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Sex and the Tudors
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Retha M. Warnicke |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Four months after the death of their premature son, Henry VIII ordered his second wife, Anne Boleyn, to be executed as a witch and sexual heretic. Her demise, along with five members of the King's privy chamber, was a direct consequence of superstitions prevalent among Tudor Christians which bound together miscarriage and witchcraft, sin and forbidden sexual practices. Retha M. Warnicke of Arizona State University exposes the religious and social mind-set that led to Anne Boleyn's downfall. |
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| Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII and mother of Elizabeth I. Accused of sexual crimes, she was beheaded on 19 May 1536. | |
 n January 1536, Anne Boleyn was delivered prematurely of a male child. That it was no ordinary miscarriage is an essential clue to an understanding of the events that culminated in her execution some four months later. The first major sign that this miscarriage was unusual is that it was not kept a secret, for unlike the other fetuses delivered by Henry VIII's consorts, information about its sex, age, and day of birth was made public. The chronicler Edward Hall, who had formerly noted only the arrival of live Tudor infants, dated its birth to early February and Charles Wriothesley, another chronicler, to 30 January. |
Witches and sex crimes
Since the king's ministers also leaked information about the queen's delivery to the Imperial envoy, his dispatches must be studied to discover what it was the crown wanted this partisan of Catherine to know and when. As Eustace Chapuys had heard rumors even before he learned of her miscarriage that Henry had begun to accuse Anne of bewitching him, it will be useful to examine contemporary beliefs about witches and other sexual heresies. |
Virtually all early modern Europeans believed in the existence of evil spirits; Satan was for them an actual demon who worked ceaselessly to lure mortals into becoming his followers. Among his worshippers, witches were considered such a menace that in 1542, less than six years after Anne's death, parliament enacted a statute that, among other prohibitions, specifically forbade the use of witchcraft to incite a person to illicit love. Although evidence from later English trials indicates that witches were commonly accused of maleficium, that is injuries, such as an animal's death or a person's illness, the kingdom's legends had references to their fantastic activities: they made pacts with the devil, brewed poisons, flew at night, and changed into werewolves, a feat that caused them to be associated with forests and to be described as hairy. |
Universally, witches were decried for their use of aphrodisiacs and for their excessive lust. In medieval England, for example, several noblewomen had been accused of obtaining sortileges to entice men into marriage, one of the most recent incidents involving Elizabeth, wife to Edward IV. Witches also allegedly engaged in illicit sexual intercourse, for they reportedly committed a number of sexual acts that their contemporaries viewed as deviant. Although experts continued to argue about whether the union between witches and the devil, called sodomy, could result in normal childbirth, they agreed that witches gave birth to deformed children, made demonic sacrifices of infants, including their own offspring, and committed incest. Witches were also accused of afflicting men, even their spouses, with impotence, an act that was from the mid-twelfth century recognized by the canon law as a marriage impediment. For the following 300 years, these cases were, according to George L. Kittredge, "so numerous that this species of sorcery became an everyday matter" (G.L. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, 1972). |
The Buggery Statute
A discussion of sodomy and incest, which were closely associated with witchcraft, is relevant to an analysis of Anne's fall, since she was accused of enticing her brother into having relations with her and since he had violated the Buggery Statute. This legislation, which was passed in February 1534, declared buggery a felony because there was not then "sufficient and condigne puynshment... for [this] abhomynable vice... comytted with mankinde or beast." Undoubtedly, bestiality was included because of the belief that demons and witches changed into beasts and of the fear that a union between humans and animals might result in hybrid births. |
An anonymous Protestant zealot, perhaps as late as the reign of James I, made the following statement about the statute: |
Of Chastity they monks and nuns make great outward shew but very litle was fownd amonge them, for it plainlie appered their filthie lusts were not satisfied with maidens wifes & widows but also they practised one with another that detestable sodomitishe & Romishe unnatural Acte wherof St Paul in the first to the Romans [Romans I, 26-27] writeth which was the Cause that horrible vice was made by parliament felonie without helpe or benefitt of Clergie. (D.M. Loades, The Papers of George Wyatt, 1968, p. 156.) |
This author raised several interesting issues. As he suggested, people were neither categorized as homosexual nor as heterosexual, for libertines were expected to move in a progression from adultery and fornication to buggery and bestiality. Often referred to under the general term of sodomy, buggery was condemned both as an unnatural act and as a sin against God, views that have long prevailed in western society. The Judaeo-Christian tradition had treated sodomy as idolatry and heresy, the Hebrew God having forbidden this practice principally because of its centrality in the worship of competing gods. In Tudor England sodomites were still regarded as devil worshippers. |
Because the Buggery Statute was enacted by the Reformation Parliament, later scholars have echoed the anonymous author's assertion that it was an anti-clerical measure. Although churchmen were accused of committing sodomy, they were also criticized for engaging in what were regarded as natural but illicit heterosexual acts. Had buggery been identified solely with the clergy, parliament, which later condemned clerical concubinage, surely would have said so. The above author may well have been thinking about the government's alleged discovery of numerous sexual violations in the monasteries, but Cromwell's agents did not begin their inquiries until after the Buggery Statute was passed. |
This Protestant writer and most of his contemporaries associated acts of sodomy with Rome and the Italian people. Sir Edward Coke, for example, blamed some medieval Lombard for introducing into the realm this "shamefull sin," which was an act "amongst Christians not to be named," or, as William Thomas remarked in the 1540s, a "cruelty not to be spoken with the human tongue." |
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| Sexual deviance, including sodomy and incest, was closely associated with witchcraft. This picture shows Agnes Waterhouse, who was accused of bewitching to death William Fynee and was hanged at Chelmsford in England on 27 July 1566. | |
Before the Reformation, however, accusations of sodomy were often directed at courtiers with French manners. According to Baldassare Castiglione, who had visited England late in the reign of Henry VII, there was at some courts "a most wanton life in every kinde of vice: the women enticefull ... and the men womanish." He maintained that these men "seeing nature ... hath not made them women ought ... to be banished not only out of princes courtes but also out of the company of gentlemen." The Treatise of the Galaunt, first published in 1510, associated sodomy with men who aped French fashions. It described the courtiers with "womanlike dress" as transvestites. Proud and drunken, these "progeny of Lucifer" committed lechery, "abusyon," "abhomynable" acts and defied "the noble course of nature" (B. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. T. Hoby, 1946, pp. 39, 89). |
Sodomy and incest
The charges against two men convicted of buggery in Henry VIII's reign indicate that this legislation was not aimed at a particular group of people. In July 1540, Walter, Lord Hungerford, became the first man executed for violating this statute. He lost his life for having engaged in sexual relations with his male servants and with his daughter and for having procured witches' magic to predict the length of the king's life. It is interesting that Hungerford was charged specifically with consulting with "mother Roche," a professional witch. The second person convicted of buggery was Nicholas Udall, a cleric, who had written verses for Anne's entry into London as queen. By June 1534, within four months of the statute's enactment, he had become headmaster of Eton College. Then in March 1541, less than a year after Hungerford's death, Udall admitted to having committed buggery with two of his male pupils. His sentence was reduced to imprisonment probably because his felonies had not been complicated by acts of treason, but after he was freed, Udall complained that "no man of honor" would "receive" him or "favour" him. The Church Fathers had feared that some male teachers might be tempted to seduce their students, a concern also raised in England where sodomy reportedly flourished at the public schools. |
Sodomy and witchcraft, as Hungerford's death indicated, were associated with incest. Although forbidden, this latter act horrified Tudor Christians less than it has modern people, for it did not become a secular crime until the twentieth century. Perhaps this difference is based on the former's ignorance of the rules of heredity and on their awareness that papal dispensations could permit some incestuous unions, although not between full-blooded siblings. Before Henry married Anne, in fact, rumors had circulated that to resolve the succession crisis his daughter Mary might wed Richmond, her illegitimate half-brother. Many canon lawyers maintained that if a woman engaged in the authorized form of intercourse (beneath her partner) with a male relative, even her father, it was less sinful than if she had relations with her husband in any position other than this approved one. |
Conclusion
A major reason for these restrictions was that illicit sexual acts were blamed for the birth of deformed children. On all levels of society, midwives inspected babies, even miscarried ones, for these defects. Since fetuses were thought to have been completely formed physically from the eighteenth day after conception, numerous, even minor, irregularities could cause them to be described as monstrous: an extra tuft of hair on the navel, folds of loose skin or "ruffles" on the back, and especially siamese twins; one father reportedly fled in terror when he learned of the birth of his twins whom he viewed as a two-headed monster. Asserting that the visitation of deformities upon their infants was God's way of punishing parents for committing sexual sins, clerics interpreted the appearance of these babies both as bad omens and as "wonderful" examples of divine justice. |
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