Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies

During her first year of marriage, in which Anne threw herself head first into her humanitarianism and many issues of reform, her personal life began disintegrating before her very eyes. But try as she might, she was ultimately powerless to stop it; for, unbeknown to her, Henry VIII was entering the ‘devalue’ phase of his sociopathic relationship with his coveted new queen.

And so it is with a mixture of weariness and trepidation that we approach the part of Anne’s story that readers will be most familiar with. Indeed, the following tales of adultery and scheming are the only element of Anne’s married life that most writers care to focus on – not wanting to sully their story of sex and scandal with anything as dull as helping the poor and rescuing refugees. But even then, the facts get distorted, mistold and muddied with apologist theories to excuse Henry’s ensuing affairs (the old classics that she was ‘too argumentative’ or ‘too skilled in the bedroom’). After all, when a man has an affair it’s become standard modern practice to ask what the wife did to drive him to it.

Alas, as we’ve already discovered, Anne didn’t have to do anything wrong herself for things to fall apart as spectacularly as they did. All she had to do was enter into a marriage with a sociopath.

It was around early February 1533 that Anne would have started to suspect she was pregnant for the first time. This welcome news was followed by her coronation on 1 June, by which point she would have been approximately five months pregnant.

It was in these later months of pregnancy, when it is said that she suffered terribly with sickness, that it’s possible Henry took his first mistress. However, bizarrely, this is not an indication that their relationship was falling apart so soon. Of course, it signals the death knell of doom if you’re of the belief that theirs was the most tragic love story of all time, and indeed it would be a sure-fire sign in any modern-day relationship. But a sixteenth-century royal marriage is not like any other, and Henry only seemed to take a lover during the later stages of pregnancies, when his wives were ‘out of action’. I jest not when I say it was deemed bad for the health to abstain from sex, and yet frowned upon to have a little rumpy-pumpy when heavily pregnant. So what’s a man to do? This was a medical issue. Honest, officer!

We have but one reference from Chapuys to indicate Henry may have cheated during Anne’s first pregnancy, and that came the following year, when he wrote that Henry’s new fling was a ‘renewed’ passion for a former flame, whom we will get to shortly.

But on 7 September 1533 the hallowed day at last arrived. Anne went into labour with the king’s blessed child who had been anointed by God. This is what Henry had started an international war for. This is what he had left his wife and lifelong religion for. God was now to send his king the ultimate sign that he was once again in the comfort and safety of His good grace, having washed away the sin of marrying his brother’s widow. There was peace and calm across the land.

Then Anne gave birth to a girl.

Knowing as we now do how much significance the people of the sixteenth century placed on religious signs from God, it cannot be emphasised enough just how devastating an impact this would have had on Henry’s view of his relationship with Anne Boleyn. Can we even begin to conceive how this realisation registered within the destructive workings of a sociopathic mind? When the carrot that Anne had supposedly dangled before Henry for seven years turned out to be female, and not the male heir he had pinned his salvation on?

History will tell you that Anne had failed in the only job she had been hired to do. Damn women and their disobedient ovaries. Yes, she personally failed to control the forces of nature within her own body and produce a baby boy. The thing is that Anne didn’t fail at all; Henry did. Five centuries of medical research later, and we now know that it is the sperm that determines the gender of a baby. The egg contains an X chromosome, but it is the sperm that has a chromosome that can be X, which results in a baby girl, or Y, resulting in a boy.³⁵² How’s that for irony?

However, I would argue that in 1533 the problem wasn’t that Henry saw this as Anne’s failure. It was much more catastrophic than that. It was God who had once again denied him a son.

This was no mere disappointment at the lack of a male heir. The birth of a girl would have brought all Henry’s irrational fears of God’s wrath bubbling back to the surface, taunting him once again with the Holy Word of the scripture. Had his dispensation to marry Anne been just as risky as his first with Katherine? Had it not absolved his sin at all? Either way, the continued lack of a son clearly meant one thing; if the Lord was displeased with their union, so was Henry.

So, yes, this was what shocked the king out of his seven-year ‘idealise’ phase – only not for the exact reasons we have always presumed.

However, there are some historians who believe that Elizabeth’s birth wasn’t such a great disappointment for Henry VIII, because the king kept up a public show of nonchalance in the days and weeks that followed, pointing out that downgrading the celebrations was standard for the birth of a princess, which is indeed true.

But this was no ordinary birth. Henry had placed so much significance on the gender and how it represented his salvation that of course he had to project an outward appearance of confidence. Not only was this to keep those around him calm, but also to keep Charles V’s imperial faction at bay and avoid them seeing this as the ultimate catastrophe for the new royal couple.

So in October 1533, the official line reported by Anne’s ladies was that Henry loved Anne as much as ever.³⁵³ Of course, it’s also quite plausible that they could have convinced themselves this was God’s plan all along: an older sister to support the future king. Yes, Henry needed that boy, but with the world watching this could not be the couple’s ruin, and they knew it. If ever there was a time for the self-delusion that everything was juuuuust fine, that time was now.

Anne was young; she could conceive again. After all, in 1511, when Katherine of Aragon gave birth to a baby boy who sadly died only fifty-two days later, Henry didn’t appear too worried, believing they still had time for God to bless their marriage with a son.³⁵⁴

Of course, the myth that just keeps building momentum is that this disappointment was simply too much, not for the mentally unstable father, but for the evil, cold-hearted mother.

Rumours still persist that Anne never bonded with or loved Elizabeth, solely because her child had failed to secure for her the role of mother to the future king; apparently, we need look no further than the fact that Elizabeth was sent away at only three months old and raised in a separate household. A great narrative for the terrible Boleyn legend, if it were not the case that, as we’ve seen with the childhood of Henry VIII and his siblings, this was a sad and somewhat bizarre royal tradition that was not in any way exclusive to Anne Boleyn. Yet only she is singled out as a bad mother for complying with the rules – an insinuation that is even more galling when we consider that Henry VIII is never called out for being an absent father.

It may appear that Anne shipped Elizabeth away and forgot about her, but that’s only when historians purposefully refuse to mention the years’ worth of correspondence and state papers that confirm Anne spent as much time as was allowed with her daughter, displaying a fierce and protective love for her baby.

Italian historian Gregorio Leti told how Anne fought against strict rules of handing her baby over to a wet nurse in the early months in order to breastfeed Elizabeth herself; a claim that, admittedly, has been called into question given Leti’s lack of respect for the facts in his historical biographies.³⁵⁵

Um . . . is that the twenty-first-century pot calling the sixteenth-century kettle black?

Nevertheless, we have a multitude of other reports confirming that Anne doted on Elizabeth, and would proudly place a cushion underneath her canopy at court so her baby princess could take a regal place beside her throne.³⁵⁶ Latymer confirms that Anne was anxious to personally oversee Elizabeth’s education, confiding she ‘vowed to almighty God that if it would please him to prolong her days to see the training up of her young and tender babe’ that she would teach her all the languages of the scripture: Hebrew, Greek, Latin and, of course, her beloved French. Not exactly the intentions of an indifferent and neglectful mother, it has to be said.³⁵⁷

In terms of personal care, one of Anne’s biographers confirms Anne was a ‘fond, if distant mother’ and visited as much as was permitted.³⁵⁸ Indeed, her first visit was mere weeks after the three-month-old Elizabeth had been taken from her, indicating Anne struggled with this enforced separation early on. What’s more, according to Chapuys, by March of the following year, 1534, after visiting Elizabeth at Hatfield Anne had demanded her baby be moved to the much closer palace of Eltham.³⁵⁹ This was only five miles away from the royal residence in Greenwich, which would allow Anne to visit more frequently. We have to remember that Anne was a full-time working mother; now she was the queen of England, her schedule wasn’t her own. Indeed, we have evidence of a visit only a few weeks after the move to Eltham on 18 April, where Sir William Kingston reported, ‘Today the King and Queen were at Eltham, and saw my lady Princess, as goodly a child as hath been seen, and her grace is much in the King’s favour as goodly child should be.’³⁶⁰

Of course, the striking thing about this report is Kingston’s need to point out that the king loved his daughter, indicating there had been gossip to the contrary over Henry’s unease at the continued lack of a son.

We have further reports of Anne’s visiting Elizabeth at Richmond Palace on 24 October, this time bringing her ladies and key members of the court to see their infant princess, including Anne’s uncle Norfolk and Charles Brandon, indicating he had well and truly wheedled his way back into the fold by this point.³⁶¹

Proving Anne was obviously struggling with the prolonged bouts of separation from her baby, she finally demanded Elizabeth be brought to live with her at court, where she stayed for five weeks in the early months of 1535.³⁶² This is something she repeated at Christmas, with Elizabeth living with her mother right through to the following year and subsequently throughout the final months of Anne’s life. In fact, Elizabeth was still at court around the time of her mother’s arrest in May,³⁶³ a time when history recorded perhaps the biggest indicator of Anne’s feelings towards her daughter: in her final days of freedom, she made desperate plans to ensure Elizabeth’s safety and future care: a heartbreaking moment we will come to in time but one that cannot be overlooked now.

However, I fear we are focusing on the wrong people’s reaction, as there were plenty of enemies at court who were positively gleeful that the new queen had given birth to what was considered a lowly girl. Elizabeth gave them hope that Anne’s evangelical reign was not secure, and there was still a chance they could get her out – none more so than Henry’s former wife, Katherine, and her daughter, Mary, who were still refusing to accept their newly demoted titles of Princess Dowager Katherine and Lady Mary.

But all was not lost for the king and his new queen; they were down but not out, and six months later, in April 1534, it became clear that Anne was pregnant again. Chapuys noted the king was confident that this time it would be a boy; but the poor little soul wasn’t given a chance, as Anne miscarried around late July.

This would have been a particularly devastating blow to them both, as calculations suggest she lost her baby approximately one month before full term. With Henry’s hopes of salvation for his seemingly unforgivable sins cruelly snatched away once again by the Almighty, things would have been at breaking point for him and Anne.

Locked away following her miscarriage, when a woman had to be ‘churched’ for the apparently unclean act of childbirth, Anne was helpless to stop her husband from falling into the arms of the mistress it’s presumed he took during the later months of this pregnancy. But this was no innocent and forgettable fling. The mysterious Catholic woman in question remains to this day shrouded in secrecy. Known only as the Imperial Lady, due to her staunch support for the former queen, she was actively working with Anne’s enemies to end her reign.

It was good old Spanish ambassador Chapuys who first reported in September 1534 that upon hearing the tragic news of Anne’s miscarriage, which they had managed to keep secret until this point,³⁶⁴ ‘[The king] has renewed and increased the love which he formerly bore to another very handsome young lady of this court.’³⁶⁵

Understandably, Anne was said to be horrified by the affair; but not merely at the thought of her husband wanting anyone but herself, as is the only way this affair has been reported throughout history. No, the true betrayal Anne would have felt is that Henry should find solace in someone so clearly against her and everything she stood for.

To make matters worse, this woman was said to have had the audacity to be openly hostile towards Anne. And so Anne attempted to get this Imperial Lady dismissed from her service – something that informs us she wasn’t just a girl at court, but a girl whom Anne trusted within her very own household.

It was this attempt to control Henry that, according to Chapuys, prompted the king to send Anne the foreboding message that she ‘ought to be satisfied with what he had done for her’ and that ‘she ought to consider where she came from’, for apparently, if given the chance, the king would not go back and marry her again.³⁶⁶

However, Chapuys was not inclined to take this explosive threat too seriously, stating ‘no great stress is to be laid on such words’ due to what he describes as the king’s ever-changing emotions and Anne’s ability to manage them; a report that gives us a unique insight into the dynamics of their relationship.³⁶⁷ However, the argument still rings true. It doesn’t sound like a simple case of frayed nerves and overcharged emotions but, rather, very much in keeping with the ‘devalue’ stage of a sociopathic relationship.

Things were to go from bad to worse for Anne when, the following month, she was dealt a political blow in that England’s French allies were rumoured to be considering a marriage between Katherine’s daughter, Mary, and the heir to the throne of France.

Henry was quick to intercede and propose that his new daughter Elizabeth, the only one he now deemed his legal heir, instead be the one to marry the duke of Angoulême.³⁶⁸ But the damage had already been done for Anne. That her beloved French royal family would not consider her own daughter legitimate was too big an insult, and she made it known that she was not best pleased with Francis I.

The once unbreakable friendship between Anne and her childhood home of France continued to deteriorate so badly that by the following year, in July 1535, King Francis was bad-mouthing Anne to the pope’s spokesman Rodolfo Pio, saying ‘how little virtuously she has lived and lives now’.³⁶⁹

It’s hate speech like this that has been taken out of context as further proof of Anne’s moral corruption. Yet, when we discover not only the timing of these rumours but who they came from and the motivation behind them, it’s pretty easy to see that they were just that: purposefully poisonous rumours and slanderous gossip.

But back in October 1534, personal relations between Henry and Anne also continued to deteriorate. Even though she had fully recovered from her miscarriage by this point, her husband showed no signs of giving up his controversial mistress. Anne felt forced to take extreme action to stop the situation slipping further out of control, and enlisted the help of her brother’s wife, Jane Rochford.

The way in which Anne dealt with Henry’s affair tells us a lot about her spirit. She didn’t pine and beg him not to leave her; she approached it smartly and fought back with a plan. Admittedly, it was a crap plan. Together, Anne and her sister-in-law conspired somewhat unimaginatively for Jane to pick an argument with the Imperial Lady, so she would be banished from court.

Now, if Anne was the devious mastermind she was meant to have been, she surely would have come up with something slightly more foolproof than a quarrel between two ladies at court?

Unfortunately for her, Henry speedily cottoned on and, as Chapuys tells us on 13 October, had Jane banished from court instead of his mistress. Chapuys could barely conceal his excitement as he explained:

The wife of Mr de Rochefort has lately been exiled from Court, owing to her having joined in a conspiracy to devise the means of sending away, through quarreling or otherwise, the young lady to whom the King is now attached. As the credit of this [Imperial Lady] is on the increase, and that of [Anne Boleyn] on the wane, she is visibly losing part of her pride and vainglory.

It was this victory over Anne’s attempt to oust her that prompted the presumptuous Imperial Lady to send a message directly to Princess Mary, as Chapuys describes:

. . . telling her to take good heart; that her tribulations will come to an end much sooner than she expected; and to be assured that, should the opportunity occur, she will show herself her true friend and devoted servant.³⁷⁰

This Imperial Lady was on a mission. And winning.

But what of the banished Jane Rochford? The anger she went on to display towards Anne tells us she never forgave her royal sister-in-law, not only for getting her into trouble with the king but for allowing her to suffer the embarrassment of being sent away.

However, it was during these months that Anne was in need of Henry’s support in much more controversial cases than this. Alongside the personal trauma of miscarriages and plots to ruin her marriage, Anne was simultaneously fighting to rescue those in need of amnesty, campaigning for the youths’ right to education and providing poverty relief for the people.

So, the fact that Anne felt scared to push her luck and challenge Henry over Jane’s banishment suggests the Imperial Lady situation was becoming too volatile, and wasn’t worth risking her relationship with the king over. This meant Anne had to diffuse the issue, not add fuel to the fire with more arguments. Yes, if ever there was a moment in history where it’s safe to accuse Anne of seducing the king of England, that time would be now. She needed to go on a charm offensive if she wanted to lure her husband away from his dangerous mistress, who she could see was out to ruin her. I’m afraid that in the process, her sister-in-law, Jane, unwittingly became collateral damage.

People say that Anne was wracked with jealousy when Henry cheated because theirs was a marriage built on sweet, all-consuming love and desire; that Anne’s reaction to Henry’s mistress was more that of a broken-hearted wife than a distant queen, because unlike Katherine of Aragon before her, theirs was not a political match.

But I must point out that in the end, Henry and Anne’s became the most political marriage of the sixteenth century. In eventually making Anne his wife, Henry was taking a stand against the pope. He was making a religious statement against Catholic dominance. He was aligning his country with France over the Holy Roman Empire. He was proving his power as king of England to all of Europe. And in Anne taking Henry as her husband, she was trying to give royal approval to the religious reformation, make England’s stance on the abuses of the Church known and show exactly where their powerful monarchy stood on the controversial scriptural debate.

So, while it may have started out as an innocent sociopathic obsession, after a seven-year war with Europe and their own countrymen, Henry and Anne entered married life as a political match. Which means Anne’s increasing anger at her husband cheating on her wasn’t due to a broken heart, but the very real fear that he was slipping back into the arms of Catholicism and everything Katherine’s imperial faction at court represented. It would have been the ultimate kick in the teeth as an evangelical.

Evidence that supports this are the reports that Anne worked with her cousin and avid supporter Margaret Shelton to have her replace the Imperial Lady as the king’s mistress, which they successfully achieved by the following February of 1535.³⁷¹ Anne clearly trusted Margaret, as her mother had been governess to Elizabeth and Mary. But Anne’s readiness to provide her husband with an alternative bedmate tells us loud and clear that she was less annoyed at the idea of him taking a mistress than of that mistress being an imperial and orthodox Catholic. He could cheat on her, but not on her faith. Indeed, it was in this same month, January 1535, that Chapuys reported Anne laughing off Henry’s flirtation with another woman at a banquet.³⁷²

It is while Henry was dealing with the aftermath of his excommunication and the unenviable task of forcing the more reluctant half of the country into denouncing their lifelong faith of Catholicism that we hear of a horrific event in the early months of 1535 that was to cast a dark shadow over this new reformation.

In April, Henry ordered the shocking executions of the Charterhouse monks who refused to accept him as the head of the Church of England and take the Oath of Succession. These were no mere beheadings; Henry made sure the monks suffered horrendously for disobeying their king. They were first dragged through the streets by horse, then forced to watch in turn as they were each hanged. Then, ‘while still alive the hangman cut out their hearts and bowels and burned them’. It was only at this point, after they had succumbed to their torture, that they were beheaded and quartered.³⁷³

This barbaric and senseless cruelty, though an undeniable sign of the times, suddenly feels at extreme odds with the humanitarianism we’ve just witnessed from Anne. It’s jarring to read the insinuation that she turned a blind eye, making no attempt to stop it.

But did she?

Henry and Anne were still on shaky ground following his affair with the Imperial Lady. If Anne didn’t feel she was in a secure enough place to speak up for her sister-in-law mere months earlier, then she surely wasn’t in a strong enough position to fight Henry on his decision to publicly torture and kill the monks now.

But she knew a man who was, who could act on her behalf – and often did.

Yes, it’s curious to discover a desperate plea from Anne’s man Thomas Cranmer in a rarely discussed letter to Cromwell shortly following the monks’ condemnation. In this letter he begs Cromwell to spare the men’s lives, reasoning that it would help the king win the whole country round if they were instead able to persuade the monks to change their minds by educating them with ‘sincere doctrine’.³⁷⁴

Though Cranmer’s appeal was to be largely ignored by Cromwell and the king, reports revealed that one young man, the vicar of Thistelworth, Robert Ferron, was pardoned. This was on account of his youth, it has since been presumed, and Cranmer’s appeal.³⁷⁵

But could Anne have been behind this intervention?

Cranmer was one of her closest allies and most genuine member of the Boleyn faction, who vitally, like herself, had the ear of Cromwell and the king. In light of her extensive amnesty work that same year in saving religious men and women, it certainly makes sense that she might ask Cranmer to speak up where she thought she would not be heard. It’s widely acknowledged that Anne’s chaplains would often preach controversial messages on her behalf, so by that same reckoning it’s valid to presume she would be in support of, or even the instigator behind, some of Cranmer’s more contentious appeals. After all, this was the archbishop that Anne had appointed directly challenging the king’s wish to execute the monks; would he have had the nerve to make such a bold request without secret encouragement from his patron, the queen? Given we know how strict Cranmer would be in the coming years over the punishment of heretics himself, his appeal here doesn’t sound entirely like his own doing.

Perhaps the very fact that Cranmer’s intervention has been brushed under the carpet and is rarely spoken of tells us all we need to know. What with his intimate connection to Anne Boleyn, there would be an obvious risk of her being linked to this act of mercy – and we can’t have that, can we? While we will never reach a conclusive answer all these centuries later, it’s certainly worth considering;³⁷⁶ not least so we question the standard narrative that Anne forced the people to accept her as queen, whatever the cost to human life.

No doubt keen to surround herself with family members rather than traitorous young ladies out to seduce her husband, we hear news around this time of Anne accepting another loyal cousin into the service of her private household: a young girl Anne’s relative Sir Francis Bryan could vouch for as trustworthy and not one to cause a fuss. This was a delightful country girl called Jane Seymour.³⁷⁷ Anne definitely wasn’t going to have any trouble with this one, and thank goodness, because by the summer of 1535 she was about to be rocked by yet another betrayal and would need all the support she could get.

Her brother’s disgruntled wife, Jane Rochford, was back and out for revenge. Enlisting Anne’s aunt Lady William Howard, Jane made a very public statement regarding her feelings towards her royal sister-in-law; she stormed the streets of Greenwich as part of a demonstration led by several London women in support of the very person who represented an orthodox Catholic monarchy: Princess Mary.

The demonstration caused enough of a riot for both Jane and Lady Howard to end up being arrested and thrown in the Tower of London. This was a huge scandal for the queen of England and so was understandably hushed up by the royal court, no doubt in a desperate attempt to keep up a united front at a time when they were struggling to get the country on board with the reformation that was already dividing the people.³⁷⁸

George Boleyn would have been as horrified by his wife’s actions as his sister Anne. Not only was he part of the king’s intimate inner circle of trusted friends and family, he also considered himself his sister’s rock. He would have been enraged that someone so close to him could hurt his sibling and inevitably bring his own loyalty to the Crown into question. It’s said that George and Jane never had the best relationship, so we can imagine this was only to drive a further wedge between them. In fact, George choosing loyalty to his sister and brother-in-law over his wife is the reason he would be dead in less than a year.

While George was dealing with the embarrassment of his wife’s arrest in London, Anne had more important issues to deal with, as this was the summer of the Reformation progress. All this ‘love rivalry’ and family infighting had served as too much of a distraction; Anne needed to renew her focus on why she had battled to be queen in the first place – to bring about reform.

Unfortunately, by this point she had lost one of her most powerful and skilled workers in Thomas Cromwell, who saw an opportunity to serve the king of England directly in his former master Wolsey’s role. Yes, Cromwell had very wisely seen that wives could come and go, yet the king was here to stay, so he had to be on the right team. But exactly how did the self-educated courtier from Putney acquire the top job as adviser to the king of England?

During his time serving Cardinal Wolsey, long before Henry even considered breaking away from the Catholic authority of Rome, Cromwell was given the task of converting six monasteries into Cardinal College in Oxford. He went on to work on the dissolution of a further thirty monasteries, the money from which funded Wolsey’s grammar school in Ipswich.³⁷⁹ It was probably at this point that he realised just how much money could be raised from dissolving a monastery. Both Chapuys and Foxe separately state that Cromwell promised he could make the king ‘the richest prince in Christendom’.³⁸⁰

So much for the great seductress Anne Boleyn – it appears Cromwell was actually the one who knew how to seduce Henry, with alluring promises of boundless streams of cash from the very people who were defying his authority as head of the Church of England. And so this is how their working relationship began.

But what’s important to know about the early monasteries closed by Cromwell is that most of the tenants he threw out were poor men who were losing their homes and livelihoods.³⁸¹ So perhaps, having come to know Anne’s values and plans for the country, Cromwell quietly realised that the new queen probably wouldn’t get behind this scheme.

But he knew a monarch who would.

So, although Cromwell continued to serve Anne as high steward until as late as 1535, this shift in his priorities and loyalties was a catastrophic move that probably none of them grasped the enormity of at the time. In fact, we might wonder if Anne would have actively supported one of her own men moving into the direct service of the king, in the hope that he could influence him with her own political agenda. It’s a bittersweet thought, knowing the events that were shortly to come.

As part of the same royal progress round the country that took Henry and Cromwell to Winchcombe Abbey to discuss the new nationwide dissolution of the monasteries, and Anne to Hailes Abbey to confront the priests over their fake ‘blood of Christ’ relic, Latymer also tells us that she paid a visit to the nuns of Syon.

In spite of, or perhaps pointedly because of the fact that Katherine of Aragon was their former patron, Anne stopped by the Syon nunnery to give them prayer books translated into English. This was no malicious act of spite, trying to get a rise out of the very people who opposed an English Bible; as Latymer explains, Anne wanted the nuns, like the rest of the country, to understand what they were actually praying for, in order to be ‘stirred to more devotion’.³⁸²

Alas, they flatly refused to let her in, because she was a married woman – a confusing stance, considering their loyalty to Katherine of Aragon and refusal to acknowledge Anne’s marriage to Henry. Perhaps it was a subtle attempt at sarcasm? But proving once again that she was a dab hand at persuasion, Anne finally managed to talk her way inside, whereupon she gave the nuns a lecture in theology – and a stack of English prayer books.³⁸³

Clearly there’s nothing like a fight against the clergy to bring a couple together, as by the time Henry and Anne returned to court in the autumn of 1535, she was pregnant again. The happy news was out in the open at Christmas, and Henry was so overjoyed that God was giving him another chance of salvation that he decided he was not going to risk putting this baby in harm’s way. That meant there would be strictly no more sex between him and Anne; and as his affair with Margaret Shelton was now over, Henry’s attentions turned to Anne’s other cousin – the new girl at court, Jane Seymour.

Jane had accompanied the couple on summer progress, where a royal visit to her family home of Wolf Hall would have given her a brief moment to shine and come to everyone’s attention, including that of the king. So once back in London, Henry embarked on his favourite court pastime: the lusty pursuit of a virgin. However, unbeknown to Anne, she herself was starting the inevitable countdown to her death in a little over five months’ time.