A Journey Through Tudor England (14 page)

‘Say what they will, she is nothing as fair as she hath been reported.’

R
ochester is a forbidding, medieval stone castle, situated in an impressive and strategically important position on the banks of the River Medway. There has been a castle on this site (as so often is the case) since soon after the Norman Conquest, but the ragstone keep that still stands was built around 1127 by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, William of Corbeil. It is one of the finest and oldest surviving twelfth-century castles in England. Although besieged twice in the thirteenth century, and captured and ransacked during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, it remains, albeit in partial ruin, fundamentally intact. It Was already ancient when Henry VIII surprised his fourth wife-to-be, Anne of Cleves, here on New Year’s Day 1540 — and it was her behaviour at Rochester that determined not only the course of their marriage, but her entire future.

By 1539, Henry VIII had been mourning Jane Seymour’s death for a couple of years and his advisers urged him to marry
again in order to secure the succession with a bevy of boys. A number of European women were considered (including Christina, Duchess of Denmark, whose legendary response was that if she had two heads, ‘one of them would be at the King of England’s disposal’). In an effort to bolster Henry’s alliances in Europe, his first minister Thomas Cromwell urged Henry to marry one of the daughters of the German Duke of Cleves. Soon after, reports of the beauty of the eldest, the twenty-four-year-old Anne, reached Henry’s ears. English ambassador Christopher Mont claimed that ‘everyone praiseth the beauty of the said Lady, as well for the face, as for the whole body, above all other ladies excellent’, and added that in looks she surpassed the Duchess of Denmark ‘as the golden sun excelleth the silver moon’. Hans Holbein was dispatched to the Continent to paint images of Anne and her sister Amelia for the King’s consideration. Henry found the picture of Anne so appealing that he retained it in his royal collection long after he had dispensed with the flesh-and-blood version.

On the strength of Holbein’s portrait, the King decided to marry her. Anne set out in November 1539 to travel the slow land-route to the English territory of Calais, and thence on to the mainland. By New Year’s Eve, she had arrived at Rochester Castle, where it was intended that she would spend the New Year holiday, before travelling on to meet her groom-to-be at Blackheath on 3 January. Entertainment was provided for the young lady to pass the time while she waited for her bridegroom: entertainment such as the blood sports so favoured by the Tudors.

On New Year’s Day, Anne was standing by a window watching bull-baiting on the grass beside the keep when six gentlemen burst into her room unannounced, all hooded and disguised in identical gowns. One of the men stepped forward to present her with a gift from the King. He started kissing her and made advances. Disconcerted, but not flustered, the demure Anne seems to have tried to
ignore this break with courtesy by ‘regard[ing] him little but always look[ing] out of the window on the bull-baiting’. The man swept out of the room and returned moments later in a gown of purple velvet. It was, of course, Henry VIII himself.

The King had hoped that: by surprising Anne he would ‘nourish love’, because it was a widely known chivalric notion that true lovers could recognise each other through a disguise. He also probably hoped that his sheer royal bearing and dashing good looks would win her attention. Her lack of response was deeply humiliating. The lesson Henry took was that she was unschooled and lacked the cosmopolitan wit of the courtly lady that he sought. There was some truth to that: Anne was very parochial in her education and accomplishments, and she barely spoke English, let alone Latin or French. But what was more painfully obvious was that at forty-eight, and with a waist of nearly fifty-four inches, Henry was no longer the Adonis he had once been.

According to his close servant, Sir Anthony Browne, Henry spoke barely twenty words to Anne and left quickly. The next day he told Browne that he saw, ‘nothing in this woman as men report of her’, and to Cromwell, that he liked her, ‘nothing so well as she was spoken of’. As time went on, he became more emphatic, telling Cromwell, ‘Say what they will, she is nothing as fair as she hath been reported’ and on the day of their delayed marriage, 6 January 1540, muttered, ‘If it were not to satisfy the world and my realm, I would not do that I must do this day for none earthly thing.’ Hardly what one hopes the groom will say before he walks down the aisle.

Anne has been slandered throughout history as an ugly ‘Flanders’ Mare’ (a phrase invented in the seventeenth century), but Henry only made passing mention of her looks, and other people continued to praise her beauty. On their wedding day, the chronicler Edward Hall reported that Anne was ‘so fair a Lady of so goodly a Stature & so womanly a countenance’ and her hair, ‘fair, yellow and long’.

The real problem was Henry’s sense of shame and humiliation. This meant that when he came to consummate the marriage, and touched her belly and breasts, he quickly convinced himself that ‘she should be no maid … which struck me so to the heart when I felt them that I had neither will nor courage to proceed any further in other matters’. It had to be her fault and not his.

On 9 July, Anne was informed that the court had decided her unconsummated marriage had been annulled. Although initially distraught, she gathered her wits and played her hand well. Agreeing to being honoured as the King’s ‘sister’, she earned Henry’s gratitude, and with it an income of £4,000 a year and the palaces of Richmond and Bletchingley, to which were later added Hever, Kemsing and Seal: not a bad haul for six months of benign companionship.

Of all Henry’s wives, Anne was the one who truly survived. She lived the longest and, when she died in 1558, Mary I buried her in a prominent tomb in Westminster Abbey. Anne’s fate rested on that serendipitous moment at Rochester when she found baited bulls more compelling than a bullheaded old man.

If you’ve time, it’s worth driving past nearby Allington Castle. It’s not open to the public (if you must see its interiors, you will have to get married there), but this thirteenth-century stone-moated castle has an important role in Tudor history as the home of the Wyatts. Sir Henry Wyatt entertained Henry VIII here in the summer of 1527 but, more importantly, it was the birthplace of his son, Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, famed poet of Henry VIII’s court. In the 1520s, Wyatt was probably in love with Anne Boleyn, who lived down the road at Hever, but he was prevented from courting her by his existing unhappy marriage. It is suggested that
he is alluding to Anne and Henry’s love for her in his sonnet ‘Whoso list to hunt’ — in which the hunter abandons his vain pursuit of a deer after seeing that her collar indicates that she belongs to Caesar. Perhaps as a result of this flirtation, in 1536 Wyatt was accused of committing adultery with Anne and was imprisoned in the Tower, from where he watched the execution of the other accused men, but miraculously escaped the chop. He retired to Allington to lick his wounds. Allington was also the birthplace of his son, Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger, who led a vast rebellion against Mary I in 1554 [see W
INCHESTER
C
ATHEDRAL
]. Unlike his father, he could not escape execution, and was beheaded for treason at the Tower.

‘
I would all the world knew that I have nothing but it is the King’s of right, for by him, and of him I have received all that I have.’

C
hrist Church is Oxford’s largest and arguably most impressive college. As well as a seat of learning, it is, or has been, a priory, cathedral, royal court and, more recently, a double for Hogwarts in the
Harry Potter
films. Its chapel, which is also the City of Oxford’s Cathedral, dates from the twelfth century when it was part of an Augustinian priory dedicated to St Frideswide, Oxford’s patron saint. The college itself was originally called Cardinal College and was founded in 1524 by Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England and Henry VIII’s right-hand man.

Wolsey was famously born — as his Tudor biographer and gentleman-servant, George Cavendish, described — ‘an honest poor man’s son’ in 1470. His father, Robert, was an Ipswich butcher and cattle-farmer, but Wolsey rose from these humble origins with the help of a degree from Magdalen College, Oxford, and a clerical benefice from the Marquess of Dorset. Under Henry VII, he became a royal chaplain and the Dean of Lincoln Cathedral.

But it was in Henry VIII’s reign that his rise became truly meteoric. Starting off as the royal almoner and member of the King’s Council, Wolsey’s list of promotions in a few short years reads like a panoply of church hierarchy: in 1513, he was made Dean of York and Bishop of London; in 1514, Bishop of Lincoln and Archbishop of York; in 1515, Cardinal. These appointments brought him great wealth, but his real power was derived from the King’s increasing dependence upon him as Lord Chancellor of England from 1515. Before long, the Venetian ambassador would observe that Henry, ‘leaves everything in charge of Cardinal Wolsey’, while Erasmus noted that he governed ‘more really than the King himself’.

Cavendish attributed Wolsey’s success to his charisma and ‘special gift of natural eloquence … with a filed [polished] tongue … he was able … to persuade and allure all men to his purpose’. Wolsey was indispensable to Henry because he took the burden of state affairs off the young King’s shoulders, ‘putting the King in comfort that he shall not need to spare any time of his pleasure for any business’. Wolsey also worked tremendously hard. His servant recalls one occasion when he rose at 4 a.m. and worked straight through until 4 p.m., during which time ‘my Lord never rose once to piss, nor yet to eat any meat but continually wrote his letters with his own hands, having all that time his night cap and keverchief on his head’.

Wolsey’s greatest achievements were in the realm of foreign diplomacy. He negotiated the marriage of Henry’s younger sister, Mary [see S
T
M
ARY
’
S
, B
URY
S
T
E
DMUNDS
] to the French King, Louis XII, and managed to position the relatively puny England as a peace broker between the great kingdoms of France and the Holy Roman Empire. His Treaty of Universal Peace in 1518 was his stellar accomplishment and was celebrated in glorious, spectacular fashion at the Field of Cloth of Gold [see L
EEDS
C
ASTLE
], in a
masterly display of organisation that epitomised his consummate skill as a civil servant, politician and diplomat.

Wolsey, the butcher’s son, lived as befitted his status as a Prince of the Church and was known for the splendour and richness of his court. At his death, he owned over 600 tapestries of incalculable value; when he received the King, or ambassadors, he served up courses of 100 dishes and entertained with ‘masques and mummeries in so gorgeous a sort and costly manner that it was an heaven to behold’. He travelled in the sort of pomp that might seem absurd today, processing astride a mule trapped in crimson velvet and gilt stirrups, dressed all in red and swathed in sable fur, behind men carrying aloft two silver crosses, two silver pillars, the Great Seal of England and his red Cardinal’s hat. Christ Church’s badge still features Wolsey’s hat, and his very hat is preserved in the college library.

Like his house at Hampton Court, Wolsey intended Cardinal College to proclaim his magnificence, as well as his cultural patronage of, and commitment to, learning. He did it, however, by getting permission from the Pope to suppress St Frideswide’s Monastery in 1524 (well before Henry’s later dissolution), and use the land and funds to build his new college. Parts of the original monastery do still exist, however, and form the oldest parts of the college: the Chapter House, cloisters and refectory.

The rest of the monastery was demolished to make way for Wolsey’s grand new project. He completed three sides of the enormous Tom Quad (named after the Great Tom bell in Sir Christopher Wren’s later Tom Tower), which at 264 by 261 feet is the largest quadrangle in Oxford. Wolsey also had the kitchens and the Great Hall built. The hall’s original hammer-beam ceiling was replaced in the eighteenth century after a fire. The college was so impressive that Thomas Cromwell proclaimed in 1528 that, ‘every man thinks the like was never seen for the largeness, beauty, sumptuous, curious and substantial building’.