I wrote an article for the newest issue of History of Scotland magazine , focusing on the relationship between Anne Boleyn & Henry VIII's elder sister Margaret Tudor, Dowager Queen of Scots.
This is an excerpt from my book "Medical Downfall of the Tudors: Sex, Reproduction & Succession" (pp. 111-113).
"In 1519, Francis I quipped that Henry VIII
“has an old deformed wife, while he himself is young and handsome”.[i] It
is generally assumed that the French King was referring to Katharine’s
corpulent figure; several years later one eyewitness described her as “of low
stature” and “rather stout”.[ii]
Yet there’s evidence that Francis was referring not only to Katharine’s bulky
figure but also to a deformity of her jaw—a deformity that has been overlooked
by modern historians until now.
In the vast collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, there is a boxwood draughtsman that bears a portraitof Katharine of Aragon, dating to c. 1535.[iii] She is depicted in profile to the left, with her head covered by a hood of English making, and wears a dress with a low-cut décolletage that emphasises her ample bosom. Around her neck, she wears a chain with a pendant. The feature that draws the viewer’s attention is the half-opened, jutting jaw.
This is not the only depiction of Katharine with a pronounced jaw. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna holds a set of twenty-seven boxwood-on-walnut game pieces, dating to c. 1535, depicting various historical personages of the sixteenth century.[iv] Katharine of Aragon is one of them: She is depicted wearing similar headdress, clothes and pendant as in the Victoria & Albert boxwood draughtsman but faces the viewer with her eyes turned to the left. Like in the Victoria & Albert piece, her jaw is half-opened and pronounced.
The National Portrait Gallery in London preserves a miniature of Katharine, dating to c. 1525-26, wherein her jaw is more pronounced that in other known portraits.[v] Finally, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has a portrait of the Queen wherein her jaw is closed but clearly jutting.[vi]
The abovementioned evidence suggests that
Katharine of Aragon suffered from mandibular prognathism, much like her
Habsburg nephew Charles V (Katharine’s sister Joanna married into the Habsburg
dynasty in 1496, espousing Philip the Handsome, Duke of Burgundy). The so
called “Habsburg jaw” refers to the inherited trait which was present and
clearly evident in the Habsburg family, Maximilian I and Charles V being the
most prominent examples in the sixteenth century. This condition manifests
itself as a jutting of the jaw. Yet the Habsburgs were not the only ones who
suffered from prognathism. The Trastámara dynasty, from which both of
Katharine’s parents descended, had several members who suffered from
prognathism. Katharine’s half uncle, Henry IV of Castile, was the most
prominent example, as evidenced by his skeletal remains. John II of Castile,
Katharine’s maternal grandfather, also suffered from prognathism, as did the
first Trastámara King of Castile, Henry II. Clearly, prognathism ran in
Katharine of Aragon’s family and was a trait she inherited."
[i] Calendar
of State Papers Relating To English Affairs in the Archives of Venice,
Volume 2, 1509-1519, n. 1230.
[ii] Calendar
of State Papers Relating To English Affairs in the Archives of Venice,
Volume 4, n. 694.
[iii] Catherine of Aragon, gamesiece, Museum
number: A.35-1934,
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O96204/catherine-of-aragon-gamespiece-kels-hans
[iv] The Kunsthistorisches Museum, KK 3851-77.
[v] Katherine of Aragon, attributed to Lucas Horenbout
(or Hornebolte), watercolour on vellum, circa 1525-1526, NPG L244,
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw191234/Katherine-of-Aragon
[vi] Catherine of Aragon, 48.1142,
https://collections.mfa.org/objects/33353
We see the Boleyn girls at the French court. Anne is reading Christine de Pizan’s "Le Livre de la Cité des Dames" ("The Book of the City of Ladies") while a servant is trying to lace Mary into a corset. Anne and Mary are shown walking down the corridor; Mary is acting seductively towards the two courtiers who pass them by (she blows them a kiss) while Anne treads behind her somewhat timidly.
We
hear Dr Suzannah Lipscomb’s commentary: Mary, Anne's sister, "is much more
interested in the immediate pleasures and the immediate satisfactions of
things, whereas Anne, she holds out for something more.”
Then
we see Anne again, who introduces Francis I, King of France: “King Francis:
Ruler of France, patron of the arts and banging my sister".
The two sisters are pitted against each other in an already familiar fashion. Anne: bookish, intelligent, quick-witted. Mary: looking for carnal pleasures, not the type of girl you would call learned ("you can't possibly have read all these", Mary says as she's pointing at the pile of books belonging to Anne despite the fact that in her own letter Mary once mused that she read "old books" too).
Every single book about the Tudors tells the same tale: Mary Boleyn became Francis I's mistress at some point during her stay at the French court. Francis, however, had only two known mistresses (the official title was maîtresse-en-titre) and a lot of sexual partners. Maîtresse-en-titre was an office and if Mary became the King's mistress, we would have more evidence of it. Did they have sex? Perhaps; if anything happened between them, it was likely a fling.
The notion that Mary Boleyn was sexually promiscuous during her stay at the French court is based on the French King’s reminisce from 1536, when he boasted that he knew Mary Boleyn “here in France” as “una grandissima ribalda” which means more or less that she was notoriously infamous for her promiscuity. The whole report was recorded by Rodolfo Pio di Carpi, Bishop of Faenza, who stated that:
“Francis said also that they are committing more follies than ever in England, and are saying and printing all the ill they can against the Pope and the Church; that ‘that woman’ pretended to have miscarried of a son, not being really with child, and, to keep up the deceit, would allow no one to attend on her but her sister, whom the French king knew here in France ‘per una grandissima ribalda et infame sopre tutte’ [“a great wanton and notoriously infamous”].” [1]
No other contemporary
source records Mary’s allegedly infamous reputation. In the 1580s, Nicholas Sander hinted that Anne Boleyn was Francis I's mistress and known in France as his mule or mare; perhaps he confused the Boleyn sisters or was just trying to be malicious. His book entitled "The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism" depicted Anne and her family as lechers and heretics so anything Sander says is mostly based on lies or anti-Boleyn propaganda that circulated during their times. If the Boleyn sisters were indeed as notorious for their promiscuity as Nicholas Sander and Rodolfo Pio di Carpi claimed, the rumours would have been circulating in England as well as in France, and it remains dubious whether Henry VIII would take one sister as his mistress and the other as his wife had they been so notorious.
Also it looks like the Bishop of Faenza was referring to Anne and not Mary when he made a comment about “that woman...whom the King knew here in France”. I doubt that Mary Boleyn was notoriously promiscuous because there’s just not enough evidence to substantiate this claim.
Pio's report is wrong on many levels. First, “that woman”, Anne Boleyn, was indeed pregnant and did not pretend to have miscarried a son—she really did miscarry a foetus that had the appearance of a male, at about fifteen weeks’ gestation, as recorded by a contemporary chronicler. [2] There is also no tangible evidence that Mary Boleyn was back at court after she and her newly wedded husband, William Stafford, were banished for marrying in secret in 1534. Because of these glaring errors, the report is generally regarded with a touch of reserve when it comes to Anne Boleyn. Oddly, it is rarely questioned when it comes to Mary, and the Bishop of Faenza’s words are often quoted to prove that Mary was Francis I’s mistress and sexually promiscuous because it is assumed that the French King “knew” Mary in the carnal sense.
PS. The only historian
who challenged the view that Mary Boleyn was promiscuous while in France is Retha M.
Warnicke, who pointed out that in 1514 Mary Boleyn was too young to achieve
such notoriety and that Francis I may have well referred to the 1532 meeting in
Calais and “come to this conclusion about her character at that time, aware
that she was Henry’s ex-mistress.” [3]
[1] Letters and Papers, Volume 10, n.
450.
[2] Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, Volume 1, p. 33.
[3] Retha M. Warnicke, Wicked Women of Tudor England, p. 30.
New eight-part drama "Becoming Elizabeth" tells the story of the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn before she became Queen Elizabeth I, as she navigated the reigns of her half-siblings, Edward VI and Mary I. But how accurate is the drama? I will discuss the real history behind "Becoming Elizabeth" in a series of blog posts over the coming weeks.
Early in the drama we see a sex scene between Thomas Seymour and Katherine Parr. While some viewers find it difficult to believe that Katherine was "some sex-starved woman who can barely keep her hands off Thomas Seymour", this is not an inaccurate depiction and I'll tell you why.
Before she married Henry VIII, Katherine had fallen in love with Edward Seymour’s younger brother Thomas. Handsome, athletic and ambitious, Thomas reciprocated her feelings and proposed marriage within days of Henry VIII’s death. The thirty-five-year-old Dowager Queen was torn between duty and her own desires. After three marriages—her husbands were either mentally incapacitated or past their prime—she still had no offspring, although she yearned to have a child of her own.
As a royal widow, she was expected to wait at least two years before marrying again, but she was not getting any younger, and Thomas urged her “to change the two years into two months”. Before she agreed, Katherine emphasized that her decision did not proceed from “any sudden motion or passion” because she was in love with Thomas before the King started courting her.
Katherine could not resist Thomas’s charm, and the couple soon embarked in a love affair. YES, a love affair. Their secret marriage probably took place before 17 May 1547 since, in one of his love letters addressed to Katherine, Thomas referred to himself as her husband: “from him whom ye have bound to honour, love, and such in all lawful thing obey”. Katherine reciprocated, signing herself as “her that is and shall be your humble, true and loving wife during her life”. The couple understood that their wedding was very hasty and could meet with opposition from the influential members of Edward VI’s circle since, as Dowager Queen, Katherine was expected not only to mourn her royal husband at least two years, but also obtain the Privy Council’s approval for remarriage.
Such a hasty remarriage caused scandal and even Katherine Parr's friend, the Dowager Duchess of Suffolk, could not restrain herself from making a comment: She named a black stallion in her stable 'Seymour' and a bay mare 'Parr'.
People believed that Katherine remarried to fulfil her repressed sexual desires. It was a common medieval belief, stemming from ancient Greek philosophers, that marriage could protect women from illnesses that usually afflicted those who abstained from sex. It was also a common belief that a woman’s judgement was clouded by her sexual urges.
When Katherine Parr married Thomas Seymour within months after Henry VIII's death, she knew what she was doing. She was already in her mid-thirties and childless. She was in love and yearned to have a child of her own. She knew her remarriage would cause scandal and yet she remarried anyway. I call that taking things into her own hands. She was, finally, in a position to make her own decision.
This blog post is based on my book "The Forgotten Tudor Women: Anne Seymour, Jane Dudley & Elisabeth Parr."
A list of ladies who received costumes they wore as mementoes after the pageant appears to be the source of who played whom:
“These things remain with the French queen, the countess of Devonshire, Mistress Anne Boleyn, Mistress Karre, Mistress Parker, Mistress Browne, Mistress Danet and Mistress [blank].”[3]
Someone has apparently merged these two accounts together, resulting in the assumption that Beauty was played by Mary Tudor (Henry VIII’s sister); Honour played by Gertrude Courtenay, Countess of Devonshire; Perseverance played by Anne Boleyn; Kindness played by Mary Carey (Anne Boleyn’s sister); Constancy played by Jane Parker (soon to become Anne Boleyn’s sister-in-law); Bounty played by Mistress Browne; Mercy played by Mistress Danet; and Pity played by an unknown woman. It would not have been impossible for these women to play these exact roles; Mary Tudor, for instance, was praised for her physical attractiveness, so the role of Beauty seems apt. She was also the former queen consort of France and highest in rank; the role of Beauty would have been assigned to her as she was the other women’s social superior. Ultimately, however, we cannot be sure who played whom.
The ladies wore satin gowns cut in Italian fashion, close-fitting golden cauls and bejewelled Milan bonnets. Each woman’s role was sewn onto her costume for everyone to see.
[1] William Dunn Macray, The
History of Grisild the Second, p. 53.
[2] Edward Hall, Hall's Chronicle,
p. 631.
[3] Letters and Papers, Henry VIII, Volume 3, 1519-1523.
