The Boleyns (13 page)

Wolsey was down, but not yet out. For the first few weeks after his fall he remained at Esher, borrowing money to keep body and soul together while the King plundered his possessions.
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He was deprived of the bishopric of Winchester and the Abbey of St Albans, while Henry sought for (and found) a legal pretext to lay hands on York Place, which belonged to the province of York rather than to the Cardinal. Wolsey, rightly it would seem, blamed these depredations on the Boleyn party in the council, and protested vigorously that they should ‘put no more into his head than … may stand with a good conscience’. Cavendish was of the opinion that ‘the Council’ was out to torment and humiliate the fallen minister, and indeed there seems to have been an inconsistency in Henry’s own actions which suggests as much.
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In spite of the plunder, more than once he sent Wolsey a ring as a gesture of his continued favour, and even persuaded Anne to send him a similar token. He sent his physicians to him at Christmas when he was unwell, and in February 1530 sanctioned his move from Esher to Richmond. This last without the knowledge of his council.
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Then in April Wolsey was given leave to retire to his diocese in the north, which may have been the King’s idea of favour, or it may have been the Duke of Norfolk who was anxious to have him out of the way. Henry gave him £1,000 towards his removal expenses, which would be consistent with either interpretation. By that time, however, the Cardinal was embarked upon a dangerous course. He decided to mobilise his European contacts and prestige in an effort to recover the King’s favour, and apparently entered into a secret negotiation with Clement VII. Inevitably his messages were intercepted, and although not very explicit, were sufficient to tip the balance in the King’s mind in favour of his enemies. On 1 November 1530, just a few days before his planned enthronement in York Minster, his arrest was ordered on a charge of treason. He had, it was alleged, ‘intrigued … both in and out of the kingdom’ and had entered into ‘sinister practices made to the court of Rome for reducing him to his former estates and dignity’.
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Apprehended on 4 November, he began a slow and painful journey south, but at Leicester Abbey on the 29th he died, and so deprived his enemies of the satisfaction of seeing him tried and executed.

This was, in a sense, a victory for Anne, her family and friends. It had been demonstrated more than two years before the Act in Restraint of Appeals that any negotiation with Rome not conducted through the King would be deemed high treason. That was sufficient warning to the prelates of England to curtail their normal business relationship, and was an act of Supremacy well ahead of the game. However, with Wolsey gone, the coalition of hostile interests which he had held together, fell apart. The Duke of Norfolk, swallowing his increasing dislike of Anne and her ways, continued to back her in his own interest, but Lord Darcy fell away, and so did the Duke of Suffolk, taking his clients with him. Significantly, as early as 29 October 1529 Sir Thomas More was named as the new Lord Chancellor. More was not only not a client of the Boleyns, he was fundamentally opposed to Anne and her ambitions, and his appointment represents a gesture of independence on Henry’s part which should not be overlooked. The King was determined to have no more clerical chancellors, and his choice fell upon a prestigious lawyer, whom he wrongly supposed would be amenable to his wishes when the time came. Wolsey had clients, but few friends when it came to an issue, and even many of his clients proved unreliable, witness the career of Stephen Gardiner, but the Queen was an altogether different proposition.
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With the Cardinal’s confusing presence removed, the Boleyns found themselves confronting Catherine and her supporters in undisguised hostility. The court and the council both became divided, with the King apparently undecided what to do next. The pardon of the clergy, which they purchased at the beginning of 1531 was a victory for the annulment party, but only a partial one, because Henry did not follow it up with any decisive action. Meanwhile, Francis I was trying to use diplomatic means to bring England and the papacy together, because he did not want to sacrifice the alliance of either, and Henry, in spite of his bluffings, had not given up on the papacy. Consequently a strong conservative party rallied to the Queen, pointing out the dangers of the course which the King was apparently proposing to take. These included the Duke of Suffolk (not without prompting from his wife), the Marquis of Exeter, the Earl of Shrewsbury, and the King’s intimate friend, Nicholas Carew.
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Rather more surprising, they were joined by Elizabeth Howard, Duchess of Norfolk, who was bitterly at odds with her husband over his affair with Bess Holland, and for that reason was deeply suspicious of Anne and her pretensions. Most effective of all in thwarting Henry’s wishes was his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham. Warham was too old a royal servant to defy his master openly, but his obstructiveness became more and more apparent as the King began to move towards finding a domestic solution to his problem.
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Against this formidable line up there stood in the Boleyn camp, not only Anne, her father and brother, but the earls of Huntingdon and Sussex, the veteran diplomat Sir Thomas Wyatt, and the rapidly rising Thomas Cromwell. Eustace Chapuys who is our main source of information, may have exaggerated the strength of the conservative position, because his whole sympathy was that way inclined, but he gives the impression of an aristocracy on the verge of revolt, and of a population entirely supportive of their concerns.
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Nevertheless, at the centre it was an uneven battle, because Catherine’s friends relied for success on either the Pope giving a definitive sentence against Henry, and his accepting it, or else upon his becoming weary of his never-ending quest, and simply giving up. With Anne on the war path, however, neither of those things was likely to happen. She might rely on her supporters for decisions which had to be made in council, but when it came to the vital task of influencing the King, her own combination of sexuality and intelligence was invincible. Henry might waver from time to time, but when it came to the point, he wanted her as he had never wanted any woman before – and she knew it.

From the autumn of 1532 to the summer of 1533, the Boleyns were riding a high tide of success. This was partly political, Warham’s death, the creation of Anne as Marquis of Pembroke, the success of Henry’s meeting with Francis I at Calais, and partly sexual. Anne slept with Henry and became pregnant; he married her and appointed Thomas Cranmer to the archbishopric to regularise that position. None of this had much to do with her family or supporters, it was all down to Anne herself. The most that her party could do was to organise the propaganda campaign which backed the King’s decisions.
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Her coronation was fair trial of strength, and all the honours went to the Boleyns, who turned out in force, male and female, and shanghied all but the most determined of Catherine’s following into taking part. It may have been a distasteful spectacle as far as the onlookers were concerned, but that is by no means certain, and all the honours of the occasion went to Anne. The same was true, as we have seen, of Elizabeth’s christening in September. Meanwhile, she had secured another tactical success in the affair of Elizabeth Barton.
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Elizabeth had been around for a while. Originally a servant girl, in about 1525 she had begun to see visions and to utter prophecies, and at that point her vocation had been recognised and she had retired to a convent in Canterbury. This was unusual, and earned her a reputation for sanctity, but it was politically harmless. However, towards the end of 1527, when rumours of the King’s search for an end to his marriage were circulating, she began to make pronouncements on that issue. Summoned to the royal presence, she warned Henry to his face that disaster would befall him if he persisted in his plans, and is alleged to have had considerable influence over both Warham and Wolsey. She also publicly warned the Pope of the dangers of yielding to the King’s petition.
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All this was sufficiently irritating, but Anne Boleyn was not yet a public factor in this equation, and the King apparently shrugged off the warnings as the fruits of ‘hysteria’, an ailment to which women were particularly prone. Elizabeth, however, persisted in her prophecies, and once Anne was identified as the Queen’s rival, began to warn Henry specifically of the dangers of marrying her, predicting that he would not survive a month thereafter and would die a villain’s death. These prophecies may have been spontaneous, or they may have been inspired by a group of clerical ‘managers’ led by Dr Edward Bocking, a monk of Christ Church, who appears to have been manipulating her in the interests of the Queen’s party. By 1531 the Boleyns were mobilised against her, and she began to feature in the front line of the political battle. Prominent people were associated with her, not only the Friars Observant and the London Carthusians, but John Fisher, Thomas More, and even Catherine herself.
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Henry waited until a month was past from Anne’s coronation, and the more lurid of the nun’s predictions were discredited, and then struck against what was becoming by then a serious nuisance. In mid-July Cromwell and Cranmer were ordered to act. Elizabeth was arrested, taken to the Tower and interrogated. Her associates were rounded up and her writings suppressed. According to Richard Grafton ‘the juggling and crafty deceit of this maid was manifest and brought to light’, and she and Bocking, together with two other priests and sundry Kentish gentlemen, were made to confess their fraud at Paul’s Cross.
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The council, we are told, was much exercised against her, and debated the case for three days. The Earl of Wiltshire was of the opinion that they should be condemned as heretics and burned, in which he was no doubt voicing the desire of his daughter for revenge against this dangerous group. Heresy, however, was a tricky issue in the embryonic state of the Royal Supremacy, and they were eventually condemned as traitors by Act of Attainder in the parliament which met from 15 January to 30 March 1534. The King personally drove the case on, using it as a means to purge some of his ex-wife’s more recalcitrant followers, and to frighten other more substantial figures.
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Catherine and More were too clever to be caught, but Fisher was convicted of misprision. He was not proceeded against, but his case was clearly intended as a warning to others who might be similarly tempted. Elizabeth Barton, Edward Bocking and five others were hanged at Tyburn in April. It was clear thereby that open support for Catherine would henceforth be classed as treason, and her remaining friends in the council were forced to draw in their horns. Queen Anne and her friends were triumphant, but it had become more obvious than ever that their continued enjoyment of that success was dependant upon the Queen herself, and upon her influence over her husband. As long as Catherine lurked in the background, there seemed little danger that that would diminish. Henry had burned his boats, and the beneficiaries of the fire were the Boleyns.

There were, however, issues which threatened the unity of that party. Anne was by taste and political logic strongly pro-French, but Francis was determined to maintain amicable relations with Rome, and Thomas Cromwell did not trust the French. When Clement pronounced his sentence of excommunication against Henry in September 1533, the King took umbrage with his colleague, and withdrew the Duke of Norfolk and Lord Rochford, who were then on embassy in France.
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In fact Henry’s display of bad temper at the thought of a meeting between Francis and Clement in October was seriously counterproductive. The French king had done his best for Henry, securing the postponement of the sentence for two months, but he got little thanks for his efforts. It was not Anne who was behind this outburst, because she knew well enough that as long as Catherine was being backed by the Emperor, the only diplomatic support that her husband was likely to get would come from Francis, who it would be folly to annoy. The Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Wiltshire apparently felt the same, but Cromwell did not agree. Towards the end of 1533 he arranged the publication of
The Articles Devised by the Whole Consent of the King’s Council
, a strongly anti-papal justification of Henry’s policy in which the King of France’s new friend was denounced as a bastard and a heretic, and Francis became even more annoyed.
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Early in 1534 Cromwell, who ‘ruled everything about the king’ persuaded Henry to send a mission to the Lutheran princes of Germany, because they were also committed to oppose the Emperor. What Anne thought of this effort we do not know, but her father was not a little put out at this evidence of dabbling in heresy. Nothing came of the embassy at this time, and when Clement died in September 1534 Henry appears to have contemplated re-opening negotiations with Rome. He sent Gregory Casale in an attempt to influence the conclave, and was pleased by the election of Cardinal Farnese as Paul III. Paul would, he hoped, be amenable to seeing things Henry’s way, but since he was not prepared to moderate his position in the slightest, this was forlorn hope. Although he may have been personally sympathetic to the King’s dilemma, Paul was not prepared to surrender the principles upon which his predecessor had acted.
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It is fairly safe to conclude that the King’s intransigence on this issue owed not a little to the combined influence of his Queen and Thomas Cromwell.