A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (10 page)

She would never have to worry about the executioner’s ax because of her success in bearing a prince, but that’s what killed her. In 1537, after less than eighteen months as queen, Jane Seymour was dead at the age of twenty-eight. Though Henry was genuinely moved by her passing, she wasn’t cold in her grave before the search for a fourth wife began.

England, at the time of Jane Seymour’s death, was becoming increasingly isolated next to the Catholic powers of France and Spain, so a new wife was needed not only to give the king comfort and produce more sons, but to help shore up European relations. To this end, a foreign bride was pursued. Though Henry had known and loved his first three queens before he married them, the fourth would be a total stranger. As was generally the case with diplomatic marriages at the time, he would not even meet her first.

The famed artist Hans Holbein was sent to the royal courts of Europe to capture the images of all potential brides so at least his patron would have some idea of what they looked like. Henry was smitten by the portrait of young Duchess Christina of Milan, a niece of Emperor Charles V, but she was somewhat less enthusiastic about the English king’s colorful marital history. Christina is reported to have said that she would be happy to wed Henry—if only she had an extra neck to spare. For various reasons, other attempted political matches failed as well. Then the name of Anne of Cleves came up. Her portrait was pleasant enough. She was from a German Duchy that might make a good Protestant alliance with England, and Henry’s Lord Chancellor Thomas Cromwell recommended her. Anne got the job.

While there is nothing in Holbein’s portrait to suggest she was a dog, the artist must have missed some intangible quality that absolutely revolted Henry. When the heretofore lusty king finally met her face to face, the daughter of Cleves came as a withering surprise. “I like her not” was his brutally frank appraisal of the mate Cromwell had selected for him. The unfortunate minister would pay with his head for engaging his royal master in this “unendurable bargain,” but not before having to listen to Henry endlessly squawk about it. Anne of Cleves was “nothing so fair as she had been reported,” the king liked to remind Cromwell, and if he had known any better she “would never have come within the kingdom.”

But Anne
had
come to England, and there was nothing even this willful monarch could do about it without upsetting the carefully constructed alliance with Cleves. The wedding would have to go on. The reluctant groom was feeling a bit cranky on the morning of the ceremony. “My Lord,” he said to Cromwell, “if it were not to satisfy the world, and my Realm, I would not do that I must this day for none earthly thing.” Henry’s mood had not improved after the wedding night. “How liked you the Queen?” Cromwell, no doubt desperate, inquired the next morning. “I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse,” was the devastating reply. Henry had not been able to consummate the marriage, announcing that he “could never in her company be provoked and steered to know her carnally.” To his doctors the disappointed king reported that her “body [was] in such a sort disordered and indisposed” that it did not “excite and provoke any lust” in him. Although she was only twenty-three, he said her breasts sagged.

Poor Anne wasn’t getting any bargain either. The once strapping and romantic king, universally praised for his good looks and charm, was becoming a bloated old tyrant with foul-smelling leg ulcers and eyes that had all but disappeared into his fat face. The wedding night couldn’t have been too much fun for the bride. Fortunately, the exceedingly sheltered virgin had no idea what the evening was supposed to entail, and Henry was not inclined to show her. Night after night they just lay there, with the impotent king reporting to Cromwell that Anne “was still as good a Maid . . . as ever her Mother bare her.”

Shriveled in her presence, he could manage only a few glancing kisses before he gave up completely. His wife thought this was what making love was all about. “When he comes to bed,” she confided to her ladies, “he kisses me and taketh me by the hand, and biddeth me, ‘good night sweetheart’ and in the morning, kisses me, and biddeth me, ‘Farewell, darling.’ Is not this enough?” The tentative groping rapidly became intolerable, particularly since Henry had spotted a cute little lady-in-waiting attending his unpalatable queen. Her name was Catherine Howard and the king, thirty years her senior, desperately wanted to make her wife number five.

Wisely Anne, ever amiable, stepped aside. Six months after the sexless marriage began, it was over. Grateful for her cooperation in setting him free without complications, Henry treated Anne generously. She was granted a large settlement of manors and estates, and given social prominence as the king’s adopted “good sister.” Not bad considering the fates of other displeasing queens. Relations were so friendly after the divorce that “sister” Anne was frequently a guest at court, even dancing with the new Queen Catherine who had once served her.

With his dormant passions aroused once again, Henry married the thoroughly English Catherine Howard on July 28, 1540. Ironically, it was the same day Cromwell lost his head for, among other things, getting his king entangled in such a sorry foreign marriage with Anne of Cleves. The new queen, as a matter of fact, was the niece of Cromwell’s political enemy, the Duke of Norfolk.

Besotted with his teenage bride, the king publicly caressed her, showered her with jewels, and called her his “blushing rose without a thorn.” He was “so enamoured,” reported the French ambassador, that he could not “treat her well enough.” Catherine, however, would break Henry’s heart, and pay dearly for it. It seemed the “blushing rose” had been around the garden path a few times before her royal marriage. This was not good, especially since she had been passed off as a virgin by her family eager to advance themselves. Worse still, she carried on after the wedding as well.

In retrospect, it’s somewhat understandable that a young girl might stray when her husband, three decades older, was so obese that he could barely walk on his ulcerous legs, let alone do much in bed. Still, considering his increasingly savage reputation, cheating on him might be considered just a tad reckless. The object of Catherine’s affections was Thomas Culpeper, a gentleman of the king’s Privy Chamber and one of his favored companions. In the one letter of hers that survives, the adulterous queen lovingly writes Culpeper, “It makes my heart die to think I cannot be always in your company,” concluding, “Yours as long as life endures.” It would not last long for either of them.

Henry was devastated when he heard about the affair, and the premarital shenanigans that had gone on with other men. Mouldering in self-pity, he lamented his misfortune in having a succession of such “ill-conditioned” wives. His mood then turned to bitter anger as he called for a sword to slay himself her “that I loved so much.” The betrayed monarch vowed that all the pleasure “that wicked woman” had derived from her wantonness should not equal the pain she should feel from torture. Finally he broke down and cried.

A huge round-up of all the players began. Members of the Howard family who may have had knowledge of the affairs were sent to the Tower of London, including Catherine’s elderly step-grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. Culpeper was beheaded, while another former lover was hanged but cut down while still breathing, disemboweled, and castrated before being carved into quarters. Then it was Catherine’s turn. After being formally demoted from the title of Queen, she was indicted for having led “an abominable, base, carnal, voluptuous and vicious life” before her marriage, “like a common harlot with divers persons . . . maintaining, however, the outward appearance of chastity and honesty”—not to mention that she had cuckolded the king after he married her.

On the morning of February 13, 1542, Catherine Howard lost her head at the Tower of London. She had been queen a little over eighteen months and had just entered her twenties. Fearing she wouldn’t know what to do at her execution, the terrified girl had requested a block be brought to her so she could practice laying her head upon it. She was the second niece of the Duke of Norfolk to have her head chopped off. The first was Anne Boleyn almost six years earlier. While both women were dispatched at the same site, with both their headless bodies buried a few feet away, one was clearly guilty of her crimes and one was not. “I die a Queen,” Catherine announced from the scaffold, according to legend, “but I would rather die the wife of Culpeper.”

With two wives beheaded and two others cast aside, the ladies were not exactly lining up to become the latest spouse of England’s most eligible bachelor. It was way too dangerous. Prominent English families thought it prudent to find ways to advance themselves other than offering up their daughters, while foreign courts indicated they had no extra princesses to spare.

There was one lady, however, who seemed quite willing to become wife number six: wife number four, Anne of Cleves. The woman who Henry had once called “The Flanders Mare” apparently had no hard feelings. The king’s “good sister” wanted to be queen again. There were some actually pushing for a remarriage, including, of all people, her own brother, the Duke of Cleves. Putting a quick end to any such talk, King Henry made it abundantly clear that he wasn’t
that
lonely.

No longer the lusty rake, and severely burned by Catherine Howard, the aging king was now looking for a comforting nurse rather than a nubile lover. He turned to a lady of the court named Katherine Parr. While she was no voluptuous beauty, there was no question about her virginity. Katherine had been twice widowed before catching Henry’s eye. “Gentlemen,” he announced to his Council, “I desire company, but I have had more than enough of taking young wives, and I am now resolved to marry a widow.” Mature, wise, and caring, in addition to sharing Henry’s passion for music and art, Katherine was the perfect companion for the king and his three motherless children. Yet while Henry would eventually make her a widow for the third time, Katherine Parr barely survived the marriage with her head.

Unlike her decapitated predecessor, the new queen was not an uneducated, flighty teenager, but an intelligent and informed woman who took an active interest in theology. A religious scholar of sorts, she wrote a series of popular devotional books during her tenure as Henry’s sixth wife, making her one of only eight women to be published during the first half of the sixteenth century. Queen Katherine was writing in dangerous times, however, on subjects very close to the king’s heart. While Henry VIII had broken away from the power of the pope, his English Church was still essentially Roman Catholic in ritual and doctrine. It was the religion he had known all his life. Katherine, on the other hand, was part of a growing Prostestant reformist movement, organizing theological seminars and encouraging radical preachers.

What she failed to do was heed the advice she gave in one of her books. “Women married,” she had instructed, should learn from St. Paul “to be obedient to their husbands, and to keep silence in the congregation, and to learn from their husbands at home.” Instead, Katherine developed the dangerous habit of arguing religion with a sick and irritable king who already thought himself quite a theologian. At times, the queen seemed unwilling to back down from her fiercely held beliefs—never a good idea with Henry VIII—and “in the heat of discourse [went] very far,” according to the Protestant writer John Foxe, who chronicled the nearly fatal consequences of such hubris.

Although Henry wasn’t showing any outward signs of his anger at his wife’s presumptuous behavior, Katherine secretly got word that she was in deep trouble and that charges had been drawn up against her. Facing the very real possibility that her head would soon roll, the queen wisely decided to humble herself completely. Rushing to Henry, she found him in the mood to discourse on religion. He was actually testing her, and Katherine’s life literally depended upon passing.

She knew what she had to do. Instead of engaging Henry in his proposed discussion, she demurred, saying that “women by their first creation were made subject to men.” It was a good opening move. She then continued: “Being made after the image of God, as women were after their image, men ought to instruct their wives, who would do all their learning from them.”

Appealing to Henry’s sense of intellectual superiority, Katherine continued to score points when she indicated that she wanted “to be taught by his Majesty, who is a prince of such learning and wisdom.” She was doing well, but the crucial test was not over. Henry had more up his bejeweled sleeve. Referring to their previous heated discussions, he seemed to undermine the humility she was now attempting to project. “You are become a doctor [of the Church],” he reminded her, “able to instruct us and not be instructed by us.”

Fortunately, Katherine was no fool and knew exactly what to say next. The king, she said, “had much mistaken the freedom [she] had taken to argue with him,” which she did only to distract him from his pains and, as an added benefit, to learn from him herself. Bingo! “And is it even so?” responded her now placated husband. “Then Kate, we are friends again.” Katherine Parr lived to marry husband number four, who happened to be Jane Seymour’s brother, after King Henry finally breathed his last on January 28, 1547.

 

 

Y
ears before she lost her head in a hideously botched execution,
¹⁴
Mary Queen of Scots lost her heart to an equally hideous choice of husband. The young queen, a great-niece of Henry VIII, was already a widow of twenty-two when she fell madly for her cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, in 1565.

Her first husband had been Francis II of France,
²
and that had been a fine marriage, in its own way. Sure Francis was stunted, bloated, and sickly, with an ineffective pair of undescended testicles, but Mary loved him and he loved her. Chastely. The young couple were, in fact, more like brother and sister, having been raised together since 1548, when the five-year-old queen of Scotland was sent to France to live with the family of her four-year-old fiance. Owing to his frail health and unfortunate deformity, the marriage was most likely never consummated and Francis was dead before he turned seventeen.