In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I (19 page)

Finding a location for illicit sexual encounters was difficult for Tudor men and women of all walks of life. While it is impossible to delineate patterns of sexual behaviour within marriage beyond the evidence of conceptions, it is apparent that relations took place on a frequent and informal basis among unmarried and adulterous couples, especially those living under the same roof, like fellow servants or masters and female servants. Bedrooms were rare luxuries; most people shared a bed or at least slept in the same room. Servants Davie Cox and Alse Mathews, working together at Tilbury-near-Clare, had sex ‘divers and sundry’ (many different) times in the space of nine months, before she fell pregnant in 1588.
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Susan Babye, of Coggeshall, confessed that she had slept with John Fletcher once at the fair in 1582, as well as with Richard Howe who lay with her once at Midsummer and William Dagnett, who ‘had to do with her … divers and sundry times’.
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Servants Thomas Mathew and Elizabeth Browne had sex on a journey between Witham and Cressing in 1582, although they were ‘hinderd by rayne’ and later resorted to using their master’s chamber in his absence.
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Joan Collen and William Rothman made use of a ‘rye stubble field’, a stable and an apple store in 1592
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while in 1589, Agnes Jolley witnessed Margery Hawles and Thomas Dooe of Chapel going together into a thicket of bushes, after which Dooe emerged, incriminatingly ‘tying his points’.
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Such examples are typical of the opportunistic encounters resulting in illegitimate births dealt with in the legal courts; conversely, when the doors to the marital bedroom were closed, or when royalty were involved, patterns of behaviour were less clear. For Henry’s unmarried subjects, the great outdoors provided their best opportunity for illicit sex: Essex parish records list March and April as consistently the most common months for baptisms, indicating conception dates in the abundant midsummer when the temperature and undergrowth were higher. By late summer, before the harvest, food prices would rise and workers would be exhausted by long working hours once the gathering in began. Conception cycles support this theory, with the birth rate tailing off between May and July, suggesting that less conceptions took place in August and September.
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As poverty and dependence dictated sexual practices, money could buy a degree of privacy and choice. Free from such agricultural commitments, Henry’s numerous hunting lodges and country manor houses must have provided him with opportunities. A king could also rely on the discretion of those involved, who would turn a blind eye or even facilitate his amours.

It was unlikely that Mary and Henry’s affair was conducted in her marital home or conflicted with her marriage in any way. Just as Henry continued to sleep with Catherine through the duration of his relations with Mary, so she would have been a wife in the fullest sense to her husband William Carey. Modern, romantic sensibilities have attempted to separate two sexual narratives in her life although they were likely to have been concurrent, with no shame to Mary’s reputation. In this lies the clue to the suppositions arising regarding the paternity of her two children, Catherine, born around 1524 and Henry in 1525/26. If Catherine and Henry Carey were the children of Henry VIII, he did not acknowledge them as such. From the moment of Henry Fitzroy’s birth, there was little doubt of his royal paternity from his christening onwards; in 1525, at the age of six, the boy was created Earl of Northumberland and Duke of Richmond and Somerset; Henry appeared to have every intention of including him in the succession, possibly through a marriage to his half-sister Mary. Yet the birth of Fitzroy differed from that of the Carey children in one key element. Their mother was already married. The law automatically recognised a woman’s husband as the father of any children born during or shortly after, a marriage. To alter or contest paternity would cause considerable scandal at significant legislative difficulty. However, this was the king; other reasons may have prevented their recognition. Firstly, if Mary Boleyn was sleeping with Henry and her husband simultaneously, paternity was by no means attributable to either: given the difficulties of ascertaining conception dates and predicting delivery, it is possible that Mary herself was unsure exactly who was responsible. If Henry had chosen to recognise either child, the implications for inheritance became more complex, potentially jeopardising the succession. Additionally, to admit he had impregnated a married woman would have conflicted with the chivalric image Henry had of himself: a king’s adultery with an unmarried woman was acceptable whilst that with another man’s wife was something else entirely. If either child was Henry’s, it was more likely to have been Catherine, conceived in 1523. A portrait of her from 1562 shows an undeniable physical likeness to many of the Tudor family line, particularly Elizabeth I, although this may easily be through the Boleyn line. Possibly Mary’s pregnancy motivated Henry to distance himself from her and brought about the end of the affair; equally, the conception of a child by her husband may have provoked the same response. The most likely solution appears to be that Henry was possibly the father of Catherine, although he was unaware of the fact or in his mind there existed reasonable doubt that he was not. His affair with Mary may not have lasted until the advent of her sister Anne; in fact, the 1523 pregnancy is more likely to have ended it.

Mary later incurred the wrath of her family by conducting a secret marriage to William Stafford, a soldier far below her in rank. In this, she was following a pattern of many aristocratic women whose first arranged matches had ended through the death of their spouse; now like Mary Rose Tudor, she chose to marry for love. Appealing to Cromwell for financial assistance she claimed she ‘would rather beg my bread with [Stafford] than to be the greatest queen in Christendom’. Reappearing at court in December 1534, Chapuys reported that she was pregnant but no record of this child survives; she may not have carried it to term or it may have died in infancy: alternatively Chapuys may have been mistaken, as he often was. She lived in obscurity in for the remainder of her life and died in 1543. Her children, Catherine and Henry, provided her with twenty-eight grandchildren, a record her king would have envied.

1526–1536

Miscarriage & Misogyny

In the King’s royal head
Secret displeasure bred
Which cost the Queen her head.
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On a summer Sunday at the start of June 1533, Londoners in all their finery converged on Westminster Palace. The Mayor and Aldermen, dressed in crimson and scarlet, arrived by barge; bishops and abbots in their ceremonial copes and mitres; Knights of the Bath with their distinctive white lace on the left sleeve; barons and viscounts in their parliamentary scarlet robes; noblemen in powdered ermine, all awaiting the arrival of their new queen. Her sexual magnetism was legendary, her name scandalous: everyone wanted to see the woman who had held their king in thrall for seven years and displaced the popular Catherine. Between eight and nine that morning, their patience was rewarded. Anne Boleyn, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, emerged from the royal lodgings. Her audience saw a tall, lithe, pale-skinned, raven-haired woman in her early thirties, with enchanting large dark eyes, not traditionally beautiful but unusual and captivating. She was splendidly dressed in a robe of purple velvet lined with ermine, over a kirtle of crimson and on her loose dark hair, sat a gold circlet set with pearls and other precious stones. The accounts for her clothing at that time included over thirty-two yards of crimson velvet, costing 13
s
and 4
d
a yard, 19 yards crimson damask costing 7
s
a yard and 3 yards of scarlet at 9
s
: considerable expense given that the daily wage of an unskilled labourer was around 7
d
, a poor woman to wash dishes or a boy to turn a spit could be had for 4
d
and a carpenter could command 1
s
, 2
d
for a day’s work.

Under the folds of sumptuous fabric, Anne’s swollen belly showed that she was pregnant, carrying the longed-for heir that had precipitated her rival’s downfall. As Cranmer wrote later ‘the condition thereof did well appear, by reason she is somewhat big with child’. Among her attendants were her triumphant family but also those supporters of Catherine, who had little choice but to fulfil ceremonial roles, like the king’s brother-in-law Suffolk, who was High Steward of the day, dressed in crimson, pearls and precious stones. Anne’s kinswoman, the Duchess of Norfolk, bore her long train, her ladies wore scarlet with the more fashionable narrow sleeves, while borne above her was carried a canopy of red and blue. She was led to St Peter’s Church, Westminster and sat in the ‘seate riall’, a platform elevated on two steps, covered with tapestry, where she was anointed by Archbishop Cranmer, who placed the traditional crown of St Edward on her head, although this was later substituted for a lighter one made especially for her. She took communion and made an offering at St Edward’s shrine before processing out to the sound of trumpets. The following feast for 800 guests, was held in the Palace’s Great Hall, where the newly anointed queen sat under the cloth of estate. Two ladies sat at her feet throughout, to ‘serve her secretly’, and two others nearby to lift cloths and conceal her in case she wished to spit or wipe her face. An enclosure around her ensured nobody could approach except those assigned to attend her and there was ‘good order’ despite the four great tables below hers, extending the length of the hall. Conduits flowed with wine at every door, the kitchens were commanded to give meat to everyone and vast quantities were consumed. Anne, though, ate little of the spices, subtleties and ‘other delicacies’ presented to her on golden plates, along with wafers and hippocras wine. The mayor of London presented her with a gold cup to drink from before she departed to the sound of trumpets and hautbois, to spend the night at York Place.
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It was hardly the ‘cold, meagre and uncomfortable’ affair that Imperial ambassador Chapuys reported to Catherine’s nephew Charles V. Yet this is what the old Aragon faction would have hoped to hear. As the dishes were being cleared away, the tapestries and arras taken down and the crowd outside the abbey dissolved, the awkward question still remained. England had a new queen. But what was to be done about the old one?

Few historical figures have attracted such a persistent, fascinated following as Anne Boleyn. Her appeal, then as now, lies partly in her personal charisma and partly in the hold she exerted over Henry, with all its attendant consequences for English royalty and religion. Her dramatic fall from grace on blatantly trumped-up charges and the shocking execution of an anointed queen, have made her a figure of sympathy and romance for readers of history and fiction, as well as more recent portrayals in film and television. Five centuries on she is still able to provoke powerful and dichotomic responses. Yet for someone so controversial, the basic facts of her life are sometimes unclear. Sources disagree about Anne’s birth date; 1501 and 1507 are usually suggested, with modern scholarship tending towards the earlier. The daughter of a union between the ambitious Boleyn and Howard families, her early years were spent at Blickling Hall, Norfolk and then at Hever Castle, in Kent. Educated as a teenager in the refined Netherlands court of Margaret of Savoy, then as maid to the unfortunate Queen Claude of France, she acquired a polish that set her aside from her English counterparts, despite not conforming to contemporary standards of beauty. Hindsight has often coloured the accounts of her early years but when she first came to the king’s attention, she was little more than another potential mistress: her arrival at court in 1522, dancing as ‘Perseverance’ in a masque in a caul of Venice gold, hardly give any indication of the serious threat she eventually posed to Catherine of Aragon and the ultimate event of her coronation.

For aristocratic young women of ambitious families, one route for securing an influential husband was to take a position in the household of the queen or Mary Tudor. In this, Anne did not differ from Elizabeth Blount or her sister Mary, yet early in her career she found herself at the centre of one such scandal. Although she did not become one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting until 1527, she was probably in attendance on Henry’s sister Mary, the French queen, now the wife of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. One early reference places Anne with Mary at York Place, where Thomas Wolsey arranged the pageant Château Vert to be danced before visiting Imperial Ambassadors. Around 1523, Anne again came to attention, this time through the secret betrothal she had entered into with Henry Percy, future Earl of Northumberland. Sent to court as a teenager, he became a page at Wolsey’s court and would have had ample opportunities to woo the young Anne. If, as Wolsey’s nineteenth-century biographer George Cavendish believed, the pair had exchanged formal vows, the question of their physical closeness arises. An informal handfasting between people of noble blood would only be considered binding by the church if the union was then consummated. As Wolsey was able to dissolve the match, the likelihood is that this final step had not been taken and Anne’s virginity remained intact. Cavendish’s suggestions that the union was forbidden due to the king’s fledgling interest in the bride are unlikely this early; he was at that point in a relationship with Mary Boleyn and if he had desired Anne, her marriage would have only been to his advantage; equally, Wolsey had already dissolved one match made by Percy in 1516. Anne was banished to the country, to re-emerge in 1526, already in her mid-twenties and comparatively old in terms of marriage.

It is not clear exactly when Henry fell in love with Anne Boleyn. The passionate love letters he wrote, dating from 1527–8, leave little doubt that by then his feeling for her was genuine, as was his desire to make her his wife. Crucially, her rise was a question of timing, coinciding with the king’s resolution to divorce and remarry. Catherine’s menopause occurred around 1525–6, after seven childless years, convincing him that she would not be the one to bear him a male heir. For a short while in 1527, he considered Wolsey’s scheme for a union with the French princess Renee, although he rejected her after the Hungarian ambassador told him her inherited limp suggested she would be incapable of bringing ‘forth frute, as it apperith by the liniacion of her body’.
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He had determined to remarry, citing Leviticus 20:21 that a man taking his brother’s wife upon his death would remain childless: if he received clerical support, he could simply announce the marriage had been null and void in the first place and no divorce would be needed. He would have been living in sin with Catherine and was free to take a wife of his own choosing. It should have been a straightforward matter but Henry had not reckoned with his queen.