Anne Boleyn Part Six: Juggling King Henry VIII's Romantic Feelings

Written By: Katelyn Abbott

                                      A picture of King Henry VIII during the 1520s

A public ceremony was held in June of 1525, with both Anne and King Henry VIII’s wife Katherine of Aragon in attendance, King Henry VIII created his illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy by Lady Bessie Blount, the Duke of Richmond. The title had been held by King Henry VIII’s own father King Henry VII and by creating his illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy the Duke of Richmond he was effectively preparing to have an alternate option as his heir to the throne. Only one of at least six attempts at him having children with his wife Katherine of Aragon came to end in the birth of a healthy and living child red-haired and blue-eyed Princess Mary who was a beautiful, intelligent, charming, and deeply sweet little girl during King Henry VIII’s nearly twenty year marriage to Queen Katherine. King Henry VIII desperately wanted a son to succeed him on the throne and it ended up governing his thoughts for the remainder of his reign. England had only recently recovered from a very turbulent period of civil war called the War of the Roses and for King Henry VIII the last thing he wanted was any question as to the legitimacy of his heir. Though technically a woman was not barred from the English throne and could rule in her own right the only example of this occurring had ended in disaster and the queen Matilda was disposed. With this in mind King Henry VIII was convinced that if Princess Mary were able to succeed him on the English throne it would be disastrous for England and the best that could happen to England would be that she would marry a foreign prince and therefore bring England under foreign rule. The ceremony was most likely humiliating for Queen Katherine to attend since it was King Henry VIII essentially saying that she failed to provide him with a male heir especially since King Henry VIII had lost the affection that he had once had for her and she was well past child-bearing years.

 

                                          A picture of Anne with King Henry VIII

In 1526 red-haired and blue-eyed King Henry VIII was able to accept Anne for who she was, care about her, and deeply fall in love with her and he began his pursuit of her. He was captivated by Anne’s black hair, dark brown eyes, and ivory skin which gave her a strikingly different appearance from other ladies at the English Court. King Henry VIII was drawn to her allure, her beauty, her brilliance, her charm, her drive, her elegance, her fine sense of humor, her grace, her high independence, her keen wit, and her lively, opinionated, and passionate personality. Anne ended up standing out not only in her looks at the English Court, but also in her fashion, her mannerisms, her overall acumen, and her speech. For contemporary accounts noted that she behaved, dressed, and spoke more like a French woman than an English woman. Anne had gotten to be known for introducing French fashions into the English Court and she had been noted to make a variety of changes to her accessories and her dress every single day. It had to have been an expensive habit of Anne’s to be sure, but on her father Sir Thomas Boleyn’s salary one her family was able to afford and ultimately got the English Court talking about it which was after all the point.  She had been a good dancer and a musician and she had a fine singing voice. Her vibrant personality radiated at dances and she injected herself into conversations with people above her own station about art, culture, diplomacy, fashion, important European matters, literature, music, poetry, politics, the sciences, and theology. She was able to hold her own intellectually against some of the most highly educated scholars of the day including King Henry VIII. Anne also enjoyed fine food and good wine, playing cards and dice, gambling, and going on hunts and she had a great love of the arts,  literature, and poetry which were seven main passions of King Henry VIII.

                   A picture of one of the love letters that King Henry VIII wrote to Anne

King Henry VIII hated writing in general, but he had come to put paper to pen when it came to his romantic feelings for Anne and he wrote a series of beautiful love letters to her. Seventeen of these charming love letters still exist today and these letters survived because at one point they landed into the hands of the Vatican though Anne’s letters (except for one) responding to King Henry VIII’s love letters to her have unfortunately been lost to us. Sometimes King Henry VIII enclosed Anne’s initials in a heart next to his name much like a love-struck school boy and he signed his letters to her informally as H RX while to letters to everyone else he signed his name regally as ‘Henry R’. Feminist historian Karen Lindsay had suggested that Anne had suffered as a silent victim of sexual harassment from King Henry VIII. The first of these passionate love letters was:

My mistress and my friend,

I and my heart commit ourselves into your hands, beseeching you to hold us recommended to your good favor and that your affection to us may not be by absence diminished. For great pity it were to increase our pain, seeing that absence makes enough of it, and indeed more than I could ever have thought; remembering us of a point in astronomy, that the longer the days are, the farther off is the sun, and yet, notwithstanding, the hotter; so it is with our love, for we by absence are far sundered, yet it nevertheless keeps its fervency, at least on my part, holding in hope the like of yours. Ensuring you that for myself the annoy of absence doth already too much vex me; it is almost intolerable to me, were it not for the firm hope that I have of your ever during affection towards me. And sometimes, to put you in mind of this, and seeing that in person I cannot be in your presence, I send you my picture set in a bracelet. Wishing myself in their place, when it should please you. This by the hand of your loyal servant and friend,

H. R.

Anne’s one letter in response to King Henry VIII’s letters to her in the summer of 1526 was:

Sire,

It belongs only to the august mind of a great king, to whom Nature has given a heart full of generosity towards the sex, to repay by favors so extraordinary an artless and short conversation with a girl. Inexhaustible as is the treasury of your majesty’s bounties, I pray you to consider that it cannot be sufficient to your generosity; for if you recompense so slight a conversation by gifts so great, what will you be able to do for those who are ready to consecrate their entire obedience to your desires? How great so ever may be the bounties I have received, the joy that I feel in being loved by a king whom I adore, and to whom I would with pleasure make a sacrifice of my heart, if fortune had rendered it worthy of being offered to him, will ever be infinitely greater.

The warrant of maid of honor to the queen induces me to think that your majesty has some regard for me, since it gives me means of seeing you oftener, and of assuring you by my own lips (which I shall do on the first opportunity that I am,

Your majesty’s very obliged and very obedient servant, without any reserve,

Anne Bulen

 

Anne must have been shocked when King Henry VIII explained to her that he wanted her to be his next mistress, but she played her course of the dangerous game of love cautiously. She had to have been flattered in every sense to have the most powerful man in England pursuing her. It could not have been difficult for Anne to accept King Henry VIII for who he was, care about him, and deeply fall in love with him in return as he was described to be as handsome, brilliant, charismatic, dashing, energetic, fun-loving, generous, highly athletic, incredibly tall, and kind, extremely well-educated in arithmetic, astronomy, basic reading, spelling, and writing, cartography, foreign languages, grammar, history, literature, logic, navigation, philosophy, religion, rhetoric, science, and theology, fluent in French, Greek, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, and gifted in the arts and sports, but his desire to have her as his own could have serious consequences for her if she agreed to become his mistress. Anne ended up being incredibly pious and felt above everything else value in society’s convention that “her maidenhead” should be reserved for her husband. She would not give up her virginity without marriage and King Henry VIII was unable to do so since he was already married to Queen Katherine of Aragon and had a potential heir in the Princess Mary. Anne refused to become King Henry VIII’s mistress much to his own astonishment since she had seen what had happened to her sister Mary as his mistress who had been cast off without so much as a pension after he bored of her (though  she was aware that being a mistress was not always bad as it could come with lavish gifts if one asked for them as well as distinction and high offices for the mistress’s male relatives and King Henry VIII did provide a property settlement and a respectable husband to the lady at the end of their affair) and she said to King Henry VIII (according to George Wyatt): “I think Your Majesty speaks these words in mirth to prove me, but without any intent of degrading your princely self. To ease you of the labor of asking me any such question, hereafter, I beseech Your Highness most earnestly to desist, and to take my answer in good part. I would rather lose my life than my honesty, which shall be the greatest and best part of the dowry I shall have to bring to my husband.” Since Anne and her family were evangelicals they viewed marriage and women differently from religious conservatives according to Joanna Denny for evangelical women were expected to be highly educated and to be an equal partner to their husband in their marriage and sexual relations before marriage was a sin that could no longer be absolved by a visit to the confessional.

King Henry VIII was stunned and said to her, “Well, Madam, I shall live in hope.” Then it was Anne’s turn to be surprised and she told him, “I understand not, most mighty King, how you should retain such hope! Your wife I cannot be, both in respect of mine own unworthiness, and also because you have a queen already. Your mistress I will not be.” Besides, she went on to add, referring to Queen Katherine who she accepted for who she was, cared for, and loved as a faithful subject should do, "How could I injure a princess of such great virtue?"

However the story of her rejection of being King Henry VIII’s mistress to King Henry VIII told even by her detractors had her fall upon her knees saying, “I think Your Majesty, most noble and worthy king, speaketh these words in mirth to prove me, without intent of defiling your princely self, who I find thinks nothing less than of such wickedness which would justly procure the hatred of God and your good queen against us…. I have already given my maidenhead into my husband’s hands.”

Whichever were Anne’s actual words is really immaterial. She must have said something of the sort for she made it very clear to King Henry VIII that she was a woman who was incredibly pious and above everything valued society’s convention that her “maidenhead "should only be reserved for whoever the man to be her husband was. The only way that King Henry VIII would ever enjoy her sexually was by making her his wife and that as she had pointed out was impossible. King Henry VIII had already started to have doubts about the validity of his marriage to Queen Katherine long before he began to chase after Anne. George Wyatt wrote that King Henry VIII said to Cardinal Wolsey that he had spoken with a young lady with the soul of an angel and a spirit worthy of a crown who would not sleep with him. Cardinal Wolsey, who failed to see the significance of what the King was really saying, told in his wordly-wise way that if Henry considered Anne to be worthy of such an honor that she should do as he wished her to do. “She is not of ordinary clay,” King Henry VIII replied with a sigh, “and I fear that she will never condescend in that way.” “Great princes,” Cardinal Wolsey insisted, “if they choose to play the lover, have means of softening hearts of steel.”

 

 

A couple of pictures of Anne during her courtship with King Henry VIII

 

 

 

 

 

A couple of more pictures of Anne's courtship with King Henry VIII

 

King Henry VIII’s purpose at least at first was him likely to make Anne be his next mistress as he had done so with other women many times before, but Anne refused to become his mistress and resisted his every attempt to do so. By Anne refusing to sleep with King Henry VIII was all it took to enhance his desire to possess her even further. Anne’s refusal to sleep with him caused him to be intrigued since it was a rare instance as the King of England when he did not receive his every desire and whim from any of his subjects and it did perhaps for the first time put him in the same league as any other suitor seeking a lady’s hand. Anne ended up being incredibly resilient against his attempts to woo her and he made many of them. He engaged her in deep intellectual conversations, got into writing poetry for her, sent her gifts of fabrics, fine jewels, and meat for her table that he had hunted himself ( for Anne had developed a gourmet’s palate in France and ended up relishing in all kinds of rare meats), and sought every opportunity he had to be in her presence. Anne returned the jewels that he sent to her deeming that she was not worthy enough to receive them and she would often leave the English Court for the seclusion of Hever Castle only enticing his desire for her further. She did sometimes send King Henry VIII a gift in return with one of them being a silver locket with her initials on the outside of it and a miniature portrait of her on the inside of it. Seeking to please her he made her brother George a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and the King’s Cupbearer which was a position of great trust in 1526.  Anne would keep King Henry VIII at a distance by giving him just enough hope of her returning his affections to continue to pursue her while letting King Henry VIII’s feelings for her to grow without her giving into his sexual advances towards her.

A picture of Anne retreating to from the English Court to Hever Castle

 

 

                                          

A picture of Anne hearing the song “Greensleeves” that King Henry VIII wrote in honor of her

In a popular legend it was reported that King Henry VIII wrote the lyrics to the song “Greensleeves” about Anne in how much he was suffering from Anne refusing to become his mistress:

 

Alas, my love, you do me wrong,
To cast me off discourteously.
For I have loved you well and long,
Delighting in your company.

Greensleeves was all my joy
Greensleeves was my delight;
Greensleeves was my heart of gold,
And who but my lady greensleeves.
Your vows you’ve broken, like my heart,
Oh, why did you so enrapture me?
Now I remain in a world apart
But my heart remains in captivity.

I have been ready at your hand,
To grant whatever you would crave,
I have both wagered life and land,
Your love and good-will for her to have.
If you intend thus to disdain,
It does the more enrapture me,
And even so, I still remain
a lover in captivity.
My men were clothed all in green,
and they did ever wait on thee;
All this was gallant to be seen,
And yet thou wouldst not love me.

Thou couldst desire no earthly thing,

But still though hadst it readily.
Thy music still to play and sing;
And yet thou wouldst not love me.

Well, I pray to God on high,

That thou my constancy mayst see,

And that yet once before I die,
Thou wilt vouchsafe to love me

Ah, Greensleeves, now farewell, adieu,
To God I pray to prosper thee,

For I am still thy lover true,
Come once again and love me.

                  A picture of King Henry VIII asking Anne to be his Maitresse-en-titre

King Henry VIII offered to make Anne his Maitresse-en-titre, a title very famous in France for the woman who was the chief mistress of a sovereign and he promised to place her before all others. He only ever offered this title to Anne alone, but Anne refused his offer. King Henry VIII proposed marriage to her sometime in 1527 (probably around New Year) and after some hesitation on Anne’s part she agreed. This was marked by a gift she sent to King Henry VIII in the shape of a symbolic jewel. This jewel was set with a fine diamond and took the form of a ship in which a lonely maiden was storm tossed. There was a letter of interpretation that accompanied it which no doubt explained that the maiden was Anne herself and that King Henry VIII was henceforth to be her refuge from the storms of life. King Henry VIII and Anne were engaged to each other and Anne faithfully promised to give him a son to be the living image of his father once they were married to each other.

 

          A picture of Anne agreeing to accept King Henry VIII's marriage proposal to her