The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser

Author:Antonia Fraser [Fraser, Antonia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5261-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

The removal of her rival – in the eyes of the world, if not in the affections of the King – should have ushered in the happiest period of Queen Anne’s life. Instead it brought about her downfall. Her repeated wild remark concerning the King’s daughter Mary the previous autumn – ‘she is my death and I am hers’ – had a frightening new significance where Mary’s mother was concerned. As Chapuys commented drily, the marriage of ‘the Concubine’ had not become ‘more valid and legitimate’ as a result of Queen Catherine’s death.8 Henry VIII was now, by strict Catholic standards, a widower since his only wife in the eyes of the church had died; he was thus free to marry again whomsoever he chose. It hardly needs to be emphasized to the reader of this narrative how quickly any monarch who was a widower – particularly one without a male heir – regarded himself as not only free but bounden to marry again.

But of course by other standards – that of the new English church of which he was the constituted head – the King was far from being free to marry. His fancy for Jane Seymour might be intensifying, but his second wife was pregnant, and that event for which the nation hoped – the birth of his son – apparently set in motion once more. ‘O lady Anne, O Queen incomparable’ ran the dedication in a poem by Clément Marot, ‘may this good shepherd with whom you find favour give you a son, the image of his father the King, and may he live and flourish so that you may both see him come to manhood.’9 It is perfectly possible that the second half of this pious hope might actually have been fulfilled – both parents of this putative ‘prince’ (who would have been born in the summer of 1536) would have survived to see him ‘come to manhood’ – if only the child himself had lived and flourished.

But it was not to be. At the end of January – the twenty-ninth is a plausible date – Queen Anne miscarried.† It was ‘a man child’, something over three months old. At the time, according to a contemporary account, Queen Anne was hysterical with disappointment – and no doubt apprehension. The King had had a recent serious fall at jousting which had left him unconscious for two hours. The Queen burst out that this dreadful shock had caused the mishap, so great was her love for him. The plea and the excuse fell equally on deaf ears. The King was supposed to have remarked ‘with much ill grace’ that when the Queen had risen from her bed of sickness, ‘I will come and speak with you’. But a more ominous part of the same story concerned the King’s exclamation: ‘I see God will not give me male children’. George Wyatt’s sympathetic biography of Anne Boleyn, which although written many years later preserves the traditions of her ladies-in-waiting, conveys the same impression of a chilling scene.

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