A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (9 page)

Henry found little relief from Katherine’s haranguing in the arms of Anne Boleyn. His intended bride was growing tired of waiting around and didn’t hesitate to let Henry know it. After one particularly nasty argument with Katherine, he rushed over to Anne’s room where he got an unusually snappish reception. “Did I not tell you that whenever you disputed with the Queen, she was sure to have the upper hand?” Anne burst out. Then she began to cry, wailing that he would eventually return to his wife and leave her with nothing. “I have been waiting long and might in the meanwhile have contracted some advantageous marriage, out of which I might have had issue, which is the greatest consolation in this world, but alas! Farewell to my time and youth spent to no purpose at all.”

This was about all the drama Henry was going to take. A nagging wife and a nagging wife-in-waiting were proving to be too much. The pope had dragged his feet long enough and it was time to show him who was boss in his kingdom. Defying Pope Clement’s order to put away Anne while the case was being decided, Henry instead banished Katherine forever from court. “Tell the Queen,” he ordered a messenger, “that I do not want any of her goodbyes.”

Henry had once been a faithful son of the Church, even receiving the title “Defender of the Faith”
¹³
from Pope Leo X for his scholarly defense of Rome against the theological attacks of Martin Luther, but he was now a defiant outsider. Threatened with the Church’s ultimate punishment, Henry belligerently retorted, “I shall not mind it, for I care not a fig for all his excommunications.” The pope could do as he pleased in Rome, the king snarled, “I will do here what I think best.”

Henry VIII named himself Supreme Head of the Church in England, and one of his first actions was to secure at long last his divorce. Katherine was ordered to stop referring to herself as “Queen” and adopt the title “Princess Dowager” as she was nothing now but the widow of the dead Prince Arthur. She was also ordered to hand over all her jewels to her supplanter, Anne Boleyn, who had finally gone all the way with Henry and gotten pregnant in the process.

Soon after, the king married Anne and had her crowned Queen of England. This meant that Katherine’s defiant use of the same title, and her refusal to acknowledge Henry’s new role in the English Church, had to be dealt with. She was moved to increasingly desolate places of exile and deprived of any contact with her only child, Mary. Strain and illness were taking their toll as Katherine was battered into submission, but she never broke. She dictated a final letter to her once loving prince: “My most dear Lord, King and husband, the hour of my death approaching . . . I cannot choose, but out of love I bear you, advise you of your soul’s health which you ought to prefer before all considerations of the world or flesh whatsoever. For which yet you have cast me into many calamities, and yourself into many troubles . . . I forgive you all, and pray God to do so likewise.” After pleading with Henry to treat their daughter kindly—a plea he ignored—she opened her heart for the last time, revealing just how much she loved the man who had so ruthlessly discarded her. “Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things. Farewell.” The banished queen died in January 1536, of what was probably cancer, though many people then believed the cause was a broken heart. She would be followed only four months later by Anne Boleyn.

Forbidden fruit tends to lose its flavor after a few bites, and so it was with Anne Boleyn. Though Henry had courted her passionately and defied Rome to marry her, he spit her out mercilessly when, like Katherine of Aragon before her, she failed to give him the son he desired far more than any wife’s charms. Furthermore, the fiery temperament and quick tongue the king once found so captivating came across more like a roaring hangover as Anne struggled to cling to the position that was rapidly slipping away from her. The glistening blade of a French sword would end it all in a very short time.

Anne Boleyn had never been popular with the English people. “The king’s whore,” they called her; a “naughty paike” [prostitute] who audaciously usurped the place of their adored Queen Katherine. Some were even bold enough to heckle the new queen at her coronation. They mocked, for example, the entwined initials of Henry and Anne that lined the magnificent coronation route. “HA! HA!,” they snickered. Even members of her own family resented the haughtiness with which the queen wielded her newly acquired power. Fed up with her biting insults, Anne’s powerful uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, began calling her
la grande putain
, the great whore, even as he reaped the vast rewards of her position.

Anne, however, blithely dismissed her enemies, some of them quite powerful. After all, she had the mighty king on her side—or so she thought. “That’s how it’s going to be,” she was fond of saying in reaction to criticism, “however much people may grumble.” It became her motto. Another was, “The Most Happy”—an unintentionally ironic choice considering the fate that awaited her when Henry turned on her and had her, quite literally, cut down to size.

Although she had no way of knowing it at the time—and neither did Henry for that matter—Anne Boleyn’s fall was actually set into motion when she finally agreed to sleep with the king. Both took it for granted the child that resulted, with whom Anne was pregnant at her coronation, was going to be a boy. So confident were expectations that the official birth announcement, prepared in advance, joyfully proclaimed the blessed arrival of a prince.

It was a devastating surprise, then, when the much anticipated prince turned out to be an unwelcome princess—the future Elizabeth I. Obviously unaware that the child would grow up to embody the glory of Britain, Henry was violently disappointed. In a huff, he canceled a joust planned to celebrate the birth of his son. Had he gone through so much for this? Mesmerizing black eyes and tempestuous nature aside, Anne Boleyn was beginning to look like another Katherine of Aragon—especially when she miscarried a second baby.

Like Katherine before her, Anne was forced to put up with Henry’s wandering eye. Unlike her predecessor, though, she was unable to contain her jealousy. She knew queens were disposable. After all, she was now sitting on another’s throne. Having been a lady-in-waiting herself, she went ballistic when she found her own lady, Jane Seymour, sitting on her husband’s lap. Far from being swayed toward monogamy by his wife’s fits of fury, Henry became even more adamant about enjoying himself in any way he desired. There was a time when Anne’s passionate temper had served as an enticing prelude to sex. Now it led only to bitterness and recriminations. The king told her angrily that she must shut her eyes and endure his affairs, as those who were better than she had done. Then he ominously reminded her that he could at any time “lower her as much as he had raised her.”

In January 1536, Queen Anne Boleyn miscarried again—a boy. Aware that her declining fortunes could only be reversed by the birth of a son, she became hysterical with grief and fear over the loss. The good king provided little comfort. “I see God will not give me male children,” he reportedly hissed. Turning to leave his stricken wife, he announced that he “would have no more boys” by
her.
Anne’s fate was sealed.

King Henry began insisting that there was something sinister behind the exotic, Gypsy-looking creature who had so enchanted him. He claimed he had been bewitched by Anne Boleyn, seduced and forced into this second marriage by means of “sortileges and charms.” Picking up on Henry’s lead, the queen’s many enemies would take the wicked witch theme to absurd levels after her fall. She was hideously deformed, they claimed, “a goggle-eyed whore” covered with warts and moles, possessing a third breast and a sixth finger on one hand—enough to send the choosy king away screaming had they been even remotely accurate.

Henry’s new minister, Thomas Cromwell, who had replaced Cardinal Wolsey, was too shrewd a politician to resort to attacks on Anne’s appearance. He chose instead to assassinate her character. The scheming lord chancellor was determined to succeed where his predecessor had failed in expeditiously ridding his master of an unwanted wife. It took seven years, and Henry’s ultimate break with Rome, to get rid of Katherine of Aragon, after which time Wolsey was stripped of all power and charged with treason for failing his sovereign. Cromwell would be much more efficient ensuring that Anne Boleyn would not be a lingering problem.

Henry VIII saw his wife for the last time on May Day, 1536. Like Katherine before her, there were no goodbyes. The queen was arrested the next day, charged with a variety of trumped-up crimes that included conspiracy to kill the king, committing adultery with a variety of men and even sleeping with her own brother. Cromwell left nothing to chance. Anne was taken by barge to the Tower of London, the same place she had prepared for her coronation only three years before. Terrified by what awaited her inside, the queen broke down and cried out, “I was received with greater ceremony last time I was here.” The Constable of the Tower, Sir William Kingston, reassured her that she would be treated well and have comfortable quarters, not shoved into a dark dungeon. Awash with relief, the doomed lady fell on her knees. “It is too good for me,” she wept before succumbing to a fit of laughter.

The manic transitions from tears to laughter, along with episodes of incoherent rambling—prompted no doubt by overwhelming stress and fear—characterized her stay in the Tower. She had every reason to be frightened. Cromwell, with the king’s obvious complicity, was arranging a trial that would make certain the “poisoning whore,” as Henry called her, would never come out alive.

Anne and her brother, George, were tried May 15 in a public spectacle that required special stands to be erected in order to accommodate the estimated 2,000 people in attendance. Sitting in judgment of the grossly maligned siblings were twenty-six peers of the realm, including their uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, who presided as High Steward. Anne was tried first. Arriving at the proceeding with cool dignity, she gave “wise and discreet answers to her accusers,” according to a witness, but nothing she said mattered. The king wanted her dead, so the ridiculous evidence against her was solemnly heard with only one possible verdict. It was the same for George Boleyn, whose own wife testified to “undue familiarity” between brother and sister. Both were sentenced to death that very day—to be burnt or beheaded according to the king’s pleasure.

Two days later, George and four other condemned men tried earlier were beheaded on Tower Hill. Anne had to wait a couple more days. After the dignity she had maintained during her trial, some of the erratic behavior returned as she waited to die. Upon hearing the news that she was going to be dispatched with a sword rather than the potentially messy ax, Anne remarked with a laugh that she had “heard say the executioner was very good.” Then circling with her fingers her most famously graceful feature, she noted it was just as well since “I have a little neck.”

It was a bright May morning when they came for her. The tears and hysteria were all gone now, replaced with a certain calm as she walked to the specially erected scaffold on Tower Green. To various witnesses, it seemed as if she welcomed death as a relief from all her troubles. Addressing the crowd that had gathered to watch a queen die, she spoke simply and pleasantly: “Masters, I here humbly submit me to the law as the law hath judged me, and as for mine offenses, I here accuse no man. God knoweth them; I remit them to God, beseeching him to have mercy on my soul.”

She then spoke kindly of Henry, who not content with simply killing her, had divorced her as well several days earlier. Perhaps she was grateful that he did not order her burned at the stake or hacked apart with an ax, or perhaps she was just following the aristocratic custom of dying graciously. She called on Jesus Christ to “save my sovereign and master the King, the most godly, noble and gentle Prince that is, and long to reign over you.”

Finishing her brief speech, Anne then knelt down as her ladies removed her outer garments, made sure her long dark hair was properly tucked away and covered the flashing black eyes that had once entranced the king. Like Katherine of Aragon, who had died just four months before, her last words were, “To Jesus Christ, I commend my soul.” With that, her head was severed with one smooth stroke of the sword. The separated head and body were then gathered up and quickly buried in the adjacent chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula. Anne Boleyn had been Queen of England for nearly three and a half years. Twenty-four hours later, Henry VIII was officially betrothed to Jane Seymour.

Jane Seymour has the distinction of being the only one of Henry’s six wives to be buried next to him, enshrined forever as his “true and loving wife.” Lucky lady. Her exalted position came at a terrible price. While Jane was the only wife to give Henry the ultimate gift of a male heir, she died doing it—carried away twelve days after the birth of the future Edward VI by puerperal, or “child-bed” fever. Perhaps this was not the worst of it.

To become the king’s “entirely beloved,” she had to be not just a successful breeder, even if it killed her, but a humble, mousy one at that. After the tempestuous Anne Boleyn, Henry wanted a wife who would completely sublimate herself to him. He hit the mark with former lady-in-waiting Jane. This compliant queen’s motto was “Bound to Obey and Serve,” which suited the king just fine. Her pleasing disposition was exemplified by her kind treatment of Henry and Katherine’s daughter Mary. While the jealous Anne Boleyn hated the girl, once threatening to give Mary “a good banging for the cursed bastard that she is,” Jane was sweet and gentle to the unhappy princess, exchanging loving gifts and trying to reconcile Mary with her father.

When Queen Jane’s natural submissiveness failed her, however, King Henry was prepared to put her right back in her place. God forbid she ever express an opinion or offer counsel to her mighty husband. After a series of religious uprisings in the north of England, collectively known as “The Pilgrimage of Grace,” Jane ventured the unwelcome suggestion that perhaps the people were upset by the destruction of monasteries and other changes wrought by Henry’s break with Rome. Big Mistake. According to one report by the French ambassador, Jane fell to her knees and “begged [Henry] to restore the Abbeys.” The king demanded she get up, reminded her that “he had often told her not to meddle with his affairs,” and then made a pointed allusion to the unhappy fate of her predecessor. Jane took the hint.