The first Elizabeth Read online

  Even so delicate a matter as Elizabeth's weaning was handled at several removes. First, Lady Bryan wrote to the chief royal minister Thomas Cromwell that the princess was big enough and mature enough to leave her wet nurse and drink from a cup, and the other officers of the household concurred. Then Cromwell showed the letter to the king, who considered the issue and determined that his daughter should be weaned "with all diligence." He communicated his decision to William Paulet, then comp-

  troller of the royal household, who put it in a letter to Cromwell. And finally Paulet wrote on the king's behalf to Lady Bryan, directing her to proceed with the weaning. Enclosed with his letter was another from Anne, perhaps giving instructions, but this letter has not survived. 9 Elizabeth was then just over two years old.

  The princess was occasionally brought to court, but less for the sake of spending time with her parents than to be shown off to courtiers or visiting ambassadors. It was essential that the king's only legitimate child be seen to be healthy, particularly in an era when more infants died than survived. And if Elizabeth was healthy—"as goodly a child as hath been seen," one observer wrote of her at seven months old, in April of 1534—then she was marriageable. Just at this time King Henry proposed a match between his baby daughter and the third son of the king of France. Two French diplomats came to inspect her. She was shown to them first "in very rich apparel, in state and triumph as a princess," and then completely naked, so that they could personally refute any rumors of physical defects. 10

  During 1534 and the first six months of 1535 the proposed marriage alliance was the focus of serious negotiation. The betrothal would not take place until Elizabeth was seven years old, by which time, it was hoped, Anne and Henry would have at least one son; if they had two sons, they could spare Elizabeth to be brought up in France among her future inlaws. 11 Despite months of diplomatic discussions, in the end the negotiations came to nothing. King Francis refused to join his brother monarch in England in breaking away from the church of Rome, and he would not lend his public support to Henry's controversial second marriage. Both issues were essential to any dynastic union, from the English point of view, and so the discussions ended.

  Elizabeth's babyhood witnessed the radical upheaval of the English church. The authority of the pope in England was denied, and the clergy became subject to the king in religious as well as secular matters. It was nothing short of a revolution in that the autonomy of the spirituality in England was forever broken, and the monarchy gained immensely in both wealth and power. Papal taxation was now diverted to the crown, and the clergy were heavily taxed. That close scrutiny of monastic mores and revenues began which was to lead, in 1536, to the suppression of the lesser monasteries and, a few years later, to the liquidation of the entire monastic establishment in England.

  Even more important, there began in these years that crucial shift in public consciousness and in the workings of the political order which undercut the moral force of the clergy and shifted the locus of spiritual suasion toward the king. Amid a climate of religious ferment, widespread

  and outspoken anticlericalism and blasphemous contempt for sacred things among the people, the king and his chief minister Thomas Cromwell fashioned a new concept of sovereignty.

  Henry VIII saw himself as responsible for the souls as well as the bodies of his subjects; he claimed an ultimate, imperial power that recognized no higher authority but God himself. Cromwell translated the king's vision of rulership into policy, embedding the strictly religious changes in the Reformation statutes in a broader theory of monarchical government. Parliament became the natural arena of royal legislation, and the bond formed between king and Parliament was to be fateful for England's governance in future.

  But for these momentous changes to be secure and lasting the king needed a son to succeed him, and by 1535 it was becoming a worrisome possibility that the male heir Anne Boleyn hoped desperately to conceive would never be born. Her several pregnancies had ended in miscarriage, and each of her failures served only to increase the continuing tension under which she lived, making it more and more unlikely that she would give her husband a male heir. "The king despairs of other sons," the bishop of Faenza wrote prophetically in April, 1535, "so this last daughter may be mistress of England." 12

  Henry and Anne had long since ceased to be bound by either lust or affection. Henry, ever "inclined to amours," amused himself with flirtations and infatuations which drove Anne into a helpless frenzy. She was trapped, and he knew it; she dared not complain about his favorites—among them her maid of honor Jane Seymour and her cousin Margaret Shelton, daughter of that Lady Shelton who kept watch over Mary Tudor—for fear he might lose patience with her once and for all and put her aside as he had Katherine. Oddly enough, besides her continuing hopes for a son Katherine was Anne's strongest safeguard against ruin. As long as Katherine lived, Henry would hesitate to rid himself of Anne, for if he did he might be forced to return to his first wife.

  Then in November of 1535 Anne took heart again, and by December she was certain she was pregnant. The holiday season came and went, and she found herself able to overlook both her husband's ceaseless gallantries and the vulgar insults of her uncle Norfolk, who at his least offensive called her "a great whore." She began to breathe more easily, and to allow her expectations to rise. She was only twenty-eight, after all, younger by three years than Queen Katherine had been when she gave birth to Mary. Perhaps this time, if she was careful, she would carry her child to term.

  Unexpectedly, Katherine died on January 8, still professing to love the king who, many said, had had her poisoned. The death of her longtime rival cannot have left Anne indifferent, and her relief at the news was almost

  certainly mingled with apprehension. Characteristically, Henry camouflaged his own mixed feelings with frenetic activity. "God be praised," he shouted exultantly when word of {Catherine's death first reached him, "now we are free from all suspicion of war!" All the machinery of celebration was set in motion, and the king outdid himself in planning banquets and tourneying to commemorate the passing of an abiding peril. He put on his gayest clothes, danced for hours with overeager abandon, and then went out to exercise in the tiltyard, forgetting his age and jousting like a young man again. This was the first good news to reach him in two years. The menace of invasion receded, the intricate arguments over the validity or invalidity of his first marriage became moot. Most important, the child Anne was carrying would be born without the stigma of bastardy.

  Two fateful events interrupted the revelry. First, the king was nearly killed in a jousting accident. He fell off his mount, and as he lay pinned to the ground by his heavy jousting armor the horse fell on top of him. Two hours passed before he recovered consciousness. Then shortly afterward, on the day Katherine of Aragon was interred, Anne lost her child. In the circumstances the tragedy seemed insurmountable, especially when the midwives admitted that the tiny foetus "had the appearance of a male." 13

  For Henry the blow was very bitter, and decisive. Anne's inadequacy went beyond either blame or forgiveness; it called for a complete change of heart. All at once she was dislodged from her key position in his life, and a new rationale took shape to justify both her past disappointments and her future fate. Henry decided that all along he had been bewitched by Anne, and that now that his eyes were opened he must rid himself of her. Their daughter Princess Elizabeth would, of course, be a casualty of Anne's disgrace, but with luck a new wife—Mistress Seymour—would soon make up for the loss by presenting him with a son.

  Less than three months after her miscarriage Anne was led to her execution on Tower Green. A secret royal commission had uncovered evidence sufficient to convict her of treason, and the list of her specific crimes was long and shameful. "Despising her marriage, and entertaining malice against the king," the accusation read, "and following daily her frail and carnal lust, she did falsely and traitorously procure by base conversations and kisses, touchings, gifts and other infamous i
ncitations, divers of the king's daily and familiar servants to be her adulterers and concubines."

  Anne's "incontinent living" was bad enough, especially as her brother George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, was said to be among her lovers. But there was more. Anne and her paramours had conspired to kill the king, and he had been preserved from death by the grace of God alone. The royal councilors "quaked at the danger his grace was in," Cromwell wrote pi-

  ously, "and on our knees gave him laud and praise that he had preserved him so long from it." 14

  There could be no mercy for the guilty queen. Anne was sentenced to be taken to Tower Green, to the small grass-covered courtyard facing the church of St. Peter in Chains that was reserved for prisoners of the highest rank, and there "burned or beheaded so shall please the king." She was allowed the less painful death, uncommon in England, of beheading by the sword.

  Several days before her execution her marriage to Henry VIII was judged to be of no force, because of her husband's prior relations with her sister. Her child Elizabeth, two years and eight months old, was no longer princess, but a bastard like her half-sister Mary. But unlike Mary, Elizabeth was the daughter of a condemned adulteress and traitor, whose headless body would be stuffed into a crude wooden box and buried, without ceremony, in St. Peter's church.

  In the final months of her mother's life, two scenes may have impressed themselves on Elizabeth's memory. In both she was the focus of wide attention.

  The first was on the occasion of {Catherine's death. As part of his display of satisfaction King Henry dressed himself in yellow satin and sent for his little daughter. She was brought to him, no doubt arrayed in similar finery, and he carried her about for some time, holding her out to each of his courtiers, smiling at her, talking about her. The excitement of the occasion, the sight of her tall, broad-shouldered father in his bright yellow suit, the sound of his hearty voice booming out happily and repeating her name— these impressions may well have stayed in the mind of a precocious child of two and a half.

  The second occasion was more poignant. Shortly before Anne was taken to the Tower, she made a last mute appeal to her husband to spare her— if not for her own sake, then for the sake of their child. A contemporary who witnessed the event described it to Elizabeth many years later. "Alas I shall never forget the sorrow I felt when I saw the sainted queen your mother, carrying you, still a little baby, in her arms," he wrote, "and entreating the most serene king your father in Greenwich Palace, from the open window of which he was looking into the courtyard where she brought you to him." The king had just received the accusations of his commissioners; though their findings were no more or less than he had ordered, he responded to the indictment with the anger appropriate to an unsuspecting husband who discovers he has been betrayed. At the moment Anne appeared outside his window he may well have been giving orders for her execution. "The faces and gestures of the speakers plainly showed the king

  was angry," the man went on, "though he concealed his anger wonderfully well."

  Whether the king's enigmatic expression concealed anger or dark satisfaction will never be known. But he dismissed his repudiated wife and her child without a word or a look, and a few hours later the cannon thundered from the Tower to announce that Anne Boleyn, commoner and traitor, had entered by the river gate.

  Crie not out-right for that were children s guise, But let thy teares fall trickling downe thy face, And weepe so long untill thy blubbered eyes, May see (in Sunne) the depth of thy disgrace.

  Oh shake thy head, but not a word but mumme.

  The heart once dead, the tongue is stroken dumme.

  W

  F Tithii

  ithin days of Anne Boleyn's execution every evidence of her queenship was gone. Her coat of arms was removed from linens and liveries, and from the royal barge. Her servants were dispersed, many of them joining the king's engorged household. Her debts, among them bills for velvet kirtles and purple satin caps for her little daughter, were paid and buried in the comptroller's accounts. And her throne was filled by another woman.

  When Elizabeth was next brought to court a pale, sweet-faced lady with a prim mouth and mild brown eyes sat at her father's side, and when this lady turned her mild eyes on the king's younger daughter there was more pity in them than respect.

  For Anne's child was the only ineradicable proof of her existence, and as such she seemed to incarnate her mother's dark memory. For years Anne's enemies had called her the Great Whore; now all that was left of her was the child they called the Little Whore, a thin, fair-skinned girl with delicate features and lashes and eyebrows so light they gave her a startled look. 1 The new queen, Jane Seymour, was kind to her, but kinder to her half-sister Mary, who was given the seat of honor at her side in the dining hall while Elizabeth was placed out of sight. And there was an unmistakable difference in the way the courtiers looked at her, now frowning to them-

  selves as they scrutinized her features, now whispering to one another, now turning their faces away as if to avoid all contact with a tainted being.

  Only a month had passed between the arrest of Queen Anne and the king's marriage to Queen Jane, and during those whirling days so much had happened so quickly that no one had even begun to digest it. The court was alive with rumor and conjecture, much of it centered on the late queen's discredited child. "Here are so many tales," wrote Lord Hussey, a staunch enemy to Anne and recently Mary Tudor's chamberlain, "I cannot tell what to write." 2

  The circumstances leading to Anne's conviction lent themselves to much speculation and embroidery. She had been unfaithful to the king, but when, and how often, and with whom? Henry himself averred that Anne had slept with more than a hundred men, and in fact beyond the five convicted lovers who were executed with her several others were detained in the Tower, and the courtiers looked for "many more" to be executed before long. 3

  Anne's adultery, of course, not only imperiled Elizabeth's legitimacy but —far more important—called into question her royal lineage. For if, as many believed, someone other than the king was her father, then even the relatively debased status of royal bastard was a much higher honor than she deserved. Beyond her own base lust two things, it was alleged, had prompted Anne to faithlessness: the king's impotence (hardly broadly publicized, but repeatedly alluded to at the trial), and the reassurances of liberal bishops, infected with Lutheran doctrines, that it was permissible for a woman to "ask for aid in other quarters, even among her own relatives," if her husband was incapable. 4

  Armed with these inducements Anne seduced her lovers, "by sweet words, kisses, touches and otherwise," to lie with her, and so conceived not only her miscarried children but her one surviving daughter. Anne had betrayed the king, according to rumor, even before he married her. "It was proved at the trial that she had behaved in this way before the conception of the child which the king thought to be his," wrote an imperialist diplomat in Rome confidently. "It is intended to declare the child not to be the king's." 5

  Of the many candidates for Elizabeth's paternity three stood out. One was Henry Norris, the tall, handsome principal gentleman of the chamber who had long been among the king's most trusted intimates. So likely did Norris seem as Elizabeth's true father that Eustace Chapuys, the imperial ambassador, found his paternity plausible grounds for Henry's divorce from Anne. "The archbishop of Canterbury declared by sentence that the concubine's daughter was the bastard of Mr. Norris," he informed Charles V's minister Granvelle, "and not the king's daughter." 6

  George Boleyn was the most sensational choice—and one reinforced even more strongly by family resemblance. The charge of incest against Anne was repeated with particular relish by her continental opponents; a Portuguese contemporary noted that "after her execution the council declared that the queen's daughter was the child of her brother." 7 That both Anne and George denied the charge did nothing to brake the scandal, and George, who was widely disliked for his arrogance, was probably least mourned of the queen's alleged lovers. />
  The allegation that endured longest in common memory was that Mark Smeaton, musician on the virginals and organ, "deft dancer" and groom of the king's chamber, was the father of Anne's child. Smeaton, a commoner (and carpenter's son) and possibly a Fleming, was the only one of the men accused with Anne to confess, under torture, to being her lover. His confession set off imaginative speculation. By the time Charles V heard the story it was reduced to essentials: Anne, he said, had been surprised in bed with the king's organist; hence her execution. For years afterward English courtiers thought they could see in Elizabeth's maturing features the imprint of Mark Smeaton's. Mary found the likeness particularly strong, and to her dying day she asserted (to her intimates) that Elizabeth had the "face and countenance" of the hapless musician, and was neither her sister nor her father's daughter. 8

  If there was much doubt about Elizabeth's father, there was at least some doubt about her mother as well. Even before Anne's execution the imperialists had spread the tale that all along she had been unable to conceive, and that Elizabeth was the daughter of peasants, brought secretly to court while Anne was said to be in labor and represented to be her long-awaited child. There was an inescapable flaw in this argument, for surely if Anne had taken the trouble to locate a supposititious child she would have made certain it was male. Yet the story was repeated all the same, and it became more welcome than ever on Anne's death. With Henry having all but disowned her, it would have been a short step to denying Elizabeth's bond to Anne as well, and so hopelessly severing her connection to the court, much less to the throne. 9 Chapuys made much of Anne's own acknowledgment of another possible defect in Elizabeth's claim. After her last miscarriage Anne comforted her women, saying that her next child "would not be doubtful like this one, which had been conceived during the life of the [late] queen," thereby implying that Elizabeth too was "doubtful." 10