (Henry had her in mind as his fourth wife), he was having less luck with his frontier skirmishes against the English king. Henry had launched spasmodic raids across the border and James, increasingly demoralized by the lack of solidarity from his lords (many of whom were accepting money from the English exchequer), had attempted a counterattack. In 1542, in the bitter end of November, James presided over an ill-judged retaliatory invasion of the Debatable Land, the unruly and ungovernable strip of wild country to the west of Liddesdale. In this godforsaken heath he suffered a humiliating rout of his men by the English troops at Solway Moss. His uncommitted nobles had deserted him and over a thousand Scots were taken prisoner.

      James was left to ride north, broken in spirit and submerged in deepest melancholy. He was an intelligent, sensual man, a creative builder of beautiful palaces, personally attractive to his people but temperamentally more suited perhaps to the life of an enlightened landowner than to the crown of thorns of the Scottish monarchy. He had a complex character, combining opposing qualities of rapacity and a certain identification with his people. He tried to break the domination of his lords and establish a rule of law but earned the suspicion of both church and nobility with his attempts at raising money from their assets in order to build grand palaces such as Falkland and Linlithgow. Striving to secure a male heir for his dynasty he, nevertheless, was known for his licentiousness and fathered seven or more illegitimate children, at least five of whom were sons. John Knox managed succinctly to sum up his doublesided nature, a polarity that fatally weakened him as a man and a king: ‘Hie was called of some a good poore mans king; of otheris hie was termed murtherare of the nobilitie, and one that had decreed thair hole destruction. Some praised him for the repressing of thyft and oppressioun; otheris dispraised him for the defoulling of menis wiffis and virgines. And thus men spake evin as affectionis led thame. And yitt none spack all together besydis the treuth: for a parte of all these foresaidis war so manifest that as the verteuis could nott be denyed, so could nott the vices

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