September 7, 1533: The Birth of Elizabeth I

It must have been miserable!

Anne Boleyn had "taken to her chamber" on August 26, 1533 to be sealed away from the world until after the birth of her child. She was led in a solemn procession to her chamber door, where she drank a goblet of spiced wine, and then proceeded inside with her ladies. The door was sealed shut; no men could enter until after the birth of the new heir.

Anne had no choice but to obey the conventional rules for royal childbirth. They had been codified by the king's grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, when she wrote Ordinance as to What is to be Made ​​Preparation Against the Deliverance of the Queen, as Also for the Christening of the Child of Whom She Shall Be Delivered for the delivery of the child of her daughter-in-law Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry VII.

The Ordinance is minutely detailed, down to specifying the colors of the fringe on the bedspread of the queen. You can read the whole Ordinance here.

The walls - and even the ceiling - were covered with tapestries, and the floors were laid with layers of rugs. All of the tapestries were required to have pleasant scenes, because if the expectant mother saw an ugly or deformed face, it was believed her child could be born with the same deformity.

Every window was covered over with a tapestry nailed down to keep out the foul "miasmas" in the air, except for one tapestry left partially unfastened, so the queen could lift the corner to allow in some daylight when it pleased her. Even the keyhole on the door was covered.

Anne followed these rules obsessively, not just because of her queenly status, but because if something went wrong, she would have been blamed for it, and any deviation cited as the cause.

It was late summer, and since the windows were sealed against any cooling breeze, it must have been stifling. The incense and heavy perfumes - thought to purify the air of foul miasmas - probably didn't help.

Boredom had to have set in, as well, though the women played cards, read, played musical instruments and embroidered while they waited for the birth. Anne had to be anxious - kings usually took a mistress while their wives were expecting. Sexual intercourse during pregnancy was not only considered sinful, it was thought to induce miscarriage.

Anne had a chapel set up in her chambers, complete with a baptismal font in case the infant was dying and needed emergency baptism. As she prayed for a safe delivery, did her eyes drift to that grim reminder of mortality?

Traditionally, a woman went into confinement about a month before the child was due, and remained inside the lying-in chamber until she was "churched" about forty days after the birth. Fortunately for Anne, her confinement was much shorter than expected. Everyone was shocked when she went into labor a scant two weeks after taking to her chamber.

The birth itself went well. Like almost every other aspect of life, Tudor royal births were semi-public events. All of Anne's ladies in waiting and maids of honor watched as she was settled on a cot where most of her labor would occur.

There were no painkillers available to Tudor women. Wealthy ladies used to send for relics of the saints which were said to reduce the pain of childbirth and ensure a healthy child. Henry's mother, Elizabeth of York, sent a girdle (belt) to a church to be wrapped around the statue of a saint. When the labor began, it was taken off the statue and brought to her, and she laid it across her belly.

But by this time, many of the famous relics had been denounced as frauds and removed from the churches. Anne had only the prayers of her ladies for assistance, and her "gossips," who told entertaining stories to try to distract the laboring woman from the pain.

When the actual birth itself was near, Anne was transferred to a "groaning chair." It was a slightly-slanted wood chair with a cut-out seat. The midwife held her hands below to catch the emerging child.

At three o'clock, the baby was born, and to her parents' dismay, she was a girl. Henry must have been stunned. For Anne Boleyn, he had destroyed a thousand years of English religious tradition and defied the crowned heads of Europe, only to get another worthless girl. So confident was he that Henry had birth announcements drawn up, announcing the arrival of his prince, with only the date left blank for later insertion. He had believed God would show his approval of Henry's actions by sending him his heir, and he had believed what the fortune tellers promised him. Later, he would tell the Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, that those soothsayers' predictions had induced him to marry Anne, and when their prognostications turned out to be false, he thought it meant his marriage was null and void.

The alteration is on the third line down.

There must have been many who laughed behind their hands at this outcome. All this for another girl! But Henry gritted his teeth and smiled. The child was healthy; the next one would be a boy. They named her Elizabeth, after her grandmothers, Elizabeth of York and Elizabeth Howard Boleyn.

The celebratory jousts were cancelled, and the birth announcements were altered. A tiny "s" was slipped in to turn the word "prince" into "princes," an acceptable spelling of princess at the time, though people must have squinted to read it.

Anne was tucked into a great bed of estate, covered with cloth of gold and ermine. There, she would receive the congratulations of the court and foreign dignitaries. She would still have to remain in seclusion until after she'd been "churched," ritually blessed and allowed to rejoin court life.

Neither of her parents attended Elizabeth's christening three days after her birth. You can read a first-hand account of the christening here. The Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, Agnes Tilney Howard, carried the baby into the chapel of the Observant Friars in Greenwich Palace, accompanied by a huge procession of the highest nobles of the land, bearing torches and candles. The baby wore an elaborately embroidered gown made for her by her mother. It supposedly still survives at Sudeley Castle, having been given to Kateryn Parr and passed down through her descendants.

A wetnurse was selected for the baby. There's an apocryphal tale that Anne Boleyn wanted to nurse the baby herself, but the king refused. I included it in Under These Restless Skies, but it's likely not factual. Anne would have wanted to become pregnant again as soon as possible, and nursing was known to reduce fertility.

Selecting a wetnurse was a difficult task. She had to be of fine moral character, because vices were thought to be transmitted through the milk. It was better to have a nurse who had given birth to a boy herself, because it was believed the milk a woman produced for a boy was of better quality. Her diet had to be carefully monitored to ensure she made the best milk possible.

The baby would have been tightly swaddled and dressed in fine clothing, miniature versions of the bejeweled gowns worn by the lords and ladies of the court. Her rattles would have been made of solid gold and ivory. Tiny rings would have adorned her fingers, and pearls gleamed from the brim of her cap.

The baby was soon sent off to her own household in the country, complete with hundreds of servants as befitted the royal heir.

Anne kept close tabs on her daughter, visiting her as frequently as possible, and writing every day to her nursemaids to see how she fared. She sent the baby sumptuous gowns, likely made by her own hands. Historians note Anne seems to have been very affectionate and attentive to her baby, more so than usual. Share on Tumblr

The Body of the Queen: The Strange Journey of Kateryn Parr

Today is the anniversary of the death of Kateryn Parr, Henry VIII's sixth and final queen. In life, she was a fascinating woman, and her interesting journey did not end with her death.

Kateryn survived Henry - though by the skin of her teeth - when he died in January, 1547. Everyone was shocked when she married Thomas Seymour in April or May, only a few months later.

Thomas Seymour was an ambitious man. His sister, Jane Seymour, had been Henry's third queen. Unlike Henry's previous wives, Jane's family retained his favor. (Jane had been polite enough to die of puerperal fever after childbirth, instead of being divorced or beheaded.) Thomas was still unmarried when the king died, and it was no secret he was looking for a rich and well-connected wife. He'd been connected to - possibly courting - Kateryn when she caught Henry's eye. Thwarted, Thomas considered Mary Howard, the widow of Henry FitzRoy, or one of the king's daughters, Elizabeth or Mary.

Kateryn seems to have been in love with Thomas, possibly even before she married the king. But she did not have the option of saying "no" to the king when he asked her to marry him. Kateryn did her duty, just as she'd always done, and she was a good queen. A patron of the arts and literature, she was England's first queen to publish under her own name. She also was kind and supportive of the king's children, especially his neglected daughters. Her dedication to the "new religion" emerging from the Reformation almost cost her life, but she managed to convince the king she was only pretending to disagree with him on the matter of religion so he could teach her more. Flattered, the king canceled her arrest.

Kateryn must have breathed a sigh of relief when Henry breathed his last. She was now free, safe, and the richest woman in England. Knowing she would find herself married off again once the new king and council got around to it, Kateryn decided to take her fate into her own hands. Three times, she'd wed for duty. This time, she would follow her heart. She and Thomas Seymour wed quietly.

It came as a further surprise that the former queen found herself pregnant shortly after the wedding. Kateryn was thought to be barren because none of her previous three marriages had produced children.

She was around thirty-five or thirty-six, dangerously old for a first pregnancy according to the standards of the day. Her friends wrote to her, expressing their concern, but Kateryn was happy. Or, at least she would have been, if her husband hadn't been paying undue attention to her step-daughter, Elizabeth, who was living with her. Elizabeth eventually had to be sent away, but she and Kateryn kept in touch by letter.

Thomas may have been hedging his bets in case his wife died in childbirth, trying to groom Elizabeth into accepting him as a husband. Kateryn was very hurt by this, though she doesn't seem to have believed Elizabeth was to blame.

The birth went well, except for the unfortunate outcome that the child was a girl. They named her Mary Seymour. But it soon became clear that Kateryn wasn't doing well. Like Jane Seymour, Kateryn was stricken with puerperal fever, and she did not think she would survive it. The following testimony was given by one of her ladies, Elizabeth Tyrwhitt. (Elizabeth was the wife of Sir Robert Tyrwhitt, who had been previously married to Bridget Wingfield - the lady whose deathbed testimony may have helped condemn Anne Boleyn.)

“Two days afore the death of the Queen, at my coming to her in the morning, she asked me where I had been so long, and said unto me, she did fear such things in herself, that she was sure she could not live. Whereunto I answered, as I thought, that I saw no likelihood of death in her. She then having my Lord Admiral [Thomas Seymour] by the hand, and divers others standing by, spake these words, partly, as I took it, idly [in delerium], ‘My Lady Tyrwhitt, I am not well handled, for those that be about me careth not for me, but standeth laughing at my grief, and the more good I will to them, the less good they will to me.’ Whereunto my Lord Admiral answered ‘why sweetheart, I would you no hurt.’ And she said to him again aloud, ‘No, my Lord, I think so’ and immediately she said to him in his ear, ‘but my Lord you have given me many shrewd taunts.’ Those words I perceived she spoke with good memory, and very sharply and earnestly, for her mind was far unquieted. My Lord Admiral perceiving that I heard it, called me aside, and asked me what she said; and I declared it plainly to him.

Despite her anger at the way her husband had treated her, Kateryn made out her will on the 5th, leaving everything to him with the notation she wished it could be a thousand times more. She died in the wee hours, between one or two AM. Depending on which version you believe, she was buried the same day she died, or two days later.

Either way, she was buried with bizarre haste and very little ceremony, especially for a woman who had been the Queen of England. (Katharine of Aragon was buried 22 days after she died, having lain in state, surrounded by thousands of wax candles.) Kateryn had no funeral effigy, no procession of mourners in new clothing provided by the family of the deceased. The only notable aspects of her funeral were that Miles Coverdale preached the sermon and Lady Jane Grey served as chief mourner.

Kateryn's body was wrapped in cere (waxed) cloth and her body was wrapped close in sheets of lead, forming a small coffin, and was buried in the chapel of Sudeley Castle.

Over the years, the castle and its chapel fell into ruin. The buildings' roofs were removed and nature did the rest. In the 1780s, the new resident of the land poked around in the ruins and found Kateryn's coffin buried at a depth of two feet. A witness wrote a description of the discovery:

Mr. John Lucas (who occupied the land of Lord Rivers, whereon the ruins of the chapel stand) had the curiosity to rip up the top of the coffin, expecting to discover within it only the bones of the [deceased] but to his great surprize found the whole body wrapped in 6 or 7 seer cloths of linen, entire and uncorrupted, although it had lain there upwards of 230 years. His unwarrantable curiosity led him also to make an incision through the seer cloths which covered one of the arms of the corpse, the flesh of which at that time was white and moist. I was very much displeased at the forwardness of Lucas, who of his own head opened the coffin. It would have been quite sufficient to have found it and then to have made a report of it to Lord Rivers or myself.

In the summer of the year following 1783, his Lordship's business made it necessary for me and my son to be at Sudeley Castle, and on being told what had been done the year before by Lucas, I directed the earth to be once more removed to satisfy my own curiosity and I found Lucas's account of the coffin and corpse to be just as he had represented them, with this difference, that the body was then grown quite fetid, and the flesh where the incision had been made was brown, and in a state of putrefaction in consequence of the air having been let in upon it. The stench of the corpse made my son quite sick whilst he copied the inscription which is on the lead of the coffin; he went thro' it, however, with great exactness. I afterwards decided that a stone slab should be placed over the grave to prevent any future and improper inspection, &c.

K.P.

Here lyeth quene

Kateryn wife to Kyng

Henry the VIII And

last the wife of Thomas

lord of Sudeley high

Admyrall of England

And unkle to Kyng

Edward the VJ

Dyed

5 September

MCCCCC

XL VIII

The coffin bore a lead plate with an identifying description. A replica is pictured to the left.

Lucas cut off a few locks of her hair, a piece of the cere cloth, and possibly snagged a tooth (or else someone did during another of the disinterments; the tooth is in the Sudeley museum). The stone slab described by the visitor was apparently never put in place.

From The Lives of the Queens of England and Their Times by
Francis Lancelott (1894):

In 1784 some rude persons again opened the grave and taking the body out left it exposed on a heap of rubbish where it remained till the parish vicar procured its re-interment. On the fourteenth of October 1786 the Rev. T. Nash F.A.S. made a scientific exhumation of the body and from his report published in the Archaelogia we extract the subjoined: "Delicacy prevented me from uncovering the body; the face was totally decayed the teeth sound, but had fallen out, and the hands and nails were entire but of a brownish hue... I could heartily wish more respect were paid to the remains of this our first Protestant Queen and would willingly, if permitted by the proper authorities, have them wrapped in another sheet of lead and coffin, and decently buried another place that at least her body might rest in peace, whereas the where she now lies is used for the keeping of rabbits which make holes and scratch very irreverently about the royal remains."

The coffin was opened again a few more times over the next decade by curious people who wanted a peek at Henry's last queen. In 1792, a party was assembled to rebury Kateryn's body, but they got drunk before setting out and abused the corpse.

The last occasion of opening the tomb was in 1817 when the then rector of Sudeley, the Revd. John Late, who had undertaken the repair of the chapel, determined to search for the remains of Queen Catherine Parr, in which he was assisted by Mr. Edmund T. Browne, the Winchcombe antiquary, who in a letter to Mr. Hogg gives the following account of its discovery on 18 July, 1817. He says after considerable search, and aided by the recollection of Mrs. Cox, the coffin was found bottom upwards in a walled grave, where it had been deposited by by the order of Mr. Lucas.

It was then removed to the Chandos vault, and after being cleaned we anxiously looked for the inscription. To our great disappointment none however could be discovered, and we proceeded to examine the body; but the coffin having been so frequently opened, we found nothing but the bare skeleton, except a few pieces of sere cloth, which were still under the skull, and a dark-coloured mass, which proved to contain, when washed, a small quantity of hair which exactly corresponded with some I already had. The roots of the ivy which you may remember grew in such profusion on the walls of the chapel, had penetrated into the coffin, and completely filled the greater part of it.

Kateryn was moved, temporarily, into an intact tomb. When the property passed into the hands of the Dent family, they began to restore the castle and grounds.

The ancient chapel, which had been desecrated by the Puritans, was thoroughly renovated under the direction of Sir John Gilbert Scott, and a handsome decorated altar- tomb, surmounted by a gothic canopy, was erected on the north side of the Sacrarium to the memory of Queen Katherine Parr, whose effigy was rendered as correctly as it could be from the portraits which are extant, and in the ornamentation of the tomb there is a reproduction of the pattern carved on the fragment of the original tomb. On a pillar next to the west end of the tomb a plate is now affixed upon which there is an engraved facsimile of the inscription upon the leaden case or coffin in which remains of Q. Katherine Parr were found[.]

Queen Kateryn now rests in the finest tomb of any of Henry's wives, her journey - hopefully - at an end.

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May 19, 1536: The Body of the Queen

After the thousand spectators vanished, Anne Boleyn's body still lay where it had fallen, the blood draining from the stump of her neck to patter down through the boards to the grass below. It was at that point everyone realized no instructions had been given as to what was to be done with her body.

The king had given detailed instructions of every step in this process thus far, down to what type of cloth should bedeck the scaffold, but nary a word on what should happen to the body of the woman he had once loved enough to defy the crown heads of Europe and break a thousand years of religious tradition.

No one knew what to do. They waited, hoping word would come, but there was only silence from the king and council. Eventually, someone - possibly Sir William Kingston, constable of the Tower - made the decision. A coffin had not been provided, but they did not want to put her body directly into the earth. She was, after all, the Queen of England. A shipment of bow staves, intended for troops in Ireland had recently arrived at the armory, and they decided to use the storage chest as a coffin to inter Anne's remains. It was brought to the scaffold.

Anne's body had been stripped of its clothing, likely down to her shift. The clothing of the deceased was the prerogative of the executioner, part of his expected payment. The rest of Anne's belongings, left behind in the royal apartments, belonged now to William Kingston. Later, the council would pay him 100£ to buy it back - they wanted no "souvenirs" of the dead woman surfacing.

Anne had removed her gray damask gown on the scaffold before the sword fell, and her ladies were likely the ones who removed the scarlet kirtle she wore below to give to the executioner. The cloth of it would have been too voluminous to fit in the bow stave chest, anyway. Anne's ladies wrapped her remains in white cerecloth - a heavy, wax-coated cloth used for burial shrouds - and placed them in the chest, her head tucked beneath her arm, because the chest was too short for normal placement.

They carried the makeshift coffin to the Tower's chapel, Saint Peter-ad-Vincula (Saint Peter in Chains) and dug a shallow grave to the left of the altar. There, Anne was buried beside her brother, in consecrated ground, but with no funerary rites. She would later be joined by her cousin, Katheryn, another of Henry's ill-fated queens, and Jane Parker, her sister-in-law.

In the Victorian era, the little chapel had fallen into a sad state of neglect. Queen Victoria gave permission for a restoration and ordered the graves beneath the sinking floor to be exhumed, with an attempt made at identification.

This proved to be much more difficult than anticipated.

On removing the stones of the pavement it was found (as reference to the burial register too abundantly proved) that the resting places of those who had been buried within the walls of the chapel during the troublous times of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had been repeatedly and it was feared almost universally desecrated.

When the Tower ceased to be a residence of the sovereign or a state prison, the chapel of St. Peter appears to have gradually come to be regarded too much in the light of a mere ordinary parish church, in which the interment not only of those who had lived in the Tower, but even of residents in the neighbourhood, was freely permitted.

It is true that the bodies of those who had perished on the scaffold, or died as prisoners within the walls of the Tower, were buried (no doubt intentionally) "in great obscurity;"' but even if some memorial stone had recorded their burial place, it is doubtful whether that would have protected their remains, for in the instance of the three Scotch lords (Lovat, Balmerino, and Kilmarnock) although their grave was specially marked by a stone, which is still preserved, it was found that their bones had been much disturbed, so much so indeed as to be beyond all possible means of identification. It is even feared that in some instances coffins had been designedly broken up and their contents scattered in order to make room for some fresh occupant of the ground.

The chapel had been in continuous use as a parish church for those who lived and died in the vicinity of the Tower, not only prisoners, but also the families of the staff, and those from the surrounding neighborhood. Over a thousand people (I've seen figures ranging up to fifteen hundred) are buried in the tiny chapel. When a new burial occurred, the remains of those buried before were shoved unceremoniously aside in a jumble of bones. The spot where Anne Boleyn was supposed to rest was occupied by a lead coffin belonging to a woman who died in 1750.

The archaeologists believed they identified the remains of Anne Boleyn, based on the graceful physical characteristics of one of the skeletons found near the location her remains were supposed to be buried, though modern historians tend to doubt the identification. The final report stated:

“The bones found in the place where Queen Anne is said to have been buried are certainly those of a female in the prime of life, all perfectly consolidated and symmetrical and belong to the same person. The bones of the head indicate a well-formed round skull, with an intellectual forehead, straight orbital ridge, large eyes, oval face, and rather square full chin. The remains of the vertebra and the bones of the lower limbs indicate a well-formed woman of middle height with a short and slender neck. The ribs show depth and roundness of chest. The hand and feet bones indicate delicate and well-shaped hands and feet, with tapering fingers and a narrow foot.”

For a long while, it was said the “square, full chin” conflicted with the portraits of Anne which show a narrow, pointed chin. however, in the modern era, the “real face” of Anne Boleyn has been shown to be closer to the Nidd Hall portrait than the most widely-recognized portraits, and indeed, Anne may have matched this description. The bones were also said to be from a woman around 25 to 30 years of age, and those who insist on the 1501 birth date say this proves the bones cannot be hers. Some scholars, such as Alison Weir, speculate that the bones belonged either to Katheryn Howard or Jane Parker, both of whom ended up under the chapel floor. And we cannot discount the possibility that the bones were not any of these famous persons - they could have been the remains of one of the Tower residents.

The remains of George Boleyn and Katheryn Howard were not discovered. They speculated George had been moved to an area not excavated and that Katheryn had decayed to dust because her young bones were still soft and lime was found mixed with the soil.

The remains were collected into boxes and buried in a secret location to deter ghoulish curiosity and souvenir hunters. The chapel floor was set with marble markers depicting the arms of those who had once been buried there.

There is a legend that claims Anne's body was secretly exhumed and moved to Salle Church near Blickling Hall, and placed under a plain black marble block. Charles Dickens wrote a fictional account of the secret re-burial:

[Anne Boleyn] had apprehended that her remains would be indignantly treated – that the rites of sepulture would be withheld from her, and that her grave would be where no memorial would be found of her; and therefore, her appeal to Wyatt, to save her, if possible, to the tomb of her fathers. Her desire had now, however, a prospect of fulfilment – a grave had been opened in Salle Church, which was the ancient burial place of her father’s family; and thither, on the second night after Wyatt’s arrival, the Earl proceeded, accompanied by his guests, ostensibly for the purpose of having midnight masses said for the repose of his daughter’s soul’ his daughter’s remains, however, went with him. They had, under Mary Wyatt’s care, immediately upon their removal from the Tower to her house, been most carefully embalmed, and wrapped in cere-cloth. In that state, and covered with a black velvet pall, she was placed in one of her father’s carriages, into which Wyatt and his sister entered; the Earl proceeding them in another carriage alone.

[...]

But all that could be done for the murdered queen was done, – mass was said for the repose of her soul – De profundis (Psalm 130) was chanted by those present, – her remains were carefully lowered into the grave, where they now rest, and a black-marble-slab, without either inscription or initials, alone market the spot which contains all that was mortal of Anne Boleyn – once queen of England.”

Needless to say, this story is highly unlikely. The Tower was too carefully guarded to permit a secret exhumation and removal of a body, and Anne's family had shown little interest in her fate, let alone where her mortal remains would lie. Thomas Wyatt himself said, “God provided for her corpse sacred burial, even in a place as it were consecrated to innocence,” which seems to imply he felt any spot she was buried was sacred.

Recently, the story that Anne Boleyn's heart was secretly buried in St. Mary the Virgin Church in Erwarton was revived. In the 19th century, a small casket was discovered, which the residents believed contained the heart of Anne Boleyn. This story is as equally unlikely as the story of the secret exhumation and reburial.

Anne's ladies were recorded by witnesses as being very upset after the execution. The Bishop of Riez describes them as being "half dead" themselves. They were concerned her remains would be treated disrespectfully, and so they interred her as quickly as possible. Given their emotional state, it's unlikely one of them cut open Anne's chest to remove her heart.

There is currently a movement to have Anne exhumed again and reburied with the honors due a queen, but its unlikely to happen.

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