Anne soon began to crack under the strain, turning her sharp tongue on her husband, flaying him like a piece of leather. One successful pregnancy and two miscarriages in three years must have had her hormones completely out of whack. Henry’s eyes began to roam the court looking for a diversion from his harridan of a wife. When she complained, Henry told her to remember where she came from and that if he had to do it all over again, he wouldn’t! Anne must have started to panic. She knew that she was only safe as long as the king loved her. She grew thin and brittle, looking older than her years. To compensate for her unhappiness, and hoping to provoke Henry’s jealousy, she began to flirt outrageously at court.
Anne became increasingly isolated. Her arrogant and highhanded behavior on her way to the top had made her many enemies eager to see her fall. Catherine of Aragon still had friends at court, who called Anne “the goggle-eyed whore” behind her back. Her poor treatment of the young princess, Mary, appalled even her friends at court. She was blamed for the deaths of Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher, who refused to sign the Acts of Succession. Even her uncle the Duke of Norfolk, once one of her biggest supporters, began to turn his back on her. Norfolk liked his women docile and obedient and was not pleased that Anne was not willing to be his puppet. He was willing to support his niece as long as it was politically expedient; otherwise he was perfectly willing to throw her under the bus to save his own skin. Anne lost Thomas Cromwell’s support when she differed with him about where the resources of the church should be spent. She wanted education and relief for the poor. Cromwell began to resent her growing power. He now made it his mission to take Anne down before he met the same fate as Wolsey.
Her rise had set a dangerous precedent, as other ambitious ladies-in-waiting batted their eyes at the king. One in particular was Jane Seymour, who had been one of Catherine of Aragon’s attendants. She was the antithesis of Anne, barely literate and meek. At twenty-eight, she was even older than Anne was when Henry was first courting her. Taking a leaf out of Anne’s book, she was keeping her legs crossed until marriage. Encouraged by her brother Edward and Thomas Cromwell, Jane encouraged Henry’s disillusionment with his wife.
The only happiness in Anne’s life was her daughter, Elizabeth. Any disappointment she might have felt over Elizabeth not being a boy was swept away on a tide of maternal love. She had wanted to breast-feed the baby herself, but Henry nipped that idea in the bud. Refusing to be separated from her daughter, Anne brought the infant to court, laying her on a velvet cushion next to her throne. When Elizabeth was finally moved to her own establishment, Anne spared no expense to make sure her little darling was the most stylishly dressed baby in the kingdom. An attentive mother, not only did she visit her daughter regularly but made sure she was brought to court, the better to show her off. She was also ambitious for Elizabeth, wishing her to be well educated, in preparation for her role as Henry’s heir.
Anne’s inability to bear a son added fuel to the vitriol and rumors spread by her enemies. Henry began to fret that he would never have a legitimate heir to his kingdom. He began to question his marriage, claiming that Anne had bewitched him. In January 1536, Henry had a jousting accident; thrown from his horse, he lay unconscious for two hours. Anne had another miscarriage, this time a boy. It was the final nail in her coffin.
On May 2, 1536, Anne was arrested and charged with adultery, incest, and intent to murder the king. Surprised and frightened, she fell to her knees, claiming that she had committed no crime. She was taken to the Tower of London, to occupy the same rooms she’d occupied before her coronation. Five men were accused and charged with committing adultery and incest with the queen: a young musician, Mark Smeaton; her brother, George; Sir Henry Norris; Sir Francis Weston; and William Brereton. Four of them denied the charges, but Smeaton confessed to adultery under torture. They were all tried quickly, found guilty of treason, and summarily executed.
Anne’s own trial was a sham from the beginning. Even her greatest enemies didn’t believe the charges against her, the most heinous being that she had tried to conceive a child with her own brother. None of her ladies were charged as conspirators to her adultery. The evidence against Anne and her brother came solely from his wife, Jane. Jealous of his relationship with his sister, Jane stuck the knife in Anne’s back so deep it’s a wonder it didn’t come out the other side. Anne defended herself eloquently but the sentence was a forgone conclusion. Anne’s own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, pronounced the guilty verdict, as her former love Henry Percy looked on.
Showing some mercy, the king paid twenty-four pounds for an expert swordsman to come over from Calais to perform the deed on Tower Green, but not before he divorced her. Yes, just to rub salt in the wound, Henry had his marriage to Anne annulled two days before her execution. And irony of ironies, it was on the grounds that she had been previously contracted to marry Henry Percy! Even though this technically nullified the charge of adultery, the king was still determined that her head would roll. Still, to the very last minute Anne hoped for a reprieve. She was doomed to be disappointed.
On May 19, 1536, Anne dressed carefully for her final public appearance, wearing an ermine cloak and a gabled hood. Underneath the cloak, she wore black damask and a kirtle of red, the color of martyrdom, proclaiming her innocence. As she walked through the vast crowd, she distributed alms to the poor, her last act as queen. Carrying her book of psalms with her, she mounted the scaffold. As was the custom, Anne made a final speech from the scaffold; she refused to condemn Henry for his actions, to protect her daughter, Elizabeth. With her final words, Anne knelt down and prayed before being beheaded with one stroke of the sword. Eleven days after Anne’s death, Henry VIII married Jane Seymour, who took the motto “Bound to Obey and Serve.” He never again spoke of the woman he had once promised “ever truly to honor, love and serve.”
Anne’s reign of a thousand days had more of an impact on English history than Henry’s other five wives combined. The crown broke with the Church of Rome, putting the power into the hands of the king. There would be other ambitious families who jockeyed for position close to the crown using the weapons that Anne wielded so effectively in the beginning. In the end, it wasn’t sex that caused Anne to lose her “little neck,” but politics. The transition from mistress to Queen of England turned out to be a rocky one, strewn with pitfalls that Anne couldn’t have imagined. She gambled and lost but her legacy lived on in her daughter, Elizabeth I, one of the greatest monarchs England has ever known.
Barbara Palmer
1640-1709
A woman of great beauty but most enormously vicious and ravenous, foolish but imperious.
—BISHOP BURNET
In the court of Charles II, there came a point when people began to wonder just who really ruled England, the amiable but amoral king or his beautiful mistress Barbara Palmer. Her power over him was absolute, her avarice insatiable, and her temper formidable. During her reign, Barbara was loathed, feared, and envied by men and women at court, including people who relied on her patronage. Lord Clarendon, the chancellor of England, couldn’t bear to utter her name. He referred to her as “That Lady,” and diarist John Evelyn, disgusted at her lack of morals, called her the “curse of the nation.”
Barbara was a member of the Villiers family, an ancient family who had been successful courtiers since the Norman Conquest. Her father had died fighting for Charles I at the battle of Bristol when she was still an infant. Barbara grew up in reduced circumstances, hankering after the wealth and luxury she felt was her due. Raised in the country among relatives, by the time she hit puberty, Barbara realized that she had the goods to attract the type of lifestyle she wanted. At fifteen she was brought by her mother to London, where she fell in with a wild group of royalist society, earning a tarnished reputation.
At eighteen, she was married off to Roger Palmer, the son of another Cavalier family. Her mother may have hoped that marriage would tame her wild, wanton daughter, but Barbara had other ideas. The couple was mismatched from the start; the bride was vivacious with a quick wit, and an even quicker temper, while the groom was quiet, studious, and a devoted Catholic. He had married her against his parents’ wishes, his father predicting at their wedding that she would make him one of the most miserable men on earth. At first Palmer kept her in the country, away from temptation, but before long Barbara was bored. She seduced the libertine Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, a man who once claimed he would sleep with any woman who wasn’t ugly or old. Barbara was neither.
Palmer might have thought his worries were over when Chesterfield was forced to flee abroad but it was nothing compared to what happened when Barbara took up with the king. In 1659 she and her husband, as true-blue royalists, rushed to the continent to offer the exiled king their support on his restoration to the throne of England. At nineteen, Barbara was striking with her long chestnut hair, eyes so deep a blue that they appeared almost black, voluptuous figure, and easy manner. She and the king immediately became lovers and when Charles returned to England in triumph, he allegedly spent his first night in London with Barbara. Soon she became known as “the lewdest as well as the fairest of King Charles’ concubines.”
At first the lovers were relatively discreet about their affair. They took care always to be in the company of his two brothers, the Duke of York and the Duke of Gloucester. But tongues still wagged about the king’s visits to her home, which was conveniently located near the palace of Whitehall. Their relationship finally became public after the birth of her first child, Anne, in early 1661. Eventually she bore five children acknowledged by the king.
6
For his pains, her husband was created the first Earl of Castlemaine, an Irish peerage. The terms of the title made it embarrassingly clear that it was for services rendered by Barbara. Although he accepted the honor, Roger never took his seat in the Irish Parliament. Barbara reveled in her new title because it provided her with the rank befitting a king’s mistress. The couple finally separated after Barbara gave birth to her first son, named Charles after the king. Out of spite, Roger had him baptized a Catholic. When Barbara found out, she flew into a rage, packing her bags to go live at her brother’s house in Richmond. They never lived as husband and wife again. The baby was rebaptized Anglican in front of the king, who publicly proclaimed the child as his own.
Just when things were going swimmingly, Barbara was brought down to earth with a bang. The king had decided to get married and hinted that her position would be different when his bride arrived. “The whole affair,” Samuel Pepys noted maliciously in his diary, “will put Madame Castlemaine’s nose out of joint.” When Catherine of Braganza arrived from Portugal in 1662, Barbara angled to be appointed a lady of the bedchamber, which would give her an income and rooms at the palace. However, the queen had been warned about Barbara. When she saw her name on the list of appointees, she immediately struck it off. Barbara was pissed, and she let the king know it in no uncertain terms.
The king was not a man to be thwarted by his wife. Instead he brought Barbara to be presented to the queen at court. When Catherine discovered who she was, she fell into a faint, blood pouring from her nose. The king was incensed by what he considered to be her stubbornness. Determined to bring her around, he dismissed her Portuguese ladies, allowing the queen to retain only a few priests and one elderly, blind attendant. The poor queen was left friendless and alone. The few friends that she had made at court turned from her rather than face the king’s wrath. Catherine eventually gave in and accepted Barbara as one of her ladies.