Game of Queens by Sarah Gristwood

Author:Sarah Gristwood
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2016-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

If Anne Boleyn’s baby had been a boy, her position would have been unassailable; she would have won. With only a daughter in the cradle, everything was still to play for.

A daughter was certainly enough to ensure Anne’s unremitting hostility to that other mother and daughter who might stand in her, and Elizabeth’s, way. She sent orders not only that Katherine of Aragon’s daughter Mary should come to attend on her daughter Elizabeth, when the baby heiress was given her own household, but that if Mary should insist on being called princess, Elizabeth’s attendants were to box her ears ‘as the cursed bastard that she was’.

No doubt her aggression sprang in part from fear. ‘She is my death, and I am hers’, Anne is reported to have said. On several occasions Anne made conciliatory gestures towards Mary, which would always be rejected; an attitude very actively endorsed by Katherine of Aragon. Perhaps Henry, and Anne, were right when they were both separately, credited with attributing Mary’s obstinacy to her ‘unbridled Spanish blood’.

On 23rd March 1534, ironically the very day that the pope tardily declared in Katherine’s favour, parliament passed the first Act of Succession, declaring Anne Boleyn Henry’s lawful wife and their children the heirs to the throne. Everyone of consequence was asked to swear to it. Princess Mary had been bastardised, and mother and daughter knew that Mary would be asked to renounce her title.

‘Daughter, I heard such tidings today that I do perceive, if it be true, the time is come that Almighty God will prove you; and I am very glad of it’, Katherine of Aragon wrote, in terms that reflect her belief their very lives might be in jeopardy. ‘If any pangs come to you, shrive yourself; first make you clean; take heed of His commandments, and keep them as near as He will give you grace to do, for then you are sure armed . . . we never come unto the kingdom of Heaven but by troubles.’

That November the Act Respecting the Oath to the Succession required swearers ‘to be true to Queen Anne, and to believe and take her for the lawful wife of the King and rightful Queen of England, and utterly to think the Lady Mary daughter to the King by Queen Katherine a bastard, and thus to do without any scrupulosity of conscience’. It also required that they abjure any ‘foreign authority or potentate’.

At the end of the year Henry opened parliament to pass the Act of Supremacy, declaring that Henry VIII was and always had been ‘the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England’. Henry, and Cromwell, were determined to crush any opposition but Anne has certainly got much of the blame.

For a woman to be the scapegoat was perhaps the reverse side of a queen’s traditional intercessory function; the same distancing of responsibility from the monarch that had allowed Margaret of Austria and Louise of Savoy to make peace more easily than their men. But

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