The Boleyn Women: The Tudor Femmes Fatales Who Changed English History (19 page)

Catherine continued, insisting that Henry had found her a virgin at their marriage. She begged him to let her remain as his wife. Finally, as a mortified Henry sat watching, she stood and left the hall, refusing all commands that she return with the words that ‘it makes no matter, for it is no impartial court for me, therefore I will not tarry’.

The trial continued without Catherine and Henry was soon pushing Campeggio to give judgement. Finally, aware that he could delay no longer, Campeggio stood and said that he would give no judgement, instead revoking the case to Rome.
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This announcement infuriated Anne and Henry and caused uproar at court, with the king’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk, declaring that ‘cardinals never did good in England’. Anne was as furious as the king and, at dinner one day, spoke openly against Wolsey, turning towards Henry and declaring, ‘Is it not a marvellous thing to consider what debt and danger the cardinal hath brought you in with all your subjects?’ Anne claimed that Wolsey had done enough to warrant execution and, while Henry tried weakly to defend him and declared that he perceived that Anne was ‘not the cardinal’s friend’, she countered that ‘I have no cause to be. Nor hath any other man that loves your Grace. No more has your Grace, if ye consider well his doings.’

Henry had relied on Wolsey for many years by 1529, but he was furious with the cardinal’s failure to secure for him his greatest desire. Following Cardinal Campeggio’s departure from England, he was surprised to find that his bags were searched at Calais on the suspicion that he was carrying money to facilitate Wolsey’s flight to Rome. On 9 October 1529, Wolsey was charged with taking orders from a foreign power (i.e. the pope) and forced to surrender the great seal and his position as chancellor of England. He was also ordered to retire to his house at Esher, although was not arrested, spending the next few months attempting to engineer a return to court. Wolsey knew that the best way to assuage Henry’s anger was by appealing to the king’s greed and he ordered that accounts should be prepared of all his possessions so that they could be surrendered to the king. Anne and Henry travelled secretly to York Place to view their new possession and Anne must have felt triumphant to see that all the cardinal had once owned now belonged to her and the king. Wolsey on the other hand was forced to make use of borrowed dishes, plate and cloth at Esher. Henry remained unsure about Wolsey and, at Christmas 1529, sent his own physician to attend the cardinal, who had fallen ill. At the same time, he insisted that Anne sent the fallen minister a token of comfort which she complied with, sending a golden tablet. Henry also sent Wolsey four cartloads of gifts at Candlemas.

Anne and her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, continued to press Henry to abandon the cardinal and, finally, at Easter 1530 Wolsey was ordered to travel to his diocese of York. Wolsey was staying at Cawood in November 1530 when Henry Percy, who had by then become Earl of Northumberland, arrived to arrest him for treason. This was Anne’s final revenge and, following his arrest, the cardinal was taken towards London with his legs tied to his horse. He was a broken man, stating that ‘had I served God as diligently as I had done the king, he would not have given me over, in my grey hairs’. On 29 November 1530 Wolsey died at Leicester. It was suggested that he took poison to avoid a more shameful death, although he may also simply have died an old and broken man, aware that his fall from grace was to be made permanent. Anne and her family rejoiced in the minister’s fall, and by the end of 1530 it was clear to everyone that she was queen in all but name.

As early as December 1528 the French ambassador had commented of Anne that ‘greater court is now paid to her every day than has been to the queen for a long time. I see they mean to accustom the people by degrees to endure her, so that when the great blow comes it may not be thought strange.’
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As the years wore on, Henry increasingly began to despair of receiving an annulment from the pope and he and Anne instead began to look around for other solutions. In September 1532 Henry felt secure enough to create Anne Lady Marquis of Pembroke with land grants worth 1,000 pounds a year. It is of particular note that in the patent conferring the title on Anne, the title and lands were stated to descend to her male heirs, rather than the more usual specification that it must be legitimate male heirs. This is a clear indication of a change in the nature of Anne and Henry’s relationship and suggests that they had already begun to, or were close to, finally consummating their relationship. In October 1532 the pair visited Calais on a visit to Anne’s old acquaintance, Francis I of France. Although no suitable French lady had been found to greet her (and suggestions that she be met by Francis’s mistress were treated with short shrift by the English) Anne acquitted herself well, dancing before Francis in a masquing costume of cloth of gold and crimson tinsel satin.
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She was accompanied in the visit by both her sister, Mary, and her sister-in-law, Lady Rochford, with the two women dancing alongside the future queen.

By mid-January 1533 Anne would have begun to suspect that she was pregnant and, in spite of rumours of an earlier marriage ceremony, it appears that the couple finally wed in considerable secrecy on 25 January 1533 at Whitehall Palace. Word of the marriage soon began to leak out and, on 23 February 1533, Chapuys wrote to the Emperor to inform him that he had heard that the couple had married privately with only Anne’s parents, brother, two friends and one of the king’s priests in attendance. Chapuys’s sources were not entirely accurate since he asserted that it was Cranmer himself who had performed the ceremony, something which the archbishop himself denied in a private letter to a friend.
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It is not impossible that the Boleyns might have been able to attend the wedding. An alternative account, however, considers that the ceremony was attended by only two members of the king’s Privy Chamber and Anne’s friend, Lady Berkeley, while it was officiated over by Henry’s chaplain, Rowland Lee, who received the office of Bishop of Lichfield for his pains.
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Whoever attended the marriage, it is certain that, by the end of January, Anne was indeed married to the king, with only weeks to wait until she was finally acknowledged as Queen of England.

Although Anne and Henry finally felt secure enough to marry in January 1533, they were both aware that, in the eyes of the world, Henry was still married to Catherine of Aragon. While Henry preferred to secure his divorce through a sentence given by the pope, at Anne’s urging he was prepared to look at other solutions.

Although Chapuys referred to Anne and her father as ‘more Lutheran than Luther himself’, it is more correct to say that both shared the humanist ideals of promotion of the scriptures in the vernacular.
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While both were interested in religious reform, this does not necessarily equate them with Protestantism, which, in any event, was still in its infancy during Anne’s lifetime. Anne owned a French Bible and, as queen, kept an English version on display for her household to read.
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She was also, not surprisingly, anti-papal. As well as owning a copy of Tyndale’s
Obedience of a Christian Man
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which she had shown Henry, Anne possessed Simon Fish’s anti-clerical work,
The Supplication of Beggars
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which criticised the cult of purgatory and the payment of ecclesiastical fees.
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More pertinently for Anne, Fish argued that the king’s laws could not be enforced against the pope’s as the chancellor was generally a priest. Few others would have dared to show Henry such ‘heretical’ works and he began to take an interest.

In 1531 the king made his first move against the pope, insisting that the English clergy, in order to avoid a charge of praemunire (i.e. prioritising papal law above the king’s) recognise him as sole protector and supreme head of the Church of England.
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The value of this title was limited by the qualification that Henry was only supreme head ‘as far as the law of Christ allows’, but it was the first step towards the break with Rome. Henry also instigated an attack on church revenues levied in England and was presented, in August 1532, on the death of the conservative Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, with the perfect opportunity to secure his annulment.

Warham’s death cleared the way for a more reform-minded successor, with Henry’s choice falling on the unknown Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer had been appointed as one of the king’s chaplains in January 1532, almost certainly on Anne’s recommendation. He had previously been a member of Thomas Boleyn’s household. He held strong reformist views and was already secretly married when he accepted the post of Archbishop of Canterbury early in 1533. As soon as he was appointed, a request was made to the pope for the bulls confirming Cranmer’s appointment and the pontiff, anxious to do anything to appease Henry, unsuspectingly dispatched them in March 1533.
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Soon after they arrived, Cranmer repudiated his oath of loyalty to the pope. Already, the groundwork had been laid for the divorce with the Act in Restraint of Appeals, which was passed by Parliament in February 1533 and stated that matrimonial cases should not be tried by appeal to Rome, instead remaining within the jurisdiction of the Church of England.
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As a result of this, in early May 1533, Cranmer travelled to Dunstable, close to Catherine’s residence at Ampthill. Not surprisingly, the queen refused to attend a Church court to try the validity of her marriage. Cranmer pressed on regardless, giving sentence on 8 May 1533 that Henry’s first marriage had been invalid from the start.
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Cranmer informed Henry and Anne personally of the sentence, hurrying back to London in order to prepare for the new queen’s Coronation.

Anne had found it impossible not to drop hints of her marriage even before it was officially recognised, for example informing stunned observers that she had a craving for apples which the king had assured her meant that she must be pregnant. The official announcement was finally made on Easter Saturday 1533, by which time Anne must have been visibly pregnant. According to Chapuys, she made a grand statement of her new status:

On Saturday, Easter Eve, dame Anne went to mass in Royal state, loaded with jewels, clothed in a robe of cloth of gold friese. The daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, who is affianced to the duke of Richmond, carried her train, and she had in her suite 60 young ladies, and was brought to church, and brought back again with the solemnities, or even more, which were used to the queen. She has changed her name from marchioness to Queen, and the preachers offered prayers for her by name.
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For Anne, it was the culmination of all her hopes and she adopted the motto ‘the Most Happy’. Although she was secure in the king’s love, Anne’s queenship was not accepted by everyone in England and there was a good deal of muttering among the people. It was perhaps in retaliation to this that Anne could not resist a further attack on her predecessor, ordering her chamberlain, Lord Burgh, to seize Catherine’s barge and remove and mutilate her arms and badges.
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It was this barge that Anne used to make her ceremonial procession to the Tower of London on the first day of her Coronation festivities.

On 29 May the Mayor of London and representatives of all the crafts arrived by water at Greenwich, travelling in barges decked with colourful banners. Anne may have reflected on just how far the Boleyns had risen since her great-grandfather had fulfilled the office of mayor himself less than a century before as she watched the company assemble. At 3 p.m. she walked out to her own barge, sailing down the river in procession to be met, at Tower wharf, by a great gun salute, louder than anyone could remember. Henry also came out of the Tower to greet his wife ‘with a noble loving countenance’ and the couple retired inside to the royal apartments.
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An enormous crowd had come out to watch Anne’s procession and, while Chapuys claimed that the crowd ‘showed themselves as sorry as though it had been a funeral’, this was not the majority verdict.
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In general the mood was one of celebration. The couple spent the next day quietly at the Tower.

The ceremonies recommenced on 31 May when Anne set out for Westminster in a grand procession. She sat in a litter of white satin with a canopy of cloth of gold carried above her head.
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Immediately after her rode twelve ladies on horseback dressed in cloth of gold. Anne’s mother, Elizabeth, followed with her stepmother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, in a chariot covered in cloth of gold before a further twelve mounted ladies followed dressed in crimson velvet, with the remaining ladies riding in three golden coaches. Anne wanted her family around her, and both her sister and sister-in-law are likely to have been among the ladies in the procession. Jane, Lady Rochford, was certainly present in London, with one member of the court writing to George Boleyn, who was then in France, to inform him that Anne’s Coronation had honourably passed and that he could shortly expect a letter from Jane containing news from the court.
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Anne’s route through London on 31 May took her past a number of pageants designed to demonstrate the glory of Anne and the Tudor dynasty.
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One displayed a castle. As Anne watched, a white falcon, representing her own falcon emblem, descended from the sky. As the bird landed, a child stepped forward to recite a poem on the glory of the falcon and, by analogy, Anne. An angel then descended to crown the falcon, before another child praised the queen, declaring, ‘Honour and grace be to our Queen Anne!’ The crowd was not entirely positive, with Anne apparently complaining to the mayor that few members of the crowd uncovered their heads or cried God save the Queen.
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However, in the main, the ceremonies went well. The following day Anne was crowned in Westminster Abbey by Archbishop Cranmer.