In these two days in the autumn of 1758, Callender was thinking about politics again, but in particular the politics of love and marriage. She was reading from the Spectator, a magazine that was prominent in England, about the marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. King Henry famously divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, only by renouncing the Catholic faith and instituting the new protestant Church of England with himself as its head. While the pope was not going to allow Henry to divorce Queen Catherine, Henry gave himself permission to annul (invalidate) the marriage, in part because the marriage produced no heirs, and to marry the young Anne. It was a marriage that ended badly. In 1536, after only three years of marriage, Anne was accused of treason and beheaded. Henry went on to marry four more women—one died, another he divorced, and another was executed like Anne; his sixth wife, Katherine Parr, survived him. Clearly, this tale of a king’s marriage gone gravely awry gave young men and women much food for thought, as is evident both in Susanna Wright’s poem on the subject and Callender’s excerpt of the same.
6 Morn: Writeing in my place book,13 Caty and I went to meeting, DS, Sarah Morris, and Hannah Hulford spoke, Jona: Copeland & Polly Nichols passed. Hannah Hulford dined hear, and gave me some very wholsome advice, thy ways are ways of wonder O Providence, and all thy paths, are paths of light, ‘tis not the Wise by natural Wisdom, that thou chusest to declare thy truths. but the simple honest mind, thou gives tounge and Utterance too. — drank tea with Caty Howel, staid the evening, becky there, a good deal of conversation concerning some matches and talked of, Joshua, of popes opinion
Every Woman is a Rake at heart.14
7 day. Caty and I quilting, Tommy Lightfoot here, says that my beauties are all gone home, evening Abel James, says that Women generally take care to place their Love discretionally. Caty & I read in the Spectator Ann Bullen’s letter to Harry 8th,15 who I make no doubt will in her own words be convinced of his mistake:
When Bones sepulcred leave there narrow rooms,
And hostile Kings rise tumbling from there tombs;
When nor your heart, nor mine, can lye conceal’d,
But every secret motive stands reveal’d,
Stands full reveal’d, that God, and Man, may see,
How fate has err’d, and you have Injured me.
Source: Material reprinted from The Diary of Hannah Callender Sansom: Sense and Sensibility in the Age of the American Revolution, by Susan E. Klepp and Karin Wulf. Copyright © 2010 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.
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