Six Wives (83 page)

    Much has been read into this haste. For Chapuys and Catholic conspiracy theorists, it is evidence that Catherine had been poisoned and that her murderers were in a hurry to conceal the deed. But these notions seem far-fetched. Chamberlain and Bedingfield were simply going by
The Royal Book
and the procedures it described. Moreover, Catherine's health had been poor even before the Divorce. And the Great Matter had imposed its own dreadful strains.
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    In short, nature had taken its course and Catherine, in dying, had at last done what Henry wanted.

T
he news reached the Court within twenty-four hours on 8 January. 'You could not conceive', reported Chapuys with distaste, 'the joy that this King and those who favour the concubinage have shown at [Catherine's] death.' Henry exclaimed: 'God be praised that we are free from all suspicion of war!' while Anne's father and brother, Wiltshire and Rochford, focused on domestic concerns, saying 'that it was a pity [Mary] did not keep company with her [mother]'.

    The following day was a Sunday, when the King's procession to hear mass in the Chapel Royal provided a ready-made setting for ceremonial. This Sunday it was turned into a carnival-like celebration of Catherine's death.

    The King dressed flamboyantly: 'Henry was clad all over in yellow, from top to toe, except the white feather he had in his bonnet'. And Elizabeth, who was staying with her parents for the Christmas festivities, was paraded like a trophy, being 'conducted to Mass with trumpets and other great triumphs'. Then, after he had dined, Henry went to Anne's apartments and 'entered the room where the ladies danced and there did several things like one transported with joy'. He kissed, he embraced, he laughed. 'At last he sent for [Elizabeth] and, carrying her in his arms, he showed her first to one and then to another.' He put up similar performances on subsequent days. He also jousted.
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    Henry, in short, was rejuvenated. The woman who had clung on to him, dragging him down and keeping him back, was dead. The future was his.

    But with whom?

* * *

Recusant tradition preserves a different story. In this, it is Anne who wore the outrageous 'yellow for mourning', while Henry, smitten with conscience, wept over Catherine's last letter.

It would be better for Henry's reputation if all this were true. But, alas, it is pious nonsense. Chapuys's contemporary report alone proves that. So does Henry's subsequent behaviour. For he showed only two concerns for Catherine after her death. The first was to exploit her funeral to drive home, irrefutably and for the last time, that she had never been his wife nor Queen of England; and the second was to get his hands on what was left of her property.
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    Awkwardly, the two aims conflicted. For if Catherine were only Arthur's widow, then she was a 'woman sole' and, as such, had the right to dispose of her property as she wished. And she had already made her wishes clear in a Will. In this, she described herself, with characteristic neatness, as ' I, Catherine etc.' and divided her still considerable personal wealth (later estimated at £3,333) between her servants and her daughter. Henry did not get a look in.
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    Luckily for Henry, the Solicitor-General, Richard Rich, was to hand. His economy with the truth had already provided the vital evidence which had sent Sir Thomas More to the block. Now, with equal legal ingenuity, he came up with the formula which enabled Henry to seize Catherine's property without conceding that she had ever been his wife.
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    Rich was indeed a man to watch.

* * *

Anne's reaction to Catherine's death was, apparently, more complex. At first, like Henry, she showed unbounded joy at the news and gave a handsome present to the messenger who brought it. But then, so Chapuys learned later, she had second thoughts: 'she had frequently wept, fearing that they might do with her as with [Catherine]'. Chapuys had been inclined to be dismissive of his sources for this story, thinking them not to be 'very good authorities'. But the general thrust of the information was confirmed by the unimpeachable source of Gertrude Blount, Marchioness of Exeter, and her husband, the Marquess, whose place as the King's first cousin and honorific head of his Privy Chamber gave him unparalleled access to all Court gossip.
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    They reported that Henry had shared with someone 'in great confidence, and as it were in confession' his doubts about Anne. 'He had made this marriage', he said, 'seduced by witchcraft and for this reason he considered it null.' 'This was evident', he continued, 'because God did not permit them to have any male issue, and that he believed he might take another wife.'

    Indeed, he indicated that he was thinking of doing just that.

* * *

Despite its provenance, Chapuys was frankly incredulous of the story. But he resolved to exploit it by passing it on to Lady Shelton, Mary's governess, in order that, with an eye to her possibly uncertain future, she might treat Mary better.
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    Anne, as it happened, had already made her own moves in the same direction. In mid-January she had written to Lady Shelton ordering her to suspend all pressure on Mary. So far, Anne claimed, she had been cruel to be kind and her efforts to get Mary to conform had been actuated 'more for charity than for anything [else]'. But now, considering the Word of God and its injunction 'to do good to one's enemy', she was advising Mary to submit to her father while she could still gain benefit from the act. For soon, Lady Shelton was to inform Mary, Catherine's daughter would have no choice, since Anne was pregnant again.

    It was a bombshell, which Anne presented as only she knew how. '[And] if I have a son as I hope shortly', she wrote menacingly, 'I know what will happen to her.'
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    Anne was right: a son was a trump-card. His birth would guarantee her triumph and Mary's oblivion. But what if her confidence was misplaced?

* * *

Meanwhile, for all his supposed doubts about his second marriage, Henry continued to appear in infectious high spirits. And the most unlikely people were affected. Sir William Kingston was the sober, middle-aged Lieutenant of the Tower and Captain of the Guard, in which capacity he had arrested Wolsey. Nevertheless, he caught the prevailing spirit. 'My Lord', he wrote on 14 January from Court to his friend and Hampshire neighbour, Lord Lisle, the Deputy or Governor of Calais, 'here is much youth.' 'I am but in the middest of mine age,' he continued, '[nevertheless] I will be a' horseback among them.' Could Lisle 'help me to some good horse for my money'? It would have to be, he reminded his friend, 'a free horse and able to bear me'. For Kingston was a big man, who took after Henry's own build and had been unhorsed by him in a memorable jousting encounter in 1516.
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    It is unclear whether Kingston wanted the horse for riding or the tilt. Henry, for his part, showed off his own youthfulness once more by preparing for the jousts on 24 January. But then disaster struck. He was 'mounted on a great horse to run at the lists', Chapuys reported, when 'both [horse and rider] fell so heavily that everyone thought it a miracle he was not killed'.
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    Indeed, the King's escape was even greater. For, once he was unarmed, it was clear he was not even hurt.

    Anne was not present when her husband had his accident. Perhaps she had absented herself because of their temporary estrangement. Or perhaps she was feeling the strain of her advancing pregnancy. At all events, she was spending the time quietly with her women when Norfolk broke the news. He told the story baldly, it was claimed later, and she was badly shocked.
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    It was the eve of the third anniversary of her formal wedding on the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul, 1533.

* * *

Five days after the tilt-yard incident, Catherine was buried at Peterborough Abbey. She had asked to be interred in a Carthusian monastery, but, as Cromwell pointed out, there were none left in the kingdom. He refrained from adding that this was because he had rooted them out as centres of resistance. The rest of her funeral ceremony would have been equally unwelcome to Catherine. She was buried as Princess Dowager, not as Queen. Still worse, in his sermon Hilsey, the Bishop of Rochester, claimed that 'in the hour of death she acknowledged she had not been Queen of England'. Chapuys, aware of what was coming, had boycotted the service and instead made his own private devotions for her in London.
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But Catherine had her revenge.

* * *

For, on the day of the funeral, Anne miscarried. The foetus, Chapuys reported, 'seemed to be a male child which she had not borne three and a half months'. The rumour mill of the Court came up with various reasons, including, most hurtfully, '[Anne's] incapacity to bear children'.
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    But, despite the gloating of her enemies, the Queen recovered quickly. She even had the presence of mind to comfort 'her maids who wept'. 'It was for the best', she told them, 'because she would be the sooner with child again.' Moreover, she added, 'that the son she bore [then] would not be doubtful like this one, which had been conceived during [Catherine's] life'.
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    Henry's reaction was far more extreme. Anne had been pregnant for a second time in 1534. That too had ended in a miscarriage or still birth. He had a new marriage. But, it seemed, the old pattern had reasserted itself.

    'When she miscarried', Chapuys heard, '[Henry] scarcely said anything to her, except that he saw clearly that God did not wish to give him male children.' Anne, for her part, had protested that the disaster was due to her love for Henry. She had been distraught at his jousting accident. '
And her heart broke when she saw that he loved others.'
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* * *

Anne's remark was pointed and Henry responded furiously. For, the same day that he reported Anne's miscarriage, Chapuys mentioned for the first time that Henry was making much of 'a lady of the Court, named Mistress Semel [Seymour], to whom, many say, [Henry] has lately made great presents'.
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    This, indeed, is the first reference at all to Jane Seymour. The King had stayed at Wolf Hall, her father, Sir John Seymour's house near Marlborough during the 1535 Progress. The visit was a substantial one, lasting five days and romantic speculation naturally has Henry and Jane meeting and falling in love in a rural idyll. But there is not a scrap of contemporary evidence. Instead, Henry's new love seems to have been a product of New Year 1536. Death had liberated him from Catherine. His own mounting disillusionment was freeing him from Anne. And her miscarriage was the last straw.
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    It was time to turn over a new leaf. Or, as Chapuys put it, time to exchange 'a thin, old and ugly ring' for a new one.
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B
y March, the breach between the Queen and the King had been followed by another, between the Queen and the minister. There has been much speculation about Cromwell's personal motives. He and Anne had come to disagree about foreign policy, where Cromwell, with his strong links to the London merchant community, was viscerally pro-Imperial just as much as Anne was instinctively proFrench. There was also, as we shall see, a widening rift over the direction that religious policy should take.

    But, essentially, the question about Cromwell's motives is
mal posé
. It was not Cromwell's business to have motives of his own. Instead, it was his job to do what the King wanted. In breaking with Anne, therefore, Cromwell was acting as jackal to Henry's lion. Which is not to say that he did not extract the maximum personal advantage from his change of sides. And it is hard to blame him: he was merely earning high interest on what, to begin with, was a very high-risk investment.

    For Anne might be tottering. But she had not fallen. And she was a brutal and effective politician who had been more than a match for Cromwell's old master, the great Cardinal Wolsey himself.

* * *

Chapuys was kept abreast of developments by his friends at Court, who were drawn from the highest, the most conservative and the most Catholic elements of the aristocracy. As well as the Exeters, they included Henry Pole, Lord Montague. He was the eldest son of Mary's old governess, the Countess of Salisbury, and the brother of Reginald Pole, who was then in Venice, half way through writing the book
In Defence of
the Unity of the Church
, which would turn him from Henry's protégé into his bitterest enemy. Finally Montague, as he never forgot, was also the greatnephew of King Edward IV, and therefore, it could be argued, the person through whose veins coursed the purest Yorkist royal blood, free from the taint of illegitimacy, which, thanks to the slanders of Richard III, clung to Henry's own mother, Elizabeth of York.
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    With these contacts, Chapuys found it easy to assemble an impressive guest-list at his London residence. But, even by his standards, the company that sat down to dinner one day in late March was spectacular: it included two peers of the blood royal, Exeter and Montague, as well as the Dowager Countess of Kildare,
née
Elizabeth Grey, who was also the King's cousin of the half blood. The conversation began with a general lament that the country was going to the dogs. Then Montague became interestingly specific. '[Anne] and Cromwell were on bad terms', he revealed, 'and . . . some new marriage for the King was spoken of.'
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