1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (8 page)

The word apparently used by Henry,
sortilèges
, translates as ‘sorcery, spells, charms’, and has given rise to the suggestion that Anne Boleyn dabbled in witchcraft. This is regularly cited as one of the charges for which she was found guilty at her trial, even though on this latter point, there is no evidence at all – witchcraft is not mentioned in the trial records. Eric Ives has suggested that the use of this French word is misleading as while Chapuys’ letters were in French, Henry, if he made this comment, would probably have been speaking in English. The primary English meaning of
sortilèges
at this time was ‘divination’, which potentially changes the meaning of this sentence. It could mean Henry was persuaded into the marriage by the premarital prophecies that Anne would bear sons. Equally, the use of the word could refer simply to Henry’s earlier infatuation or ‘bewitchment’ by Anne. Recently, the sense of Henry being ‘seduced by witchcraft’ has become attached to another theory, which holds that the real reason for Anne’s ruin was that she gave birth to a deformed foetus. According to Retha Warnicke’s reading of sixteenth-century superstition, this evinced that Anne was both a witch and adulterously promiscuous. The evidence for this is one description during Elizabeth’s reign by the Catholic sympathizer, Nicholas Sander, that Anne had miscarried of a ‘shapeless mass of flesh’. Sander himself did not link this to Anne’s fall, nor does his partisan opinion, written so long after the event, make him a reliable source. It seems highly improbable that such a fantastically damning piece of evidence would not have surfaced in 1536 if there were anything in it at all. Despite the fact there is no other evidence of any sort to add credence to the ‘deformed foetus’ theory, it has a salacious quality that has made it highly attractive and enduring.
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So, to return to the question of Henry’s response to Anne after the miscarriage, if – and it is quite a big if – Henry said these things, they could be taken as powerful evidence of his reaction against Anne, especially if they had been followed by a backlash against her over the following months. But, as we shall see, the evidence of February–April 1536 does not sustain such a conclusion. Both Henry’s stunned remarks to Anne in her chamber and this outburst, if it occurred, appear to have been made in moments of frank emotion in the immediate aftermath, full of the ‘shock of grief and disappointment’. They do not represent Henry’s resolved opinion once some stability had been regained. Both Henry and Anne were upbeat before long. Anne is recorded as telling her ladies soon after this that the miscarriage had been for the best, because she would soon conceive again, and that the legitimacy of this new son would be unquestionable, because he would have been conceived after Katherine’s death.
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Jane Seymour

Yet, in February 1536, another character was thought important enough for Chapuys to mention her in his dispatches – Jane Seymour. An Elizabethan writer, George Wyatt, believed that Jane Seymour used Anne Boleyn’s pregnancy to displace her in Henry’s affections: ‘she waxing great again and not so fit for dalliance, the time was taken to steal the king’s affection from her, when most of all she was to have been cherished’. Henry had previously had affairs and flirtations, while married to both Katherine (notably with Elizabeth Blount, the mother of his illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, and with Anne’s sister, Mary Boleyn) and Anne. When Jane Seymour is first mentioned by Chapuys in mid-February, it is in the context of Henry lavishing gifts upon her, as he would a potential mistress. Henry’s attentions to her continued throughout March, and on 1 April, Chapuys wrote to the Holy Roman Emperor of Jane’s reception of a purse full of sovereigns sent to her by Henry, accompanied by a letter. Rather than opening the letter, which Eric Ives suggests contained a summons to the royal bed, Jane kissed it, returned it unopened and asked the messenger to tell the king that ‘she was a well-born damsel, the daughter of good and honourable parents, without blame or reproach… there was no treasure in this world that she valued as much as her honour, and on no account would she lose it, even if she were to die a thousand deaths’. She added that if the king wanted to make her a present of money, she begged that it might be at ‘such a time as God would be pleased to send her some advantageous marriage’. In other words, a marriage to Henry himself.
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Such a calculated response is reminiscent of Anne in the days of her courtship, and in response to her coy elusiveness, Henry’s love for Jane was said to have ‘marvellously increased’. It was so clever that Chapuys (and historians since) thought she was being coached not to give in to him unless he made her his queen. Yet, even Chapuys, who gives us this information, says earlier in the same letter that ‘there had been… talk of a new marriage for this king… which rumour agrees well with my own news from the court of France, where, according to letters [I have] received, courtiers maintain that this king has actually applied for the hand of Francis’ daughter’. Chapuys himself therefore does not connect up the rumours of a ‘new marriage’ with Jane Seymour. In early April, Jane was still little more than a lady whom the king was pursuing. At best, in accordance with the conventions of courtly love, she was the lady whom ‘he serves’ – a telling phrase. At worst, she was a passing fancy, whom Henry may have hoped to make his mistress. Chapuys certainly didn’t think much of Henry’s choice. He described Jane the day before Anne’s execution as ‘no great beauty’ and ‘not a woman of great wit’; he implied that she was unlikely to be a virgin, and reported that people said she was inclined ‘to be proud and haughty’. Yet, by this point, the world had changed, and with it, Henry’s intentions towards Jane. It is highly improbable that before Anne was considered guilty of adultery, Henry had seriously begun to plan to make Jane his wife.
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The Still Before the Storm

If Anne’s miscarriage and the arrival of Jane Seymour on the scene were not enough to justify Anne’s downfall, a natural decline in Henry and Anne’s relationship could hold the key. One line of argument has been that ‘Anne’s proud and abrasive character soon became intolerable to her husband’. J. J. Scarisbrick writes that ‘what had once been devastating infatuation turned into bloodthirsty loathing, for reasons we will never completely know’. This, however, is a peculiar conclusion, because according to the psychological theory of dissonance, the opposite is likely to have been true. This theory of cognitive dissonance – the ‘state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent’ – suggests that holding two such contradictory ideas is very uncomfortable, and as a result, humans will always seek to resolve the two and make sense of them. One of the consequences of this is that if people go through a great deal of pain, effort or discomfort to attain something, they’ll generally be happier with that thing than they would have been if they’d won it easily, in order to resolve the sense of dissonance produced by working for something and then not enjoying it. The very fact that Henry had gone through such ordeals and difficulty to obtain Anne, should, according to dissonance theory, have made her a greater prize and more precious to him. The notion that he would rapidly lose interest is therefore neither psychologically plausible, nor in fact, historically accurate.
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There were, indeed, some observers who thought that Henry was sick and tired of Anne by early 1536, and had determined to abandon her. Chief among those reporting this was, though, the ever-hopeful Chapuys. It is hard not to read wish-fulfilment into the evidence of one who referred to Anne as ‘the concubine’ or ‘the she-devil’, and who had made similar bitter assertions about the doomed state of Henry and Anne’s relationship at the height of their happiness, in August and September 1533. Even Chapuys himself recognized that Henry and Anne had always been prone to ‘lovers’ quarrels’, and that the king’s character was very ‘changeable’. Henry and Anne were direct with each other, got angry, shouted, sulked, got jealous – but they were also frequently described as being ‘merry’ together, including throughout the autumn of 1535 – and this epithet seems to be appended to their marriage more often than to any of Henry’s other marriages. G. W. Bernard has correctly described theirs as a ‘tumultuous relationship of sunshine and storms’. But, between February and April 1536, Henry’s actions in support of his marriage to Anne speak louder than the rumours that she was out of favour.
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For, during this period, Henry increased his pressure on the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, to recognize Anne Boleyn as his wife, and admit his error in his past treatment of Henry over the annulment from Katherine of Aragon. A series of negotiations on this theme reached their climax on 18 April 1536, when Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador, was invited to the court to talk with the king. Events that day were very deliberately staged to provoke official recognition of Anne by the diplomat. On arrival, Chapuys was warmly welcomed by George Boleyn, Lord Rochford (Anne’s brother), and Cromwell brought a message from Henry inviting Chapuys to visit Anne and kiss her hand. Chapuys politely declined, but the royal party had another trick up its sleeve. Rochford accompanied the ambassador to Mass, and as Henry and Anne descended from the royal pew to the chapel, Anne stopped before Chapuys, turned and bowed to him. Etiquette necessitated that he do likewise – a significant diplomatic coup and one which provoked comment among Anne’s enemies. A later letter from Chapuys noted that ‘although I would not kiss or speak to the Concubine, the Princess (Mary) and other good persons have been somewhat jealous at the mutual reverences required by politeness which were done at the church’. Later, after dinner, the king took Chapuys aside to talk. In strong terms, Henry impressed on Chapuys that he would not brook Charles V’s meddling in his affairs, specifically referring to the Holy Roman Emperor’s demands that Mary be recognized as legitimate (and by implication, Henry’s marriage to Katherine sound). Henry also required Charles V to send him a letter asking Henry’s forgiveness for his past treatment of the English king, or failing that, a letter that promised to put the past behind them. All such negotiations were designed to persuade Charles V to admit that Henry had been right and that his marriage to Anne Boleyn was entirely valid. While there is clearly a strong element of wilfulness and egoism in Henry’s demands, it would have been extraordinarily capricious of Henry to go to these great lengths to have Anne recognized as his wife, if he actually intended to rid himself of her shortly thereafter. This does not preclude the possibility that Anne and Henry were not on the best of terms, but it does make it unlikely that Henry was preparing to abandon the marriage. It also means that it is difficult to sustain an argument based on a characterization of Henry as fickle and uncommitted to his marriage, at least at a political, diplomatic and practical level, or one which posits that Henry deliberately acted to discard and destroy Anne, simply because his eye had strayed elsewhere.
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So Why Did Anne Fall?

If Anne’s downfall was not the direct result of her miscarriage, nor because Henry planned to make Jane his queen, nor due to a terminal decline in Henry and Anne’s relationship, why then did she fall? It seems there are only four or five possible scenarios:

1) That Anne was actually guilty of the charges against her

2) That Cromwell and Jane’s relatives, the Seymours, conspired to bring Anne down, and Henry was genuinely deceived, believing Anne to be guilty

3) That Henry was not genuinely deceived and asked Cromwell to bring Anne Boleyn down, even though he knew she was not guilty

4) That Anne’s behaviour was risky enough for her to appear guilty, but then 1) or 2) apply

5) That everyone can be exonerated – that neither Cromwell, nor Henry, nor Anne was guilty, but that she appeared so.

The answer is crucial because on it rests our picture of Henry VIII and the effect of this year’s events.

Historians such as Eric Ives, David Starkey and G. R. Elton have favoured the second scenario, in which Cromwell and a court faction, including the Seymours, conspired to bring Anne down. Fundamentally, this view rests on an image of Henry as a king who could be manipulated and manoeuvred by the factions of his court, to ‘bounce’ him into action and tip him ‘by a crisis’ into rejecting Anne. Faction, and the ability to influence the king, certainly had a role to play in the Henrician court, and there is also some evidence that Anne and Cromwell were on bad terms in April 1536. Anne’s influence had also been instrumental in Thomas Wolsey’s fall, the king’s erstwhile first minister, so Cromwell had reason to be fearful. The problem is that the disagreements posited between Anne and Cromwell – to do with a difference of opinion over the use of funds from the dissolution of the monasteries and matters of foreign policy – seem insufficient as motives to destroy a queen, especially given Cromwell and Anne’s long supportive association. The crucial piece of evidence is a remark made by Cromwell to Chapuys after Anne’s death in which he claimed to have ‘to set himself to devise and conspire the said affair’. One translation (of Chapuys’ letter reporting this in French) renders this in a way that suggests Cromwell planned and arranged the plot against Anne, from beginning to end. Yet, although Cromwell clearly arrogates a certain amount of initiative and responsibility for his accomplishment, probably to impress the ambassador with his power, the context of this phrase is that the king had given Cromwell the authority to discover and bring to an end the affair of the ‘concubine’. It seems likely that the ‘affair’ in question was the matter of investigation, trial and execution. This reading suggests the third scenario in which Henry asked Cromwell to take Anne down, knowing she was innocent, but wanting to get rid of her. This is the version adopted by most films that have been made recently about Henry VIII, and therefore, the notion most fixed in the popular imagination. But, as we have already seen, it seems unconvincing that this is the case in terms of Henry’s relationships with Anne and Jane prior to the end of April 1536, while neither the interpretation that focuses on Cromwell, nor this theory, sufficiently explore and explain Henry VIII’s character in a way that would make such behaviour comprehensible.
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