The Boleyn Women: The Tudor Femmes Fatales Who Changed English History (23 page)

Anne always reacted angrily to Henry’s affairs. Where the lady in question was a member of her household, she had particular power over them, something that the ladies often found to their cost. When Anne found Jane Seymour wearing a locket with a picture of the king round her neck, for example, she snatched it from her forcibly, while on other occasions the two actually came to blows, scratching and fighting. Mary Shelton also felt the force of her cousin’s anger. According to Anne’s chaplain, William Latymer,

there was a book of prayers which belonged to one of her maids of honour called Mrs Mary Shelton presented unto her highness wherein were written certain idle posies. She would not be satisfied by any means before she understood certainly to whom the book pertained. The matter was covered a while because of the express threatening of her majesty, but nothing can long escape the piercing eyes of princes, especially in their own palaces, so that at length the pensive gentlewoman (to whom the book appertained) was discovered. Whereupon the queen her majesty, calling her before her presence, wonderful rebuked her that would permit such wanton toys in her book of prayers, which she termed a mirror or glass wherein she might learn to address her wandering thoughts; and upon this occasion commanded the mother of the maidens to have a more vigilant eye to her charge to the end that at all times and in the time of prayers especially they might comely and virtuously behave their selves.
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Given that Anne had once exchanged similar verses with Henry in a prayer book of her own, the incident with Mary Shelton’s prayer book is highly significant. It is possible that the verses were exchanged with Henry himself. More likely, their discovery was used as a pretext by Anne to allow her to upbraid a cousin who was romantically involved with her husband. The discovery allowed her to attempt to bring the affair to an end by having her cousin more closely watched and, thus, no longer affording her an opportunity to meet with the king. It was a policy that was followed by Anne’s later successor as queen, Catherine Parr, in relation to Anne’s own daughter. When Catherine realised that her stepdaughter, Princess Elizabeth, was becoming inappropriately involved with her fourth husband, Thomas Seymour, she complained to Elizabeth’s governess that the girl had been seen embracing an unidentified man. Elizabeth’s governess strongly suspected that this incident had been fabricated by the queen in order to give her a reason for ordering better care to be taken of the princess and it is highly likely that Anne responded in a very similar way in relation to Mary Shelton. Mary’s affair with Henry was not long-lasting but the origins of Anne’s hostility towards her aunt, Lady Shelton, may lie in her anger over Mary’s affair, with Lady Shelton herself angered by the queen’s treatment of her daughter. Certainly, by May 1536 Anne was referring to her aunt as someone that she had never loved.

If Anne did not direct Henry’s interest towards Mary, it may be that her friend, the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, unwittingly did. It was Wyatt in his pursuit of Anne that first brought her to the king’s attention. By the 1530s he had turned some of his attention towards Mary herself, writing a poem expressing his love for her in which the first letter of each line tellingly spelled out ‘Sheltun’. This echoes a similar, earlier poem where the initial letters spelled out ‘Anna’, which is usually associated with Anne Boleyn. Wyatt met with no greater success in his pursuit of Mary than he had previously done with Anne. In the manuscript in which the poem was written, Mary herself contributed the lines beneath the poem: ‘Undesired fancies require no higher Mary Mary Shelton.’
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That there was some flirtation is clear, with a margin note next to the poem written by Lady Margaret Douglas saying, ‘Forget this,’ to which Mary replied, ‘It is worthy.’ As with Anne Boleyn’s own relationship with Wyatt, the surviving evidence suggests a playful game of courtly love, particularly as Wyatt was still married and involved in a more lasting affair with another mistress. However, Wyatt had a knack for drawing attention to himself, and those he favoured; perhaps he and Henry had their own game of bowls over Mary Shelton? More likely Wyatt’s interest served to bring the teenager into the king’s own circle, to the queen’s anger and alarm.

Wyatt was not the only suitor interested in Mary. According to a recent work on the mistresses of Henry VIII, she was engaged to Henry Norris, a gentleman in Henry’s household to whom he was close.
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The evidence for this comes from Queen Anne Boleyn herself when, in the Tower following her arrest, she declared that ‘Weston told her that Norris came more unto her chamber for her than for Madge’.
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This ‘Madge’ may be Mary Shelton if it accepted that she really was known as Madge and that this was not simply a misreading of sixteenth-century handwriting. More certain are Anne’s comments regarding Francis Weston ‘that she had spoke to him because he did love her kinswoman Mrs Shelton and that she said he loved not his wife; and he made answer to her again that he loved one in her house better than them both; she asked him who is that? To which he answered that it is yourself.’ Weston was young and handsome and an affair between him and Mary, in spite of his recent marriage, is not impossible. It cannot have improved her relationship with the queen if Mary considered Anne, albeit unwittingly, to be her rival in love again.

While Anne worried about her troubled marriage, the woman who still believed that she was Henry’s true wife was in increasingly bad health in her exile from court. With the annulment of her marriage, Catherine of Aragon had been placed under considerable pressure to use the title of Princess Dowager of Wales. When she had first been officially informed of this in July 1533, she had fully demonstrated to Henry and Anne that she would continue to fight, forcibly scoring through any reference to ‘Princess Dowager’ in a copy of the orders sent to her and replacing them with ‘Queen’. Henry spent the next few years trying to break his ex-wife’s will, ordering her removal further and further away from London. This did not always go according to plan, however. One move turned into something of a triumphal progress, with crowds rushing to greet her. In December 1533 when she was ordered to move to Somersham, a house surrounded by marshes which Catherine considered to be ‘the most unhealthy house in England’, she refused absolutely to go, humbling the Duke of Suffolk who had been sent to enforce the orders in the process.

Catherine could not endure forever, however, and by December 1535 word reached London that she was dying. Her friend, Chapuys, rushed to Kimbolton where she was staying to comfort her, with the former queen piteously declaring her gratitude that ‘if it pleased God to take her, it could be a consolation to her to die under my [Chapuys’s] guidance and not unprepared, like a beast’.
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Catherine lingered until 7 January 1536 before slipping peacefully away. Her last actions confirmed her continuing belief in her marriage: she refused to make a will, something that married women were forbidden by law to do, and dictated a letter to Henry, declaring, ‘Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things’.
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Anne and Henry received the news of Catherine’s death joyfully, with the king, rightly as it happened, exclaiming, ‘God be praised that we are free from all suspicion of war.’ The next day he and Anne, along with their daughter, appeared wearing yellow as they were conducted in fine style to Mass before dinner and dancing, with the king behaving like one ‘transported with joy’. Anne was as overjoyed as her husband, watching with pride as he carried Elizabeth in his arms, showing her off to the court. Thomas Boleyn, who was present, was equally pleased, declaring that it was a pity that Princess Mary did not keep company with her mother, while Anne exclaimed that she was sorry about Catherine’s death ‘not indeed because she is dead, but because her death has been so honourable’. It is perhaps not surprising that groundless rumours soon arose that Catherine had been poisoned on Anne’s orders. Lady Shelton did not help matters by announcing the death to Mary with no ceremony or preparation, something which must have been devastating to the young woman.
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With Catherine dead, Anne decided that she would make one final attempt at befriending her stepdaughter. She had previously made overtures, only to be rebuffed, for example in March 1534 sending her a message as queen, only for Mary to reply that there was no queen in England except her mother, but that she would be grateful if the king’s mistress would intercede for her with him. Later, when they were both again in the same house, Anne was thrilled to hear that Mary had curtsied to her, replying that ‘if we had seen it, we would have done as much to her’. Unfortunately, Mary’s curtsey had been to the altar, something the girl was quick to point out. It is perhaps no surprise that Anne, doing all she could, ranted that she ‘intended to bring down the pride of this unbridled Spanish blood’.

Within days of the former queen’s death, she had written to Mary saying that ‘if she would lay aside her obstinacy and obey her father, she would be the best friend to her in the world and be like another mother, and would obtain for her anything she could ask, and that if she wished to come to court she would be exempted from holding the tail of her gown’.
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Anne must have felt that this was a very generous offer given the history between the pair, particularly as Mary’s loyalties were no longer divided between her parents. Anne was, in January 1536, also pregnant and confidently expecting a son, something which would have rendered Mary almost completely irrelevant. Lady Shelton certainly thought that it would be to both her and Mary’s benefit if the princess accepted, ‘continually begging and entreating her in the warmest possible terms to reconsider these offers’.
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It was therefore with fury that Anne received another rebuff from her stepdaughter, firing off a letter to Lady Shelton to complain about her young charge:

Mrs Shelton, my pleasure is that you do not further move the Lady Mary to be towards the King’s Grace otherwise than it pleases herself. What I have done has been more for charity than for anything the king or I care what road she takes, or whether she will change her purpose, for if I have a son, as I hope shortly, I know what will happen to her: and therefore, considering the word of God, to do good to one’s enemy, I wished to warn her beforehand, because I have daily experience that the king’s wisdom is such as not to esteem her repentance of her rudeness and unnatural obstinacy when she has no choice. By the law of God and of the king, she ought clearly to acknowledge her error and evil conscience if her blind affection had not so blinded her eyes that she will see nothing by what pleases herself. Mrs Shelton, I beg you not to think to do me any pleasure by turning her from any of her wilful courses, because she could not do me [good] or evil; and do your duty according to the king’s command, as I am assured you do.

While this letter was addressed to Lady Shelton, it was meant for Mary and Anne’s aunt showed it to her. Mary was unconcerned, with Chapuys recording that after reading the letter she ‘has been laughing ever since’, something which was hardly Anne’s desired effect.
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By May 1536 Lady Shelton and her niece had become estranged and this letter does not imply any warmth between the two women. In any event, Anne Boleyn’s time as queen was rapidly drawing to a close in January 1536 and Lady Shelton, along with other members of the Boleyn family, took steps to ensure that they were not implicated in the queen’s fall.

When Anne Boleyn had written so harshly about Princess Mary she had been full of hope: her rival, Catherine of Aragon, had died and she confidently expected the birth of a son. In January 1536 she and the other members of her family present at court had no reason to believe that the end of their political dominance was coming, and that it would come with extreme suddenness.

It took Anne over a year to conceive following the end of her second pregnancy, something which must have been deeply worrying for her. Given the claims that emerged at her trial, that Anne had complained that Henry was impotent, it would appear that the difficulty lay with him. However, in the sixteenth century, a failure to produce a child was always the woman’s fault and Anne was therefore jubilant when, in the last months of 1535, she realised that she was pregnant once again. Sadly for Anne, this pregnancy proved no more successful than its predecessor and, in January 1536, on the very day of Catherine of Aragon’s funeral, she went into premature labour, miscarrying a son at only around three and a half months of pregnancy.
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For Anne, the loss of her son was a disaster and she wept bitterly as she lay in her chamber, allowing herself to be attended only by her sister. Henry was also grief-stricken, taking out his anger on Anne by storming into her chamber to confront her angrily and ‘bewailing and complaining unto her the loss of his boy’ before saying that he could see that ‘he would have no more boys by her’ before stalking from the room. Anne had heard these kind of threats before from Henry, such as in their angry confrontations over his infidelity. Soon rumours were flying around court that Henry was claiming that ‘he had made this marriage, seduced by witchcraft, and for this reason he considered it null; and that this was evident because God did not permit them to have any male issue and that he believed that he might take another wife, which he gave to understand that he had some wish to do’.
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This caused Anne to go on the offensive, trying to shift the blame for the miscarriage to others. On 24 January, Henry had fallen heavily from his horse and had been knocked unconscious. At the time, there was some fear for his life and the Duke of Norfolk was sent to inform Anne of the calamity.
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Since Henry’s death would have resulted in civil war between his two rival daughters, it is easy to see why Anne would have been terrified. According to Chapuys, Anne saw this as one of the principal causes of her miscarriage and ‘she wished to lay the blame on the Duke of Norfolk, whom she hates, saying he frightened her by bringing the news of the fall the king had six days before’. However, this argument was largely dismissed as ‘it is well known that this is not the cause, for it was told her in a way that she should not be alarmed or attach much importance to it’.