Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (16 page)

‘I have heard say,’ she replied, ‘that the executioner is very good, and I have a little neck.’ Then she put her hands about her neck, and laughed. On 19 May, just before noon, she was brought to the scaffold within the walls of the Tower. In her nervousness she continually glanced behind her, as if she might be taken unawares. She was the first queen of England ever to be beheaded. Her exact age at the time is unknown, but it is estimated that she was in her early thirties. When the executioner held up the head, its eyes and lips moved. Her body was then thrown into a common chest of elm-tree, made to hold arrows.

Henry had also taken the precaution of having his marriage to Anne annulled, on the grounds that she had been involved in a liaison nine years before, without seeming to realize that if she had not been his wife she could not have committed adultery. But he wished to expunge her, to blot her out. Whether he was right to do so has been a matter of controversy ever since the events themselves. It has been supposed, for example, that Anne Boleyn was the victim of a conspiracy managed by Cromwell or by the ‘conservative’ faction at the court.

Yet common sense would suggest that this would be a perilous undertaking indeed. All of the men accused were well known at court; George Boleyn was her brother, in high estate, and Henry Norris was the intimate of the king. It would have been madness to implicate such men in a scheme that had no foundation. At the trial all the details of the times and places were read out, as, for example, in the first indictment that ‘the queen [on the] 6th October 25 Hen. VIII [1533] at Westminster, by words etc.,
procured and incited one Henry Norris, Esq., one of the gentlemen of the king’s privy chamber, to have illicit intercourse with her; and that the act was committed at Westminster, 12th October 25 Hen. VIII’. The details may not have been entirely accurate, but the fact that they were given suggests a strong and definitive case was being made. This was not some nebulous charge built upon rumour and false report. Why accuse five men, four of them known and respected, when one would have been sufficient?

And the charges were believed. It is true enough that no one would willingly defy the wishes of the king, but it is still the case that twenty-seven peers unanimously decided that the queen had indeed committed incest with her brother. Two grand juries and a petty jury had concluded the cases of the other men.

It is at least possible that Anne Boleyn was not as innocent as she claimed. It may be that she pursued other men in desperate search for a male child who could be hailed as the heir to the throne, thereby saving herself and her family for the foreseeable future. Another aspect of the trial was suppressed. It was alleged against her that she had spoken to George Boleyn’s wife about the king’s impotence. A piece of paper detailing the matter was handed to George Boleyn, during the course of the trial, that he was supposed to read in silence. ‘The king was not skilful in copulating with a woman and he had not virtue or power.’ In scorn, and bravado, he read it out aloud. That is not necessarily the action of an honest man. It is the action of a defendant daring the court to do its worst. Boleyn also did not deny that he had spread rumours about the princess Elizabeth’s true paternity. It was in fact rumoured that the real father was Sir Henry Norris. No one can at this late date be certain of anything. The truth, as always, lies at the bottom of the well. The best epigraph of the events in the spring of 1536 comes from one of those briefly accused, Thomas Wyatt:

The king dressed in white on the day of Anne Boleyn’s execution, and on the following morning he married again. He must have been thoroughly convinced of her guilt, or had come upon another offence that he never disclosed, or both. When his
illegitimate son, Henry of Richmond, visited him the king greeted him with tears saying that he and Mary ‘ought to thank God for having escaped from the hands of that woman, who had planned their deaths by poison’. He was said to have behaved with an almost defiant gaiety, and to have composed a verse tragedy in which Anne Boleyn had 100 different amours.

The king had a further reason to remarry. He was now forty years old and he was desperate for a male heir. He had in effect already bastardized Mary and Elizabeth. The duke of Richmond was illegitimate and therefore ineligible.

The death of Anne Boleyn was not greeted with any great dismay by the people of England. Anne had been in large part disparaged by the populace, at least in private, and a contemporary described the joy evinced ‘at the ruin of the concubine’. Henry’s new wife, Jane Seymour, was not herself universally popular. ‘There is a ballad made lately of great derision against us,’ Henry told her ‘which if it go abroad and is seen by you, I pray you to pay no manner of regard to it. I am not at present informed who is the setter forth of this malignant writing; but if he is found, he shall be straitly punished for it.’ The man was in fact never found.

The joy of the people was also part of a general belief that Lady Mary would now be restored to royal favour. Yet this was too optimistic an interpretation of events at court. Thomas Cromwell now moved against Mary’s supporters on the grounds that they had been trying to engineer the succession on her behalf. It seems that Jane Seymour herself urged her new husband to reconcile himself with his oldest daughter, but instead Henry subjected Mary to even more pressure.

He sent a delegation to her, under the leadership of the duke of Norfolk, urging her to take the oath of allegiance; this would entail repudiating the marriage of her mother and her own legitimacy. It would also require her to accept the king as supreme head of the Church. On all these matters, she declined to swear. The duke of Norfolk then declared that she was guilty of treason. It was clear enough that Henry was willing to prosecute her, with all the unhappy and perhaps even unbearable consequences. Thomas Cromwell wrote to her that ‘I think you the most obstinate and obdurate woman . . . that ever was’; he urged her to
repent ‘your ingratitude and miserable unkindness’. He warned that otherwise she would reach ‘the point of utter undoing’ which might include a traitor’s death. She was now twenty-one years of age.

A short while after, she surrendered. The imperial ambassador had remonstrated with her, telling her that it was her duty to survive the chaos and the terror. He persuaded her that her destiny might lie in rescuing the nation for the true faith, and that nothing in the world should prevent this. Martyrdom would be a failure of responsibility. She did not read the declaration of submission, but simply signed it. She had declared ‘the King’s Highness to be the supreme head in earth under Christ of the Church of England’ and that the marriage between her mother and the king ‘was by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful’.

She could go no further. In her abject state she wrote to her father declaring that ‘my body I do wholly commit to your mercy and fatherly pity, desiring no state, no condition nor no manner or degree of living but such as your grace shall appoint unto me’. She was at once welcomed back into royal favour, but the damage to her conscience and sense of self had been done. She would never bend, or weaken her will, again. The guilt of repudiating her mother would remain with her, perhaps to be in part allayed by the fires of Smithfield. It is reported that she was overcome with sorrow and remorse, immediately after signing the document, and asked the imperial ambassador to obtain for her a special dispensation from Rome. Yet she seems to have adjusted to her return to court very well, purchasing jewellery and fine clothes; she gambled, modestly but continuously, and had her own group of minstrels. She also had her own ‘fool’, a lady called Jane, with a shaven head.

After the beheading of Anne Boleyn it was clear that the party of religious change, which had profited by her intervention in the affairs of the realm, might be destined for an eclipse. In Rome dislike of the king was replaced by something like sympathetic pity, in the pious hope that Henry might now return to the embrace of the Church after his experiences with the ‘witch’. That was of course entirely to misunderstand the nature of Henry’s reform. He had never been opposed to the doctrines of the Church, only to its leadership. His understanding of the power,
and profits, he had thereby gained was enough to prohibit any return to Rome. He believed also that religious unity was the prerequisite of political unity.

He saw himself in the role of the Old Testament kings who were determined to enforce the law of God upon their kingdoms in the fear that they might be consumed by divine wrath. Had not Jehoash, king of Israel, stripped the priests of their gold? Had not Josiah renovated the Temple of the Lord? Had not Solomon sat in judgment? The bishop of Durham, Cuthbert Tunstall, declared that Henry acted ‘as the chief and best of the kings of Israel did, and as all good Christian kings ought to do’.

His assertion of royal supremacy, however, was aligned with a desire for reform of the monasteries and the colleges. The king attended several Masses each day and never proclaimed or believed himself to be a Lutheran. He was also attached to various forms of popular piety, including the ritual of ‘creeping to the cross’. All his life he fingered a personal rosary, now in the possession of the duke of Devonshire, and ordained many requiem Masses at the time of his death. He was in most respects an orthodox Catholic.

A meeting of parliament was called at the beginning of June in order to discuss the circumstances of the realm after the recent execution of Anne Boleyn. It cancelled the two Acts favourable to Anne Boleyn and her offspring, thus reducing Elizabeth to the same status as Mary. The lord chancellor extolled the third marriage of the king, who, ‘at the humble entreaty of his nobility, has consented once more to accept that condition and has taken to himself a wife who in age and form is deemed to be meet and apt for the procreation of children’.

The key was the begetting of a male heir and, if the king should die (which God forbid!) or the new queen prove infertile ‘he desires you therefore to nominate some person as his heir apparent’. Their answer may already have been agreed and rehearsed. In the absence of a legitimate male heir, parliament granted the king the power to bequeath his crown at his will. The way, therefore, was open to the illegitimate duke of Richmond. He was the least bad alternative. Yet the frailty of the dynasty
was confirmed when, in the summer of 1536, Richmond died of tuberculosis or some other undiagnosed lung complaint; Henry ordered that the body should be buried secretly, to prevent public disquiet, but nothing could conceal the fact that the succession now rested on two daughters who had been declared illegitimate. The young man’s ornate tomb is still to be seen at the church of St Michael the Archangel in Framlingham, Suffolk.

The evidence of the king’s anxiety at this time emerged when in the summer Lord Thomas Howard, the younger brother of the duke of Norfolk, was accused of treason; his crime was to contract himself to Lady Margaret Douglas, the daughter of the queen of Scots. Since the queen was Henry’s sister, Henry suspected that Howard was aiming at the succession. Howard was confined to the Tower where he died in the following year.

In June 1536 the convocation of the senior clergy had been assembled at St Paul’s. Hugh Latimer, the recently consecrated bishop of Worcester and principal reformer, had been chosen to preach to them. His text came from the sixteenth chapter of St Luke’s Gospel, namely ‘the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light’. He asked them to examine their hearts and enquire what they had achieved in convocation after convocation. The odious fictions of Rome survived even still, including ‘the canonizations and beatifications, the totquots and dispensations, the pardons of marvellous variety’ as well as ‘the ancient purgatory pickpurse’. You know the proverb, he told them. An evil crow, an evil egg. At the end of his sermon he warned them that ‘God will visit you. He will come. He will not tarry long.’

The reaction of the 500 clerical delegates is not known, but two weeks later they presented the king with a petition of complaint against the numerous blasphemies and heresies that were now circulating through the kingdom. It was a barely disguised attack on Latimer and other radicals. They were aggrieved that the sacrament of the altar was being described as a ‘little pretty piece Round Robin’. The hallowed oil of extreme unction was ‘the bishop of Rome’s grease and butter’. Our Lady was only a woman ‘like a bag of saffron or pepper when the spice was out’. Mass and matins were ‘but roaring, howling, whistling, mumming, conjuring
and juggling’. It was an implicit invitation to the king to bring to a halt the process of reform. There was no question of ‘toleration’. The concept was only rarely mentioned. Matters of religion were too powerful and too important to be treated with circumspection. Falsehood was to be prosecuted by every means available.

In response Henry, with the help of Cranmer and others, drew up a summary of the articles of faith that the people of England were required to believe. The preface to the Ten Articles declared that their purpose was to bring ‘unity and concord in opinion’. In truth the king wished to assert the royal supremacy, and the general renovation of the Church, without embracing Lutheran doctrine. He seems to have concurred with the reformers’ emphasis upon only three of the sacraments – those of baptism, penance and the Eucharist – without denying the efficacy of the other four. Purgatory was denounced as a pernicious invention of the bishop of Rome, but it was also declared that ‘custom of long continuance approving the same, we agree that it is meet and expedient to pray for the souls departed’. It was a question of balance. A manuscript draft of one page survives; it shows the rival scribblings of the reformer Cranmer and the conservative Tunstall vying for authority.

There are other examples of compromise or mediation. The habit of kneeling and worshipping images of the saints was considered to be unnecessarily superstitious. But other customs and ceremonies of the Church, such as the giving of ashes on Ash Wednesday and the carrying of palms on Palm Sunday, were deemed to be ‘good and laudable’. Even as the Articles were being drawn up the king and his new queen, Jane Seymour, took part in a Corpus Christi procession celebrating the Eucharist consecrated in the Mass. The question of reform was raised but by no means answered, and the English Church was still in almost all respects a Catholic Church. You may go so far, but you can go no further. The process of religious change was fitful, improvised and still uncertain. The Ten Articles were therefore described by the German reformer Melanchthon as ‘
confusissime compositi
’.