“Vous pranderay pour ma seulle mestres”

In May 1528 the sweating sickness struck England. The illness, which had first appeared in 1485, followed by flare-ups in 1506, 1511, and 1517, was much dreaded.^[662] Fleeing the epidemic with his family, the king left Greenwich for Waltham just after 11 June.^[663] As for Anne, in a letter of 18 June, French ambas­sador to England Jean Du Bellay writes that she had fallen ill with the sweat and been sent home to Hever.^[664] Shortly before 20 August she was back at court.^[665] Henry VIII soon sent her home again, anticipating the arrival of papal legate Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, dispatched by the Pope to settle the question of the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

love letters to Anne. Unfortunately, none of Anne’s responses exists, leaving us to reconstruct the dialogues from the king’s words alone.

The letters reside today in a single codex in the Vatican Library, manuscript Vat.lat.3731.pt.A., where they occupy, in succession, folios 1r-16r. The digitized manuscript can be viewed on-line.⁷ Although no one knows how the letters ended up in Rome, the most recent theory speculates that they landed there in the first years of the seventeenth century, in contrast with the older hypothesis that they were stolen from Anne, possibly by papal legate Lorenzo Campeggio,⁸ to bol­ster Catherine of Aragon’s case against Henry VIII's request for an annulment.⁹ Because the letters are not dated, their original order can only be guessed from internal clues, and no order has won consensus among their many editors.

Neither the rarity of such letters nor their significance for the insight they offer into the relationship between Henry VIII and Anne can be overstated. Indeed, they are responsible for one of the most tenacious narratives about the relationship. In several of the French letters, the king addresses Anne as his “mis­tress” (“mestres”) (letters 1, 2, 4, 10, 11, 12), and, in letter 4, he famously promises to make her his only mistress, his “seulle mestres,” provided that her love for him is a singular one, “ung singularis.” Historians have taken the letter to be a plea for Anne to become his long-term extra-conjugal sexual partner, that is, his mis­tress in the modern sense of the word. The letter, coupled with the fact that the king eventually proposed marriage, has led historians to extrapolate that Anne strategically rejected the proposition in hopes of inveigling a marriage proposal.

“What was Henry asking and offering?” wonders Anne’s great biographer Eric Ives with reference to the “seulle mestres” letter. Whatever the king had in mind, Ives continues, it was

clearly more than a conventional love pose but certainly not marriage. He appears to be offering a recognized permanent liaison, perhaps like the French

comes it may not be thought strange. However, the people remain quite hardened, and I think they would do more if they had more power; but great order is continually taken.”

7 The letters are viewable at https://digi.vatlib.1t/view/MSS_Vat.lat.3731.pt.A. The transcriptions and translations are my own. They have been edited by Thomas Hearne (1714); William Gunn (1822); Georges Crapelet (1826); J. O. Halliwell Philipps (1906); Henry Savage (1949); Jasper Ridley (1988). Susi Bellinello offers an impeccable diplomatic transcription of the letters in her 2016 Masters thesis.

8 For the newest hypothesis see Lake et al, “A real papist plot.” For the Campeggio hypothesis see Henry VIII, “The Love-Letters of King Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn,” 328.

9 See Starkey, Six Wives, 278. Ives hypothesizes that they were taken to the Vatican during the reign of Mary I, Life and Death, 375, n. 49.

maitresse en titre. Francis I, after all, had had Franpoise de Foix and was even at that moment (though Henry probably had yet to hear of it) fixing his interest with the woman who was to be his companion for the rest of his life, Anne d’Heilly, later duchesse d’Etampes. Why should Henry not have his Anne Boleyn?^{[667] [668]}

Ives’s interpretation is widespread. Carrolly Erickson writes of the letter that in it “there was no hint of marriage; rather the king seemed to be trying to persuade Anne to become his official mistress.”¹¹ George Bernard too believes that Henry VIII was intent on making Anne his mistress. “It is vital to note,” he writes, “that what was in question was the title of royal mistress: there was no question here of Henry offering to marry Anne and make her his queen.”^[669]

Before addressing these historians’ reading of the situation in greater detail, I note that no French concept of an “official” royal mistress upon which Henry VIII could have drawn existed at the time that he penned his love letters. Extra- conjugal relationships were common, of course: Henry VIII verifiably had mis­tresses, or, at least one, evidenced by his recognition of Henry Fitzroy as his son; although Franpois I had no recorded (or at least verified) illegitimate off­spring, contemporaries discuss his mistresses.^[670] However, the politically powerful royal favorite, a woman who served as the king’s political advisor and acted as a go-between for the king and foreign diplomats—the role that modern historians call the “official royal mistress” even though the role was in no way “official”— did not exist in France until the Duchess of Etampes began to be courted by ambassadors at the end of the 1530s. No trace of ambassadors seeking to do business with Franpois I via Franpoise de Foix exists; nothing suggests that she was any more politically influential than Henry VIII’s mistresses.

Still, whatever sort of mistress Henry VIII had in mind, to historians apply­ing the modern meaning of the term, the king’s position seems reasonably clear. But because we have no responses from Anne, her position is less so. Certainly she was attracted to the king, writes Ives. But despite this, she refused to sleep with

Vouspranderay pour ma seulle mestres: Anne Boleyn’s | 191 him and stayed away from court. Why? Ives concludes that she was holding out for a ring on her finger and that she won. Realizing that he could not live without Anne and that to get her he would have to marry her, the king finally proposed marriage. Although no letter indicates this directly, Ives deduces it from letter 5 in which Henry VIII thanks Anne for sending him a gift, an etrenne, symboliz­ing, as the king writes, her “too humble submission.” Anne’s hesitation, to which the king alludes in letter 4, has disappeared, the idea of marriage transforming her “hitherto distinctly muted response to Henry’s ardour.”^[671]

This idea of Anne’s position, too, is widespread.^[672] According to Henry VIII’s biographer J. J. Scarisbrick, Anne refused to follow the conventional path of her sister, Mary Boleyn, “either because of virtue or ambition.” The result was that “the more she resisted, the more, apparently, did Henry prize her,” and eventually her persistence was rewarded.^[673] Antonia Fraser asserts that “Anne Boleyn, capri­cious fascinating ‘Brunet’ ” was not “willing to be another Duchesse d’Etampes.”^[674] Or as David Starkey puts it, she gave Henry “only half of what he wanted: her heart and her love. But as for her body, he would have to wait.”^[675] Alison Weir also sees the refusal as strategic:

Anne’s brother and sister were notorious for their sexual exploits, and even her mother’s reputation was suspect.

For months, Anne played “hard to get,” a ruse that led the king to “beg her to come back.”^[677] When he pursued her too ardently, “she would tactically withdraw home to Hever....” At some point along the way it became clear to Anne that, “if she played her cards right, she could win not just her King but also the consort’s crown.”

To serve as evidence for Anne as coquette, “seulle mestres” letter must be interpreted as an illicit proposition; reexamination of it therefore begins with the meaning of the word “mistress” in sixteenth-century English and French. It should be noted that the modern interpretation has not always seemed self-evident. In fact, the two earliest compilers of the letters in England, Thomas Hearne (1678—1735) and William Gunn (1750—1841), insist that the letters prove the king’s honorable intentions.^[678] For Hearne and Gunn the meaning of mistress would have been equivocal: it might, but did not necessarily, mean a long-term extra-conjugal partner. They reasonably assume that with the expression Henry VIII means something like the modern “fiancee.” As for Henry VIII, writing two hundred years before Hearne, whether he was thinking in French or in English, the word “mistress” certainly did not mean a woman with whom one had an enduring extramarital relationship. During his lifetime, the English word “mis­tress” or the French word “maistresse” meant a woman whom one loved and, in many cases, intended to marry. Only around the beginning of the seventeenth century did the word, either in English or French, come to include among its possible definitions a woman with whom one carried on an adulterous affair, and, even then, this was not the primary definition.

Kurath, Kuhn, Reidy and Lewis’s Middle English Dictionary offers the fol­lowing for mistress: a woman in charge of household; sovereign lady or queen; a supernatural being; a beloved woman; women who is a leader or an example; a schoolmistress; a woman expert in some skill; a polite mode of address to a woman.^[679] The Oxford English Dictionary offers a similar suite of definitions and shows that these usages continued into the seventeenth century. The word was first and foremost the female equivalent of “master,” but it meant other things as well. The OED gives an example from Stephen Hawes’s The Pastime of Pleasure published in 1509, relatively close in time to the love letters, that ties the term to marriage by citing the words Grande Amour, who later marries Belle Pucelle. He tells her: “You are my lady, you are my masteres, Whome I shall serve with all my gentylnes.”^[680] The term, then, suggested a woman whom one intended to wed.

A shift is perceptible beginning in the seventeenth century. The fifth defi­nition offered by the OED is “a woman loved and courted by a man; a female sweetheart. Obsolete” Why did the meaning become obsolete? “By the late 19th cent. (my emphasis) this usage was generally avoided as liable to be mistaken for sense A. 7.” Turning to A. 7., we finally find the definition common today: “a woman other than his wife with whom a man has a long-lasting sexual relation­ship.”^[681] As for when the word “mistress” began to mean this, although it is not the primary meaning, the OED gives the example of John Donne referring in 1631 to those “those women, whom the Kings were to take for their Wives, and not for Mistresses, (which is but a later name for Concubines).”

The word “mistress” in early sixteenth-century England, then, meant a woman with whom one was in love, often a woman one would marry, and it held no implication of an affair outside of marriage, although presumably it did not exclude a sexual relationship. Still, it is important to remember that Henry VIII does not use the term when writing in English; in his native language he addresses Anne as “darling” or “sweetheart.” The term appears only in the French letters. What did it signify in sixteenth-century French?

Huguet’s Dictionnaire de la langue franςaise du seizieme siecle shows the same set of definitions as the English dictionaries. A maistresse is a “woman who is loved and courted.” Some of the usage examples cited in the dictionary are drawn from Etienne Pasquier, who writes that “Women are always considered to have the upper hand over the one who is courting them.” The term is also applied to a woman one intends to marry, Henri Estienne offering, “Today a mistress is she to whom one speaks of love for marriage, either in fact or appearance.”^[682] In its first edition of 1694, the dictionary of the Academie franpaise is still defin­ing “maistresse” as women and girls sought after in marriage, or, simply loved by someone. There is no word about mistress in the modern meaning.^[683] The mid-seventeenth-century dictionary of Antoine Furetiere defines the word (after mistress of the house, mistress of the inn, of the cabaret, of the Three Kings, the Golden Cross, etc.) as “a clever woman, who knows how to govern her family, the business of the house. One says it especially of a young woman whom one seeks to marry.”^[684] Finally, “one says it about a person of dubious morals and generally, of a person with whom one makes love.” Like its English counterpart, by the seventeenth century, “maistresse” can mean an extra-marital partner, but this is not the primary meaning.

Moving from dictionaries into other writings of the period, Brantome, writ­ing in the early seventeenth century, provides an instructive example, noting of a character in a romance of the late fifteenth century, that “she declared to [Jehan de Saintre] that she wanted to be his lady and lover; because in those times the word mistress was not used.”^[685] And King Henri IV of France provides a partic­ularly apt example. In letters to Marie de Medicis, Princess of Tuscany, written in the months before their marriage, the king addresses his wife-to-be as “ma maistresse.” They cannot possibly have slept together at this point, because they had not yet met in person. He will call her “maistresse,” he writes, until he finally marries her in Marseilles, where “you will exchange [the title of maistresse] for a more honorable [title].”^[686] Mistress, then, is the woman to whom Henri IV is engaged to be married; once married, she will no longer be his mistress. Once again, the term means what we would consider fiancee.

A study of the word in courtly literature turns up more of the same. Late fifteenth-century romance hero Charles of Hungary addresses the woman he loves and will eventually marry as “ma damme, m’amye et ma maistresse.”^[687] Proposing marriage, he says to her, “Madame, I would like that you, who are my lady and “maistresse,” be my wife, my “amie,” and that I remain your husband, servant, and friend.”^[688] In the popular late-fifteenth-century romance, Cleriaduc kneels before Meliadice, the woman whose hand he will finally win, calling her “my lady,” “ma seule maistresse.”^[689] It should also be noted that “ma seule mais- tresse” is a fixed phrase in courtly literature. Undoubtedly the expression can be translated as “my only mistress,” but, because it was so widely used, the idea of “only” may have lost some of its force. When Henry VIII used it, Anne may not have felt that the king was proposing something truly exceptional, any more than a modern reader would find “my one and only love” substantially different from “my true love” or any number of popular terms of endearment.