So with more weighty anticipation perhaps than accompanied any other royal birth either before or since, Queen Anne settled in to Greenwich, the favoured royal palace and birthplace of Henry himself, to await the event which would seal the fates of many. The expectant father had already chosen the baby’s names, Edward or Henry, and had ordered the elaborate celebrations expected to honour a male heir. Anne seemed to be as certain as Henry was of the desired outcome of her pregnancy. In dismissing a book which claimed that marrying the king would literally be the death of her, she reputedly said: ‘I think the book a bauble; yet for the hope I have that the realm may be happy by my issue, I am resolved to have him [the king] whatsoever might become of me.’6
Elizabeth’s birth was not easy. She was her mother’s first child and the labour, according to Anne’s earliest biographer, was particularly painful: the sight of the red-faced infant lacking the prerequisite male genitalia would not immediately have replaced pain with triumphant euphoria. The same biographer mentions that the baby looked more like her father than her mother, which was less surprising given that many newborn babies seem to bear a passing resemblance to Henry VIII, whose features by that time were beginning to sink into his surrounding cheeks and multiple chins.7
‘The King’s mistress was delivered of a girl, to the great disappointment and sorrow of the King, of the Lady herself, and of others of her party, and to the great shame and confusion of physicians, astrologers, wizards, and witches, all of whom affirmed that it would be a boy,’8 reported Chapuys, ambassador to Charles V. As a stalwart Catholic representing the Holy Roman Empire whose emperor, Charles, was the nephew of the divorced Catherine, any schadenfreude at the unexpected confounding of Henry’s schemes was only to be expected.
The sixteenth-century mind sought significance in everything, made connections between apparently random events and attempted to bring order and understanding to chaos. Anne, confronted with her fundamental failure in bringing forth a daughter, pointed out the fortuitous circumstances of this baby’s birth in an attempt to salvage some divine justification for her life from the critical flaw of her sex. She was born on the eve of the Virgin Mary’s own feast day, and in a room hung with tapestries depicting the histories of the holy virgins, a room which had therefore become known as the chamber of virgins. Anne too would have grown up knowing that Saint Anne, after whom she was named, was the mother of the Virgin herself. So the symbolism of the pre-eminent Virgin, the woman elevated above all others, was associated with Elizabeth from the moment of her birth.
None of the mother’s frantic reasonings, however, mitigated the outraged disappointment of the baby’s father. Surely he had done all he could, endured enough penance, prayed night and morning, changed his wife for someone younger and untainted by scriptural ambiguity, even altered the tenets of Christianity. Such a blatant blighting of his hopes had to have some deeper message, and it could not be a comforting one.
Eustace Chapuys, admittedly a hostile witness, gave a verdict on Henry’s disappointment which most of Catholic Europe and many of his own English subjects would have shared: ‘God has entirely abandoned this King, and left him prey to his own misfortune, and to his obstinate blindness that he may be punished and completely ruined.’9 The pageant and jousting which had been organized to celebrate the birth of a son was cancelled, although the elaborate christening and confirmation went ahead as planned three days later in the friars’ church at Greenwich. But there was no disguising the general sense of disappointment underlying the ancient rituals and the lack of spontaneous enthusiasm on the streets. There were even many who were as hostile to this new princess as they were to her mother. They could not accept the sophistry which had transformed Queen Catherine from faithful wife of twenty-four years to Henry’s unwitting concubine, and reduced her daughter from Princess Mary, her father’s heir, to Lady Mary, her father’s bastard. To these sceptics, Anne Boleyn was the impostor queen and Elizabeth her cuckoo in the nest, although the epithets used then were more frequently ‘whore’ and ‘bastard’.
Oblivious to all these adult judgements, the baby Elizabeth was carried back from her christening to the palace and to her mother who was traditionally in seclusion until ‘churched’ about a month after childbirth. Certainly Henry was not expected to be present at the christening but there was no mention that he was even at Greenwich that day. As was the custom, a wet nurse was immediately found for Elizabeth, for queens of England and noblewomen generally did not feed their babies themselves. Royal and aristocratic women were mostly of value as brood mares and binding up the breasts of a new mother to staunch her milk would make her sooner able to conceive again, thereby continuing her procreative duty.
In fact by the beginning of 1534, just four months or so after Elizabeth’s birth, Anne was thought to be pregnant again. But strain and anxiety were an inevitable part of the pressure to produce, a pressure which the baby Elizabeth’s sex had intensified. By the late summer a miscarriage, or possibly the realization that her symptoms were due to a hysterical pregnancy, had robbed Anne and Henry again of their longed-for prince. Anne had failed twice and her hold on Henry and the throne was beginning to feel precarious.
Elizabeth spent only three months in Greenwich Palace with her mother and the court before being sent to the old palace at Hatfield, some thirty miles from London, to establish her own household under her governess Margaret, Lady Bryan. Elizabeth’s day-to-day care was already the responsibility of her women attendants, with the queen’s role more as visitor to the nursery, but this banishment from her mother at such a young age would not have been a conscious wrench. Elizabeth was never to live with her again.
At the same time, by orders of their father, Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary was deprived of her own household and sent to become a lady-in-waiting to the new heir presumptive. The manor she had been ordered to leave had been granted to Queen Anne’s brother, George Rochford, and the new governess to whom she was subject, Lady Anne Shelton, was the new queen’s aunt. In this way the influence of the Boleyns extended even into Mary’s most private life and could only seem to her to be all-pervasive and utterly malign. Together with the insults to her much-loved mother, whom since 1531 she had been forbidden to see, these new strictures were particularly cruel humiliations for an unhappy young woman of seventeen. She was to take these hurts, unforgiven, to her grave. Despite her loneliness and misery, however, Mary seems to have been as taken with her baby sister as anyone, commending her to their father when she was three: ‘My sister Elizabeth is in good health (thanks to our Lord), and such a child toward [a forward child], as I doubt not, but your Highness shall have cause to rejoice of in time coming.’10
If a girl child was unwelcome as heir to a king, she did have her uses as a future bride in the strategic game of dynastic alliances. When Elizabeth was barely six months old, Henry opened negotiations with François I to see if they could reach an agreement to marry his new daughter, and currently still his heir, to Francis’s third son, Charles, Duc d’Angoulême. The French and Spanish ambassadors were introduced to the baby princess who was presented in full regal apparel: ‘[she] was brought out to them splendidly accoutred and dressed, and in princely state, with all the ceremonial her governess could think of, after which they saw her quite undressed’.11 The undressing of high-born infants, whose health and survival – and sex – were of strategic importance in their families’ marital bartering, was a common enough procedure at the time. Nine