Six Wives (73 page)

    Was it Cranmer himself who invoked 'Reformation'? Or Henry? Or Cromwell? Whoever it was chose well. For the clarion cry of 'Reformation' was one of the keys to the forthcoming revolution. It would be used to justify actions more dubious than the breaking of oaths and to quell consciences more sensitive than Cranmer's.

    After making the Protestation, Cranmer processed south through the Cloister to St Stephen's chapel for his consecration.

    Built by the first three Edwards, St Stephen's was the private royal chapel of Westminster Palace. And its lavish decoration and sculpture made it the symbol of the piety of the medieval English kings: there were images of King Edward III and Queen Philippa and their ten children, of the two sergeants-at-arms who attended them in procession, and of the Adoration of the Magi or Three Kings, on whose feast day of 6 January the King and Queen came to the chapel for the most splendid ceremony of the Court liturgical year.
¹⁴

    No one, however, who had worshipped in the chapel, not even the founder-kings, was a more devout believer in the religious role and authority of monarchs than Cranmer. But no one interpreted the role more radically either.

    Before entering the chapel, Cranmer had been vested in his priestly robes and the ceremony he was to undergo would make him a priest of priests: Archbishop, Primate of All England, successor of St Augustine and the Apostles, and, through the laying-on of the
pallium
, the direct representative of the Pope and St Peter himself. But, throughout, Cranmer clutched the notarial copy of his Protestation like a royal talisman. And, at each crucial point, he referred himself to it: when he took his first oath to the Pope before his consecration, and, again, when he swore a second oath before he received the
pallium
. All that he did, swore and accepted, he insisted, was subject to the over-riding conditions made in his Protestation: the ceremony might seem to make him the Pope's but, to his mind at least, his Protestation kept him intact as God's and the King's.

    Reginald Pole's brutal comment seems fair. 'Other perjurers', he told Cranmer, 'be wont to break their oath after they have sworn; you break it before.'
¹⁵

* * *

The rights and wrongs of Cranmer's action were, finally, a matter between his conscience and his God. It was the
effect
of what he did that mattered. For Henry and Anne now had an Archbishop of Canterbury of their choice who would do their bidding. And he hastened to obey. He had to, because Easter, Anne's proclaimed deadline, was only a fortnight away.

    The issue of the Divorce had already been submitted to Convocation on 26 March and, over the following days, the 'Determinations' of the universities, in the obtaining of which Anne's tutor, her father and her brother had played so prominent a role, were tabled and debated. But on 1 April, Cranmer himself took the chair in the upper house of Convocation for the first time as Archbishop. He proved a ruthless business manager and, within a few days, secured large majorities for two key propositions: that there was proof that Arthur had 'carnally known' Catherine and that the Pope had no power to dispense the case. Fisher fought to the last and was silenced only by his arrest on the 6th. On the 8th, Convocation itself was prorogued. It had laid down the principles; it would be up to Cranmer to give them judicial effect.
¹⁶

    Parliament had also been prorogued for the Easter recess on 7 April. According to Chapuys, the Commons were still resisting the Bill in Restraint of Appeals on 31 March. But, within the week, opposition collapsed and the Bill cleared both Houses by the day of prorogation.
¹⁷

    Anne's deadline had been met.

* * *

On 9 April a high-ranking delegation of Councillors, headed by Norfolk, formally gave Catherine notice that Henry had already married Anne. But it was left to her Chamberlain, Mountjoy, to inform her of the corollary: that she was no longer Queen and must neither live nor be addressed as such. Indignantly, Catherine brushed the royal order aside.

    'It is this Anne', Chapuys wrote, 'who has put [Henry] in this perverse and wicked temper . . . and we must believe that she will never cease until she has seen the end of the Queen, as she has done that of the Cardinal, whom she did not hate so much.'
¹⁸

    It is a harsh judgement. But events would prove it accurate.

    Finally on 12 April, Easter Saturday, Anne, having vanquished her rival, appeared for the first time as Queen herself. 'Anne went', the Venetian ambassador reported, 'with the King to high mass, as Queen, and with all the pomp of a Queen, clad in cloth of gold, and loaded with the richest jewels.' During the service, she was prayed for as Queen and afterwards 'she dined in public' in state.

    'All the world is astonished at it', Chapuys noted, 'and even those who take her part do not know whether to laugh or to cry.' But the incentive to keep a properly composed expression was great. 'The King', Chapuys continued, 'is very watchful of the countenance of the people, and begs the Lords to go and visit and make their court to the new Queen.' Henry had also, the ambassador had discovered, done a deal with Cranmer to regularise his matrimonial position.
¹⁹

* * *

That very day, in fact, Henry had replied to a letter from Cranmer, asking for permission to try his marriage. The request was an awkward one: Cranmer, who professed his submission to the King, had nevertheless to sit in judgement upon him. The irony of the situation had not disturbed Wolsey's serenely imperious confidence in either of the earlier trials of 1527 or 1529. But it concerned both the King and his Archbishop now, and it took two versions of Cranmer's letter before Henry was satisfied. In the first version, Cranmer had asked to know Henry's 'pleasure' before he proceeded. In the second version, this was formalised into a request for a royal 'licence' to judge the case, as specified by the Act in Restraint of Appeals. Nor was it sufficient for Cranmer to state that he sought such permission 'most humbly upon my knees'. Instead, he was coached into ending his second letter by proclaiming himself to be 'prostrate at the feet of your Majesty' and protesting that he had sued for the licence 'only for the zeal' he had to end the scandal of the Great Matter and to settle the succession 'and for none other intent and purpose'.
²⁰

    Henry, clearly, was determined that the keys snatched from St Peter should not be handed over unconditionally to his English substitute. And Cranmer, out of conscience as well as expediency, was happy to acquiesce.

    Armed with Henry's licence, Cranmer stepped, however improbably, into Wolsey's shoes and launched the third 'inquisition' into the marriage. And, as previously, the royal couple were summoned to appear before their ecclesiastical judge. According to Chapuys, the summons was served on Catherine on about 15 April. 'The Queen', he reported, 'has been cited to appear before the Archbishop of Canterbury on [1 May], at an Abbey 30 miles from here.' The Abbey was Dunstable Priory in Bedfordshire. It was near the royal hunting lodge of Ampthill, where Catherine had been ordered to take up residence – but, at a dozen miles to the south-west, it was not too near. Indeed, according to Chapuys, its remoteness was why it had been selected. 'This', he reported, 'being a solitary place [it] has been chosen for secrecy, as they fear that if the affair was managed [in London], the people would not refrain from speaking of it and perhaps from rioting.'
²¹

    Henry, clearly, had not forgotten his humiliation at the hands of the London crowd at the Blackfriars Trial. There must be no repetition, and Catherine must be given no opportunity to grandstand and milk sympathy.

* * *

Nevertheless, the King's preparations were strikingly disorganised. This is curious. Henry's arguments were hardly under-rehearsed (after all, he had been saying much the same thing for six years). And his leading counsel was the usually ferociously efficient Gardiner. What had gone wrong? Perhaps there were already tensions between Gardiner and Cromwell. Perhaps Henry's advisers had spread themselves too thin: after all, they had just coped with contentious sessions of both Parliament and Convocation and they were about to face a meeting of the Northern Convocation, which was even more rootedly hostile to the Great Matter than its southern equivalent. Perhaps Anne's own driving energy was absent, as her mind had already moved on from fighting for her new status to celebrating and enjoying it; if so, it proved a temporary aberration, albeit a dangerous one.

    Whatever the reason, crucial documentation was missing. Where, Audley wrote to Cromwell, were the 'Determinations' of the universities? Cranmer had already been approached, but 'Wiltshire reports he hath them not'. If Cromwell did not have them, they must be at York Place or with Dr [Rowland] Lee. 'If at York Place the King says you may go thither; if not, send for Dr Lee, or, if he be not in town, search his chambers'. For the papers must be found! 'The King', Audley concluded, 'wishes them sent with speed to [Gardiner].'
²²

* * *

All this accounts for the fact that Cranmer did not open his court till Saturday, 10 May. Even then the King's case was not water-tight: papers were still astray and crucial witnesses were missing.

Ironically, the day was saved for Henry only by Catherine's own behaviour. For Catherine was not for turning. Instead, she stuck rigidly to the strategy she had pursued since the Blackfriars Trial and refused either to recognise the court or to respond to the summons. This enabled Cranmer, like the Cardinal-Legates, to pronounce her 'contumacious' and proceed in her absence.

    But it was still a close-run thing, as Thomas Bedell, the clerk to the Council, detailed in a letter to Cromwell written immediately after the end of the first day's session. The key witnesses to Catherine's response to the summons, Bedell reported, had not arrived at Dunstable; the two aged ladies who were to testify to the consummation of Catherine's marriage had not appeared either; the King's 'protestation' (in effect his witness statement) was not to hand nor, despite Henry's imperious command, had the 'Determinations' of the universities turned up. Oh, and they were still missing 'the instrument of the opinion of the Convocation', which Cranmer had secured with such effort the previous month.
²³

    It is an extraordinary catalogue of ineptitude. But Catherine's own absence and,
a fortiori
, the absence of her lawyers, enabled Cranmer to keep the show on the road. Anne's cousin, Sir Francis Bryan, turned up like a bad penny for the second session on Monday, 12 May, and his evidence of Catherine's response to the summons enabled her to be pronounced definitively contumacious (
vere et manifeste contumacem
). This, in turn, meant that the two elderly ladies, who had refused to imperil their bodies as well as their consciences by travelling to Dunstable, could depose in London without the need for a further summons to Catherine and the consequent delay while her response was awaited.
²⁴

    But the most important advantage of the King's men was, as Chapuys had foreseen, Dunstable's rural isolation. 'Few or almost none were present at the place of judgement', Bedell reported, 'but such as came thither . . . with their lords and masters.' Not even Catherine, though she was only a few miles distant, bothered to send observers. 'There came', Bedell reported in his second letter to Cromwell, written after the Saturday session of the court, 'no servant of hers in Dunstable, sith our coming hither, but only such as this day be brought in as witness against her.'
²⁵

    Practically
in camera
, therefore, the King's lawyers felt able to cut corners. Henry's counsel, Bedell noted in a revealing remark, 'studieth, as diligently as they possibly can, to cause everything to be handled, so as it may be most consonant to the law,
as far as the matter will suffer
'. Much the same went for Cranmer himself as judge, according to the same observer. 'And my Lord of Canterbury', he wrote, 'handleth himself very well, and very uprightly, without any evident cause of suspicion to be noted in him by the counsel of the said Lady Catherine, if she had any present here.'
²⁶

    Indeed, so happy was the present state of affairs for the King's case that Cranmer did everything he could to prevent any further publicity. He had not, he explained to Cromwell on 17 May, 'even written to the Queen' (that is, Queen Anne, not Queen Catherine) but only to the King himself. His reason was the overwhelming need for discretion: 'I think it expedient that . . . the process be kept secret for a time,' he insisted. And, above all, it must be kept secret from Catherine, lest 'a great bruit and voice of the people in this behalf might move her to do that thing herein which peradventure she would not do if she shall hear little of it'. For Cranmer's fear was that Catherine might think better of her position and appear in his court, which would throw the whole now smoothly running machinery out of gear. Say nothing, he begged Cromwell, and beseech Henry himself to say nothing either.
²⁷

    It is an unlovely picture. But the tactic worked. By the 17th, Cranmer was able to advise Henry that, at last, 'your Grace's great matter is now brought to a final sentence, to be given on Friday now next ensuing [the 23rd]'. That was almost a week away. But the court, Cranmer explained to his impatient master, could not convene any earlier since all the intervening days were 'ferial' or holy days, on which an ecclesiastical court could not sit.
²⁸

    On the 23rd, Cranmer duly reported to Henry 'that I have given sentence in your Grace's great and weighty cause' and sent him a transcript. But immediately there arose another problem: Cranmer had also been instructed that Henry's marriage with Anne was to be found good. But the details were lacking. So, Cranmer reminded Henry, it was time: 'for the time of the Coronation is so instant and so near at hand, that the matter requireth good expedition to be had in the same'.
²⁹