![]() ![]() ![]() Immediately, he had himself rowed to Chelsea, where Jane Seymour was waiting. Henry VIII was at Whitehall Palace when the Tower guns signalled that he was a free man. Having at long last won her King, she had adopted for her motto the legend ‘The Most Happy’. The marriage, and Anne’s pregnancy, remained strictly guarded secrets until Easter Sunday 1533, when, ‘loaded with diamonds and other precious stones’, she went ‘in royal state, openly as queen’ to her closet to hear Mass, with sixty maids of honour following her. The few witnesses were all sworn to silence. As far as Henry was concerned, he had never been lawfully married at all, and was free to enter into wedlock at will. Possibly the priest was informed that the Pope had sanctioned the marriage a royal envoy had just returned from Rome, leading some to suspect that the Pope had given his tacit consent. It is more likely to have been Lee, who was preferred to the bishopric of Coventry and Lichfield in 1534. ‘It has been reported throughout a great part of the realm that I married her, which was plainly false,’ Cranmer protested, ‘for I myself knew not thereof a fortnight after it was done.’ The officiating priest was either Dr Rowland Lee, one of the royal chaplains, or George Brown, Prior of the Austin Friars in London. ![]() Just before dawn on 25 January 1533, a small group of people gathered in the King’s private chapel in Whitehall Palace for Henry VIII’s secret wedding to Anne. ![]()
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