The Tudors (27 page)

As for England, from where Luther sat it must have been a very hard place to understand. The church of Henry VIII was not evangelical and it was not Roman Catholic. No one in either camp could have imagined that in the next three decades it would become first the former, then the latter, and finally go off in a third direction of its own devising.

Consummation

I
n August 1532, three months after receiving the submission of the clergy, King Henry learned of the death of William Warham. He must have been pleased with the news. Though both as primate of England and as onetime chancellor Warham had long been a friend to the Crown, his great age had reduced his ability to be useful even when he wished to be so, his swings of opinion since the start of the divorce case had brought his dependability into question, and his unhappiness with the direction of royal policy was becoming increasingly worrisome.

His passing meant that Henry was now free, assuming that he met with no interference from the pope, to fill the highest clerical office in the kingdom with a man of his own choosing. He would not have been slow to appreciate the potential benefits.

But Warham’s death was an even bigger stroke of luck than Henry appears to have realized. The archbishop had been a man of exceptional abilities and great learning, with doctorates in civil and canon law, and his early performance in the royal service had caused him to be singled out for advancement by no less demanding a judge than Henry VII. And unlike Wolsey, who eventually succeeded him in the chancellorship (possibly but not certainly by elbowing him aside—Warham appears to have been genuinely happy to focus exclusively on his ecclesiastical responsibilities), he had always maintained the highest standards in both his professional and his personal life. Erasmus, an unsparing critic of
clerical politicians, called him “a man worthy of the memory of all posterity.” Though age had diminished his ability to provide consistent and decisive leadership, he remained a formidable potential adversary, and after his death it was discovered that he had been preparing to speak out. He had been drafting, presumably for delivery in the House of Lords when Parliament reconvened, a speech invoking the example of his most celebrated predecessor in the seat of Canterbury, the martyr Thomas Becket. A canonized saint whose tomb was a pilgrimage site that drew thousands of visitors from around England and the continent, Becket had been murdered in 1170 by a trio of knights who thought, probably mistakenly, that they were carrying out the wishes of King Henry II. Becket and the king, once the closest of friends, had come to be bitterly at loggerheads over the latter’s insistence on trying clerics in his own courts and blocking appeals to Rome. The reaction to Becket’s murder was so powerful that Henry, one of the most forceful and dynamic monarchs of the English Middle Ages, was not only defeated in his challenge to the church but forced to do public penance. The veneration in which Becket was held explains why such an extraordinary number of fifteenth-century Englishmen had been given the name Thomas. His legend was a potent one for Warham to draw upon.

Warham’s draft referred also to other kings who had tried and failed to challenge the rights of the church, and it ended on a note of defiance. At the time of his death Warham had hanging over him a praemunire charge laid against him earlier in the year—another of the king’s acts of harassment, this one accusing the archbishop of having failed to obtain royal permission before installing a new bishop in a small, obscure Welsh diocese. (The difficulty Henry’s researchers must have had in finding a “crime” in Warham’s past is suggested by the fact that the alleged offense had been committed a decade and a half before.) In his undelivered speech, Warham declared his refusal to pay the bond that was being demanded of him in connection with the charge. The Crown had no right to make such a demand, he wrote, or to take action against him for refusing to comply: anyone who arrested or assaulted a bishop committed a mortal sin, and any kingdom where such a thing happened could be—as England had been after the murder of Becket, until Henry II begged forgiveness—placed under an interdict forbidding the exercise of the sacraments. Implicit in these words was the threat that, if Henry
continued on his present path, he too might be excommunicated. Had the archbishop lived to utter them, they might have had a powerful impact on churchmen whose refusal to accept the document of submission had shown them to be hungry for leadership. Their effect on the people, and even on a king still hesitant to complete the break with Rome, could likewise have been immense. Excommunication and interdiction had, in centuries past, stopped ambitious monarchs in their tracks. No one could be certain whether they retained their old power, but Henry had reason to be concerned. It was a boon to his cause that Warham went to his grave when he did.

The prestige of the see of Canterbury made finding the right replacement crucial. If Warham had died just a year earlier, he probably would have been succeeded by Bishop Stephen Gardiner, an early and vigorous champion of Henry’s divorce suit. (An interesting sidelight on Gardiner is an old assertion, utterly unprovable, that he was a son of Jasper Tudor’s illegitimate daughter and therefore Henry VIII’s second cousin.) But Gardiner’s part in writing the bishops’ response to the Supplication Against the Ordinaries had been, in the king’s eyes, an act of betrayal. Other likely candidates presented similar problems. Edward Lee had been chosen to replace Wolsey as archbishop of York after helping substantially with the preparation of the king’s divorce case, but thereafter, while never daring to defy his royal master, he had become a halfhearted and almost grudging advocate. Cuthbert Tunstal was among the most respected bishops in England, and Henry’s decision to promote him from London to Durham in 1530 had been widely applauded. But by now he too was out of the question, having put himself on the side of Catherine of Aragon in the divorce controversy and objected in writing to Henry’s claim to be supreme head.

Other bishops had proved more pliant than Gardiner or Lee or Tunstal, but for one reason or another none seemed quite satisfactory. Thus the king’s attention turned to a man who was not a bishop, had never before been considered for a bishopric, and was unknown even by reputation to most of the clergy of England. Henry appointed a new ambassador to the court of Charles V and ordered Thomas Cranmer to return home, where his opinions and willingness to cooperate could be given a final examination. All the auguries were encouraging, certainly. Cranmer came with the endorsement of the Boleyns, who had sponsored
him earlier in his career and encouraged his membership in that circle of Cambridge clerics whose reformist ideas extended as far as a questioning of Catholic doctrine including the authority of the pope. The king himself, by this point, had had considerable opportunity to observe Cranmer and take his measure. He had used him as a researcher, an envoy to the universities, and finally a diplomat. He had found him to be intelligent, learned, industrious, and conscientious, and to give no evidence of seeking either to enrich himself or to push any personal religious agenda. Instead he seemed happy to embrace the king’s objectives, and to acknowledge that the setting of priorities was the king’s province exclusively. If Henry was hoping to find a lieutenant who could be as useful to him in the ecclesiastical sphere as Cromwell was proving in the council, he should have seen the emergence of the amiable, unassuming Cranmer as his latest stroke of good fortune.

There was an obstacle, however: in contravention of his clerical vows, Cranmer was married. During his time as Henry’s representative in Protestant Germany, where his reformist and antipapal inclinations had been reinforced by exposure to leading Lutheran thinkers, he had made the acquaintance of a Nuremberg theologian who called himself Osiander and had won fame by persuading the head of the religious order of Teutonic Knights to break with Rome. This Osiander, himself a married former priest, persuaded Cranmer—who appears to have needed little convincing—that his vow of chastity was papist nonsense. Thus liberated, Cranmer married Osiander’s niece; it was actually his second marriage, an earlier wife having died years before, thereby making it possible for him to resume his career at Cambridge and in the church. Cranmer kept the German marriage secret, and with good reason: King Henry was, and all his life would remain, rigidly insistent on the celibacy of the clergy, forbidding matrimony even to the monks and nuns released from their vows of poverty and obedience after the destruction of their monasteries. Eventually there would be stories—one hopes that they were the invention of his Catholic adversaries—about how, when Cranmer returned to England, his wife accompanied him upside-down, hidden in a trunk into which airholes had been punched. A decade would pass before Cranmer finally confessed his marriage to the king. There is no better evidence of Henry’s unique affection for him, an affection anchored in the certainty that in Cranmer
he had found an absolutely loyal servant, than his decision to allow him to keep both his job and his spouse so long as the latter remained secret.

As the end of 1532 approached the pace of events began to accelerate. The king’s divorce case and his attack on the church, which until now had been distinct battles fought on separate fronts, came to be inextricably entwined. Barely a week after Warham’s death, Henry raised Anne Boleyn to the high rank of Marquess of Pembroke with a suitably munificent income (land worth a thousand pounds per year, plus an annuity of another thousand pounds exacted from Stephen Gardiner’s diocese of Winchester) and the right to pass title and wealth to the “heirs male” of her body. Never before had an Englishwoman received a noble title other than by inheritance or matrimony. Perhaps Henry’s sudden generosity was intended as an inducement for Anne to surrender at last; it provided some assurance that, even if she and the king never married, she would be handsomely provided for, and that any son born out of wedlock would be heir to a title and a fortune. The title she was given had had special meaning for the Tudors ever since Jasper was made Earl of Pembroke three-quarters of a century before and the future Henry VII spent most of his childhood at Pembroke Castle.

Not coincidentally, Anne’s title enhanced her suitability to serve as the king’s companion at a meeting with Francis I in northern France. Both kings had been eager for this meeting, which took place in October first at Boulogne (which belonged to France) and then at Calais (English), because each wanted to make sure that the other did not enter into an alliance with Charles V. Henry in particular had to be concerned that a conclusive break with Rome might cause the pious Charles to want to invade not only to avenge his aunt’s honor but to rescue England from schism and heresy. The gathering was a grand occasion, as such events invariably were. The new Marquess of Pembroke (she did not have the female form of the title, marchioness, because she held it in her own right rather than as a spouse) had the satisfaction of dancing with Francis and later of receiving from him the gift of a costly diamond. To be presented to the king of France as the king of England’s all-but-wife was no small thing, and it must have added to Anne’s confidence that she was in no danger of being cast aside. The only disquieting note was the failure of any of the female members of the French royal family to appear: evidently they found the relationship between
Anne and Henry insufficiently respectable. Concerns on that score were not assuaged by the refusal of Henry’s own sister Mary, herself a onetime queen of France, to join the festivities in Calais; she remained infuriatingly loyal to Catherine.

The substance of the conference had less to do with Charles V—Henry and Francis were satisfied for the time being with reaffirming the defensive alliance that already bound their two countries—than with the recalcitrant Pope Clement. Francis professed sympathy with Henry’s anger and frustration. When Henry proposed that the two of them call a general council of the church as a way of overriding and neutering the pope, Francis was not enthusiastic, perhaps out of fear of Charles’s possible reaction. He offered excuses: a council would be too difficult, would take too long to arrange, would be unpredictable in the final result. As an alternative he said that he was attempting to arrange a meeting with Clement in the new year, and he offered to include Henry in this meeting and use it to try to effect a resolution of the issues dividing England and Rome. Henry agreed; the thought of the French king meeting separately with the pope, of his possibly being drawn into an alliance with Clement and Charles, would have given him severe discomfort. He promised to do nothing in the meantime that might make reconciliation with the pope impossible. Francis for his part pledged not to proceed with a plan to marry his second son to the pope’s niece Catherine de’ Medici until Clement nullified Henry’s marriage. Henry and Anne then returned home by slow stages, making leisurely stops along the way.

It was at about this time that Anne, if she had never done so previously, admitted Henry to her bed. We know this for the best of reasons: she was, by late January, incontrovertibly pregnant. Several things could have caused her to yield at this point. Her prominence during the visit to France, and her new status in the upper reaches of the hereditary nobility, obviously would have served as positive inducements. On the negative side were the French king’s unexpected offer of a meeting with the pope and Henry’s alarming (from Anne’s perspective) acceptance. This raised the spectre of a rapprochement between England and Rome, a development that could mean ruin for Anne, her family, and their whole following including the religious reformers with whom the Boleyns were allied. If Henry decided to abandon the divorce—that could not
have seemed likely, but no one knew better than Anne how unpredictable he could be—everything that had come to them with the king’s favor would likely be lost. On the other hand, the promise of a royal son could secure the future for all of them.