Hi history lovers and welcome back to the channel, where I bring you new videos every
Friday looking at the events of the past. Today on History Calling we’re asking the
question, did Anne Boleyn have a pseudo pregnancy, known as pseudocyesis, in 1534? There’s
considerable evidence that Henry VIII’s second wife was pregnant again within months
of the birth of her daughter Elizabeth in September 1533, but no second baby appeared
in the summer of 1534, as would have been expected. Then, in September, the Imperial
Ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, made a comment in a letter to Charles V of Spain, which for
some historians, has thrown the whole issue of whether Anne was truly pregnant or not,
into confusion. Stay tuned to hear the evidence and decide for yourself. For other videos
on the Tudors and much more, please also remember to subscribe to the channel with notifications
switched on and follow me on Instagram where my username is History Calling. I’ll leave
a link for that in the description box.
Rumours of Anne Boleyn’s second pregnancy date from late January 1534. Her biographer,
Eric Ives, writes that the Imperial Court had been informed of it by 23rd of that month,
saying they had gained this information:
Allegedly by a letter from the newly arrived English ambassador in France. If this was
Lord William Howard, the date of arrival must have been the beginning of December, suggesting
that Anne became pregnant in November 1533.
Eustace Chapuys wrote on 28 January that ‘Anne de Boulans is now in the family way again’.
This date would mean that she was at least a month pregnant, perhaps even more, again
giving her a likely conception date of November or December 1533. Given that she would have
been in confinement at Greenwich Palace for a month after the birth of Elizabeth and not
able to resume sleeping with Henry until at least the second week of October, this timeline
makes sense. She had quickly fallen pregnant with Elizabeth at the end of 1532, shortly
after she began sleeping with Henry, so a fast conception mirrored her previous experience.
Additional evidence survives dating from the following months which further supports the
conclusion that she was pregnant again. On 26 February, Chapuys wrote to Charles V that
Henry had said that ‘According to the laws of the kingdom, the Princess [meaning Mary
in this case] was unable to succeed, and there was no other princess except his daughter
Elizabeth, until he had a son which he thought would happen soon’. Two months later, on
27 April, Anne’s receiver general, George Taylor, wrote a letter from Greenwich to Lady
Lisle, whose husband Arthur was a son of Edward IV and therefore Henry’s illegitimate, half-uncle.
In this letter, Taylor remarked that ‘The Queen hath a goodly belly, praying our Lord
to send us a prince.’ If Anne was showing at this stage, then that would suggest that
she was at least 4 months (or 16 weeks) pregnant, again chiming nicely with a conception in
November or December.
There is also evidence that in April 1534 or later, Henry VIII ordered a royal cradle
to be created for the expected infant. This evidence is an undated receipt from the royal
goldsmith, Cornelius Hayes, addressed to Mr Secretary, meaning Thomas Cromwell, for:
A silver cradle, price 16l. For making a silver plate, altering the images, making the roses
underneath the cradle, the roses about the pillars, and new burnishing, 13s. 4d. For
the stones that were set in gold in the cradle, 15s.; for fringes, the gold about the cushions,
tassels, white satin, cloth of gold, lining, sypars and swadylbands, 13s. 6d. Total, 18l.
1s. 10d. The silver that went to the dressing of the Adam and Eve, the making of all the
apples, the gilding of the foot and setting of the currall, 33s. 4d.
This evidence is open to interpretation however, as it’s possible it refers to Anne’s final
pregnancy which she lost at the end of January 1536. She was just 3 and a half months gone
in that case however and the idea that Henry had already ordered a cradle by that point,
especially if she had previously lost a baby or had had a pseudo pregnancy, seems very
optimistic. I believe the King would have been more likely to wait until after his wife’s
quickening, meaning whenever she felt the baby start to kick, to order such an item.
As Eric Ives has noted, 1534 is also too late to be ordering up a crib for Elizabeth and
the receipt cannot date to before that April, as Cromwell wouldn’t yet have been Henry’s
Principal Secretary. It also cannot refer to the birth of the future Edward VI in 1537
either as by then, Cromwell would have been referred to as the lord privy seal. Incidentally,
if you’d like to read Ives’ excellent book on Anne’s life, I’ll leave it linked
in the description box, along with some other books, films, TV shows and documentaries about
her life.
We also have a single portrait medal of Anne which is dated 1534 and which now resides
in the British Museum. This is the only contemporary likeness of the Queen to survive and is generally
thought to have been struck to celebrate the expected birth of a son as nothing else of
great enough importance to warrant such a medal happened that year. The reason only
one copy survives, so the theory goes, is that Anne lost the baby and so it was pointless
to create any more of the medals.
Next we have a set of instructions given to Anne’s brother, George Boleyn, Viscount
Rochford on the 7 July 1534. In these instructions, Rochford, who was being sent on a ambassadorial
mission to France, was told to request that a meeting between Henry and the French king,
Francis I, which was scheduled for August, be delayed until April 1535, the reason being
that his sister was ‘so far gone with child, she could not cross the sea with the King’
to attend the meeting as well, nor did she want to be without Henry at such a crucial
time. Another letter from 27 July, this time written by Chapuys, also references Rochford’s
mission and Anne’s continuing pregnancy. In this instance, Chapuys writes that among
the news Rochford had sent from France was ‘the postponement of the interview till
the month of April, owing, as people here say, to the wish expressed by Madame de Boulans
of being present at the conferences; which is quite impossible by reason of her pregnancy.’
I’m also going to mention a letter which is sometimes attributed to 24 June 1535. It’s
from William Kingston, Constable of the Tower of London, to Lord Lisle and includes the
line, ‘Her Grace has as fair a belly as I have ever seen’. This is understandably
taken as evidence of another pregnancy in mid-1535, however there is no other source
that says that Anne was pregnant again until the end of that year and it has been postulated
by the editor of the Lisle letters that this document actually dates to either June 1533,
when she was expecting Elizabeth, or June 1534, during her second supposed pregnancy.
This dating is supported by the fact that the letter makes reference to a man named
Sir Christopher Garneys, who died in October 1534. It may therefore be additional evidence
for the 1534 pregnancy. Whether it is or not however, I think we’ve established that
Anne and those around her certainly believed she was pregnant that year, but what’s the
evidence that they were wrong and that this was a phantom pregnancy?
First and foremost, there’s the fact that no baby appeared and we have no record of
a miscarriage or stillbirth. However far more important is another letter written by Chapuys,
this time dated 24 September. This is the first we’ve heard of the pregnancy from
any source in nearly two months and the ambassador tells his master that ‘Ever since the King
began to entertain doubts as to his mistress' reported pregnancy, he has renewed and increased
the love which he formerly bore to another very handsome young lady of this court.’
On the surface, this seems damning, for it appears that Henry doubted Anne was ever pregnant
at all. There are two other ways of looking at this however. First, Chapuys may simply
have been throwing shade at a woman he hated by insinuating that she couldn’t produce
a boy, or even another child. This could even be an oblique reference to something which
had happened to Catherine of Aragon back in 1510, when she miscarried but was persuaded
by her doctors that she was still pregnant with the second of a set of twins. Second,
Chapuys may not mean that Henry doubted the pregnancy was real, but rather that he doubted
its success. Perhaps the baby had stopped kicking and it was increasingly evident that
Anne had miscarried, but not yet delivered.
I also have a video on the childbearing experiences of another Queen Anne, in this case Anne Stuart
and in the course of researching that, I read of numerous instances during her 17 pregnancies,
where she delivered a stillborn baby that her doctors thought had been dead inside her
for days, or even weeks. I’ll leave that video linked on screen and in the description
box. It’s certainly hard to believe that if there had been rumours or evidence that
Anne Boleyn had never been pregnant in the first place in 1534, that Chapuys wouldn’t
have heard them, at this point or later, or that he wouldn’t have reported them. Of
the many slanderous things said about Anne during her life and in the decades after her
death, the accusation that she had had a pseudo pregnancy was never levelled at her. Yet,
at the same time, it’s strange that Chapuys is only reporting doubts about the pregnancy
in late September. Even if we assume Anne fell pregnant at the end of December 1533,
she should have taken to her chamber to await the expected birth by the beginning of September
at the latest. Here however, Eric Ives also offers an explanation, writing of Chapuys
that:
We have to remember that the ambassador had been out of touch with the court while it
was on summer progress. Away from the public eye, with a smaller number of attendants than
at other times, total discretion was achieved. [meaning Anne lost the baby at an earlier
date in the summer but it was kept quiet and Chapuys’ information was out of date].
This is certainly possible. When Catherine of Aragon lost her baby girl in 1510, it was
initially well hushed up according to her confessor, who wrote that only he, the King,
Catherine’s doctor and two of her Spanish women knew what had happened. By contrast,
when her daughter Mary suffered a phantom pregnancy, it was the talk of the court as
people began to suspect that there was no royal heir on the way. It would have been
all the harder for Mary to keep her condition quiet, as she was also so convinced of her
pregnancy that she took to her chamber to await the birth. Anne did not and we can be
certain of that, as there would be plenty of evidence in the royal accounts and correspondence
coming out of the court if she had, just as there was when she took to her chamber to
await Elizabeth’s arrival. This suggests that the Queen knew she’d lost a baby and
was not deluding herself, as Mary would do, that she was still expecting. We also have
to wonder if Anne could have mistakenly believed herself pregnant for such a long time given
how recently she’d actually been pregnant. When Catherine and Mary had their false pregnancies,
Catherine had only ever been pregnant once before and had lost the baby before the later
stages of that pregnancy while Mary had never been pregnant at all. Furthermore Catherine
seems to have only believed she was still expecting because her doctors were telling
her so. Anne was in a very different situation. She’d been pregnant as recently as September
1533. She knew what it felt like to feel a real baby kick, or to press down on her abdomen
and feel that her son or daughter was there. Lastly, while she was certainly under pressure
to produce a boy, Ives argues that this stress would not have been enough to produce pseudocyesis,
given the recent arrival of a healthy baby. She was also several years younger than Mary
was when she had attempted to get pregnant and observers wrote that she appeared happy
and relaxed during 1534. When George Taylor had mentioned her pregnancy for instance,
he also said that ‘The King and Queen are merry and in good health.’
There is also a theory that Anne lost the baby between 26 June and 2 July, as the King
and Queen were reportedly ‘merry’ at Hampton Court Palace on the earlier date, only for
Henry to suddenly leave Anne there on the later one and go on progress. It’s difficult
to reconcile this notion though, with the fact that George Boleyn’s instructions on
7 July for his dealings with the French King specifically say that Anne was still pregnant
and Chapuys further mentions the pregnancy at the end of July. The authors of this theory,
Sarah Morris and Natalie Greuninger write in their book on Anne (linked in the description
box), that Henry was so disappointed by this that he was ‘No longer able to face Francis,
who was already the father of three healthy sons’. Therefore ‘a cover story was created
to save face and the whole event swept under the carpet.’ This seems like a stretch to
me, given the lack of evidence for a miscarriage during this week or Henry’s mindset regarding
it. The pregnancy had been widely reported and news of its loss would likely have made
its way back to Francis anyway. The scheduled meeting was initially supposed to have taken
place a good 7 weeks after the supposed miscarriage and I can’t see Henry delaying this monarchical
summit and continuing to pretend that Anne was pregnant to his fellow monarch for such
a long time. Nevertheless, this hypothesis does still support the idea of a genuine pregnancy.
So, it’s crunch time. Do I think Anne had a pseudo pregnancy? No, I don’t. I think
she truly was pregnant again in 1534 and that she lost the baby. I don’t think she was
prone to pseudocyesis, which is a very rare disorder, nor do I think that a phantom pregnancy
wouldn’t be mentioned in any sources, especially Chapuys’ letters. It would have been a useful
slander to throw against her at the time of her fall in 1536 too, but we hear nothing
of it. Nor did Anne take to her chamber as Catherine of Aragon and Mary I both did when
they falsely believed themselves to be expecting, suggesting a known miscarriage. Furthermore,
if she was susceptible to this psychosomatic illness, it’s interesting that she didn’t
have another phantom pregnancy. If we omit the probably false idea that she was expecting
in mid-1535, it was October of that year before she conceived again. All that being said,
there is certainly enough evidence to argue the other side of this debate and I look forward
to reading your thoughts in the comments’ section as to whether you think Anne’s 1534
pregnancy was genuine or not. While you’re down there, please also remember to give the
video a like. If you’re an Anne fan, I also have videos on her birth, her relationship
with Henry, her death and the exhumation of her bones by the Victorians which you may
wish to watch next. Whatever you choose, please enjoy and until next time, keep learning.