The names of Henry VIII’s wives: handwriting and signatures

“What is this post about?” you may wonder. “I know that Henry VIII had six wives and I know their names”. Indeed. Henry VIII had six wives and they are all very well-known historical figures: 

Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard and Katherine Parr. 

But when you actually read the original contemporary letters, the names of Henry VIII’s wives are different! So what were their real names?

Katherine of Aragon

Married Henry on 11 June 1509. He was 17, she was 23. Marriage annulled on 23 May 1533.

Married for 23 years and 11 months.

Born in Spain, Katherine’s Spanish name was “Katalina”, but when she became Queen she used the anglicized version of her original name. She signed her letters with “Katharine”, “Katherine”, “Katherina”, and “Katharina”. In one of her prayer books, Katherine left the inscription: “This boke ys myn Katherina the qwene”.

 “This boke ys myn Katherina the qwene”

"Katharina"

Anne Boleyn

Married Henry on 14 November 1532 and 25 January 1533. He was 41, she was either 26 or 32.

Beheaded on 19 May 1536.

In a letter written in French to her father from the Low Countries when she was a teenager, Anne used the French version of her surname: “Anna de Boullan”. A letter she wrote to Cardinal Wolsey sometime prior to the Cardinal’s disgrace in 1529 bears the signature “Anne Boleyn”. Between December 1529 and August 1532 Anne started signing her letters as “Anne Rochford”. In 1533 she became Queen and adapted a new signature: “Anne the Queen” or, in original, “Anne the Qwene”.

"Anna de Boulan"

Jane Seymour

Married Henry on 30 May 1536. He was 44, she was 26. Died on 24 October 1537. Married for 1 year and 4 months.

Jane Seymour seems to be the only wife of Henry VIII who spelled her name the same way we do it today, “Jane the Queen”.

Anne of Cleves

Married Henry on 6 January 1540. He was 48, she was 24. Marriage annulled on 9 July 1540. Married for 6 months.

Anne was born in Germany and her name was spelled “Anna”. She signed herself as “Anna, the daughter of Cleves” in a letter she sent to Henry soon after the annulment of their marriage.

Catherine Howard

Married to Henry on 8 August 1540. He was 49, she was between 17 and 22. Beheaded on 15 February 1542. Married for 2 years and 6 months.

The only extant letter by Catherine Howard was addressed to “Master [Thomas] Culpeper”, a gentleman of Henry VIII’s court who was later beheaded as the Queen’s lover. Catherine signed this letter: “Yours as long as life endures, Katheryn”.

"Yours as long as lyffe endures, Katheryn"

Katherine Parr

Married Henry on 12 July 1543. He was 52, she was 31. Survived the King. Married for 3 years and 6 months.There are several samples of Katherine Parr’s handwriting from the period when she was Queen. She always signed her letters “Kateryn the Quene KP” adding her initials in the end.

So, in the end, we have Katharina, Anne, Jane, Anna, Katheryn and Kateryn. What a diversity!

Picture Sources:

http://exetercollegespecialcollections.com/tag/katherine-of-aragon/

http://smalldogsyndrome.com/tag/travel/page/3/

Pet Monkeys: Marmosets at the Tudor court

Yesterday I’ve been to the zoo with my family and we saw a curious little creature called marmoset. Marmoset is a small tropical American monkey with a silky coat and a long tail. I remembered that at least two Tudor personages were painted with this funny-looking creature so I’ve decided to post these portraits together with some photos of the charming marmosets.

Henry VIII received a marmoset as a Christmas present in 1539 and his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, was painted with this animal in the late 1520s. Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret Tudor, was also painted with a marmoset sitting on her hands. Not everyone was into marmosets, however. When Lady Honor Lisle wanted to present Anne Boleyn with a pet monkey, she was informed that Anne “loveth no such beasts nor can scant abide the sight of them”. 

Sources:

http://mentalfloss.com/article/64629/9-bizarre-objects-owned-henry-viii

Alison Weir, Henry VIII: King and Court, 2011.

Joanna Denny, Anne Boleyn, 2010.

Thomas Cromwell’s illegitimate daughter Jane

Thomas Cromwell and his daughter Grace
 in "Wolf Hall"

Thomas Cromwell’s two known daughters, Anne and Grace, died from the fatal infectious fever called “the sweating sickness” that swept through England in 1528. However, in his History of the Lives and Actions of Thomas Cromwell, written c. 1761, Arthur Collins made a reference to Thomas Cromwell’s son Gregory “and a daughter Jane”.[1] In her recent biography of Thomas Cromwell, historian Tracy Borman wrote this about Jane:

“Little is known about her, except that she married William Hough of Leighton in Wirral, Cheshire, sometime between 1535 and 1540. Girls were often married as young as twelve years old, but even if the latter date for Jane’s marriage is accepted, she must have been conceived while Cromwell’s wife was still alive. Jane’s husband, a staunch Catholic, was the son of Richard Hough, who was Cromwell’s agent in Cheshire from 1534 to 1540. It is therefore likely that Cromwell arranged their marriage, which was a good one for a girl of Jane’s obscure origins. But he would arguably have performed this favour for any loyal servant, and there is little other than the girl’s surname to suggest that she might have been his daughter.” [2]

There’s also a curious reference to a daughter in a letter to Cromwell from his colleague, Richard Southwell, in 1537. Southwell wrote that “I saw a child of my Lady your daughter’s at a nunnery in Yorkshire”. [3] Sadly, nothing more is known about her. 

Sources:

[1] Michael Everett, The Rise of Thomas Cromwell: Power and Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII, p. 197.

[2] Tracy Borman, Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant, Kindle edition.

[3] Michael Everett, The Rise of Thomas Cromwell: Power and Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII, p. 197. 

“Don’t ask, don’t get”: Mary Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell in “Wolf Hall”

In Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall”, there’s an apparent chemistry between Thomas Cromwell and Mary Boleyn, the sister of Anne. We meet Mary after her first husband William Carey, member of the King’s Privy Chamber, has died of sweating sickness in 1528. Mary regrets being widowed because “I am to be swept out after supper like the old rushes. Now I’m no one’s wife, they [the Boleyns, her family] can say anything they like to me”. She reveals to Thomas Cromwell that she “needs a new husband” and tells him that she needs a husband who would upset her family. “I want to marry a man who frightens them”, says Mary in the course of her conversation with Thomas Cromwell and Hilary Mantel clearly hints that Cromwell, who had recently lost his beloved wife, seems like a great catch to Mary Boleyn: “There is a sudden light in her blue eyes. An idea has dawned. She rests one delicate finger on the grey velvet she so admires, and says softly, ‘Don’t ask, don’t get’”.

“Don’t ask, don’t get”: Mary Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell's apparent chemistry in "Wolf Hall" 

Is there any truth to this? Was Mary Boleyn ever interested in Thomas Cromwell? Was he interested in her? Well, there is no historical evidence to prove that Mary Boleyn was romantically linked with Thomas Cromwell. Or that she was poor and couldn't afford grey velvet, as implied both in the novel and in the TV adaptation of "Wolf Hall". Mary and Cromwell certainly knew each other socially and when in 1534 Mary made a secret match to one William Stafford,  her social inferior, she appealed to Thomas Cromwell because she knew he could help her. According to Mary:

“I saw that all the world did set so little by me, and he [William Stafford] so much, that I thought I could take no better way but to take him and forsake all other ways, and live a poor, honest life with him. And so I do put no doubts but we should, if we might once be so happy to recover the King’s gracious favour and the Queen’s. For well I might have had a greater man of birth and a higher, but I assure you I could never have had one that should have loved me so well, nor a more honest man.”

Thomas Cromwell’s reply does not survive and, sadly, we don’t know if he interceded with Henry VIII and the Boleyns on Mary’s behalf. Mary's letter is the only recorded interaction between her and Cromwell. 

Sources:

Hilary Mantel, "Wolf Hall", (Fourth Estate, 2009)

Mary Stafford to Thomas Cromwell (1534), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1862-1910), Volume 7: 1655.

New book releases: Summer Reads

Here's a fresh selection of books to look forward to this summer! 

1. The Rival Queens: Catherine de' Medici, her daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal That Ignited a Kingdom by Nancy Goldstone (non-fiction)

Release date: 18 June 2015 (UK), 23 June 2015 (US)

2. The Seymours of Wolf Hall: A Tudor Family Story by David Loades (non-fiction)

Release date: 15 June 2015 (UK), 19 August 2015 (US)

3. Margaret Pole: The Countess in the Tower by Susan Higginbotham (non-fiction)

Release date: 15 August 2015 (UK), 19 August 2015 (US)

4. The Taming of the Queen by Philippa Gregory (novel)

Release date: 13 August 2015 (UK), 25 August 2015 (US)

Guest Post: Remembering Anne Boleyn: Reminisces of Mary Howard & the Devonshire group by Sylvia Barbara Soberton

Remembering Anne Boleyn: Reminisces of Mary Howard & the Devonshire group by Sylvia Barbara Soberton

Happy Sunday! I'm delighted to announce that today we have a guest post by Sylvia Barbara Soberton, author of the best-selling book entitled The Forgotten Tudor Women. 

Over to Sylvia . . . 

In my book, The Forgotten Tudor Women, I explore the tumultuous lives of three courageous women: Margaret Douglas, Mary Howard and Mary Shelton. These three women all started their careers at court as maids of honour to Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn.

Anne Boleyn

On 19 May 1536, Anne Boleyn was beheaded on what her contemporaries and the majority of historians today believe to have been trumped-up charges of adultery with four men, incest with her own brother and plotting the King’s death with one of her alleged lovers. Through the course of her meteoric rise to power right up until her execution, Anne Boleyn was an unpopular figure. The common people believed that she had usurped the place of their beloved Katherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife and queen. Foreign monarchs were slow to acknowledge Anne’s position as Queen and mother of the heiress to the throne, and the situation at court, where political factions scrambled for power, was even worse.  

Mary Howard

Although Anne Boleyn was surrounded by female servants on a daily basis, only one of them allowed her memories to be recorded for posterity. This woman was Mary Howard, Duchess of Richmond, Anne  Boleyn’s first cousin, who was described as “chief and principal of her waiting maids”.[1] Mary started her career at court on 1 September 1532, when she played a prominent part during the ceremony of Anne’s ennoblement as Marquess of Pembroke. Anne took her young cousin under her wing and, despite the protests of Mary’s mother, she arranged her marriage to Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy. Little is known about the personal relationship between Mary Howard and Anne Boleyn, but considering that Mary was known to have been one of the chief and principal ladies serving the Queen, we may assume that they were close.

Anne Boleyn’s tenure as Queen came to an abrupt end in May 1536 when she was arrested and executed. Henry VIII remarried eleven days after his wife’s judicial murder, and it seemed that life at court went on as normal. Behind the closed doors, however, some people gave vent to their despair. Thomas Wyatt, the poet who was imprisoned as Anne’s alleged lover but later cleared of charges and released, wrote a heartbreaking poem where he recorded:

“I was made a filling instrument

To frame other, while I was beguiled”.[2]

Thomas Wyatt’s biographer, Nicola Shulman, explained that Wyatt was a “filling instrument” in the sense of betraying or defiling the honour of other people, presumably those who died with the Queen. The fact that Wyatt was romantically linked with Anne Boleyn in the past answers the question of why he was imprisoned in May 1536 but doesn’t offer an explanation as to why he was released. Thomas Cromwell rewarded Wyatt with a large sum of £100 in May 1536, a date implicating the poet may have been interrogated and coerced into providing damning details about Anne Boleyn’s circle. Whatever he confessed to the authorities, it is clear that Wyatt felt guilty. His poem was copied into the Devonshire Manuscript, a courtly anthology strongly associated with Mary Howard, Margaret Douglas and Mary Shelton, who were among its most prominent contributors. Did they feel the same? Were they forced to testify against their royal mistress? It seems highly likely because Thomas Cromwell later claimed that Anne Boleyn’s ladies-in-waiting provided damning details, and three of her serving women—Elizabeth Somerset, Countess of Worcester, Nan Cobham and one other unnamed maid—were mentioned in contemporary correspondence as the Queen’s accusers.

John Foxe

At some point during the reign of Edward VI, Mary Howard employed John Foxe as tutor to her nieces and nephews, her wards since her brother’s execution in 1547. Living in the Duchess of Richmond’s household provided ample opportunities to talk about people associated with spreading the good religious works during Henry VIII’s reign. Anne Boleyn was seen by her enemies as “the cause and principal nurse” of spreading “heresies” in England.[3] Although Anne’s personal faith is still a matter of debate among historians, it is certain that she was anti-papal, keen on reforming the Church from within and eager to promote reading the Bible in the vernacular. In his Actes and Monuments (best known as The Book of Martyrs), John Foxe recorded that Mary Howard was one of Anne Boleyn’s “chief and principal” ladies-in-waiting and was thus well acquainted with the Queen’s daily doings. When compiling materials for his book, Foxe talked to Mary Howard, who recalled “how Her Grace carried ever about her a certain little purse, out of which she was wont daily to scatter abroad some alms to the needy, thinking no day well spent wherein some man had not fared the better by some benefit at her hands.”[4]

Mary Howard's handwriting

Foxe’s book also contains a rich description of Princess Elizabeth’s christening on 10 September 1533, and this event was most likely related to him by Mary Howard, who carried a rich chrism of pearl and stone. The fact that Mary Howard kept these memories alive proves that she cherished them, and perhaps Mary’s early religious views were shaped by Anne Boleyn’s religious tendencies. Mary had not only sheltered the Protestant John Foxe, but also read the Bible in the vernacular and enjoyed debating its contents with like-minded individuals so much so that her elder brother, the Earl of Surrey, warned her about “going too far in reading the Scripture”.[5] Anne Boleyn had famously encouraged her ladies to read the New Testament translated by William Tyndale, which she held wide open at her desk, and it is possible that Mary began to develop her own religious views under Anne’s wing. 

Mary left court, probably in the summer of 1536, and did not join the household of Henry VIII’s new wife, Jane Seymour. It may be that Mary voluntarily shunned court after Anne’s execution, although the arrest of her half uncle, Thomas Howard, and the death of her young husband, Henry Fitzroy, in the summer of 1536 certainly influenced her decision. 

---

[1] John Foxe, Book of Martyrs: The Actes and Monuments of the Church, Volume 2, p. 372.

[2] Nicola Shulman, Graven with Diamonds, p. 195.

[3] Letters and Papers, Volume 10, n. 601.

[4] John Foxe, Book of Martyrs: The Actes and Monuments of the Church, Volume 2, p. 372.

[5] Letters and Papers, Volume 21 Part 1, n. 769.

RSC Wolf Hall - Aldwych Theatre: Review by Christine Wilson

RSC Wolf Hall - Aldwych Theatre: Review by Christine Wilson 

Ben Miles as Thomas Cromwell

I had managed to get to London’s Aldwych Theatre from Belfast minus the two coveted tickets for Wolf Hall. Luckily I had taken a boastful photo to put on Facebook and duplicates were found for me - even better seats for 4 rows from the front. So I could see the whites of their eyes and not miss a thing. The theatre was full for this, a preview and none of us were disappointed.

The curtain pulled back to a gasp from the audience as we saw a tableau of Tudor characters captured in mid dance - straight from the 1530s, staring out at us in their ghostly dance and instantly drawing us in. This is exactly what Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall did. It draws us the reader back, back to the past so we inhabit the characters and see, smell and feel them. This simple opener instantly told us that Director Jeremy Herrin had understood that and was staying true to the book. This device was used four or five times in the 3 hour duration - the cast appearing on stage; moving together and staring out sightlessly at the audience as if woken from slumber for our entertainment.

Nathaniel Parker as Henry VIII

Could the handsome Ben Miles as Cromwell pull off this mighty role? He looks nothing like the character. But within seconds his manner and severe black costume- had convinced. He played the role in a slightly comic way - although wry humour more like The Thick of It than perhaps Blackadder. He spoke direct to the audience and stared around him constantly as if always on the look-out and never relaxed and his sharp wit quickly showed him a man who could rise to the top - as he did - after the fall of his beloved master Cardinal Wolsey (who continued to appear on stage at key points as a ghost.) Loss was a regular feature in the opening acts - as Cromwell also lost his wife and children but also his family life.

Lydia Leonard as Anne Boleyn

Henry VIII was played by TV’s Nathaniel Parker as a slightly dim but deadly, vain man - very much at the mercy (or merci perhaps?) of the charming and clever Anne Boleyn and the ambitious Cromwell who makes it possible for them to eventually wed. Anne’s brother, George, played by Oscar Pearce, got the biggest laugh of the night as he minced on wearing jewellery and waving a small hanky. It was a controversial interpretation of the character but we have to remember that this is Cromwell’s interpretation of events and how he saw people. And as a theatrical device to bring some small humour to a serious play it worked well and added enormously to the enjoyment. Anne Boleyn was ably handled by Lydia Leonard who perhaps brought nothing especially new to the role but stayed true to Hilary Mantel’s creation and played her witty and taunting ‘Cremuel‘ … She was nearly overshadowed by the quirkiness of the anything -but- humble Jane Seymour played by Leah Brotherhead with confidence. There were also some outstanding young actors in the ensemble, many taking their first stage roles.

The set and costume design deserve a special mention for their authenticity and the simple stage switched easily from being Wolsey’s Palace to a boat being rowed up the Thames and then Greenwich Palace in moments and a bit like the character of Thomas Cromwell himself showed how you can see the same thing in many different ways and guises. Step forward Christopher Oram who did both with brilliance.

Although an ensemble cast, some actors playing several roles, it is very much Ben Mile’s role. He is on stage the entire time and drives the play. He reacts to and initiates everything we see so these characters only exist because they are in his world. And his confidence, poise and rapport with the audience meant we could only emphasise with this very modern man.

On my way for a half time drink - and still feeling slightly spell bound by the production, I could hear some Americans drawling ‘It’s hard to know who all these people are really’. But it turned out that they thought they’d booked The Lion King.