Read Online Anne Boleyn: Henry VIII's Obsession by Elizabeth Norton - Free Book Online

heart tormented as mine has been by yours for long past has urged me hither to ask for some consolation from one who has caused it so much pain’. Anne then allowed Wyatt to kiss her and to move to even greater familiarities before a great stamping in the room above disturbed them and Anne rushed upstairs. When she returned over an hour later, Anne sent Wyatt away peremptorily and, according to the story, Wyatt later suspected that she must have had another lover upstairs.
    The Chronicle of Henry VIII is contemporary with Anne and suggests not only that Anne was prepared to consummate her relationship with Wyatt but that she also took other lovers. This story clearly formed the basis of two later accounts written during the reign of Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, and intended to be unfavourable to the queen and her mother. One writer, Nicholas Harpsfield, wrote that Wyatt also informed the king that Anne was not a fit wife for him and that he had had ‘carnal pleasure with her’. The Catholic propagandist, Sander, claimed that Wyatt had informed the council of ‘how shameless Anne’s life had been’. In his account, the Council agreed that ‘Anne Boleyn was stained in her reputation’ and no fit wife for the king. According to Sander, the Council rushed to inform Henry of Wyatt’s disclosure:
‘Henry was silent for awhile, and then spoke. He had no doubt, he said, that the council, in saying these things, was influenced by its respect and affection for his person, but he certainly believed that these stories were the inventions of wicked men, and that he could affirm upon oath that Anne Boleyn was a woman of the purest life’.
     
    Sander claims that Wyatt was angry with the king’s response and offered to arrange a meeting with Anne so that the king could see for himself. Henry angrily refused saying that Wyatt ‘was a bold villain, not to be trusted’. Both Sander and Harpsfield claim that Wyatt and Anne had a sexual relationship. Sander even went further to claim that Wyatt was only one of many lovers for Anne and that her first had been her father’s butler when she was only fifteen.
    It is impossible now to say for certain whether Anne and Wyatt consummated their relationship. The account of the Chronicle of Henry VIII and later writers have often been believed and it has been claimed that Anne had several lovers before her marriage to the king and acquired a reputation for not being chaste. It is certainly true that Wyatt was arrested at the time of Anne’s fall along with several other young men accused of adultery with Anne, and Wyatt was one of only two that survived. It is therefore possible that the Chronicle’s claim is correct, that it was Wyatt’s disclosure of his relationship with Anne before her marriage that saved him. However, the Chronicle , although contemporary, does not appear to have been written by someone who moved in royal circles and it is just as likely that Wyatt was saved by the king’s affection for him than by claims that he had had sexual relations with Anne. It is also implausible that Wyatt would have remained in favour after disclosing that he had slept with the king’s fiancée and, as George Wyatt pointed out, such a disclosure would almost certainly have broken the marriage. Anne was no fool and was determined to make the best marriage that she could. No evidence that survives of her character suggests that she would have risked ruining her prospects by sleeping with a married man. George Wyatt in his Life of Queen Anne, perhaps best sums up the unlikelihood of Anne agreeing to consummate her relationship with Wyatt ‘for that princely lady, she living in court where were so many brave gallants at that time unmarried, she was not like to cast her eye upon one that had been then married ten years’. Wyatt, as a married man, was a very different proposition to Henry Percy and it is inconceivable that Anne, who stood out against the married king for so long, would have