The Tudors (28 page)

Anne’s pregnancy further accelerated the pace of everything the king was doing. It immediately gave rise to a need to ensure that her child, the king’s son, would be legitimate. This led to an impromptu wedding at York Place early on January 25. The ceremony was performed by one of the royal chaplains, Rowland Lee, who as he hurried to the palace’s western turret that morning knew only that he had received an unexpected order to go to a specific room to say mass. When he arrived, he was surprised to find waiting for him King Henry, Lady Anne, and a lady and two gentlemen of the court. Told that Henry and Anne wished to be married, Lee, mindful of the unresolved state of the divorce case, expressed concern about whether he was free to proceed. The king assured him that the necessary papal permission was in safekeeping in his privy chamber. At best, he was referring to the bull with which, long before, the pope had set aside the impediment created by the king’s affair with Mary Boleyn, granting him permission to marry Anne
if
the marriage to Catherine were found to be invalid. At worst, Henry was simply lying. Lee, whether or not his mind was put at rest, had little choice but to take the king at his word.

The wedding was kept secret so that, later, it would be possible to fudge the date and make it appear that Anne and Henry had been married when their child was conceived. Anne’s father, however, was sent across the Channel to inform Francis I, who did not abandon his hopes of including Henry in a meeting with the pope but did feel free, now that the English king had broken his promise, to resume negotiations for the marriage of his son to Pope Clement’s niece. Under other circumstances a Medici might not have been considered an acceptable bride for a prince who was second in line to the crown of France. But Francis, obsessed as always with his ambitions in Italy, would have sacrificed more than family pride in order to keep pope and emperor apart.

Henry now had the wife he had craved, and she was delightfully pregnant. The only remaining need was for the marriage to be declared valid, which would remain impossible until the marriage to Catherine was nullified. As he had no hope by now of getting the pope’s help, he
had to find another way, and quickly. Inevitably, his attention and Cromwell’s focused on the Archbishopric of Canterbury. More than five months had passed since Warham’s death, and the two had used that time to work out a plan of action more detailed and ambitious than anything they had thus far attempted. Cranmer was central to that plan and, in the days after he arrived home from the continent, had shown himself to be as eager to assist as Henry and Cromwell could have hoped. In mid-January the king dispatched riders to Rome with a politely submissive request that Thomas Cranmer be appointed to Canterbury. A heavy curtain of secrecy remained in place around Henry’s marriage to Anne and her pregnancy so that the papal court would have no idea that something new was afoot. To further ensure the pope’s good will, he continued to be sent his traditional share of England’s ecclesiastical revenues. He like the king was of course unaware that the candidate had a wife.

The nomination of an obscure archdeacon to such a high post would have raised eyebrows in any case, but Cranmer’s candidacy provoked alarm. Well-placed Catholics on the continent and even in Rome had had dealings with Cranmer, whose assignments had taken him at one point to the Eternal City. His doctrinal inclinations were therefore fairly well known if his marital status was not, and Clement was warned not to agree to his appointment. The pope, however, lived in fear of a break with England as damaging to the church as the Lutheran rebellion that had already engulfed half of Germany. Though he was satisfied that Henry’s marriage to Catherine was valid, and though he was mortally sick of the king’s ham-handed attempts to bully and cajole him, he remained willing to do almost anything short of approving the divorce to heal the breach between them. Knowing little of who Cranmer actually was and nothing of the uses to which Henry intended to put him, Clement dispatched the documents required for the new primate to be consecrated exactly as his predecessors had always been.

Henry and Cromwell’s plan was to have Cranmer, as soon as possible after he was installed, declare the king’s first marriage null and his second valid. It was a simple plan as far as it went, but there was one complication. Catherine was certain to appeal to Rome, just as she had appealed years earlier. This would lead to delays even more intolerable than those the king had already suffered, and there could be no hope
that Catherine would be denied. The legitimacy of the prince whose birth now approached would be compromised, and Henry would stand in increased danger of being excommunicated, his kingdom put under an interdict.

Cromwell was ready with an answer, and as usual his solution was to cut the Gordian knot. Long before the end of 1532 he had had in preparation a draft bill that would become famous as the Act in Restraint of Appeals (not to be confused with the Act in Restraint of Annates). Once approved by Parliament, it would use England’s supposed status as an empire and the English king’s consequent autonomy as a basis for forbidding any of his subjects to ask any foreign power (the bishop of Rome most emphatically included) to overrule him on any question. Cromwell revised his draft and revised it again as he waited for Cranmer’s bulls of appointment to arrive from Rome, and sought advice on how to maximize support in Parliament. As soon as the bulls were in hand, he was ready to move. The years-old deadlock would be broken at last.

The next necessary step was to consecrate the new archbishop. This happened on March 30, and it happened in a way so peculiar that it might not have been possible had Cranmer not already shown himself to have a relaxed view of vows. The ceremony for installing bishops had always included the taking of an oath of loyalty to the pope. Until Henry turned this oath into a weapon with which to charge the bishops with praemunire, this procedure had never posed a problem. Except on those few and usually brief occasions when kings had clashed with the church over questions of jurisdiction, everyone had understood the distinction between royal and ecclesiastical authority and accepted the legitimacy of both. But Cranmer came to his new position with no such understanding. On the contrary, he believed sincerely that neither the king nor he nor any Englishman owed anything to the bishop of Rome, and that where religion was concerned the monarch’s wish and will provided the answers to all questions.

The papal oath, therefore, presented Cranmer with a problem of ethics. He resolved that problem, just minutes before his consecration, by taking four selected witnesses and a notary aside to a place where they could hear him privately declare that, although he was about to complete the traditional formalities, nothing that he swore publicly
should be construed as an intention to violate the law of God, disobey the king, or fail to do whatever must be done for the good of the church in England. The installation ceremony then began. Cranmer took the very oath that he had minutes before repudiated, an oath in direct contradiction to the work he was preparing to undertake.

That work was multifaceted but went forward with lightning speed. Six days after Cranmer’s consecration, with the new archbishop presiding, the Southern Convocation approved a resolution declaring that the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon had never been valid. This victory was easily won; many churchmen had never been strongly opposed to the divorce, and many who had been opposed, faced now with the demoralizing presence of Cranmer as their ostensible leader, saw no point in resisting. Two days after that, in spite of stubborn resistance, the Restraint of Appeals bill was passed by Parliament and became law. After another six days Anne’s marriage to the king was announced in such a way as to create the impression that it had occurred in mid-November, before the expected child was conceived. By all accounts the news was not well received; at one London church on Easter Sunday, upon being told that Anne was now queen and asked to pray for her, the entire congregation got to its feet and walked out. The lord mayor was ordered to make certain that there would be no more such displays of discontent, and the city’s professional guilds were told to keep silent on the subject and make their apprentices do the same.

The stage was now set for the final act, an ecclesiastical hearing at which Cranmer and a selected panel of his fellow divines would hear arguments on the validity of Henry’s marriage to Catherine and pass final judgment. The result was a foregone conclusion. A procedural difficulty arose, however, in connection with Henry’s new status as supreme head of the church: with the pope out of the picture, so that Cranmer could not claim to be acting in the name of any higher ecclesiastical authority, on what basis could he
order
the king to appear before the court and allow his case to be judged? Seeing that there was no such basis, the archbishop prudently decided not to order but to beg. But when he wrote to the king saying that “most humbly on my knees” he requested permission to convene his court, his words were found to be insufficiently abject. In the final version of his request, poor Cranmer described himself as “prostrate at the feet of your Majesty.”

On May 23, to the surprise of no one, Cranmer’s court declared that Henry and Catherine had never been married. Five days later, equally unsurprisingly, it declared that Henry and Anne were very married indeed. Just three days after that, at huge expense and amid great fanfare intended to inflame the enthusiasm of a public that in the event showed no enthusiasm at all, Anne was crowned queen of England at Westminster Abbey.

All of it had gone almost exactly according to plan, and everything continued to do so. On July 11, the same day that Henry signed the letters needed to implement the long-deferred Act in Restraint of Annates and terminate all payments to Rome, Pope Clement declared Henry’s marriage to Anne invalid and warned him that unless he recognized Catherine as his wife he would be excommunicated—but not until the following September, and only
if
he failed to mend his ways. Henry responded with a fury that must have been fueled in part at least by fear, recalling his envoys and cutting off communications with the papacy. His participation in the planned meeting between Clement and Francis was now out of the question, but when that meeting finally took place in September Francis remained hopeful of somehow effecting a reconciliation. He had little difficulty persuading Clement to delay the excommunication again. In fact it would never be promulgated, so that neither Henry nor Clement ever found out whether it was still a weapon that could hurt.

Only one thing remained for the scenario to be complete. Anne still had to give birth to her son.

The child, when born on September 7, was named Elizabeth, after Henry’s mother.

First Blood

T
wo dams broke in 1534. One was in Parliament, where resistance to the Crown snapped at last under Cromwell’s relentless pressure and a torrent of revolutionary new laws began to change the character of English government and society. The other was inside the mind of a monarch who, perhaps swept away by the ecstatic realization that in the whole kingdom there was no force capable of keeping him from doing exactly as he wished, threw off all restraint and showed himself ready to destroy not only anyone who opposed him but anyone withholding approval of whatever he wanted to do.