In an age of superstition and magic, where God’s agency and the spirit world controlled the elements and directed daily lives, barrenness, and the lack of a son as heir, was never just a matter of chance. There was an uneasiness in kingdoms without male heirs that somehow the natural order of things had been disrupted and disappointment, rupture and discord would ensue. To continue the quote at the head of the chapter of the speech which Shakespeare gave Ulysses on the essential patterning of the universe:
The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order:
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthron’d and spher’d
Amidst the other; whose med’cinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad.
In such a closely ordered world where everything had a reason, and that usually a supernatural one, Henry feared that his virtually barren marriage indicated he had transgressed some article of holy writ. The words of Leviticus particularly troubled him: ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an impurity: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.’2 Had he not done precisely that in marrying Catherine, the widow of his elder brother Arthur? But Henry was also an opportunist. Although conservative and orthodox in his own religious beliefs he cannot have failed to give thought to the Continental reformers whose disdain for the pope and evangelical zeal for an individual faith drawn directly from the Gospels gave him a different approach to his own immutable church. His troubled conscience, however, his questioning of a possibly invalid marriage, were made all the more insistent by the fact that Henry had long ago tired of his wife and found a determined replacement in an attractive, nubile, lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn. It was significant that this clever woman was part of the radical religious faction at court and her own conversation was as tantalising to the king as her physical charms.
Emotionally, Henry was a crass and simple man. He could be handled by any adept and resolute woman who managed to withhold from him something he desired. For more than six years Anne drew him close and reeled him out. At times he was driven almost to distraction by her seductive manner combined with her steadfast refusal to become his mistress. Henry had already produced a bastard son by Elizabeth Blount, a boy he was fond of and ennobled as Duke of Richmond and Somerset. But the prize Anne held out to the king was a legitimate son and heir. The longing to secure the succession with a male heir propelled him to marry again. So Henry put in train the momentous events which led him to sweep aside the Catholic Church and proclaim himself supreme head of the newly established Church of England. Spurred on by fear and desire, Henry drove this pragmatic revolution through Parliament. He had the support of the Protestant apologist Thomas Cranmer and his tireless executor Thomas Cromwell. His immovable Lord Chancellor Thomas More, however, paid with his life.
By the beginning of 1533, however, Anne Boleyn’s long game seemed to have paid off triumphantly. Showing remarkable self-confidence and independence of mind, she had refused the considerable honour of becoming the king’s mistress (having first been married off for propriety’s sake to a compliant nobleman). She had the presence of mind and the boldness to play for the much higher stakes of becoming his queen. This really was a remarkable ambition given that there was already a genuinely popular possessor of that title in Queen Catherine, and divorce was not an obvious or easy option. It suggested a woman of will and vision who, through force of character, could impart that vision to others. Certainly she did not appear overawed by her evident destiny, believing that God had elevated her to this high estate in a divine intervention of a personal kind: she told the Venetian ambassador that God ‘had inspired his Majesty to marry her’.3 The poet Thomas Wyatt, probably half in love with Anne, certainly arrested in the debacle of her downfall, left a compelling image of her mysterious and self-possessed attraction. His poem envisaged her as a magical deer whom only the king could hunt, her tameness an illusion:
Whoso list to hunt? I know where there is a hind,
….
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain!
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written her fair neck round about:
‘Noli me tangere’ [do not touch] for Caesar’s I am
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.4
Anne Boleyn’s trump card was the promise of fecundity. The point of a queen was to produce the male heir, ideally a number of possible heirs to ensure against disease, misfortune and sudden death. In fact, Anne’s resistance to Henry’s sexual desire had been overcome sometime prior to their secret marriage at the end of January 1533. By then, already a month pregnant, she had proved her fertility. Perhaps her strategic surrender was Henry’s reward for ennobling her as Lady Marquess of Pembroke on the first day of September the previous year. With this honour came considerable estates and authority. Or perhaps Anne’s capitulation came little over a month later, after the triumphant diplomatic meetings with the French king King François I in Calais and Boulogne which she attended as Henry’s consort and where she gained gratifying recognition from this influential potentate. Whatever the timing, Anne quickly conceived and that boded well for her. Queen Catherine was much more widely loved but by 1533 she was beyond childbearing: for the people to be prepared to accept their new queen, Anne had to provide the hoped-for prince.
At her coronation the pageants stressed this contract with the people. One had Clio, muse of history, chant ‘Anna comes, bright image of chastity, she whom Henry has chosen to his partner. Worthy husband, worthy wife! May heaven bless these nuptuals, and make her a fruitful mother of men-children.’5 It was the first day of June and Anne was already almost six months pregnant. The whole of Christendom had been defied for the sake of this baby; no one seemed to doubt that it would be a boy. But childbirth was dangerous for both mother and baby. It was customary for a woman who had any property to leave, to make her will before entering the dark wood of labour for there was real uncertainty as to whether she would return. But the omens were fair: the late summer weather had been warm and sunny, the harvest was expected to be a good one, there were no epidemics or plagues to disturb the surface calm. Good order was all around: the spirits seemed appeased.
There was an underlying uneasiness and dissension, however, in all segments of society. People did not like to see their good queen Catherine, who had behaved with nobility and utmost probity throughout, so humiliated and ill-treated. Henry’s subjects were largely conservative and did not care for the extreme measures he had pursued in order to satisfy his desire to marry again and produce an heir. Happy as they may have been at the thought that the excesses and corruption of the established church in England would be redressed, there was less support for so radical a reform of religion that papal authority was abandoned and spiritual power vested in the king. Certainly the pope’s* excommunication of Henry in July, and the declaration that his marriage to Anne was invalid, was serious and unwelcome to a conservative and still Catholic people.
During the summer of 1533, augury and prognostication