The Girls' Book of Famous Queens

In 1529 Queen Catharine was summoned into court to meet her public sentence. When the crier called, “Henry, king of England, come into court,” he answered from his royal seat of state, in loud tones, “Here,” and thereupon proceeded to make known his many troubles regarding his tender conscience and religious scruples, which so sore distressed his royal mind; ending in a panegyric upon the many virtues of his beloved wife, Catharine, from whom none other cause than his afflicted conscience would ever have forced him to consent to part.

After this arch-traitor to all domestic faithfulness had thus relieved his burdened heart, the crier summoned, “Catharine, queen of England.” Taking no notice of the surrounding legates, the sorrowful queen rose with graceful dignity, and, followed by her ladies, she went round about the court, even to where the king sat, and kneeling at his feet she thus pathetically addressed him, with quaint foreign accent and persuasive voice: “Sir, I beseech you, for the love of God, let me have some justice. Take some pity on me, a poor stranger in your dominions; I have no counsellor in this land, and, as you are the head of justice in your realm, I flee to you. Alas! I take God to witness that for these twenty years I have been to you a true, humble, and obedient wife. And if our children have died, it has not been for the want of a mother’s love or care. The king, your father, was accounted a second Solomon for wisdom, and my father, Ferdinand, was deemed one of the wisest kings of Spain; and they had counsellors as wise as those of these days, and they all, verily, thought our marriage good and lawful. Therefore I marvel greatly at the inventions now brought against me. If you have found any dishonor in my conduct, then am I content to depart; but if none there be, then I beseech you thus humbly to let me remain in my proper state.”

The queen then rose up in tears, and making a low obeisance to the king, she walked out of court; nor would she return, even though the crier again called her name. Nor would she ever more attend these evil councils, but waited in patient silence the coming of her dread doom. Nor did she display any enmity to the boastful Anne Boleyn, who did most indecently declare her growing power over the fickle fancies of the cruel king. Save only on one occasion, did Queen Catharine give to her intimation that she was aware of her ambitious views. The queen was once playing cards with Anne Boleyn, when she thus addressed her: “My lady Anne, you have the good hap ever to stop at a king; but you are like others, you will have all or none.”

At length, as Queen Catharine would not again appear in court, although several times summoned by the loud voice of the crier, King Henry, in his rage, sent Cardinal Wolsey and others to the queen, to have a private interview with her. Catharine was engaged with her ladies in needlework at the time, to while away her tedious hours, for the cruel king had removed the Princess Mary from her mother, nor would any tears avail the lonely, neglected wife, though she wrote most tender letters to the king begging him to let her behold her child. As the prelates entered the apartment where Queen Catharine and her ladies were occupied with their embroidery, the queen rose to meet them, having a skein of white silk around her neck, and apologizing for the manner of their unceremonious reception. “You see,” said Catharine, pointing to the skein of silk, “our humble employment with my maids; and yet, save these, I have no other counsellors in England, and those in Spain on whom I could rely are far away.”

“If it please your Grace,” replied Wolsey, “we would speak with you alone.”

“My lord,” answered the queen, with a proud innocence, “if you have anything to say, speak it openly before these folk; I would all the world should see and hear it.”

Whereupon Wolsey began to address her in Latin, in which language she was well skilled; but she said humbly: “Pray, my good lord, speak to me in English, for I can, thank God, understand English, though I do know some Latin.”

The queen then led the cardinals into her withdrawing-room, and it is recorded of this conference, that she did so set forth her cause that they would not henceforth decide against her.

But chafing at the long pontifical delays, King Henry determined to take the matter into his own hands. He had used every device to induce the queen to consent to the divorce; and had by bribes and threats obtained from most of the universities of Europe opinions that the marriage was illegal.

King Henry then sent a message to Queen Catharine, who was at that time residing at Greenwich Palace, entreating her, for the quieting of his conscience, that she would refer the matter to arbitration. Catharine replied: “God grant my husband a quiet conscience; but I mean to abide by no decision excepting that of Rome.”

This answer so enraged the king that he took the queen to Windsor Castle, and then himself departing on some excuse, he sent authoritative commands to her that she should leave forever the royal palace.

“He is my husband, and it is my duty to obey him,” said the injured and faithful wife; “but though I go hence at his bidding, I am his wife, and for him will I pray.”

King Henry had previously endeavored to have Catharine persuaded to enter a convent; and in view of such an event, his sensitive conscience had required him to apply to the ablest canonists in Rome to give him their opinions on the three following questions: 1. Whether, if a wife were to enter a convent, the Pope could not, in the plenitude of his power, authorize the husband to marry again. 2. Whether, if the husband were to enter a religious order that he might induce his wife to do the same, he might not be afterwards released from his vow and at liberty to marry. 3. Whether, for reasons of state, the Pope could not license a king to have, like the ancient patriarchs, two wives, of whom one only should be acknowledged and enjoy the honors of royalty. Rather convincing proofs, truly, that the compunctions of conscience of this royal hypocrite were a hollow sham!

After her expulsion from her husband’s court, Catharine first went to her manor of the More, in Hertfordshire; and then settled at Ampthill, from whence she wrote to Pope Clement, informing him of her banishment from the royal court. As the Pope would not sanction the divorce, but instead issued a bull of excommunication against the royal rebel, the king, in 1533, dissolved his own wedlock by a decision pronounced in a court held by Archbishop Cranmer. Some historians state that he had married Anne Boleyn previously to the time when the divorce was pronounced.

When the news of this double insult reached poor Catharine, she was lying upon a sick-bed, worn out with sorrow. In vain had she pleaded to be allowed to see her only child, the Princess Mary, for one last farewell. And now her agonized mother’s heart is wrung with added woe. Lord Montjoy, her former page, was deputed to bear to her the minutes of the infamous conference, by whose decision she was degraded from the rank of queen of England to that of dowager-princess of Wales.

Rising from her couch and seizing her pen, she drew it through the words “princess-dowager,” and exclaimed to those who had brought to her this insulting document: “So I return the minutes; and I desire ye to say to his Grace, my husband, Catharine, his faithful consort, is his lawful queen; and for no earthly consideration will she consent to be called out of her name.”

Catharine afterwards removed to the Bishop of Lincoln’s palace of Bungen. By the king’s orders, she was deprived of most of her servants, because she would be waited on by no one who did not address her as queen. She was next removed to Kimbolton Castle, though Henry’s first orders had been to take her to Fotheringay Castle, a place notorious for its bad air. But Catharine had declared that she would not go there “unless drawn with ropes,” and so she had been sent to Kimbolton.

King Henry also withheld her income, due from her jointure as Arthur’s widow; and notwithstanding the noble portion which she had brought as her dower, she was allowed to suffer for the very necessaries of life, and even a new gown was obtained on trust, as her will shows. When one of her servants, in a rage at her inhuman treatment, execrated the perfidious Anne, Catharine gently chided her, saying: “Hold, hold! curse her not, for in a short time you will have good reason to pity her!”

As death rapidly approached the heart-broken Catharine, she welcomed the summons as a joyful release from her earthly unutterable woe. A few days before she expired, she dictated the following touching words to the base husband who had so atrociously wronged her.

“My Lord and Dear Husband: I commend me unto you. The hour of my death draweth fast on, and my case being such, the tender love I owe you forceth me with a few words, to put you in remembrance of the health and safeguard of your soul, which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and tendering of your own body, for which you have cast me into many miseries and yourself into many cares. For my part I do pardon you all, yea, I do wish and devoutly pray God that He will also pardon you. For the rest I commend unto you Mary, our daughter, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I heretofore desired. I entreat you also on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage portions which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants I solicit a year’s pay more than their due, lest they should be unprovided for. Lastly do I vow that mine eyes desire you above all things.”

Catharine of Aragon breathed her last Jan. 7, 1536. Although it was said that King Henry shed tears over her last pathetic letter, which he received a short time before her death, yet it is also stated that he sent his lawyer to endeavor to seize upon her little property and try to escape paying her trifling legacies and debts.

On the day of her burial, King Henry wore mourning, but Anne Boleyn clothed herself and all her ladies in yellow, exclaiming, “Now am I queen! I am grieved, not that she is dead, but for the vaunting of the good end she made.”

Neither King Henry’s arrogant power nor Anne Boleyn’s pernicious influence could prevent the widespread and lasting effect of the Christian death-bed of Catharine. At length some dared to suggest to King Henry, “that it would become his greatness to rear a stately monument to her memory,” whereupon the beautiful abbey-church of Peterborough, where her remains were placed, was spared from destruction at the period of the suppression of the monasteries, and was endowed and established as the see of Peterborough.

The life of the woman who had supplanted her was short and full of sorrow. Three years only elapsed after Henry had married Anne Boleyn, and only four months after Catharine had sent him her dying forgiveness, when her exulting rival met her awful doom.

Already had King Henry cast his eyes upon Jane Seymour, and on the 15th of May, 1536, the sentence upon the queen was pronounced. Wolsey, who had suggested and aided the divorce of Catharine, had fallen under the disfavor of Anne, and through her influence he was overthrown and died in disgrace. And now Anne herself was to suffer the penalty of her wicked ambition. On the 19th of May, 1536, Anne Boleyn was led out upon Tower Green, and a blow from the executioner ended her eventful, but brief life.

“It is done!” cried the inhuman Henry, as he heard the cannon which was the signal that the tragedy was over; “that is an end of the matter. Unleash the dogs, and let us follow the stag.”

Thus ended the life of Anne Boleyn, and on the next day King Henry VIII. was married to his third wife, Jane Seymour.

QUEEN ELIZABETH, AND MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS.

A.D. 1533-1603

“A crownGolden in show, is but a wreath of thorns,Brings dangers, troubles, cares, and sleepless nightsTo him who wears the regal diadem.” – Milton.“One speaks the glory of the British Queen,And one describes a charming Indian screen;A third interprets motions, looks, and eyes;At every word a reputation dies.” – Pope.

THE lives of Queen Elizabeth, and Mary, Queen of Scots, are so intimately associated, that a sketch of one includes that of the other; and in order to give the history of that epoch with greater conciseness and clearness without unnecessary repetition, a brief outline of each of their lives is here sketched.

For the sake of perspicuity, a few lines will be given to intervening events.

As we stated in the account of Catharine of Aragon, Henry VIII. married Jane Seymour upon the day following the execution of Anne Boleyn. Fortunately for Jane Seymour, death removed her during the succeeding year, rather than the fatal axe of her royal husband. She left an infant prince, who afterwards reigned a few short years as Edward VI.

In 1540 Henry VIII. married his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. She had been represented as a great beauty by Cromwell, whom the king had raised to power. This Cromwell was a former servant of Cardinal Wolsey. But so great was Henry’s disgust upon beholding the awkward, ill-dressed, ill-featured, German princess, whom he had been inveigled into making his fourth bride, that though the marriage was perforce celebrated according to agreement, the unfortunate Cromwell was soon after disgraced and executed, and the sensitive conscience of the royal hypocrite was once again called into requisition to annul this ill-starred union. The beautiful face of Lady Catharine Howard no doubt quickened the stings of the conveniently tender conscience of this dissembling King of Knaves, who declared with pious cant that, having ascertained that Anne of Cleves had previously been betrothed to the Duke of Lorraine, his punctilious scruples would not allow him to retain her as his wife; whereupon King Henry, who waited not now for pope or bishop to annul his marriage vows and break his conjugal fetters, bestowed upon his divorced wife the title of “Adopted Sister,” which honor poor Anne of Cleves consented to receive, doubtless thanking heaven for having preserved her from the more terrible fate of some of the wives of this fickle consort.

By way of celebrating his fifth nuptials, King Henry sent to the stake Dr. Barnes and other heretics, while certain Catholics were quartered for having refused to take the oath of supremacy. This persecution of both parties occasioned the indignation of both Catholics and Protestants. “How do folks manage to live here?” exclaimed a Frenchman, in surprise at such fickle punishments. “The Papists are hanged, and the anti-Papists are burned,” was the answer.

But Catharine Howard had not been queen of England one year before her terrible doom overshadowed her. The king discovered certain condemnatory circumstances regarding the conduct of the queen previous to her marriage with him, and in a few short months Catharine also expiated her ambition and her supposed guilt upon the scaffold.

King Henry again resorted to his literary pursuits for solace, being for the time disgusted with his experiments in the matrimonial line, as before his hapless wives had also been, and forsooth with graver cause and better reason. “The king had better marry a widow,” said the people; and that idea seeming to have occurred also to the mind of his august majesty, in the year 1543, this “royal Bluebeard of English history” took for his sixth wife, the Lady Catherine Parr, the three months’ widow of Lord Latimer. She was an ardent partisan of the Protestant party, as well as learned and beautiful, but her skill in argument had well-nigh cost her dear.

To amuse her gouty, quarrelsome, would-be-literary and spasmodically-religious royal spouse, Queen Catherine ventured to argue with him upon certain points in theology. Finding himself worsted in the mental contest, the irate king exclaimed: “A good hearing this, when women become such clerks; and a thing much to my comfort to come in my old age to be taught by my wife.” And thereupon the new chancellor received the order to prepare the impeachment of the queen. But Catherine was warned in time of her coming doom and was possessed of self-control and tact sufficient for this emergency. When again the conversation turned upon religious subjects and the king questioned her upon some knotty point, she answered laughing: “I am not so foolish as not to know what I can understand when I possess the favor of having for a master and spouse a prince so learned in holy matters.”

“By St. Mary!” exclaimed the king; “it is not so, Kate; thou hast become a doctor.”

“And surely,” quoth the queen with mirthful looks, “I thought I noticed that such conversation diverted your Grace’s attention from your sufferings, and I ventured to discuss with you in the hope of making you forget your present infirmity.”

“Is it so, sweetheart?” replied the king; “then we are friends again, and it doth me more good than if I had received a hundred thousand pounds.”

The skilful and politic queen, well pleased to find her lovely head still resting on her own shoulders instead of on the executioner’s block, gave thanks to God for her deliverance, and henceforth left theology in peace. The orders given to the chancellor not having been revoked, the next day he arrived with forty men to arrest the queen, but King Henry, feigning surprise and anger, sent him away with much apparent displeasure.

Thus had Queen Catherine’s wit saved her neck, and the strong grip of the increasing gout now came to her rescue, and this Prince of Shams soon found himself held in the clutch of such a sturdy foe that neither qualms of conscience, nor tears, nor threats, could rid him at last of this dread consort of the tomb. Death claimed him, and the royal hypocrite was forced to yield to that relentless conqueror; and Henry VIII. faced the awful tribunal where no pretensions or shams could avail to hide the horrid deformity of his sin-polluted soul.

Upon the death of Henry VIII. in 1547, his son Edward was proclaimed king as Edward VI. But this young king died in 1553, at the age of sixteen years, and the mighty realm of England was left to the conflicting succession of two princesses, both of whom their royal father had stigmatized with the ban of illegitimacy. In this emergency the Protestants, headed by the Duke of Northumberland, determined to set up a new claimant.

The daughter-in-law of the Duke of Northumberland was Lady Jane Grey, who was the granddaughter by her mother’s side of Mary, queen-dowager of France, and sister of Henry VIII. Upon the death of young Edward, the Duke of Northumberland appeared before the gentle Lady Jane, – who was occupied in reading Plato in Greek, – and bowing his haughty knee in the presence of his daughter-in-law, he exclaimed: —

“The king, your cousin and our sovereign lord, has surrendered his soul to God; but before his death, and in order to preserve the kingdom from the infection of Popery, he resolved to set aside his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, declared illegitimate by an act of Parliament, and he has commanded us to proclaim your Grace as queen and sovereign to succeed him.”

Thereupon the poor, unwilling Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed queen, but dearly did she buy her ten days of sovereign power. Mary was speedily brought to London and declared queen, and for this innocent offence the gentle Lady Jane Grey afterwards met death upon the scaffold.

The reign of Mary was made infamously illustrious by the execution of Lady Jane Grey and many others, and the burning at the stake of the bishops Ridley, Latimer, Cranmer, and many other religious martyrs. So sanguinary was the reign of this queen that she is known in history as Bloody Mary.

Poor Catharine of Aragon! It were surely sad enough to have borne the many sorrows of her afflicted life, without having her only surviving child stamped with such a name of infamy. Mary was the first queen-regnant of England. The queens of England are classified as queen-regnant, queen-consort, or queen-dowager. The first alone reigns in her own right as sole sovereign of the realm. Of the forty queens of England beginning with Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror, who was the first crowned consort, and ending with Victoria, the present queen of England, five were queens-regnant and thirty-five queens-consort.

Elizabeth Tudor, the daughter of Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn, was born in 1533, on the seventh of September. On the tenth of the same month, the royal babe of three days was christened with great pomp and ceremony.

The walls between Greenwich Palace and the Convent of the Grey Friars were hung with tapestry, and the way strewn with green rushes. The baptismal font was of silver; it was placed in the middle of the church, raised three steps high, the steps being covered with fine cloth, surmounted by a square canopy of crimson satin fringed with gold, enclosed by a rail covered with red ray, and guarded by several gentlemen with aprons and towels about their necks. Between the choir and body of the church a closet was erected with a pan of fire in it, that the child might be dismantled for the ceremony without taking cold. When all these things were ready, the child was brought into the hall of the palace, and the procession proceeded to the Grey Friars’ church. The citizens led the way, two and two; then followed gentlemen, esquires, and chaplains; after them the aldermen, then the mayor by himself, then the privy council in robes, then the gentlemen of the king’s chapel in copes, then barons, earls; then the Earl of Essex, bearing the gilt covered basin; after him the Marquis of Exeter with a taper of virgin wax, followed by the Earl of Dorset bearing the salt, and the Lady Mary of Norfolk, bearing the chrism, which was very rich with pearls and precious stones; lastly, came the Dowager-Duchess of Norfolk, bearing in her arms the royal infant, wrapped in a mantle of purple velvet, having a long train furred with ermine, which was borne by the Countess of Kent, assisted by the Earls of Wiltshire and Derby.

The Duchess was supported on the right side by the Duke of Norfolk, with his marshal’s rod, and on the left by the Duke of Suffolk – the only dukes then existing in the peerage of England – and a rich canopy was borne over the babe by the Lords Rochford, Hussey, and William and Thomas Howard.

At the church door the child was received by the Bishop of London, who performed the ceremony, and a grand cavalcade of bishops and mitred abbots. The sponsors were Archbishop Cranmer, the Dowager-Duchess of Norfolk, and the Marchioness of Dorset.

The future queen was carried to the font, and with the ceremony of the Catholic church christened Elizabeth, after her grandmother, Elizabeth of York; and that done, Garter King-at-Arms cried aloud, “God, of his infinite goodness, send prosperous life and long to the high and mighty Princess of England, Elizabeth. Then the trumpets sounded, the princess was carried up to the altar, the Gospel read over her, and she was confirmed by Archbishop Cranmer and presented with the following gifts: – A standing cup of gold by Cranmer; a similar cup fretted with pearls, by the Duchess of Norfolk; three gilt bowls, pounced, with covers, by the Marchioness of Dorset; and three standard bowls graven and gilt, with covers, by the Marchioness of Exeter. Then, after wafers and comfits had been served in abundance, the procession returned to the palace in the same order as it had set out, excepting that the Earl of Worcester, Lord Thomas Howard, the Lord Fitzwalter, and Sir John Dudley, preceded by the trumpeters, carried the gifts of the sponsors before the princess. Five hundred staff torches carried by the yeomen of the guard and the king’s servants, lit up the way homeward; and twenty gentlemen, bearing large wax flambeaux, walked on each side of the princess, who was carried to the queen’s chamber-door, when a flourish of trumpets sounded and the procession dispersed.”

The tiny infant, christened with all this ceremony, was created Princess of Wales when three months old; and when in her thirteenth month, an attempt was made to betroth her to the Duke D’Angoulême, the third son of Francis I., of France. Rather a strange proceeding concerning the spinster queen of England.

The tragic death of Anne Boleyn left this babe motherless at three years of age.

The first public ceremony in which Elizabeth participated was the christening of Edward the Sixth. She was then just four years of age, and was borne in the arms of the Earl of Hertford, brother to the queen, Jane Seymour. Elizabeth carried in her tiny hands the chrism for her new-born half-brother; and after the ceremony she walked with infant dignity in the procession, being led by the hand by the Princess Mary.