In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I Read online

  Naked boys striding,

  With wanton wenches winking.

  Now truly, to my thinking

  That is a speculation

  And a meet meditation.

  – ‘Colin Clout’ by John Skelton

  for Rufus and Robin

  First published 2012

  Amberley Publishing

  The Hill, Stroud

  Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP

  www.amberleybooks.com

  Copyright © Amy Licence, 2012

  The right of Amy Licence to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-4456-0693-4 (PRINT)

  ISBN 978-1-4456-1481-6 (E-Book)

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Elizabeth of York & Arthur, 1485–1486

  2 Elizabeth of York & the Future Henry VIII, 1487–1503

  3 Catherine of Aragon & Henry, Prince of Wales, 1501–1510

  4 Catherine of Aragon & Mary, 1511–1518

  5 Elizabeth Blount & Mary Boleyn, 1518–1526

  6 Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth, 1526–1536

  7 Jane Seymour & Edward, 1536–1537

  8 Anne of Cleves & Catherine Howard, 1537–1542

  9 Catherine Parr, 1543–1548

  10 Henry’s Legacy, 1534–1553

  11 Mary & Elizabeth, 1553–1603

  Picture Section

  Notes

  Bibliography

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  It is not convenient to be a man when women go into labour.

  – Joseph, from the Coventry Mystery Cycle

  To push or not to push? Home or away? Boy or girl?

  While giving birth isn’t quite that simple, the modern, Western mother has an unprecedented degree of choice when it comes to her experience. Even if the delivery does not go quite to plan, and few do, she retains a measure of confidence and ownership of the event beyond the reach of previous generations. Encouraged to write a detailed ‘birth-plan’ and opt for an active labour, she can deliver her children in the comfort of her own home, or in birth pools at midwife-led units or warm, safe hospital wards, with her partner by her side. Every stage of a pregnancy is monitored, with carefully written notes and recorded tests; she has the option to hear her unborn child’s heartbeat, discover its gender and see it wriggle in 3D. Midwives are only at the end of a telephone, day or night; various forms of pain relief are available on request and, following the delivery, she is encouraged to return home, happily breastfeeding, as soon as possible. Following her maternity leave, she may resume her career, confident that her child will be cared for by well-trained and regulated professionals.

  In these aspects, motherhood has changed greatly in the last 500 years. Yet birth is unpredictable. Even now, every woman’s experience is different. The duration and circumstances surrounding any new arrival can defy even the most careful planning. Babies rarely appear on their due date and tend to take as much or as little time as they need. Birth plans often get adapted or abandoned; perhaps their value lies more in exercising some advanced control over an unknown quantity. For the first-time mother, the reality can form a surprising contrast with the mental image her planning has inspired. She had this in common with mothers of all eras.

  For the Tudor mother, there were far fewer guarantees. Birth frequently proved to be a life-threatening occasion, in which the Church and popular superstition played a significant part. Pain relief was illegal, with one midwife being burned for using opium to assist labours in 1591, while the customs of centuries were being challenged by immense religious and cultural change. A woman expecting a child had little choice but to put her trust in the hands of other women and the remedies that had been passed down by word of mouth through the generations, even when these had been outlawed. As her time approached, she might rub her belly with powdered ants’ eggs and tie a piece of wild ox skin about her thigh. She might call out to her favourite saints and sprinkle her bed sheets with holy water, whilst closing the chamber door upon daylight for several weeks together. Problems arising during the birth may be caused by lurking devils or ignored superstitions; she may have rolled up her mat the wrong way, gazed at the moon or tiptoed through the May dew. As her contractions intensified, she would rely on herbs and the panacea of prayer; interventional surgery was only performed in extreme cases and usually resulted in maternal mortality. Assuming she was one of the lucky ones and her baby was born healthy, it would be washed in wine and rubbed with butter so the harmful air could not enter its pores. She would not emerge from her chamber for a month, after which she would process, veiled, to be purified and then perhaps undertake a pilgrimage to leave offerings of eggs and herbs, or money and jewels, at the shrine of the Virgin Mary. Does this make her experience of birth vastly different from that of women in the twenty-first century? In her time-specific context, yes; birth customs and gynaecological understanding varied greatly in the Tudor era from those of today. Yet, in her reasons for performing these strange rites, little has changed. Whilst much of this may seem like lunacy, the Tudor mother also experienced the hopes and fears of women of all time, regardless of whether they are depending on an epidural or the milk of a red cow to get them through. Facing such life-threatening circumstances, it is no surprise that a successful lying-in would become the cause of female celebration.

  No one can escape from the times in which they were born; we are all conditioned by a complex interplay of personal, social, cultural, national and spiritual factors that shape our identities in the times in which we live. Whilst basic human emotions do not change, the ways in which people explain them, the ways they make sense of their immediate and wider experiences, do. Tudor women were born into a world which placed little value on their gender and expected them to conform to a limited range of roles. Whilst some women broke the rules, either through courage, failure or accident, the transgressors of strict sexual and social codes were frequently punished and rarely lauded. Acts of rebellion, self-assertion and individuality were not valued as they have been in subsequent, post-Romantic centuries. Tudor mothers’ experiences of marriage, sex, pregnancy and birth were an illustrative function of their world, as are those of modern women. Their life expectancy and consequently their expectations of life, were limited by factors of inequality and health that would be rejected or easily treated today. Common infections could kill and frequently did; gynaecological health was poorly understood and prone to misdiagnosis; doctors were almost exclusively male and expensive. Women could only own property or goods if left it in their own right; marriage meant the immediate transfer of all they owned, including their own person, to their husband. Few were literate, although this was progressing among aristocratic circles, yet a vast oral tradition of maternal wisdom was the average Tudor woman’s inheritance. The importance of female communities cannot be underestimated and is reflected in the exclusivity of the birth chamber. Whilst a considerable number lived in a household with at least one servant, apprentic
e or peripatetic support, the daily routine for most was frequently domestic and gruelling. Friends, relations and neighbours were vital to women of all ranks.

  The status of motherhood was high during the sixteenth century. It was most women’s ultimate ambition, although this was over-determined by the dominant male culture. This is partly because the general status of women was lower; becoming a mother topped the list of the most desirable options available, reinforced by religious, cultural and legal doctrine. At all stages, issues of female fertility were rife with paradoxes. The act of birth could be a woman’s making or undoing. Delivery could be dangerous but also offer protection. A woman’s moment of greatest weakness was also her empowerment, extending to all those closeted within the freedom of the lying-in chamber. Outside the church, virginity was seen as a threat by men collectively and individually; even within, only relatively small numbers of conforming female divines were tolerated. This is by no means to suggest that wives and mothers were necessarily venerated or respected, although in some degrees their lives were easier than their spinster sisters. They fitted more easily into social boxes. Even after decades of female monarchy, the court records of litigious late Elizabethans illustrate the dangers incurred by women living outside the prevailing codes. Most decisively, the Church shaped the rites of passage of a woman’s life through its ceremonies and rituals. These marked every stage of her being, from birth to death, offering a range of supports and comforts during the childbearing years. Personal faith, set against the upheavals of the English Reformation, played an important but hitherto neglected part in the story of Tudor childbirth.

  Then, as now, the union between a woman and a man was a matter of unquantifiable personal inclination. Raw human emotions have changed little over time: sixteenth-century wives hoped for happy lives and successful pregnancies just as much as their modern counterparts, although they could ultimately exercise less control over this. In Tudor times, aristocratic marriages were usually arranged for dynastic benefit, whilst those of the middle and lower classes were equally dependent upon financial restraints at the opposite end of the scale. Yet, even without the romantic notion of a companionate marriage, all relationships are shaped by the behaviours and mores of those involved. For a Tudor wife, from the queen down to her scullion, their husband’s authority was law. There was little escape from mental or physical cruelty; expectations were that a man would not beat his wife too loudly or too late at night. Divorce was equable with treason; separation and sexual or maternal failure would be blamed on the wife, usually as divine judgement for their immorality. Yet women still broke the rules, frequently and publicly. The lower down the social scale, the less they often had to lose. The higher up they found themselves, the more dangerous their illicit and challenging behaviour could prove. For England’s queens, their public role sometimes conflicted with their private inclinations but those who acted on their desires could find retribution to be swift and decisive.

  The lives of Henry VIII’s wives are already well known, as is his daughter Elizabeth’s virgin state. I do not intend to repeat much of their histories already in print. In exploring the maternal and marital experiences of Tudor queens from 1485 through to 1603, I have focused on the specific gynaecological factors of their moment in time, from their sexual experience, fertility and conception, through to the pregnancy and circumstances of their deliveries. That is to say, the conditions of Elizabeth of York’s first pregnancy differed from her second, third and subsequent ones, just as they did from those of her predecessors. Her delivery of a daughter is not comparable with that of Catherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn, yet there are certain parallels, such as in the phantom pregnancies of mother and daughter in the 1510s and 1550s. In some cases this has concurred with existing material yet the wider context of their confinements and their implications can often shed new light. The balance of material is uneven also: Elizabeth of York and Catherine of Aragon were the most regularly pregnant queens, whilst astonishingly the birth of Edward in 1537 marked the last male royal arrival on English soil until that of Charles II in 1630. Of course other women gave birth during this period and I have drawn on their stories also. The experiences of Henry’s childless wives as well as that of his daughters can also shed light on issues of marriage, fertility and inheritance. Whilst my focus is predominantly on the Queens of England, I have juxtaposed these with examples of women from other walks of life, in order to better delineate the experience in its universality. The delivery of a queen in her luxurious chamber can hardly be equated with that of an unmarried servant girl giving birth in a church porch. In spite of the obvious advantages though, England’s queens were less free and less able to be maternal than their poorer counterparts. The very intimate and private act of birth was, for them, a state occasion; their bodies were dynastic vessels for reproduction above all and their success or failure was international news. For at least two Tudor queens, childbirth undermined and ultimately destroyed their power whilst it was the cause of premature death for others. Fortunately times have changed. Whilst twentieth-century women will recognise much in the stories of Tudor mothers, they will also appreciate the advances in medical, social and cultural factors that have so significantly improved their lot.

  1

  Elizabeth of York & Arthur

  1485–1486

  The First Tudor Heir

  I tell you, masters, without lett

  When the red rose so fair of hew

  And young Bessy together mett

  It was great joy, I say to you.

  A bishopp them married with a ringe,

  The two bloods of great renown.

  Bessy said ‘now may we sing,

  Wee two bloods are made all one.’1

  On 18 January 1486, a wedding was celebrated in London’s Westminster Abbey. The bride, not yet twenty, was tall and slender and blonde. Her pink-and-white Plantagenet beauty would become legendary, celebrated in art and sculpture, verse and prose: chroniclers of the present and future would define her by her long flowing golden locks and regular features. The eldest child of notoriously good-looking parents, she would set the standard of beauty for an age. As Elizabeth of York approached the altar, feeling all eyes on her, she may have wondered about the man with whom her future lay: a man she scarcely knew; a man who had spent most of his adult life in exile, technically her enemy, who was about to become her husband. She knew it was no love match. If she was lucky, mutual respect might develop into something deeper. Despite her beauty, Elizabeth’s attraction lay in her identity, her family line; she was fully aware of her role as a dynastic tool and this was the most important day of her young life so far. Perhaps she was proud, even triumphant that her family’s reputation was being reinstated and their continuing position assured. Perhaps she was nervous, as she headed into a life she understood to be full of difficulties and suffering, beside the privilege of status and wealth; after all, she had witnessed her own mother’s tumultuous ride as queen and knew that much depended upon the vagaries of fate and the disposition of her husband. He was a king, yet he was still also a man, whose personal, intimate rule over her would be complete.

  Waiting at the altar, the groom was ten years her senior, with pale blue watchful eyes and dark hair crisply curled in the European fashion. Together they made an impressive pair: England’s newly anointed king and the daughter of the popular Plantagenet Edward IV, uniting the country after decades of bloody civil war. Only six months before, Henry Tudor had been a nobody, waiting for the tide of fortune to turn in his favour on the battlefield, a thorn in the side of the ruling Yorkists. He was a man stained by the mud, sweat and blood of battle: a man who had gambled and taken the ultimate prize. Now he was Henry VII. History would record him as the progenitor of a remarkable dynasty, a wise and prudent figure who ruthlessly squashed his enemies, bringing a long-lasting peace to the nation; yet all this lay in the future. Elizabeth cannot have known the character, abilities or ambitions of her new husband, nor he hers. Th
ey were virtually strangers to each other and the directions of their lives were still to be determined. Nevertheless, their significance could not be underestimated: on this marriage rode the fortunes of their people. Around them blazed hundreds of torches, illuminating the rich tapestries and hopeful faces of the nation’s decimated nobility. One contemporary foreign commentator wrote of the match that ‘everyone considers (it) advantageous for the kingdom’ and ‘all things appear[ed] disposed towards peace’.2 Later chronicles termed it a ‘long expected and so much desired marriage’3 and recalled that harmony ‘was thought to discende oute of heaven into England’ when these ‘two bodyes one heyre might succeed’.4 Yet hindsight can confer many such poetic turns of phrase. At the time, Henry’s reign was in its infancy and Bosworth’s truce could still prove fragile. There was no guarantee that the turbulent decades were, in fact, over; no neat historical line was drawn in the sand at Bosworth indicating the end of the Wars of the Roses; Henry’s end could prove as swift and bloody as his predecessor’s. Yet the new king knew better than to rest on his laurels: soon the first rumours of rebellion would threaten his delicate position and they would not be the last. His own family was small; as an only child he had relied on the support of his stepfather Thomas Stanley, Earl of Derby, as well as the country’s disaffected magnates, in order to seize power but such alliances could prove infamously fickle. Henry needed to establish his family line. The rapid production of heirs would be seen by the world as a mirror for the health of his claim to the throne: a son would confirm God’s approval of the match and the new Tudor monarchy.

  No descriptions survive of the actual wedding but accounts of Henry and Elizabeth’s separate coronations offer a taste of the day’s finery. From the start, the new regime was characterised by an understanding of the importance of impressing the people with numbers, pageantry and ceremony. Appearances were critical. Royalty should look the part, to elevate them above their subjects and display the divine and earthly power at their disposal. The bride would have looked striking, with her rich clothes, jewellery and golden hair. White wedding gowns were not the Tudor norm: Henry IV’s daughter Philippa had worn one back in 1406, for her marriage to Eric of Pomerania, but it was as a favoured colour rather than a tradition. Elizabeth’s wardrobe of the late 1480s did contain kirtles and mantles in white cloth-of-gold of damask, trimmed with powdered ermine, but she was equally likely to have chosen velvet, in rich tawny, blue, purple or crimson. Her garments would have been designed well in advance and worked by hundreds of seamstresses, embroiderers, furriers and jewellers. The choice of fabric was as significant as the style of dress: sumptuary laws dating back to the 1360s had confined the wearing of cloth-of-gold and purple silk to women of royalty, another important distinction of status at a time when upstarts jostled for power. Elizabeth’s wedding dress was an opportunity to reinforce her legitimacy through colour, material, design and decoration; it was not just a pretty dress, its sumptuousness sent a barely coded message. No doubt it would have been studded with precious gems, embroidered with thread of gold, set with intricate lace and brocade, delicate filigree tissue and silk ribbons. For the Tudors, simplicity and elegance did not equate – as ornamentation was a measure of status, the more the better: descriptions of their clothing can make the modern reader wonder just how all these elements were combined in one outfit! The bride’s golden hair might have hung loose, as befitted a maiden, or else been caught up in a net dotted with pearls and gold tassels. Perhaps the bridegroom put aside his habitual black velvet jacket, furred with the skins of black lambs, in favour of the purple cloth-of-gold tissue, shirt of crimson sarcanet (soft silk) and satin doublet worn during his coronation. One unused plan for that event imagined him dressed in the Tudor colours of green and white: ‘a doblet of gren or white cloth-of-gold satyn, a long goune of purpur velwet, furred with ermys poudred, open at the sides and puffed with ermyn.’ Later during the proceedings, he was to wear a shirt laced with silver and gilt, a velvet belt, hose laced with ribbons, a cap of crimson garnished with gold and a surcoat with gold ribbons at the collar and cuffs.5 Whatever choices they made on the day, the dazzling appearances of Henry and Elizabeth distinguished them as the personifications of divine majesty and temporal wealth.