On the last day of January 1536, two queens of England occupied the court’s attention at once. In Peterborough, the body of Catherine of Aragon was being lowered into a tomb three weeks after her death. At Greenwich Palace, the woman who had taken her place, Anne Boleyn, had just lost the child she was carrying. The Imperial Ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, reported that it seemed to have been a boy.

For nearly a decade, the promise of a son had justified everything Henry VIII had done to marry Anne. What the king said to her in the days after the loss leaked out of the palace in whispers. One hundred and eleven days later, Anne was dead. To see where that promise came from, one has to start with Henry’s first marriage.

By the late 1520s, he had been married to Catherine of Aragon for almost twenty years. Only one of their children had survived: a daughter, Mary. Henry convinced himself that the marriage was cursed because Catherine had first been the wife of his late brother, Arthur. God, he argued, had denied him a living son as punishment.

To get free of the marriage, he spent years fighting the Pope, and in the end he broke with Rome altogether. The woman Henry wanted to marry instead was Anne Boleyn. She had spent part of her youth at the French court and returned to England polished and quick, with a sharp tongue and a serious interest in religious reform. She would not agree to be simply the king’s mistress.

Henry pursued her for years; seventeen of his love letters to her still survive in the Vatican Library. Cardinal Wolsey, Henry’s chief minister, lost power in 1529 because he could not win the annulment. In January 1533, Henry married Anne in secret. By June, when she was crowned in Westminster Abbey, she was visibly pregnant.

The court fully expected a prince. On September 7th, 1533, Anne gave birth to a healthy girl, Elizabeth. A daughter was not what all that upheaval had been meant to produce, though the child at least showed that Anne could carry a pregnancy to term. Henry kept going.

In 1534, Parliament passed an Act of Succession that put Anne’s children first in line, and later that year the Act of Supremacy made the king head of the Church in England. Mary, Catherine’s daughter, had already been declared illegitimate. In December 1533, she was sent to serve in the household of the baby Elizabeth. Anne took “The Most Happy” as her motto.

On paper, her position looked secure. But it still depended on a promise she had not yet kept. Catherine had a foreign royal family behind her; Anne had no such family and no inherited claim to the crown. Her place depended almost entirely on Henry’s choice and on what she could give him.

In 1534, she was pregnant again. That spring, a courtier wrote that the queen had a goodly belly. Then the documents go quiet. No birth was recorded.

The historian Eric Ives believed the pregnancy ended in miscarriage, though no surviving document says what happened. Others think it may have been a false pregnancy. By September, Chapuys was reporting that Henry had started to doubt whether his wife was pregnant at all. The same letter said the king had renewed his affection for a very beautiful young woman at court, someone he had loved before.

Chapuys did not name her. Tudor medicine could not do much to help. Physicians explained pregnancy and miscarriage through the four humors, the balance of heat and moisture inside the body. Many courts also shared an older belief that a queen’s body and the kingdom’s fortune were tied together.

A healthy prince was a sign that God approved. Losing one could be taken as a sign of the opposite. Anne knew exactly how people would read it. So when she conceived again in the autumn of 1535, the pregnancy meant far more than a new baby.

A son would answer every doubt her enemies had ever raised about her marriage. January 1536 began with a death. On January 7th, shortly before two in the afternoon, Catherine of Aragon died at Kimbolton Castle. To the end, she insisted she was Henry’s true wife.

When the news reached court, Chapuys reported, Henry exclaimed: “God be praised that we are free from all suspicion of war. ” Catherine’s nephew was Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, so her death removed the most dangerous grievance between England and the Empire. The next day, according to Chapuys, the king appeared dressed from head to toe in yellow, with only a white feather in his cap. Elizabeth, now two years old, was taken to mass with trumpets sounding, and Henry carried her in his arms from one courtier to the next to show her off.

The chronicler Edward Hall recorded that Anne wore yellow as well, though he said it was for the mourning. Historians still disagree about what the color meant. Some see grief in it, others celebration. It might also have been nothing more than fashion.

Whatever the reason, it looked bad. In one of his more hostile passages, Chapuys sneered that Anne’s father and brother must have wished Mary had died along with her mother. A darker rumor followed. The man who embalmed Catherine reported that her heart was black, with a strange dark growth attached to it, and some at court began whispering about poison.

Weeks later, Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief minister, repeated a French rumor about poison to Chapuys. The ambassador noticed that Cromwell changed color as he said it. Chapuys, who disliked Anne intensely, reported that she was delighted by Catherine’s death. He also passed on something that tells us more: he had been told that the queen often cried in private, afraid that one day she would be treated the same way.

Mary, meanwhile, still refused to accept Anne as queen. Anne wrote to Mary’s governess: “If I have a son, as I hope shortly, I know what will happen to her. ” That letter survives only because Mary secretly made a copy. Anne’s whole future now hung on the child she was carrying.

On January 24th at Greenwich, Henry was riding in the lists, running at the ring. He was forty-four and had been a formidable athlete. This time he and his horse went down together. Chapuys, writing from London, said the fall was so heavy that everyone thought it a miracle the king was not killed.

Yet he reported that Henry sustained no injury. The accounts that reached France and Rome were far more alarming. A papal envoy in France heard that the king had been thought dead for two hours. A letter from Rome described two hours in which he could not speak.

Whichever account was right, the court had glimpsed a terrible possibility. Henry had no legitimate son. If he had died that day, England would have faced the very succession crisis he had spent ten years trying to prevent. Someone had to tell the pregnant queen.

Anne later claimed it was her own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, who brought her the news. Five days after the fall, on the day of Catherine’s funeral, Chapuys wrote to the emperor with a story that had reached him second-hand through several people. A great person at court, he said, had told the marquis and the marchioness of Exeter about something Henry was supposed to have said. According to the story, Henry claimed he had entered the marriage because of what Chapuys wrote as sortilege, a word often translated as spells or witchcraft.

He supposedly said he considered the marriage null, pointed to the lack of a son as proof, and talked of taking another wife. Chapuys himself admitted the story was very hard to believe. It was never a formal witchcraft accusation against Anne. But if Henry did say it, the reasoning sounded familiar.

Years earlier, he had used almost the same argument against Catherine: a marriage without a son must be a marriage God had never blessed. That same day, while Catherine was being buried and Chapuys was writing his letter, Anne miscarried. The London chronicler Charles Wriothesley wrote that the queen was “delivered of a man child, as it was said, afore her time,” adding that by her own reckoning she was only fifteen weeks along. Writing on February 10th, Chapuys described a child which seemed to be a male, lost before she had carried it three and a half months.

He added that the king had shown great distress. Chapuys also believed Henry had been putting off a final confrontation with Princess Mary until the birth, since both parents were sure the child would be a son. The timing could hardly have been worse for Anne. On the day the old queen was buried in Peterborough, the new queen lost the son she had hoped for.

Chapuys even complained that Catherine had been laid to rest far from the high altar, as if she were still being kept in her place. Inside the palace, pregnancy and its dangers were mostly women’s business. News from the queen’s rooms had to pass through her ladies and the household officers before it reached anyone else at court. Nobody recorded exactly how Henry heard about the loss or who told him first.

Every account we have was written down afterwards at second hand, and each one needs to be weighed carefully. For Anne, a private grief and a political disaster arrived together, and the parallel with Catherine was hard to miss. Henry had put Catherine aside because she had not given him a living son. Now the woman who had promised to succeed where Catherine failed was standing in exactly the same place.

The Bishop of Faenza later reported hearing Francis I repeat a rumor that Anne had faked the miscarriage and let no one but her sister attend her. Nothing supports that claim, but it does show how fast Anne’s body had become a subject of gossip between kings. Centuries later, the historian J. E.

Neale summed up the day in a phrase that stuck: Anne had “miscarried of her savior. ”

We do not know what happened in the room itself. No midwife left an account. Nothing records where the child was buried.

The reports that leaked out afterwards—passed from ladies to courtiers to ambassadors—suggest that the king and queen had both been counting on a son and began looking for someone to blame almost at once. It is an uncomfortable picture, and most of it comes from people who had every reason to dislike Anne. No source describes the furniture-smashing rage that later television dramas put on screen. It is easy to picture this as a confrontation at Anne’s bedside, but Chapuys’ dispatch does not say where it happened.

On February 25th, he wrote: “According to several people at court, Henry spoke to Anne after the miscarriage and told her he could see clearly that God did not wish to give him male children. ” As he left, he added almost spitefully that he would speak to her once she was up again. Anne had her own explanation for the loss. The first cause, she said, was the shock of the king’s fall.

The second was that she loved him far more than Catherine ever had, and her heart broke when she saw that he loved others. According to Chapuys, the king was much grieved by that remark. Some historians think the shock of the fall could indeed have played a part, though there is no way to prove it. The sources never settle the blame between a grieving mother and a king whose attention was already starting to wander.

Anne also blamed Norfolk for frightening her with the news, though Chapuys wrote that it was well known this was not the cause. Others at court, he said, put it down to her inability to carry a son, or to her fear of ending up like Catherine now that the king had been giving great presents to a young woman named Jane Seymour. Anne reportedly offered her weeping maids an odd kind of comfort. The loss, she told them, was for the best.

She would soon be pregnant again, and the next son would be beyond doubt, unlike this one, which had been conceived while Catherine was still alive. That sounds cold. It may also have been a desperate attempt to turn a disaster into a promise. Henry, meanwhile, went off to the festivities in London before Lent and stayed away.

He left Anne at Greenwich, Chapuys noted, when once he could not leave her for an hour. The ambassador went further and claimed that in more than three months the king had not spoken to Anne ten times. Coming from a hostile witness, that may be an exaggeration. Decades later, though, George Wyatt, who defended Anne’s memory, recorded a report that the queen had blamed the loss on unkindness.

Later writers made the story darker still. In a book published in 1585, the Catholic writer Nicholas Sander claimed Anne had given birth to a shapeless mass of flesh, and for good measure he gave Anne herself a sixth finger and a projecting tooth. Much later, in 1989, the historian Retha Warnicke suggested the child might have been deformed, something Tudor minds could have connected with witchcraft. Most historians reject the deformity theory because no report from 1536 mentions anything of the sort.

A theory published in 2010 proposes that Henry may have been Kell positive, a blood group trait that can cause repeated pregnancy losses when the mother does not share it. If that is right, neither Catherine nor Anne was to blame for the sons they lost. The same authors connected it to a condition called McLeod syndrome, which might also help explain Henry’s later decline. No remains have ever been tested, so the idea is still unproven.

Anne was still queen in the weeks that followed. No one had arrested her or charged her with anything. But her footing was slipping. Jane Seymour, a quiet young woman from Anne’s own household, was drawing more and more of the king’s attention.

In late March, Henry sent Jane a purse full of gold coins and a letter. According to Chapuys, Jane kissed the letter and returned it unopened. Then she fell to her knees and begged the messenger to tell the king that she had no greater riches than her honor. “If he wished to give her money,” she said, “let it be when God sent her an honorable marriage.

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Henry understood the gesture. He announced that from then on he would see Jane only with her family present. Soon her elder brother, Edward Seymour, was given rooms the king could reach through private galleries—rooms that Cromwell himself had been asked to vacate. By late April, Chapuys was reporting that Sir Nicholas Carew, a courtier hostile to Anne, was coaching Jane on how to handle the king.

Chapuys later heard that even before Anne’s arrest, Jane had urged Henry to restore Princess Mary. Henry told her she was a fool who ought to think about the children they would have together. Anne also had an enemy much closer to power. According to Eric Ives, she had clashed with Cromwell over how the wealth of the dissolved monasteries should be used.

Cromwell told Chapuys that Anne would have liked to see his head cut off. In public, he still defended the marriage. But when he insisted to the ambassador that the king would stay married to Anne, Chapuys saw him raise a hand to his mouth as if to hide a smile. On April 2nd, Anne’s almoner, John Skip, preached a sermon that seemed aimed squarely at Cromwell.

Skip told the story of Haman, the wicked minister who urged a king to destroy the Jews. He also spoke about King Solomon, who lost his true nobility by taking new wives and concubines. Few people listening could have missed the point. On April 18th, Chapuys was maneuvered into a public exchange of bows with Anne at chapel, a sign that Henry still wanted the emperor to accept the marriage.

Then, on April 23rd, the prized Order of the Garter went to Carew rather than to Anne’s brother, George. The very next day, April 24th, commissions were quietly set up to hear and try unspecified treasons. Around April 29th, Anne made a reckless remark to the courtier Henry Norris. “You look for dead men’s shoes,” she told him, “for if aught came to the king but good, you would look to have me.

” Norris answered that if he had any such thought, he would rather his head were off. In 1559, the Scottish reformer Alexander Ales recalled a scene from those last days: Henry at a window, angry, and Anne below him holding little Elizabeth and pleading. Around April 30th, by most historians’ reconstruction, the musician Mark Smeaton was taken in for questioning. On May 1st, Henry watched the May Day joust at Greenwich, then abruptly rode away with only a handful of men and left the queen behind.

On May 2nd, at about five in the afternoon, Anne was taken to the Tower. Wriothesley says she fell to her knees and swore she was not guilty. Once inside, she asked the constable, Sir William Kingston, whether she was going to be put in a dungeon. Even there, Kingston reported, she was worried about a friend, Lady Worcester, whose unborn child had stopped moving.

The charges against Anne were adultery with four men, incest with her own brother George, and plotting the king’s death. Many of the dates in the indictment could not be true. By Eric Ives’ count, in twelve cases Anne or the man named was somewhere else. Two of the dates given for George fell in November and December 1535, when Anne was carrying the son she would lose.

On May 15th, Anne and George were tried in the Tower before a court of peers, with Anne’s own uncle Norfolk presiding. Chapuys heard that more than two thousand people crowded in to watch. George was handed a written note, repeating something Anne had supposedly said—that the king lacked skill and vigor in bed—and he read it out loud. Chapuys claimed the betting ran ten to one on George’s acquittal.

Both were condemned. Two days later, George and the other accused men were executed. That afternoon, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer declared Anne’s marriage void. Early on May 19th, Anne was led out onto Tower Green.

A skilled swordsman had been brought over from Calais. Kingston recorded her saying, with a laugh, that she had a little neck. Chapuys reported that before and after she received the sacrament, she swore on the damnation of her soul that she had never been unfaithful to the king. Wriothesley noted that she had reigned as queen three years, lacking fourteen days, counting from her coronation.

She died 111 days after the day she lost her son. Henry showed no sign of grief. Chapuys wrote that in the weeks after her arrest, the king was seen banqueting late into the night, and was heard to say he believed more than a hundred men had been involved with Anne. In the same letter, the ambassador remarked with open contempt that no man had ever made a greater show of his horns or worn them more cheerfully than Henry.

The king even showed the Bishop of Carlisle a little book, a tragedy he said he had written himself, and claimed he had long expected the affair to end this way. He reportedly told his son, Henry Fitzroy, in tears, that Anne had planned to poison both the boy and Princess Mary. On May 20th, the day after the execution, Henry was betrothed to Jane Seymour. They married on May 30th.

Chapuys, never a generous observer, described the new bride as of middle height, rather pale, no great beauty, and past twenty-five. A few days later, Edward Seymour was made Viscount Beauchamp. In late May, according to the ambassador, Cromwell claimed that he himself, with the king’s authority, had set out to arrange the plot. In the same conversation, he praised the intelligence and courage of Anne and her brother.

However much of it Cromwell set in motion on his own, he could not have prosecuted and destroyed a queen without royal authority. The miscarriage on its own does not explain why Anne died. Eric Ives argued that the loss was not Anne’s last chance, and not the moment Jane replaced her, though it did leave her vulnerable again. George Bernard has argued that Anne may actually have committed adultery.

Chapuys himself wrote on the day of Anne’s arrest that Henry had already made up his mind to leave her, and was even looking into an old claim that Anne had once been contracted to marry Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland. Others point to Cromwell’s quarrel with Anne, to Henry’s growing interest in Jane, or to court factions acting without any single plan. The truth was probably messier than any conspiracy: a tangle of ambition, religion, personal grudges, and a king’s shifting moods. Some even connect Henry’s harsher behavior to his fall in January.

A 2016 study by researchers at Yale suggested the king may have suffered repeated head injuries. The historian Suzannah Lipscomb has argued that 1536 as a whole was the year that changed Henry. The lost son may not have caused Anne’s fall. It did make an already dangerous position easier to attack.

Go back to the evening of January 29th, 1536, before any of this had happened. At Peterborough, Catherine’s tomb had been closed. At Greenwich, the queen’s rooms had gone quiet. Whatever small preparations had been made for a birth still months away were no longer needed.

Anne was still queen that night, and no one could have known that she had less than four months left to live. The daughter Henry had once shown off in his arms would outlast them all. Edward, Henry’s only legitimate son to survive infancy, died at fifteen. Elizabeth ruled England for forty-four years.

Her mother’s motto had been “The most happy. ” Elizabeth’s own reign became one of the most celebrated in English history.